YOu can already get a picturebook with an intel processor, We have a couple of them at work. Here are my impressions:
This thing is tiny. The picture doesn't do it justice. It's less than 1/4 the size of my Dell laptop (Latitude CPx--with the batteries that explode).
The Screen is wierd, with only about 1/2 the height of a normal screen (resolultion is 1024x384 or something), so you are constantly panning up and down the screen.
Ours is loud, although I think it might be a misfeature of the particular laptop we have, the little beastie has a high pitched incessant whine while it is running.
The camera is neat, quality is on par with Indycams and the like, the built in software lets you add all kinds of useless effects to the picture, we never use it.
There are apparently linux drivers for the camera, although I don't have the link handy.
Battery life is pretty pathetic if you don't get the external battery add-on. We usually just have to leave the thing plugged in whenever we want to use it.
These machines are so thin they only have one type II PCMCIA slot, which leads to lots of swapping (naturally type III cards are out of the question).
The Picturebook is also among the lightest laptop I have ever used, it is literally no problem to carry this thing around, unlike my aformentioned Dell (especially with both batteries installed).
Overall they are pretty neat little boxes, although a little small for everyday use (the keyboard is a bit cramped as well, but the pointer does have three buttons--unusual for a laptop). I'd recommend them for people who absolutely need to have the smallest fully functional latptop possible (and who have small fingers).
I don't think the people coming up with these region schemes are worried about customer goodwill (that is the job of the sales/support people).
In fact most of the schemes we've seen are decidedly consumer hostile, including things like disabling the FF during ads, region encoding, macrovision, and CSS scrambling. None of these technologies help the consumer directly, and most of them don't even have any indirect benefit, they are there purely for the benefit of the company, consumer goodwill be dammed.
Public Domain? HA! Nothing ever goes into the public domain anymore, not with the giant mouse of doom extending copyrights to the end of time; and don't even try to hide behind "fair use", the MPAA and RIAA are making sure that every possible circumstance is exempted from fair use.
performance rights and the printing of the sheet music is protected.
I don't think this is true, as long as the song was written before Walt made The Mouse (IE in the public domain), you are free to recreate the song in sheet music form or as sound waves as much as you like. Who would you pay the royalties to? The grandchildren of the composer? That totally violates the entire purpose of copyrights.
Dang, in the preview window this looks like shameless karma whoring. Oh well.
Of course all Slashdot readers should remember that the FCC has no authority in Australia, so this only applies to people trying to do the same thing in the US.
I don't know about Australia, but here in the US there are strict limits on what you can do with te 2.4GHz band, including rather low caps on the total transmitting power which limits the range of any sort of home network. Does anyone with experiance in the aussie equivelent of the FCC have any insight into this?
Oh, and the link in the article should point to www.air.net.au.
Heck yeah, the A10 is the best at what it does (Forward Air Support--blowing up bunches of tanks:)
Unfortunatly they also had the highest losses (when your job description includes flying past SAM sites and man portable SAM launches at low speed it is rather hard to avoid getting shot at.)
Because of Saddam's aggressiveness, the Gulf War came about, during which a lot of American technology (Patriot missles, A10 Warthog, etc) was tried in battle for the first time and found to work really well.
Huh? "Patriot missile" and "work really well" are two phrases I never thought I'd see in a sentence together.
Some more information on the patriot.
IIRC, the A10 was around long before the Gulf War, and in fact was in the middle of being phased out before the war started (and the Pentagon realized that they didn't have anything that could replace it.)
Well, it's a great way to distribute Fansubbed Anime (the kind that you are not allowed to sell, but rather distribute freely). With Divx you avoid all of the hassles of mailing videotapes from here to kingdom come, and you avoid the generation lossage that plagues the fansubber community (just try to watch a fourth of fifth generation VHS tape).
Of course fansubbing has always been kind of a legal grey area, so it is quite possible that even that is breaking the law. Of course it's basically impossible to get any sort of entertainment anymore without breaking the law or sticking to the very expensive, no talent, bring-me-your-money sheep mass media.
Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. -- I can't remember who said this.
This article has some of the most memorable lines I've heard in quite a while:
The fashion show came after a stark warning from one of the leading architects of the Silicon Valley computer revolution that technology was developing so rapidly and with so few checks that it could eventually wipe out humans.
