It is expected to sell for... less than $400 in the United States, Sony said, undercutting Apple's 40-gigabyte device, which sells for $499
ok?! why not compare it to the 20G iPod, being as it is that the Sony one is a 20G player as well? the 20G iPod costs $399 as of now (and probably less when the sony is launched...).
i love Joel on Software but i think he is missing the obvious solution: M$ will go for a clean break with the past with Avalon/Longhorn, and provide backwards compatibility the same way Classic works on OS X. the old programs never know they run on top of a completely new OS. at least that's what they should be doing. they did, after all, buy Virtual PC.
that solution would cleanly reconcile the preservationists (who want to be backwards compatible with 1983 DOS) and the modernists with.NET and Avalon.
In Germany and Austria, online banking requires a TAN (Transaction Authorization Number) for any operation that changes the account.
the TANs come one a one-time-pad kind of sheet and you can use each number once before they become invalid. Therefore, if somebody is scanning my TANs (along with other things), they can do exactly nothing with it.
The sheet of TANs is generated on some bank server and sent to me via postal mail.
Admittedly, i wouldn't want anyone browsing my bank account. But the damage they can do with that is limited (changing passwords and so on requires a TAN too).
I hereby nominate DVI Dual-Link for the award of "Worst-named Technology 2004". reason: Because most pro cards have two of them. So they are called dual DVI. Dual DVI ports, a DVI Dual Port, Dual DVI Dual ports?
Other worst-named technologies: - Hi-Speed USB (of which i am not sure to this date whether it's USB 1 or 2. What's wrong with 1 and 2?). - Airport Extreme. Just for the sheer sillyness of it. - Java 2. Because it means Java 1.2.x and up. Why, let's confuse everybody.
that's not backwards. this will definitely increase sales of BMWs.
let's say i am going to purchase a $40,000+ car. spending this kind of money, that car must be PERFECT. so what am i going to do about the stereo? 1) buy a $20 cassette adapter which looks like it would fit in an 1987 buick? 2) replace the perfectly fitting in-dash stereo with one with a line-in jack just like i would replace the stock radio that came with a 1987 buick? 3) get an iTrip iPod radio adapter and entertain my passengers with the sound of static interference, making the fancy stereo sound like the stock radio in the 1987 buick? 4) go back to burning Audio CDs and put them in the bulky CD changer in the back? and impress my passengers with my retro-style? take the $600 CD-changer option over the $300 iPod option?
NO. I wouldn't. I would expect there to be an elegant way of hooking up my incredibly stylish iPod. Or maybe i would love to have an excuse to finally get an iPod for myself.
It's just one more reason to buy a BMW, just like "looks sexy" or "has better handling than competitor X's car". besides, anyone who considers buying a BMW definitely has enough money to get an iPod, and definitely would want one, or already has one.
It's a great idea for both companies. Apple can sell this thing to all other car manufacturers, too, and further their plans for total world domination in the mp3 player market. BMW gets an edge over competition. I would say smaller things have sold a car.
while bouncing up and down in the waves, endless ocean in front of me, waiting for a big(ger) one... the last thing i would want is a laptop in front of me... but apart from that, there is other limitations that make this not just pointless, but actually stupid:
1) it will be impossible to do anything while riding out in the waves. as any surfer knows, the waves, well, go up and down, and the surfboard is not exactly a stable surface. it would be impossible to see anything on the screen, let alone move a mouse pointer etc
2) if i slam into the coral the centrino will be a goner
3) if the centrino slams into my head and breaks while i surf, i will be suing intel (if i ever had one, that is, which i won't).
the best application of this technology is to put it in your room, or in a surfer hangout cafe, as some kind of geeky, not-that-funny prop.
can anybody think of a more useless location for a wireless laptop than inside a surfboard? what are your ideas?
X prize or not: If you get this to work, and if you get it to work relatively cheaply, then there is tons of money to be made. you could start a $Bn business out of that, or sell the tech for 100s of millions. The X-Prize is nice but chump change compared to that. And while JC would do it no matter what, just for the heck of it, or maybe just for the chance to strap the biggest possible engine to his butt, he must be well aware of that.
You can even start spreading loop cycles over multiple CPUs, but I'm pretty certain that the present JVMs aren't that smart.
the JIT could also recognize code that can be vectorized and take advantage of SSI/AltiVec automatically.
