I'll let someone else cover Java & Eclipse, but for Android itself, I can recommend http://www.manning.com/ableson/ - I'm currently reading it and find it good. Keep an eye up for their deals - you can typically get up to 50% off (particularly on PDF versions) if you put yourself on their mailing list and just wait for their offers to tick in.:)
This car is a marvel of safety technology, including the system that automatically emergency brakes the car and will avoid a rear ender in speeds up to ~25kph. And at higher speeds it'll still brake in order to reduce the impact.
Adding to this, systems such as the BLIS (blind spot information system or something like that), it's a pretty impressive feat of engineering - if you can afford it!
According to my bro who's put an order for the 2010 model, the test version he tried also alerted him to proximity to the car in front when driving at higher speeds.
For me personally I'm quite intrigued by laser cruise control systems... that would be of huge benefit to me.
Just wanted to chip in that I too love my polarised (Ray Ban) prescription sunglasses for my driving. They take away almost all the glare from the front (and there's a lot of that!), at the small price of making certain windshields (that have tint treatments) and LCD screens etc technicolour funky.
They were the most expensive pair of glasses I've ever bought, so I treat them with great care and have actually held on to them for over 3 years now. Absolutely love them!
My UV reactive normal glasses are pretty useless in comparision. The change rate is way too slow, and they don't go dark in the car. Anyway those lenses are worn down now so will get replaced with "normal" ones instead of the UV reactive.
I found another bad thing about UV reactive; going dark on an overcast day (I'm in Australia), things would get even more glum than before.
Oooh, didn't know they were in such high demand! I have two myself, was using both up (home+work) until when I sampled the G5 -- and promptly bought another one. Now the Explorer is perfect for the laptop next to my main computer, and I guess the 2nd unit will be a good backup.
Up until the G5, I never saw a mouse that could outperform trackballs for combating RSI.
My self built 4.5tb quad core'd Vista PC in a sleek black Zalman HD160XT case with a BR Rom, dual DVI-B tuner and Vista Media Centre up front does a fantastic job of recording Australian HDTV, playing back 1080/720 h264 mkv files, BluRay and more. "More" would include e.g. browsing stuff on the big screen with missus, watching online video services such as Youtube, act as a temp file / torrent server for my Linux one that bought the farm half a year ago, games.
Oh and it just turned 1 year old....
It's easy enough to explain down here in Australia, but it might help that my friends and colleagues are all pretty smart even if not all as geeky as myself --- and that Tivo isn't what iPod is to a PMP here yet.
It buggers me that I now have to pay money for quality EPG, however IceTV does a good job of getting the data out of the quite paranoid FTA channels who scream bloody murder at the thought of anyone skipping their ads.
Their most effective counter reaction is to run everything off schedule; I'm sure they're claiming that's just how it turns out, but I refuse to believe that if they can run everything so consistently off schedule they couldn't just as well plan it correctly. It's nothing that an "add 15 minutes to every recording" won't fix in most cases.
Agree; I used to bike to work until I moved too far away from work... Now it's car to work, however have a gym nearby so try to go there 3-4 times per week in lunch breaks.
Also Hip Hop dancing is a great way of exercising. Whilst the audience here might initially laugh at that, there are a number of great benefits:
1) Improves memory and co-ordination; is great fun & challenging 2) Improves lower back/core strength, thus making you better able to do all those hard hours in front of the computer. No joke, this messes with your back! 3) Is a great way to meet people outside your normal day to day routine. If you are single you will probably notice that they also tend to slew towards the more attractive range of the scale. Even if you are not [check] there's always value in this:)
An even more interesting question is, what would it take to get them delivered with Server 2008 (64bit)? This set up as a workstation is just fantastic stuff compared to Vista; even my 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9300 runs the 32 bit with the themes service enabled and Aero just fine, and on my quad core 8GB it is simply flying.
I bought my own Technet license when they were 40% off and that was my way of getting it. It's a shame this OS is so expensive the much more lethargic Vista is the only real route.
