More times than not, the solution is actually really difficult - you just underestimated the problem. Then you go to github and find a library that shows you how it should be done, and you can't believe it takes so much code to do something that seemed so straightforward.
I only had a buck every time I read, "No one is going to do [x] on a mobile device," over the past few years...
I have entire seasons of TV shows (Last Airbender) queued up on my phone for when I get trapped waiting somewhere and/or my son is bored on car trips, etc. It's not 2004 any more - the whole "mobisodes" trend came and went as it was discovered people don't *like* 2 minute custom-created content for the phones. They want normal length videos, and with today's large screens and relatively massive storage there's no problem with that.
Moving the default placement of the window min/max/close buttons is a really annoying change.
First, 95% of the world uses Windows which will make any sort of transition that much harder for end-users.
Second, I like it the old way, dammit! (What? That's a valid argument...) I don't want to have to change the damn default window theme for every install of Ubuntu I use (and at this point that's three boxes - my main computer, my netbook and my media PC).
There's a few spots on the web where you can find PDFs of the instructions to make older Lego kits and indexes of pieces you need. Brickset: http://www.brickset.com/ and Brickley's Words: http://www.br-eng.info/words/index.php/search-lego-instructions/ are two of them, and I'm sure there's tons of others as well. Once you've purchased half a dozen kits or so, you've got more than enough pieces to create stuff from other kits.
Using your imagination is fun too of course, but every time I follow one of these "official" instructions for a kit, I learn a new way to put bricks and other pieces together to make cool stuff. We can then use these new techniques to make even cooler things on our own.
I switched to Ubuntu a few months ago, and discovered Xara Xtreme - just 'sudo apt-get install xaraxl'. It's really pretty great (though a little buggy still, and shows its Windows roots), and is a fine replacement for Macromedia Fireworks, for those image creation/editing tasks that don't need anything as complex as a drawing program (Illustrator) or image editor (Photoshop/Gimp).
I just picked up a cheap Tapwave Zodiac, and combined with a Palm-based emulator app called Little John Z (http://yoyofr92.free.fr/ljz/), it's a killer handheld emulation device. GB/GBC and NES ROMs play perfectly, and some Genesis and SNES games as well. The best thing is that it doubles the resolution for the games *and* adds antialiasing so no jaggies.
While waiting for the new PSP to be hacked (or for Sony to get a clue and open the platform up) go get yourself a Zodiac.
Luddites all of you. You and every moron who modded you up and every frigin' commenter who responded in agreement (which seems to be all of them). Amazing.
Is this not Slashdot? News for Nerds? WTF is this attitude towards new technology? WAKE UP. The mobile phone is in use by 1.5 BILLION people world wide. By the end of the decade that number will have almost doubled and more people on Earth will be using it as their primary computing and communication tool than any other device.
The mobile phone is a PLATFORM now. Get it?
Long gone are the days when it was used for just making phone calls, just like long gone are the days when Linux was used just for servers. Do you bitch every time someone launches a new CPU or adds new stuff to computer OSes just because you don't need anything except VI? "What's with all this multi-threading, multimedia and GUI support? I don't need any of that crap!"
Get used to the fact that mobile phones are now the most important piece of technology in the world. More important than your PC or your television or your iPod.
Bitching about how you want a simple mobile phone with cheap service is like bitching about only wanting a Pentium 3 and basic AOL dial up because all you use your computer for is email and the web. The rest of us who are trying to focus on the future are sick of hearing from you backwards motherfuckers.
Ummm. What are all those Windows.dlls and Linux.so's doing in the distrib? I'm assuming they're for the graphics stuff... It seems you could probably get JavaScript to manage the game play if you offloaded all the heavy graphics lifting to compiled native libraries like this seems to do.
I pay the $9.99 a month for the online service and it's great. Ten bucks gets me 10 songs on iTunes, but gets me streaming access to just about every son in Napster's catalog. It's so great when someone says something about a song and you can click-click and start playing it immediately, or someone talks about a new album and you can start listening to it right away as well.
