Someone must set a standard and make parts interchangable.
I've been thinking the same thing. It's just too expensive and time consuming to design everything youself, but if I could buy the basic parts, pre-built, it would be a lot easier to buil your own robot.
Hopefully, the whole battle-bot craze will help with this.
Wrong. MS and Disney are owned and controled mostly by a very small number of people (Bill Gates, et al.) That's who they represent.
Corporations act in the interests of their shareholders. Corporations are not controlled via popular elections. They are not part the democratic system, and should kept the hell out of it.
Look at it this way: How the hell can you have a functioning democracy, when one person with resouces far beyond those of most people (Bill G.) can contribute as much of his money as he wants to buying influence?
These people depend on Office and Mickey to provide them with a paycheck.
This argument is silly for a million reasons. For one, how do you know that MS is the only possible way these people could be employed? If MS was dissolved tomorrow, would everyone just stop using computers?
Two, how do you that this is the best possible why these people could be employed? Perhaps there is another way things could be organized which would produce more.
Arguments like this are a last resort of those who don't want to see change.
But you cannot blame these companies for trying to keep their source of income strong.
This statement is silly too. As long as a company is working to increase it's profits, they shouldn't be held accountable for anything they're doing? This pure idiocy.
Here's an example:
A nuclear power company has all these spend fuel rods they need to get rid of. They discover the cheapest way to do this, and increase their profits, is to buy a law that allows them to throw it out with their normal trash.
This is clearly wrong, but all the arguments you gave support it. The power company is represented, speaking for all those people you think they speak for. The power company stays afloat, so everyone who works there can keep their jobs. And all they're doing is trying to increase their profits, they're blameless right?
Your biggest failure is to consider the costs to society of these company's actions. There is no Wildlife Corp, that can buy influence to preserve our wilderness. There is no Public Domain Inc. which fights to get works placed into the public domain.
Yes, there may be citizen's groups that fight these things, but the money they get is not anywhere near the value of the damage they have to try and prevent.
Take my power company example above. Can you figure out the problem? The damage to society is not being accounted for. There is no automatic reverse contribution to take this into account. And don't say the people should take care of this reverse contribution, either. That would be impossible. It would require every person in the country to be informed about every law that was going to be passed, and donate accoringly.
You should gripe about the system behind his victory, not some imaginary crime committed by his campaign.
WTF!? His fricking brother was the governor of Florida. His brother was the one who ordered the counting stopped at the point where Bush was ahead. Sounds like rigging an election to me.
But hey, it's not like the Bush family would have idea how to do that. It's not like his dad was formerly director of the CIA.
And pretending he's not the president isn't going to keep him from being re-elected, so I suggest focusing on the legitimate reasons to dislike him instead of imaginary ones.
I doubt the parent was trying to say the Bush is not the current president of the US. He was pointing out that he was elected under very shady circumstances. This is a very important thing to do. We certainly don't want Bush pulling the same thing in the next election.
Interesting. Is the new firewire standard not backward compatible? Is it compatible with multiple voltages? I don't think a typical PC power supply even puts out 30V. Are you sure those weren't just the specs for the connector and cabling?
Ex: A USB cable might need to be rated for 30V 2A, but the USB interface specs say that it will never see more than 5V.>
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, this just seems very weird.
The latest firewire standard can do 800Mb and provide up to 45W of power
But does it work over several hundred feet? Nope.
Also, are you sure about 45W? That's 9 amps at 5V. You're going to see sparks if you yank that cable out. They would need to have designed a new connector too. I doubt the original firewire connector was rated for that much current. I know a USB connector can only handle 2 amps and they are a very similar design.
I do not, either. But, were someone to introduce a vehicle 25% larger than the Caprice Classic today, I would consider it valid to say that the new vehicle was not "car-sized." You have to draw the line somewhere.
Agreed. Seems like a reasonalble line to me.
And neither of us is "wrong" (despite our earlier claims to the contrary) because what we are talking about here is opinions.
I suppose we'll just have to disagree about it's PDA-sizedness. The Axim is definately not the largest PDA I could find, though.
I happen to have my very own Apple Newton. This was one of the first devices ever to carry the name PDA.
I have also owned a Psion Revo.
I also have a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500.
Your definition would probably say that none of these are PDA-sized. I don't buy it.
Let me make an analogy: Up until a while ago, I owned a 1985 Chevy Caprice Classic. It's much more than 25% larger than a Honda Civic. It is still car-sized. Yes, it's a big car, but it's still a car.
I consider it valid to say "That car's too big for my taste."
I do not consider it valid to say "A Caprice Classic isn't car-sized."
