Well, the exit polls do affect something. Several years ago when Nixon (I think it was Nixon) was elected, early poll releases were anounced on the east cost before the polls closed on the west coast. Nixon was leading exit polls on the East coast. It caused a landslide affect because people then, just like people today, wanted to vote for a winner, or the guy they think their friends are voting for, or the guy that wears a really neat button....
So, exit polls may have a tendancy to skew the results of an election. People on the west coast have information concerning how people on the east coast voted, and they can allow this to affect the way they vote.
Reporter: And the winner is.... You, with the shiny black shoes and the smart sport coat! Tell me, what do you attribute your opponents loss to?
Candidiate: Bad sportsmanship. Simple really. The other guy just can't stand to lose.
While you may not need all this stuff, I want it. And so do a lot of other people.
I'd love to have an mp3 player without having to either run wiring from my computer to my living room where my stereo is (yes, I'm one of those people that spend time away from the computer) or place a whiring beast PC in my stereo cabinet. I enjoy playing games on a console but would really like to be able to play against other (debatably) living breathing people. I'd like to have a Tivo-like solution but I don't already have one. The only thing that doesn't really get me all that excited is the web browsing/DVD playback capability, but it would my parents.
By your stating you don't want/need all this, its become quite obvious that you just aren't the target market for this device. I'm guessing that anyone that has seriously considered purchasing 2 or more of these features in their own seperate box but hasn't yet is the market they are trying to appeal to.
I'm guessing you are one of those people that question the existance of MS Word. We've got Vi, why would we ever want Word?
> changes its power depending on how much is necessary to reach the cell base
It changes for more than that too. CDMA, the digital technology that over-advertised Sprint PCS and others use, change power levels based on activity. When you talk, you broadcast at a higher power level then when you are just listening. This is done basically for power saving reasons, but there are also other reasons related to CDMA specifically (Ec/Io signal to noise levels). There isn't a constant power level.
How about one of the various games out there that let you program a bot? I took place in The Adventures of Stickman, a programming contest at Illinois Wesleyan Univeristy at Normal (Information located here).
It was probably the single most fulfilling coding experience that I have ever taken part in. It was extremely gratifying to see a game that I had a hand in. They have posted the server and clients that the contestants wrote are available online. The clients are written in C/C++, so it may not be the easiest language to start out with. However, using something like KDevelop, it makes development much easier. Be warned, though, that there will probably be some porting involved as it was developed for a SparcWorks compiler on Sun systems. See the readme for more information. Oh, and if you download it, I'm sure the officers would like to know.
Some more about the contest: The chalenge was to write an AI client for a PacMan style game. You have a stickman running around in a maze eating pellets and avoiding, or eating, monsters and other stickmen. Just navigating the maze presents an interesting challenge (especially because we only had 8 1/2 hours to code it!). It's a great way to get familiar with C or C++ (API available for both) because its educational and entertaining. Your kids could colaborate on a client, or write clients to compete against each other. If they beat my partner and my client, let me know:). Oh, we got 3rd. Not too shabby out of 19.
> Long term, I see 'code morphing' as a basic part of software development, > but it would be insane for Transmeta to dump that much cash into a > development project and then just 'give' it to Intel.
Isn't this the founding theory behind Open Source? Write software and release it without any cost to the consumer in the hope that they will A) Use it B) Take the source and improve upon it
The amount of time and development that goes into some open source projects has been staggering. It has been proved that a company can survive, not off of the revenues of its software sales, but off of other services such as support or advertising.
We need look no further than our own beloved and infalable (evidently based on the posts I've seen today)/. for evidence of this phenomenon. Or, how about, RedHat, Suse, etc. The difference there, is that they have been released under the GPL. Why couldn't the GPL also be applied to the microcode in the processor? Transmetta could still make a profit off of the packaging and distribution of this microcode in their Crusoe chip.
I'm not saying that I agree with everything that Metcalf says, but lets not toss the whole article out the door just because some of it might (gasp) criticize Linux and Open Source.
Ok, Somebody needs to beat many Linux users with the clue stick. I've seen posts whining about how Win2k got rated higher because of graphical utilities that the reviewer says Linux does not have, when in reality, Linux does have them, and they are at least comporable, if not better, to the Win2k utils. Perhaps the review reached this conclusion because he could not find them! Did it ever occur to you that perhaps some of these tools could be just a tad easier to find. Yes, they may be on the Gnome menu. Yes, they may be on the KDE menu. But are they in a central location like the control panel in Windows? Yes, there is Linuxconf, but as a poster pointed out recently, Linuxconf has a long way to go, and doesn't include basic utilities such as top or a network monitor. I'm not saying that it should either, though. Linuxconf is for configuration, not statistics. But perhaps there should be a better control panel than the one included with RedHat, because while RedHat's control panel puts many basic utilities in one location, its interface is still worse than the long forgotten days of Win 3.1
I know that you don't want to think that anything bad could ever happen to you and those others in the startup with you, but, in my experience, its better to deal with a small unpleasantness now than a whole lot in the future.
