Most people NEVER needed a PDA anyway - a calendar and addressbook in a mobile is enough for most people.
Having attempted to use both the calendar and addressbook in my cell phone (which is, granted, the cheapest phone my carrier offered), I am fairly certain anyone that utters this kind of nonsense has never used a PDA for more than a few minutes at a time.
Plus many modern PDAs cost almost as much as a small / low budget laptop. Why bother buying an expensive gizmo if you can the real thing for a bit more? Also subsidized smart phones from network operators will always be cheaper as 'unconnected' PDAs.
You can get a brand new Palm Z22 for $99 plus shipping from Palm's website. The cheapest I've found a brand new laptop was $449.99 at Wal-Mart's website. Granted, the technology in the Z22 isn't the most modern...but neither is the technology in the cheap laptop, and they're both capable of getting the job done (as long as the job isn't playing Doom 3).
As for subsidized smart phones being cheap, the cheapest smartphone my carrier offers is $299 with a new two-year contract, versus the $99 Palm mentioned above.
So in the future we will only have even smarter phones and mini notebooks. PDAs will be gone - they were an evolutionary step to the new offsprings.
Which I'd be fine with...if there were any actual "mini notebooks". All the "mini notebooks" I've seen so far have actually been running Windows CE (yuck) or Linux on an ARM processor. When I can install Windows 2000, Microsoft Office Professional, and Winamp on my handheld, it'll be a mini notebook. And I don't mean something that replicates the functions of those - you can do that today on even reasonably priced handhelds - but the actual original code itself.
For some reason, WMVs inside Firefox never show video at first for me. But when I minimize and restore FF, everything starts working just fine. (Actually, I think it's just covering the WMP display; I'm not at home so I can't check.) This is on Win2k running WMP9 and FF 1.5 - I think the same thing happened on earlier 1.0.x versions of FF as well, not sure. If your set up is the same, you might want to try it.
While I agree with you that religion and science don't need to be mutually exclusive; I think the rest of your logic is flawed. Allow me to explain:
Hypothesize a God that doesn't like people taking things "on faith", and wants His creations to learn through experimentation and reason, but doesn't care about being worshipped. Would this God put those who blindly follow preachers into hell? And what's to stop Him from putting those who contribute to our scientific knowledge into some sort of eternal paradise?
Speaking of which - why does God want to be worshipped anyway? He's omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent - if he wants people to worship Him, or believe in Him, he can simply cause those things to happen. There are those who says "God works in mysterious ways" - sure, but he if mysteriously created some rocks over my head and let them fall, I'd sure be a lot more likely to believe in him!
That wasn't a snake. It was the Noodly Appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (The rest of the FSM was hiding further up the tree.) Oh, and it wasn't an apple that was offered to Eve - it was a tomato.
Somebody probably swapped the cord out with one from a later keyboard, leaving the OP with a 1984-dated keyboard with a PS/2 plug. That kind of thing should be easy to do; I don't think they changed the design much (other than to drop the removable cord that came with the original IBM PC) over the entire lifespan of the Model M keyboard.
Why not patent the process of taking out patents? Let me know if you find a way to phrase it that will get it by the patent examiners - I'm too lazy to do so myself.
I find this amusing, seeing as Douglas Adams had the idea for "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" as he was hitchiking through Europe - accompanied by a book called "The Hitchiker's Guide to Europe."
Agreed. Trying to use a design pattern that is close, but not quite, what you need, is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: It may work if you use a big enough hammer, but it's never going to be as good as just using a round peg.
Everyone: Please ignore this book, and actually solve the problems you have; rather than attempting to look up the answer in this "solutions manual" for writing programs.
Well, sure, if you don't care about the quality of your porn. If you do, you should probably having a separate drive as a "staging area" to review things before you move it off to the "archive" drive(s). A nice, cheap, 100GB drive should do - you'll have to take time to review two or three times a week, though. Better stock up on hand lotion.
