It has a keyboard, but a remarkably useless one, for anything other than poking in someones last name with one finger.
I cant stand using a laptop keyboard let alone one of those things.
It's like I said, if I want a full-featured PC I'd get a new laptop, or look into those tablet PCs (which I'm doing right now). I dont want a PC crammed into a gameboy. The only reason I'd consider one would be for the "toy" factor, and I dont have that kind of cash to pay for a toy.
(Oh, and a touchscreen thats pressure sensitve? Wow, what will they think of next? Waterproof rubber duckies?)
I have run ssh from my palm, do some minor data-type functions, but its mostly just a date/address book. I have a laptop for everything else.
I wouldnt want to have to go through a kernel compile or editting sendmail.cf armed with only a stylus and a magnifying glass. I dont want a full featured PC that small.
And having to recompile the kernel for any reason whatsoever is pure idiocy and one of my main beefs with linux. Jebus. A monolithic kernel in a "modern" OS. It's like putting a steam engine in a 2004 model car.
Linus didnt develop a "new" operating system, he cloned a very old one (Minix).
Of course, if the commercial went "In the early 90s, Linus Trovalds copied someone else's shit and put it on the internet for free" it probably wouldnt have the same effect.
Sure, thats who IBM blamed after all. And it's easier to point fingers than look at what went wrong.
IBM could have gone the other direction, ran with OS/2, and we could be in a world where OS/2 is the desktop OS, Microsoft is a Corel-sized fringe player, maybe only making mice and keyboards.
They let a technically good OS die because they had no idea how to sell it. That was IBM's main problem, they'd been a monopoly so long they were absolutely clueless as to how to sell something in a market.
Microsoft is in this position now with XBox. They have no idea why people aren't buying XBoxes. They dont understand that people feel that PS2 or GCN have a better selection of games, and it's that simple. They'll piss away billions on marketing and celebrity tie-ins and movie deals and all that bullshit before some genious comes up with the idea "hey, why dont we pay some talented dev houses to create some good exclusive titles?"
When they've decimated all competing linux vendors (seems they prefer Red Hat), pulled kernel development from Linus (hey, they just need to fork it.. Not their fault if the world needs their fork), completely shift the focus of Linux to make it permanently a big-iron datacenter thing, and the community realizes that it will never become the mainstream desktop OS they want it to be, then we'll see who the good guy was.
More likely, though, they'll do to Linux what they did to OS/2. Make it the running joke of the industry.
In the IBM commercial, a blond, blue-eyed boy sits mum as a stream of celebrities ply him with information on everything from plumbing to the mysteries of the universe.
I think the image of a little boy being approached and molested by a bunch of creepy strangers sums up the Linux community and ethos to a T.
Sure it's taking a chance. Most european TV shows wouldnt last 5 minutes on American TV, or vice-versa.
It looks like they're trying to do the Japanese game-show thing now (with Bonzai and some Japanese show on TNN). To me that's a huge risk, Bonzai with its screaming engrish-speaking announcer is unwatchable crap.
BTW I was watching something not too long ago about some european network buying the rights to remake "Who's the Boss?" for Euro audiences, so dont try to play the "We're more creative and cultured than you" card.
So have the voting kiosk print a paper ballot for you. It'd be even more readily read by a machine than your filled in bubbles, though it wouldnt be necessary unless there was a recount. The original count could be electronic.
Know what? The people in FL understood the system perfectly. They had no problems with it.
It was the douchebag politicians who swarmed around demanding recounts and making a big circus out of the whole thing. Reporters were hard pressed to pound the pavement for days to find an interview with someone who found the ballot confusing.
The whole thing was a joke, but one played by the sore losers in both parties. They actually wanted me to believe that seniors couldn't figure out the same voting system they'd used their whole lives? It was seriously laughable.
A lot of people dont understand why Futurama got the axe while the Simpsons endure. They dont appreciate how much went into Futurama.
Adult Swim has been putting little factoids into their commercial bumpers about it. It cost something like 2 million dollars per episode. The opening sequence has something like a dozen layers of animation and took months to complete. The animation in Futurama was really above-par, with multilayered hand animated characters mixed in with CGI and special effects and whatnot. It was all so subtle, though, that people didnt get it.
Cartoon Network was negotiating with Groenig about continuing Futurama, but the price tag was just way to high. They'd have to animate it like any other cartoon, which would kill the shows feel and mood.
The good news, however, is that they've struck an agreement for new Family Guy episodes.
I remember one episode of DS9 (one of the few I watched) where Worf and OBrien and Doctor Eurodork went back in time to the original series, and were in the little restaurant thing from the Tribbles episode.
