I'm still suffering from this utter nightmare of Pentium III id codes that just made using the internet a living hell. No really, you remember when the sky fell back when they were announced?
Also I'm upset because it's impossible to get around the DVD regions and watch discs from other countries. Asia fears the DMCA so much that it's impossible to find a player that does not submit to the region codes.
ok/sarcasm
Seriously, this isn't going to work. Taiwan will have cloned BIOSes out faster than you can say "Overclocking is popular!" and warez groups will have the can only run on trusted hardware feature of the next windows cracked faster than you can say "Product Activation".
Give it 8 months. Even if there isn't an outcry that gets it reversed or ignorable like the P3 chip codes, I'm betting some major MB manufacturer *coughABITcough* will have something like, dual bios, trusted/untrusted with a toggle between them.
As for network routers killing "untrusted" clients, how do businesses expect to keep their linux servers on the network? Yeah, I think either we'll be seeing other OSes support it, or it'll be turned off more often than on. Also what about network-aware appliances like attatched storage, printers etc? I doubt it'll be that easy to convince businesses to just toss them as incompatible. They probably will just patch their existing windows desktops and stay on 2000, xp, or 2003 or whatever doesn't have this nuisance. I know tons of places that still refuse to move up from 2000 to XP.
Also, if only "trusted" software runs, I'm curious how students will do programming assignments on their computers at college. Do they just stand in line for the woefully inadequate lab resources? Do they get "special for academic use only" versions of windows and MSVC that allows them to execute their own code? What does it mean for professional developers, no development station can ever be on the network because it can't be trusted? That's going to make for some intersting development and testing work.
Why not pass a hat around and get enough money for a "linux" substitution in Apple's 1984 commercial? Never saw that one on TV enough anyway.
Hmm, so what about copyright issues on this? Do the companies that made the original commercials get any say in this matter? If you went through with that idea I'd imagine Apple would be pretty unhappy.
Instead of spending millions and millions to build new machines and install them all over and teach everyone how to use them, why not just use the existing, proven, tested, installed, and WORKING infrastructure?
Just re-issue all social security card as credit card sized with magnetic stripes instead of just paper. Plug yours in any ATM on election day, vote on the screen, done. Sure it'd need software side work to switch the ATMs over for one day every 4 years when a specific card type is inserted but compared to what, building all new custom hardware? Plus installing it, maintaining it, and storing it when not in use?
And which is easier to gain corrupt control over, a couple of companies building new hardware, or every major bank in the USA?
Network security? The network's already been in use for secure transactions for over a decade. I doubt it has any major issues left, and it's constantly watched for problems already.
"Oh but what if someone steals my card?" Well what if someone steals your existing card now? It's still a problem, but it's not as common as people think. How many times have you lost your license? Major credit card? I think I lost my wallet once, when I was 16. Haven't since. Same procedure for credit cards, call, cancel, get a new one. There's too many people voting even in this apathetic country for it to be worth mugging people for their cards the night before an election.
"What about pin numbers so we know the right person has it?" Well first they'd have to steal your card, which isn't that common. I suppose you could issue random pins with the cards but people would likely forget it for a card you use once every 4 years or so. If you use something as common as birthdate or zipcode it'll be easy for anyone who's stolen the card to guess anyway. So why bother? Go with ease of use. You'd get 1000x as many "I forgot my PIN" calls than "I lost my card" calls.
Half the reason people don't vote is because it's a pain in the ass to go down there if you've got work and stuff to do on election day. If you could just pop your social security card into any ATM you pass and vote in 2 minutes, I'd bet alot more people would be voting.
Gee I dunno, maybe the fact that he was put on trial for homosexuality, found guilty, and forced to take hormone treatments instead of a prision sentence? Simple google search on his hame would bring up plenty of evidence, or you could try looking for a biography in your local library. From what I've read he was quite open about it, which is why the trial came about in 1952 or so.
