Yep, but hopefully this will soon pass this year, as other devices come out. And hopefully Google will roll out Android 2 updates to some existing handsets (I've read the myTouch and Magic devices should have enough hardware specs to make it possible/practical, but unfortunately the first G1 will probably be left out).
My only wish is that I could get Google Maps Mobile on more devices or on real computers. It was the one app I really miss from the Blackberry I used to have for work. I've tried getting it on the Android SDK emulator and on Androidx86, but it's not in the feeble stripped-down app repository on those platforms. Maybe they'll do one for ChromeOS? Doubtful.
I still have my sights set on a Nokia N900 to replace my Palm TX, but as far as I can tell, Google only has GMM for Symbian and not Maemo. But I'd hate to have to pick up an el-cheapo Android device simply to get my GMM fix:/
Actually, in my past two big corporations, I would instead install the corporate image in a VM and run my dev tools on the bare metal.
The corporate image was always 32-bit Windows XP configured to run Outlook and IE6 (which was always necessary for non standards-compliant "web-based" training and timecards and expense reports).
That way I got to run a 64-bit OS on the bare metal, use more than 3.5GB of RAM, and had good performance, while still having a clean, kosher, fully encrypted corporate image for office docs and emails.
In both cases, I patiently became good friends with the real sysadmins first, though.
If it's like their other Android phones, it will likely support wifi as well, so that should take care of your occasional data sync needs... hopefully most of the apps are smart enough to still work while you're offline.
On T-Mobile, you can also get the $10/mo. wap/T-Zones/Web2Go browsing plan, which will basically give you full http / https web access through their proxy. Admittedly this isn't full internet, so apps that won't work through their proxy (such as gmail, gmm, etc.) will fail, but it's still quite useful for the price (well, it used to be better when it only cost $3/mo.) . But a little secret is that if you tether it up with a PDA or Laptop, you can get full internet access through their $10/mo. data plan for some reason. Not terribly convenient compared to an always-on smartphone, but it's served me well plenty of times.
Cool... just remember to contact t-Mobile to have your ebay phone unlocked before you sell it... there are some wonky restrictions, like you have to have it for two billing cycles or something like that before they'll give you the unlock code for your phone.
But also remember they have contractless pricing plans now too... so... just do the math first:P
Meh, I understand the desire for small government... the less they do the less they'll f*(k things up. But as a purveyor of several fine national parks and other conservation efforts, environmental policy is one of the few things I can get behind without reservation.
As far as Gore goes, yes, conflicts of interests, maybe, but somehow I fail to see the evil in trying to get a firm that makes accounting software and a "carbon karma" bank that plants trees off the ground.
I think it depends more on how enlightened your state government is. They're the ones you'll have to file most of your taxes through, and the better ones (the ones that want to attract more businesses) have websites that allow you to e-file most of your work. That means the development is funded by taxpayer dollars, and if you can convince them to use open source for all of the standard reasons, so much the better!
There are several business-grade open-source accounting programs that might be of help to you, such as xacc and maybe gnucash and of course all the spreadsheet programs. But when it comes to forms used to submit all that data, you're left with what your state provides and allows.
And along the lines of "it takes money to make money", you're not all that worse off with paying some of these commercial companies to help you fill out forms and paperwork... just remember to translate it in terms of hours saved. I've used nannytaxes.com, and one of the employee tax form things (which are only maybe $6 a pop and include mailing/postage straight to your employees). Also I've used both the web-based TurboTax and the free filetaxes.com service to do some of my personal taxes back in the day, and it turned out that the extra optimizations and stuff they put in the $70 commercial product reduced my taxes for more than that amount compared to the free service. Plus, if there are any mistakes, the service should help cover your (and their) collective asses a tad more.
Also don't forget that money you spend on people to handle your taxes for you is itself tax-deductible.
So really, I'd say focus on petitioning your government tax collectors on using sane, web-based, open-standards, open-source software to run their end of the deal, and feel free to spend a pittance on whatever guaranteed commercial software gives you a financial edge on actually calculating and paying your taxes.