Month 1: I wandered into a startup company owned by myself and three other individuals. We didn't have any contracts. None. Hell, we didn't even have a contract with the ISP that was hosting our box. We were easy going and excited to see that things were getting off the ground. That was month 1.
Month 2: One of the startup members declared himself CEO (sounds rediculous for a 1 month old company). The co-owner that was administering the box removed the rest of our administrative priviledges and gave them to the new "CEO". Well, not that big of a deal except that the rest of us (myself and on other owner as well as another fellow that had come on board to help with content development) didn't really like the direction that he was taking things. So we, voiced by myself, complained. And he and one other co-owner didn't like it. Arguments ensued and some nasty emails flew around. This could have all been avoided if we had some sort of agreement, not even a contract, but at least a basic writen agreement as to what each of our functions in the company would be.
Month 3: Not having a contract with the ISP hosting our box bit us in the ass. Not all of the ISP owners new the box was there, evidently, and they wanted it gone. So one of the ISP owners, the one that agreed to host our box, said that if we didn't deal with the 1500% increase in price (yeah, that's actually the right amount!), that we had to have our box gone by that afternoon. Well, we couldn't get there that afternoon but when we did get the box back the next day, the warm fuzzy ISP owner had fdisked the whole damn thing. Gone was 3 months of development work. Gone is the company.
If somebody had told me before all of this that we needed to draw up a written agreement, I would have told them that they were crazy. But now, I wouldn't even think about trying a start-up venture without one.
Re:Please to enlighten me...
on
Linux on Palm
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· Score: 1
1) This would replace the existing PalmOS just like any other OS upgrade.
2) With the Visor (and I'm assuming the Palm) you would be able to drop back down to the original OS at any time. With the Visor, it would be really simple. Just pull the batteries and wait 10 minutes for the capacitor to lose its juice. There is no flash on a visor, so everything is in resident memory. The Palm, on the other hand, HAS flash (at least some models). So I don't know how you would do that, but I'm assuming that if you program a bad rom image to the flash that you can somehow reflash it with a good rom w/out sending it back to the factory for a reburn.
The reason (parially) the U.S. has so many various technologies is that we have served as a sort of test bed for new cell phone technologies. Cell phone technology, as a whole, has been around in the U.S. longer. People had cell phones that were opperating on scary old legacy analog systems and no one wanted to alienate anyone else (I know of one case where a state government stopped Motorola from giving customers new phones so that they could move from an older system that they had found a show stopper bug in to a newer system. The state has laws about giving away cell phones. So Motorola instead had to take the customers' phones [which were archaic] to the factories and modify them so that they would work on the new system). So the cell-site vendors, such as Motorola, Lucent, (who else makes cell site hardware?), bowed to the demands of their customers and created systems that were as backward compatible as possible, such as mixed cells that have both Analog and Digital.
What hasn't helped matters is that major cell providers won't agree on what technologies they want to use. Some say CDMA, some TDMA, and some are still using, *gasp* HDII Analog.
Now add in the fact that other countries have a much larger usage of cell phones than the US and you get a much larger need for mass standardization. Some countries have little infrastructure so far as telecommunications is concerned. This is when it makes the most sense to use cells and cell standards. If you can't drag in a land line to everyones, well, then drop in one micro-cell in the neighborhood (perhaps with a wireless link itself) and everyone can use their cell phones as if it were their home phone (which, for many people outside of the U.S. it is).
The OS needs to be usable to a new user - on the same level as Windows. Again, see above comment, and Corel Linux Linux needs to be easy to install, easy to uninstall, able to sense hardware without the user needing to open the PC to read numbers off of chips. Yet again, see Corel Linux Linux needs to support the latest and greatest hardware, like USB (USB2), firewire, parallel port scanners, WinModems... Again, see.... er.. wait. Damn, we don't have these. Linux needs to have GAMES! See Linux Game Tome and Linux Games and Loki Games End see
Ok, I'm not going to pretend that I am a database expert by any means. However, an order number would be a good start on anything. This is sort of how my last (third) phone conversation went. A little history:
Oct 15, 10:00 P.M. CST
I called to place my order for a Handspring Visor Delux. I was originally going to order the Visor Delux along with a Flash backup module. At about 10:30, I was greated by a real living human being. I was impressed that there was anyone there, so I didn't mind the 30 minute wait. After talking with the order department for about 10 minutes, I decided to go with just the Visor Delux (kudos go to the phone support guy. He knew a great deal about what he was talking about and was able to communicate it to me.) So the order process has begun (around 10:40). He asked what my Credit card number was. I told him. After that he asked if I could hold for just one moment. I said sure, why not. I'd been waiting for 30 minutes by now, so who cares? After 2 minutes on hold, the recorded opperator came on and told me that the number I had dialed was not in service. "The number that I dialed?" I though. I didn't dial any number. The phone clicked off and I went back to a dial tone. This made me very very nervous. They had my Credit Card number, but not my address!
