I bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 a year ago - with DVD. These were cool, as the laptop has a hardware MPEG2 decoder included. I use it along with the TV out as a DVD player and it works flawlessy (except for the Windows DVD player bugs, but that's another story). The only drawback is that there's no multichannel sound out, so I have to do with the default stereo out.
The problem now is that Dell no longuer puts a hardware decoder for its DVD enabled-laptop, instead relying on the pseudo-hardware decoding of the ATi video chipset, which is not as good as a real hardware decoder.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada have ridiculously low population (Canada is about 30M, about the same as the population of Mexico city and its distant suburbs) - and an important part of it doesn't speak English as first language (like Quebec). Those 3 countries are immigration countries - and mind you, most of these immigrants didn't came from UK.
Hong Kong, and Singapore have very small population too. And although they officaly speak English - many people in the streets don't (especially HK which is now part of China)
Even if you had blindly the population of the countries you quoted, that doesn't do more than the 470 million : do the math for yourself if you don't believe it. And if you substract from these numbers all the people who don't speak English as first language in these countries (in USA most of the Mexican and Asian immigrants for example) you'll end up with a lot less.
BTW the 322 million figures come from The Ethnologue web site, one of the most reputated source around when it comes to languages...
Remove a few dozen millions of them whose English is not first language (Spanish or Chinese mainly). Don't forget many Americans are immigrants even nowadays, and although they might speak perfectly English, this is NOT their first language.
South Africa 42,600,000
I don't think Afrikaner (spelling?) counts as English, as well as the other local languages (I think Zulu is one of these). Removing this country is already a lot less people.
Canada 30,600,000
More like 25,000,000, since Quebec doesn't speak English either.
Additionally, several other African and Carribean nations speak English
Officially - in the streets most people speak another language (it is especially true in Africa). Again you have to account for the reality.
Also note that there are so many dialects of even Mandarin that it's ridiculous to lump all Mandarin speakers together.
Agreed, but if you look back at the URL I pointed to, you'll the that the number displayed for the first language (Mandarin) is only for ONE variant of Mandarin. Adding the other variants would make for an even greater number.
So far we are about 6 billion people on earth => 322/6000 = roughly 5%, which is exactly my estimation. I'm affraid that only US and UK have an important population - Canada, Australia and New-Zealand, as big as some of them might be in surface, are small player in population (and then an important chunck of Canada speaks French or Chinese, and many Americans speak Spanish more than English).
Don't forget that many "English speaking" countries only speak it as an official language, and most of the population speaks local languages and knows hardly about English at all.
Did you have some other language you'd like to propose as an alternate? Why do you believe that is superior?
Spanish : it is spoken by most of south/central America + an millions of people in the USA, and of course Spain. It is also easier to learn than English for many people who use latin-based language (including Portugese (Brasil), Italian and French).
or Chinese... it's not convenient by any means - but as far as the number of speakers go, it is well ahead of anything else.
English has some real positive attributes to recommend it over other languages as a lingua franca - the rich vocabulary
Well the first and biggest one : it is one of the simplest in the grammar - with one of the smallest alphabet.
the great body of literature (rivaled only by Greek and Sanskrit)
ahem I'm not sure about what you mean by "body of litterature"... if it is the richness of writings, then I'm affraid French has a much bigger classical literature than English or Greek - I could probably count over 50 classical French authors from memory. Dunno about Sanskrit...
I don't think so. Billions of people don't have access to books. Hundred of millions don't even know how to read a simple sentence written into their OWN language.
30% of the world pop. is almots 2 billion people - and I doubt that many people are either native English speakers or followed serious English courses. School is a priviledge accessible to few people.
The bad news is that such language would be probably English (bad news for >95% of mankind who doesn't speak English as a first language). The good news is that it will be a "perverted" of English with plenty of foreign words. Seing how many French words and expression are being integrated in English is already impressive, n'est-ce pas ?
I still hasn't really figured out how this hack work, but as far as I can tell it is both faults. At least Slashdot should secure its cookies : - store the login into the cookie string - append the hashed password to the string - append the client IP to the string - append an expiration time (makes user session mortal) - append a hash result of the previous string with a secret key (known only from Slashdot). This "sign" the cookie and ensure Slashdot is the original author of it - crypt the whole string (just to be 100% safe)
Unfortunately there are few site with such high level of security...