I don't really understand how Gore will amass a fortune from pushing forward environmental policy (administration fees? bribes?) but he seems pretty well off already. And you know, out of all the politicians I've read about he's probably the only one I'd trust to put his resources to good use.
But yeah, the system needs more work to separate the politics / power from the finance / money.
We do need to try to separate the politics from the science. I'm an environmentalist and was pretty impressed when I first read of this "Al Gore" character from an old ecology book from the late 80s/early 90s who was also into ecology and was working on a way to translate it into a way politicians and industrialists could give a rats' ass about.
Yes, what he came up with was an oversimplification, and a brilliant one at that. It's not often you can target one metric and have it achieve multiple goals: discourage fossil fuel consumption (which we've already been burned on several times in the past), coal consumption, encourage alternative energy development (which otherwise wouldn't be able to compete with dirty energy without factoring in the cost to "clean up" after the cheap stuff), and reduce other pollutants linked to CO2 generation (which would be a pain to go after individually).
I don't think global warming is that much of a concern compared to all of the other beneficial side effects of CO2 cap-n-trade. Hell, even Gore's presentation itself said the that even under worse case projections we wouldn't feel anything for at least a century. But without any kind of policy change, the question is when, not if. It would be nice if we could institute some kind of policy/before/ things get bad, but looking at the history of environmental law, nothing will happen until something bad happens and people start dying. Industrial pollution wasn't regulated until people started suffocating and dying in the yellow London fogs at the last turn of the century, CFCs weren't eliminated until the ozone hole opened wide, agricultural runoff and oyster dredging in the Chesapeake was not curtailed until red tides suffocated and destroyed prime fishing spots.
The, um, anti-environmental crowd knows this, and can keep piling on FUD behind the science to keep any new environmental policy from passing until it's too late and damage has been definitively done -- again when, not if. The only real question is who will take the blame and have to pay to clean up when we do start feeling the effects of climate change. This "ClimateGate" scandal is pure gold for them, because instead of them saying "yeah, you were right, our greed and laziness are destroying the planet", they can say "we were on the path to destruction and we would have changed course if only you hadn't lied on all the science that could have saved us!". So they really have nothing to lose and everything to gain through their current denial stance.
Which again just means we have to separate the science from the politics. Their are a lot of politically expedient avenues to take, where you are allowed to fight dirty and appeal to people's hearts. But frankly it annoys me when they try to blend climate science together with political rhetoric... I don't care about evaluating my lifestyle in terms of a "carbon footprint" and don't care to measure energy efficiency of appliances in terms of carbon emissions! I just want to live efficiently with minimal waste!
I'm about the evaluate the Fit-PC2 for work, which can be had in diskless forms for under $250. http://www.fit-pc.com/
And I'm currently posting from an EeePC 901 running eeebuntu, which is actually quite a bit better and can be had for under $200. Plug in an external monitor, and rig up the built-in LCD and peripherals as a fancy KVM switching interface for your various VNC, RDP, VMware, NX, etc. backends. I'm really impressed by the Compiz desktop performance, so you can still get pretty slick transitions between various sessions on different virtual desktops.
And I'm really looking forward to the explosion of new nVidia ION netbooks and nettops, which will actually give a real nVidia 9400 GPU and dual-core Atom processors to these "thin clients", which means they can actually be used more or less like a real box in terms of running web-based interfaces and things without stuttering and pausing occasionally.
So with a dirt-cheap nettop, unfortunately you'll pay a little bit more than your target, but at least you get extra features (like a small SSD, built-in speakers, keyboard/mouse/multitouchpad, and maybe even a webcam, etc. that you could probably put to good use with a bit of creativity.
Ah yes, Orbiter! (Mod the parent Troll up, he actually knows what he's talking about beneath the harsh exterior he presents towards a cold, cruel world)
I spent many a good hour playing with Orbiter... I even managed to get the Space Shuttle into an irregular but stable orbit manually once (but of course without any fuel left for the reentry burn). I also liked their take at the advanced HUD and orbital transfer calculator on their Delta glider.