Look, of course gender differences can be an interesting field of study, but that's when it's studied. You know, research?
She never said that that was what she believed.
You clearly misunderstood what I wrote. It would have been much more interesting if she had taken a postion.
Save your comments for when you can understand these ideas, have worked out why he called himself Johannes de silentio, and have worked out what he would have to say about your self-confidence.
What a typical arts-student response. You don't know anything about this topic unless you've read THIS book. (The obvious implication being that, since I haven't read a book that you have, I don't know what I'm talking about.) What matters is ideas, not how many books you've read. If your ideas are worthwhile, you shouldn't need to pull that kind of crap. You should be able to restate the idea which you think is important. If you can't.......
OMG, you mean there are smaller PDA's out there? One's with more battery life?
No shit. Of course there are. I never claimed that there weren't. You however said the Zaurus, isn't PDA-sized, and doesn't have a battery big enough to last for multiple days. Both statements are wrong.
Maybe you want your PDA to be smaller and have more battery life, fine. Say that. Your post was incorrect.
Hehe. Yeah, because 8 hours just isn't that much battery life. Try not being such an asshat. Read your own post: You give up the convenience of a full-sized screen and keyboard and a fast CPU so that it fits in your pocket and runs for days between battery changes/charges.
Even at 4hrs/day, it does run for days between charges. You were wrong.
Maybe you have room for something that size in the pockets of oversized Hawaiian shirts you wear to cover you man titties, but most of us have normal-sized pockets.
Someone doesn't like to be proven wrong, does he? The Zaurus is PDA-sized. Period
Dell Axim: 5.0" x 3.2" x 0.7"
Zaurus 760: 4.7" x 3.3" x.9"
PDA is something the size of a calculator that you can put into a shirt pocket.
These are, dumbass. Just because it looks like a laptop, doesn't mean it's as big as one. Sheesh.
You give up the convenience of a full-sized screen and keyboard and a fast CPU so that it fits in your pocket and runs for days between battery changes/charges.
WTF are you talking about? The SL-C760 is spec'ed at 8 hours continuous battery life.
This is right up there with 1998 Toshiba technology.
It's been five years since then. Technology has improved. These are the best of it. No other PDA even has a 640x480 screen. And if you want a hard drive, just stick an IBM microdrive in it.
Just to clarify, it was written using it, not about it (i.e. it was about feminist philosophy, and not what nerds do in their spare time)."
Too bad, a whole thesis about a single case mod would be quite an achievement. Instead we get this:
About half of you have vaginas, and about half of you don't. So what kind of difference is that? And about half of you will be called Ms or Miss or Mrs, and about half of you won't. And so what kind of difference is that? And what kind of difference is there between these differences?
Wow, how interesting. The rest is just your typical artsy biology vs. free thought crap. What a waste of time.
Really, check this out....
And that is why men and women live out different gender roles; not because it is in their nature to do so, but because something in the society is causing it. In an ideal society, these gender-neutral rational capacities and so on would mean that men and women would
WTF is wrong with some people? Men and women are different. Some of this difference is genetic. Deal already. Men are better suited for some tasks, and women are better suited for others. Finally there is a third set of tasks where both sexes perform equally.
Blah, blah, blah. Society. Blah.
There is nothing interesting here. No reasearch. No unique ideas.
This is a pretty clear example of why you should NEVER be able to patent DNA.
At least one developing nation (South Africa, I think) has already outlawed GE crops, because of the IP concerns involved. What would happen to S.A. if these crops spread on their own and became the dominant species?
The developing nation would no longer be able to grow any food without paying royalties to Monsanto, which they couldn't afford. People would starve. Look at what happend with S.A. and AIDs drugs. I think that showed pretty clearly how little respect some companies have for life.
You should be able to patent a process for modifying DNA. You should never be able to patent the actual organism. If this means that you can get corporate funding for X, oh well. Apply for a grant.
Hell, what happens if someone else patents your DNA? Do you have to pay them royalties if you want to have kids? This is stupid.
BTW, someone else patenting your DNA isn't as unlikely as you might think. It's not like Monsanto developed the DNA for all their crops from scratch. What happens when you participate in some successful cancer/AIDS/whatever research, where they find you have just the right gene they need?
That's all you needed to do in Redhat. I do it every time I upgrade my kernel.
I bet there was a simple solution to your mouse problem too. It's not like you're the only guy on the planet with a USB mouse.
(I don't know why I keep trying Linux distros. I must be a sucker for punishment or something.)
You must be, going though all that work when you could have just fixed two little problems. It seems to me like you were looking for any excuse you could find to use BSD, not that you were forced to.