I know I can't take it with me and the songs aren't mine, but you know what? I'm a geek. I'm online 15 hours a day. Excercise? Life outside? Are you kidding me? WTF do I need a portable music player for? My fat ass is tied to my Aeron or my fold-out IKEA chair for 98% of my waking hours. Napster to me is perfect.
How much does anyone want to bet that these improvements involve moving away from Windows and Active Server Pages for their page serving tech?
It doesn't make much financial or strategic sense. I can almost see the conversation over the weekend: "Wow, the site is popular and growing exponentially! We need to add another two or three servers... Google's got thousands, so that isn't a problem, so now we just need to buy more copies of Windows Server..." (Or who knows, maybe even pay for the version they were using in the first place.;-) ) and then someone with a clue (think ex-Novell, ex-Sun guy Eric Schmidt) says, in so many words, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
I'd put money on a PHP version of the site replacing it. Any takers?
How easily it will be for non-Windows based IM applications to get that license? Trillian and Odigo are both Windows based apps.
Are Linux-only licensees going to be allowed to buy a license? How about non-M$ based smartphones?
I doubt it. Microsoft wants its cake and wants to eat it too. I'm keeping my MSN Messenger on only as a way to get contacted by someone and then to tell them to use another system.
Java won't be a bottleneck. The system is made by the guys who developed an on-chip Java system, so all the Java stuff happens on the cartridge. That's why the system can be run on GBCs as well.
IBM has a lot invested in Java. It's become their common development platform for their various OS's they run from Linux on up. Native code for the heavy-duty stuff, Java for everything else. Probably saves them billions a year.
I think if Sun burns up (and with numbers like $2 billion in losses, it could happen overnight, look at Enron/WorldCom... who knows what sort of tricks are being played with the books) IBM would be the first in line to grab Java.
Doh! I misstated this: 400 million NORMAL mobile phones are predicted to be sold in 2003 by both Motorola and Nokia. I don't know the number of Symbian or Linux phones, but the numbers will be a lot, lot smaller. 400 million smart phones would be cool, though, wouldn't it? Maybe in 2008...
I think what Motorola is doing is smart - like the article said, by using Linux/Java they're controlling their own destiny a bit more. The part that I don't understand is that Motorola is part owner of Symbian. It seems to me that they would want to promote that platform instead of going off in a different direction entirely.
But if you just ignore that for a sec, I think choosing Linux is the right thing to do from a power/scalability perspective. Symbian, for example, was designed from the ground up to run on mobile devices. But since these devices are now becoming more and more powerful (like a circa 1995 laptop) you're going to need an OS that can take advantage of that power in an open way and I'll vote Linux any day (like all the rest of you, I'm sure).
Think about this: Motorola (and Nokia) are both going to sell around 400 million smart phones in 2003. Even if a very small percentage of these phones initially use Linux, it will still mean millions of Linux "installs". Motorola could soon be the #1 Linux computing platform.
If you check out Motorola's home page, you'll also see that they've launched a reference platform for OEMs called i.Smart to base their mobile phones on also. According to this article on InfoSync.no, this will allow OEMs to create smart phones in as little as 90 days with support for Symbian, eLinux, Windows CE or PalmOS. This is pretty cool, but what is disappointing is the complete lack of WCDMA/CDMA2000 (i.e. 3G) support in either the A760 or the i.Smart reference design. They need to just pay Qualcomm some ransom money and get on board the CDMA train, IMHO.
I've got lots more thoughts about this. From what I've seen so far, I can't tell if Motorola is going to follow Sharp's example and make the Java Apps peers with the native apps using Personal Java, or whether they'll restrict the functionality and use J2ME, which keeps Java apps in a tightly controlled sandbox. That could really make a difference in the number of apps available and usability also.
150+ posts and no one's mentioned Groove? Do you people live in a frigin' vacuum?
Groove is a company founded by Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes. The Groove Workspace is a hyper-secure P2P application made for business and government use. It has several "tools" that you can use within the application like chat, file-sharing, calendaring, custom forms, etc. All communication between the P2P clients is encrypted as well as the files themselves. Once you import a file into Groove to be shared, it's encrypted automatically.