When evil computers come to destroy humanity, who can save us? The army with their flaccid spears? no! The famed pocket protector wearing geeks? no! Fashion? Yes!!!
Inspiration for Tillotson's merging of the science of smell with nanotechnology and fashion came from the coolant systems built into the space suits worn by astronauts on the Apollo space missions in the 1960s, she said.
Man, I guess the 60s are going back in fashion.
``People are afraid technology will turn them into cyborgs and make them lose their privacy and humanity. But the way to prevent the cyborg thing is to make it fashionable,'' she said.
How do we prevent technology from making people lose their privacy and humaity? Fashion! After all, nobody can spy on you if you look just so chic.
Ah, I forgot to mention that one, slow and buggy. I think this has more to do with the terrible Java implementation under FreeBSD though (like Java ICQ).
I don't know if anybody else has noticed this, but all of the Unix clients for Gnutella suck. They seem to range from the unbeliveably confusing and undocumented console mode applications (gnut) to crash prone X applications (gnubile -- never runs more than once between reinstalls!) to leech only clients (gtk-gnutella).
I'm not going to connect just to leech files, which basically leaves me with 0 options for the client. Plus it seems like the majority of the users are leeches on there already, and those that aren't are on modem connections (and always disconnect the instant someone starts to snag a file from them).
That's my $0.02
Despises? We love loss leaders, especially when then can be converted over to something useful. We don't like companies that tell use we can't play with the hardware we bought (or picked up a Radio Shack) because they want us to buy the expensive components as well. If you're selling hardware at reduced prices that can be used for something interesting, don't act all surprised when it is used for something interesting (running Linux, playing MP3s, etc...)
It took years to get most of the lamers off of the Usenet (the longest October indeed), but now most people seem to think it is all porn spam and meowers and don't bother connecting anymore. Most AOLers don't even know the Usenet exists anymore, and many of the newbies who found it years ago have grown up and either left or became contributing members. Plus the Usenet is a great way to get new kinds of music/tv shows that you have never seen before (unlike Napster, which is only well suited for searching out "popular" music you already know about.
Oh come on, asf sucks compared to realvideo. At least realvideo doesn't freeze if you get the tiniest little error in the encoding (like just about every asf seems to have).
At least you can play realvideo under Linux/FreeBSD/Irix/etc... Plus ASF always looks like ass, even when people encode it at high bitrates, at least realvideo is watchable at 300kbps.
I don't know about your area, but around here there is a strong correlation between the Nerds and Anime watching. Slashdot isNews For Nerds.
You can turn off the Anime category in your preferences you know. Personally I'd like to see a poll like: Anime
1. Love it
2. Ambivalient
3. Hate it
4. Huh?
Just to get an idea of the demographics on Slashdot.
Er no. I think you forget that there are multiple local phone companies in the US, and they aren't (for the most part) controlled by the government. Not to mention how the long distance and local providers are seperate companies as well. The closest thing we have to a "natonal" local code are the 8xx (800, 888,...) series of phone numbers that are billed to the reciever instead of the sender. Since most people pay $0/minute in the US for local phone calls this costs the same as a local phone call from the end user's standpoint. The problem is 8xx numbers are expensive for the other end to maintain. I think AOL actually offers an 800 number, but it has additional per-minute charges that quickly add up even if you are just reading email.
Sure AOL is not the ISP of choice for most Linux users, but it certainly has its place.
One of the most overlooked features of AOL is its widespread availabilty. If you are anywhere near a moderate to major city in the US, you are basically guarenteed to have a local AOL dialup number. If you are in a rural area/small town, you still have a good chance of having a local dailup. This means when you travel/go on temporary assignments, your AOL account can follow you. Even better is that AOL will automatically find local dialup numbers for you, so you don't have to scrounge around the phone book or anything.
Of course you have to put up with all of the lamerz on AOL, but if you are just using it for dailup access it isn't so bad.
I'm sure many of you are sitting with your cursor over the reply button ready to flame me. "What about the FreeISPs!" you might say well if you know of one that works in half as many areas as AOL, I'd love to hear about it.
Disclaimer: I only use AOL when I travel (my parents account), so YMMV.