Get someone to implement some standards in their own software, plus bundle the bare necessities (Mozilla, Galeon, something!) and they could have a decent competitor.
And what, make it so you can't get GNOME without thouse programs too. They're serperate so the are availible serperately. That's the sensible way to do things. That's also why most people use a Linux distribution that installs all of those things for them.
You made a choice to build your system from scratch. Obviously, it doesn't include everything. Should BSD be tied to GNOME just because they need to "bundle the bare necessities"? No. One's a GUI, one's a UI envionment. They should be availible seperately.
I prefer KDE to GNOME as well, but it's not fair to dismiss GNOME because it doesn't come with the kitchen sink. Any typical install is going to include both, as well as a bunch of other applications. Then you pick the desktop environment you like more.
Re:But nobody knows about ogg.
on
Ogg Now An RFC
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· Score: 1
Everybody has heard of mp3, and a lot people have heard of DivX;)/MPEG, but only nerds know about ogg. Its sounds stupid, it looks stupid and theres poor support for it in windows.
If media player dosen't play it, 99% of people won't use it.
Yeah, whatever.
Does media player come with DivX;) support? No. Guess what? People use it anyways.
Another reply here points out that every just uses winamp. You can play.ogg with winamp just like you can play divx with media player. Both are just a download away.
And how the hell does an audio format "look stupid"? This is just a blatant troll. Who modded this guy up?
OK then, what about all those exploits in web pages -- URLs, malformed html, etc? If you put a poison html page that you *know* is going to cause a certain version of IE or Mozilla viewing it to do something the user never intended, do you really think you can hide behind the "All I was doing was answering requests!" defense?
Or what if you managed to get Microsoft's private key for WindowsUpdate, and intercepted people's requests for updates, giving them "updates" that allow you to 0wnz0r their machines. Hey, you didn't install it, you just answered requests! Yeah, see if a jury buys that one.
In your examples a deception, misrepresentation, or a deliberate circumvention of existing security mechanisms is being employed. None of these things are happening here.
In the situation at hand neither of these things is happening. The worm is looking for an.exe at foo.com, and it's getting an.exe at foo.com. The people aren't tricking the computers into coming there or executing anything. These computers we already scheduled to visit the site and execute whatever's there before they ever got involved.
they haven't tested this update on a wide variety of systems, and it may cause a lot of damage and data loss. It's not their place to make that kind of a decision.
Cry me a river. These systems are already hacked. If you want your system to be reliable, you shouldn't have worms on it. It's not like this is the first day Fizzer hit or something.
If you don't want your system to automatically download and execute code at a certain URL, why don't you make sure your system doesn't do so?
I wouldn't be suprised if this method was totally legal.
If they were SSHing into the infected machines, you could consider that unauthorized access, but that's not happening. All they're doing is placing a file on a geocities page. The HTTP client/server thing is pretty clear, besides they don't even control the server. Even if you try and argue that the geocities server is accessing the client, the task force isn't in control of it.
If they were IP spoofing or redirecting traffic, that would probably be illegal, but that's not happening.
If they were taking advantage of a buffer overflow, or some other exploit to accomplish this, that would be illegal. Not so.
If there was an intent to do harm, then knowingly putting the program there to do so would probably be illegal. Not happening either.
How about this: Why don't you try and tell me what law you think they're actually breaking?
Normally, I would be against any sort of "hack them back" actions, but I just can't see how this is hacking them. If the infected machines were just checking the webpage for the word "monkey", would adding the work monkey to that page be illegal? I just can't see how it would be.
It depends on the purpose. I used the example of parking in front of a hydrant for a reason.
If you park in front of a hydrant, it's legal for the firemen to smash your windows and run the hose though your car, even if it's just to teach you a lesson and they could have gone around it.
It is not okay to go around smashing car windows just because you want to, even if you find a car parked in front of a hydrant.
Isn't this just as illegal as releasing the worm itself? What if the fix has some adverse effects that we don't know about?
Nope. This is perfectly legal. They aren't breaking any security on the infected machines, and they aren't contacting them.
All they're doing is putting a file on a webpage. It's not their fault that the infected machines run whatever is on that page.
Generally, have illegaly used someone else's computer, you have to have defeated some sort of access control mechanism. At least that's how it is in NYS.
Since the remote computer is initiating everything, and all they're doing is answering requests, it would be pretty hard to charge them with unauthorized use of your machine.
Think of it this way:
1. The remote computer goes: "What do I do?"
2. The server goes: "Well, since you're asking, I think you should do this."
There's no stolen password, and there's no exploit needed.