Anyway, I think they had some technical limitations that made it tough to implement multiplayer... plus not much of a damage model. But yes... Orbital and also Celestia are fun sims to explore, but not so much for combat:/ .
I've long been looking for a space-fighting video game that actually uses real laws of physics. The closest I've seen so far are things like 2D Gravity Wars (sort of like Scorched Earth except your shots are affected by gravity of small planets between you and your target. Heck, even the classic Asteroids is more realistic than just about any other space shooter these days.
Most space games since Wing Commander and even Descent have strange limits like maximum speeds, and never let you go into uncontrolled spins... so it's kinda like there's an artificial atmosphere always present around your vehicle. Of course, if you could just keep accelerating towards your opponent, the gameplay would become decidedly different, like jousting. But even that seems more fun that what things like EVE have turned space combat into.
Anyone have good recommendations? My favorite 6DOF games so far are Descent (though it's hard to find a modern version of this) and Vendetta. VegaStrike and Beyond the Red Line shows some promise as an engine, but never really got into them much.
Is there even demand for the stuff? I spend most of my time trying to get it down, not up. Seems like an artificial way of getting it up would just create more problems than it solves...
Well, at least in Canada, I hear that the recording industry does get a cut of blank media sales, regardless of whether that media will go on to be used to record copyrighted works or not.
Don't just go out and get a telescope without a good book to go with it.
I've been using one of David Levy's books with my kids... something similar to: David Levy's Guide to the Night Sky that I found in the bargain bin some time ago. It has great introduction and background, plus points of interest to look for in every constellation. Much better than the rudimentary charts that come packaged with most telescopes.
Also, it recommends first starting with a good pair of binoculars before moving on to telescopes. Which are also more practical for virtually any other kind of natural sciences pursuit as well.
Meh, $300 isn't bad considering you get free wireless web browsing with the unit. If someone made one in color with a GPS and offered that kind of data plan, I might actually consider ditching my mobile phone company's wap browsing service.
As a long-time Palm PDA + Sunrise + Plucker user, I'm really getting a chuckle out of all this attention e-books are getting lately:-P
But I guess it's all about content distribution and control from the publishers... not a game I've really even been fond of playing, especially when it comes to entertainment. If I have enough of that kind of free time on my hands, I can spend it looking for legitimate free entertainment (or producing my own), thank you.
Yeah, I've been using Chromium for a few months... unfortunately, only to play MafiaWars on Facebook.
It's much, much faster than Firefox at that task, though... I can click on a button 10 times in succession, and it'll register maybe 8 of them and come back with the results. Under Firefox, it would just sit there and register 1 click and wait until it got a response from the server before registering the next.
More legitimately, I've found it runs pretty well on my eeebuntu netbook, and I pretty much use it as the primary browser there.
I tried playing with Xandros a little bit, but it was pretty crappy and limited.
I never tried the ubuntu netbook remix version, but eeebuntu worked great and supports all of the eeepc hardware up front. Compositing is configured on the "Standard" load and runs surprisingly fast.
Also it can run directly from a 1GB USB thumbdrive, so it's easy to play with.
I tried using the Xandros install on my 901 for a little longer, but it is pretty dang limited.
I went the other route and put eeebuntu on it and have been very happy ever since, though. Especially the current Standard release, which has nice compositing effects and everything working on the little thing.
As the joke goes... keep a mistress. So the wife will assume you're with the mistress, the mistress will assume you're with the wife, and you can sneak off to the lab and get some work done!
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, but hopefully this will soon pass this year, as other devices come out. And hopefully Google will roll out Android 2 updates to some existing handsets (I've read the myTouch and Magic devices should have enough hardware specs to make it possible/practical, but unfortunately the first G1 will probably be left out).
My only wish is that I could get Google Maps Mobile on more devices or on real computers. It was the one app I really miss from the Blackberry I used to have for work. I've tried getting it on the Android SDK emulator and on Androidx86, but it's not in the feeble stripped-down app repository on those platforms. Maybe they'll do one for ChromeOS? Doubtful.
