> Why do people assume Windows CE is unstable and uncustomizable?
Well, I dunno. Ask the editors at Pen Computing magazine who note, in this month's editorial, that while the Palm platform is rocketing (another source quotes something like a 25% surge in 4Q99 sales above predictions), the CE platform appears to be tanking.
> Many people don't realize that an operating system is only as stable as its applications.
Certainly. But James Bond doesn't give a crap. If his Jornada crashes while he's trying to save the world, he's not concerned whether it's because the OS is flaky, or it's that special program Christmas Jones gave him for calculating radiation density... or even just that she's got nice boobs.
It broke. End of report.
I have a Pilot Pro with about a dozen aftermarket apps on it; I use it hourly.
It has locked up _twice_ in 8 months, requiring no more than a soft reset either time. Never lost a byte of data, even though it's developed that "LCD panel cable pulls out of the connector" problem that requires pulling off the back and plugging it back in tight. I can live with that for $129.
Try _that_ on a CE device. Go ahead.
One of these days, the Microsoft apologists will take note that Hotmail _still_ isn't running on NT/IIS... and ask themselves why.
ICQ to talk to people whom _I_ (usually) pointed at it, and they were bright enough to set it up safely (it's pretty powerful; there's stuff you want to turn off).
And AIM, because there are, shockingly enough, some people whom I _do_ want to talk to, who only do AOL.
And this is the point: you need whatever clients are required to talk to the people you want to talk to; you don't always have the influence to make _them_ install _your_ client of choice.
And the second-layer point is this:
We continue, on the net, to allow engineering decisions to be made by marketroids. Ok, perhaps the competition between the various protocols is good, in the final analysis: the IMPP working group will have more good and bad examples to draw from. But still: have you _ever_ clicked an ad you saw on AIM?
> But the idea of a secret hidden function is just too over-the-top.
Sorry. This is the government we're talking about here... There are black boxes on the schematic of a Canon color copier, in the service manual. All they say is (something like) "processor".
> and will continue to do so until a Canon tech is called. (They usualy call the Secret Service)
Well, not quite.
There was a thriving thread on this topic at www.flutterby.com this month, too, and I'm the guy who'd tried. Once side of a one dollar bill came out greened-out on the copy. No other reactions. Tried the same thing using the PC, scanner, and Fiery RIP hooked up to the same copier; printed fine.
I can't _imagine_ who the hell would accept it: it was certainly obvious to _me_ it was a copy.
(Oh, yeah; burned it. Color copier toner smells awful...)
There was some commentary floating around a while back that there might be criminal fraud charges laid against NSOL, because their S-1 neglected to mention that _they wouldn't have a monopoly much longer_. Does any one know what happened there?
I'd _love_ to see them get fried to a crisp. I'm tired of engineering jobs being treated as marketing.
Rodney Joffe (who runs geektools.com) noted on NANOG yesterday (or maybe the day before) that his whois has, indeed, been modified to deal correctly with the whois referrals.
There's even a Windows client, for those who haven't looked around there, yet.
Yeah... that's part of it. It became too easy _not_ to be limited by geography, and on top of that, as one other post implied, _too many_ people could be connected at once.
But then, I have no hope of practically being able to track the threads my postings to/. generate, either; the tools are not built for that.
He actually did it, although it didn't make it outside the labs. Deja _used_ to have the Usenet posting wherein I quoted his email reply stating this, but damn if I can find it now.
Actually, it's not. Right after I originally wrote it, and it was published, a correspondent explained to me that the meter it _is_ in is called 'anapestic tetrameter'.
There's one _very_ important point here, that I've synthesized my opinion on from a mish-mash of Alan Cooper (many of whose opinions I _violently_ disagree with, BTW), Jakob Neilsen, Phil Greenspun, and half a dozen others:
There are two major types of applications:
1) Ones I _sleep_ with,
2) ones I date occasionally.
The latter can easily be implemented as fancy browser based graphical UI's which are easy to train... but in the case of the former, ease of training is _much_ less important than ease of _use_.
I've seen 3 or 4 mainframe applications where the re-write made the app look like "Windows on a TTY"... and spread 1 or 2 screens of entry out over 14 screens.
They are _unanimously_ panned by the people who have to do heads-down data entry on them all day long. Allied Van Lines did it; the Florida DMV has just done it... and you shouldn't.
Non-productivity applications that a user lives with all day long -- that is to say, database front end-y stuff, not word processors and calendars -- should be 80x25 in a text window.
The absolute best archival format for audiovisual imagery at this point is 35mm b&w separation negatives with an optical soundtrack, stored in vacuum packages in a radiation protected environment.