Here's another example:
I put a box on the internet, let's call it pk12.foobar.com. This box is a Linux box which accepts any username/password combo as root, and no notices that it is for private use only. Under NYS law (I'm not sure about federal) you can come along and use any services my box provides, including telnet, http, ftp, etc.
IMO, if the fix trashes your data, tough shit. Are owners of DDOS zombies held responsible for the damage their computers are doing?
Morally, this is like parking in front of a hydrant and then bitching because they smashed your windows to run the hose though your car or towed it. It's doesn't matter if you knew you were parked in front of the hydrant. Your car was causing a danger and it had to be dealt with. If you don't want that happening to your car, you should make sure you don't park in front of hydrants. It's your car. You are responsible for it.
I can see your reasoning that this advantage might diappear. Maybe it will, but there it a chance that it could stay an advantage for quite some time to come. It's actually a pretty neat concept.
Power consumption in CMOS logic is directly proportional to your clock speed, and how many transistors you have switching. This is proportional to how much computing you're doing. If your OS requires less computation to run, you use less power, and your battery lasts longer than the competition's.
Maybe Moore's Law will double the amount of CPU power availible in a PDA, but if your OS only needs half of that, your battery life is going to be double your competition's.
This isn't quite true due to the other components in the device that draw a fixed amount of power to keep them running (backlight for example), but power usage by the CPU is a significant factor in the battery life of most PDAs.
Anyways, the reason I was pointing out that Symbian OS was designed to run on small devices was not hardware requirements, but UI design. There are nice touches in the way they did Symbian OS that let it use the tiny screen more efficiently than a PocketPC.
For example, there's a menu button which hides/unhides the menu at the top of the window, in all applications. That's 10% more screen availible most of the time. It's also very easy to hide the taskbar as well.
In general, the UI was designed for a small screen, instead of trying to shrink the Windows UI. This is nice, because you can get more out of the small physical size of the screen.
I'm pretty optimistic about the whole Symbian thing because of things like this. It's just too bad Psion isn't in the PDA business anymore.
IMHO Bill G is not successful because he is a visionary in the computing field.
Bill Gates is successful because he is a good businessman. I once got curious and did a little research on the worlds richest people. Know what all of those who made their own money seem to have in common? Insane business sense/craftiness. The ability to work deals that just make others shake their heads. He knows how to work the system for all it's worth.
Bill Gates has always bet on Moore's Law, and has always won.
MS has never really worried about beating competitors spec-wise, not because of Moore's Law, but because they beat them other (often illegal) ways. If doesn't matter if the other guy's software is better, if you control the OS that everyone uses. All you have to do is develop/buy your own and bundle it with your OS. Instant market share. You make money because you just charge more for the OS to recover the cost, while the other company dies. Why is anyone going to buy a competitor's product (for additional cost), when the already have the MS equivalent?
Now, back on topic: MS can't use this tactic to get WinCE on cellphones. This means they have to compete on a (somewhat) level playing-field. Since their software is currently inferior to Symbian OS for smartphone use, I predict they will loose. By the time WinCE is stable enough, it will be too late, another OS will have already become the standard.
The only way I can see MS really making it in the embedded OS field is if they take huge losses, basically giving their stuff away, until they get market share. They definately have the money to do this, but even so, they may not get anywhere. Even if they charge $0, they still have to compete with embedded Linux at the same price point. With Linux, companies know that they will always be able to redistribute it royalty-free. They also know that, at some point, MS is going to want to make back the money the spent developing WinCE, so they will get charged for it eventually.
Meanwhile: Symbian is owned by Ericsson, Panasonic, Motorola, Nokia, Psion, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.
That's basically all the major cellphone manufacturers. Since they all own the OS, they know they're getting their OS just about as cheap as possible anyways, as well as knowing that they have control over it in the future.
Since their cellphones are already the standard, one can be pretty sure that whatever OS they choose to put on them will also become the standard. Just like MS choosing IE.
Check his user info. He only has 3 comments, ever. All of them in this thread about how great the MS smart phone is and how "Smartphone is a brilliant OS."
Sounds like a rabid MS fanboy or an astroturfer to me.
Here is a link to some user reviews of this phone. In particular, note the user reviews which describe these updates which he claimed just increase efficiency, are actually necessary to keep the phone from crashing all the time.
This is my favorite quote from his postings: "There was never any problems with the OS, only the Orange side of it. The firmware upgrade has improved performance and batterylife and its now a very good phone/pda."
Funny, it seems everyone else's smartphone crashes but his. Maybe he got a magic phone.
I don't know if he had the rate correct but I wouldn't be suprised if he did.
Do you know what sending an SMS costs here in the US? It's actually cheaper to just call there person for five minutes than to send a few messages back an forth.
