The visuals might be approaching Hollywood quality, but the scriptwriting wouldn't stand up in even the most hackneyed action flick.
"No! I vant it alive!"
The problem seems to arise from basic differences between films and games as forms of media.
I think it's more to do with deadlines. Tie-in games have to come out when the film does. This means that publishers will go for unadventurous game designs and the game will often be released before it's ready.
I'm looking forward to using Konqueror on OS X, if only because the file transfer and browsing options sound interesting. Using the Finder for FTP seems to be unaccountably slow and prone to random disconnects.
Anyway, the thing that really interested me in this story was the screenshot - looking at someone else's desktop gives me the prurient thrills that I imagine some people get out of Hello! magazine.
Does anyone know what that little menu bar weather indicator is? I've seen similar desktop things, but they're not really worth it on a 12" screen. Ta.
"...less than 5,000 units of Nokia N-Gage hardware were sold in the United States in the system's first week of release", after reported sales of 500 units in the UK following launch
Flawed though the N-Gage is, these figures don't mean very much. In the UK, cellphones are subsidised by the telecoms companies - it's much cheaper to buy one as part of a monthly contract than to own the hardware outright. People who want an N-Gage will mostly be upgrading from existing contract phones, so damning on the basis of purchase figures is a bit hasty.
Not that I think the N-Gage is going to be successful - sounds like it's doomed by the portrait screen, awkward cartridge changing and lack of usefulness as a phone. But at 49 quid on some contracts, a lot of people will be tempted to get one as a games console and keep their SIM card in an old handset. (Can you play games and use the Bluetooth without a SIM?)
I love the idea of Bluetooth multiplayer. If Nokia have screwed it up this time, it's not going to be long before somebody gets it right.
Why Bluetooth is dead, or at least, not very well
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
All the people posting things like "I use Bluetooth to sync my phone to my Mac and it works fine" are correct. Apple's implementation works well. But Bluetooth is in trouble for the following reasons:
Microsoft. Microsoft is the 200 pound gorilla that dominates the software jungle. And Microsoft's Bluetooth support is poor. Try installing a few Bluetooth adapters on Windows XP. There's no Plug and Play - the packaging will have dire warnings that ON NO ACCOUNT should you even let the computer SEE the dongle until you've installed the correct drivers. You then have to click through dire Windows warnings that the drivers you're using aren't certified. If you're lucky enough for your dongle to work at all, it'll be driven by a special application that assumes you know terms like 'OBEX PUSH'. Nothing is integrated into the OS. It's still a stroll in the park for the average Perl-codin' Slashdotter, but not for John Q Consumer.
Fragmenting standards. Bluetooth isn't just Bluetooth. Different dongles and gadgets can support different profiles. For example, Bluetooth mice use an HID profile that's not found in most of the dongles out there. Because Bluetooth is still being tinkered with, it won't always "just work" like it should. There may be firmware updates available, but John Q Consumer doesn't know or care.
Difficult setup. Some devices are a nightmare to set up. Try setting up printing over Bluetooth, then tell me I'm wrong. You have to convince the PC that its Bluetooth adapter is a parallel port, or some such nonsense. Add that to the fact that if the access point was written by company A, the manual will assume you are using company A's Bluetooth dongle and its associated cryptic interface, rather than the one from company B that you actually have. Bluetooth networks need to be substantially more self-organising to be worthwhile, while still requiring user confirmation for anything that might threaten security.
If it's to survive, in the short term, the market for Bluetooth will be in simpler devices like mobiles and that Nokia N-Gage thingy.
You can't access all the reports, but you can get lots of design documents and stuff. It's done in FrontPage and riddled with spelling errors. Not promising.
I don't think the shuttle disaster is the reason for the new limit. There was going to be a special 7-crew escape craft for the ISS called the X-38 - but it was cancelled last year, in favour of a pursuing a multipurpose vehicle.
I use an old Handspring Visor Deluxe and a program called Weasel reader (gutenpalm.sourceforge.net). It's not quite as good as paper, but it's a lot easier on the eye than a PC screen.
I'd recommend you buy the Palm Zire, except it only has 2MB of memory, which isn't really enough if you want to carry around a decent selection of reading material. Maybe get an old second-hand monochrome Palm from someone who's upgrading?
