I'm truly sorry, but you bought yourself a gaming platform dud.
True enough... it's the price we pay for being free of all that nasty virus/spyware/trojan crap you folks have to deal with. Not to mention the godawful interface you torture yourselves with when not gaming.
The easiest answer: a Mac for real computing (anything internet-connected). A cheap, non-networked Windows PC for gaming. (And/or the patience to wait for the good games to get ported. At least some developers are starting to realize that even 4% is an awful lot of customers to ignore.)
Now as for online gaming... well, I'd rather skip on the Windows-only online games than have to deal with a internet-capable Windows PC. Bleaugh!
Oh, and WTF "it's a camera that happens to have a phone in it?"
If I want a digital camera, I would think I could do better than 1.3 Megapixels with zero optical zoom!!! For less money, I could get an absolutely tiny Canon with 4 or MP, and still have room in my pocket left over for a small phone. Collectively, they'd probably take up less space than that monster S710a.
After using a S710a for a little while, I found these little glitches...
1. Use it closed. Open the switchblade. Notice that it's upside down now? WTF?
2. Microphone is in the front of the phone. Hold it against your face. Nobody can hear a word you say. You MUST either hold it away from your face or use a BT headset. Genius move there, when they easily could have put it on the bottom.
3. Volume controls are lacking for many functions. There is no way to turn down the deafening camera sound, or to adjust many other sound volumes.
4. Up and down arrows on side don't control volume when not on a call. That's just retarded.
5. Buttons are on the part of the switchblade that moves. So if you use it sometimes-open, sometimes-closed, half the time a button is in one place, half the time it is in another. This makes is very difficult to learn where a button is.
6. Data usage is enormous. I looked through the Cingular online menus and... used up my entire (paltry) 500 KB data allotment. I never actually got any data; just looked at the options.
7. Menus are clumsy. For example, you have to cruise for ever to try to find a picture you recently took. It is easier to open the camera, go to View, then close the camera. Stupidly, that is much easier than following the menus.
8. General comment on switchblade form factor... DUMB! You get all the disadvantages of a wand and a flip. The screen is always exposed, so likely to scratch; yet you have to open it to use the buttons. Extra fun when you are using it closed and need to press a button... slide it open, and the friggin' button is upside down above the screen.
Those are the only flaws I can recall, but I only used it briefly.
Still think it's a good phone?
But your point about Americans buying habits is well taken. We'd rather get a free phone and get stuck into an enormous monthly contract for crappy service than actually pay dollars for a phone. We'll fall for any gimmick except a genuine good deal.
But that said, it is still almost impossible to get a really good phone in the U.S. without going through a very shady reseller.
Has anyone noticed that no matter how cool a phone is, it is usually unavailable in the U.S.?
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and so on all keep coming out with killer phones, and they are completely unavailable from regular American channels. The only way to get most of them is to give hundreds and hundreds of dollars plus your credit card information to some fly-by-night, grey-market operation based in who-knows-where. Much of the time (judging by what I've read in reviews), the result is that you get some Chinese-language phone and no response from customer service.
Why the lack of cool phones in the U.S. when Europe and Asia have such a great selection of the latest and greatest?
Sure, we don't have third generation networks here... but we still appreciate cool phones. WTF is up here?
P.S. And no, the Sony-Ericsson S710a is not a cool phone. It *looks* cool, but has such horrendous design flaws as to be mostly unusable.
"...IBM is working on future Power chips that can physically reconfigure themselves -- adding memory or accelerators, for example -- to optimize performance or power utilization for a specific application."
This is revolutionary: Self-evolving machines.
on
A History of PowerPC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I figured/. would have a lot more discussion of the Terminator-like aspects of today's announcement.
"...IBM is working on future Power chips that can physically reconfigure themselves -- adding memory or accelerators, for example -- to optimize performance or power utilization for a specific application."
That is the first step in self-evolving machines.
Yes, it is a minor step, but it is a friggin first step, OK? If they can pull this off, they are creating machines with the ability to adapt and evolve.
This is what I would call artificial life. Once that step is taken, it's only a matter of time before the machines start evolving themselves.
P.S. Now think about the kinds of viruses that could happen in that environment.
Imagine if each OS on there ran each of its various flavors of Netscape, Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Lynx, Cyberdog, or whatnot.
Then (does VPC support Applescript?) program a simple little Applescript to go through each OS and each browser, pasting in a URL. If not Applescript, then a keystroke generater, perhaps.
Then the hardest part would be actually looking at all of those hundreds of browsers. Especially if you tried to do each version of each flavor of each browser. Oh, the boredom!
I'll bet on this cluster, launching Acrobat Reader will only take like 30 seconds.
(As far as I can tell, Adobe has come up with some sort of reverse Moore's Law, where each new version of Reader takes twice as long to start up... at least on Macs.)