Yeah:) I saw the prices when I built my new rig then (10 months ago) - high end system, but thought the GPU was too much, so didn't go for it. I got a 8800GTS/320 for less than a third of the XFX 8800 ULTRA premium version (AU$1300) instead and had made my mind up to go high end when next gen came out.
The 280 was it; probably should have waited a few weeks, however AoC is smooth as butter now even in high resolutions and I'd just gotten a nice bonus at work so no regrets:)
Am loving the fact that ATI are keeping up and then some. Just having a single gaming GPU developer was quite a depressing thought.
How? It takes heat away -- the GPU fan helps push the heat out the back of the case, thus there's less of it to go UP into the CPU area and BACK into the motherboard.
When I swapped my 8800GTS (I now have a GTX280) onto water 9 months ago for some reason I wasn't able to clock it much higher. However ambient temps dropped significantly around the motherboard and CPU area.
I've just gotten a big GTX280; it's on the stock cooler, as I haven't found a suitable block for delivery in Australia --- and have had to turn fans on the 900 case back up. I.e. the triple radiators mounted externally at the back are not being put to full use, a lot of heat is trapped inside the case... and I have to listen to the thing ramp up like crazy whilst playing games. That tiny fan is not silent by any definition of the word --- and it certainly needs to be put to use when that plus one billion transistor gpu is fired up 100%. (Can't wait to install a proper block...)
This is why I consider a high air flow case like the 900 perfect for water cooling - all those little things are not allowed to build up lots of heat that decrease stability and or lifespan of the entire system.
... plus you might have to buy a new power supply. My Seasonic S12+ 650W didn't have an 8 pin connector; I only bought it 10 months ago - it wasn't a cheap one - and thought it was all up to date...
Well, A$300 more later and I have a massive Corsair HX1000W and a functioning XFX GTX280, only to learn of the $150 price drops for the card just days after purchase and then the awesome value for money of the 4870 -- not to mention the prospect of all that X2 power.
(At least my heavily modified for water cooling and cabling hiding 900 case was big enough to fit it. Just. )
It's great to see ATI come back so strong. I honestly didn't expect it - it's keeping the entire market sharp. Good riddance to the +$1k prices of the 8800 ULTRA 1 year ago!
I'm not winging re the price drops. These things happen, it can't be helped and is just a question of time anyway. Q6600 3.7ghz / 8GB mem system works well in Server 2008 x64 - the GPU instantly clocking up ~15% from stock on core/mem/shader and that's still on air whilst I'm finding a water block.:)
Here's a hint: RIM is only a player in push-mail smartphones. Thanks for clearing that up! As an Australian/Norwegian person, my first thoughts were... "what the hell is (a) RIM?".
My second thought was, "what the hell is an iPhone?". Actually, that was mainly in jest, but you can't buy those non-3G things legitimately here --- and they're non-3G --- so why bother.
(Yours Truly is patiently waiting for the N96 to be released so that I have a proper Symbian smartphone with an awesome camera, lots of storage and a 3G connection for my N810 tablet to bluetooth into.)
My 3 year old Dell 9300 laptop has a beautiful 1920x1200 17" screen - I'm using it for work purposes (and reading slashdot) whilst at work, hooked up to my main XP compuber via Synergy. With Ubuntu it even runs pretty fast.
At home I do quite like the combo of 2x 1600x1200 20" screens and 1x 1920x1200 24" screens. My preferred font is Lucida Console 7pt in Windows, so I can fit quite a bit.
(Message to the OP: HTFU and get yourself a 17" 1920x1200 unit if you value screen real estate so much.)
... and use them to force install all relevant windows 95 / winnt / linux / vista / osx / amiga / c64 / vic20 etc security updates.
(Ok, some of the latter ones might be fictional, but who knows.)
And when that's done, force the users to read a 10 minute introduction to how not to be a clueless n00b on da internetz --- the anti botnet software will only give the OS or what passes for it back, and remove every single trace of itself as the last step if the user successfully completes a multi choice quiz or something to that effect.