That would make Java blazingly fast and incredibly efficient in some applications. Imagine getting SSI/AltiVec optimization for free! That would be a huge value for programmers right there.
I'm seeing the benchmarks take serious advantage of java's GC mechanism
the first part of your analysis is sound: the benchmarks are highly questionable since the Java code never runs the gc, thereby cheating it's way out of having to do mem management. very good point.
Worse, when I ran it with a 1:1 ratio of delete:System.gc(),
so, you took it back to Java, and biased the test in favor of C++ by running way too many gc's, which, as you point out don't even mean anything because the gc doesn't get invoked immediately. by adding System.gc() to the Java side of the test, you in fact added some kind of randomizer to the code. you don't know what System.gc() does - it's a notification that the gc may run, yes. But you don't know what exactly the system will do after it's called. For all you know, it could stall for a couple of seconds. Or it could count all objects in memory. Or... anything. You added a random delay to the Java side of things. and, lo and behold, you "proved" that c++ is faster. now, if the original comparison was biased, this was surely worse.
a better test would probably be to let the c++ side never collect anything. and to stop the watch before java starts collecting (just use a huge max. heap size and set it to use the traditional gc and it won't collect anything for a while).
Regarding the article: It's kind of silly to count the JVM startup delay in the tests. Because for some things it will matter, e.g. programs that get run, then shut down again zillions of times. That's why you can't write command line tools in Java. For other things it won't matter at all because they get started once and then continue running (client-GUI software, server app). Also, new JVMs from Apple (and Sun, in the future) just won't have the startup delay because they will statically link precompiled versions of the java class library (rt.jar).
IMHO, speed matters only in one area: When doing calculations in tight loops. There, i believe Java is just as good as c++ because the hotspot compiler actually works and will generate fast, optimized assembler code out of the java loop.
I did some unrelated speed tests within Java (checking the overhead of final method calls - it turned out to be zero as it gets optimized away) and found out, to my surprise, that a simple calculation in a for-loop ran at 400 million loop iterations per second, or 1/3 of phyiscal machine speed (1.3GHz Pentium-M). I found that impressive. Come to think of it, it was probably exactly the DRAM access speed (i was accessing a huge array).
They also have entirely different national banking systems,...
all EU banks are required by law to allow wireless transfers to other banks within the EU at the same conditions as transfers within the country.
i did it recently. my bank's online banking site has a form to enter the IBAN. a few days later it arrived at the destination bank. no fees involved - the entire transfer was free.
i agree on the Credit card thing. no one has them in europe. the reason is probably that, pre-internet, we had EC cards which were subsequently used like debit cards. so no one really needed a debit-visa card.
the problem is, these EC cards don't have a credit card number. they are directly linked to your account number at the bank. so they are not suitable for online commerce - the banks won't accept an EC card number without PIN code, and they won't send the PIN over the internet.
this system is much safer than, say, visa debit cards, but it also means there is no way for anyone to pay online. whereas, in america, everybody gets a visa-debit card and everything is happy. if the number is abused, you get a new visa card, you are not responsible for fraud, etc.
i think it's a failure of the banks that they have not re-introduced the visa debit card... credit is not seen as a good thing in europe, so it never will be as wide-spread as in the US. as of now, it's not even offered. just one of the strange things hampering e-business in europe.
for people to lazy to click on the link, the Blinkenlights project wired up light bulbs behind every window of a large office building and allowed them to be remote-controlled by a computer.
They had a building-size dot matrix display at night. For text messages, and Pong over the mobile phone! just call a number, and play. It looks awesome. Too bad it's not operational anymore.
true story: a couple once ran off with my wife's suitcase from the baggage claim. I caught them outside on their way to the taxi and asked them if they were sure that was their luggage (black samsonite). They were absolutely, adamantly sure. No Way that was mine. they had checked because there are so many suitcases like that. after a lot of convincing, i got them to open it up anyway.
it turns out they had checked the combination to see if it was theirs: 000.
(we have since changed the combination and added stickers)
From the Article: ATT didn't keep the messages, but they have a backup storage system which automatically backs up everything - including the text messages.
So it's not that they wanted to keep the messages - they just forgot to tell the backup program not to back them up, or delete them after a certain period of time.