I mean, the way this works you can just prosecute someone for the potential of them assisting in a crime. If someone goes and says "I'm gonna kill you!" to me, I could get them charged with murder since there's knives in their kitchen so they could potentially kill me, and they were saying they were gonna. I can probably get his friends who drove him to my house charged as accessories for enabling the crime too. Doesn't matter I'm still alive, we'll just assume he committed a crime because he has the means to commit it.
I for one welcome our new thought-policing overlords and their department of pre-crime.
Ok, how about OLD movies? Say, something you have a copy of that has since gone out of circulation on DVD and has no chance in hell of being re-released in theaters or shown on TV? This happens with books and music quite often, not everything is in circulation.
So do my files become jailbait again when the studio decides it's no longer profitable to press more copies and blockbuster ditches it to clear shelf space?
Copyright infringement isn't theft, since it doesn't deprive someone else of anything. It's copyright infringement and is illegal. It's also a civil offense, not a criminal offense, like say... shoplifting a CD or DVD, since that would deprive the store of a physical object and the potential revenue from it's sale. See now that's theft, which is a criminal offense, and you'd face harsh penalties of maybe a $200 fine in most states, as opposed to the civil offense of copyright infringment, where you're liable for what... 12 songs on a cd x 150,000 each, 1.8 million dollars?
Let me know if there's parts you still don't understand.
But that would require us to move around to power our electronic devices, and I don't think too many slashdotters do all that much moving around.
How about one of those blood sugar powered setups. Then your laptop could help you lose weight without all that inconvenient moving around. I can see it now. "I need to finish this paper by midnight, bring me more Krispy Kremes NOW!"
I know there seems to be a little pickup in helpdesk and support IT around here, I think it may be related to machine lifespans. If the average company upgraded most of their desktops in 99 out of y2k paranoia, how long before they all start dying and need replacements?
But since you already know the number is a factor of itself, so you don't need to print that. So given a prime number, you only need to print the remaining factors, which are... 1. Since 1 is always length 1, the program can print the factors of a prime number (excluding itself) in O(1) time.
Seriously though, it's a good idea if it catches on. People are starting to accumulate data they want or need to carry around and use in different places in different machines. I'd much rather have people plug their own machine into a docking station at my house than constantly bug me "Can I use your computer to check my mail?" and have to worry about them screwing up my machine.
The main obstacle is getting enough power and storage without losing portability and compatability. PDAs seem to have a problem with the latter, most are very limited in what they can run. Laptops seem to have problems with the former. To get a decent battery life and features you often wind up having to haul around 5lbs more hardware.
The big problem I can see with it is there's no standard for the docking bay design. Which means proprietary systems that are no good. There needs to be a standard design for this kind of thing so they all work in each other's docks and you can just plug your base unit into anyone's keyboard, monitor, cd drive, sound system etc.
I've seen the Acer. It's a little too small for me. I want one of the 12" ones. The Toshiba 3505 is nice but too slow and power hungry. The new Fujitsu T3010 seems about right though.
Wacom puts the pressure sensor in the pen, and they make the best digitizer that most of the tablets use, so on most you can just buy one of the better sensitive pens and never use the crappy bundled one that comes with the tablet.
I think the tilt sensor might be pen-dependant too, I'm not sure if it's actually sensed by the screen or if it's a gyro system in the pen itself or some kind of differential compare in the pen between top and bottom (most likely I think).
Who's seriously going to want to write their word documents? I type about 5x faster than I can possibly scribble with a pen, and with fewer errors to boot.
But I'm dying to get one of these to draw on!
Maybe if they bundled some of the better pressure sensitive pens and photoshop and painter instead of office, they'd find that people were more interested in using them as digital sketchbooks. I know some people say the digitizers aren't up to it, but from what I've read on tablet pc forums, it depends on which one you get. The ones with the newer Wacom based digitizers are supposedly pretty good if you're using one of the decent Wacom pens, which are all interchangeable with the crappy ones bundled with the tablets.