I have a set of Sennheisers too (PXC 300), however I've found the Audio Technica ATH-CK7s to be much better at providing rich sound at low volumes whilst also pretty much blocking out all external sound.
If you want to be able to hold a conversation with someone then this isn't what you want. However for said scenario of adding mobile phone chatting to the chorus of crying children etc, they are pretty darned perfect. I find that the SQ when coupled with my Samsung YP3 is exceptional.
I bought the more expensive Asus D2/PM in my HTPC last year and the quality of the thing just blows me away.
Whilst I'm mainly in Dolby Digital Live mode, I've switched to analogue out a few times for extra nice sound quality when playing back lossless CD rips (my entire collection of ~500 CDs, which are now suitably boxed up!). Now, in this case, up to 118db SN/R is better than anything I've played on the Rotel system before - cleanly blowing the old Rotel CD player out of the water; the sound quality is just pristine. Things are still good in DD mode and I must admit I mainly leave it there for all purposes.
Speaking of which, for playing back multi channel content (blurays, 720p H264s etc), the DD Live works _flawlessly_. My old Rotel preamp only accepts multi channel imput from an external DD decoder, and I'm holding out on an preamp upgrade as long as possible - hopefully until TrueHD is fully supported in the PC world - and with the Asus soundcard I can just play everything without having to worry about switching settings and the like. Whether it is DTS, DD, stereo or whatever, Asus tells Vista that "I'm a multi channel analogue soundcard - please send me 5.1", this happens, and then everything is real time encoded to DD. Perfect.
Having used Creative a lot before, I too got incredibly peeved off with their lack of driver support and many other issues - complete lack of respect for their customers being the #1 thing. I don't think I'll give them any more money for a long time. If nothing else, it's great that Asus delivers some serious competition to the market.
Having said all that, I'm looking forward to HDMI based soundcards that add TrueHD support. The difference in sound quality is said to be stupendous; with cheap TrueHD receivers outplaying high end non-uncompressed hifi gear costing many, many times their price.
.. by suggesting that the 4gb memory stick would operate a lot faster if I put it into a high speed plug which was available on my Dell 2407wfp rather than in the top tray of the Antec 900 case. I hadn't figured that one out myself for some reason.
Had to transfer files (photos) from my D70s memory card to my wife's USB stick so she could bring some shots to her work. Estimated time before I moved the stick was 15-20 minutes; just moving the stick to the monitor it took 2-3.
In effect it was saying, hey you got a high speed usb stick, why plug it into a slow connector when you have a fast one available for use.
I for one thought that was sweet, especially as I just dodged the worst Melbourne morning traffic by not having to stay home another 15 minutes.
>>> ninjamonkey26 (1258466) Wow... You registered just to post that? Looks like he's been planning that one for quite some time, kind of a slashdot sleeper agent. Scary.
Or perhaps he was running Vista with less than 1GB of memory*.
Cheers, Funky (posting from my Ubuntu 7.1 laptop that's Synergy'd to my XP workstation at work... and I do have 2 Vista machines and 1 Ubuntu server at home, and a Maemo device in my pocket)
*) Ok, I know it doesn't hold up - a UID like that was probably early WinXP times, but still...;)
Sorry forgot to include this kind of relevant information.;) The server is an old AMD-3200 Newcastle with 1.5gb of memory; nothing special but does the job, although I am struggling to get power saving configured. The Dell was top of the line when I bought it 3 years ago, and got new life when I put Ubuntu on it, it's really a perfect fit and so much better than Vista. 2.13ghz CPU,2gb memory, Geforce 6800 with 256mb of memory. The 17" 1920x1200 screen coupled with the cube makes it very cool, the windows users are typically thinking it's something brand new going by how quick it performs.
Well any crappy old PC is a lean mean Linux machine waiting to be born:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'll let someone else cover Java & Eclipse, but for Android itself, I can recommend http://www.manning.com/ableson/ - I'm currently reading it and find it good. Keep an eye up for their deals - you can typically get up to 50% off (particularly on PDF versions) if you put yourself on their mailing list and just wait for their offers to tick in. :)
This car is a marvel of safety technology, including the system that automatically emergency brakes the car and will avoid a rear ender in speeds up to ~25kph. And at higher speeds it'll still brake in order to reduce the impact.