Very interesting. I would be surprised if the other wireless companies (which immediately claimed they didn't keep messages around) didn't have the same problem. Any professional company would have a backup system for their main servers. You really think they would go through the trouble and remove the text messages from that? What if the text message can't be delivered instantly and the server crashes? You would want to retrieve them from the backup system of course. This is not a trivial problem - you would really have to give this some thought. Do i really think that the marketing-drones who were quick to repeat the official company line really thought this through? No.
boobs... it goes much further than that. boobs are _always_ useful in any kind of advertising or trying to get attention. it's the one thing that always, always works. has for thousands of years.
no matter what the product: slap some boobs on the front, and it sells.
it's not for nothing that bay watch is (still!) the most watched TV show on the planet.
I used to use SurfAndSip way back when it started in San Francisco. $20/Month for unlimited internet access is not bad, especially if you have a cell phone (save $10 on land line) and spend a lot of time in or around cafes anyway.
But last week, i saw the death of this model. I went into the Canvas Cafe - free wireless access from 8 am - 6 pm, and the typical hipster atmosphere we all love and loathe. I sat down with my latte, and saw in front of me 30 (thirty!) laptops. Everybody in this place had a laptop. All of them with WiFi (new and shiny PCs and 50% macs). I think i saw maybe two people without computer. The whole cafe had turned into some kind of office. It was packed.
Now, this cafe was popular to begin with, but this was a weekday, and this was sometime in the afternoon.
The euquation is simple: Free WiFi = more customers!. Once that begins to sink in, imagine how many Cafes would _not_ be able to affort $50 per month for a serious DSL line. Exactly Zero. Any business can afford that. The cost is negligible.
This isn't some theory or opinion. This is reality: It's happening right now, it already happened, it's working, and there is no stopping it or turning back the clock.
I am sorry for SurfAndSip (which always had excellent service and good prices) and less sorry for others (e.g. t-mobile with their attempts to sell the internet as something close to Gold). But the reality is: The future is free wireless access. Paid-for hotspots will be gone in no time. The only way i can imagine these companies making money is by reselling DSL and installing the equipment.
i loved this one... it's definitely some form of poetry. the subtle grammatical errors in every single sentence, the immense sadness expressed by the "...=(", and the notion that there is a "rock virulent"... just great spam. unaltered and pure, here it is:
From: "Rath" Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 10:51:42 +0100 Subject: Get a piece of the rock virulent
Every man must have a s6x! MUST!!! But some can't...=(
C-i@l!s helps to have an 6r6ction when you need it within 36 hours. Get a piece of the rock!
Everything you need is to know more about it
Re:How long is the iPod thing going to last?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I went to the Apple Store SF last week (it's more like a cathedral of Apple, really - a clean, white, well-lit cathedral to adore sleek designs... anyway).
They had some iPod minis coming in. Buying frenzy ensued, and the color ones (blue only) were sold out in half an hour. Imagine a 50% off sale of Hermes (or LV) bags in Japan - it was kind of like that.
This is a fashion phenomenon, like none has happened in technology before. People buy them because they are sexy, sleek, the thing to have - especially the minis.
So this is not just a piece of tech with a cool look. It's a cool look (if you want to put it that way) with a piece of tech. Therefore, the competition will fail - they don't get it. Of all tech companies, Sony is probably the only one which would be able to launch a successful competitor. But they haven't so far...
The iPod, especially the mini, is about one thing: Being the coolest person in the gym - or in any other social situation. And you don't get there with a Dell, a Creative XYZ or an Archos whatever.
The biggest danger to the iPod thing, therefore, is fashion itself. Fashion trends tend to be unstable and things that were cool last year tend to be not cool anymore this year. But i somehow think the iPod will be spared this fate - maybe the Design is too timeless for that to happen.
point 1: criticism that does not provide a solution is still valid criticism.
point 2: just because we didn't come up with another solution doesn't mean nuclear is the only way to go. we have time, and we should damn well use that time to come up with a better plan than nuclear.
point 3: in order to have more time (like, say, 50 years) we can right now start to make everything more energy efficient. put LED lighting everywhere - it looks as good as light bulbs/halogen, yet uses only 10% the electricity. etc. there are a zillion ways to save energy, and we are using none of them so far.