Maybe they should try pitching them more towards art students, and maybe try to bring the prices down a bit. I wish apple would make one of the convertable flip-over type tablets because I'm betting they could get it right on the first try. It's probably the only way I'd ever consider buying a mac, but I'd buy one in a heartbeat if they did it.
Cellphones will become extinct as PDAs with cellphone capabiltiy become common!
My local supermarket beta tested this years ago.
on
Shopping Carts Go Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It failed miserably. The system was called smart cart or smart shop or something lame like that. They had little 9" black and white LCD screens on the carts and heavy ass lead acid batteries in the bottom. The screens had infrared sensors and there were transmitters hanging above the isles that'd beam updated data as you walked down then. Lots of blurry little animations and stuff. I never found it useful.
The reason the program failed is because the local kids smashed them all for the fun of it. It doesn't matter that the hardware won't run anything useful, people like to break stuff. A steel shopping cart in itself isn't that fun, but if it's got electronics on it to smash, it's alot more appealing to the bored and destructive.
I don't think there's much of a doubt the Dells will ship with WindowsXP. I think most people will agree that the Apple laptops are going to be less of a headache to the people administering them and keeping everything functional. They may also be slightly easier to use or to teach the kids how to use.
But what also needs to be considered is what kind of skills the kids are going to acquire for use out in the real world. Face it, not that many places are using OSX and alot are using Windows. Alot of these kids may also be likely to have windows machines at home.
So, if you get to teach them how to use one OS and its major applications, which do you think they'll be more likely to run into in the future?
It's not about which is the better OS or which has the lower total cost, it's about which will provide the better education.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still suffering from this utter nightmare of Pentium III id codes that just made using the internet a living hell. No really, you remember when the sky fell back when they were announced?
/sarcasm
Also I'm upset because it's impossible to get around the DVD regions and watch discs from other countries. Asia fears the DMCA so much that it's impossible to find a player that does not submit to the region codes.
ok
Seriously, this isn't going to work. Taiwan will have cloned BIOSes out faster than you can say "Overclocking is popular!" and warez groups will have the can only run on trusted hardware feature of the next windows cracked faster than you can say "Product Activation".
Give it 8 months. Even if there isn't an outcry that gets it reversed or ignorable like the P3 chip codes, I'm betting some major MB manufacturer *coughABITcough* will have something like, dual bios, trusted/untrusted with a toggle between them.
As for network routers killing "untrusted" clients, how do businesses expect to keep their linux servers on the network? Yeah, I think either we'll be seeing other OSes support it, or it'll be turned off more often than on. Also what about network-aware appliances like attatched storage, printers etc? I doubt it'll be that easy to convince businesses to just toss them as incompatible. They probably will just patch their existing windows desktops and stay on 2000, xp, or 2003 or whatever doesn't have this nuisance. I know tons of places that still refuse to move up from 2000 to XP.
Also, if only "trusted" software runs, I'm curious how students will do programming assignments on their computers at college. Do they just stand in line for the woefully inadequate lab resources? Do they get "special for academic use only" versions of windows and MSVC that allows them to execute their own code? What does it mean for professional developers, no development station can ever be on the network because it can't be trusted? That's going to make for some intersting development and testing work.
Why not pass a hat around and get enough money for a "linux" substitution in Apple's 1984 commercial? Never saw that one on TV enough anyway.
Hmm, so what about copyright issues on this? Do the companies that made the original commercials get any say in this matter? If you went through with that idea I'd imagine Apple would be pretty unhappy.
Instead of spending millions and millions to build new machines and install them all over and teach everyone how to use them, why not just use the existing, proven, tested, installed, and WORKING infrastructure?
