FYI: at 1600x1200 resolution, the data rate to your screen is something on the order of 3Gb/sec. I don't think bluetooth was ever designed to do that.
Fact is, bluetooth doesn't do *anything* all that useful, which is why it still hasn't been adopted five years after the consortium announced that $5 wireless was "coming soon".
802.11 is where it's at. Good throughput, moderate range. For short range there's either IR (fast, line of sight - PDA sync, printer, etc) or 433MHz AM (slow but goes through stuff - KB/Mouse). Bluetooth is way more expensive than either, and doesn't really solve the problem any better. Also don't forget you still need power for these devices - mayb KB/mouse could be battery powered, but what about CDROM, scanner, etc? That't why USB (for short range) and 802.11 (for moderate range) will rule. Bluetooth will fail.
It is unreasonable to require each retaler to file and keep track of all 50 states rules/laws/tax amounts.
Acutally it's even more onerous than that. AFAIK in most/all states, some portion of the sales tax is decided by the individual county or even city where the goods are sold. Presumably any proposed internet tax would invert this so the seller would have to collect sales for the city/county/state of the purchaser. How in the name of god do they expect businesses to keep track of all the sales tax collected in different states??? Are we going to have to fill our forty-nine more tax forms every year, and write forty-nine more separate checks?
Or maybe we'll have some interstate customs system, where the freight companies collect taxes on delivery. Then some day, us old timers can talk about the days Americans could "drive from one state to another... with no papers!"
PS I think the reason I made that quip is that most people associate any diabetes with poor health. type I is less common. *usually* type II occurs later in life along with other complications, ergo my stupid comment to differentiate the two. That's about all I know about diabetes, so I'm signing off now.
Sorry - I've had a few beers and was just blurting out a stream of thoughts there, in response to the insulin patch idea. I admit that I don't know much at all about type II... again, my apologies.
That's right! Someone else needs to make sure we get laid, since we geeks are too busy coding, forgetting to shave, and getting fat on dew/pizza.
For the love of christ, get some cojones and go out once in a while. There's more to life. Of course it's 11:00 on Friday night, and I'm here reading slashdot, so I guess I should shut up now.:)
Just some random thoughts here: my sister is "type I" diabetic, ie the kind you get a child (total failure of the pancreas), not the kind that fat people get. Nobody knows why people get type I diabetes - it is usually not inherited genetically.
I've never heard anything about an insulin patch, but it's an interesting idea. She has tried the insulin pump (yes, invented by the Segway guy). It didn't work for her because she's into sports, and the pump has to be connected all the time. A couple shots a day is actually less painful (can you imagine that?)
Anyway, more power to these guys if they can come up with a solution for painless insulin delivery. The market is huge, and if they can work out the issues with accurate metering/timing, this would almost certianly replace the needle. Perhaps they could perforate the patches in such a way that you can tear them apart into a smaller section that meters out the right dose of fast vs slow-acting insulin....
PS some interesting things are being invented for blood sugar testing, but none have hit the market yet. Watches with lasers in them, implants, etc... If you're into medical tech, this is a pretty hot field.
you could read it for a time, share your license with a friend so they could too, and then return the book automatically when your rental time is up
How does the author benefit from me returning the book? Does it mitigate his cost in some way?
I've never brrowed the same book from a library twice. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've checked out anything from the library in over five years. Big hard cover reference books hold their value (content-wise) for many years, and are generally worth the investment. Paper back novels are so cheap that it's not worth a trip to library and back, when you can just grab one in the checkout aisle.
I just don't see the value in time-locked eBooks... for me or the publisher. Just give me the material with no restrictions, at a good price, and I'll buy *lots*.
It's cheaper. Notice that the "connector" on the drive is just a routed tab in the PCB, like a PCI/ISA card. The cable itself costs slightly more, but the drive is significantly cheaper because there's no connector at all to install there. The old-style connectors were almost certainly placed by hand before soldering.
The Tom's HW review sort of implies that serial is somehow inherently faster than parallel, which is BS. Serial is just *cheaper* than parallel. Instead of big honking connectors and bulky ribbon cables, you have a nice thin cable. Data rates aren't a bottleneck with parallel IDE, and if you used the same differential signalling with a parallel interface, you could get n times the bandwidth vs serial, where n == number of pairs.