as energy becomes more expensive, the ways to save energy become more economically viable. witness germany: gas there costs $4.20 on average, and new vehicles get 40MPG _on average_. see the connection?
point 4: shit happens. you can't prevent it. you have not been in europe when chernobyl happened. 300 million people were staying inside for a week, just because one (1) reactor failed. planes crash despite our best efforts to make them not crash. and nuclear plants will leak radiation despite our best efforts. who in their right mind would place our entire future on a technology that has zero tolerance for failure? where large-scale catastrophe is always only just a human error away?
i don't trust the technologists that say they can build error free systems. there never has been one in the history of technology. chances are that a single plane crash, terrible as it is, will not affect me. chances are that a single catastrophic failure in a nuclear power plant _will_ affect me.
add to that the terrorist threat (which some people seem to completely misunderstand): nuclear power plants can be attacked. easily. effortlessly. in a million different ways. from good old fashioned sabotage to brute force attacks.
we have not yet found a viable and large-scale alternative to oil. so let's focus on looking for that instead throwing our hands up in the air and running around like headless chickens, jumping at the first dumb idea coming along...
Re:Why would you pay for it anyways?
on
Hardcore Java
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· Score: 1
uh, AFAIK, the windowing libraries (the GUI) are neither free nor cross platform. they are windows-only, ms-only.
that that is what matters. ANSI c was cross platform, too. fine if you don't need a GUI.
and, apart from technical details, there is the small matter of trusting the owner of this language - the company called microsoft - to keep it "open and free". HA HA HA. sigh.
as soon as it poses any kind of business problem for MS, it's dead. c# development will not cost you money _right now_. but it will pretty much guarantee that you will be paying microsoft tax _somewhere_ down the road.
kudos to Mono for being such a subversive development. Beat them with their own weapons. i just thing it's extremely risky. it just comes down to common sense, and the question: can you learn from history? M$ business ways have not changed in 20 years. what makes you think they will now?
slight problem: if you bounce spam, you let the spammer know that your account is live, so they will proceed to send you even more spam.
besides, a lot of spam also has fake return addresses (viruses and such). so you are spamming the real owners of the address. and if they have such a bounce-system as well...
=> if everybody automatically bounced all spam, the internet would go down in an avalanche of spam and bounces...
the best way to stay spam-free is to never give out your email address. use a disposable one instead, like this one: slashdot-test.3.nikster@spamgourmet.com
i will receive the first 3 emails to that address. everything else gets eaten (deleted right on the server). works beautifully.
In today's article of this three-part series, I'm going to fine-tune this strategy, plus take a closer look at Mail.app, so that you can more fully unleash its potential.
...Interestingly enough, the technology that underlies the Junk Mail filter began its life as an information retrieval system, developed in the Apple labs to help users who managed thousands or millions of large documents find the one they were looking for easily.
...The Apple data kit allows the user to find the single document that best represents each topic.
...The main advantage of vector representation is that this technology does not rely on word order to do its work -- you can have a look at our speech article to learn more about why this is important.
...So, a document that contains "Aunt Emma" and "cooking tips" at the beginning and the end of a page can well be in the same cluster as a text that talks precisely about "the time Aunt Emma sent you cooking tips."
...Imagine this: take the biggest issue you can find of the Mac Developer Journal and put it in your left hand, and put your favorite dictionary in your right hand.
...Let's say, for example, that your Aunt Emma, in her cooking tips, talks about a "hippopotamus" (as in "For the turkey to be tasty, it should be quite large but obviously, you don't want a hippopotamus-sized one.").
...If each document is a point in a X0,000-dimension space or so, we reduce its dimensionality into a small number of dimensions that capture the salient patterns and the majority of the variation in the corpus.
...Like we did before, you can perform a bit of cluster analysis and find clusters of documents that each represent a topic.
...Because words are distributed in the same space as documents, you can find the words that are closer to the center of a document cluster.
...Even though Apple is not the only company working on such technologies, they do seem to be the only ones to have made it so accessible to end users and powerful at the same time. In fact, they do it so well that it is now at the center of many system components as we have seen, requiring them to continuously refine the calculations and develop the formal mathematical representations -- all for your benefit.