Just re-issue all social security card as credit card sized with magnetic stripes instead of just paper. Plug yours in any ATM on election day, vote on the screen, done. Sure it'd need software side work to switch the ATMs over for one day every 4 years when a specific card type is inserted but compared to what, building all new custom hardware? Plus installing it, maintaining it, and storing it when not in use?
And which is easier to gain corrupt control over, a couple of companies building new hardware, or every major bank in the USA?
Network security? The network's already been in use for secure transactions for over a decade. I doubt it has any major issues left, and it's constantly watched for problems already.
"Oh but what if someone steals my card?" Well what if someone steals your existing card now? It's still a problem, but it's not as common as people think. How many times have you lost your license? Major credit card? I think I lost my wallet once, when I was 16. Haven't since. Same procedure for credit cards, call, cancel, get a new one. There's too many people voting even in this apathetic country for it to be worth mugging people for their cards the night before an election.
"What about pin numbers so we know the right person has it?" Well first they'd have to steal your card, which isn't that common. I suppose you could issue random pins with the cards but people would likely forget it for a card you use once every 4 years or so. If you use something as common as birthdate or zipcode it'll be easy for anyone who's stolen the card to guess anyway. So why bother? Go with ease of use. You'd get 1000x as many "I forgot my PIN" calls than "I lost my card" calls.
Half the reason people don't vote is because it's a pain in the ass to go down there if you've got work and stuff to do on election day. If you could just pop your social security card into any ATM you pass and vote in 2 minutes, I'd bet alot more people would be voting.
Gee I dunno, maybe the fact that he was put on trial for homosexuality, found guilty, and forced to take hormone treatments instead of a prision sentence? Simple google search on his hame would bring up plenty of evidence, or you could try looking for a biography in your local library. From what I've read he was quite open about it, which is why the trial came about in 1952 or so.
I mean, the way this works you can just prosecute someone for the potential of them assisting in a crime. If someone goes and says "I'm gonna kill you!" to me, I could get them charged with murder since there's knives in their kitchen so they could potentially kill me, and they were saying they were gonna. I can probably get his friends who drove him to my house charged as accessories for enabling the crime too. Doesn't matter I'm still alive, we'll just assume he committed a crime because he has the means to commit it.
I for one welcome our new thought-policing overlords and their department of pre-crime.
Oh Google cache, why hast thou forsaken me? :P
Ok, how about OLD movies? Say, something you have a copy of that has since gone out of circulation on DVD and has no chance in hell of being re-released in theaters or shown on TV? This happens with books and music quite often, not everything is in circulation.
So do my files become jailbait again when the studio decides it's no longer profitable to press more copies and blockbuster ditches it to clear shelf space?
So how exactly will it be different from now?
Copyright infringement isn't theft, since it doesn't deprive someone else of anything. It's copyright infringement and is illegal. It's also a civil offense, not a criminal offense, like say... shoplifting a CD or DVD, since that would deprive the store of a physical object and the potential revenue from it's sale. See now that's theft, which is a criminal offense, and you'd face harsh penalties of maybe a $200 fine in most states, as opposed to the civil offense of copyright infringment, where you're liable for what... 12 songs on a cd x 150,000 each, 1.8 million dollars?
Let me know if there's parts you still don't understand.
How about one of those blood sugar powered setups. Then your laptop could help you lose weight without all that inconvenient moving around. I can see it now. "I need to finish this paper by midnight, bring me more Krispy Kremes NOW!"
It's called counterstrike. I can't figure out why it's popular.
Now we've exhausted the wonders list for our civilization to build! I guess we go conquering enemy cities then?
I know there seems to be a little pickup in helpdesk and support IT around here, I think it may be related to machine lifespans. If the average company upgraded most of their desktops in 99 out of y2k paranoia, how long before they all start dying and need replacements?
But since you already know the number is a factor of itself, so you don't need to print that. So given a prime number, you only need to print the remaining factors, which are... 1. Since 1 is always length 1, the program can print the factors of a prime number (excluding itself) in O(1) time.
