I personally believe PDAs will continue on the market thou they might evolve into phone devices. At the moment, I suspect the market it somewhat saturated since I don't know of too many folks who upgrade their PDAs year after year. PDA's can do a lot too that many folks don't realize yet. I have a high end Tungsten T3 and after searching for software for the thing it acts as a black book, organizer, encrypted password database, starmap, mp3 player, Xvid widescreen movie player (Yes you can fit a whole movie on a 256 mb SD card), universal remote, voice recorder, stopwatch, gaming system and a nifty way to share photos. So no I wouldn't say these things are useless. And if you get an IR portable keyboard, for rapid note taking. Sony's exit from the market is a bit sad but Palm has essentially caught up on all of Sony's offerings which I suppose doesn't leave much room for Sony to manuver in anymore.
1. Take your HD apart.
2. Save the cool magnets.
3. Toss platters in the fireplace!
If you can still recover data from that I'm impressed! Oh and thoes magnets are dangerous. Becareful with them.:)
It's odd but I've long told folks that there is a reason why Microsoft is wasting billions on the Xbox project. It's much more than just trying to grab the gaming market. Imagine a PC that you could just bring home, plug in and instantly you have your games, online web surfing, e-mail and basic web-processing. This is what an Xbox could become. Impossible you say because Microsoft can't write good software? Well think about it, an Xbox is proprietary hardware. Unlike Windows which needs to deal with a multitude of hardware configurations, the OS at Xbox's heart only needs to deal with one. Microsoft has already proven that they can write stable software on the current Xbox. While true there have been some rare crashes, it's for the most part had the stability of a console. This and the fact that with increasing multimedia capibilities of modern systems a high end Xbox could literally replace your DVD player / recorder, stereo system, and virtually everything else in your home entertainment system. You give this to your end consumers and make it easy to use and you can bet that it will wildly be a success. DRM you say? Well guess what it isn't an issue to customers! Gamecube, PS2, Xbox all have the equivalent of DRM on them. How many average consumers out there do you think are willing to shell out money for the convenience of buying something that works rather than spending ages writing their own software? This is why DRM is not an issue. Sadly, if Microsoft succeeds, we'll soon be stuck with Microsoft branded PCs dominating the market which would be very depressing.
Actually, I'm surprised they didn't point out that some electrolytic capacitors if wired in backwards can literally explode! Appearently the insulator can suffer an instantaneous breakdown causing the stored charge to short in on itself. The resulting pulse of heat vapourises the insides and since a capacitor is a sealed metal can. Well you know. I had an electronics prof warn me about this after he accidently put himself in the hospital once. Yup airplane authorities will be pleased to know this.
CO2 Concentrations
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I remember reading a National Geographic article nothing that CO2 concentrations have been their highest in 400,000 years thanks to ice core samples in the arctic. This was through several ice ages and the most recent dramatic spike being the start of our industrial age. Whether or not this causes global warming or climate change or it's outcome no one is really sure of. However considering earth is our life support, can you risk messing around with it? I think it's something to be concerned about rather than completely ignoring. The solution however is a difficult one. Knowing how we do things thou, we'll likely do something when it's too late sadly.
Geeze I don't know why adware is such a huge problem. I always tell my family not to click "yes" whenever IE asks you to install something and they don't because I've already installed everything you need. Plus we get the latest windows updates whenever they come out. That alone will keep you safe 99% of times. Unfortunately I suppose there's folks out there that hit "yes" to anything. I wonder if someone put a pay me $100 pop-up (yes/no) if they'd learn faster.
I'm not sure AMD-64's instruction set is all that useful at this point in time owning a new Athlon64 3200+ myself. I find the Cool'n'Quiet function more impressive. At idle I have a core cpu temperature of 31 Celcius! A tie to my motherboard chipset due to it CPU clocking down to 800mhz when idle. If you ask me that's a much nicer innovation at this point.
You're kidding right? We have people that can hack highly encrypted digital satellite signals and a broadcast bit is suppose to prevent that?:p Mann that's as bad as leaving an expensive car in a bad neighbourhood and putting a "do not steal me!" bumper sticker on it.
People tend to forget that a Film SLR doesn't depreciate as rapidly as a Digital and with good hardware like a high resolution negative drum scanner, you will get a picture quality that far exceeds a Digital. Technology is still far away for when digital surpasses film in sheer quality and resolution especially for the professional photographer.
Digital's advantages however are that you can freely experiment taking photos without worrying about wasting film and developing provided you don't print most of your pictures (could get expensive printing).
Still, a point hasta be made. Do you plan on being a "shutter bug" or no? I remember reading an article somewhere that if you don't plan on shooting in the thousands of pictures a year then your digital camera may not be worth it.