Meaning, DownloadSite and OtherDownloadSite could use the same.torrent... that is what would be best for everyone. Have different trackers means smaller user base meaning less efficiency.
Why don't software companies just offer.torrents of their demos straight from their sites?
Fuck, are we still stuck on the old "reading on teh computor SUCKS!!!" argument?
As someone's already pointed out, a PDA is a reasonable ebook reader. But what's really going to make ebook reading take off is the coming wave of cheap devices with cholesteric LCD screens, that run on one set of batteries for months. Here's a review of an early device aimed at the Chinese market:
http://www.blackmask.com/archive/argosyrev.htm
Once the bugs are ironed out, this thing and a few format conversion utilities will be all you need to get your bestsellers from Kazaa rather than Borders.
The publishing houses will have to rely on P2P hassles like crappy OCR and the number of fucktards putting ebooks in PDF and.lit formats to make people fork out for hard copies. Either that, or they'll realise that they can compete by offering cheap, well-indexed versions of their books with fair DRM (or none at all).
Unfortunately, at the moment, most big publishers see ebooks as some sort of premium service, and in many cases they're actually more expensive than the hardback.
Once these readers become common within the small proportion of the public that actually buys books for its own use (and not as gifts), we'll see a big change. Publishers will have to sell cheap ebooks with fair DRM, or fold. Physical books will still be around, but hardbacks will probably die.
What does this have to do with Zeno's paradox and Achilles and the turtle? Aren't they to do with points in space, not time?
I thought the solution to Zeno's paradox is that although you occupy an infinite series of points when you move, they can still sum to a finite distance. The Greeks may not have understood this, but this was all worked out centuries ago. By Cantor or someone.
So the author of this paper is claiming to solve a non-problem - doesn't sound very promising to me. Also, in these days of online preprint archives, why didn't the submitter link to the actual paper?
Tapwave will continue to unveil a new feature each week for the next few week
If the point of issuing press releases is to get stories, this is a pretty bad way to handle it. Do they expect mainstream news sources to publish a story like "Tapwave gadget will have one more button than previously thought" or "Smart Media card support unveiled for that thing we covered last week"? No-one would care. They'd be better off doing a big unveiling and getting lots of review samples out there.
Maybe if they're going for a niche market, PalmOS websites and the like will play along, but I bet even they get bored with weekly hype.
I've had the misfortune to read Decipher. It's badly written and technically and scientifically illiterate. Anyone who has enough basic interest in technology to read Slashdot will throw it against the wall in disgust before they get a third of the way through.
The author thinks that:
Carbon 60 is a crystalline substance that looks like diamond.
The GPS system works by having all vehicles broadcast their location at all times.
Hydrogen fusion and combustion of hydrogen are the same thing, and somehow imply an engine could work on water alone.
And much, much more... apart from the constant tech and science gaffes, Pavlou writes like an excited teenager recounting the kewl bits of an action movie. There's no characterisation and 400% too much plot.
If you see this book, burn it on sight.
If you're wondering if I'm being a bit negative about Decipher, consider this - the fuckwit who wrote the 'review' above thought it was good. See my point?
PS - Slashdot editors: articles like this are why nobody wants to pay to subscribe. This is a fucking insult. You might as well ask me to pay you to go over to my grandma's house and use her roughly from both ends.
The book's author, Alan Moore, was able to create this literary-parallel universe because the protagonists are all within the public domain, and so are not owned by any one person or corporation, and thus available for anyone to use without having to pay royalties.
In Volume 2 of LOEG, characters like Rupert the Bear and Mr Toad (from Wind in the Willows) are referenced, but they are surely covered by copyright. I don't know if Moore got permission, or if he's just hoping no-one will sue, or what.
So never mind that Saddam had WMDs, as the Kurdish and Iranian survivors of his WMD attacks will attest
Nobody disputes that Saddam used nerve gas in the 80s (although the US administration at the time initially blamed the attacks on Iran, since at that time they were rooting for the Iraqis to win the war).
Sometime between the Iran-Iraq war and now those WMDs magically disappeared and we should all take Saddams word for it.