...The other traditional approach is to look at the sender and not accept any message from any known junk-mail sender.
it helps to check Apple apps _again_ from time to time since they tend to make huge improvements with every release. Mail.app has not been slow for a while now. Apple seems to pretty consequently follow the strategy "make it work first, make it fast later" . i am running the latest version on OS X 10.3
I have about 1G of mail and it doesn't really seem slow in any situation, even though it's running on a almost 3 year old 667MHz powerbook (with a sloooow hard disk).
I just did a test of search entire message in all mailboxes (all 1G of them). the first results appeared after 3 seconds, and it stopped after 40 secs, rebuilding some indexes along the way. the second search was done in about 15 seconds.
Every single criticism i had since Mail 1.0 - and there were a lot, including performance - has since been addressed. It is now fast, no annoying modal dialogs, no indexing behind your back, no weird delays. It's just a beautiful mail client.
i recommend you try it again.
On topic: The junk mail filter seems to indeed work pretty well. i just checked my junk mail folder (2000 unread messages, heh): All except for 5 were spam, and those 5 were all mass mailings, too. Even clever(?) subject lines like v$a.g.r.a and such were filtered out.
Oddly, 3 of the 5 false positives were from Apple, sent to my.mac account.
Slashdot Mirror
ok?! why not compare it to the 20G iPod, being as it is that the Sony one is a 20G player as well?
the 20G iPod costs $399 as of now (and probably less when the sony is launched...).
i love Joel on Software but i think he is missing the obvious solution:
.NET and Avalon.
M$ will go for a clean break with the past with Avalon/Longhorn, and provide backwards compatibility the same way Classic works on OS X. the old programs never know they run on top of a completely new OS. at least that's what they should be doing. they did, after all, buy Virtual PC.
that solution would cleanly reconcile the preservationists (who want to be backwards compatible with 1983 DOS) and the modernists with
In Germany and Austria, online banking requires a TAN (Transaction Authorization Number) for any operation that changes the account.
the TANs come one a one-time-pad kind of sheet and you can use each number once before they become invalid. Therefore, if somebody is scanning my TANs (along with other things), they can do exactly nothing with it.
The sheet of TANs is generated on some bank server and sent to me via postal mail.
Admittedly, i wouldn't want anyone browsing my bank account. But the damage they can do with that is limited (changing passwords and so on requires a TAN too).
I hereby nominate DVI Dual-Link for the award of "Worst-named Technology 2004".
reason: Because most pro cards have two of them. So they are called dual DVI. Dual DVI ports, a DVI Dual Port, Dual DVI Dual ports?
Other worst-named technologies:
- Hi-Speed USB (of which i am not sure to this date whether it's USB 1 or 2. What's wrong with 1 and 2?).
- Airport Extreme. Just for the sheer sillyness of it.
- Java 2. Because it means Java 1.2.x and up. Why, let's confuse everybody.
that's not backwards. this will definitely increase sales of BMWs.
let's say i am going to purchase a $40,000+ car. spending this kind of money, that car must be PERFECT. so what am i going to do about the stereo?
1) buy a $20 cassette adapter which looks like it would fit in an 1987 buick?
2) replace the perfectly fitting in-dash stereo with one with a line-in jack just like i would replace the stock radio that came with a 1987 buick?
3) get an iTrip iPod radio adapter and entertain my passengers with the sound of static interference, making the fancy stereo sound like the stock radio in the 1987 buick?
4) go back to burning Audio CDs and put them in the bulky CD changer in the back? and impress my passengers with my retro-style? take the $600 CD-changer option over the $300 iPod option?
NO. I wouldn't. I would expect there to be an elegant way of hooking up my incredibly stylish iPod. Or maybe i would love to have an excuse to finally get an iPod for myself.
It's just one more reason to buy a BMW, just like "looks sexy" or "has better handling than competitor X's car". besides, anyone who considers buying a BMW definitely has enough money to get an iPod, and definitely would want one, or already has one.