Years ago, some researchers theorized that a severe nuclear accident like the one at Chernobyl would cause such severe genetic damage that animals would be born showing drastic changes in appearance.
I don't know squat about nuclear radiation, so I'm honestly curious about this. How bad would it be? We all know "blinky", the three-eyed fish...
Mutation is a normal and necessary component of evolution. Is the kind of mutation caused by radiation inherently bad, or is it possible that there might be some positive long term side effects (at the expense of some organisms dying because of the radiation poisoning)?
Humans cannot physically remember events that happen before the age of two.
I don't buy that for a second. I'm in my early twenties now, and I can remember several things from when I was about three years old (playdoh), and a few things much earlier than that. A couple specific examples: I remember in great detail a security blanket and some stuffed animals that I had. I also remember being bathed in the kitchen sink when I was small enough to fit in it. I'm not kidding... I don't mean that I vaguely remember these things the way you "remember" something because soemone told you it happened. I can actually remember the appearance things and scenes, as well as smells, colors, textures, and emotions.
It's as if you became a doctor and 2 years later no one had a liver anymore. They all upgraded to a new organ, about which you know nothing. All the learning about the liver you did and the exams you passed on it mean nothing.
This is just not true, unless your entire career consists of following every red herring: the latest languages, the latest tools, the latest OSes, the latest APIs. Spending all your time learning ephemeral things like that is what will leave you burned out, and with little useful knowledge.
Instead, you need to choose your career in a way that you're learning things that are truly timeless. Learn how to architect large programs. Learn how compilers work. Learn about threading, packet networking, instruction set design, searching algorithms, etc. etc. etc. There is so much you can learn in computers today that will be valuable for the rest of your life, you just need focus and discipline in choosing what you pursue.
Just pick up a copy of Knuths, and decide for yourself how much of the material will become irrelevant in your lifetime. You'll walk away with a much better feeling about comp sci and engineering in general.
You mean there's no/dev/trigger and/bin/fire? All the software is etched into silicon with lots of magic numbers scattered around in the code? WTF are you talking about? Do you have any idea what an OS is? Or what it means to "hard code" something?
I can fool my microwave pretty easily
Hmm... I cook just about all my food by pressing "popcorn", but it still tastes like Budget Gourment. Is that what you mean?
I need Windows on Linux....
on
Bochs 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But I have to admit I'm not all that well read on the state-of-the art in emulation. I know that Wine is like a clone of Windows running natively on Unix, so it's fast. Bochs is a full-blown, platform independent emulator, so it's compatible but slow. Vmware is X86 only, so it's faster, right?
So many choices, but I really don't have time to try everything out. Mainly I care about compatibility over performance. $250 won't break the bank, but free is better of course. I need to run a few simple apps like UPS shipping software, but also a bunch of specialty stuff where hardware compatilibty might be hard and the apps aren't likely to have been thoroughly tested already (OrCAD, Microchip MPLAB, Xilinx WebPack, stuff like that). I could give a flying sh*t about games, but I suspect that's mostly what people want these for.
Could anyone with experience using several of these emulators shed some light? It'd be really nice if the authors would provide some compatiblity/performance/stability matrices for popular apps, to help us choose.
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school.
This IMHO is the big one. I went to school in England until about age 12, and then came back to a private school in California. Overnight, I went from doing trig, chemistry, latin, greek, french, to gluing fucking popsicle sticks together. I kid you not, our schools are WAY behind the rest of the world.
If you're an American parent, PLEASE either ship your kids over to Europe, or home school them yourself. American society is way too fucked up to allow for anyone to get a decent education. You would not believe the social pressure - I remember it well, and I had to fight it tooth and nail in order to succeed.
A cute troll, and I'm sure that many slashdot readers would believe that you actually do work for "SD". However, it's obvious to me that you don't, because we have only four employees right now and I know their writing styles very well. Nobody has ever referred to the company as SD, it's always SDI. There are other obvious giveaways in your post, which includes only public information that anyone could pull from our web site, but I won't waste my time listing them.
