We ordered one of theses at work once. Called an Aqua Pad.
I have one of these in my desk somewhere. Vendor claimed to have Linux support but I never got support flashing it or installing Midori Linux or whatever they wanted.
My grandfather rented one of his phones at his house since it was installed. The fee increased every few years and finaly my mom noticed it at a whopping $5.95/year. She didn't bother removing it, as my grandfather was going to be moved to a retirement home.
When we called to get the service connected the tech said that we had to return the equipment. They wanted something like $150.00 for the phone that was installed god-knows-when and was probably paid off in full ten times over.
Just though it was kind of amusing.
Why bandwidth should scare Microsoft -- Mike @ 9:30 am
More users than ever use broadband connections at home these days. Though it will take time, these connections will do nothing but get faster. With companies figuring out seemingly every day how to cram more information down the same pipes, and new options like fixed wireless and fiber to the door becoming available, connectivity options for the average consumer are ever-expanding, and with them, the speeds available.
This spells the doom of the modern computer, and the modern operating system as we know it - and this is not a bad thing.
Broad statements, I know, but this isn't an article about the flaming doom of Microsoft, for I believe they will have a place in the market for many years to come. However, it does spell the end of bloated, leviathan operating systems like Windows XP in its present form, and unless Microsoft is very nimble, it could spell the end of the Microsoft monopoly.
At present, we find ourselves in a situation unprecedented in all history - the average person, in charge of a machine of such complexity that it can calculate anything he or she would want to know in mere seconds. This is almost an untenable situation; this average person often has no idea how to fix the computer when it breaks, and no idea even how to perform the most basic maintenance on it to prevent such breakage. It's also vulnerable to hackers, phishing schemes, and hosts of other plagues.
With a car, for instance, this exposure to complexity is a necessary state of affairs. With inevitably increasing bandwidth, this is definitely not a necessary state of affairs for computers, and the time of the personal computer as we know it will soon be at an end, I think.
Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee. As bandwidth increases, telcos, cable companies, and others will be in the perfect position to become application service providers for the average home user, and said average home user will gladly accept this, as long as the price isn't too high. I see this as almost inevitable.
With caching, smart usage of bandwidth, latency reduction strategies, etc., most users would hardly notice the difference between an application being provided remotely over a high-bandwidth connection and being provided locally by a spyware- and virus-infested home PC with inadequate memory.
In fact, given the above conditions, and a high-bandwidth connection, the ASP might actually seem faster to many users.
However, with Longhorn, Microsoft is trying to perpetuate the days of local computing, and I feel they are moving in the wrong direction. Like an off-balance fighter, the first time a company starts punching in the other direction, the momentum is likely to shift to the other fighter - in this case, cheaper, better-prepared applications such as Linux, Firefox, and other Open Source applications available for free.
Not that Microsoft couldn't also dominate this new bandwidth-based market of remote applications - they very well could. They have deep pockets and lots of research talent.
But that's not the direction they are moving, and not the direction they want to move. Like the RIAA with online music, they will resist this outcome to the end. They recognize innately that once it's not up to a billion individual users tied to the Windows upgrade path what operating system they use, companies will make the decision as to which is the most secure, most network-centric, stable and bug-free platform for providing applications to their customers - and this platform will probably not be Microsoft-based.
And this gives more nimble players, and more prepared players, like Linux and Firefox plenty of space to step into the breach.
In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn't matter, and there's no lock-in. In such a world, Microsoft loses its monopo
Self importance and feeling like your needed is one.
Another is access to a cache of pirated material the likes if which you and I can only dream. I've known people can get ANYTHING period. DVD-R divx SVCD
I know there was a revision controlled filesystem that worked with Linux and FUSE. This one just mounts a CVS repo as a filesystem. There was a better one. Still looking.
It gets down to calculating TCO and other things that I'm not involved in. I could easily have a Windows Terminal Server as the solution, but with licensing, why not just run Windows.
I've tried Crossover Office, Crossover Office Server (for Solaris boxen). Never really impressed.
All the clients that have tried... like Jmessenger and Meanwhile have functional problems, stability problems et cetera.