Nasper death could be the greatest thing because that would move all the users to GNUtella or even Freenet, which are both much harder to track and control. I'd like to see the RIAA and Metalica going after GNUTella pirates - they'll regret dearly the good old Napster and its centralised access point.
I just can't wait to see how Freenet will evolve - this thing will put the final nail in the coffin of all those who want to restrict the flow of information. Good or bad, we are headed toward a society where copyrights is something of the past.
Sure but any PDA using CompactFlash can use the EXISTING compactflash extentions, or even PCMCIA cards in some situation (if you can keep the slot open when running with an adapter). You can buy NOW a Ethernet card, a modem card or memory card or what not. Many WinCE/Pocket PC PDA already use them (plus these PDA already have things like MP3 built in).
On the other hand your Visor has limited functions, all the cool one are in vaporware modules...
Another good examples of the need to use STANDARD extensions and not proprietary ones.
- you have to carry several modules around instead of one full featured unit - they promise plenty of modules... many will never be produced in the hand
Plus the Yopy has a CompactFlash type II port, which is the same standard as PCMCIA but in a smaller form factor. So you can plugin modem, Ethernet or use a compactflash to PCMCIA adapter and use whatever is laying around.
Russians had little ressources and electronic stuff, but they did make up for it with more inventivity and originality in design. Plus they are the only country on earth using metric system in their planes (ie altitude in meters) - which is cool.
Grandes ecoles is a blurry name for a group of high flying schools. Some of them are specific to the state (ENA (administration), Polytechnic (maths and physics/army), Normale Sup (maths or litterature)) and product highly educated people for the governement needs. Many of these people still go to the private sector because of much higher salaries and better opportunities.
Other "grandes ecoles" educate engineers (some of the best imho) and businessmen that never ever work for the governement in their whole life.
"Modern" digicams all have cache memory to shorten cycle time. At highest res my Powershot S20 (3.3 megapixel) can take 4 pics in a row with about 1 to 2 seconds between each pics. My Coolpix 950 had also some buffering (don't remember the size). Ever since I sold my first camera (a DC260 from Kodak) I never had to wait between pictures (4 pics buffer is more than enough for most usage)
Who needs a printer ? You have very good online digital picture printing that are cheap : - upload your pics - pay with your card - get your pictures in the mailbox 3 days later, on neat paper for less than 40 cents/print
With time these shops are going to get cheaper and better. The convenience of digital cams + the convenience of online pictures processing = killer app. No need to go to the photo shop anymore:-)
Well if all you want is the regular agenda/todolist/memo/etc. then a Palm is fine. But if you are a true geek that likes to be able to email instantly the pictures he takes with his digital camera, or find your way around with Pocket Streets, or don't have yet a portable MP3 player, etc... then Pocket PC is the way to go. It is really a PC in a PDA, nothing less. Of course there's no keyboard and the screen is small, but it is still a real computer, not an enhanced organizer. And most Pocket PC are not THAT bigger than a Palm, if you can fit a Palm in your pockets a Pocket PC will go as well.
That being said why exactly would you want a PC in that small of a package? Sure...give us similar apps and 1/4 the functionality and make it harder to use (because of the size,etc). The reason the Palm has been successful as it has is because it does what most people want a PDA for right out of the box...contacts, todo list, appointments.
Well Palm doesn't have what I want from a PDA. I really want to have a real computer that can fit in my coat pocket. I don't only need an agenda and todo list, but also something that can run almost any apps I could need in a PC. I'm probably not the only one who wants to surf the web or listen to music on the road.
I also don't quite get how MP3 is a 'great killer app' for a PDA. Its a cool, whiz-bang thing yes...it is not practical at all with the memory constraints these devices have out of the box
I think you are not very informed here. It is just a matter of buying a flash memory card and pluging it in. It IS practical ! I use it all the time when in the train. I don't see why I should by a 300% Rio 500 when adding a 150$ 64 MB Compactflash card to my PDA gives me exactly the same functionnalities, and is one less device to carry around. When Walkmans got FM tuner included, did you complain that "there's no need for it, it is better to buy an extra portable tuner ?"
What MS seems to be forgetting is that it makes no sense to duplicate desktop PC functionality in a handheld format.
Again you are wrong, it does ! Sure Pocket Word is of little use on a PDA, but Pocket Internet Explorer is great, as is the MP3 player, a gameboy emulator (PalmGB) or Pocket Streets.