It's a great idea for both companies. Apple can sell this thing to all other car manufacturers, too, and further their plans for total world domination in the mp3 player market. BMW gets an edge over competition. I would say smaller things have sold a car.
while bouncing up and down in the waves, endless ocean in front of me, waiting for a big(ger) one... the last thing i would want is a laptop in front of me... but apart from that, there is other limitations that make this not just pointless, but actually stupid:
1) it will be impossible to do anything while riding out in the waves. as any surfer knows, the waves, well, go up and down, and the surfboard is not exactly a stable surface. it would be impossible to see anything on the screen, let alone move a mouse pointer etc
2) if i slam into the coral the centrino will be a goner
3) if the centrino slams into my head and breaks while i surf, i will be suing intel (if i ever had one, that is, which i won't).
the best application of this technology is to put it in your room, or in a surfer hangout cafe, as some kind of geeky, not-that-funny prop.
can anybody think of a more useless location for a wireless laptop than inside a surfboard? what are your ideas?
X prize or not: If you get this to work, and if you get it to work relatively cheaply, then there is tons of money to be made. you could start a $Bn business out of that, or sell the tech for 100s of millions. The X-Prize is nice but chump change compared to that.
And while JC would do it no matter what, just for the heck of it, or maybe just for the chance to strap the biggest possible engine to his butt, he must be well aware of that.
You can even start spreading loop cycles over multiple CPUs, but I'm pretty certain that the present JVMs aren't that smart.
the JIT could also recognize code that can be vectorized and take advantage of SSI/AltiVec automatically.
That would make Java blazingly fast and incredibly efficient in some applications. Imagine getting SSI/AltiVec optimization for free! That would be a huge value for programmers right there.
very good point.
so, you took it back to Java, and biased the test in favor of C++ by running way too many gc's, which, as you point out don't even mean anything because the gc doesn't get invoked immediately. by adding System.gc() to the Java side of the test, you in fact added some kind of randomizer to the code. you don't know what System.gc() does - it's a notification that the gc may run, yes. But you don't know what exactly the system will do after it's called. For all you know, it could stall for a couple of seconds. Or it could count all objects in memory. Or... anything. You added a random delay to the Java side of things.
and, lo and behold, you "proved" that c++ is faster. now, if the original comparison was biased, this was surely worse.
a better test would probably be to let the c++ side never collect anything. and to stop the watch before java starts collecting (just use a huge max. heap size and set it to use the traditional gc and it won't collect anything for a while).
Regarding the article: It's kind of silly to count the JVM startup delay in the tests. Because for some things it will matter, e.g. programs that get run, then shut down again zillions of times. That's why you can't write command line tools in Java. For other things it won't matter at all because they get started once and then continue running (client-GUI software, server app). Also, new JVMs from Apple (and Sun, in the future) just won't have the startup delay because they will statically link precompiled versions of the java class library (rt.jar).
IMHO, speed matters only in one area: When doing calculations in tight loops. There, i believe Java is just as good as c++ because the hotspot compiler actually works and will generate fast, optimized assembler code out of the java loop.
I did some unrelated speed tests within Java (checking the overhead of final method calls - it turned out to be zero as it gets optimized away) and found out, to my surprise, that a simple calculation in a for-loop ran at 400 million loop iterations per second, or 1/3 of phyiscal machine speed (1.3GHz Pentium-M). I found that impressive. Come to think of it, it was probably exactly the DRAM access speed (i was accessing a huge array).
They also have entirely different national banking systems,...
all EU banks are required by law to allow wireless transfers to other banks within the EU at the same conditions as transfers within the country.
i did it recently. my bank's online banking site has a form to enter the IBAN. a few days later it arrived at the destination bank. no fees involved - the entire transfer was free.
i agree on the Credit card thing. no one has them in europe. the reason is probably that, pre-internet, we had EC cards which were subsequently used like debit cards. so no one really needed a debit-visa card.
the problem is, these EC cards don't have a credit card number. they are directly linked to your account number at the bank. so they are not suitable for online commerce - the banks won't accept an EC card number without PIN code, and they won't send the PIN over the internet.
this system is much safer than, say, visa debit cards, but it also means there is no way for anyone to pay online. whereas, in america, everybody gets a visa-debit card and everything is happy. if the number is abused, you get a new visa card, you are not responsible for fraud, etc.
i think it's a failure of the banks that they have not re-introduced the visa debit card... credit is not seen as a good thing in europe, so it never will be as wide-spread as in the US. as of now, it's not even offered. just one of the strange things hampering e-business in europe.