At any rate, I'm flattered that you're so interested in the SliMP3 to have researched it in such depth. Why don't you try one, no-risk, and then maybe you'll change your mind about whether it's a worthwhile product? If you still think it sucks, I'll give you your money back, and then you can go bashing my company on slashdot with a little more credibility. Until then, it's no sweat off my bean bag as long as we have thousands of satisfied customers.
You should ask yourself the precursor to that question: what did my company get from me since last Christmas?
My employees (founders excepted) received fat cash bonuses this year (roughly 10% of YTD pay), because everyone has worked their asses off and we're selling more because of it.
Many businesses are failing or barely staying afloat right now. If YOU put in a little bit extra, your company might be able to pay you a little something extra. If you don't work for the kind of company that rewards extra effort, you should start looking for another job. Oh, the job market's tough you say? Hope you saved a little bit since the boom...
So why don't you sign off of slashdot, and go put in some overtime for your employer if you really want that bonus?
But when you hold a mouse, your hand fits the shape such that your index finger is on the left, and your middle finger is on the right. You've got both fingers there all the time. Why on earth would you NOT use the other finger to do something useful? Sorry but whereas Apple has usually done a lot of other excellent UI design, they're "sticking to their roots" on this one at the expense of a better user experience. Shift/option-clicking is WAY worse than just right clicking.
It doesn't take a newbie more than a few minutes to realize that the left button is the "normal" button and the right button is the "special" button. Apple's customers are generally just too enamored with the company to demand better....
Slashdot Mirror
viewing the source is only one third of the Open Source equation. The other half is being able to modify the code, and distribute those modifications.
I think you left out 1/6th....
FYI: at 1600x1200 resolution, the data rate to your screen is something on the order of 3Gb/sec. I don't think bluetooth was ever designed to do that.
Fact is, bluetooth doesn't do *anything* all that useful, which is why it still hasn't been adopted five years after the consortium announced that $5 wireless was "coming soon".
802.11 is where it's at. Good throughput, moderate range. For short range there's either IR (fast, line of sight - PDA sync, printer, etc) or 433MHz AM (slow but goes through stuff - KB/Mouse). Bluetooth is way more expensive than either, and doesn't really solve the problem any better. Also don't forget you still need power for these devices - mayb KB/mouse could be battery powered, but what about CDROM, scanner, etc? That't why USB (for short range) and 802.11 (for moderate range) will rule. Bluetooth will fail.
It is unreasonable to require each retaler to file and keep track of all 50 states rules/laws/tax amounts.
Acutally it's even more onerous than that. AFAIK in most/all states, some portion of the sales tax is decided by the individual county or even city where the goods are sold. Presumably any proposed internet tax would invert this so the seller would have to collect sales for the city/county/state of the purchaser. How in the name of god do they expect businesses to keep track of all the sales tax collected in different states??? Are we going to have to fill our forty-nine more tax forms every year, and write forty-nine more separate checks?
Or maybe we'll have some interstate customs system, where the freight companies collect taxes on delivery. Then some day, us old timers can talk about the days Americans could "drive from one state to another... with no papers!"
Well its *checks the clock* 1:34 AM on Saturday morning and this woman is at work.
Damn, you must be in Colorado or something. Heh.
PS I think the reason I made that quip is that most people associate any diabetes with poor health. type I is less common. *usually* type II occurs later in life along with other complications, ergo my stupid comment to differentiate the two. That's about all I know about diabetes, so I'm signing off now.
Sorry - I've had a few beers and was just blurting out a stream of thoughts there, in response to the insulin patch idea. I admit that I don't know much at all about type II... again, my apologies.
You forgot the women. We need more women.
:)
That's right! Someone else needs to make sure we get laid, since we geeks are too busy coding, forgetting to shave, and getting fat on dew/pizza.
For the love of christ, get some cojones and go out once in a while. There's more to life. Of course it's 11:00 on Friday night, and I'm here reading slashdot, so I guess I should shut up now.