Adding to this, systems such as the BLIS (blind spot information system or something like that), it's a pretty impressive feat of engineering - if you can afford it!
According to my bro who's put an order for the 2010 model, the test version he tried also alerted him to proximity to the car in front when driving at higher speeds.
For me personally I'm quite intrigued by laser cruise control systems... that would be of huge benefit to me.
Just wanted to chip in that I too love my polarised (Ray Ban) prescription sunglasses for my driving. They take away almost all the glare from the front (and there's a lot of that!), at the small price of making certain windshields (that have tint treatments) and LCD screens etc technicolour funky.
They were the most expensive pair of glasses I've ever bought, so I treat them with great care and have actually held on to them for over 3 years now. Absolutely love them!
My UV reactive normal glasses are pretty useless in comparision. The change rate is way too slow, and they don't go dark in the car. Anyway those lenses are worn down now so will get replaced with "normal" ones instead of the UV reactive.
I found another bad thing about UV reactive; going dark on an overcast day (I'm in Australia), things would get even more glum than before.
... especially expensive headphone and laptop charger ones.
Just FYI, and from my experience with my two Burmese. Their apettite has fortunately waned somewhat now that they're a bit older (3y/o).
Oooh, didn't know they were in such high demand! I have two myself, was using both up (home+work) until when I sampled the G5 -- and promptly bought another one. Now the Explorer is perfect for the laptop next to my main computer, and I guess the 2nd unit will be a good backup.
Up until the G5, I never saw a mouse that could outperform trackballs for combating RSI.
My self built 4.5tb quad core'd Vista PC in a sleek black Zalman HD160XT case with a BR Rom, dual DVI-B tuner and Vista Media Centre up front does a fantastic job of recording Australian HDTV, playing back 1080/720 h264 mkv files, BluRay and more. "More" would include e.g. browsing stuff on the big screen with missus, watching online video services such as Youtube, act as a temp file / torrent server for my Linux one that bought the farm half a year ago, games.
Oh and it just turned 1 year old....
It's easy enough to explain down here in Australia, but it might help that my friends and colleagues are all pretty smart even if not all as geeky as myself --- and that Tivo isn't what iPod is to a PMP here yet.
It buggers me that I now have to pay money for quality EPG, however IceTV does a good job of getting the data out of the quite paranoid FTA channels who scream bloody murder at the thought of anyone skipping their ads.
Their most effective counter reaction is to run everything off schedule; I'm sure they're claiming that's just how it turns out, but I refuse to believe that if they can run everything so consistently off schedule they couldn't just as well plan it correctly. It's nothing that an "add 15 minutes to every recording" won't fix in most cases.
3 max installs? That is, of course, unless you get the DRM free version. :P I think EA are making it pretty clear which one to get.
How long until some jokester does a phishing attack that submits the info to random slashdot threads?
Agree; I used to bike to work until I moved too far away from work... Now it's car to work, however have a gym nearby so try to go there 3-4 times per week in lunch breaks.
Also Hip Hop dancing is a great way of exercising. Whilst the audience here might initially laugh at that, there are a number of great benefits:
1) Improves memory and co-ordination; is great fun & challenging :)
2) Improves lower back/core strength, thus making you better able to do all those hard hours in front of the computer. No joke, this messes with your back!
3) Is a great way to meet people outside your normal day to day routine. If you are single you will probably notice that they also tend to slew towards the more attractive range of the scale. Even if you are not [check] there's always value in this
An even more interesting question is, what would it take to get them delivered with Server 2008 (64bit)? This set up as a workstation is just fantastic stuff compared to Vista; even my 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9300 runs the 32 bit with the themes service enabled and Aero just fine, and on my quad core 8GB it is simply flying.
I bought my own Technet license when they were 40% off and that was my way of getting it. It's a shame this OS is so expensive the much more lethargic Vista is the only real route.