If the margin that the record companies make on selling music troubles you, you'd be in for some sad times indeed if you were to learn where record industry margins fall in relation to margins for the food, clothing and computer accessories and pretty much everything else that you buy.
You're positively fucking crazy. Grocery stores survive on very small margin. (Restaurants are often the same, except on soft drinks, on which they make huge profits.) When you first look at it, the markup on computers looks better, but then you have to factor in tech support, which is a huge cost. You're right about clothing...if you're talking about brands that are currently fashionable - but if you go shop at Wal-Mart or Target for generic brand clothes, they're pretty cheap.
(I've been looking for a breakdown of where all the money a consumer pays for a CD ends up - anyone got a link for that?)
I think the grandparent post is correct - if Photoshop CS was $15.99 at Wal-Mart, you'd buy it because you had a couple of extra bucks that week. But it's not, it's $559.99 at amazon.com. I'd say that's prohibitively high for a lot of people who would use at a hobby-level rather than professionally, or would like to have it on hand in case something came up where they needed it. Sure, you'd still got a lot of piracy in places like China, but that's always going to happen. If you drop your price from $560 to $16 and eliminate the dead-tree version of the fat book, you've reduced your costs and gone from having a distribution of 2% of your potential market actually buying your product, 90% of the potential market pirating it, and 8% moving on to free work-alikes (The GIMP) or cheaper work-alikes or just not bothering; and moved to a situation where 90% of your product actually buys your product. (Yes, I made those numbers. Has anyone done a study on this?)
If I thought it feasible, yes, I would. It's not feasible, so no, I don't.
You could wear a mask. That would conceal your identity. (Unless you used your credit card, which would give away your identity. Oh, and it would make the security guys suspicious.)
I trust my credit card company, because hey, it's their money I'm spending. If they decide to be bastards, then I'll just not freakin' pay 'em.;-)
Good luck getting another credit card after the first time you decide to pull that trick. You do know that all the credit-issuing banks communicate with the credit reporting agencies on a regular basis, right? And you do know what your credit score is, right?
I know that a bank has legal limitations on how it can deal with customer information and I'm comfortable with those limitations.
So? Legal limitations only mean that the police can arrest people who violate those limitations. This won't stop someone who is determined to become a criminal from doing things which, legally, banks are not allowed to do. I work for a bank. There's all kinds of things I could do that go beyond those limitations, but I don't do them.
I have a grocery card. It says I'm a 57 year old black woman named "Monica". Or at least it did, I've traded with other people several times. Dunno who's identity I'm shopping with now.:)
Great. Now the grocery chain is shipping the black currant jelly you like to whichever store the person to whom you gave your last card shops at, because they think you've moved. The grocery industry has extremely slim margins, and this kind of thing could put them out of business. Then, where will you get your black currant jelly?
Your paranoia is not totally unjustified, however. If you were attempting to hide from, but I felt I needed to find you, these are exactly the kinds of information about you that I would attempt to get my hands on. If I know that you always go to the same place to fill your car's tank, I can simply camp out there until you show up. Same for grocery stores, convenience stores, etc. Does the convenience and savings you gain by using these things justify the risk that poses to you? To me, it does. If it doesn't to you, fine; but don't bitch about if I decide to take that risk for myself.
Oh, and as for your issues with "targetted marketing" (targetted about the same way as a shotgun, from what I can tell!): If you're smart enough to realize that companies are going to attempt to target you, you're smart enough to figure out you don't need what they're selling.
Damn right! and Mod parent up! and other good shit like that.
You need to understand not only what you're doing but what the inputs and outputs of the program you're writing are, preferably in as raw a form as you can get them. If that means dummying up a server on port 80 so you can look at raw HTTP requests, do it!
You know mastadons were herbivores (barring the occasional insect they get with their foliage), right? You might have gotten trampled by one, or gored by one of their tusks, but not eaten by.