Just some random thoughts here: my sister is "type I" diabetic, ie the kind you get a child (total failure of the pancreas), not the kind that fat people get. Nobody knows why people get type I diabetes - it is usually not inherited genetically.
I've never heard anything about an insulin patch, but it's an interesting idea. She has tried the insulin pump (yes, invented by the Segway guy). It didn't work for her because she's into sports, and the pump has to be connected all the time. A couple shots a day is actually less painful (can you imagine that?)
Anyway, more power to these guys if they can come up with a solution for painless insulin delivery. The market is huge, and if they can work out the issues with accurate metering/timing, this would almost certianly replace the needle. Perhaps they could perforate the patches in such a way that you can tear them apart into a smaller section that meters out the right dose of fast vs slow-acting insulin....
PS some interesting things are being invented for blood sugar testing, but none have hit the market yet. Watches with lasers in them, implants, etc... If you're into medical tech, this is a pretty hot field.
I just updated the web site minutes ago: MacWorld show special: $239 with free ground shipping!!
you could read it for a time, share your license with a friend so they could too, and then return the book automatically when your rental time is up
How does the author benefit from me returning the book? Does it mitigate his cost in some way?
I've never brrowed the same book from a library twice. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've checked out anything from the library in over five years. Big hard cover reference books hold their value (content-wise) for many years, and are generally worth the investment. Paper back novels are so cheap that it's not worth a trip to library and back, when you can just grab one in the checkout aisle.
I just don't see the value in time-locked eBooks... for me or the publisher. Just give me the material with no restrictions, at a good price, and I'll buy *lots*.
Shameless plug, you can find it at http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/.
Am I the only one who doesn't click on any ".cx" links these days? gnosis.cx...... gnosecx? Wha?
"static" is way underrated.
Why the new connector?
It's cheaper. Notice that the "connector" on the drive is just a routed tab in the PCB, like a PCI/ISA card. The cable itself costs slightly more, but the drive is significantly cheaper because there's no connector at all to install there. The old-style connectors were almost certainly placed by hand before soldering.
The Tom's HW review sort of implies that serial is somehow inherently faster than parallel, which is BS. Serial is just *cheaper* than parallel. Instead of big honking connectors and bulky ribbon cables, you have a nice thin cable. Data rates aren't a bottleneck with parallel IDE, and if you used the same differential signalling with a parallel interface, you could get n times the bandwidth vs serial, where n == number of pairs.
it wasn't do to a design flaw.
You word for the day is "due."
Years ago, some researchers theorized that a severe nuclear accident like the one at Chernobyl would cause such severe genetic damage that animals would be born showing drastic changes in appearance.
I don't know squat about nuclear radiation, so I'm honestly curious about this. How bad would it be? We all know "blinky", the three-eyed fish...
Mutation is a normal and necessary component of evolution. Is the kind of mutation caused by radiation inherently bad, or is it possible that there might be some positive long term side effects (at the expense of some organisms dying because of the radiation poisoning)?
Humans cannot physically remember events that happen before the age of two.
I don't buy that for a second. I'm in my early twenties now, and I can remember several things from when I was about three years old (playdoh), and a few things much earlier than that. A couple specific examples: I remember in great detail a security blanket and some stuffed animals that I had. I also remember being bathed in the kitchen sink when I was small enough to fit in it. I'm not kidding... I don't mean that I vaguely remember these things the way you "remember" something because soemone told you it happened. I can actually remember the appearance things and scenes, as well as smells, colors, textures, and emotions.
It's as if you became a doctor and 2 years later no one had a liver anymore. They all upgraded to a new organ, about which you know nothing. All the learning about the liver you did and the exams you passed on it mean nothing.
This is just not true, unless your entire career consists of following every red herring: the latest languages, the latest tools, the latest OSes, the latest APIs. Spending all your time learning ephemeral things like that is what will leave you burned out, and with little useful knowledge.
Instead, you need to choose your career in a way that you're learning things that are truly timeless. Learn how to architect large programs. Learn how compilers work. Learn about threading, packet networking, instruction set design, searching algorithms, etc. etc. etc. There is so much you can learn in computers today that will be valuable for the rest of your life, you just need focus and discipline in choosing what you pursue.