One quibble: the separation negs are red, green, and blue -- the light primaries, not the pigment ones (CYMK).
The projected lifespan of such storage is at least 150 years, based on current information.
Getting the info back _off_ the film is a bit time consuming, though...;-)
(PS: Sony AV-3650's aren't _that_ hard to find...)
Well, actually, it's not as bad as you think, Any.
If you take a look at the docos for SpeakFreely, you'll see that the current state of the art in toll-quality vocoders, or at least communications quality, can stuff voice down into 2Kbps.
I agree with Heinlein; let's rescind the franchise from men, and let women run the country for the next 200 years.
On another front, the major problem with online election is guaranteeing non-repudiability, one-vote per voter... _and_ anonymity, all at the same time. There's been _extensive_ work on this topic; check the RISKS digest archives, among other places -- available on the web at
Well, not exactly. According to the Heroine web page, they were funded to get it to beta, and ran out of money, at least temporarily. I downloaded it, but I haven't have time to make it run yet -- but I do gather it's functional. And it certainly looked pretty.
For those who missed it, B2000 is a full non-linear video editing suite for Linux, using the Quicktime for Linux libraries available at. Cheers,
No, I dont want to kill you; I just don't think you understand the situation.
First, QuickTime is merely an encapsulation file format. It's possible, insofar as I know, to put MPEG streams _in_ a QT file, just like you'd put MJPEG streams in there.
Secondly, and more importantly from the post-production viewpoint: MPEG is, by design, an assymetrical compression format -- it takes _much_ more horsepower to compress it than it does to decompress it.
For it's design purpose, distribution, this is a feature. But it's decidedly a bug for production environments. Realtime MPEG encoders are currently around $25K. Cheers,
There are two major sites corralling telephony projects for Linux:
linuxtelephony.com is an omnibus site, which has seemed not to have had any updates recently, and
opentelecom.org which, well, has.:-) These folks are supported by Natural Microsystems, who have released a bunch of their code as open source under some license or another. I mean internal switching and driver code and like that.
On a lower level front, it's possible to use mgetty+sendfax and Gert Doering's vgetty to build answering machine type stuff and also, possibly, 2-call fax response. I'm not sure about 1 call; switching modes can be messy.
This stuff works with the old Zyxel 1496+ modems, among others, and _maybe_ with the Rockwell voice chips, but I'm not sure; the Zyxel's ought to be, roughly, free, by now.
I gather it's because no machineable copies exist of some of them. I understand that there's a project to collect soft copy and re-scan it.
This seems like a good time to call attention to my own contribution to the genre, RFC 2100, "The Naming of Hosts"... from 1 April 97, and invite those who enjoy it to go vote in the contest Rob posted about last week.
Forgive me, but I believe you don't quite understand the situation...
InterNIC is an _activity_ of the US government; it provides services (registry and registrar, among others), to the US government.
NSI has a contract to provide these services, which contract is set to expire.
They have those names pursuant to a contract with the government, and title to whatever intellectual property those names comprise as a database does _not_ reside with NSI, it's owned by the US Government.
www.internic.net is a front door to that government activity. It is most decidedly _not_ the property of NSI (the trademark on InterNIC rests with the feds), and when I go to that website, I expect to find "the InterNIC", _not_ Netsol.
_Especially_ when they're marking up a service they themselves are providing, and attempting to hide the fact that you can get it at cost.
Sorry; this is out and out fraud, and I've heard that there may be criminal charges. Cheers,
The artists, do, after all, produce the music... and in not too long from now, they're going to start getting annoyed when the technology makes it possible for the artists to see that the labels are not on the artists' side: they're on _their own_ side.
Oops.
They won't tolerate it too long, either. Look at Chuck D of Public Enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
> Why do people assume Windows CE is unstable and uncustomizable?
Well, I dunno. Ask the editors at Pen Computing magazine who note, in this month's editorial, that while the Palm platform is rocketing (another source quotes something like a 25% surge in 4Q99 sales above predictions), the CE platform appears to be tanking.
> Many people don't realize that an operating system is only as stable as its applications.
Certainly. But James Bond doesn't give a crap. If his Jornada crashes while he's trying to save the world, he's not concerned whether it's because the OS is flaky, or it's that special program Christmas Jones gave him for calculating radiation density... or even just that she's got nice boobs.
It broke. End of report.
I have a Pilot Pro with about a dozen aftermarket apps on it; I use it hourly.
It has locked up _twice_ in 8 months, requiring no more than a soft reset either time. Never lost a byte of data, even though it's developed that "LCD panel cable pulls out of the connector" problem that requires pulling off the back and plugging it back in tight. I can live with that for $129.
Try _that_ on a CE device. Go ahead.
