Microsoft says customers who sign up for.Net My Services, expected to debut in full next year, can expect to eventually get one-step access to electronic documents, contact lists and calendars; instant alerts on stock changes, weather forecasts and flight delays; and automated transactions, such as online banking, ticket purchases and stock trades, from Microsoft and its partners.
I get all of these things for free from various places around the net. In a lot of cases, there are even places that will give me one stop shopping... My Yahoo! comes to mind. Why does M$ think they can get me to pay for this?
Oh, yeah, I use a Mac and Linux. I couldn't pay for them if I wanted to.
I've got a befsr81 and it's one of the worst wastes of money, brains, and time I've ever encountered. It has moronic timeouts which are completely unconfigurable. A housemate has a similar router, which doesn't include a switch. Both are plagued with similar problems, the documentation is nearly non-existant, and LinkSys lies about firmware upgrades fixing it.
It does, however, work well as an overpriced 8-port switch.
This is run by some friends of mine. I've given them quite a few machines. All of their machines use open source software, so they're completely unencumbered.
Less responsive keyboards hurt my wrists more. My Dell laptop is horrible, I type for a few minutes and I'm in pain. My Powerbook is a lot better, but still not perfect. The ultimate keyboard is, of course, the original IBM PS/2 battleship keyboard. It has perfect tactile feedback, and offers good resistance. I can type on it all day and not hurt. The wierd 'ergonomic' keyboards are bullshit, in my experience. The most important attribute of a keyboard is how the keys feel.
The absolute worst keyboards for my wrists that I've used are Sun type 5 and type 6 keyboards. MUSHY! No resonse whatsoever. 5 minutes and I'm in real pain.
Re:Vertical markets with nice profit margins
on
Compaq Shifts Focus
·
· Score: 1
The reason that commodity equipment becomes obscenely expensive in a medical context, is that all such equipment must go through extensive, and expensive, certification procedures.
Turbovision is a very nice C++ (Also Pascal, but I'm not sure if that's been ported to Unix) library, originally written for DOS by Borland, but now ported to Unix. Borland was nice enough to release full source for it around 1995, when they pretty much dropped the DOS targetting for their compilers.
Turbovision was the first application framework I ever used, and I have really fond memories of it.
It was a hard way to learn C++, though. TurboVision under Turbo C++ 3.0, senior year of highschool, the first time I ever wrote code for money. It was... glorious.
Yes, this tech has been around for years, and I'm aware of Glade and QT Designer. The NeXT toolset is, IMO, way slicker than either.
This technology has indeed been around for years. It was invented by NeXT.
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
Those that can give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither.
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
x86 instructions have always been notoriously inefficient. Hell, back in the early 80s, an x86 had to be clocked twice as fast as a 6502 to have the same throughput. Once again, comparing MHz to MHz is stupid -- and Altivec is a better vector architecture than 3DNow or KNI.
There's a gap, but it's closer to 100MHz in equivalent Intel cycles than 5-600.
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 4
I beg to differ about "three kinds of people who buy Macs"...
Apple has always, with a few notable exceptions, built first-rate hardware. With the combination of the PowerPC and OpenFirmware, modern Macs are, for all intents and purposes, low-end workstations, pretty much indistinguishable from the low-end RS6000 machines that IBM is making these days. (Boot a modern RS6000 -- you'll see Apple plastered all over the firmware.)
By contrast, PCs are still incredibly broken AT architecture machines. They still have 16 interrupts, and PCI doesn't work around this very well. If you look at a machine with no ISA slots, you'll see that windoze still loads ISA drivers. The machines are CRAP. The only decent non-server intel machines ever built were the SGI machines of a couple of years ago -- because those were full-blown workstations, throwing out all of the legacy crap, and having a real firmware.
The combination of really good hardware with a first-rate UNIX is a one-two punch that few serious UNIX geeks will be able to resist.
And it's sexy and comes in Titanium.
I *hope* Apple doesn't start catering to the lowest common denominator and making crappy AT boxes. The effect will be to kill the last quality consumer-level hardware, and it'll kill Apple, because Apple makes its money on hardware.
If Apple started making non-AT intel-based systems, that were otherwise built like normal Macs, with decent firmware &c, that would possibly be a win. But the OS for a machine like that wouldn't run on a commodity PC.
Interesting. You can use whois.arin.net to look up all of the IP blocks owned by a company. I may have to write a perl script that takes these data and creates IPCHAINS rulesets for out of them.