Perhaps I cannot afford a new computer, or I don't belive in the forced upgrade cycle that the computer manufacturers seem to like. If my comptuer does what it needs to, then why should I upgrade? Just so I can run the newest version of a piece of software with features I can't use/don't want? That is perhaps the dumbest reason to upgrade I've ever heard. If MS still sold Word 2.0, I'd buy it to run on my computer, but since they don't I have to get it some other way. IIRC MS has publicly stated that they do not support the 386 platform anymore, therefore I see no reason to support MS.
It must be tough to ski when you can't see the moguls because your world is all black and white.
Yeah, but I bet the banner ads don't even cover the cost of keeping the site up and running. They aren't making money, they're just losing money at a slower rate.
Disclaimer: I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I seriously doubt that the 0.01 cent/visit you get from the banner ad will get you any profit after you pay your ISP.
Maybe because it would cost them more to actually sell the work (and support it!) that they would get in return. Abandonware, with its lack of warentees or guarentees, is by far the most cost effective way of distributing these old titles to the small minority of people who actually benefit from them (like people who havn't upgraded their computer since 1994, or people who really like some classic game by a company that went out of business 5 years ago).
What if your computer simply cannot run Word 2000. Say it is a 386 with only the base 640k of memory. You simply cannot buy a Word processor today that will run on your system, so you have to go find an old version that will. Microsoft lost no sale, and perhaps only Intel could sue you for lost sales.
There are times when the laws, especially the laws that affect corperate earnings, aren't in touch with reality. I think a lot of Slashdot posters are forgetting this, and merely posting a lot of "stealing is wrong, if you steal you are worse than hitler, abandonware is stealing" posts.
How else are you supposed to see it? If I dress like a pusher and mouth off to the cops, who then treat me pretty fairly all things considered, am I supposed to be outraged?
His stated goal was to be arrested, and he seemed to be trying to go to jail; so he manages to get the cops to arrest him, where they put him in a comfortable (at least temperature wise) van and let him go once they are satisfied he isn't peddling acid.
what are we supposed to take a stand against here? Saftey in our streets?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's more of a loud fan/HD whine. It comes on a couple of seconds after booting the laptop, and stays until it goes to sleep or is shut down.
Also, the camera driver is Here, although I've never tried it out.
- This thing is tiny. The picture doesn't do it justice. It's less than 1/4 the size of my Dell laptop (Latitude CPx--with the batteries that explode).
- The Screen is wierd, with only about 1/2 the height of a normal screen (resolultion is 1024x384 or something), so you are constantly panning up and down the screen.
- Ours is loud, although I think it might be a misfeature of the particular laptop we have, the little beastie has a high pitched incessant whine while it is running.
- The camera is neat, quality is on par with Indycams and the like, the built in software lets you add all kinds of useless effects to the picture, we never use it.
- There are apparently linux drivers for the camera, although I don't have the link handy.
- Battery life is pretty pathetic if you don't get the external battery add-on. We usually just have to leave the thing plugged in whenever we want to use it.
- These machines are so thin they only have one type II PCMCIA slot, which leads to lots of swapping (naturally type III cards are out of the question).
- The Picturebook is also among the lightest laptop I have ever used, it is literally no problem to carry this thing around, unlike my aformentioned Dell (especially with both batteries installed).
Overall they are pretty neat little boxes, although a little small for everyday use (the keyboard is a bit cramped as well, but the pointer does have three buttons--unusual for a laptop). I'd recommend them for people who absolutely need to have the smallest fully functional latptop possible (and who have small fingers).It will certainly also cost them goodwill.
I don't think the people coming up with these region schemes are worried about customer goodwill (that is the job of the sales/support people). In fact most of the schemes we've seen are decidedly consumer hostile, including things like disabling the FF during ads, region encoding, macrovision, and CSS scrambling. None of these technologies help the consumer directly, and most of them don't even have any indirect benefit, they are there purely for the benefit of the company, consumer goodwill be dammed.
Public Domain? HA! Nothing ever goes into the public domain anymore, not with the giant mouse of doom extending copyrights to the end of time; and don't even try to hide behind "fair use", the MPAA and RIAA are making sure that every possible circumstance is exempted from fair use.
performance rights and the printing of the sheet music is protected.
I don't think this is true, as long as the song was written before Walt made The Mouse (IE in the public domain), you are free to recreate the song in sheet music form or as sound waves as much as you like. Who would you pay the royalties to? The grandchildren of the composer? That totally violates the entire purpose of copyrights.