One of these days, the Microsoft apologists will take note that Hotmail _still_ isn't running on NT/IIS... and ask themselves why.
Cheers,
Well, I'll speak to this, since I have two:
ICQ to talk to people whom _I_ (usually) pointed at it, and they were bright enough to set it up safely (it's pretty powerful; there's stuff you want to turn off).
And AIM, because there are, shockingly enough, some people whom I _do_ want to talk to, who only do AOL.
And this is the point: you need whatever clients are required to talk to the people you want to talk to; you don't always have the influence to make _them_ install _your_ client of choice.
And the second-layer point is this:
We continue, on the net, to allow engineering decisions to be made by marketroids. Ok, perhaps the competition between the various protocols is good, in the final analysis: the IMPP working group will have more good and bad examples to draw from. But still: have you _ever_ clicked an ad you saw on AIM?
Cheers,
> But the idea of a secret hidden function is just too over-the-top.
Sorry. This is the government we're talking about here... There are black boxes on the schematic of a Canon color copier, in the service manual. All they say is (something like) "processor".
They're _incredibly_ secretive about this stuff.
Cheers,
> and will continue to do so until a Canon tech is called. (They usualy call the Secret Service)
Well, not quite.
There was a thriving thread on this topic at www.flutterby.com this month, too, and I'm the guy who'd tried. Once side of a one dollar bill came out greened-out on the copy. No other reactions. Tried the same thing using the PC, scanner, and Fiery RIP hooked up to the same copier; printed fine.
I can't _imagine_ who the hell would accept it: it was certainly obvious to _me_ it was a copy.
(Oh, yeah; burned it. Color copier toner smells awful...)
Cheers,
There was some commentary floating around a while back that there might be criminal fraud charges laid against NSOL, because their S-1 neglected to mention that _they wouldn't have a monopoly much longer_. Does any one know what happened there?
I'd _love_ to see them get fried to a crisp. I'm tired of engineering jobs being treated as marketing.
Cheers,
Rodney Joffe (who runs geektools.com) noted on NANOG yesterday (or maybe the day before) that his whois has, indeed, been modified to deal correctly with the whois referrals.
There's even a Windows client, for those who haven't looked around there, yet.
Rodney is one of the Good Guys.
Cheers,
Yeah... that's part of it. It became too easy _not_ to be limited by geography, and on top of that, as one other post implied, _too many_ people could be connected at once.
/. generate, either; the tools are not built for that.
But then, I have no hope of practically being able to track the threads my postings to
Give me Usenet, anyold day...
Cheers,
He actually did it, although it didn't make it outside the labs. Deja _used_ to have the Usenet posting wherein I quoted his email reply stating this, but damn if I can find it now.
Cheers,
-- jra
Cheers,
> and it's in iambic pentameter.
:-)
Actually, it's not. Right after I originally wrote it, and it was published, a correspondent explained to me that the meter it _is_ in is called 'anapestic tetrameter'.
I just liked the joke.
Cheers,
I'm so pleased you enjoyed it. The phrase "non-compliant" hadn't ever occurred to me... but I like it. :-)
(And I was _so_ hoping someone _else_ would mention it, so I didn't have to look self-important.)
Cheers,
There's one _very_ important point here, that I've synthesized my opinion on from a mish-mash of Alan Cooper (many of whose opinions I _violently_ disagree with, BTW), Jakob Neilsen, Phil Greenspun, and half a dozen others:
There are two major types of applications:
1) Ones I _sleep_ with,
2) ones I date occasionally.
The latter can easily be implemented as fancy browser based graphical UI's which are easy to train... but in the case of the former, ease of training is _much_ less important than ease of _use_.
I've seen 3 or 4 mainframe applications where the re-write made the app look like "Windows on a TTY"... and spread 1 or 2 screens of entry out over 14 screens.
They are _unanimously_ panned by the people who have to do heads-down data entry on them all day long. Allied Van Lines did it; the Florida DMV has just done it... and you shouldn't.
Non-productivity applications that a user lives with all day long -- that is to say, database front end-y stuff, not word processors and calendars -- should be 80x25 in a text window.
Trust Me on this.
Cheers,
> Didn't the creators of the tower of babel
> get smitten or something?
Well, "smited", perhaps.
I think "smitten" has a _slightly_ different meaning there...
Cheers,
Second.
;-)
The absolute best archival format for audiovisual imagery at this point is 35mm b&w separation negatives with an optical soundtrack, stored in vacuum packages in a radiation protected environment.
One quibble: the separation negs are red, green, and blue -- the light primaries, not the pigment ones (CYMK).
The projected lifespan of such storage is at least 150 years, based on current information.
Getting the info back _off_ the film is a bit time consuming, though...