I remember one when I was logging into a Sametime chat and when I "spoke" it showed my text as coming from my co-worker. That was a fun chat to say the least. This was an older version of meanwhile-gaim.
First I will say that I am not working on this project directly. I picked a seperate project (NIS to LDAP migration++) and my co-worker took the other project.
We evaluated NLD (Novell Linux Desktop), our currently rolled-out RHEL 3.0 and RHEL 4.0 Beta.
1) Corporate web pages. We have lots of em. Most of them don't work too well in Firefox/Mozilla. From here on out, all will be tested with other browsers, but in the meantime most of our desktop users need IE.
2) Video player status. We have no video player to play corporate streams. We mostly use wmv. Don't know the full legal/patent/copyright status on mplayer/xine and company.
3) Sametime. It sucks, but our corporate IM is Sametime. I am not in a position to change that (big corporation). Meanwhile is a OS library and has a gaim-plugin, but it doesn't include adding users and currently I have to use a LDAP string to add a user. Maybe IBM has some ideas in the cookbook.
4) Training users. We would need to seriously change our support model. Currently our Unix users are using engineering applications and HPC clusters. We help with desktop issues, but we would need to have a much more flexible support environment to handle the new desktop users.
5) Evolution. Even 2.0 has some issues. We use Exchange 2k currently. Can't remember where we had blank stops on our functional matrix. thinking....
6) I think RedHat's support and errata sucks. I've got kernel bug fixes and an autofs bug that I have been waiting 2 months for. I'm not sure how well they test their patches, but I doubt it is rigorous at all.
I'm sure there are more issues. Maybe it isn't that far away for us.
Re:I just bought a Durex Pleasure Pack
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
1) Get a hidden video camera, a friend and then... 2) Find a dentist and try to sell it to him as a new delivery mechanism for oral anasthetics. 3) Submit to some hidden camera show. 4) Profit
I hated Real when they included spyware, and had their misleading and difficult to get to download pages. I also hated that they wouldn't give any info about their codecs so we could use it on Linux/BSD.
Since they open-sourced Helix and worked on that project, and has a version of RealPlayer for Linux which for me has been advertising free, what's the problem?
I just think that people have to drop their beef with the company when it changes its tune. If your going to keep your first impressions for life then just shut up and move on.
Maybe I'm just deceived by their recent actions, but I don't see what everyone's problem is.
They could sell their mp3s naked, but that wouldn't be in their best interest.
Is it okay to monopolize on something and then fall back on the fact that they can in fact sell their product if they want too, just without basic measures to protect their copyright.
I'm going to let someone a lot smarter than myself think about that for a while.
If Apple's API changed then that's fine. If they did then it is quite obvious that they would leave all of the legacy files alone by making it backward compatable. If they did that then most likely wouldn't Real's format be playable?
I'm more inclined to believe that Apple made a change to deliberatly stop Real's format from working. It's quite obvious that is their right to do that. Doesn't make me think much of the company personally, I like competition -- it lowers prices.
Yes, most people who are doing photos for magazines, even full page ones will use digital cameras. I'm not postive, but I'm sure that a lot of people who make posters and other larger prints use large or medium format cameras. Hasselblads and Mamiyas.
I personally like analog cameras because I can afford a good regular SLR, but can't afford a good digital SLR.
If I took all of my pictures with the first digital camera I bought, it would look like crap right now. I have used my Nikon F3 for a long time with good crisp pictures that can be blown up to be quite big.
Slashdot Mirror
500 billion bytes + 500 billion bytes = 1000 billion bytes 500 GiB + 500 GiB != 1 TiB 500 Gib + 524 GiB = 1 Tib no? I personally like MiB, GiB and TiB to make myself clear. nobody else does, it seems.
So if someone would explain how when the article is a fortcast of TelCo/ISP takeover of service, how my story is offtopic?
Telephones, even though they are obivously less complex were a rented equipment.
Read the article and moderate, or don't and let someone else do it.
I have one of these in my desk somewhere. Vendor claimed to have Linux support but I never got support flashing it or installing Midori Linux or whatever they wanted.
Rainy day project I guess. Maybe this will help.