It was a goofy campy throwback but it had Worf explaining away the butthead thing as some sort of "evolutionary path" the Klingons chose, but that they "dont talk about it", and it was left at that.
I know it was just bad writing to try and mask an obvious continuity problem, but I guess if they were buttheads in the olden timey days too, ah who cares. Star Trek is such a colossal waste of time. (To paraphrase Shatner's famous SNL sketch)
A buck an episode, huh? Lets be conservative and guess an episode costs a million dollars to make. So you need a million viewers, and then enough viewers to cover the infrastructure costs for that original million.
This is why there's no "TV over the 'net" like was promised back in the boom days. It just doesnt make economic sense.
Sure, on TV maybe you can get a million people to watch by cramming it between Ally McBeal and The Simpsons. 750,000 of those people left the TV on while they went to take a dump and make some nachos.
Convincing that many people to spend an hour or two downloading it is a whole different story.
Those same PHBs took a struggling bunch of stations that were showing nothing but syndicated reruns of Matlock and turned it into a major network with serious entertainment clout.
They did that by taking chances on stuff like Married with Children and the Simpsons. They're still taking those gambles. They gambled their future on the notion that people would actually watch "Joe Millionaire" or "American Idol", and they were right.
I may not like their programming (aside from Simpsons and Futurama), but I give props to Rupert Murdoch and his cronies' business skills.
Compare to TNT/TBS/TNN/WB. How's Enterprise doing these days? You change your networks image again? Oh you're the man network now, OK, I still think of you as the Nashville Network, btw. And please, WB, give some more unknown black comics their own sitcoms - we cant get enough of those crazy black folks. These are all Fox-wannabe's who just cant pull it off. TBS and TNN wouldnt exist if they didn't have WWE contracts. Anyways, that ends my offtopic rant.
His feature film screenplay credits include "Titan A.E.," "Alien: Resurrection" and "Toy Story."
Yeah, looks like the bar is set awful high for this joker.
Look at you all change your tune so quickly. You talk about lack of originality in Hollywood and blah blah blah. But this guy notices that one of his cancelled series' is slightly popular, and immediately seeks to exploit the fanbase with some Hollywood drek.
No doubt it's simply a script from an unaired episode with an hour of special effects, gratuitous sex and fight scenes added.
Yep, thats the way it works. I dont crawl around on the floor plugging shit in and getting dirty.
But you forgot the rest of the story....5 minutes later
Me "Yeah, it took IT a fucking hour to plug my computer back into the switch."
CTO "An hour? What the hell."
Me "Yeah some high school kid argued with me on the phone for 15 minutes about jibber and jabber and didnt want to come up here. Then some kid shows up and sits around just randomly clicking shit on my desktop, and types 'ping 127.0.0.1' into the command prompt like he knows what hes doing. I told the kid 50 times that theres something physically wrong with the network. But you know, he's taken a weekend course on computers and needs to act like he's got some sort of skill. It was a friggin joke. I swear to god, it took an hour for him to plug in an ethernet cable"
CTO "Who was it? They're fired."
Seriously, you talking about taking an hour to plug in a cable like it was someone elses fault just justifies everything I feel about dipshit administrators.
They're just added beurocracy for the computer world, and I work to replace them each and every day with more sophisticated self-administrating softwares.
I'm not interested in this story, let alone amazed.
I realize that slashdot is mostly populated by high-school educated "IT people", who give a shit about logs and backups and think plugging a PC and monitor into a powerbar is "computer science". To these people, the prospect of plugging in a bunch of computers and restoring backup tapes is exhillirating and exciting. The highlight of their lives.
But, as a programmer, I just dont care.
If my employer gets flattened by a tornado, I fully expect the PHBs and army of cable monkeys to get the network up and running in our new location.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, that's Oscar Wilde.
I get those old-timey writers all mixed up.
Use a different media player or software. PalmOS has nothing to do with what you just said.
It has a keyboard, but a remarkably useless one, for anything other than poking in someones last name with one finger.
I cant stand using a laptop keyboard let alone one of those things.
It's like I said, if I want a full-featured PC I'd get a new laptop, or look into those tablet PCs (which I'm doing right now). I dont want a PC crammed into a gameboy. The only reason I'd consider one would be for the "toy" factor, and I dont have that kind of cash to pay for a toy.
(Oh, and a touchscreen thats pressure sensitve? Wow, what will they think of next? Waterproof rubber duckies?)
I have run ssh from my palm, do some minor data-type functions, but its mostly just a date/address book. I have a laptop for everything else.
I wouldnt want to have to go through a kernel compile or editting sendmail.cf armed with only a stylus and a magnifying glass. I dont want a full featured PC that small.