(PS: Sony AV-3650's aren't _that_ hard to find...)
Cheers,
Well, actually, it's not as bad as you think, Any.
If you take a look at the docos for SpeakFreely, you'll see that the current state of the art in toll-quality vocoders, or at least communications quality, can stuff voice down into 2Kbps.
That will fit down your phone line, believe me.
Cheers,
The men part.
:-)
I agree with Heinlein; let's rescind the franchise from men, and let women run the country for the next 200 years.
On another front, the major problem with online election is guaranteeing non-repudiability, one-vote per voter... _and_ anonymity, all at the same time. There's been _extensive_ work on this topic; check the RISKS digest archives, among other places -- available on the web at
(forgive me, Lindsay)
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks.
Let's not re-invent the wheel, shall we?
Cheers,
> Broadcast 2000 ended up being just a timed demo
.
Well, not exactly. According to the Heroine web page, they were funded to get it to beta, and ran out of money, at least temporarily. I downloaded it, but I haven't have time to make it run yet -- but I do gather it's functional. And it certainly looked pretty.
For those who missed it, B2000 is a full non-linear video editing suite for Linux, using the Quicktime for Linux libraries available at
Cheers,
No, I dont want to kill you; I just don't think you understand the situation.
First, QuickTime is merely an encapsulation file format. It's possible, insofar as I know,
to put MPEG streams _in_ a QT file, just like you'd put MJPEG streams in there.
Secondly, and more importantly from the post-production viewpoint: MPEG is, by design, an assymetrical
compression format -- it takes _much_ more horsepower to compress it than it does to decompress it.
For it's design purpose, distribution, this is a feature. But it's decidedly a bug for production environments. Realtime MPEG encoders are currently around $25K.
Cheers,
There are two major sites corralling telephony projects for Linux:
:-) These folks are supported by Natural Microsystems, who have released a bunch of their code as open source under some license or another. I mean internal switching and driver code and like that.
linuxtelephony.com is an omnibus site, which has seemed not to have had any updates recently, and
opentelecom.org which, well, has.
On a lower level front, it's possible to use mgetty+sendfax and Gert Doering's vgetty to build answering machine type stuff and also, possibly, 2-call fax response. I'm not sure about 1 call; switching modes can be messy.
This stuff works with the old Zyxel 1496+ modems, among others, and _maybe_ with the Rockwell voice chips, but I'm not sure; the Zyxel's ought to be, roughly, free, by now.
Cheers,
I gather it's because no machineable copies exist of some of them. I understand that there's a project to collect soft copy and re-scan it.
This seems like a good time to call attention to my own contribution to the genre, RFC 2100, "The Naming of Hosts"... from 1 April 97, and invite those who enjoy it to go vote in the contest Rob posted about last week.
And to thank Jon.
Cheers,
> jwz is one of the few latter-day saints to
> become known by their initials. i mean, you
> know, GLS, RMS, ESR, ETC.
"ETC"?
Who's that?
Cheers,
> Basically, what I'm saying, is "Is this true?"
Basically, what we're saying is
Cheers,
-- jr 'will troll for food' a
(And no, I wasn't the original author.)
(Vote for RFC2100 in the contest!)
Cheers,
Forgive me, but I believe you don't quite understand the situation...
InterNIC is an _activity_ of the US government; it provides services (registry and registrar, among others), to the US government.
NSI has a contract to provide these services, which contract is set to expire.
They have those names pursuant to a contract with the government, and title to whatever intellectual property those names comprise as a database does _not_ reside with NSI, it's owned by the US Government.
www.internic.net is a front door to that government activity. It is most decidedly _not_ the property of NSI (the trademark on InterNIC rests with the feds), and when I go to that website, I expect to find "the InterNIC", _not_ Netsol.
_Especially_ when they're marking up a service they themselves are providing, and attempting to hide the fact that you can get it at cost.
Sorry; this is out and out fraud, and I've heard that there may be criminal charges.
Cheers,
Wow... now _here's_ a nice philosophical argument to waste an afternoon on... :-)
I think it _is_, and my reason, hard-boiledly pragmatic as it is, is that, to the person attacked, murder happens, and then it's over.
Rape, OTOH, is the gift that keeps on giving.
Cheers,
> a new section could be formed called `Small change to slashdot'
Would that be called the "Microdot" section"?
:-)
Cheers,
...but not for long.
The artists, do, after all, produce the music... and in not too long from now, they're going to start getting annoyed when the technology makes it possible for the artists to see that the labels are not on the artists' side: they're on _their own_ side.
Oops.
They won't tolerate it too long, either. Look at Chuck D of Public Enemy.
Cheers,