Oct 15, 10:50 P.M. CST
I called back to finish my order. Around 11:20, I reached who was quite possibly the worlds most disgruntaled order operator in the world. His name was Troy. He asked what he could do for me, and I explained that I had been cut off during the taking of my order. He asked if I remembered the name of the operator that was taking my order before, which I didn't (unfortunately). So he got angry with me and told me that I had to wait on hold for a minute. Because this is where things went awry before, I asked for his name and his extension and if there was any other number to reach him asside from the 888 number. He told me his name and then informed that there was no other way to reach him and I just had to wait like everybody else. He clicked me over to hold, where I waited nervously for about 5 minutes before he came back. He said that he had found the form that was in the process of being filled out (he had to find the guy that I was ordering from before and get my information from him. He couldn't look it up himself) and asked the rest of my information. Several times he told me that he wanted to get out of there and go home. Great. My order was taken at 11:28 P.M. CST (I wrote it down).
Oct 20, 11:00 P.M. CST
I called to verify that my order was in the system. After a new record 1 hour and 30 minutes on hold, I talked to a living person that told me the only way to look up my order was by my name. I asked if there was an order number assigned to me and if I could have it. He said that no, there wasn't. After 5 minutes of querying the database, he told me that he couldn't find me which meant that the order department probably hadn't entered me into the database yet. I said, "You mean that you don't enter me into the system?" He told me that no, their system is being rebuilt (or reorganized, or something along those lines) because it couldn't handle the volume of sales that they had experienced. I asked how many handsprings had been ordered. He guessed around 10,000. Rob, how many users do you have in the slashdot database? I'm guessing over 10,000. What are they using? Access?
Oct 22, 5:45 P.M. CST
I called again to check on the status of my visor. This time, I was on hold untill 7:15 before I gave up. I hadn't even clicked on to their second holding system (yes, they have two hold systems.) If you get a recorded man saying that they are experiencing an "unusual volume of calls" (If they are always having an unusually high volume of calls, then it ceases to be unusual, right?), then that is hold system number 1. Hold system number 2 is a lady saying that you have been placed into a priority queue. Expect to wait 30 minutes to 1 1/2 hours in the second system.
Oct 23, 2:50 P.M. CST
I'm going to call again. Let's hope that I get through to find that my nice blue Visor order has been processed and is only waiting on the factory to finish building it.
WARNING Some experts believe that use of any keyboard may cause serious injury to hands, wrists, arms, neck or back.
To reduce the risk of such injuries, follow these precautions:
[] Take frequent short pauses (at least 3 minutes per hour, or more if you feel this is appropriate for you) to let your body rest.
[] Vary your tasks throughout the day.
[] Keep your body neutral and try to stand up periodically throughout the day.
[] Align your keyboard and your monitor to keep your back and neck straight.
[] Make sure that your shoulders are relaxed and that your elbows are at your sides.
[] Adjust your chair or workstation height to ensure that there is a 90 (degree sign) between your upper arm and lower arm and that your wrists are straight.
[] When typing use a light touch to strike the keys and avoid resting your wrists on sharp edges or hard surfaces.
[] Avoid arching or bending your wrists when you type; and
[] if you use a wrist wrest make sure that you use it only between keying tasks.
I never realized how many of these things I did wrong untill I saw them all in one place. Thank you NMB Keyboards!!!! (btw, NMB makes the best keyboard known to man kind. Nice and clicky!) For best effect, combine all of these precautions into one large melodramatic step: Once an hour, stand up and sit down for three minutes straight while wresting your wrists on a wristpad with your lower arms bent at a 90 degree angle to your upper arms, making sure that your back and neck are perfectly aligned and strait throught out the entire exercise.
I'm guessing that they are wanting people with Window's to see how their HardDrive partitioning system works. I think (I could be talking out of my ass here) that Corel was supposed to have some new HD Partition deal, or perhaps has some form of PartitionMagic with it (which would require windows, or at least DOS).
I don't know about an ethernet card, but I read a quick little blurb in an "unofficial" sega dreamcast magazine stating that Sega plans to be releasing ISDN and ADSL modems for the DreamCast sometime in the future.
>>... password is a combination of this randomly generated number (shown on a neat little LED),...