I still have my sights set on a Nokia N900 to replace my Palm TX, but as far as I can tell, Google only has GMM for Symbian and not Maemo. But I'd hate to have to pick up an el-cheapo Android device simply to get my GMM fix :/
Actually, in my past two big corporations, I would instead install the corporate image in a VM and run my dev tools on the bare metal.
The corporate image was always 32-bit Windows XP configured to run Outlook and IE6 (which was always necessary for non standards-compliant "web-based" training and timecards and expense reports).
That way I got to run a 64-bit OS on the bare metal, use more than 3.5GB of RAM, and had good performance, while still having a clean, kosher, fully encrypted corporate image for office docs and emails.
In both cases, I patiently became good friends with the real sysadmins first, though.
If it's like their other Android phones, it will likely support wifi as well, so that should take care of your occasional data sync needs... hopefully most of the apps are smart enough to still work while you're offline.
On T-Mobile, you can also get the $10/mo. wap/T-Zones/Web2Go browsing plan, which will basically give you full http / https web access through their proxy. Admittedly this isn't full internet, so apps that won't work through their proxy (such as gmail, gmm, etc.) will fail, but it's still quite useful for the price (well, it used to be better when it only cost $3/mo.) . But a little secret is that if you tether it up with a PDA or Laptop, you can get full internet access through their $10/mo. data plan for some reason. Not terribly convenient compared to an always-on smartphone, but it's served me well plenty of times.
Cool... just remember to contact t-Mobile to have your ebay phone unlocked before you sell it... there are some wonky restrictions, like you have to have it for two billing cycles or something like that before they'll give you the unlock code for your phone.
But also remember they have contractless pricing plans now too... so... just do the math first :P
Meh, I understand the desire for small government... the less they do the less they'll f*(k things up. But as a purveyor of several fine national parks and other conservation efforts, environmental policy is one of the few things I can get behind without reservation.
As far as Gore goes, yes, conflicts of interests, maybe, but somehow I fail to see the evil in trying to get a firm that makes accounting software and a "carbon karma" bank that plants trees off the ground.
I think it depends more on how enlightened your state government is. They're the ones you'll have to file most of your taxes through, and the better ones (the ones that want to attract more businesses) have websites that allow you to e-file most of your work. That means the development is funded by taxpayer dollars, and if you can convince them to use open source for all of the standard reasons, so much the better!
There are several business-grade open-source accounting programs that might be of help to you, such as xacc and maybe gnucash and of course all the spreadsheet programs. But when it comes to forms used to submit all that data, you're left with what your state provides and allows.
And along the lines of "it takes money to make money", you're not all that worse off with paying some of these commercial companies to help you fill out forms and paperwork... just remember to translate it in terms of hours saved. I've used nannytaxes.com, and one of the employee tax form things (which are only maybe $6 a pop and include mailing/postage straight to your employees). Also I've used both the web-based TurboTax and the free filetaxes.com service to do some of my personal taxes back in the day, and it turned out that the extra optimizations and stuff they put in the $70 commercial product reduced my taxes for more than that amount compared to the free service. Plus, if there are any mistakes, the service should help cover your (and their) collective asses a tad more.
Also don't forget that money you spend on people to handle your taxes for you is itself tax-deductible.
So really, I'd say focus on petitioning your government tax collectors on using sane, web-based, open-standards, open-source software to run their end of the deal, and feel free to spend a pittance on whatever guaranteed commercial software gives you a financial edge on actually calculating and paying your taxes.
... are you one of the people who feed off of the trickle down from folks like http://www.google.com/search?q=Exxon+CEO ?
I don't really understand how Gore will amass a fortune from pushing forward environmental policy (administration fees? bribes?) but he seems pretty well off already. And you know, out of all the politicians I've read about he's probably the only one I'd trust to put his resources to good use.