I've often wondered what would happen if GPL source was put into a CORBA program. The program that hosts the GPLed code, an independent executable, could be open-sourced, and your program making calls into it would remain closed. Giving you, at some performance loss, the same functionality as making a dynamic library of the LGPLed code.
On the surface DVI (similar to firewire) is a good thing: high speed audio and video all on one cable
What the hell is this guy smoking? DVI is a digital video connection, mostly used for flat panel displays. Firewire is serial SCSI. DVI is similar to Firewire in as much as they both pass bits, but that's about it.
I second the recommendation for DDD. It makes working with threads quite nice.
Core dumps don't work well with threaded apps under linux right now. (There is work being done to fix this, but I can't say anything more about it right now.)
Your best bet is to catch SIGSEGV, and set up your
own error handler to dump the stack. There are libraries to do this on Freshmeat, but I don't recall any names off the top of my head.
I'm fairly certain that this means that the book can't be run through a text-to-speach system. (Does Glassbook come with one?)
This (only this, the whole idea of permission bits like this on etext piss me off) isn't a free speach issue. It's an accessability issue, and for this, Adobe are being even bigger bastards than it looks at first glance.
Damn those crips anyway. Everyone knows they have no money to spend, so who cares?</sarcasm>
Why not have the option available? I can see some uses for dedicated machines, possibly in embedded systems. This will increase the performance of the ORB quite a bit, and, IIRC, it's already one of the best-performing CORBA implementations out there.
Your CORBA calls on the Coke machine down the hall will be handled in a speedy, efficient manner!
You can't run software not officially blessed by the maker of the console on machines like the Playstation. I'm pretty sure this has been the case (through legal, if not technological means) all the way back to the original NES. Maybe Microsoft is letting this Xbox thing get to their heads.
Just because people in the US and Canada don't have many laws like this doesn't mean that it
doesn't make sense for other countries. Lets have a little respect, ok people? However, the problem
again comes down to how a country can both accept the Internet and apply their current laws.
Have a little respect? I have no respect for any government that doesn't respect basic rights for its citizens. I see no reason to not try to help citizens of other countries have the same rights which we, at least nominally, have.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft says customers who sign up for .Net My Services, expected to debut in full next year, can expect to eventually get one-step access to electronic documents, contact lists and calendars; instant alerts on stock changes, weather forecasts and flight delays; and automated transactions, such as online banking, ticket purchases and stock trades, from Microsoft and its partners.
... My Yahoo! comes to mind. Why does M$ think they can get me to pay for this?
I get all of these things for free from various places around the net. In a lot of cases, there are even places that will give me one stop shopping
Oh, yeah, I use a Mac and Linux. I couldn't pay for them if I wanted to.
I wish they'd bomb Nike headquarters.
I've got a befsr81
and it's one of the worst wastes of money, brains, and time I've ever encountered. It has moronic timeouts which are completely unconfigurable. A housemate has a similar router, which doesn't include a switch. Both are plagued with similar problems, the documentation is nearly non-existant, and LinkSys lies about firmware upgrades fixing it.
It does, however, work well as an overpriced 8-port switch.
http://kiteinc.org:8080/
This is run by some friends of mine. I've given them quite a few machines. All of their machines use open source software, so they're completely unencumbered.
Less responsive keyboards hurt my wrists more. My Dell laptop is horrible, I type for a few minutes and I'm in pain. My Powerbook is a lot better, but still not perfect. The ultimate keyboard is, of course, the original IBM PS/2 battleship keyboard. It has perfect tactile feedback, and offers good resistance. I can type on it all day and not hurt. The wierd 'ergonomic' keyboards are bullshit, in my experience. The most important attribute of a keyboard is how the keys feel.
The absolute worst keyboards for my wrists that I've used are Sun type 5 and type 6 keyboards. MUSHY! No resonse whatsoever. 5 minutes and I'm in real pain.
The reason that commodity equipment becomes obscenely expensive in a medical context, is that all such equipment must go through extensive, and expensive, certification procedures.
How many people have died in the US space program, compared to the Russian program? I believe the numbers are 10 and somewhere around 30.
Turbovision is a very nice C++ (Also Pascal, but I'm not sure if that's been ported to Unix) library, originally written for DOS by Borland, but now ported to Unix. Borland was nice enough to release full source for it around 1995, when they pretty much dropped the DOS targetting for their compilers.
... glorious.