The general theory behind the application is that you can't rely on the wires to be secure, ever. So all the data and communication between peers is encrypted automatically without any user intervention needed.
The reason you should think this app is cool is because it's an easy way to set up super-secure filesharing between peers whether on a local network or across the internet. It's not open file sharing like Gnutella, but it's more like having a virtual secure file server just for you and the peers you invite into your workspace.
The reason you should hate this app is because not only is Groove in bed with Microsoft (M$ has invested millions and only runs on Windows) but this app is also being used by the new Office of Information Awareness, i.e. Big Brother.
I'm sort of surprised by the lack of posts and enthusiasm for this topic in general from all you geeks. This stuff is really, really cool.
This isn't just a phone it's a connected risc computer in your hand. This goes for the P800 as well as for the other Symbian phones such as the Nokia 7650 which I own. The hackability is amazing.
First the hardware: These phones run on 32 bit RISC-based ARM processors. Your Gameboy Advance is running on an ARM too but at 16Mhz, these phones are all 100Mhz or more. They're fast. They all have several megs of memory (though the 7650 could be better), full color screens, and support for cool shit like Bluetooth.
The Symbian OS is a full-fledged 32bit OS. It has a real directory structure, support for all the protocols you can think of and it was designed from the ground up for mobile devices so it Just Works. The P800 even has support for Personal Java on the same level as native programs which will make it easy for the zillions of Java programmers out there to create cool-ass apps pretty easily.
I bought my phone a month ago and I'm amazed every day by the stuff it does. When I connect to the GPRS network the phone gets a real IP address. This means I can browse the web with a normal web browser, use an Instant Messenger, FTP, telnet, or anything else you can think of doing from a PC, but from my phone! The P800 already has a VNC client ready to go! And when I'm at home, instead of having to connect to the somewhat slow GPRS, I use Bluetooth to connect to my computer and get an IP address that way (I share out my DSL line just like using WiFi). Now I can do all the above, but at better speeds without wasting my GPRS meg alotment. I can synch, browse the web, send messages etc. but from my couch across the room (though normally it's perfect for the john).
The 3D games are amazing, better than anything I've seen so far on the Gameboy. And one game called MSG Karting, allows players to race each other over Bluetooth. I haven't tried it yet because I'm the only one I know with a Symbian phone, but it's possible already. No more cables.
I bought the phone to play with the tech and I haven't been let down. Every day I think of something else I can do or want to do with the phones. There's lots of interesting developments going on right now. In the next MONTH you're going to see more Symbian phones from Nokia and Siemens (both in the U.S. and Europe) as well wider availability of the P800. Plus, if you read the news lately, you'll see that unlike the rest of the tech sector, there's actually GOOD news coming out of the mobile world. Nokia and Qualcomm both just announced kick ass sales and the fact the both have over $8 Billion in the bank in cash. This is good stuff to hear... makes you realize where the next boom is going to be.
So when you read something like they put Doom on these phones, don't think, "bah" think, "ooh! What ELSE are they going to do" because these computers (not phones) are going to be everywhere within the next year or so and the innovations are just starting.
I've been using a Python NTLM proxy at my work for the past month and it's great. I point whatever is being blocked by M$'s server software at the local proxy and it does the work for me.
Slashdot Mirror
More times than not, the solution is actually really difficult - you just underestimated the problem. Then you go to github and find a library that shows you how it should be done, and you can't believe it takes so much code to do something that seemed so straightforward.
I only had a buck every time I read, "No one is going to do [x] on a mobile device," over the past few years...
I have entire seasons of TV shows (Last Airbender) queued up on my phone for when I get trapped waiting somewhere and/or my son is bored on car trips, etc. It's not 2004 any more - the whole "mobisodes" trend came and went as it was discovered people don't *like* 2 minute custom-created content for the phones. They want normal length videos, and with today's large screens and relatively massive storage there's no problem with that.