I quite don't agree : - Last year digicams were already over 5% of all cameras sold ! Must be ever higher today. So it IS taking over regular camera, slowly but surely - 3,3 megapixels digicam are available and make great pictures, once we get to 5 or 6 megapixel (in 2 or 3 years probably) it will be hard to sell 35 mm. - Many digicam manufacturer use "analog" camera bodies and lenses too. Also having everything digitall makes some functions more easy to do on digicam rather than on 35mm, and many standard digital camera have functions you can only find on very expensive regular cameras - digicam are so convenient that it has really the power to kill analog cameras. It is not just digital, it makes the way we take pictures really different and better. No need to wait to see the results, no need to pay for your pics (which means you can make more pictures and just keep the good ones instead of having one or two shots and pay thru the nose for pictures that are bad).
To me it is only a matter of 5 to 10 years to kill the analog cameras. There's no way back !
Here's why : - smallest size ever (which is important, since when pics don't cost anything you usually want to take a lot of them everywhere) - 3,3 megapixels (2048x1536 pictures). (CCD) Size does matter - it is probably the #1 criteria - 2x zoom (not very powerfull but usefull anyway) - USB port (serial too for linux), because 1,5 MB/picture is slow to transfer - Compactflash type II (accept the IBM mini hard-drive) - special "panoramic" mode (unique feature of it) - looks cool too (alimunium case)
I had a Coolpix 950 from Nikon before which was great too - for different reasons. Stay away from Sony digicams, the floppy disk sucks (quality digital imaging on a 1,44 (very slow) disk ? they must be kidding).
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 a year ago - with DVD. These were cool, as the laptop has a hardware MPEG2 decoder included. I use it along with the TV out as a DVD player and it works flawlessy (except for the Windows DVD player bugs, but that's another story). The only drawback is that there's no multichannel sound out, so I have to do with the default stereo out.
The problem now is that Dell no longuer puts a hardware decoder for its DVD enabled-laptop, instead relying on the pseudo-hardware decoding of the ATi video chipset, which is not as good as a real hardware decoder.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada have ridiculously low population (Canada is about 30M, about the same as the population of Mexico city and its distant suburbs) - and an important part of it doesn't speak English as first language (like Quebec). Those 3 countries are immigration countries - and mind you, most of these immigrants didn't came from UK.
Hong Kong, and Singapore have very small population too. And although they officaly speak English - many people in the streets don't (especially HK which is now part of China)
Even if you had blindly the population of the countries you quoted, that doesn't do more than the 470 million : do the math for yourself if you don't believe it. And if you substract from these numbers all the people who don't speak English as first language in these countries (in USA most of the Mexican and Asian immigrants for example) you'll end up with a lot less.
BTW the 322 million figures come from The Ethnologue web site, one of the most reputated source around when it comes to languages...
United States 272,500,000
Remove a few dozen millions of them whose English is not first language (Spanish or Chinese mainly). Don't forget many Americans are immigrants even nowadays, and although they might speak perfectly English, this is NOT their first language.
South Africa 42,600,000
I don't think Afrikaner (spelling?) counts as English, as well as the other local languages (I think Zulu is one of these). Removing this country is already a lot less people.
Canada 30,600,000
More like 25,000,000, since Quebec doesn't speak English either.
Additionally, several other African and Carribean nations speak English
Officially - in the streets most people speak another language (it is especially true in Africa). Again you have to account for the reality.
Also note that there are so many dialects of even Mandarin that it's ridiculous to lump all Mandarin speakers together.
Agreed, but if you look back at the URL I pointed to, you'll the that the number displayed for the first language (Mandarin) is only for ONE variant of Mandarin. Adding the other variants would make for an even greater number.
According to this link (http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html) the top most spoken languages are (by population) :
1 CHINESE, MANDARIN [CHN] 885,000,000
2 SPANISH [SPN] 332,000,000
3 ENGLISH [ENG] 322,000,000
These are the first language speakers only.
So far we are about 6 billion people on earth => 322/6000 = roughly 5%, which is exactly my estimation. I'm affraid that only US and UK have an important population - Canada, Australia and New-Zealand, as big as some of them might be in surface, are small player in population (and then an important chunck of Canada speaks French or Chinese, and many Americans speak Spanish more than English).
Don't forget that many "English speaking" countries only speak it as an official language, and most of the population speaks local languages and knows hardly about English at all.