Not nitpicking either, just showing:)
The LED would not be necessary. The less that the user has to do, the more they will like it (Sad but true golden rule of user interface design). In this case, they only need to Swipe the card into aforementioned card readers. The reader would read the "random" pin number from the card, in what I am assuming to be, a method not completely unlike a smart card (some of which are said to have a processing power equivalent to an Apple IIe).
Total hypothesis here, but it could work similar to my SecureID card. The card has some sort of imbedid processor that does nothing but generate numbers twice a minute. The "randomly" generated numbers are seeded by some other set of numbers known by my dial-in server and my card. Basically what happens is that when I dial in, my password is a combination of this randomly generated number (shown on a neat little LED), and a pin number that I set on the dial-in server. You can't get connected without knowing both the pin, and the number that is currently showing on the LED. If this CreditCard has a similar setup, users would be required to type in their credit card pin, and then swipe the card. If the number sent by the card (generated off of some known seed of course) and the pin don't match what our faithfull credit card company says they should be, then the transaction would be denied.
The nice thing is that if you wanted to steal the credit cards information, you couldn't just snag the creditcard number. You would have to know the algorithm for generating these numbers, as well as the pin (which could be snagged from the transmission)! So you would have to watch these purchases over a period of time, and only then would you be able to pretend to be the card owner.
The argument that I have seen popping up heavily here is the age old last resort of seperation of church and state. While our constitution does state that there should be a seperation of church and state, this simply does not apply. Since when was NOT teaching a subject considered to be infringing upon anyone's religious freedoms?
The seperation of church and state concept goes back to the government not requiring you to attend religious functions if you do not want to. This includes things like mandatory mass, or *requiring* students to attend bacheloriet before graduation. However, the banning the teaching of evolution does not fall into those categories.
The source of the political pressure to ban the teaching of evolution in this case was brought about by a religous group. However, that religous group also voted to elect those representatives. If you do not like who they voted for, then you will get a chance to vote against them in the future. Stating that they were unfairly elected because ignorant people just punch the catch all republican side of the ballot is not an excuse. If these people did not agree with the issues and possitions of the candidates on the republican platform, they should have payed more attention and voted for the people that they felt *did* represent them.
There is an SMB networking client for the Mac named Dave. I don't believe that it is free (though I could be wrong), but I do know that you can at least mount smb volumes from a Mac. Can you share out folders? Well, I'm not to sure about that one.
I have never used Appletalk, and I don't really know what it's about, but I assume that it is yet another file sharing system. Linux kernels have support for AppleTalk. Perhaps you could copy files from your Mac via the AppleTalk daemon.
Good luck to you!
Linux's problem is you
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Storm Linux
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· Score: 2
Yes, whoever you are reading this right now. What is it that you have done to further the Linux community. Have you helped to add anything to the LSB? Have you provided any useful feedback or positive criticism for any product available for Linux?
Perhaps some of you have. Possibly many of you. But to those of you who haven't (and I am one of them), stop complaining about everything that you see straying from the norm. This seems like Europe in the 15th century! Luther "recently" started the reformation with his ninety-five theses and suddenly people are beginning to wonder about what they had accepted up until that point. (not to say the repercussions have even close to the same significance here as they did for Luther and the world in general) We have the OS equivalent of the inquisition running here.
"Do you believe in the one true distribution as the one true church has seen fit for you to believe?"
"Yes... well mostly, except that I'd like this feature added"
"Well, then you shall be flamed for your beliefs and audacity to feel differently than the church has ordained for you!"
Do we really need a force like Catholicism running our operating systems? If you see a true problem with the way that these distributions are dealing with things, then talk to one of the standards groups out there. Ask them what you can do to help develop standards for whatever it is that you feel needs standardization. At the vary least, read the Linux Advocacy How-To. But don't cry "Foul" every time something happens that you don't like.
You forget. According to the ZDnet article, Microsoft has addressed this issue. They researched why their serving files via Microsoft Networking was slow, and saw that a little tweaking could take care of it more easily than a code rewrite. With a comercial package, there are times that it is simply easier from everyone's perspective if you just tell people how to fix it then try to deal with a new situation through a maintenence release. Perhaps this will be something included in a service pack of NT.
Shaking your finger at them and saying "Baha! You're faster than we are, but who cares because we continue to make changes that get us closer to where you were with all of your problems!" gets us no where. Be constructive. Think of Microsoft as the best teacher we could have. See what problems they have with their OS, and then look at Linux and see if maybe it doesn't have some of the same problems. If yes, then fix them. They've been around longer and so are bound to have experienced more problems.