Unless this was some sort of ice age factory farm, where they fed even herbivores with the remains of other animals...?
--Ender PS I'd think the kzinti would have been offended by even the thought of someone feeding a Hero to a herbivore - even a large one like a mastadon. Anyone dumb enough to try is a kshat.
I'll probably kick myself later for bothering to post this, but what the hell.
Both of these problems can solved just as easily in ways that DO NOT involve extra eye candy.
For example on Max OS when you minimize a Window it does a fancy dgeni efect which allows your eyes know that the window just didn't go away but it shrunk into a spot on the dock.
Label the task bar "Running Programs", so that users know these programs are running. Additional eye candy: None.
Semi-Transparencies are good to. It help the person realize there is something under your window.
You know that task bar I mentioned earlier? Don't allow windows of any sort (including dialog boxes) that don't show up there, unless they are MDI-type child windows that will always show up in the application. Also, force all non-MDI child windows to be on top of their parent application (to prevent the '"this application isn't responding, what happened?" followed by minimizing everything to discover a modal dialog' problem). Additional eye candy: None. This one does involve some additional coding, but not that much, and it should all be at the GUI level, not individual applications.
Eyecandy when used correctly is not a waist of processing for trivial things but actually an important key in having people understand the environment.
It seems to me that you can achieve the same goals by actually thinking through the complete environment design, from the standpoint of a total n00b, and come up with equivalent solutions that don't require additional eye candy.
...and I can't think of a single instance in which semi-transparent or animated menus would useful. I'm sure my mom would think they are really neat, though. (She thinks the Canon(?) printer driver that tells her - out loud! - "Printing started" is really neat, so that shows what kind of sophistication you can expect from my mom.) On the other hand, semi-transparent/translucent applications, for some people, are good for monitoring things in the background, so that item may not be a total waste of time, though I've never had any use for it myself.
Did you read the article? It implies (without outright stating it) that BitTorrent itself, not user stupidity, is the reason that nail.exe and the BitTorrent executable are on the same machine. Which is, I guarantee you, completely false. I don't recall the specifics of setting up BitTorrent, but I bet that there is *zero* chance of BitTorrent installing anything without the user's knowledge.
It's the difference between "BitTorrent spreads spyware" (false) and "BitTorrent is used to spread spyware" (probably true, though I've never encountered any myself) that's being ignored, and that's what Bram should be addressing.
I was hoping that Bram would address that article claiming that BitTorrent is being used to distribute spyware instead of this Avalanche crap. I think it's more important to keep people from being afraid of using BitTorrent than it is to deal with misconceptions about a program that isn't even out in beta form yet.
The AC above is right - I grabbed incorrect values for, actually, two of my constants, which totally screwed up my calculations. (I copied one of the constants out of a Google result, not realizing that it had an "x" I didn't need. The other was, I will admit, sheer stupidity, as there are two things that give essentially the same information and I grabbed the wrong one.) I recalculated with the correct constants and got a force of 18.37 N on a 1 kg mass, so, yes, around 1.9G at the surface.
Using Google to come up with necessary constants gives me: ((6.67300 × 10E-11) * (7.5 * 5.97200E24)) / ((2 * 12 756 300)^2)
(I used a theoretical 1 kilogram test mass, at the planet's surface, to simplify things.)...which Google says is approximately 45.92 N. A one kilogram mass on Earth should exert a downward force due to gravity of 9.8 N if I remember my physics classes correctly.
So, call it about 4.7 times the gravity of Earth. Life? Possibly - but I sure as hell wouldn't want to move there.
Slashdot Mirror
Having attempted to use both the calendar and addressbook in my cell phone (which is, granted, the cheapest phone my carrier offered), I am fairly certain anyone that utters this kind of nonsense has never used a PDA for more than a few minutes at a time.