I know, it defies all logic. SMS's are so many orders of magnitude less of a burden on the network, yet they cost more. The cell phone system here is insane.
People in Europe have it pretty good, but the Japanese are the ones who get all the really cool stuff. If I was in Japan I could use a Sharp Zaurus as my phone and have VOIP + continuous net access.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone must set a standard and make parts interchangable.
I've been thinking the same thing. It's just too expensive and time consuming to design everything youself, but if I could buy the basic parts, pre-built, it would be a lot easier to buil your own robot.
Hopefully, the whole battle-bot craze will help with this.
MS and Disney represent a large body of people.
Wrong. MS and Disney are owned and controled mostly by a very small number of people (Bill Gates, et al.) That's who they represent.
Corporations act in the interests of their shareholders. Corporations are not controlled via popular elections. They are not part the democratic system, and should kept the hell out of it.
Look at it this way: How the hell can you have a functioning democracy, when one person with resouces far beyond those of most people (Bill G.) can contribute as much of his money as he wants to buying influence?
These people depend on Office and Mickey to provide them with a paycheck.
This argument is silly for a million reasons. For one, how do you know that MS is the only possible way these people could be employed? If MS was dissolved tomorrow, would everyone just stop using computers?
Two, how do you that this is the best possible why these people could be employed? Perhaps there is another way things could be organized which would produce more.
Arguments like this are a last resort of those who don't want to see change.
But you cannot blame these companies for trying to keep their source of income strong.
This statement is silly too. As long as a company is working to increase it's profits, they shouldn't be held accountable for anything they're doing? This pure idiocy.
Here's an example:
A nuclear power company has all these spend fuel rods they need to get rid of. They discover the cheapest way to do this, and increase their profits, is to buy a law that allows them to throw it out with their normal trash.
This is clearly wrong, but all the arguments you gave support it. The power company is represented, speaking for all those people you think they speak for. The power company stays afloat, so everyone who works there can keep their jobs. And all they're doing is trying to increase their profits, they're blameless right?
Your biggest failure is to consider the costs to society of these company's actions. There is no Wildlife Corp, that can buy influence to preserve our wilderness. There is no Public Domain Inc. which fights to get works placed into the public domain.
Yes, there may be citizen's groups that fight these things, but the money they get is not anywhere near the value of the damage they have to try and prevent.
Take my power company example above. Can you figure out the problem? The damage to society is not being accounted for. There is no automatic reverse contribution to take this into account. And don't say the people should take care of this reverse contribution, either. That would be impossible. It would require every person in the country to be informed about every law that was going to be passed, and donate accoringly.
You should gripe about the system behind his victory, not some imaginary crime committed by his campaign.
WTF!? His fricking brother was the governor of Florida. His brother was the one who ordered the counting stopped at the point where Bush was ahead. Sounds like rigging an election to me.
But hey, it's not like the Bush family would have idea how to do that. It's not like his dad was formerly director of the CIA.
And pretending he's not the president isn't going to keep him from being re-elected, so I suggest focusing on the legitimate reasons to dislike him instead of imaginary ones.
I doubt the parent was trying to say the Bush is not the current president of the US. He was pointing out that he was elected under very shady circumstances. This is a very important thing to do. We certainly don't want Bush pulling the same thing in the next election.
The max it can do is 1.5A at 30V
Interesting. Is the new firewire standard not backward compatible? Is it compatible with multiple voltages? I don't think a typical PC power supply even puts out 30V. Are you sure those weren't just the specs for the connector and cabling?
Ex: A USB cable might need to be rated for 30V 2A, but the USB interface specs say that it will never see more than 5V.>
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, this just seems very weird.
Snood
The latest firewire standard can do 800Mb and provide up to 45W of power
But does it work over several hundred feet? Nope.
Also, are you sure about 45W? That's 9 amps at 5V. You're going to see sparks if you yank that cable out. They would need to have designed a new connector too. I doubt the original firewire connector was rated for that much current. I know a USB connector can only handle 2 amps and they are a very similar design.
I do not, either. But, were someone to introduce a vehicle 25% larger than the Caprice Classic today, I would consider it valid to say that the new vehicle was not "car-sized." You have to draw the line somewhere.
Agreed. Seems like a reasonalble line to me.
And neither of us is "wrong" (despite our earlier claims to the contrary) because what we are talking about here is opinions.
And, agreed.
I suppose we'll just have to disagree about it's PDA-sizedness. The Axim is definately not the largest PDA I could find, though.
I happen to have my very own Apple Newton. This was one of the first devices ever to carry the name PDA.
I have also owned a Psion Revo.
I also have a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500.
Your definition would probably say that none of these are PDA-sized. I don't buy it.