I believe that the term here would be cyberware, though I could be mistaken. To be bionic, I think that it would have to be actually bionetic in origin, (i.e. the arm would be a real arm, not a robotic one, though bionetic and bionic may be two seperate categories). Cyberware is an implanted electronic device controlled by, or providing input to, the neural impulses of the brain.
The last part there is the important one. "controlled by, or providing input to, the neural impulses of the brain", which distinguishes things like this arm, and a pacemaker. Can we say Cyberpunk, Shad owrun, or Wil liam Gibson anyone?
Pics without the bunnys
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Cool PC Cases
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· Score: 1
Take a look see here for bunnyless photos. They also design products for Sony, Qualcomm, and others. Neat company. (I saw the web page in one of the photos off of the main articles picture link above, look for it yourself. It may just entertain you like those "Where's Waldo"s of Yore.)
I had qualms going into TPM because I knew that Jackson was going to be in the movie. I knew who he was, and frankly, I thought that it would make it that much more difficult to believe his character because of it. Now, Liam Neason (sp is probably very off) was another character that others may have known well. I didn't realize who it was untill after the movie was over and someone told me. At which point, I thought to myself "Oh yeah! Hey, that is the same guy!" But I can just picture myself now, stepping out of the theatre for SW II, and whimpering every time I think of Anakin and associate Growing Pains, and a spoiled twip being glad that he wasn't nominated for any Oscars due to his performance in some disaster movie because he "didn't want to take all of the glory away from the other actors and actresses". How sad can we be?
Um.. how? I've looked through the configuration pieces (those that I can find, they're all over the place in this thing), and I don't see anything about Mozilla. Perhaps I'm missing something.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the exit polls do affect something. Several years ago when Nixon (I think it was Nixon) was elected, early poll releases were anounced on the east cost before the polls closed on the west coast. Nixon was leading exit polls on the East coast. It caused a landslide affect because people then, just like people today, wanted to vote for a winner, or the guy they think their friends are voting for, or the guy that wears a really neat button....
;)
So, exit polls may have a tendancy to skew the results of an election. People on the west coast have information concerning how people on the east coast voted, and they can allow this to affect the way they vote.
Reporter: And the winner is.... You, with the shiny black shoes and the smart sport coat! Tell me, what do you attribute your opponents loss to?
Candidiate: Bad sportsmanship. Simple really. The other guy just can't stand to lose.
(guess the reference
While you may not need all this stuff, I want it. And so do a lot of other people.
I'd love to have an mp3 player without having to either run wiring from my computer to my living room where my stereo is (yes, I'm one of those people that spend time away from the computer) or place a whiring beast PC in my stereo cabinet. I enjoy playing games on a console but would really like to be able to play against other (debatably) living breathing people. I'd like to have a Tivo-like solution but I don't already have one. The only thing that doesn't really get me all that excited is the web browsing/DVD playback capability, but it would my parents.
By your stating you don't want/need all this, its become quite obvious that you just aren't the target market for this device. I'm guessing that anyone that has seriously considered purchasing 2 or more of these features in their own seperate box but hasn't yet is the market they are trying to appeal to.
I'm guessing you are one of those people that question the existance of MS Word. We've got Vi, why would we ever want Word?
> changes its power depending on how much is necessary to reach the cell base
It changes for more than that too. CDMA, the digital technology that over-advertised Sprint PCS and others use, change power levels based on activity. When you talk, you broadcast at a higher power level then when you are just listening. This is done basically for power saving reasons, but there are also other reasons related to CDMA specifically (Ec/Io signal to noise levels). There isn't a constant power level.
How about one of the various games out there that let you program a bot? I took place in The Adventures of Stickman, a programming contest at Illinois Wesleyan Univeristy at Normal (Information located here).
:). Oh, we got 3rd. Not too shabby out of 19.
It was probably the single most fulfilling coding experience that I have ever taken part in. It was extremely gratifying to see a game that I had a hand in. They have posted the server and clients that the contestants wrote are available online. The clients are written in C/C++, so it may not be the easiest language to start out with. However, using something like KDevelop, it makes development much easier. Be warned, though, that there will probably be some porting involved as it was developed for a SparcWorks compiler on Sun systems. See the readme for more information. Oh, and if you download it, I'm sure the officers would like to know.
Some more about the contest:
The chalenge was to write an AI client for a PacMan style game. You have a stickman running around in a maze eating pellets and avoiding, or eating, monsters and other stickmen. Just navigating the maze presents an interesting challenge (especially because we only had 8 1/2 hours to code it!). It's a great way to get familiar with C or C++ (API available for both) because its educational and entertaining. Your kids could colaborate on a client, or write clients to compete against each other. If they beat my partner and my client, let me know
> Long term, I see 'code morphing' as a basic part of software development,
/. for evidence of this phenomenon. Or, how about, RedHat, Suse, etc. The difference there, is that they have been released under the GPL. Why couldn't the GPL also be applied to the microcode in the processor? Transmetta could still make a profit off of the packaging and distribution of this microcode in their Crusoe chip.