-Russ
I wrote up a blog post about using Sound eXchange (sox) to filter the sound here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/linux-command-line-streaming-vuvuzela-filter , but the short version is this:
rec -d vol .5 equalizer 233 .1o -48 equalizer 466 .03o -48 equalizer 932 .02o -48 equalizer 1864 .2o -24 | play -d
or from a response to my post here: http://www.yusufk.za.net/?p=520
rec -d | play -d vol 0.9 bandreject 116.56 3.4q bandreject 233.12 3.4q bandreject 466.24 3.4q bandreject 932.48 3.4q bandreject 1864 3.4q
After testing, I feel the parameters could be tweaked a bit more - but these definitely make a difference.
-Russ
Moving the default placement of the window min/max/close buttons is a really annoying change.
First, 95% of the world uses Windows which will make any sort of transition that much harder for end-users.
Second, I like it the old way, dammit! (What? That's a valid argument...) I don't want to have to change the damn default window theme for every install of Ubuntu I use (and at this point that's three boxes - my main computer, my netbook and my media PC).
Grump, grump, grump. Get off my lawn.
-Russ
Dammit! Got my tabs confused.
Thanks!
-Russ
There's a few spots on the web where you can find PDFs of the instructions to make older Lego kits and indexes of pieces you need. Brickset: http://www.brickset.com/ and Brickley's Words: http://www.br-eng.info/words/index.php/search-lego-instructions/ are two of them, and I'm sure there's tons of others as well. Once you've purchased half a dozen kits or so, you've got more than enough pieces to create stuff from other kits.
My son and I play the Lego Star Wars video game together, and then make the "mini kits" you gather in the game in real life using the instructions online: http://www.brickset.com/search.aspx?subtheme=Mini%20Building%20Set .
Using your imagination is fun too of course, but every time I follow one of these "official" instructions for a kit, I learn a new way to put bricks and other pieces together to make cool stuff. We can then use these new techniques to make even cooler things on our own.
-Russ
I switched to Ubuntu a few months ago, and discovered Xara Xtreme - just 'sudo apt-get install xaraxl'. It's really pretty great (though a little buggy still, and shows its Windows roots), and is a fine replacement for Macromedia Fireworks, for those image creation/editing tasks that don't need anything as complex as a drawing program (Illustrator) or image editor (Photoshop/Gimp).
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/
-Russ
I just picked up a cheap Tapwave Zodiac, and combined with a Palm-based emulator app called Little John Z (http://yoyofr92.free.fr/ljz/), it's a killer handheld emulation device. GB/GBC and NES ROMs play perfectly, and some Genesis and SNES games as well. The best thing is that it doubles the resolution for the games *and* adds antialiasing so no jaggies.
While waiting for the new PSP to be hacked (or for Sony to get a clue and open the platform up) go get yourself a Zodiac.
More thoughts on my weblog: http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008484.ht
-Russ
Luddites all of you. You and every moron who modded you up and every frigin' commenter who responded in agreement (which seems to be all of them). Amazing.
Is this not Slashdot? News for Nerds? WTF is this attitude towards new technology? WAKE UP. The mobile phone is in use by 1.5 BILLION people world wide. By the end of the decade that number will have almost doubled and more people on Earth will be using it as their primary computing and communication tool than any other device.
The mobile phone is a PLATFORM now. Get it?
Long gone are the days when it was used for just making phone calls, just like long gone are the days when Linux was used just for servers. Do you bitch every time someone launches a new CPU or adds new stuff to computer OSes just because you don't need anything except VI? "What's with all this multi-threading, multimedia and GUI support? I don't need any of that crap!"
Get used to the fact that mobile phones are now the most important piece of technology in the world. More important than your PC or your television or your iPod.
Bitching about how you want a simple mobile phone with cheap service is like bitching about only wanting a Pentium 3 and basic AOL dial up because all you use your computer for is email and the web. The rest of us who are trying to focus on the future are sick of hearing from you backwards motherfuckers.
-Russ
'nuff said, really.
Please vote. Please encourage your friends and families to vote. Please don't vote for Bush.
-Russ
-Russ
Ummm. What are all those Windows .dlls and Linux .so's doing in the distrib? I'm assuming they're for the graphics stuff... It seems you could probably get JavaScript to manage the game play if you offloaded all the heavy graphics lifting to compiled native libraries like this seems to do.