And having to recompile the kernel for any reason whatsoever is pure idiocy and one of my main beefs with linux. Jebus. A monolithic kernel in a "modern" OS. It's like putting a steam engine in a 2004 model car.
Until I played with one at Office Depot.
I found navigating it was awkward and non-intuitive. It just reeked of "desktop computer" crammed into the PDA.
PalmOS is just so much easier to deal with on such a small device.
IBM seems to have abandoned the desktop, and all but abandoned the PC altogether. Do they still sell Aptivas or whatever line of PCs they had?
It looks to me their focused on their zSeries and PPC CPUs, data centres and mainframes.
Maybe they'll shift back. I dont see why, though. PC's have pretty much reached market saturation, it's not nearly as lucrative as it was in the 90s.
But that commercial was a lie!
Linus didnt develop a "new" operating system, he cloned a very old one (Minix).
Of course, if the commercial went "In the early 90s, Linus Trovalds copied someone else's shit and put it on the internet for free" it probably wouldnt have the same effect.
Sure, thats who IBM blamed after all. And it's easier to point fingers than look at what went wrong.
IBM could have gone the other direction, ran with OS/2, and we could be in a world where OS/2 is the desktop OS, Microsoft is a Corel-sized fringe player, maybe only making mice and keyboards.
They let a technically good OS die because they had no idea how to sell it. That was IBM's main problem, they'd been a monopoly so long they were absolutely clueless as to how to sell something in a market.
Microsoft is in this position now with XBox. They have no idea why people aren't buying XBoxes. They dont understand that people feel that PS2 or GCN have a better selection of games, and it's that simple. They'll piss away billions on marketing and celebrity tie-ins and movie deals and all that bullshit before some genious comes up with the idea "hey, why dont we pay some talented dev houses to create some good exclusive titles?"
I'd guess never.
IBM is after the business market, they've shown absolutely no interest in competing on the desktop with linux.
psst.. They still are, but don't let on.
When they've decimated all competing linux vendors (seems they prefer Red Hat), pulled kernel development from Linus (hey, they just need to fork it.. Not their fault if the world needs their fork), completely shift the focus of Linux to make it permanently a big-iron datacenter thing, and the community realizes that it will never become the mainstream desktop OS they want it to be, then we'll see who the good guy was.
More likely, though, they'll do to Linux what they did to OS/2. Make it the running joke of the industry.
In the IBM commercial, a blond, blue-eyed boy sits mum as a stream of celebrities ply him with information on everything from plumbing to the mysteries of the universe.
I think the image of a little boy being approached and molested by a bunch of creepy strangers sums up the Linux community and ethos to a T.
But shouldn't it be GNU/Linux?
Sure it's taking a chance. Most european TV shows wouldnt last 5 minutes on American TV, or vice-versa.
It looks like they're trying to do the Japanese game-show thing now (with Bonzai and some Japanese show on TNN). To me that's a huge risk, Bonzai with its screaming engrish-speaking announcer is unwatchable crap.
BTW I was watching something not too long ago about some european network buying the rights to remake "Who's the Boss?" for Euro audiences, so dont try to play the "We're more creative and cultured than you" card.
So have the voting kiosk print a paper ballot for you. It'd be even more readily read by a machine than your filled in bubbles, though it wouldnt be necessary unless there was a recount. The original count could be electronic.
Seems so simple to me.
Know what? The people in FL understood the system perfectly. They had no problems with it.
It was the douchebag politicians who swarmed around demanding recounts and making a big circus out of the whole thing. Reporters were hard pressed to pound the pavement for days to find an interview with someone who found the ballot confusing.
The whole thing was a joke, but one played by the sore losers in both parties. They actually wanted me to believe that seniors couldn't figure out the same voting system they'd used their whole lives? It was seriously laughable.
A lot of people dont understand why Futurama got the axe while the Simpsons endure. They dont appreciate how much went into Futurama.
Adult Swim has been putting little factoids into their commercial bumpers about it. It cost something like 2 million dollars per episode. The opening sequence has something like a dozen layers of animation and took months to complete. The animation in Futurama was really above-par, with multilayered hand animated characters mixed in with CGI and special effects and whatnot. It was all so subtle, though, that people didnt get it.
Cartoon Network was negotiating with Groenig about continuing Futurama, but the price tag was just way to high. They'd have to animate it like any other cartoon, which would kill the shows feel and mood.
The good news, however, is that they've struck an agreement for new Family Guy episodes.
I think it was the Romulans.
I remember one episode of DS9 (one of the few I watched) where Worf and OBrien and Doctor Eurodork went back in time to the original series, and were in the little restaurant thing from the Tribbles episode.