My grandfather rented one of his phones at his house since it was installed. The fee increased every few years and finaly my mom noticed it at a whopping $5.95/year. She didn't bother removing it, as my grandfather was going to be moved to a retirement home. When we called to get the service connected the tech said that we had to return the equipment. They wanted something like $150.00 for the phone that was installed god-knows-when and was probably paid off in full ten times over. Just though it was kind of amusing.
Why bandwidth should scare Microsoft
-- Mike @ 9:30 am
More users than ever use broadband connections at home these days. Though it will take time, these connections will do nothing but get faster. With companies figuring out seemingly every day how to cram more information down the same pipes, and new options like fixed wireless and fiber to the door becoming available, connectivity options for the average consumer are ever-expanding, and with them, the speeds available.
This spells the doom of the modern computer, and the modern operating system as we know it - and this is not a bad thing.
Broad statements, I know, but this isn't an article about the flaming doom of Microsoft, for I believe they will have a place in the market for many years to come. However, it does spell the end of bloated, leviathan operating systems like Windows XP in its present form, and unless Microsoft is very nimble, it could spell the end of the Microsoft monopoly.
At present, we find ourselves in a situation unprecedented in all history - the average person, in charge of a machine of such complexity that it can calculate anything he or she would want to know in mere seconds. This is almost an untenable situation; this average person often has no idea how to fix the computer when it breaks, and no idea even how to perform the most basic maintenance on it to prevent such breakage. It's also vulnerable to hackers, phishing schemes, and hosts of other plagues.
With a car, for instance, this exposure to complexity is a necessary state of affairs. With inevitably increasing bandwidth, this is definitely not a necessary state of affairs for computers, and the time of the personal computer as we know it will soon be at an end, I think.
Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee. As bandwidth increases, telcos, cable companies, and others will be in the perfect position to become application service providers for the average home user, and said average home user will gladly accept this, as long as the price isn't too high. I see this as almost inevitable.
With caching, smart usage of bandwidth, latency reduction strategies, etc., most users would hardly notice the difference between an application being provided remotely over a high-bandwidth connection and being provided locally by a spyware- and virus-infested home PC with inadequate memory.
In fact, given the above conditions, and a high-bandwidth connection, the ASP might actually seem faster to many users.
However, with Longhorn, Microsoft is trying to perpetuate the days of local computing, and I feel they are moving in the wrong direction. Like an off-balance fighter, the first time a company starts punching in the other direction, the momentum is likely to shift to the other fighter - in this case, cheaper, better-prepared applications such as Linux, Firefox, and other Open Source applications available for free.
Not that Microsoft couldn't also dominate this new bandwidth-based market of remote applications - they very well could. They have deep pockets and lots of research talent.
But that's not the direction they are moving, and not the direction they want to move. Like the RIAA with online music, they will resist this outcome to the end. They recognize innately that once it's not up to a billion individual users tied to the Windows upgrade path what operating system they use, companies will make the decision as to which is the most secure, most network-centric, stable and bug-free platform for providing applications to their customers - and this platform will probably not be Microsoft-based.
And this gives more nimble players, and more prepared players, like Linux and Firefox plenty of space to step into the breach.
In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn't matter, and there's no lock-in. In such a world, Microsoft loses its monopo
Self importance and feeling like your needed is one.
Another is access to a cache of pirated material the likes if which you and I can only dream. I've known people can get ANYTHING period. DVD-R divx SVCD
CVSfs
I'm old skool I guess. I'm refering to the testing I did with a Riva TNT 2.
I'm a bit slow on the uptake, but since when do you have NO 3D support under the nv modules?
I remember comparing performance before and after installing the nVidia drivers.
I could be crazy, but there was at least some 3D support.
I've got my duct tape, some water and batteries.
All I can say to that asteroid is this, BRING IT ON!
It said it had nVidia support, not the drivers from nVidia. I would suspect they are using Open Source drivers (nv module).
It gets down to calculating TCO and other things that I'm not involved in. I could easily have a Windows Terminal Server as the solution, but with licensing, why not just run Windows.
I've tried Crossover Office, Crossover Office Server (for Solaris boxen). Never really impressed.
The current autofs bug is a lack of expiration code. It's on bugzilla.
You update a NIS map and with the newest errata from RHEL 3, the client doesn't notice the change.