These weapons are difficult to maintain in a usable state. Anthrax spores germinate within a few years. Nerve gases are corrosive and hard to store. I think Saddam lost his ability to keep these weapons due to the international community's policy of containment and inspections.
And the ~300,000 Iraqis Saddam's dictatorship murdered?
That 300,000 figure is grossly misleading, because it includes casualties of the Iran-Iraq war. Which the US and UK were happy to go along with as a way of containing Iran.
Don't get me wrong, the Ba'ath regime murdered and tortured thousands, and it's a good thing that Saddam is gone. But it would have been better to contain him and act with international support. The WMD pretext for the war was a lie, and the perception that this was a war for oil is going to backfire on the US and its allies. Of course, fanatics are going to be against the West no matter what, but the tacit support of the populations they live amongst is a valuable weapon for them.
From today's UK Guardian:
A man in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, told the Los Angeles Times: "They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein? Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is: 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality."
He added: "If I knew where Saddam was I would never tell you because you are an American."
Even if all you say is true for you (quite possibly it is, what do I know), do you really believe that no-one else in the world is spending less on CDs? Do you really think that some cash-strapped 12 year old, who now has access to $1 ripped copies of the music he wants, is going to keep on begging his parents for $15 to buy a legit copy ? Of course not. Of course he will be contributing to reduced sales.
I have to agree with this to a certain extent. A friend of mine who's 18 was given a record voucher. She gave it to me because she doesn't see the point of buying CDs. She gets her music on CD-Rs and downloads MP3s, even though she's on dialup.
However, as today's youngsters get jobs and higher incomes, you'd expect them to buy CDs as a more convenient way of getting music.
Except: if you've grown used to MP3s and CD-R, you'll surely be outraged that your CDs won't import into iTunes/rip into WinAmp etc/play on your CD-ROM drive. That's why I've stopped buying CDs. I couldn't be sure that the few albums I've considered buying recently would work properly on my iBook.
So the record industry is only making things worse for itself. It's like a swimmer with cramp who's only a little way off shore, but insists on using an anvil as a buoyancy aid.
In all the coverage of these trials, there has been no mention of security (or at best, a passing reference).
They are talking about allowing voting by SMS text message, a medium where messages are not guaranteed delivery! Even if they send you a receipt, if you don't get one you can't know if (a) your vote was lost or (b) the receipt was lost.
Also, the "from" phone number is spoofable to the recipient. The phone companies can probably tell where a message came from, but are these systems being designed by security experts or naive low bidders?
Slashdot Mirror
The visuals might be approaching Hollywood quality, but the scriptwriting wouldn't stand up in even the most hackneyed action flick. "No! I vant it alive!"
I think it's more to do with deadlines. Tie-in games have to come out when the film does. This means that publishers will go for unadventurous game designs and the game will often be released before it's ready.
Seconded. Let's hope someone writes a web app to generate Palm Doc formatted versions of Gutenberg texts on demand.
Wow! Thanks!
He's adopting a skeptical position as a rhetorical device to frame his review. Uh, assmunch.
I'm looking forward to using Konqueror on OS X, if only because the file transfer and browsing options sound interesting. Using the Finder for FTP seems to be unaccountably slow and prone to random disconnects. Anyway, the thing that really interested me in this story was the screenshot - looking at someone else's desktop gives me the prurient thrills that I imagine some people get out of Hello! magazine. Does anyone know what that little menu bar weather indicator is? I've seen similar desktop things, but they're not really worth it on a 12" screen. Ta.
Flawed though the N-Gage is, these figures don't mean very much. In the UK, cellphones are subsidised by the telecoms companies - it's much cheaper to buy one as part of a monthly contract than to own the hardware outright. People who want an N-Gage will mostly be upgrading from existing contract phones, so damning on the basis of purchase figures is a bit hasty.
Not that I think the N-Gage is going to be successful - sounds like it's doomed by the portrait screen, awkward cartridge changing and lack of usefulness as a phone. But at 49 quid on some contracts, a lot of people will be tempted to get one as a games console and keep their SIM card in an old handset. (Can you play games and use the Bluetooth without a SIM?)