Turbovision was the first application framework I ever used, and I have really fond memories of it. It was a hard way to learn C++, though. TurboVision under Turbo C++ 3.0, senior year of highschool, the first time I ever wrote code for money. It was
http://freshmeat.net/projects/turbovisionforunix/
I walk by that room every day :)
Yes, this tech has been around for years, and I'm aware of Glade and QT Designer. The NeXT toolset is, IMO, way slicker than either.
This technology has indeed been around for years. It was invented by NeXT.
Those that can give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither.
x86 instructions have always been notoriously inefficient. Hell, back in the early 80s, an x86 had to be clocked twice as fast as a 6502 to have the same throughput. Once again, comparing MHz to MHz is stupid -- and Altivec is a better vector architecture than 3DNow or KNI.
There's a gap, but it's closer to 100MHz in equivalent Intel cycles than 5-600.
I beg to differ about "three kinds of people who buy Macs" ...
Apple has always, with a few notable exceptions, built first-rate hardware. With the combination of the PowerPC and OpenFirmware, modern Macs are, for all intents and purposes, low-end workstations, pretty much indistinguishable from the low-end RS6000 machines that IBM is making these days. (Boot a modern RS6000 -- you'll see Apple plastered all over the firmware.)
By contrast, PCs are still incredibly broken AT architecture machines. They still have 16 interrupts, and PCI doesn't work around this very well. If you look at a machine with no ISA slots, you'll see that windoze still loads ISA drivers. The machines are CRAP. The only decent non-server intel machines ever built were the SGI machines of a couple of years ago -- because those were full-blown workstations, throwing out all of the legacy crap, and having a real firmware.
The combination of really good hardware with a first-rate UNIX is a one-two punch that few serious UNIX geeks will be able to resist. And it's sexy and comes in Titanium.
I *hope* Apple doesn't start catering to the lowest common denominator and making crappy AT boxes. The effect will be to kill the last quality consumer-level hardware, and it'll kill Apple, because Apple makes its money on hardware.
If Apple started making non-AT intel-based systems, that were otherwise built like normal Macs, with decent firmware &c, that would possibly be a win. But the OS for a machine like that wouldn't run on a commodity PC.
Interesting. You can use whois.arin.net to look up all of the IP blocks owned by a company. I may have to write a perl script that takes these data and creates IPCHAINS rulesets for out of them.
whois -h whois.arin.net "Double Click"
I've often wondered what would happen if GPL source was put into a CORBA program. The program that hosts the GPLed code, an independent executable, could be open-sourced, and your program making calls into it would remain closed. Giving you, at some performance loss, the same functionality as making a dynamic library of the LGPLed code.
What the hell is this guy smoking? DVI is a digital video connection, mostly used for flat panel displays. Firewire is serial SCSI. DVI is similar to Firewire in as much as they both pass bits, but that's about it.
The "theme song from 2001" is "Also Sprach Zarathustra", by Richard Strauss.
Sigh.
JBuilder?
*grovels through Freshmeat*
It's called pstack. http://www.whatsis.com/pstack/
I second the recommendation for DDD. It makes working with threads quite nice.
Core dumps don't work well with threaded apps under linux right now. (There is work being done to fix this, but I can't say anything more about it right now.)
Your best bet is to catch SIGSEGV, and set up your own error handler to dump the stack. There are libraries to do this on Freshmeat, but I don't recall any names off the top of my head.
I'm fairly certain that this means that the book can't be run through a text-to-speach system. (Does Glassbook come with one?)
This (only this, the whole idea of permission bits like this on etext piss me off) isn't a free speach issue. It's an accessability issue, and for this, Adobe are being even bigger bastards than it looks at first glance.
Damn those crips anyway. Everyone knows they have no money to spend, so who cares?</sarcasm>
Why not have the option available? I can see some uses for dedicated machines, possibly in embedded systems. This will increase the performance of the ORB quite a bit, and, IIRC, it's already one of the best-performing CORBA implementations out there.
Your CORBA calls on the Coke machine down the hall will be handled in a speedy, efficient manner!
I thought that this was just a joke, but apparently 3dfx is actually going in this direction.h tml
http://www.overclockers.com.au/images/v59000big.s
You can't run software not officially blessed by the maker of the console on machines like the Playstation. I'm pretty sure this has been the case (through legal, if not technological means) all the way back to the original NES. Maybe Microsoft is letting this Xbox thing get to their heads.
Have a little respect? I have no respect for any government that doesn't respect basic rights for its citizens. I see no reason to not try to help citizens of other countries have the same rights which we, at least nominally, have.