Didn't we already try this?
That's handy to know, even if it's only useful for macs. How easy is it to set it up so that the system knows to boot off the ipod?
Actually I was thinking more like one of these. If apple made anything similar, I'd consider it.
Seriously though, it's a good idea if it catches on. People are starting to accumulate data they want or need to carry around and use in different places in different machines. I'd much rather have people plug their own machine into a docking station at my house than constantly bug me "Can I use your computer to check my mail?" and have to worry about them screwing up my machine.
The main obstacle is getting enough power and storage without losing portability and compatability. PDAs seem to have a problem with the latter, most are very limited in what they can run. Laptops seem to have problems with the former. To get a decent battery life and features you often wind up having to haul around 5lbs more hardware.
The big problem I can see with it is there's no standard for the docking bay design. Which means proprietary systems that are no good. There needs to be a standard design for this kind of thing so they all work in each other's docks and you can just plug your base unit into anyone's keyboard, monitor, cd drive, sound system etc.
I've seen the Acer. It's a little too small for me. I want one of the 12" ones. The Toshiba 3505 is nice but too slow and power hungry. The new Fujitsu T3010 seems about right though.
Wacom puts the pressure sensor in the pen, and they make the best digitizer that most of the tablets use, so on most you can just buy one of the better sensitive pens and never use the crappy bundled one that comes with the tablet.
I think the tilt sensor might be pen-dependant too, I'm not sure if it's actually sensed by the screen or if it's a gyro system in the pen itself or some kind of differential compare in the pen between top and bottom (most likely I think).
Who's seriously going to want to write their word documents? I type about 5x faster than I can possibly scribble with a pen, and with fewer errors to boot.
But I'm dying to get one of these to draw on!
Maybe if they bundled some of the better pressure sensitive pens and photoshop and painter instead of office, they'd find that people were more interested in using them as digital sketchbooks. I know some people say the digitizers aren't up to it, but from what I've read on tablet pc forums, it depends on which one you get. The ones with the newer Wacom based digitizers are supposedly pretty good if you're using one of the decent Wacom pens, which are all interchangeable with the crappy ones bundled with the tablets.
Maybe they should try pitching them more towards art students, and maybe try to bring the prices down a bit. I wish apple would make one of the convertable flip-over type tablets because I'm betting they could get it right on the first try. It's probably the only way I'd ever consider buying a mac, but I'd buy one in a heartbeat if they did it.
Cellphones will become extinct as PDAs with cellphone capabiltiy become common!
It failed miserably. The system was called smart cart or smart shop or something lame like that. They had little 9" black and white LCD screens on the carts and heavy ass lead acid batteries in the bottom. The screens had infrared sensors and there were transmitters hanging above the isles that'd beam updated data as you walked down then. Lots of blurry little animations and stuff. I never found it useful.
The reason the program failed is because the local kids smashed them all for the fun of it. It doesn't matter that the hardware won't run anything useful, people like to break stuff. A steel shopping cart in itself isn't that fun, but if it's got electronics on it to smash, it's alot more appealing to the bored and destructive.
I mean if American parts and Russian parts are all made in Taiwan, where are Chinese parts made?
P.S. It's a movie reference for those of you who don't get it.
You mean like a RAID1? Yeah I think there might be something for that somewhere...
I don't think there's much of a doubt the Dells will ship with WindowsXP. I think most people will agree that the Apple laptops are going to be less of a headache to the people administering them and keeping everything functional. They may also be slightly easier to use or to teach the kids how to use.
But what also needs to be considered is what kind of skills the kids are going to acquire for use out in the real world. Face it, not that many places are using OSX and alot are using Windows. Alot of these kids may also be likely to have windows machines at home.
So, if you get to teach them how to use one OS and its major applications, which do you think they'll be more likely to run into in the future?
It's not about which is the better OS or which has the lower total cost, it's about which will provide the better education.