I love the idea of Bluetooth multiplayer. If Nokia have screwed it up this time, it's not going to be long before somebody gets it right.
- Microsoft. Microsoft is the 200 pound gorilla that dominates the software jungle. And Microsoft's Bluetooth support is poor. Try installing a few Bluetooth adapters on Windows XP. There's no Plug and Play - the packaging will have dire warnings that ON NO ACCOUNT should you even let the computer SEE the dongle until you've installed the correct drivers. You then have to click through dire Windows warnings that the drivers you're using aren't certified. If you're lucky enough for your dongle to work at all, it'll be driven by a special application that assumes you know terms like 'OBEX PUSH'. Nothing is integrated into the OS. It's still a stroll in the park for the average Perl-codin' Slashdotter, but not for John Q Consumer.
- Fragmenting standards. Bluetooth isn't just Bluetooth. Different dongles and gadgets can support different profiles. For example, Bluetooth mice use an HID profile that's not found in most of the dongles out there. Because Bluetooth is still being tinkered with, it won't always "just work" like it should. There may be firmware updates available, but John Q Consumer doesn't know or care.
- Difficult setup. Some devices are a nightmare to set up. Try setting up printing over Bluetooth, then tell me I'm wrong. You have to convince the PC that its Bluetooth adapter is a parallel port, or some such nonsense. Add that to the fact that if the access point was written by company A, the manual will assume you are using company A's Bluetooth dongle and its associated cryptic interface, rather than the one from company B that you actually have. Bluetooth networks need to be substantially more self-organising to be worthwhile, while still requiring user confirmation for anything that might threaten security.
If it's to survive, in the short term, the market for Bluetooth will be in simpler devices like mobiles and that Nokia N-Gage thingy.Here's their "intranet", which is publically accessible:
http://eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/intrane t_home.htm
You can't access all the reports, but you can get lots of design documents and stuff. It's done in FrontPage and riddled with spelling errors. Not promising.
I don't think the shuttle disaster is the reason for the new limit. There was going to be a special 7-crew escape craft for the ISS called the X-38 - but it was cancelled last year, in favour of a pursuing a multipurpose vehicle.
I use an old Handspring Visor Deluxe and a program called Weasel reader (gutenpalm.sourceforge.net). It's not quite as good as paper, but it's a lot easier on the eye than a PC screen. I'd recommend you buy the Palm Zire, except it only has 2MB of memory, which isn't really enough if you want to carry around a decent selection of reading material. Maybe get an old second-hand monochrome Palm from someone who's upgrading?
Sitting on every desk? Bollocks. I'm sure they exist, but I've never seen them used in my life. Come off it, old chap.
Signed,
A. Brit
Why don't software companies just offer .torrents of their demos straight from their sites?
Wouldn't this be handy against a hidden enemy relying on cell or satellite phones to communicate? A bit like, say, Al Quaida?
Oh no! HACKERS could access the worthless data on a display machine!
Half of their titles are available in DRM-free formats including PDB. The rest are available in Palm Reader.
As someone's already pointed out, a PDA is a reasonable ebook reader. But what's really going to make ebook reading take off is the coming wave of cheap devices with cholesteric LCD screens, that run on one set of batteries for months. Here's a review of an early device aimed at the Chinese market:
http://www.blackmask.com/archive/argosyrev.htm
Once the bugs are ironed out, this thing and a few format conversion utilities will be all you need to get your bestsellers from Kazaa rather than Borders.
The publishing houses will have to rely on P2P hassles like crappy OCR and the number of fucktards putting ebooks in PDF and .lit formats to make people fork out for hard copies. Either that, or they'll realise that they can compete by offering cheap, well-indexed versions of their books with fair DRM (or none at all).
Unfortunately, at the moment, most big publishers see ebooks as some sort of premium service, and in many cases they're actually more expensive than the hardback.
Once these readers become common within the small proportion of the public that actually buys books for its own use (and not as gifts), we'll see a big change. Publishers will have to sell cheap ebooks with fair DRM, or fold. Physical books will still be around, but hardbacks will probably die.