You can get a brand new Palm Z22 for $99 plus shipping from Palm's website. The cheapest I've found a brand new laptop was $449.99 at Wal-Mart's website. Granted, the technology in the Z22 isn't the most modern...but neither is the technology in the cheap laptop, and they're both capable of getting the job done (as long as the job isn't playing Doom 3).
As for subsidized smart phones being cheap, the cheapest smartphone my carrier offers is $299 with a new two-year contract, versus the $99 Palm mentioned above.
Which I'd be fine with...if there were any actual "mini notebooks". All the "mini notebooks" I've seen so far have actually been running Windows CE (yuck) or Linux on an ARM processor. When I can install Windows 2000, Microsoft Office Professional, and Winamp on my handheld, it'll be a mini notebook. And I don't mean something that replicates the functions of those - you can do that today on even reasonably priced handhelds - but the actual original code itself.
--Ender
For some reason, WMVs inside Firefox never show video at first for me. But when I minimize and restore FF, everything starts working just fine. (Actually, I think it's just covering the WMP display; I'm not at home so I can't check.) This is on Win2k running WMP9 and FF 1.5 - I think the same thing happened on earlier 1.0.x versions of FF as well, not sure. If your set up is the same, you might want to try it.
While I agree with you that religion and science don't need to be mutually exclusive; I think the rest of your logic is flawed. Allow me to explain:
Hypothesize a God that doesn't like people taking things "on faith", and wants His creations to learn through experimentation and reason, but doesn't care about being worshipped. Would this God put those who blindly follow preachers into hell? And what's to stop Him from putting those who contribute to our scientific knowledge into some sort of eternal paradise?
Speaking of which - why does God want to be worshipped anyway? He's omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent - if he wants people to worship Him, or believe in Him, he can simply cause those things to happen. There are those who says "God works in mysterious ways" - sure, but he if mysteriously created some rocks over my head and let them fall, I'd sure be a lot more likely to believe in him!
--Ender
Do you do rishathra?
That wasn't a snake. It was the Noodly Appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (The rest of the FSM was hiding further up the tree.) Oh, and it wasn't an apple that was offered to Eve - it was a tomato.
--Ender
Bah! iMacs aren't old! Even a Macintosh SE is only middle-aged. If you want an old computer, get a PDP-11!
Well, okay, I jest about Macintosh SE. It's as bad a dinosaur as the PDP-11. But iMacs still aren't old enough to be "old" yet.
--Ender
Somebody probably swapped the cord out with one from a later keyboard, leaving the OP with a 1984-dated keyboard with a PS/2 plug. That kind of thing should be easy to do; I don't think they changed the design much (other than to drop the removable cord that came with the original IBM PC) over the entire lifespan of the Model M keyboard.
--Ender
Where else can I get a mouse with a roller ball built in instead of a scroll wheel?
Targus makes (made?) one. You can buy it from geeks.com. Hell, here's a link so you don't even have to search for it.
Still doesn't help your grandma's confusion, though.
--Ender
Why not patent the process of taking out patents? Let me know if you find a way to phrase it that will get it by the patent examiners - I'm too lazy to do so myself.
--Ender
I find this amusing, seeing as Douglas Adams had the idea for "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" as he was hitchiking through Europe - accompanied by a book called "The Hitchiker's Guide to Europe."
--Ender
Agreed. Trying to use a design pattern that is close, but not quite, what you need, is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: It may work if you use a big enough hammer, but it's never going to be as good as just using a round peg.
Everyone: Please ignore this book, and actually solve the problems you have; rather than attempting to look up the answer in this "solutions manual" for writing programs.
--Ender
Well, sure, if you don't care about the quality of your porn. If you do, you should probably having a separate drive as a "staging area" to review things before you move it off to the "archive" drive(s). A nice, cheap, 100GB drive should do - you'll have to take time to review two or three times a week, though. Better stock up on hand lotion.