Let me make an analogy: Up until a while ago, I owned a 1985 Chevy Caprice Classic. It's much more than 25% larger than a Honda Civic. It is still car-sized. Yes, it's a big car, but it's still a car.
I consider it valid to say "That car's too big for my taste."
I do not consider it valid to say "A Caprice Classic isn't car-sized."
Yikes. Easy killer.
Look, of course gender differences can be an interesting field of study, but that's when it's studied. You know, research?
She never said that that was what she believed.
You clearly misunderstood what I wrote. It would have been much more interesting if she had taken a postion.
Save your comments for when you can understand these ideas, have worked out why he called himself Johannes de silentio, and have worked out what he would have to say about your self-confidence.
What a typical arts-student response. You don't know anything about this topic unless you've read THIS book. (The obvious implication being that, since I haven't read a book that you have, I don't know what I'm talking about.) What matters is ideas, not how many books you've read. If your ideas are worthwhile, you shouldn't need to pull that kind of crap. You should be able to restate the idea which you think is important. If you can't.......
Link
OMG, you mean there are smaller PDA's out there?
One's with more battery life?
No shit. Of course there are. I never claimed that there weren't.
You however said the Zaurus, isn't PDA-sized, and doesn't have a battery big enough to last for multiple days. Both statements are wrong.
Maybe you want your PDA to be smaller and have more battery life, fine. Say that. Your post was incorrect.
Learn to read.
.9"
Hehe. Yeah, because 8 hours just isn't that much battery life. Try not being such an asshat. Read your own post:
You give up the convenience of a full-sized screen and keyboard and a fast CPU so that it fits in your pocket and runs for days between battery changes/charges.
Even at 4hrs/day, it does run for days between charges. You were wrong.
Maybe you have room for something that size in the pockets of oversized Hawaiian shirts you wear to cover you man titties, but most of us have normal-sized pockets.
Someone doesn't like to be proven wrong, does he? The Zaurus is PDA-sized. Period
Dell Axim: 5.0" x 3.2" x 0.7"
Zaurus 760: 4.7" x 3.3" x
Get an IBM microdrive.
PDA is something the size of a calculator that you can put into a shirt pocket.
These are, dumbass. Just because it looks like a laptop, doesn't mean it's as big as one. Sheesh.
You give up the convenience of a full-sized screen and keyboard and a fast CPU so that it fits in your pocket and runs for days between battery changes/charges.
WTF are you talking about? The SL-C760 is spec'ed at 8 hours continuous battery life.
This is right up there with 1998 Toshiba technology.
It's been five years since then. Technology has improved. These are the best of it. No other PDA even has a 640x480 screen. And if you want a hard drive, just stick an IBM microdrive in it.
Just to clarify, it was written using it, not about it (i.e. it was about feminist philosophy, and not what nerds do in their spare time)."
Too bad, a whole thesis about a single case mod would be quite an achievement. Instead we get this:
About half of you have vaginas, and about half of you don't. So what kind of difference is that? And about half of you will be called Ms or Miss or Mrs, and about half of you won't. And so what kind of difference is that? And what kind of difference is there between these differences?
Wow, how interesting. The rest is just your typical artsy biology vs. free thought crap. What a waste of time.
Really, check this out.... And that is why men and women live out different gender roles; not because it is in their nature to do so, but because something in the society is causing it. In an ideal society, these gender-neutral rational capacities and so on would mean that men and women would
WTF is wrong with some people? Men and women are different. Some of this difference is genetic. Deal already. Men are better suited for some tasks, and women are better suited for others. Finally there is a third set of tasks where both sexes perform equally.
Blah, blah, blah. Society. Blah.
There is nothing interesting here. No reasearch. No unique ideas.
This is a pretty clear example of why you should NEVER be able to patent DNA.
At least one developing nation (South Africa, I think) has already outlawed GE crops, because of the IP concerns involved. What would happen to S.A. if these crops spread on their own and became the dominant species?
The developing nation would no longer be able to grow any food without paying royalties to Monsanto, which they couldn't afford. People would starve. Look at what happend with S.A. and AIDs drugs. I think that showed pretty clearly how little respect some companies have for life.
You should be able to patent a process for modifying DNA. You should never be able to patent the actual organism. If this means that you can get corporate funding for X, oh well. Apply for a grant.
Hell, what happens if someone else patents your DNA? Do you have to pay them royalties if you want to have kids? This is stupid.
BTW, someone else patenting your DNA isn't as unlikely as you might think. It's not like Monsanto developed the DNA for all their crops from scratch. What happens when you participate in some successful cancer/AIDS/whatever research, where they find you have just the right gene they need?
failing to support my NVidia card (Your kernel is too old, update. Oh wait, now it's too new, downgrade. RPM compile?