Did you have some other language you'd like to propose as an alternate? Why do you believe that is superior?
Spanish : it is spoken by most of south/central America + an millions of people in the USA, and of course Spain. It is also easier to learn than English for many people who use latin-based language (including Portugese (Brasil), Italian and French).
or Chinese... it's not convenient by any means - but as far as the number of speakers go, it is well ahead of anything else.
So much for the Anglo-saxon big ego !
English has some real positive attributes to recommend it over other languages as a lingua franca - the rich vocabulary
Well the first and biggest one : it is one of the simplest in the grammar - with one of the smallest alphabet.
the great body of literature (rivaled only by Greek and Sanskrit)
ahem I'm not sure about what you mean by "body of litterature"... if it is the richness of writings, then I'm affraid French has a much bigger classical literature than English or Greek - I could probably count over 50 classical French authors from memory. Dunno about Sanskrit...
I don't think so. Billions of people don't have access to books. Hundred of millions don't even know how to read a simple sentence written into their OWN language.
30% of the world pop. is almots 2 billion people - and I doubt that many people are either native English speakers or followed serious English courses. School is a priviledge accessible to few people.
The bad news is that such language would be probably English (bad news for >95% of mankind who doesn't speak English as a first language). The good news is that it will be a "perverted" of English with plenty of foreign words. Seing how many French words and expression are being integrated in English is already impressive, n'est-ce pas ?
I still hasn't really figured out how this hack work, but as far as I can tell it is both faults. At least Slashdot should secure its cookies :
- store the login into the cookie string
- append the hashed password to the string
- append the client IP to the string
- append an expiration time (makes user session mortal)
- append a hash result of the previous string with a secret key (known only from Slashdot). This "sign" the cookie and ensure Slashdot is the original author of it
- crypt the whole string (just to be 100% safe)
Unfortunately there are few site with such high level of security...
Nasper death could be the greatest thing because that would move all the users to GNUtella or even Freenet, which are both much harder to track and control. I'd like to see the RIAA and Metalica going after GNUTella pirates - they'll regret dearly the good old Napster and its centralised access point.
I just can't wait to see how Freenet will evolve - this thing will put the final nail in the coffin of all those who want to restrict the flow of information. Good or bad, we are headed toward a society where copyrights is something of the past.
Install MyODBC on all machine running Access - then you can control the MySQL database thru Access. Plain and simple.
Sure but any PDA using CompactFlash can use the EXISTING compactflash extentions, or even PCMCIA cards in some situation (if you can keep the slot open when running with an adapter). You can buy NOW a Ethernet card, a modem card or memory card or what not. Many WinCE/Pocket PC PDA already use them (plus these PDA already have things like MP3 built in).
On the other hand your Visor has limited functions, all the cool one are in vaporware modules...
Another good examples of the need to use STANDARD extensions and not proprietary ones.
- you have to carry several modules around instead of one full featured unit
- they promise plenty of modules... many will never be produced in the hand
Plus the Yopy has a CompactFlash type II port, which is the same standard as PCMCIA but in a smaller form factor. So you can plugin modem, Ethernet or use a compactflash to PCMCIA adapter and use whatever is laying around.
Russians had little ressources and electronic stuff, but they did make up for it with more inventivity and originality in design. Plus they are the only country on earth using metric system in their planes (ie altitude in meters) - which is cool.
Only businesses like Micrsoft which are free to innovate
Damn - losing your credibility so fast...
Hum you are mixing things up a lot here.
Grandes ecoles is a blurry name for a group of high flying schools. Some of them are specific to the state (ENA (administration), Polytechnic (maths and physics/army), Normale Sup (maths or litterature)) and product highly educated people for the governement needs. Many of these people still go to the private sector because of much higher salaries and better opportunities.
Other "grandes ecoles" educate engineers (some of the best imho) and businessmen that never ever work for the governement in their whole life.
Sure - ignore the 4th world economic power. Easy.
Now, does anyone remember a French cartoon that was on Nickelodeon years ago, called "Spartacus and the Sun Beneath the Sea"?
Well in France it was called "Les mondes engloutis" (the sunken worlds) - was pretty good too !
Cities of gold was really a cool cool one ! Started like an historic story, then ended up with plenty of sci-fi stuff mixed with old myths !
Secret of blue water (I think that's the title) was also a really good anime in the historic/sci-fi but with a J. Vernes theme.