--Ender
If the margin that the record companies make on selling music troubles you, you'd be in for some sad times indeed if you were to learn where record industry margins fall in relation to margins for the food, clothing and computer accessories and pretty much everything else that you buy.
You're positively fucking crazy. Grocery stores survive on very small margin. (Restaurants are often the same, except on soft drinks, on which they make huge profits.) When you first look at it, the markup on computers looks better, but then you have to factor in tech support, which is a huge cost. You're right about clothing...if you're talking about brands that are currently fashionable - but if you go shop at Wal-Mart or Target for generic brand clothes, they're pretty cheap.
(I've been looking for a breakdown of where all the money a consumer pays for a CD ends up - anyone got a link for that?)
I think the grandparent post is correct - if Photoshop CS was $15.99 at Wal-Mart, you'd buy it because you had a couple of extra bucks that week. But it's not, it's $559.99 at amazon.com. I'd say that's prohibitively high for a lot of people who would use at a hobby-level rather than professionally, or would like to have it on hand in case something came up where they needed it. Sure, you'd still got a lot of piracy in places like China, but that's always going to happen. If you drop your price from $560 to $16 and eliminate the dead-tree version of the fat book, you've reduced your costs and gone from having a distribution of 2% of your potential market actually buying your product, 90% of the potential market pirating it, and 8% moving on to free work-alikes (The GIMP) or cheaper work-alikes or just not bothering; and moved to a situation where 90% of your product actually buys your product. (Yes, I made those numbers. Has anyone done a study on this?)
--Ender
If I thought it feasible, yes, I would. It's not feasible, so no, I don't.
;-)
:)
You could wear a mask. That would conceal your identity. (Unless you used your credit card, which would give away your identity. Oh, and it would make the security guys suspicious.)
I trust my credit card company, because hey, it's their money I'm spending. If they decide to be bastards, then I'll just not freakin' pay 'em.
Good luck getting another credit card after the first time you decide to pull that trick. You do know that all the credit-issuing banks communicate with the credit reporting agencies on a regular basis, right? And you do know what your credit score is, right?
I know that a bank has legal limitations on how it can deal with customer information and I'm comfortable with those limitations.
So? Legal limitations only mean that the police can arrest people who violate those limitations. This won't stop someone who is determined to become a criminal from doing things which, legally, banks are not allowed to do. I work for a bank. There's all kinds of things I could do that go beyond those limitations, but I don't do them.
I have a grocery card. It says I'm a 57 year old black woman named "Monica". Or at least it did, I've traded with other people several times. Dunno who's identity I'm shopping with now.
Great. Now the grocery chain is shipping the black currant jelly you like to whichever store the person to whom you gave your last card shops at, because they think you've moved. The grocery industry has extremely slim margins, and this kind of thing could put them out of business. Then, where will you get your black currant jelly?
Your paranoia is not totally unjustified, however. If you were attempting to hide from, but I felt I needed to find you, these are exactly the kinds of information about you that I would attempt to get my hands on. If I know that you always go to the same place to fill your car's tank, I can simply camp out there until you show up. Same for grocery stores, convenience stores, etc. Does the convenience and savings you gain by using these things justify the risk that poses to you? To me, it does. If it doesn't to you, fine; but don't bitch about if I decide to take that risk for myself.
Oh, and as for your issues with "targetted marketing" (targetted about the same way as a shotgun, from what I can tell!): If you're smart enough to realize that companies are going to attempt to target you, you're smart enough to figure out you don't need what they're selling.
--Ender
Damn right! and Mod parent up! and other good shit like that.
You need to understand not only what you're doing but what the inputs and outputs of the program you're writing are, preferably in as raw a form as you can get them. If that means dummying up a server on port 80 so you can look at raw HTTP requests, do it!
Sorry, food and drinks are not allowed in the dinosaur pen.
Mainframe culture is the stuff that grows in the dust on the grate over the fan sucking air into the machine room air conditioners.
