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User: WoTG

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  1. Wow, I was wrong... on Nokia's N-Gage - Savaged By Online Opinion · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Before seeing the pictures of "Side Talking" on one of the sites in the article, I thought the N-gage concept was OK. I didn't realize how stupid the phone portion of the device was! I stand thoroughly corrected... it's hard to describe how shocked I am that a product like that could come to market - someone please tell me there is a standard hands free headset at least!

  2. Cute. But a little pricey! on Japanese Airline Sells Flight Sim On-Board · · Score: 1

    For $26 you get to buy an advertisement for the airline... It seems like something that should be given away - unless the developers are on some sort of commission.

  3. Re:one thousand million dollars plausible?? on McDonald's Denies Deal With iTunes · · Score: 1

    Yes! Especially since for $1 Billion McD's could buy around 12% of Apple (~8.5B market cap). I know, it's not the same thing... but it does put things in perspective. A multiyear deal, plus a nice discount, is very much a possibility. I might even bet on it.

  4. Re:How to avoid your banner ads being blocked on Norton Antivirus 2004 Ad Blocking - Tough Call? · · Score: 1

    The only problem is that this story isn't about "non-clickers". I haven't read the article (yet!) but it sounds like this is the DEFAULT setting of a VERY popular anti-virus program. It's NOT people going out to install software specifically for blocking ads, or using null routed hosts files.

    These are average folk who want anti-virus protection. I don't like it personally. It'll just drive web developers into silliness to work around the system - or if this becomes a "checkbox" feature of all antivirus programs, content websites might shut down altogether, who wins then?

  5. This is huge. on Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire SUSE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Excellent move for Novell. They were smart enough to realize that NetWare has had it's day, and it's time to move on.

    I'll paraphrase a post someone made on another website, "What company is going to think twice about their Linux suppliers viability when that company is Novell (with a touch of IBM thrown in)?". I think this will work out very, very, well for Novell as Linux makes it's way out from the server room onto the desktop.

  6. End of Life for NT 4.0? on Netcraft Claims Apache Now Runs 2/3rds Of The Web · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if the upcoming (or is it recently passed by now?) end of support for NT 4.0 is a factor. I would guess that some of the parked domains could be running on NT. With the end of support, these registrars would face either a paid upgrade to W2K/2003 or a free upgrade to Apache on Linux (or whatever) - or I guess they could stay with NT, and live without new security patches...

  7. Re:What about today's Xbox? on More On IBM's Next-Gen Xbox Chipset Win · · Score: 1

    Or failing that, almost any modern x86 will do. The beauty of a standard ISA, eh?

  8. Re:And here in Canada... on E-Voting Done Right - In Australia · · Score: 1

    Yeah, our elections are pretty smooth. A few things that work against the US elections that should be pointed out:

    Our elections are relatively small in terms of questions and choices involved. I was quite shocked to see the election "guide" from some county in California that one of my Poli-Sci profs showed us. It was literally 20 or 30 pages of names for a couple dozen positions PLUS several referendum. The sheer size of it must make ballots, vote counting, and voting equipment significantly more difficult to do well.

    Second, Canada's smaller! New York, Florida, and California are individually close to the same size as Canada population wise. Though, that shouldn't be a large factor. Our voting system would scale pretty well, I think.

    Third, we have a single political body to define election systems for the entire country (for Federal elections anyway). This means that it's the exact same election across the country. E.g. the ballot format, counting technology, and counting process are the same throughout the country. Bigger entities can spend the appropriate time to create an adequate election system - IIRC, in the US it's up to the county to pick counting systems.

  9. I'm surprised they haven't raised the money yet. on Compiere on Postgres/MySQL · · Score: 1

    I looked at Compiere a little over a year ago. At that time there was already a lot of talk about raising money for a port/recode to java middleware+postgresql. It made sense, and I assumed they'd reach their funding goal in short order. They already had several users, most of whom were paying Oracle thousands anually for support contracts - why wouldn't they pledge to get the port done, and then pay someone (presumably a lot less) for comparable postgresql support? I guess it doesn't work as easily as that.

    Perhaps an escrow agent of sorts is required to take pledges in a more professional or secure manner?

  10. Re:You're thinking of the REX 6000 on Credit Card Sized Concept PDA from Citizen · · Score: 1

    Again, at the time (and even now on many phones), SIM-card's don't hold that many numbers. I don't know the exact number but I think it's more than 100 less than 500. Never mind addresses, notes, and the other data you could store on a REX

    No one would turn on a laptop just to enter a single contact. Jot the contact info down on a piece of paper and deal with it later - the same way people SHOULD do it now with phones and palms. It's annoying (if not rude!) to make the other person spend two minutes waiting while you punch in a single phone number into your phone! (Ok, it's a bit of a pet peeve)

  11. Re:You're thinking of the REX 6000 on Credit Card Sized Concept PDA from Citizen · · Score: 1

    Well, it was a few years ago when phones stored at max 100 phone numbers. More importantly, it sync'd with your address book on the PC - yeah, some higher end phones at the time probably did too. Otherwise, one is left entering data by phone buttons - which I absolutely hate.