I recently switched to Mozilla frustrated by the serious security problems in IE. My sister's machine got hacked by a trojan which took me 3 hours to figure out and fix. This wasn't the fault of her not updating thou. Patches at the time didn't exist and the solution was to halariously just shutdown scripting in IE. If you want to make Mozilla popular amoung general users tell them that so far it hasn't been seriously hacked and that once installed and setup it will it will run for months without needing yet another windows update every week which in some cases won't even save your system from harm. The popup blocking and other neat features are nice but it's the fact that once setup it's very trouble free that impresses people. The only trouble I've had with Mozilla is it can be a little bit of challenge to install the Sun Java Plugin.
Hello?
I'm using a laptop with a measly 192mb of ram running on an ancient K6-3-550 processor and it runs XP just fine. Granted it's not a speed demon and it sometimes struggles a bit on high resolution divX video but it works for web and normal casual work. My desktop unit is an athlon-700 / 640 mb of ram running with no swap file in XP. I've crunched video in realtime!, rendered 3d images and done just amazing things on it despite being dated hardware. Now you're complaining to me 512mb isn't enough for a laptop? What do you plan to do with the thing? Run a multinational company's webserver on it?? Crunch scientific data? It's a portable laptop not a power desktop... Besides, it's a 900 mhz centrino processor! Applications that use 512mb will likely need much more CPU power than that. Not to mention a laptop HD isn't anywhere near as fast as your desktop unit so don't expect your data to be moving very fast from storage.
I don't know if anyone realizes this but would you rather go to a bar where there's the possibility of meeting unstable people who could mug or beat the crap out of you, or to one that scans your license to make sure that you're amoung people who you could trust not to kill you? I'm sure the bars wouldn't have decided to go this stance if there wasn't a developing problem to begin with. Casino's in Vega after all track you and I don't see anyone complaining about that there.
If you ask me I could see this working in a way like this:
a) You shell out a entry fee.
b) You win prizes (treasures).
A system like this wouldn't be unlike something like a QUAKE competition or something similar. The company of course would keep some of the entry fee to keep the system running. Sound retarded? Well we have athletes who enter competitions and get rewarded lotsa money? I imagine this wouldn't be much different.
I highly suggest high end Maha chargers at www.mahaenergy.com. They also sell some of the market's best rated NiMH batteries too although over the counter Rayovac's work fine. What's really importent in rechargables is to make sure you have a good charger because a bad one will overheat or overcharge your batteries. Maha's newest charger independently charges each battery and detects when it's full. It's a negative pulse charger and has fast and slow charge settings without melting down your batteries. (MH-C401FS is the model). I highly don't suggest rechargable alkalines. While they work, in high-drain devices they quickly loose their ability to hold charge. Anyhow, the review for the charger is here:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/C401FS/C401A. HTM
Myself I get most of my anime thanks to the existance of these compression formats. I'm a fan of DivX 5 simply because it's easy to get a hold of the codec and it works for all my historical DivX 3.x movies. I have nothing against the Xvid team but it's a bit annoying when I get the occational anime that won't play on anything else but the Xvid codec, requiring me to find it and install it into my system. And as the reviewer noted it's got a few bugs still. DivX 5 may not be the best but it's certainly the most convenient and standard to an end-user.
I help run a local Anime club and in the last few years I've noticed that a great deal of "fan-subbed" anime now appears online on P2P filesharing systems. Particularily Direct Connect. It's particularility good if you're the type that claims to have seen everything you can get locally. This type of anime is sub-titled by fans and released sometimes days after it's showing in Japan. I've watched whole series that didn't make it to the North American market for years.:)
Actually this makes sense if you think about it, society works much in this way. If we help each other then everyone wins. If we each selfishly try to do everything to only our own benefit, then we all loose. Also if you think about it, true criminals are completely selfish.;)
I'm paying about $40 CDN a month. Getting 160 kb/sec down, 56 kb/sec up where I live. There's theoretically a 5GB/2GB cap but they've never implemented it yet. Personally my thoughts on this are they should implement a reasonable charge per GB like any normal long distance phone service. I like downloading anime which is depending on the material free so admittedly I sometimes use a lot of bandwidth but on the months where I use very little I feel ripped off. Just my thoughts. ^^
My suggestion for folks who use rechargables for their PDA or whatever is to use the new NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) class batteries. They don't suffer from nasty memory effects unlike their older NiCad cousins and of course contain no Cadnium which is toxic in landfills. I've been using a set of AAA's in my Handspring Visor for over 6 months now and they've worked just fine for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally believe PDAs will continue on the market thou they might evolve into phone devices. At the moment, I suspect the market it somewhat saturated since I don't know of too many folks who upgrade their PDAs year after year. PDA's can do a lot too that many folks don't realize yet. I have a high end Tungsten T3 and after searching for software for the thing it acts as a black book, organizer, encrypted password database, starmap, mp3 player, Xvid widescreen movie player (Yes you can fit a whole movie on a 256 mb SD card), universal remote, voice recorder, stopwatch, gaming system and a nifty way to share photos. So no I wouldn't say these things are useless. And if you get an IR portable keyboard, for rapid note taking. Sony's exit from the market is a bit sad but Palm has essentially caught up on all of Sony's offerings which I suppose doesn't leave much room for Sony to manuver in anymore.