/usr/src/redhat/SRPMS /usr/src/redhat/RPMS
cd
rpm --rebuild NVIDIA*.src.rpm
cd
rpm --force -UvH NVIDIA*.rpm
That's all you needed to do in Redhat. I do it every time I upgrade my kernel.
I bet there was a simple solution to your mouse problem too. It's not like you're the only guy on the planet with a USB mouse.
(I don't know why I keep trying Linux distros. I must be a sucker for punishment or something.)
You must be, going though all that work when you could have just fixed two little problems. It seems to me like you were looking for any excuse you could find to use BSD, not that you were forced to.
Get someone to implement some standards in their own software, plus bundle the bare necessities (Mozilla, Galeon, something!) and they could have a decent competitor.
And what, make it so you can't get GNOME without thouse programs too. They're serperate so the are availible serperately. That's the sensible way to do things. That's also why most people use a Linux distribution that installs all of those things for them.
You made a choice to build your system from scratch. Obviously, it doesn't include everything. Should BSD be tied to GNOME just because they need to "bundle the bare necessities"? No. One's a GUI, one's a UI envionment. They should be availible seperately.
I prefer KDE to GNOME as well, but it's not fair to dismiss GNOME because it doesn't come with the kitchen sink. Any typical install is going to include both, as well as a bunch of other applications. Then you pick the desktop environment you like more.
Everybody has heard of mp3, and a lot people have heard of DivX ;)/MPEG, but only nerds know about ogg. Its sounds stupid, it looks stupid and theres poor support for it in windows.
If media player dosen't play it, 99% of people won't use it.
;) support? No. Guess what? People use it anyways.
.ogg with winamp just like you can play divx with media player. Both are just a download away.
Yeah, whatever.
Does media player come with DivX
Another reply here points out that every just uses winamp. You can play
And how the hell does an audio format "look stupid"? This is just a blatant troll. Who modded this guy up?
In your examples a deception, misrepresentation, or a deliberate circumvention of existing security mechanisms is being employed. None of these things are happening here.
In the situation at hand neither of these things is happening. The worm is looking for an
they haven't tested this update on a wide variety of systems, and it may cause a lot of damage and data loss. It's not their place to make that kind of a decision.
Cry me a river. These systems are already hacked. If you want your system to be reliable, you shouldn't have worms on it. It's not like this is the first day Fizzer hit or something.
If you don't want your system to automatically download and execute code at a certain URL, why don't you make sure your system doesn't do so?
I wouldn't be suprised if this method was totally legal.
How about this: Why don't you try and tell me what law you think they're actually breaking?
Normally, I would be against any sort of "hack them back" actions, but I just can't see how this is hacking them. If the infected machines were just checking the webpage for the word "monkey", would adding the work monkey to that page be illegal? I just can't see how it would be.
First off, can we get some whitespace? Please?
Good intention does not turn an illegal act into something legal.
Actually there are plenty of laws which consider intent. Here are the NYS computer crime laws for example. Go ahead, Control-F, type "intent".
It depends on the purpose. I used the example of parking in front of a hydrant for a reason.
If you park in front of a hydrant, it's legal for the firemen to smash your windows and run the hose though your car, even if it's just to teach you a lesson and they could have gone around it.
It is not okay to go around smashing car windows just because you want to, even if you find a car parked in front of a hydrant.
Isn't this just as illegal as releasing the worm itself? What if the fix has some adverse effects that we don't know about?
Nope. This is perfectly legal. They aren't breaking any security on the infected machines, and they aren't contacting them.
All they're doing is putting a file on a webpage. It's not their fault that the infected machines run whatever is on that page.
Generally, have illegaly used someone else's computer, you have to have defeated some sort of access control mechanism. At least that's how it is in NYS.
Since the remote computer is initiating everything, and all they're doing is answering requests, it would be pretty hard to charge them with unauthorized use of your machine.
Think of it this way:
1. The remote computer goes: "What do I do?"
2. The server goes: "Well, since you're asking, I think you should do this."
There's no stolen password, and there's no exploit needed.
Here's another example:
I put a box on the internet, let's call it pk12.foobar.com. This box is a Linux box which accepts any username/password combo as root, and no notices that it is for private use only. Under NYS law (I'm not sure about federal) you can come along and use any services my box provides, including telnet, http, ftp, etc.
IMO, if the fix trashes your data, tough shit. Are owners of DDOS zombies held responsible for the damage their computers are doing?