It was a goofy campy throwback but it had Worf explaining away the butthead thing as some sort of "evolutionary path" the Klingons chose, but that they "dont talk about it", and it was left at that.
I know it was just bad writing to try and mask an obvious continuity problem, but I guess if they were buttheads in the olden timey days too, ah who cares. Star Trek is such a colossal waste of time. (To paraphrase Shatner's famous SNL sketch)
They got 4WD vehicles to the moon, didnt they?
I'd think it'd be easier to transport an SUV through space than a team of horses.
A buck an episode, huh? Lets be conservative and guess an episode costs a million dollars to make. So you need a million viewers, and then enough viewers to cover the infrastructure costs for that original million.
This is why there's no "TV over the 'net" like was promised back in the boom days. It just doesnt make economic sense.
Sure, on TV maybe you can get a million people to watch by cramming it between Ally McBeal and The Simpsons. 750,000 of those people left the TV on while they went to take a dump and make some nachos.
Convincing that many people to spend an hour or two downloading it is a whole different story.
Those same PHBs took a struggling bunch of stations that were showing nothing but syndicated reruns of Matlock and turned it into a major network with serious entertainment clout.
They did that by taking chances on stuff like Married with Children and the Simpsons. They're still taking those gambles. They gambled their future on the notion that people would actually watch "Joe Millionaire" or "American Idol", and they were right.
I may not like their programming (aside from Simpsons and Futurama), but I give props to Rupert Murdoch and his cronies' business skills.
Compare to TNT/TBS/TNN/WB. How's Enterprise doing these days? You change your networks image again? Oh you're the man network now, OK, I still think of you as the Nashville Network, btw. And please, WB, give some more unknown black comics their own sitcoms - we cant get enough of those crazy black folks. These are all Fox-wannabe's who just cant pull it off. TBS and TNN wouldnt exist if they didn't have WWE contracts. Anyways, that ends my offtopic rant.
Firefly was not a good show.
But the guy in Enterprise is always in his Apollo-era space suit, so thats how you know its the "olden times".
Klingons were just black folks with bad attitudes in Kirks time, but were guys with butts for heads when we get to TNG.
I dont watch Enterprise, but do Klingons have butts for heads or are they just angry black guys?
His feature film screenplay credits include "Titan A.E.," "Alien: Resurrection" and "Toy Story."
Yeah, looks like the bar is set awful high for this joker.
Look at you all change your tune so quickly. You talk about lack of originality in Hollywood and blah blah blah. But this guy notices that one of his cancelled series' is slightly popular, and immediately seeks to exploit the fanbase with some Hollywood drek.
No doubt it's simply a script from an unaired episode with an hour of special effects, gratuitous sex and fight scenes added.
Yep, thats the way it works. I dont crawl around on the floor plugging shit in and getting dirty.
...5 minutes later
But you forgot the rest of the story.
Me "Yeah, it took IT a fucking hour to plug my computer back into the switch."
CTO "An hour? What the hell."
Me "Yeah some high school kid argued with me on the phone for 15 minutes about jibber and jabber and didnt want to come up here. Then some kid shows up and sits around just randomly clicking shit on my desktop, and types 'ping 127.0.0.1' into the command prompt like he knows what hes doing. I told the kid 50 times that theres something physically wrong with the network. But you know, he's taken a weekend course on computers and needs to act like he's got some sort of skill. It was a friggin joke. I swear to god, it took an hour for him to plug in an ethernet cable"
CTO "Who was it? They're fired."
Seriously, you talking about taking an hour to plug in a cable like it was someone elses fault just justifies everything I feel about dipshit administrators.
They're just added beurocracy for the computer world, and I work to replace them each and every day with more sophisticated self-administrating softwares.
Those businesses should realize they need a backup/disaster plan as well, if they absolutely could not withstand a day of downtime.
Perhaps having the sites mirrored on two colos in two locations, and routing to the other one when the first goes offline.
I'm not interested in this story, let alone amazed.
I realize that slashdot is mostly populated by high-school educated "IT people", who give a shit about logs and backups and think plugging a PC and monitor into a powerbar is "computer science". To these people, the prospect of plugging in a bunch of computers and restoring backup tapes is exhillirating and exciting. The highlight of their lives.
But, as a programmer, I just dont care.
If my employer gets flattened by a tornado, I fully expect the PHBs and army of cable monkeys to get the network up and running in our new location.
record stores report that blank recordable CDs are outselling recorded CDs
I dont go to a record store to get discs to burn data on. They cost twice as much as they would at Best Buy.
I'd say its a safe assumption that most of the blanks sold at Tower records wind up holding music.
This doesnt necessarily mean piracy, though, people are pretty into making their own 'mix' cds these days.