1. Take your HD apart. 2. Save the cool magnets. 3. Toss platters in the fireplace! If you can still recover data from that I'm impressed! Oh and thoes magnets are dangerous. Becareful with them. :)
It's odd but I've long told folks that there is a reason why Microsoft is wasting billions on the Xbox project. It's much more than just trying to grab the gaming market. Imagine a PC that you could just bring home, plug in and instantly you have your games, online web surfing, e-mail and basic web-processing. This is what an Xbox could become. Impossible you say because Microsoft can't write good software? Well think about it, an Xbox is proprietary hardware. Unlike Windows which needs to deal with a multitude of hardware configurations, the OS at Xbox's heart only needs to deal with one. Microsoft has already proven that they can write stable software on the current Xbox. While true there have been some rare crashes, it's for the most part had the stability of a console. This and the fact that with increasing multimedia capibilities of modern systems a high end Xbox could literally replace your DVD player / recorder, stereo system, and virtually everything else in your home entertainment system. You give this to your end consumers and make it easy to use and you can bet that it will wildly be a success. DRM you say? Well guess what it isn't an issue to customers! Gamecube, PS2, Xbox all have the equivalent of DRM on them. How many average consumers out there do you think are willing to shell out money for the convenience of buying something that works rather than spending ages writing their own software? This is why DRM is not an issue. Sadly, if Microsoft succeeds, we'll soon be stuck with Microsoft branded PCs dominating the market which would be very depressing.
Actually, I'm surprised they didn't point out that some electrolytic capacitors if wired in backwards can literally explode! Appearently the insulator can suffer an instantaneous breakdown causing the stored charge to short in on itself. The resulting pulse of heat vapourises the insides and since a capacitor is a sealed metal can. Well you know. I had an electronics prof warn me about this after he accidently put himself in the hospital once. Yup airplane authorities will be pleased to know this.
I remember reading a National Geographic article nothing that CO2 concentrations have been their highest in 400,000 years thanks to ice core samples in the arctic. This was through several ice ages and the most recent dramatic spike being the start of our industrial age. Whether or not this causes global warming or climate change or it's outcome no one is really sure of. However considering earth is our life support, can you risk messing around with it? I think it's something to be concerned about rather than completely ignoring. The solution however is a difficult one. Knowing how we do things thou, we'll likely do something when it's too late sadly.
Geeze I don't know why adware is such a huge problem. I always tell my family not to click "yes" whenever IE asks you to install something and they don't because I've already installed everything you need. Plus we get the latest windows updates whenever they come out. That alone will keep you safe 99% of times. Unfortunately I suppose there's folks out there that hit "yes" to anything. I wonder if someone put a pay me $100 pop-up (yes/no) if they'd learn faster.
I'm not sure AMD-64's instruction set is all that useful at this point in time owning a new Athlon64 3200+ myself. I find the Cool'n'Quiet function more impressive. At idle I have a core cpu temperature of 31 Celcius! A tie to my motherboard chipset due to it CPU clocking down to 800mhz when idle. If you ask me that's a much nicer innovation at this point.
You're kidding right? We have people that can hack highly encrypted digital satellite signals and a broadcast bit is suppose to prevent that? :p Mann that's as bad as leaving an expensive car in a bad neighbourhood and putting a "do not steal me!" bumper sticker on it.
People tend to forget that a Film SLR doesn't depreciate as rapidly as a Digital and with good hardware like a high resolution negative drum scanner, you will get a picture quality that far exceeds a Digital. Technology is still far away for when digital surpasses film in sheer quality and resolution especially for the professional photographer. Digital's advantages however are that you can freely experiment taking photos without worrying about wasting film and developing provided you don't print most of your pictures (could get expensive printing). Still, a point hasta be made. Do you plan on being a "shutter bug" or no? I remember reading an article somewhere that if you don't plan on shooting in the thousands of pictures a year then your digital camera may not be worth it.