Dang, in the preview window this looks like shameless karma whoring. Oh well.
Of course all Slashdot readers should remember that the FCC has no authority in Australia, so this only applies to people trying to do the same thing in the US.
I don't know about Australia, but here in the US there are strict limits on what you can do with te 2.4GHz band, including rather low caps on the total transmitting power which limits the range of any sort of home network.
Does anyone with experiance in the aussie equivelent of the FCC have any insight into this?
Oh, and the link in the article should point to www.air.net.au.
Heck yeah, the A10 is the best at what it does (Forward Air Support--blowing up bunches of tanks :)
Unfortunatly they also had the highest losses (when your job description includes flying past SAM sites and man portable SAM launches at low speed it is rather hard to avoid getting shot at.)
Because of Saddam's aggressiveness, the Gulf War came about, during which a lot of American technology (Patriot missles, A10 Warthog, etc) was tried in battle for the first time and found to work really well.
Huh? "Patriot missile" and "work really well" are two phrases I never thought I'd see in a sentence together.
Some more information on the patriot.
IIRC, the A10 was around long before the Gulf War, and in fact was in the middle of being phased out before the war started (and the Pentagon realized that they didn't have anything that could replace it.)
Well, it's a great way to distribute Fansubbed Anime (the kind that you are not allowed to sell, but rather distribute freely). With Divx you avoid all of the hassles of mailing videotapes from here to kingdom come, and you avoid the generation lossage that plagues the fansubber community (just try to watch a fourth of fifth generation VHS tape).
Of course fansubbing has always been kind of a legal grey area, so it is quite possible that even that is breaking the law. Of course it's basically impossible to get any sort of entertainment anymore without breaking the law or sticking to the very expensive, no talent, bring-me-your-money sheep mass media.
Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. -- I can't remember who said this.
This article has some of the most memorable lines I've heard in quite a while:
The fashion show came after a stark warning from one of the leading architects of the Silicon Valley computer revolution that technology was developing so rapidly and with so few checks that it could eventually wipe out humans.
When evil computers come to destroy humanity, who can save us? The army with their flaccid spears? no! The famed pocket protector wearing geeks? no! Fashion? Yes!!!
Inspiration for Tillotson's merging of the science of smell with nanotechnology and fashion came from the coolant systems built into the space suits worn by astronauts on the Apollo space missions in the 1960s, she said.
Man, I guess the 60s are going back in fashion.
``People are afraid technology will turn them into cyborgs and make them lose their privacy and humanity. But the way to prevent the cyborg thing is to make it fashionable,'' she said.
How do we prevent technology from making people lose their privacy and humaity? Fashion! After all, nobody can spy on you if you look just so chic.
Warning: Sarcasm limit exceeded, automatic -10 karma.
Ah, I forgot to mention that one, slow and buggy. I think this has more to do with the terrible Java implementation under FreeBSD though (like Java ICQ).
I don't know if anybody else has noticed this, but all of the Unix clients for Gnutella suck. They seem to range from the unbeliveably confusing and undocumented console mode applications (gnut) to crash prone X applications (gnubile -- never runs more than once between reinstalls!) to leech only clients (gtk-gnutella).
I'm not going to connect just to leech files, which basically leaves me with 0 options for the client. Plus it seems like the majority of the users are leeches on there already, and those that aren't are on modem connections (and always disconnect the instant someone starts to snag a file from them).
That's my $0.02
Despises? We love loss leaders, especially when then can be converted over to something useful. We don't like companies that tell use we can't play with the hardware we bought (or picked up a Radio Shack) because they want us to buy the expensive components as well. If you're selling hardware at reduced prices that can be used for something interesting, don't act all surprised when it is used for something interesting (running Linux, playing MP3s, etc...)
Shhh!
It took years to get most of the lamers off of the Usenet (the longest October indeed), but now most people seem to think it is all porn spam and meowers and don't bother connecting anymore. Most AOLers don't even know the Usenet exists anymore, and many of the newbies who found it years ago have grown up and either left or became contributing members.
Plus the Usenet is a great way to get new kinds of music/tv shows that you have never seen before (unlike Napster, which is only well suited for searching out "popular" music you already know about.