Pretty big, noticable big IMHO. No word from the tech on the fix, yet.
All the clients that have tried... like Jmessenger and Meanwhile have functional problems, stability problems et cetera.
I remember one when I was logging into a Sametime chat and when I "spoke" it showed my text as coming from my co-worker. That was a fun chat to say the least. This was an older version of meanwhile-gaim.
No native Unix client. (AFAIK)
First I will say that I am not working on this project directly. I picked a seperate project (NIS to LDAP migration++) and my co-worker took the other project.
We evaluated NLD (Novell Linux Desktop), our currently rolled-out RHEL 3.0 and RHEL 4.0 Beta.
1) Corporate web pages. We have lots of em. Most of them don't work too well in Firefox/Mozilla. From here on out, all will be tested with other browsers, but in the meantime most of our desktop users need IE.
2) Video player status. We have no video player to play corporate streams. We mostly use wmv. Don't know the full legal/patent/copyright status on mplayer/xine and company.
3) Sametime. It sucks, but our corporate IM is Sametime. I am not in a position to change that (big corporation). Meanwhile is a OS library and has a gaim-plugin, but it doesn't include adding users and currently I have to use a LDAP string to add a user. Maybe IBM has some ideas in the cookbook.
4) Training users. We would need to seriously change our support model. Currently our Unix users are using engineering applications and HPC clusters. We help with desktop issues, but we would need to have a much more flexible support environment to handle the new desktop users.
5) Evolution. Even 2.0 has some issues. We use Exchange 2k currently. Can't remember where we had blank stops on our functional matrix. thinking....
6) I think RedHat's support and errata sucks. I've got kernel bug fixes and an autofs bug that I have been waiting 2 months for. I'm not sure how well they test their patches, but I doubt it is rigorous at all.
I'm sure there are more issues. Maybe it isn't that far away for us.
Preheat the oven and wait 2 years?
HHOS, we are looking into this at work for a corporate desktop and there are some serious issues.
Buy plush Cthulhus online.
This link is highly amusing. Tales of the Plush Cthulhu
1) Get a hidden video camera, a friend and then ...
2) Find a dentist and try to sell it to him as a new delivery mechanism for oral anasthetics.
3) Submit to some hidden camera show.
4) Profit
Mozilla.org has been New-York-Times-dotted today, when hundreds of thousands of readers tried to download the open source browser Firefox...
I hated Real when they included spyware, and had their misleading and difficult to get to download pages. I also hated that they wouldn't give any info about their codecs so we could use it on Linux/BSD.
Since they open-sourced Helix and worked on that project, and has a version of RealPlayer for Linux which for me has been advertising free, what's the problem?
I just think that people have to drop their beef with the company when it changes its tune. If your going to keep your first impressions for life then just shut up and move on.
Maybe I'm just deceived by their recent actions, but I don't see what everyone's problem is.
They could sell their mp3s naked, but that wouldn't be in their best interest.
Is it okay to monopolize on something and then fall back on the fact that they can in fact sell their product if they want too, just without basic measures to protect their copyright.
I'm going to let someone a lot smarter than myself think about that for a while.
If Apple's API changed then that's fine. If they did then it is quite obvious that they would leave all of the legacy files alone by making it backward compatable. If they did that then most likely wouldn't Real's format be playable?
I'm more inclined to believe that Apple made a change to deliberatly stop Real's format from working. It's quite obvious that is their right to do that. Doesn't make me think much of the company personally, I like competition -- it lowers prices.
Whenever I am in the city, I see tons of people selling pirated cds and DVDs. This is mainly in the subways and on street corners.
I know what subways and what corners they are at, so why don't the cops and the MPAA break up that racket?
Yes, most people who are doing photos for magazines, even full page ones will use digital cameras. I'm not postive, but I'm sure that a lot of people who make posters and other larger prints use large or medium format cameras. Hasselblads and Mamiyas.
I personally like analog cameras because I can afford a good regular SLR, but can't afford a good digital SLR.
If I took all of my pictures with the first digital camera I bought, it would look like crap right now. I have used my Nikon F3 for a long time with good crisp pictures that can be blown up to be quite big.