Try supporting Entourage in a corporate environment. Like every other MS product, it is coded like crap.
Granted, Entourage is much better than most MS products, but it is still a source of many problems in my office. It just isn't coded well. One person might never notice all it's horrible problems, but put 50 not-so-savvy people to work on it, and it's a friggin nightmare. Like it is with all the other MS products we use.
I'm looking forward to having a 100% Microsoft-free office by the end of 2003.
Apple's biggest problem these days is that their most important software is made by their biggest competitor. In a business environment, a Mac is liekly to use MS Explorer, MS Entourage, MS Word, MS Excel, and MS PowerPoint.
Now, enter iWorks, Apple's forthcoming answer to that bug-laden piece of poorly programmed crap that should still be in Alpha, called MS Office.
Apple is taking on MS on every front. In the enterprise, they're producing powerful, cheap, easy to deploy servers. And now they're producing the clients for those servers.
The day of the desktop PC for personal use is over, and Apple is the only company to see it. Desktops still have uses in the Enterprise, and Apple is poised to take over there as well.
While I think your overall point is legitimate, I just want to point out that (I'm pretty sure) serving in a foreign army is illegal conduct for U.S. citizens. Doesn't matter if it's the Canadian army, it's not legal.
I think that is true, but prosecution is not necessarily the primary concern.
Some shadowy agency can strong-arm your ISP into releasing all the data on you. Then they can look over your conversations with your friends about going hiking in Shenandoah. Nothing to prosecute there, but also none of their damn business!
Even if they don't look at it right now, they can always change the laws later and go back and read your e-mail then.
Storage is cheap, and tape is cheap. The one protection you might have is that they only have backups on tapes and that the tapes go bad after a few years. But if they back up onto optical media, they basically have a record of all your e-mails for all eternity.
Heck, I run a mail server and a backup server for my company. It's really handy when an IMAP user accidentally deletes an e-mail. I can just go back and restore that mailbox for them. Even for something a year old.
The point is, just because the law says you are safe this instant doesn't mean squat. All that you do is recorded. If you don't like that, then use something like nonymouse.com and/or PGP.
My computer won't work hard enough
on
Hacker's Delight
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I tried all kinds of tricks to get my computer to work harder. And whaddya know, one night it patched its speech software into the modem and called the union on me.
Ingrate! If it weren't for me, it'd be running gene sequences all day and night. Computers have no sense of perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough... it's the price we pay for being free of all that nasty virus/spyware/trojan crap you folks have to deal with. Not to mention the godawful interface you torture yourselves with when not gaming.
The easiest answer: a Mac for real computing (anything internet-connected). A cheap, non-networked Windows PC for gaming. (And/or the patience to wait for the good games to get ported. At least some developers are starting to realize that even 4% is an awful lot of customers to ignore.)
Now as for online gaming... well, I'd rather skip on the Windows-only online games than have to deal with a internet-capable Windows PC. Bleaugh!
Watch out internet!
:/
Porn just found a whole new outlet.
Oh, and WTF "it's a camera that happens to have a phone in it?"
If I want a digital camera, I would think I could do better than 1.3 Megapixels with zero optical zoom!!! For less money, I could get an absolutely tiny Canon with 4 or MP, and still have room in my pocket left over for a small phone. Collectively, they'd probably take up less space than that monster S710a.
After using a S710a for a little while, I found these little glitches...
1. Use it closed. Open the switchblade. Notice that it's upside down now? WTF?
2. Microphone is in the front of the phone. Hold it against your face. Nobody can hear a word you say. You MUST either hold it away from your face or use a BT headset. Genius move there, when they easily could have put it on the bottom.
3. Volume controls are lacking for many functions. There is no way to turn down the deafening camera sound, or to adjust many other sound volumes.
4. Up and down arrows on side don't control volume when not on a call. That's just retarded.
5. Buttons are on the part of the switchblade that moves. So if you use it sometimes-open, sometimes-closed, half the time a button is in one place, half the time it is in another. This makes is very difficult to learn where a button is.
6. Data usage is enormous. I looked through the Cingular online menus and... used up my entire (paltry) 500 KB data allotment. I never actually got any data; just looked at the options.
7. Menus are clumsy. For example, you have to cruise for ever to try to find a picture you recently took. It is easier to open the camera, go to View, then close the camera. Stupidly, that is much easier than following the menus.
8. General comment on switchblade form factor... DUMB! You get all the disadvantages of a wand and a flip. The screen is always exposed, so likely to scratch; yet you have to open it to use the buttons. Extra fun when you are using it closed and need to press a button... slide it open, and the friggin' button is upside down above the screen.
Those are the only flaws I can recall, but I only used it briefly.
Still think it's a good phone?