Oh come on, asf sucks compared to realvideo. At least realvideo doesn't freeze if you get the tiniest little error in the encoding (like just about every asf seems to have).
At least you can play realvideo under Linux/FreeBSD/Irix/etc... Plus ASF always looks like ass, even when people encode it at high bitrates, at least realvideo is watchable at 300kbps.
I don't know about your area, but around here there is a strong correlation between the Nerds and Anime watching. Slashdot is News For Nerds.
You can turn off the Anime category in your preferences you know. Personally I'd like to see a poll like:
Anime
1. Love it
2. Ambivalient
3. Hate it
4. Huh?
Just to get an idea of the demographics on Slashdot.
Hmm, reading the article I run across this line: An additional broadband ethernet card will be available at the console's launch.
Sometimes, although having Loki actually test the software and SUPPORT it will make it worth paying the $50.
Er no. I think you forget that there are multiple local phone companies in the US, and they aren't (for the most part) controlled by the government. Not to mention how the long distance and local providers are seperate companies as well. The closest thing we have to a "natonal" local code are the 8xx (800, 888, ...) series of phone numbers that are billed to the reciever instead of the sender. Since most people pay $0/minute in the US for local phone calls this costs the same as a local phone call from the end user's standpoint. The problem is 8xx numbers are expensive for the other end to maintain. I think AOL actually offers an 800 number, but it has additional per-minute charges that quickly add up even if you are just reading email.
Sure AOL is not the ISP of choice for most Linux users, but it certainly has its place.
One of the most overlooked features of AOL is its widespread availabilty. If you are anywhere near a moderate to major city in the US, you are basically guarenteed to have a local AOL dialup number. If you are in a rural area/small town, you still have a good chance of having a local dailup. This means when you travel/go on temporary assignments, your AOL account can follow you. Even better is that AOL will automatically find local dialup numbers for you, so you don't have to scrounge around the phone book or anything.
Of course you have to put up with all of the lamerz on AOL, but if you are just using it for dailup access it isn't so bad.
I'm sure many of you are sitting with your cursor over the reply button ready to flame me. "What about the FreeISPs!" you might say well if you know of one that works in half as many areas as AOL, I'd love to hear about it.
Disclaimer: I only use AOL when I travel (my parents account), so YMMV.
Perhaps I cannot afford a new computer, or I don't belive in the forced upgrade cycle that the computer manufacturers seem to like. If my comptuer does what it needs to, then why should I upgrade? Just so I can run the newest version of a piece of software with features I can't use/don't want? That is perhaps the dumbest reason to upgrade I've ever heard. If MS still sold Word 2.0, I'd buy it to run on my computer, but since they don't I have to get it some other way. IIRC MS has publicly stated that they do not support the 386 platform anymore, therefore I see no reason to support MS.
It must be tough to ski when you can't see the moguls because your world is all black and white.
Yeah, but I bet the banner ads don't even cover the cost of keeping the site up and running. They aren't making money, they're just losing money at a slower rate.
Disclaimer: I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I seriously doubt that the 0.01 cent/visit you get from the banner ad will get you any profit after you pay your ISP.
Maybe because it would cost them more to actually sell the work (and support it!) that they would get in return. Abandonware, with its lack of warentees or guarentees, is by far the most cost effective way of distributing these old titles to the small minority of people who actually benefit from them (like people who havn't upgraded their computer since 1994, or people who really like some classic game by a company that went out of business 5 years ago).
What if your computer simply cannot run Word 2000. Say it is a 386 with only the base 640k of memory. You simply cannot buy a Word processor today that will run on your system, so you have to go find an old version that will. Microsoft lost no sale, and perhaps only Intel could sue you for lost sales.
There are times when the laws, especially the laws that affect corperate earnings, aren't in touch with reality. I think a lot of Slashdot posters are forgetting this, and merely posting a lot of "stealing is wrong, if you steal you are worse than hitler, abandonware is stealing" posts.
How else are you supposed to see it? If I dress like a pusher and mouth off to the cops, who then treat me pretty fairly all things considered, am I supposed to be outraged?
His stated goal was to be arrested, and he seemed to be trying to go to jail; so he manages to get the cops to arrest him, where they put him in a comfortable (at least temperature wise) van and let him go once they are satisfied he isn't peddling acid.
what are we supposed to take a stand against here? Saftey in our streets?