"Modern" digicams all have cache memory to shorten cycle time. At highest res my Powershot S20 (3.3 megapixel) can take 4 pics in a row with about 1 to 2 seconds between each pics. My Coolpix 950 had also some buffering (don't remember the size). Ever since I sold my first camera (a DC260 from Kodak) I never had to wait between pictures (4 pics buffer is more than enough for most usage)
Who needs a printer ? You have very good online digital picture printing that are cheap :
:-)
- upload your pics
- pay with your card
- get your pictures in the mailbox 3 days later, on neat paper for less than 40 cents/print
With time these shops are going to get cheaper and better. The convenience of digital cams + the convenience of online pictures processing = killer app. No need to go to the photo shop anymore
Well if all you want is the regular agenda/todolist/memo/etc. then a Palm is fine. But if you are a true geek that likes to be able to email instantly the pictures he takes with his digital camera, or find your way around with Pocket Streets, or don't have yet a portable MP3 player, etc... then Pocket PC is the way to go. It is really a PC in a PDA, nothing less. Of course there's no keyboard and the screen is small, but it is still a real computer, not an enhanced organizer. And most Pocket PC are not THAT bigger than a Palm, if you can fit a Palm in your pockets a Pocket PC will go as well.
That being said why exactly would you want a PC in that small of a package? Sure...give us similar apps and 1/4 the functionality and make it harder to use (because of the size,etc). The reason the Palm has been successful as it has is because it does what most people want a PDA for right out of the box...contacts, todo list, appointments.
Well Palm doesn't have what I want from a PDA. I really want to have a real computer that can fit in my coat pocket. I don't only need an agenda and todo list, but also something that can run almost any apps I could need in a PC. I'm probably not the only one who wants to surf the web or listen to music on the road.
I also don't quite get how MP3 is a 'great killer app' for a PDA. Its a cool, whiz-bang thing yes...it is not practical at all with the memory constraints these devices have out of the box
I think you are not very informed here. It is just a matter of buying a flash memory card and pluging it in. It IS practical ! I use it all the time when in the train. I don't see why I should by a 300% Rio 500 when adding a 150$ 64 MB Compactflash card to my PDA gives me exactly the same functionnalities, and is one less device to carry around. When Walkmans got FM tuner included, did you complain that "there's no need for it, it is better to buy an extra portable tuner ?"
What MS seems to be forgetting is that it makes no sense to duplicate desktop PC functionality in a handheld format.
Again you are wrong, it does ! Sure Pocket Word is of little use on a PDA, but Pocket Internet Explorer is great, as is the MP3 player, a gameboy emulator (PalmGB) or Pocket Streets.
I quite don't agree :
- Last year digicams were already over 5% of all cameras sold ! Must be ever higher today. So it IS taking over regular camera, slowly but surely
- 3,3 megapixels digicam are available and make great pictures, once we get to 5 or 6 megapixel (in 2 or 3 years probably) it will be hard to sell 35 mm.
- Many digicam manufacturer use "analog" camera bodies and lenses too. Also having everything digitall makes some functions more easy to do on digicam rather than on 35mm, and many standard digital camera have functions you can only find on very expensive regular cameras
- digicam are so convenient that it has really the power to kill analog cameras. It is not just digital, it makes the way we take pictures really different and better. No need to wait to see the results, no need to pay for your pics (which means you can make more pictures and just keep the good ones instead of having one or two shots and pay thru the nose for pictures that are bad).
To me it is only a matter of 5 to 10 years to kill the analog cameras. There's no way back !
Here's why :
- smallest size ever (which is important, since when pics don't cost anything you usually want to take a lot of them everywhere)
- 3,3 megapixels (2048x1536 pictures). (CCD) Size does matter - it is probably the #1 criteria
- 2x zoom (not very powerfull but usefull anyway)
- USB port (serial too for linux), because 1,5 MB/picture is slow to transfer
- Compactflash type II (accept the IBM mini hard-drive)
- special "panoramic" mode (unique feature of it)
- looks cool too (alimunium case)
I had a Coolpix 950 from Nikon before which was great too - for different reasons. Stay away from Sony digicams, the floppy disk sucks (quality digital imaging on a 1,44 (very slow) disk ? they must be kidding).
My Canon S20 makes pictures of 1,5 Mo average... so floppy disks pretty sucks. They are only good for very low-resolution cameras (which sucks)