  12. Re:It's questionable on Google Rebuffs Microsoft Takeover Bid · · Score: 1

    Sounds about right, but it doesn't have to be an all -cash purchase. Sounds like Google would have sold around 10-20% of itself in an IPO (2B out of 9B - 9 Billion probably a little low...). So, MS could easily offer 2-4 Billion in cash, and 5-10 Billion in stock. It's still a relative drop in the bucket for Microsoft.

  13. Re:You're thinking of the REX 6000 on Credit Card Sized Concept PDA from Citizen · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used a REX for a couple years. It was quite good for it's intended tasks. The lack of input was a pain, but actually not as bad as it sounds at first. It was first and foremost a phonebook, like Palms were at first. For new or updated contacts you'd have to jot down the data with a good old pen and paper, then update the contact in Outlook, or other compatible software. The next sync and you'd be good to go. Don't forget, Palm + Grafiti isn't the fastest data input method either. I tend to jot things to paper first - especially if it's info from over the phone.

    Some of the last models of REX's had limited input capability. They used the 4 (5?) buttons, in a similar manner to the way game consoles use their controllers for entering text and numbers. I assume it was suitable for updating phone or email addresses in a pinch.

    The size of the Rex was outstanding. I didn't think twice about carrying it around all day. I can't say the same about my Palm Pilot. If I could combine the size of the Rex, with the features of a Palm, I'd be interested.

  14. Good excuse to get an ipod! on Best Redundant Storage for Home Use? · · Score: 1

    They're firewire drives right? Nice and portable. Just load it up with your backup and leave it at the office.

    No, I've never done it... wish I had the iPod to try it with though. =) Does regular drive access work with non-Macs?

  15. Re:extra cost.. on On Game Consoles As Multimedia Devices · · Score: 1

    Yep. The next generation of consoles will probably all have hard disks (ala Xbox). The smallest drive available will be 40GB in the near future... so... why not use all that space for PVR features? The "only" incremental cost would be a TV decoder, which is probably a single chip nowadays.

    I'd definitely consider a console+dvr unit.

  16. Hmm... maybe this will be the start of... on Pacman for Excel 97 and 2000 · · Score: 1

    games running under Office. With chips getting faster, how about a MAME emulator in VBA?

  17. Bigger hard drives? on Xbox Gets Japanese Dress-Up, Rumored Price Cut, Giveaway · · Score: 1

    I wonder how many more 10GB drives are kicking around in warehouses... wouldn't it be CHEAPER for MS to move to something a little bit bigger? I've always assumed that XBoxes used off the shelf hard drives, well, 10GB drives (smaller in some machines) haven't been on shelves for quite a while...

  18. Anyone else tired of 'ster's? on Leapfrog Launches GBA-Style Educational Handheld · · Score: 1

    Napster was 5 years ago... why must that 'ster suffix still be so popular? Isn't it about time to come up with something new?

  19. Re:Am I the only one who UNDERCLOCKS? on AMD Optimal BIOS settings + Overclocking Guide · · Score: 1

    Well, it depends on the definition of "modern". It wasn't too long ago (less than a year) that AMD chips did not reduce power usage by much when in an idle loop. There was some weird issue that prevented proper power savings from occuring. I think this finally changed on the Tbred A's or B's... motherboard support came a little while after that.

  20. Will product activation push people to OSS? on Symantec Hit by Product Activation Glitch · · Score: 1

    I suspect so. It's such a PITA to deal with product activations, especially if you're setting up a brand new network of a few PC's and the internet connection has not been installed yet!!! ARGH. Really, does this reduce piracy? Even if it did, would it serve the long term interests of the software firm? The folks who pirate, probably aren't going to be buying the software if (mythical) unpiratable software is released.

  21. Slightly OT: How good is Access under Crossover? on Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX With CrossOver Office · · Score: 1

    Excellent news on Dreamweaver.

    My question is how good is Access nowadays under Crossover. I see on the list that it can open the sample .mdb file, but I want to know if ODBC works. (It would seem to be a rather hard thing to do, but then again, so is WINE!) This is particularly important for a lot of companies that have software packages from vendors that use Access as a front end to a bigger DB.

  22. OT: Rollover images in a review? on Upcoming SuSE 9.0 Professional Reviewed · · Score: 1

    SuSE 9.0 sounds interesting. Maybe it's time I give SuSE a roll.

    On an OT note, that's a different approach to doing graphs, using two images and some rollover javascript. I must say, it didn't work for me. I kept mistaking them for adverts.

    Go ahead, mod this down now...

  23. Re:For everyone complaining about nuclear waste... on Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Design · · Score: 1

    Right. I forgot about that. Except that most (?) countries don't reprocess waste. Scared that terrorists will steal it somehow...

  24. Another neat module I've never heard of before... on New Apache Module For Web Intrusion Detection · · Score: 1

    I had to browse the site to see what this does, this overview page was good.

    It reminds me of URLScan for MS's IIS - but with extra features.

  25. Re:For everyone complaining about nuclear waste... on Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Design · · Score: 1

    Would this even be the same ... "quality" ... of waste that we get out of current reactors? It seems to me that leaving the fuel in the reactor for 30 years would burn off a lot of the most radoactive biproducts of the initial reaction, like plutonium and cesium. For comparison, I was under the impression that fuel in current reactors stays in the reactor for about 5 years. Anyone who knows more care to correct me?

    You would still have to store the waste for xx thousand years but at least it won't be as radioactive, would it?