> but it would be insane for Transmeta to dump that much cash into a
> development project and then just 'give' it to Intel.
Isn't this the founding theory behind Open Source? Write software and release it without any cost to the consumer in the hope that they will
A) Use it
B) Take the source and improve upon it
The amount of time and development that goes into some open source projects has been staggering. It has been proved that a company can survive, not off of the revenues of its software sales, but off of other services such as support or advertising.
We need look no further than our own beloved and infalable (evidently based on the posts I've seen today)
I'm not saying that I agree with everything that Metcalf says, but lets not toss the whole article out the door just because some of it might (gasp) criticize Linux and Open Source.
Ok, Somebody needs to beat many Linux users with the clue stick. I've seen posts whining about how Win2k got rated higher because of graphical utilities that the reviewer says Linux does not have, when in reality, Linux does have them, and they are at least comporable, if not better, to the Win2k utils. Perhaps the review reached this conclusion because he could not find them! Did it ever occur to you that perhaps some of these tools could be just a tad easier to find. Yes, they may be on the Gnome menu. Yes, they may be on the KDE menu. But are they in a central location like the control panel in Windows? Yes, there is Linuxconf, but as a poster pointed out recently, Linuxconf has a long way to go, and doesn't include basic utilities such as top or a network monitor. I'm not saying that it should either, though. Linuxconf is for configuration, not statistics. But perhaps there should be a better control panel than the one included with RedHat, because while RedHat's control panel puts many basic utilities in one location, its interface is still worse than the long forgotten days of Win 3.1
I know that you don't want to think that anything bad could ever happen to you and those others in the startup with you, but, in my experience, its better to deal with a small unpleasantness now than a whole lot in the future.
Month 1: I wandered into a startup company owned by myself and three other individuals. We didn't have any contracts. None. Hell, we didn't even have a contract with the ISP that was hosting our box. We were easy going and excited to see that things were getting off the ground. That was month 1.
Month 2: One of the startup members declared himself CEO (sounds rediculous for a 1 month old company). The co-owner that was administering the box removed the rest of our administrative priviledges and gave them to the new "CEO". Well, not that big of a deal except that the rest of us (myself and on other owner as well as another fellow that had come on board to help with content development) didn't really like the direction that he was taking things. So we, voiced by myself, complained. And he and one other co-owner didn't like it. Arguments ensued and some nasty emails flew around. This could have all been avoided if we had some sort of agreement, not even a contract, but at least a basic writen agreement as to what each of our functions in the company would be.
Month 3: Not having a contract with the ISP hosting our box bit us in the ass. Not all of the ISP owners new the box was there, evidently, and they wanted it gone. So one of the ISP owners, the one that agreed to host our box, said that if we didn't deal with the 1500% increase in price (yeah, that's actually the right amount!), that we had to have our box gone by that afternoon. Well, we couldn't get there that afternoon but when we did get the box back the next day, the warm fuzzy ISP owner had fdisked the whole damn thing. Gone was 3 months of development work. Gone is the company.
If somebody had told me before all of this that we needed to draw up a written agreement, I would have told them that they were crazy. But now, I wouldn't even think about trying a start-up venture without one.
1) This would replace the existing PalmOS just like any other OS upgrade.
2) With the Visor (and I'm assuming the Palm) you would be able to drop back down to the original OS at any time. With the Visor, it would be really simple. Just pull the batteries and wait 10 minutes for the capacitor to lose its juice. There is no flash on a visor, so everything is in resident memory. The Palm, on the other hand, HAS flash (at least some models). So I don't know how you would do that, but I'm assuming that if you program a bad rom image to the flash that you can somehow reflash it with a good rom w/out sending it back to the factory for a reburn.
The reason (parially) the U.S. has so many various technologies is that we have served as a sort of test bed for new cell phone technologies. Cell phone technology, as a whole, has been around in the U.S. longer. People had cell phones that were opperating on scary old legacy analog systems and no one wanted to alienate anyone else (I know of one case where a state government stopped Motorola from giving customers new phones so that they could move from an older system that they had found a show stopper bug in to a newer system. The state has laws about giving away cell phones. So Motorola instead had to take the customers' phones [which were archaic] to the factories and modify them so that they would work on the new system). So the cell-site vendors, such as Motorola, Lucent, (who else makes cell site hardware?), bowed to the demands of their customers and created systems that were as backward compatible as possible, such as mixed cells that have both Analog and Digital.
What hasn't helped matters is that major cell providers won't agree on what technologies they want to use. Some say CDMA, some TDMA, and some are still using, *gasp* HDII Analog.