--Ender
Yes, conditioners. Redundancy is good for critical items.
What, you couldn't be bothered to at least come up with a clever troll?
Not that I blame - I can't be bothered to come up with a clever retort, either.
Fishes,
Ender
You know mastadons were herbivores (barring the occasional insect they get with their foliage), right? You might have gotten trampled by one, or gored by one of their tusks, but not eaten by.
Unless this was some sort of ice age factory farm, where they fed even herbivores with the remains of other animals...?
--Ender
PS I'd think the kzinti would have been offended by even the thought of someone feeding a Hero to a herbivore - even a large one like a mastadon. Anyone dumb enough to try is a kshat.
I was hoping for the same. Or possibly levitation, which would have been really cool.
Both of these problems can solved just as easily in ways that DO NOT involve extra eye candy.
Label the task bar "Running Programs", so that users know these programs are running. Additional eye candy: None.You know that task bar I mentioned earlier? Don't allow windows of any sort (including dialog boxes) that don't show up there, unless they are MDI-type child windows that will always show up in the application. Also, force all non-MDI child windows to be on top of their parent application (to prevent the '"this application isn't responding, what happened?" followed by minimizing everything to discover a modal dialog' problem). Additional eye candy: None. This one does involve some additional coding, but not that much, and it should all be at the GUI level, not individual applications.It seems to me that you can achieve the same goals by actually thinking through the complete environment design, from the standpoint of a total n00b, and come up with equivalent solutions that don't require additional eye candy.
...and I can't think of a single instance in which semi-transparent or animated menus would useful. I'm sure my mom would think they are really neat, though. (She thinks the Canon(?) printer driver that tells her - out loud! - "Printing started" is really neat, so that shows what kind of sophistication you can expect from my mom.) On the other hand, semi-transparent/translucent applications, for some people, are good for monitoring things in the background, so that item may not be a total waste of time, though I've never had any use for it myself.
--Ender
Did you read the article? It implies (without outright stating it) that BitTorrent itself, not user stupidity, is the reason that nail.exe and the BitTorrent executable are on the same machine. Which is, I guarantee you, completely false. I don't recall the specifics of setting up BitTorrent, but I bet that there is *zero* chance of BitTorrent installing anything without the user's knowledge.
It's the difference between "BitTorrent spreads spyware" (false) and "BitTorrent is used to spread spyware" (probably true, though I've never encountered any myself) that's being ignored, and that's what Bram should be addressing.
--Ender
I was hoping that Bram would address that article claiming that BitTorrent is being used to distribute spyware instead of this Avalanche crap. I think it's more important to keep people from being afraid of using BitTorrent than it is to deal with misconceptions about a program that isn't even out in beta form yet.
--Ender
The AC above is right - I grabbed incorrect values for, actually, two of my constants, which totally screwed up my calculations. (I copied one of the constants out of a Google result, not realizing that it had an "x" I didn't need. The other was, I will admit, sheer stupidity, as there are two things that give essentially the same information and I grabbed the wrong one.) I recalculated with the correct constants and got a force of 18.37 N on a 1 kg mass, so, yes, around 1.9G at the surface.
--Ender
I'm glad you weren't my math teacher. My formula and math are correct. (I used Google as my calculator, and to check my memory of the formula.)
I'll give you a cookie if you can tell which constant is off.
--Ender
The correct formula is Fg = G((m1*m2)/(r^2))
...which Google says is approximately 45.92 N. A one kilogram mass on Earth should exert a downward force due to gravity of 9.8 N if I remember my physics classes correctly.
Using Google to come up with necessary constants gives me:
((6.67300 × 10E-11) * (7.5 * 5.97200E24)) / ((2 * 12 756 300)^2)
(I used a theoretical 1 kilogram test mass, at the planet's surface, to simplify things.)
So, call it about 4.7 times the gravity of Earth. Life? Possibly - but I sure as hell wouldn't want to move there.
--Ender