Morally, this is like parking in front of a hydrant and then bitching because they smashed your windows to run the hose though your car or towed it. It's doesn't matter if you knew you were parked in front of the hydrant. Your car was causing a danger and it had to be dealt with. If you don't want that happening to your car, you should make sure you don't park in front of hydrants. It's your car. You are responsible for it.
I can see your reasoning that this advantage might diappear. Maybe it will, but there it a chance that it could stay an advantage for quite some time to come. It's actually a pretty neat concept.
Power consumption in CMOS logic is directly proportional to your clock speed, and how many transistors you have switching. This is proportional to how much computing you're doing. If your OS requires less computation to run, you use less power, and your battery lasts longer than the competition's.
Maybe Moore's Law will double the amount of CPU power availible in a PDA, but if your OS only needs half of that, your battery life is going to be double your competition's.
This isn't quite true due to the other components in the device that draw a fixed amount of power to keep them running (backlight for example), but power usage by the CPU is a significant factor in the battery life of most PDAs.
Anyways, the reason I was pointing out that Symbian OS was designed to run on small devices was not hardware requirements, but UI design. There are nice touches in the way they did Symbian OS that let it use the tiny screen more efficiently than a PocketPC.
For example, there's a menu button which hides/unhides the menu at the top of the window, in all applications. That's 10% more screen availible most of the time. It's also very easy to hide the taskbar as well.
In general, the UI was designed for a small screen, instead of trying to shrink the Windows UI. This is nice, because you can get more out of the small physical size of the screen.
I'm pretty optimistic about the whole Symbian thing because of things like this. It's just too bad Psion isn't in the PDA business anymore.
IMHO Bill G is not successful because he is a visionary in the computing field.
Bill Gates is successful because he is a good businessman. I once got curious and did a little research on the worlds richest people. Know what all of those who made their own money seem to have in common? Insane business sense/craftiness. The ability to work deals that just make others shake their heads. He knows how to work the system for all it's worth.
Bill Gates has always bet on Moore's Law, and has always won.
MS has never really worried about beating competitors spec-wise, not because of Moore's Law, but because they beat them other (often illegal) ways. If doesn't matter if the other guy's software is better, if you control the OS that everyone uses. All you have to do is develop/buy your own and bundle it with your OS. Instant market share. You make money because you just charge more for the OS to recover the cost, while the other company dies. Why is anyone going to buy a competitor's product (for additional cost), when the already have the MS equivalent?
Now, back on topic: MS can't use this tactic to get WinCE on cellphones. This means they have to compete on a (somewhat) level playing-field. Since their software is currently inferior to Symbian OS for smartphone use, I predict they will loose. By the time WinCE is stable enough, it will be too late, another OS will have already become the standard.
The only way I can see MS really making it in the embedded OS field is if they take huge losses, basically giving their stuff away, until they get market share. They definately have the money to do this, but even so, they may not get anywhere. Even if they charge $0, they still have to compete with embedded Linux at the same price point. With Linux, companies know that they will always be able to redistribute it royalty-free. They also know that, at some point, MS is going to want to make back the money the spent developing WinCE, so they will get charged for it eventually.
Meanwhile:
Symbian is owned by Ericsson, Panasonic, Motorola, Nokia, Psion, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.
That's basically all the major cellphone manufacturers. Since they all own the OS, they know they're getting their OS just about as cheap as possible anyways, as well as knowing that they have control over it in the future.
Since their cellphones are already the standard, one can be pretty sure that whatever OS they choose to put on them will also become the standard. Just like MS choosing IE.
What idiot modded this guy up?
Check his user info. He only has 3 comments, ever. All of them in this thread about how great the MS smart phone is and how "Smartphone is a brilliant OS."
Sounds like a rabid MS fanboy or an astroturfer to me.
Here is a link to some user reviews of this phone. In particular, note the user reviews which describe these updates which he claimed just increase efficiency, are actually necessary to keep the phone from crashing all the time.
This is my favorite quote from his postings:
"There was never any problems with the OS, only the Orange side of it. The firmware upgrade has improved performance and batterylife and its now a very good phone/pda."
Funny, it seems everyone else's smartphone crashes but his. Maybe he got a magic phone.
I don't know if he had the rate correct but I wouldn't be suprised if he did.
Do you know what sending an SMS costs here in the US? It's actually cheaper to just call there person for five minutes than to send a few messages back an forth.
I know, it defies all logic. SMS's are so many orders of magnitude less of a burden on the network, yet they cost more. The cell phone system here is insane.
People in Europe have it pretty good, but the Japanese are the ones who get all the really cool stuff. If I was in Japan I could use a Sharp Zaurus as my phone and have VOIP + continuous net access.