Now add in the fact that other countries have a much larger usage of cell phones than the US and you get a much larger need for mass standardization. Some countries have little infrastructure so far as telecommunications is concerned. This is when it makes the most sense to use cells and cell standards. If you can't drag in a land line to everyones, well, then drop in one micro-cell in the neighborhood (perhaps with a wireless link itself) and everyone can use their cell phones as if it were their home phone (which, for many people outside of the U.S. it is).
A solid, stable, pretty, glitzy GUI is needed first.
As many have mentioned before, see KDE or WindowMaker or Enlightenment w/ Gnome
The OS needs to be usable to a new user - on the same level as Windows.
Again, see above comment, and Corel Linux
Linux needs to be easy to install, easy to uninstall, able to sense hardware without the user needing to open the PC to read numbers off of chips.
Yet again, see Corel Linux
Linux needs to support the latest and greatest hardware, like USB (USB2), firewire, parallel port scanners, WinModems...
Again, see.... er.. wait. Damn, we don't have these. Linux needs to have GAMES!
See Linux Game Tome and Linux Games and Loki Games
End see
Oct 15, 10:00 P.M. CST Oct 15, 10:50 P.M. CST Oct 20, 11:00 P.M. CST Oct 22, 5:45 P.M. CST Oct 23, 2:50 P.M. CST
WARNING
Some experts believe that use of any keyboard may cause serious injury to hands, wrists, arms, neck or back.
To reduce the risk of such injuries, follow these precautions:
[] Take frequent short pauses (at least 3 minutes per hour, or more if you feel this is appropriate for you) to let your body rest.
[] Vary your tasks throughout the day.
[] Keep your body neutral and try to stand up periodically throughout the day.
[] Align your keyboard and your monitor to keep your back and neck straight.
[] Make sure that your shoulders are relaxed and that your elbows are at your sides.
[] Adjust your chair or workstation height to ensure that there is a 90 (degree sign) between your upper arm and lower arm and that your wrists are straight.
[] When typing use a light touch to strike the keys and avoid resting your wrists on sharp edges or hard surfaces.
[] Avoid arching or bending your wrists when you type; and
[] if you use a wrist wrest make sure that you use it only between keying tasks.
I never realized how many of these things I did wrong untill I saw them all in one place. Thank you NMB Keyboards!!!! (btw, NMB makes the best keyboard known to man kind. Nice and clicky!) For best effect, combine all of these precautions into one large melodramatic step: Once an hour, stand up and sit down for three minutes straight while wresting your wrists on a wristpad with your lower arms bent at a 90 degree angle to your upper arms, making sure that your back and neck are perfectly aligned and strait throught out the entire exercise.
I'm guessing that they are wanting people with Window's to see how their HardDrive partitioning system works. I think (I could be talking out of my ass here) that Corel was supposed to have some new HD Partition deal, or perhaps has some form of PartitionMagic with it (which would require windows, or at least DOS).
I don't know about an ethernet card, but I read a quick little blurb in an "unofficial" sega dreamcast magazine stating that Sega plans to be releasing ISDN and ADSL modems for the DreamCast sometime in the future.
>> ... password is a combination of this randomly generated number (shown on a neat little LED), ...
:)
Not nitpicking either, just showing
The LED would not be necessary. The less that the user has to do, the more they will like it (Sad but true golden rule of user interface design). In this case, they only need to Swipe the card into aforementioned card readers. The reader would read the "random" pin number from the card, in what I am assuming to be, a method not completely unlike a smart card (some of which are said to have a processing power equivalent to an Apple IIe).
Total hypothesis here, but it could work similar to my SecureID card. The card has some sort of imbedid processor that does nothing but generate numbers twice a minute. The "randomly" generated numbers are seeded by some other set of numbers known by my dial-in server and my card. Basically what happens is that when I dial in, my password is a combination of this randomly generated number (shown on a neat little LED), and a pin number that I set on the dial-in server. You can't get connected without knowing both the pin, and the number that is currently showing on the LED. If this CreditCard has a similar setup, users would be required to type in their credit card pin, and then swipe the card. If the number sent by the card (generated off of some known seed of course) and the pin don't match what our faithfull credit card company says they should be, then the transaction would be denied.
The nice thing is that if you wanted to steal the credit cards information, you couldn't just snag the creditcard number. You would have to know the algorithm for generating these numbers, as well as the pin (which could be snagged from the transmission)! So you would have to watch these purchases over a period of time, and only then would you be able to pretend to be the card owner.
The argument that I have seen popping up heavily here is the age old last resort of seperation of church and state. While our constitution does state that there should be a seperation of church and state, this simply does not apply. Since when was NOT teaching a subject considered to be infringing upon anyone's religious freedoms?