I recently switched to Mozilla frustrated by the serious security problems in IE. My sister's machine got hacked by a trojan which took me 3 hours to figure out and fix. This wasn't the fault of her not updating thou. Patches at the time didn't exist and the solution was to halariously just shutdown scripting in IE. If you want to make Mozilla popular amoung general users tell them that so far it hasn't been seriously hacked and that once installed and setup it will it will run for months without needing yet another windows update every week which in some cases won't even save your system from harm. The popup blocking and other neat features are nice but it's the fact that once setup it's very trouble free that impresses people. The only trouble I've had with Mozilla is it can be a little bit of challenge to install the Sun Java Plugin.
Hello? I'm using a laptop with a measly 192mb of ram running on an ancient K6-3-550 processor and it runs XP just fine. Granted it's not a speed demon and it sometimes struggles a bit on high resolution divX video but it works for web and normal casual work. My desktop unit is an athlon-700 / 640 mb of ram running with no swap file in XP. I've crunched video in realtime!, rendered 3d images and done just amazing things on it despite being dated hardware. Now you're complaining to me 512mb isn't enough for a laptop? What do you plan to do with the thing? Run a multinational company's webserver on it?? Crunch scientific data? It's a portable laptop not a power desktop... Besides, it's a 900 mhz centrino processor! Applications that use 512mb will likely need much more CPU power than that. Not to mention a laptop HD isn't anywhere near as fast as your desktop unit so don't expect your data to be moving very fast from storage.
I don't know if anyone realizes this but would you rather go to a bar where there's the possibility of meeting unstable people who could mug or beat the crap out of you, or to one that scans your license to make sure that you're amoung people who you could trust not to kill you? I'm sure the bars wouldn't have decided to go this stance if there wasn't a developing problem to begin with. Casino's in Vega after all track you and I don't see anyone complaining about that there.
Umm, maybe I'm wrong but do the editor's at SlashDot actually check out these posts? This is a very poor article if you ask me.
If you ask me I could see this working in a way like this: a) You shell out a entry fee. b) You win prizes (treasures). A system like this wouldn't be unlike something like a QUAKE competition or something similar. The company of course would keep some of the entry fee to keep the system running. Sound retarded? Well we have athletes who enter competitions and get rewarded lotsa money? I imagine this wouldn't be much different.
I highly suggest high end Maha chargers at www.mahaenergy.com. They also sell some of the market's best rated NiMH batteries too although over the counter Rayovac's work fine. What's really importent in rechargables is to make sure you have a good charger because a bad one will overheat or overcharge your batteries. Maha's newest charger independently charges each battery and detects when it's full. It's a negative pulse charger and has fast and slow charge settings without melting down your batteries. (MH-C401FS is the model). I highly don't suggest rechargable alkalines. While they work, in high-drain devices they quickly loose their ability to hold charge. Anyhow, the review for the charger is here: http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/C401FS/C401A. HTM
Myself I get most of my anime thanks to the existance of these compression formats. I'm a fan of DivX 5 simply because it's easy to get a hold of the codec and it works for all my historical DivX 3.x movies. I have nothing against the Xvid team but it's a bit annoying when I get the occational anime that won't play on anything else but the Xvid codec, requiring me to find it and install it into my system. And as the reviewer noted it's got a few bugs still. DivX 5 may not be the best but it's certainly the most convenient and standard to an end-user.
I help run a local Anime club and in the last few years I've noticed that a great deal of "fan-subbed" anime now appears online on P2P filesharing systems. Particularily Direct Connect. It's particularility good if you're the type that claims to have seen everything you can get locally. This type of anime is sub-titled by fans and released sometimes days after it's showing in Japan. I've watched whole series that didn't make it to the North American market for years. :)
Actually this makes sense if you think about it, society works much in this way. If we help each other then everyone wins. If we each selfishly try to do everything to only our own benefit, then we all loose. Also if you think about it, true criminals are completely selfish. ;)
I'm paying about $40 CDN a month. Getting 160 kb/sec down, 56 kb/sec up where I live. There's theoretically a 5GB/2GB cap but they've never implemented it yet. Personally my thoughts on this are they should implement a reasonable charge per GB like any normal long distance phone service. I like downloading anime which is depending on the material free so admittedly I sometimes use a lot of bandwidth but on the months where I use very little I feel ripped off. Just my thoughts. ^^
My suggestion for folks who use rechargables for their PDA or whatever is to use the new NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) class batteries. They don't suffer from nasty memory effects unlike their older NiCad cousins and of course contain no Cadnium which is toxic in landfills. I've been using a set of AAA's in my Handspring Visor for over 6 months now and they've worked just fine for me.