OMG they could play Pong on a building.
for people to lazy to click on the link, the Blinkenlights project wired up light bulbs behind every window of a large office building and allowed them to be remote-controlled by a computer.
They had a building-size dot matrix display at night. For text messages, and Pong over the mobile phone! just call a number, and play.
It looks awesome. Too bad it's not operational anymore.
true story: a couple once ran off with my wife's suitcase from the baggage claim. I caught them outside on their way to the taxi and asked them if they were sure that was their luggage (black samsonite). They were absolutely, adamantly sure. No Way that was mine. they had checked because there are so many suitcases like that. after a lot of convincing, i got them to open it up anyway.
it turns out they had checked the combination to see if it was theirs: 000.
(we have since changed the combination and added stickers)
it never hurts to RTFA though, or research this before posting opinions. laplogic claims the CPU will run cooler or as cool as on a table.
it's somewhat disappointing that they didn't dramatically improve the cooling as well though.
From the Article: ATT didn't keep the messages, but they have a backup storage system which automatically backs up everything - including the text messages.
So it's not that they wanted to keep the messages - they just forgot to tell the backup program not to back them up, or delete them after a certain period of time.
Very interesting. I would be surprised if the other wireless companies (which immediately claimed they didn't keep messages around) didn't have the same problem.
Any professional company would have a backup system for their main servers. You really think they would go through the trouble and remove the text messages from that? What if the text message can't be delivered instantly and the server crashes? You would want to retrieve them from the backup system of course. This is not a trivial problem - you would really have to give this some thought.
Do i really think that the marketing-drones who were quick to repeat the official company line really thought this through? No.
boobs... it goes much further than that. boobs are _always_ useful in any kind of advertising or trying to get attention. it's the one thing that always, always works. has for thousands of years.
no matter what the product: slap some boobs on the front, and it sells.
it's not for nothing that bay watch is (still!) the most watched TV show on the planet.
I used to use SurfAndSip way back when it started in San Francisco. $20/Month for unlimited internet access is not bad, especially if you have a cell phone (save $10 on land line) and spend a lot of time in or around cafes anyway.
But last week, i saw the death of this model. I went into the Canvas Cafe - free wireless access from 8 am - 6 pm, and the typical hipster atmosphere we all love and loathe. I sat down with my latte, and saw in front of me 30 (thirty!) laptops. Everybody in this place had a laptop. All of them with WiFi (new and shiny PCs and 50% macs). I think i saw maybe two people without computer. The whole cafe had turned into some kind of office. It was packed.
Now, this cafe was popular to begin with, but this was a weekday, and this was sometime in the afternoon.
The euquation is simple: Free WiFi = more customers!. Once that begins to sink in, imagine how many Cafes would _not_ be able to affort $50 per month for a serious DSL line. Exactly Zero. Any business can afford that. The cost is negligible.
This isn't some theory or opinion. This is reality: It's happening right now, it already happened, it's working, and there is no stopping it or turning back the clock.
I am sorry for SurfAndSip (which always had excellent service and good prices) and less sorry for others (e.g. t-mobile with their attempts to sell the internet as something close to Gold). But the reality is: The future is free wireless access. Paid-for hotspots will be gone in no time. The only way i can imagine these companies making money is by reselling DSL and installing the equipment.
I went to the Apple Store SF last week (it's more like a cathedral of Apple, really - a clean, white, well-lit cathedral to adore sleek designs... anyway).
They had some iPod minis coming in. Buying frenzy ensued, and the color ones (blue only) were sold out in half an hour. Imagine a 50% off sale of Hermes (or LV) bags in Japan - it was kind of like that.
This is a fashion phenomenon, like none has happened in technology before. People buy them because they are sexy, sleek, the thing to have - especially the minis.
So this is not just a piece of tech with a cool look. It's a cool look (if you want to put it that way) with a piece of tech. Therefore, the competition will fail - they don't get it. Of all tech companies, Sony is probably the only one which would be able to launch a successful competitor. But they haven't so far...
The iPod, especially the mini, is about one thing: Being the coolest person in the gym - or in any other social situation. And you don't get there with a Dell, a Creative XYZ or an Archos whatever.