-Russ
I pay the $9.99 a month for the online service and it's great. Ten bucks gets me 10 songs on iTunes, but gets me streaming access to just about every son in Napster's catalog. It's so great when someone says something about a song and you can click-click and start playing it immediately, or someone talks about a new album and you can start listening to it right away as well.
I know I can't take it with me and the songs aren't mine, but you know what? I'm a geek. I'm online 15 hours a day. Excercise? Life outside? Are you kidding me? WTF do I need a portable music player for? My fat ass is tied to my Aeron or my fold-out IKEA chair for 98% of my waking hours. Napster to me is perfect.
-Russ
How much does anyone want to bet that these improvements involve moving away from Windows and Active Server Pages for their page serving tech?
It doesn't make much financial or strategic sense. I can almost see the conversation over the weekend: "Wow, the site is popular and growing exponentially! We need to add another two or three servers... Google's got thousands, so that isn't a problem, so now we just need to buy more copies of Windows Server..." (Or who knows, maybe even pay for the version they were using in the first place.
I'd put money on a PHP version of the site replacing it. Any takers?
-Russ
Actually, Nokia is promoting the use of MAME on its N-Gage site.
-Russ
How easily it will be for non-Windows based IM applications to get that license? Trillian and Odigo are both Windows based apps.
Are Linux-only licensees going to be allowed to buy a license? How about non-M$ based smartphones?
I doubt it. Microsoft wants its cake and wants to eat it too. I'm keeping my MSN Messenger on only as a way to get contacted by someone and then to tell them to use another system.
-Russ
Yahoo bought Inktomi not too long ago (which is working on its own Google killer) and Overture owns FAST which produces AllTheWeb.com
Thus... Yahoo now has all it needs to produce Google-quality search results *and* a proven way to make money from it (i.e. step 3).
-Russ
MacGyver torrents
-Russ
Java won't be a bottleneck. The system is made by the guys who developed an on-chip Java system, so all the Java stuff happens on the cartridge. That's why the system can be run on GBCs as well.
-Russ
IBM has a lot invested in Java. It's become their common development platform for their various OS's they run from Linux on up. Native code for the heavy-duty stuff, Java for everything else. Probably saves them billions a year.
I think if Sun burns up (and with numbers like $2 billion in losses, it could happen overnight, look at Enron/WorldCom... who knows what sort of tricks are being played with the books) IBM would be the first in line to grab Java.
Just my best guess.
-Russ
Doh! I misstated this: 400 million NORMAL mobile phones are predicted to be sold in 2003 by both Motorola and Nokia. I don't know the number of Symbian or Linux phones, but the numbers will be a lot, lot smaller. 400 million smart phones would be cool, though, wouldn't it? Maybe in 2008...
-Russ
I think what Motorola is doing is smart - like the article said, by using Linux/Java they're controlling their own destiny a bit more. The part that I don't understand is that Motorola is part owner of Symbian. It seems to me that they would want to promote that platform instead of going off in a different direction entirely.
But if you just ignore that for a sec, I think choosing Linux is the right thing to do from a power/scalability perspective. Symbian, for example, was designed from the ground up to run on mobile devices. But since these devices are now becoming more and more powerful (like a circa 1995 laptop) you're going to need an OS that can take advantage of that power in an open way and I'll vote Linux any day (like all the rest of you, I'm sure).
Think about this: Motorola (and Nokia) are both going to sell around 400 million smart phones in 2003. Even if a very small percentage of these phones initially use Linux, it will still mean millions of Linux "installs". Motorola could soon be the #1 Linux computing platform.
If you check out Motorola's home page, you'll also see that they've launched a reference platform for OEMs called i.Smart to base their mobile phones on also. According to this article on InfoSync.no, this will allow OEMs to create smart phones in as little as 90 days with support for Symbian, eLinux, Windows CE or PalmOS. This is pretty cool, but what is disappointing is the complete lack of WCDMA/CDMA2000 (i.e. 3G) support in either the A760 or the i.Smart reference design. They need to just pay Qualcomm some ransom money and get on board the CDMA train, IMHO.