Yeah :) I saw the prices when I built my new rig then (10 months ago) - high end system, but thought the GPU was too much, so didn't go for it. I got a 8800GTS/320 for less than a third of the XFX 8800 ULTRA premium version (AU$1300) instead and had made my mind up to go high end when next gen came out.
The 280 was it; probably should have waited a few weeks, however AoC is smooth as butter now even in high resolutions and I'd just gotten a nice bonus at work so no regrets :)
Am loving the fact that ATI are keeping up and then some. Just having a single gaming GPU developer was quite a depressing thought.
How? It takes heat away -- the GPU fan helps push the heat out the back of the case, thus there's less of it to go UP into the CPU area and BACK into the motherboard.
When I swapped my 8800GTS (I now have a GTX280) onto water 9 months ago for some reason I wasn't able to clock it much higher. However ambient temps dropped significantly around the motherboard and CPU area.
I've just gotten a big GTX280; it's on the stock cooler, as I haven't found a suitable block for delivery in Australia --- and have had to turn fans on the 900 case back up. I.e. the triple radiators mounted externally at the back are not being put to full use, a lot of heat is trapped inside the case... and I have to listen to the thing ramp up like crazy whilst playing games. That tiny fan is not silent by any definition of the word --- and it certainly needs to be put to use when that plus one billion transistor gpu is fired up 100%. (Can't wait to install a proper block...)
This is why I consider a high air flow case like the 900 perfect for water cooling - all those little things are not allowed to build up lots of heat that decrease stability and or lifespan of the entire system.
... plus you might have to buy a new power supply. My Seasonic S12+ 650W didn't have an 8 pin connector; I only bought it 10 months ago - it wasn't a cheap one - and thought it was all up to date...
Well, A$300 more later and I have a massive Corsair HX1000W and a functioning XFX GTX280, only to learn of the $150 price drops for the card just days after purchase and then the awesome value for money of the 4870 -- not to mention the prospect of all that X2 power.
(At least my heavily modified for water cooling and cabling hiding 900 case was big enough to fit it. Just. )
It's great to see ATI come back so strong. I honestly didn't expect it - it's keeping the entire market sharp. Good riddance to the +$1k prices of the 8800 ULTRA 1 year ago!
I'm not winging re the price drops. These things happen, it can't be helped and is just a question of time anyway. Q6600 3.7ghz / 8GB mem system works well in Server 2008 x64 - the GPU instantly clocking up ~15% from stock on core/mem/shader and that's still on air whilst I'm finding a water block. :)
My second thought was, "what the hell is an iPhone?". Actually, that was mainly in jest, but you can't buy those non-3G things legitimately here --- and they're non-3G --- so why bother.
(Yours Truly is patiently waiting for the N96 to be released so that I have a proper Symbian smartphone with an awesome camera, lots of storage and a 3G connection for my N810 tablet to bluetooth into.)
... and they wonder why people turn to piracy...? The mind boggles.
My 3 year old Dell 9300 laptop has a beautiful 1920x1200 17" screen - I'm using it for work purposes (and reading slashdot) whilst at work, hooked up to my main XP compuber via Synergy. With Ubuntu it even runs pretty fast.
At home I do quite like the combo of 2x 1600x1200 20" screens and 1x 1920x1200 24" screens. My preferred font is Lucida Console 7pt in Windows, so I can fit quite a bit.
(Message to the OP: HTFU and get yourself a 17" 1920x1200 unit if you value screen real estate so much.)
... and use them to force install all relevant windows 95 / winnt / linux / vista / osx / amiga / c64 / vic20 etc security updates.
(Ok, some of the latter ones might be fictional, but who knows.)
And when that's done, force the users to read a 10 minute introduction to how not to be a clueless n00b on da internetz --- the anti botnet software will only give the OS or what passes for it back, and remove every single trace of itself as the last step if the user successfully completes a multi choice quiz or something to that effect.
Now that'd be kind of cool.