But yeah, the system needs more work to separate the politics / power from the finance / money.
Backing you up, bro.
We do need to try to separate the politics from the science. I'm an environmentalist and was pretty impressed when I first read of this "Al Gore" character from an old ecology book from the late 80s/early 90s who was also into ecology and was working on a way to translate it into a way politicians and industrialists could give a rats' ass about.
Yes, what he came up with was an oversimplification, and a brilliant one at that. It's not often you can target one metric and have it achieve multiple goals: discourage fossil fuel consumption (which we've already been burned on several times in the past), coal consumption, encourage alternative energy development (which otherwise wouldn't be able to compete with dirty energy without factoring in the cost to "clean up" after the cheap stuff), and reduce other pollutants linked to CO2 generation (which would be a pain to go after individually).
I don't think global warming is that much of a concern compared to all of the other beneficial side effects of CO2 cap-n-trade. Hell, even Gore's presentation itself said the that even under worse case projections we wouldn't feel anything for at least a century. But without any kind of policy change, the question is when, not if. It would be nice if we could institute some kind of policy /before/ things get bad, but looking at the history of environmental law, nothing will happen until something bad happens and people start dying. Industrial pollution wasn't regulated until people started suffocating and dying in the yellow London fogs at the last turn of the century, CFCs weren't eliminated until the ozone hole opened wide, agricultural runoff and oyster dredging in the Chesapeake was not curtailed until red tides suffocated and destroyed prime fishing spots.
The, um, anti-environmental crowd knows this, and can keep piling on FUD behind the science to keep any new environmental policy from passing until it's too late and damage has been definitively done -- again when, not if. The only real question is who will take the blame and have to pay to clean up when we do start feeling the effects of climate change. This "ClimateGate" scandal is pure gold for them, because instead of them saying "yeah, you were right, our greed and laziness are destroying the planet", they can say "we were on the path to destruction and we would have changed course if only you hadn't lied on all the science that could have saved us!". So they really have nothing to lose and everything to gain through their current denial stance.
Which again just means we have to separate the science from the politics. Their are a lot of politically expedient avenues to take, where you are allowed to fight dirty and appeal to people's hearts. But frankly it annoys me when they try to blend climate science together with political rhetoric... I don't care about evaluating my lifestyle in terms of a "carbon footprint" and don't care to measure energy efficiency of appliances in terms of carbon emissions! I just want to live efficiently with minimal waste!
They're getting there, just be patient!
I'm about the evaluate the Fit-PC2 for work, which can be had in diskless forms for under $250. http://www.fit-pc.com/
And I'm currently posting from an EeePC 901 running eeebuntu, which is actually quite a bit better and can be had for under $200. Plug in an external monitor, and rig up the built-in LCD and peripherals as a fancy KVM switching interface for your various VNC, RDP, VMware, NX, etc. backends. I'm really impressed by the Compiz desktop performance, so you can still get pretty slick transitions between various sessions on different virtual desktops.
And I'm really looking forward to the explosion of new nVidia ION netbooks and nettops, which will actually give a real nVidia 9400 GPU and dual-core Atom processors to these "thin clients", which means they can actually be used more or less like a real box in terms of running web-based interfaces and things without stuttering and pausing occasionally.
So with a dirt-cheap nettop, unfortunately you'll pay a little bit more than your target, but at least you get extra features (like a small SSD, built-in speakers, keyboard/mouse/multitouchpad, and maybe even a webcam, etc. that you could probably put to good use with a bit of creativity.
Ah yes, Orbiter! (Mod the parent Troll up, he actually knows what he's talking about beneath the harsh exterior he presents towards a cold, cruel world)
I spent many a good hour playing with Orbiter... I even managed to get the Space Shuttle into an irregular but stable orbit manually once (but of course without any fuel left for the reentry burn). I also liked their take at the advanced HUD and orbital transfer calculator on their Delta glider.
Anyway, I think they had some technical limitations that made it tough to implement multiplayer... plus not much of a damage model. But yes... Orbital and also Celestia are fun sims to explore, but not so much for combat :/ .