The seperation of church and state concept goes back to the government not requiring you to attend religious functions if you do not want to. This includes things like mandatory mass, or *requiring* students to attend bacheloriet before graduation. However, the banning the teaching of evolution does not fall into those categories.
The source of the political pressure to ban the teaching of evolution in this case was brought about by a religous group. However, that religous group also voted to elect those representatives. If you do not like who they voted for, then you will get a chance to vote against them in the future. Stating that they were unfairly elected because ignorant people just punch the catch all republican side of the ballot is not an excuse. If these people did not agree with the issues and possitions of the candidates on the republican platform, they should have payed more attention and voted for the people that they felt *did* represent them.
There is an SMB networking client for the Mac named Dave. I don't believe that it is free (though I could be wrong), but I do know that you can at least mount smb volumes from a Mac. Can you share out folders? Well, I'm not to sure about that one.
I have never used Appletalk, and I don't really know what it's about, but I assume that it is yet another file sharing system. Linux kernels have support for AppleTalk. Perhaps you could copy files from your Mac via the AppleTalk daemon.
Good luck to you!
Yes, whoever you are reading this right now. What is it that you have done to further the Linux community. Have you helped to add anything to the LSB? Have you provided any useful feedback or positive criticism for any product available for Linux?
Perhaps some of you have. Possibly many of you. But to those of you who haven't (and I am one of them), stop complaining about everything that you see straying from the norm. This seems like Europe in the 15th century! Luther "recently" started the reformation with his ninety-five theses and suddenly people are beginning to wonder about what they had accepted up until that point. (not to say the repercussions have even close to the same significance here as they did for Luther and the world in general) We have the OS equivalent of the inquisition running here.
"Do you believe in the one true distribution as the one true church has seen fit for you to believe?"
"Yes... well mostly, except that I'd like this feature added"
"Well, then you shall be flamed for your beliefs and audacity to feel differently than the church has ordained for you!"
Do we really need a force like Catholicism running our operating systems? If you see a true problem with the way that these distributions are dealing with things, then talk to one of the standards groups out there. Ask them what you can do to help develop standards for whatever it is that you feel needs standardization. At the vary least, read the Linux Advocacy How-To. But don't cry "Foul" every time something happens that you don't like.
You forget. According to the ZDnet article, Microsoft has addressed this issue. They researched why their serving files via Microsoft Networking was slow, and saw that a little tweaking could take care of it more easily than a code rewrite. With a comercial package, there are times that it is simply easier from everyone's perspective if you just tell people how to fix it then try to deal with a new situation through a maintenence release. Perhaps this will be something included in a service pack of NT.
Shaking your finger at them and saying "Baha! You're faster than we are, but who cares because we continue to make changes that get us closer to where you were with all of your problems!" gets us no where. Be constructive. Think of Microsoft as the best teacher we could have. See what problems they have with their OS, and then look at Linux and see if maybe it doesn't have some of the same problems. If yes, then fix them. They've been around longer and so are bound to have experienced more problems.
I believe that the term here would be cyberware, though I could be mistaken. To be bionic, I think that it would have to be actually bionetic in origin, (i.e. the arm would be a real arm, not a robotic one, though bionetic and bionic may be two seperate categories). Cyberware is an implanted electronic device controlled by, or providing input to, the neural impulses of the brain.
The last part there is the important one. "controlled by, or providing input to, the neural impulses of the brain", which distinguishes things like this arm, and a pacemaker. Can we say Cyberpunk, Shad owrun, or Wil liam Gibson anyone?
Take a look see here for bunnyless photos. They also design products for Sony, Qualcomm, and others. Neat company. (I saw the web page in one of the photos off of the main articles picture link above, look for it yourself. It may just entertain you like those "Where's Waldo"s of Yore.)
I had qualms going into TPM because I knew that Jackson was going to be in the movie. I knew who he was, and frankly, I thought that it would make it that much more difficult to believe his character because of it. Now, Liam Neason (sp is probably very off) was another character that others may have known well. I didn't realize who it was untill after the movie was over and someone told me. At which point, I thought to myself "Oh yeah! Hey, that is the same guy!" But I can just picture myself now, stepping out of the theatre for SW II, and whimpering every time I think of Anakin and associate Growing Pains, and a spoiled twip being glad that he wasn't nominated for any Oscars due to his performance in some disaster movie because he "didn't want to take all of the glory away from the other actors and actresses". How sad can we be?
Grab your flash plugin and drop on by the Ford Prefect section and watch the hilarities! Kudos to Adams. May the fun continue.
Um.. how? I've looked through the configuration pieces (those that I can find, they're all over the place in this thing), and I don't see anything about Mozilla. Perhaps I'm missing something.