Agreed! I'm in Australia and I pay A$200 per month for a 100GB download quota at 8mbit ADSL1.
I look at what my brother in Europe is paying for what in comparison is truly_unlimited access and shake my head in disbelief (keyword:SFA).
I have a set of Sennheisers too (PXC 300), however I've found the Audio Technica ATH-CK7s to be much better at providing rich sound at low volumes whilst also pretty much blocking out all external sound.
If you want to be able to hold a conversation with someone then this isn't what you want. However for said scenario of adding mobile phone chatting to the chorus of crying children etc, they are pretty darned perfect. I find that the SQ when coupled with my Samsung YP3 is exceptional.
I bought the more expensive Asus D2/PM in my HTPC last year and the quality of the thing just blows me away.
Whilst I'm mainly in Dolby Digital Live mode, I've switched to analogue out a few times for extra nice sound quality when playing back lossless CD rips (my entire collection of ~500 CDs, which are now suitably boxed up!). Now, in this case, up to 118db SN/R is better than anything I've played on the Rotel system before - cleanly blowing the old Rotel CD player out of the water; the sound quality is just pristine. Things are still good in DD mode and I must admit I mainly leave it there for all purposes.
Speaking of which, for playing back multi channel content (blurays, 720p H264s etc), the DD Live works _flawlessly_. My old Rotel preamp only accepts multi channel imput from an external DD decoder, and I'm holding out on an preamp upgrade as long as possible - hopefully until TrueHD is fully supported in the PC world - and with the Asus soundcard I can just play everything without having to worry about switching settings and the like. Whether it is DTS, DD, stereo or whatever, Asus tells Vista that "I'm a multi channel analogue soundcard - please send me 5.1", this happens, and then everything is real time encoded to DD. Perfect.
Having used Creative a lot before, I too got incredibly peeved off with their lack of driver support and many other issues - complete lack of respect for their customers being the #1 thing. I don't think I'll give them any more money for a long time. If nothing else, it's great that Asus delivers some serious competition to the market.
Having said all that, I'm looking forward to HDMI based soundcards that add TrueHD support. The difference in sound quality is said to be stupendous; with cheap TrueHD receivers outplaying high end non-uncompressed hifi gear costing many, many times their price.
.. how do you drink just one cup of coffee per day?
.. by suggesting that the 4gb memory stick would operate a lot faster if I put it into a high speed plug which was available on my Dell 2407wfp rather than in the top tray of the Antec 900 case. I hadn't figured that one out myself for some reason.
Had to transfer files (photos) from my D70s memory card to my wife's USB stick so she could bring some shots to her work. Estimated time before I moved the stick was 15-20 minutes; just moving the stick to the monitor it took 2-3.
In effect it was saying, hey you got a high speed usb stick, why plug it into a slow connector when you have a fast one available for use.
I for one thought that was sweet, especially as I just dodged the worst Melbourne morning traffic by not having to stay home another 15 minutes.
Wow... You registered just to post that? Looks like he's been planning that one for quite some time, kind of a slashdot sleeper agent. Scary.
Or perhaps he was running Vista with less than 1GB of memory*.
Cheers,
Funky
(posting from my Ubuntu 7.1 laptop that's Synergy'd to my XP workstation at work... and I do have 2 Vista machines and 1 Ubuntu server at home, and a Maemo device in my pocket)
*) Ok, I know it doesn't hold up - a UID like that was probably early WinXP times, but still...
Sorry forgot to include this kind of relevant information. ;)
:)
The server is an old AMD-3200 Newcastle with 1.5gb of memory; nothing special but does the job, although I am struggling to get power saving configured.
The Dell was top of the line when I bought it 3 years ago, and got new life when I put Ubuntu on it, it's really a perfect fit and so much better than Vista. 2.13ghz CPU,2gb memory, Geforce 6800 with 256mb of memory. The 17" 1920x1200 screen coupled with the cube makes it very cool, the windows users are typically thinking it's something brand new going by how quick it performs.
Well any crappy old PC is a lean mean Linux machine waiting to be born