I thought the solution to Zeno's paradox is that although you occupy an infinite series of points when you move, they can still sum to a finite distance. The Greeks may not have understood this, but this was all worked out centuries ago. By Cantor or someone.
So the author of this paper is claiming to solve a non-problem - doesn't sound very promising to me. Also, in these days of online preprint archives, why didn't the submitter link to the actual paper?
If the point of issuing press releases is to get stories, this is a pretty bad way to handle it. Do they expect mainstream news sources to publish a story like "Tapwave gadget will have one more button than previously thought" or "Smart Media card support unveiled for that thing we covered last week"? No-one would care. They'd be better off doing a big unveiling and getting lots of review samples out there.
Maybe if they're going for a niche market, PalmOS websites and the like will play along, but I bet even they get bored with weekly hype.
The author thinks that:
Carbon 60 is a crystalline substance that looks like diamond.
The GPS system works by having all vehicles broadcast their location at all times.
Hydrogen fusion and combustion of hydrogen are the same thing, and somehow imply an engine could work on water alone.
And much, much more... apart from the constant tech and science gaffes, Pavlou writes like an excited teenager recounting the kewl bits of an action movie. There's no characterisation and 400% too much plot.
If you see this book, burn it on sight.
If you're wondering if I'm being a bit negative about Decipher, consider this - the fuckwit who wrote the 'review' above thought it was good. See my point?
PS - Slashdot editors: articles like this are why nobody wants to pay to subscribe. This is a fucking insult. You might as well ask me to pay you to go over to my grandma's house and use her roughly from both ends.
In Volume 2 of LOEG, characters like Rupert the Bear and Mr Toad (from Wind in the Willows) are referenced, but they are surely covered by copyright. I don't know if Moore got permission, or if he's just hoping no-one will sue, or what.
Nobody disputes that Saddam used nerve gas in the 80s (although the US administration at the time initially blamed the attacks on Iran, since at that time they were rooting for the Iraqis to win the war).
Sometime between the Iran-Iraq war and now those WMDs magically disappeared and we should all take Saddams word for it.
These weapons are difficult to maintain in a usable state. Anthrax spores germinate within a few years. Nerve gases are corrosive and hard to store. I think Saddam lost his ability to keep these weapons due to the international community's policy of containment and inspections.
And the ~300,000 Iraqis Saddam's dictatorship murdered?
That 300,000 figure is grossly misleading, because it includes casualties of the Iran-Iraq war. Which the US and UK were happy to go along with as a way of containing Iran.
Don't get me wrong, the Ba'ath regime murdered and tortured thousands, and it's a good thing that Saddam is gone. But it would have been better to contain him and act with international support. The WMD pretext for the war was a lie, and the perception that this was a war for oil is going to backfire on the US and its allies. Of course, fanatics are going to be against the West no matter what, but the tacit support of the populations they live amongst is a valuable weapon for them.
From today's UK Guardian:
A man in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, told the Los Angeles Times: "They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein? Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is: 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality."
He added: "If I knew where Saddam was I would never tell you because you are an American."
I have to agree with this to a certain extent. A friend of mine who's 18 was given a record voucher. She gave it to me because she doesn't see the point of buying CDs. She gets her music on CD-Rs and downloads MP3s, even though she's on dialup.
However, as today's youngsters get jobs and higher incomes, you'd expect them to buy CDs as a more convenient way of getting music.
Except: if you've grown used to MP3s and CD-R, you'll surely be outraged that your CDs won't import into iTunes/rip into WinAmp etc/play on your CD-ROM drive. That's why I've stopped buying CDs. I couldn't be sure that the few albums I've considered buying recently would work properly on my iBook.
So the record industry is only making things worse for itself. It's like a swimmer with cramp who's only a little way off shore, but insists on using an anvil as a buoyancy aid.
Nope.
http://www.biomedcentral.com
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org
They are talking about allowing voting by SMS text message, a medium where messages are not guaranteed delivery! Even if they send you a receipt, if you don't get one you can't know if (a) your vote was lost or (b) the receipt was lost.
Also, the "from" phone number is spoofable to the recipient. The phone companies can probably tell where a message came from, but are these systems being designed by security experts or naive low bidders?
This whole thing is an extremely bad idea.