But your point about Americans buying habits is well taken. We'd rather get a free phone and get stuck into an enormous monthly contract for crappy service than actually pay dollars for a phone. We'll fall for any gimmick except a genuine good deal.
But that said, it is still almost impossible to get a really good phone in the U.S. without going through a very shady reseller.
http://www.lessmeat.com/ :D
That's why I just switched to T-Mobile.
Their net service is FAR from perfect, but I can surf to my heart's delight for $5 a month.
Has anyone noticed that no matter how cool a phone is, it is usually unavailable in the U.S.?
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and so on all keep coming out with killer phones, and they are completely unavailable from regular American channels. The only way to get most of them is to give hundreds and hundreds of dollars plus your credit card information to some fly-by-night, grey-market operation based in who-knows-where. Much of the time (judging by what I've read in reviews), the result is that you get some Chinese-language phone and no response from customer service.
Why the lack of cool phones in the U.S. when Europe and Asia have such a great selection of the latest and greatest?
Sure, we don't have third generation networks here... but we still appreciate cool phones. WTF is up here?
P.S. And no, the Sony-Ericsson S710a is not a cool phone. It *looks* cool, but has such horrendous design flaws as to be mostly unusable.
March 2003: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/tsnotes.html
December 2004: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0412expo3.html
Mee too :-D
I guess we're safe for another year.
Pshwew!
What ever will they think of next!?!
Does no one care? Is this not the biggest news to come along since, well, the beginning of organic life?
Did you read this? Look at the second-to-last paragraph:
Did you read this? Look at the second-to-last paragraph:
That is the first step in self-evolving machines.
Yes, it is a minor step, but it is a friggin first step, OK? If they can pull this off, they are creating machines with the ability to adapt and evolve.
This is what I would call artificial life. Once that step is taken, it's only a matter of time before the machines start evolving themselves.
P.S. Now think about the kinds of viruses that could happen in that environment.
I have now contributed two cents. And what's that worth these days?
Sheeze. There are plenty of other things that Mac could be emulating.
Imagine if each OS on there ran each of its various flavors of Netscape, Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Lynx, Cyberdog, or whatnot.
Then (does VPC support Applescript?) program a simple little Applescript to go through each OS and each browser, pasting in a URL. If not Applescript, then a keystroke generater, perhaps.
Then the hardest part would be actually looking at all of those hundreds of browsers. Especially if you tried to do each version of each flavor of each browser. Oh, the boredom!
So maybe it's not a webmaster's dream. Nevermind.
I'll bet on this cluster, launching Acrobat Reader will only take like 30 seconds.
(As far as I can tell, Adobe has come up with some sort of reverse Moore's Law, where each new version of Reader takes twice as long to start up... at least on Macs.)
Who's banning clothing on the Olson twins?
Try supporting Entourage in a corporate environment. Like every other MS product, it is coded like crap.
Granted, Entourage is much better than most MS products, but it is still a source of many problems in my office. It just isn't coded well. One person might never notice all it's horrible problems, but put 50 not-so-savvy people to work on it, and it's a friggin nightmare. Like it is with all the other MS products we use.
I'm looking forward to having a 100% Microsoft-free office by the end of 2003.
Now, enter iWorks, Apple's forthcoming answer to that bug-laden piece of poorly programmed crap that should still be in Alpha, called MS Office.
Apple is taking on MS on every front. In the enterprise, they're producing powerful, cheap, easy to deploy servers. And now they're producing the clients for those servers.
The day of the desktop PC for personal use is over, and Apple is the only company to see it. Desktops still have uses in the Enterprise, and Apple is poised to take over there as well.
While I think your overall point is legitimate, I just want to point out that (I'm pretty sure) serving in a foreign army is illegal conduct for U.S. citizens. Doesn't matter if it's the Canadian army, it's not legal.
I think that is true, but prosecution is not necessarily the primary concern.
Some shadowy agency can strong-arm your ISP into releasing all the data on you. Then they can look over your conversations with your friends about going hiking in Shenandoah. Nothing to prosecute there, but also none of their damn business!
Even if they don't look at it right now, they can always change the laws later and go back and read your e-mail then.
Storage is cheap, and tape is cheap. The one protection you might have is that they only have backups on tapes and that the tapes go bad after a few years. But if they back up onto optical media, they basically have a record of all your e-mails for all eternity.
Heck, I run a mail server and a backup server for my company. It's really handy when an IMAP user accidentally deletes an e-mail. I can just go back and restore that mailbox for them. Even for something a year old.
The point is, just because the law says you are safe this instant doesn't mean squat. All that you do is recorded. If you don't like that, then use something like nonymouse.com and/or PGP.
Ingrate! If it weren't for me, it'd be running gene sequences all day and night. Computers have no sense of perspective.
Or to put it another way...
They have Linux on computers now? Wow!
Just don't see the relevance here....