I've got lots more thoughts about this. From what I've seen so far, I can't tell if Motorola is going to follow Sharp's example and make the Java Apps peers with the native apps using Personal Java, or whether they'll restrict the functionality and use J2ME, which keeps Java apps in a tightly controlled sandbox. That could really make a difference in the number of apps available and usability also.
Anyways, cool news to see.
-Russ
150+ posts and no one's mentioned Groove? Do you people live in a frigin' vacuum?
Groove is a company founded by Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes. The Groove Workspace is a hyper-secure P2P application made for business and government use. It has several "tools" that you can use within the application like chat, file-sharing, calendaring, custom forms, etc. All communication between the P2P clients is encrypted as well as the files themselves. Once you import a file into Groove to be shared, it's encrypted automatically.
The general theory behind the application is that you can't rely on the wires to be secure, ever. So all the data and communication between peers is encrypted automatically without any user intervention needed.
The reason you should think this app is cool is because it's an easy way to set up super-secure filesharing between peers whether on a local network or across the internet. It's not open file sharing like Gnutella, but it's more like having a virtual secure file server just for you and the peers you invite into your workspace.
The reason you should hate this app is because not only is Groove in bed with Microsoft (M$ has invested millions and only runs on Windows) but this app is also being used by the new Office of Information Awareness, i.e. Big Brother.
-Russ
I'm sort of surprised by the lack of posts and enthusiasm for this topic in general from all you geeks. This stuff is really, really cool.
This isn't just a phone it's a connected risc computer in your hand. This goes for the P800 as well as for the other Symbian phones such as the Nokia 7650 which I own. The hackability is amazing.
First the hardware: These phones run on 32 bit RISC-based ARM processors. Your Gameboy Advance is running on an ARM too but at 16Mhz, these phones are all 100Mhz or more. They're fast. They all have several megs of memory (though the 7650 could be better), full color screens, and support for cool shit like Bluetooth.
The Symbian OS is a full-fledged 32bit OS. It has a real directory structure, support for all the protocols you can think of and it was designed from the ground up for mobile devices so it Just Works. The P800 even has support for Personal Java on the same level as native programs which will make it easy for the zillions of Java programmers out there to create cool-ass apps pretty easily.
I bought my phone a month ago and I'm amazed every day by the stuff it does. When I connect to the GPRS network the phone gets a real IP address. This means I can browse the web with a normal web browser, use an Instant Messenger, FTP, telnet, or anything else you can think of doing from a PC, but from my phone! The P800 already has a VNC client ready to go! And when I'm at home, instead of having to connect to the somewhat slow GPRS, I use Bluetooth to connect to my computer and get an IP address that way (I share out my DSL line just like using WiFi). Now I can do all the above, but at better speeds without wasting my GPRS meg alotment. I can synch, browse the web, send messages etc. but from my couch across the room (though normally it's perfect for the john).
The 3D games are amazing, better than anything I've seen so far on the Gameboy. And one game called MSG Karting, allows players to race each other over Bluetooth. I haven't tried it yet because I'm the only one I know with a Symbian phone, but it's possible already. No more cables.
I bought the phone to play with the tech and I haven't been let down. Every day I think of something else I can do or want to do with the phones. There's lots of interesting developments going on right now. In the next MONTH you're going to see more Symbian phones from Nokia and Siemens (both in the U.S. and Europe) as well wider availability of the P800. Plus, if you read the news lately, you'll see that unlike the rest of the tech sector, there's actually GOOD news coming out of the mobile world. Nokia and Qualcomm both just announced kick ass sales and the fact the both have over $8 Billion in the bank in cash. This is good stuff to hear... makes you realize where the next boom is going to be.
So when you read something like they put Doom on these phones, don't think, "bah" think, "ooh! What ELSE are they going to do" because these computers (not phones) are going to be everywhere within the next year or so and the innovations are just starting.
-Russ
I've been using a Python NTLM proxy at my work for the past month and it's great. I point whatever is being blocked by M$'s server software at the local proxy and it does the work for me.
http://www.geocities.com/rozmanov/ntlm/
It's GPLed and works as advertised. Once I figure out how to make it run as a service, it'll be perfect.
-Russ