The biggest danger to the iPod thing, therefore, is fashion itself. Fashion trends tend to be unstable and things that were cool last year tend to be not cool anymore this year. But i somehow think the iPod will be spared this fate - maybe the Design is too timeless for that to happen.
point 1: criticism that does not provide a solution is still valid criticism.
point 2: just because we didn't come up with another solution doesn't mean nuclear is the only way to go. we have time, and we should damn well use that time to come up with a better plan than nuclear.
point 3: in order to have more time (like, say, 50 years) we can right now start to make everything more energy efficient. put LED lighting everywhere - it looks as good as light bulbs/halogen, yet uses only 10% the electricity. etc. there are a zillion ways to save energy, and we are using none of them so far.
as energy becomes more expensive, the ways to save energy become more economically viable. witness germany: gas there costs $4.20 on average, and new vehicles get 40MPG _on average_. see the connection?
point 4: shit happens. you can't prevent it. you have not been in europe when chernobyl happened. 300 million people were staying inside for a week, just because one (1) reactor failed. planes crash despite our best efforts to make them not crash. and nuclear plants will leak radiation despite our best efforts. who in their right mind would place our entire future on a technology that has zero tolerance for failure? where large-scale catastrophe is always only just a human error away?
i don't trust the technologists that say they can build error free systems. there never has been one in the history of technology. chances are that a single plane crash, terrible as it is, will not affect me. chances are that a single catastrophic failure in a nuclear power plant _will_ affect me.
add to that the terrorist threat (which some people seem to completely misunderstand): nuclear power plants can be attacked. easily. effortlessly. in a million different ways. from good old fashioned sabotage to brute force attacks.
we have not yet found a viable and large-scale alternative to oil. so let's focus on looking for that instead throwing our hands up in the air and running around like headless chickens, jumping at the first dumb idea coming along...
uh, AFAIK, the windowing libraries (the GUI) are neither free nor cross platform. they are windows-only, ms-only.
that that is what matters. ANSI c was cross platform, too. fine if you don't need a GUI.
and, apart from technical details, there is the small matter of trusting the owner of this language - the company called microsoft - to keep it "open and free". HA HA HA. sigh.
as soon as it poses any kind of business problem for MS, it's dead. c# development will not cost you money _right now_. but it will pretty much guarantee that you will be paying microsoft tax _somewhere_ down the road.
kudos to Mono for being such a subversive development. Beat them with their own weapons. i just thing it's extremely risky. it just comes down to common sense, and the question: can you learn from history? M$ business ways have not changed in 20 years. what makes you think they will now?
if you look here you can see that only 1.5% of petroleum is used for power generation.
still seems to be a lot though.
it also shows something like 67% is used for transportation.
slight problem: if you bounce spam, you let the spammer know that your account is live, so they will proceed to send you even more spam.
besides, a lot of spam also has fake return addresses (viruses and such). so you are spamming the real owners of the address. and if they have such a bounce-system as well...
=> if everybody automatically bounced all spam, the internet would go down in an avalanche of spam and bounces...
the best way to stay spam-free is to never give out your email address. use a disposable one instead, like this one: slashdot-test.3.nikster@spamgourmet.com
i will receive the first 3 emails to that address. everything else gets eaten (deleted right on the server). works beautifully.
Mail CHOKED on them
.mac account.
it helps to check Apple apps _again_ from time to time since they tend to make huge improvements with every release. Mail.app has not been slow for a while now. Apple seems to pretty consequently follow the strategy "make it work first, make it fast later" . i am running the latest version on OS X 10.3
I have about 1G of mail and it doesn't really seem slow in any situation, even though it's running on a almost 3 year old 667MHz powerbook (with a sloooow hard disk).
I just did a test of search entire message in all mailboxes (all 1G of them). the first results appeared after 3 seconds, and it stopped after 40 secs, rebuilding some indexes along the way. the second search was done in about 15 seconds.
Every single criticism i had since Mail 1.0 - and there were a lot, including performance - has since been addressed. It is now fast, no annoying modal dialogs, no indexing behind your back, no weird delays. It's just a beautiful mail client.
i recommend you try it again.
On topic: The junk mail filter seems to indeed work pretty well. i just checked my junk mail folder (2000 unread messages, heh): All except for 5 were spam, and those 5 were all mass mailings, too. Even clever(?) subject lines like v$a.g.r.a and such were filtered out.
Oddly, 3 of the 5 false positives were from Apple, sent to my