I've long been looking for a space-fighting video game that actually uses real laws of physics. The closest I've seen so far are things like 2D Gravity Wars (sort of like Scorched Earth except your shots are affected by gravity of small planets between you and your target. Heck, even the classic Asteroids is more realistic than just about any other space shooter these days.
Most space games since Wing Commander and even Descent have strange limits like maximum speeds, and never let you go into uncontrolled spins... so it's kinda like there's an artificial atmosphere always present around your vehicle. Of course, if you could just keep accelerating towards your opponent, the gameplay would become decidedly different, like jousting. But even that seems more fun that what things like EVE have turned space combat into.
Anyone have good recommendations? My favorite 6DOF games so far are Descent (though it's hard to find a modern version of this) and Vendetta. VegaStrike and Beyond the Red Line shows some promise as an engine, but never really got into them much.
12 has the most common factors... 1,2,3,4, and 6
So just make 6 cuts, use a clock as a template if you must.
Unless your party happens to have 5 people, then you're in trouble. Then you need to find one of those metric pizzas...
Hmm...
Pay me $1000 and I'll develop one that gives you a full dozen slices.
Stand back, everyone, I'm an engineer...
( ε )
OK, you can have whatever's left now.
Is there even demand for the stuff? I spend most of my time trying to get it down, not up. Seems like an artificial way of getting it up would just create more problems than it solves...
Oh no, run for your lives! They're preparing the coconut cannon!
http://xkcd.com/520/
Well, at least in Canada, I hear that the recording industry does get a cut of blank media sales, regardless of whether that media will go on to be used to record copyrighted works or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
So don't worry... the recording industry has it covered! :-P
Don't just go out and get a telescope without a good book to go with it.
I've been using one of David Levy's books with my kids... something similar to:
David Levy's Guide to the Night Sky
that I found in the bargain bin some time ago. It has great introduction and background, plus points of interest to look for in every constellation. Much better than the rudimentary charts that come packaged with most telescopes.
Also, it recommends first starting with a good pair of binoculars before moving on to telescopes. Which are also more practical for virtually any other kind of natural sciences pursuit as well.
Meh, $300 isn't bad considering you get free wireless web browsing with the unit. If someone made one in color with a GPS and offered that kind of data plan, I might actually consider ditching my mobile phone company's wap browsing service.
As a long-time Palm PDA + Sunrise + Plucker user, I'm really getting a chuckle out of all this attention e-books are getting lately :-P
But I guess it's all about content distribution and control from the publishers... not a game I've really even been fond of playing, especially when it comes to entertainment. If I have enough of that kind of free time on my hands, I can spend it looking for legitimate free entertainment (or producing my own), thank you.
Yeah, I've been using Chromium for a few months... unfortunately, only to play MafiaWars on Facebook.
It's much, much faster than Firefox at that task, though... I can click on a button 10 times in succession, and it'll register maybe 8 of them and come back with the results. Under Firefox, it would just sit there and register 1 click and wait until it got a response from the server before registering the next.
More legitimately, I've found it runs pretty well on my eeebuntu netbook, and I pretty much use it as the primary browser there.
I tried playing with Xandros a little bit, but it was pretty crappy and limited.
I never tried the ubuntu netbook remix version, but eeebuntu worked great and supports all of the eeepc hardware up front. Compositing is configured on the "Standard" load and runs surprisingly fast.
Also it can run directly from a 1GB USB thumbdrive, so it's easy to play with.
Ha, on /. it is :P
I tried using the Xandros install on my 901 for a little longer, but it is pretty dang limited.
I went the other route and put eeebuntu on it and have been very happy ever since, though. Especially the current Standard release, which has nice compositing effects and everything working on the little thing.
Well, if you're really in a hurry to go THERE, it does loosely translate to PenisPenis in some languages.
As the joke goes... keep a mistress. So the wife will assume you're with the mistress, the mistress will assume you're with the wife, and you can sneak off to the lab and get some work done!