Just pick up a copy of Knuths, and decide for yourself how much of the material will become irrelevant in your lifetime. You'll walk away with a much better feeling about comp sci and engineering in general.
A gun will not have an OS, it will be hard coded.
/dev/trigger and /bin/fire? All the software is etched into silicon with lots of magic numbers scattered around in the code? WTF are you talking about? Do you have any idea what an OS is? Or what it means to "hard code" something?
You mean there's no
I can fool my microwave pretty easily
Hmm... I cook just about all my food by pressing "popcorn", but it still tastes like Budget Gourment. Is that what you mean?
But I have to admit I'm not all that well read on the state-of-the art in emulation. I know that Wine is like a clone of Windows running natively on Unix, so it's fast. Bochs is a full-blown, platform independent emulator, so it's compatible but slow. Vmware is X86 only, so it's faster, right?
So many choices, but I really don't have time to try everything out. Mainly I care about compatibility over performance. $250 won't break the bank, but free is better of course. I need to run a few simple apps like UPS shipping software, but also a bunch of specialty stuff where hardware compatilibty might be hard and the apps aren't likely to have been thoroughly tested already (OrCAD, Microchip MPLAB, Xilinx WebPack, stuff like that). I could give a flying sh*t about games, but I suspect that's mostly what people want these for.
Could anyone with experience using several of these emulators shed some light? It'd be really nice if the authors would provide some compatiblity/performance/stability matrices for popular apps, to help us choose.
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school.
This IMHO is the big one. I went to school in England until about age 12, and then came back to a private school in California. Overnight, I went from doing trig, chemistry, latin, greek, french, to gluing fucking popsicle sticks together. I kid you not, our schools are WAY behind the rest of the world.
If you're an American parent, PLEASE either ship your kids over to Europe, or home school them yourself. American society is way too fucked up to allow for anyone to get a decent education. You would not believe the social pressure - I remember it well, and I had to fight it tooth and nail in order to succeed.
No offense Sean, but I work for you
A cute troll, and I'm sure that many slashdot readers would believe that you actually do work for "SD". However, it's obvious to me that you don't, because we have only four employees right now and I know their writing styles very well. Nobody has ever referred to the company as SD, it's always SDI. There are other obvious giveaways in your post, which includes only public information that anyone could pull from our web site, but I won't waste my time listing them.
At any rate, I'm flattered that you're so interested in the SliMP3 to have researched it in such depth. Why don't you try one, no-risk, and then maybe you'll change your mind about whether it's a worthwhile product? If you still think it sucks, I'll give you your money back, and then you can go bashing my company on slashdot with a little more credibility. Until then, it's no sweat off my bean bag as long as we have thousands of satisfied customers.
Could someone please tell me where this whole "in soviet russia..." thing came from?
Yes, I also missed the AYB craze by a couple months...
the shaft.
You should ask yourself the precursor to that question: what did my company get from me since last Christmas?
My employees (founders excepted) received fat cash bonuses this year (roughly 10% of YTD pay), because everyone has worked their asses off and we're selling more because of it.
Many businesses are failing or barely staying afloat right now. If YOU put in a little bit extra, your company might be able to pay you a little something extra. If you don't work for the kind of company that rewards extra effort, you should start looking for another job. Oh, the job market's tough you say? Hope you saved a little bit since the boom...
So why don't you sign off of slashdot, and go put in some overtime for your employer if you really want that bonus?
www.quantum.com: blank screen for me in Mozilla/Linux
I'm a huge mac fan.
But when you hold a mouse, your hand fits the shape such that your index finger is on the left, and your middle finger is on the right. You've got both fingers there all the time. Why on earth would you NOT use the other finger to do something useful? Sorry but whereas Apple has usually done a lot of other excellent UI design, they're "sticking to their roots" on this one at the expense of a better user experience. Shift/option-clicking is WAY worse than just right clicking.
It doesn't take a newbie more than a few minutes to realize that the left button is the "normal" button and the right button is the "special" button. Apple's customers are generally just too enamored with the company to demand better....