Compared to an iPod it's big, ugly, extremely heavy, poorly engineered, badly integrated with the computer and generally not in any way cool. The iPod is image blended with great functionality, the Zen has no image value and average functionality at best.
Almost right, but better phrasing would be 'the average computer user is ignorant'. They're not stupid, they just don't know how it works.
This is, in my mind, actually worse - you can't help being dumb but you can help not knowing what the hell you're doing. If I bought a car I would make a point of knowing roughly how it worked, how I should maintain it and how to fix basic faults when it goes wrong. I am not a mechanic but it seems to me common sense to understand how somthing I use often works. I would think that non-techies would have this attitude about computers (which they don't neccesarily care about but need every day) just as I have the attitude about cars (which I don't really care about but would use daily).
Re:Alcohol and Consumer Electronics Don't Mix.
on
Take Me Home, I'm Drunk
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· Score: 5, Funny
It depends what you're trying to figure out with your phone. I can attest that I and my friends were completely smashed when the idea came to us that we should all throw our phones at the floor and see which one bounced higher;-)
You could do this for a finite amount of time, and then the fixed magnets would degrade as their energy was lost. I'm not an expert on magnetics by any means, but AFAIK the basic concept is they are a store of potential energy and run down like batteries (oversimplifying greatly since I don't know the technicalities myself).
For a time you do get more energy out than you put in, just like a nuclear reactor, but then just like in the reactor you need to replace your fixed energy store.
Low range, high speed. It's damn irritating having cable spaghetti for all my current USB devices, locating the appropriate connector for device X, Y or Z when I need to attach it and then realising that I need to unplug device A to make space for whatever I just located the cable for.
Bluetooth is too slow for many USB applications. Keyboard and mouse, yes, but even synching my PDA over BT is irritating especially if I want to backup the 128MB memory card. WiFi in my digital camera is unneccesary and if I had a decent cam (which I will probably purchase when I actually have some cash) I don't want to have to transfer 1GB+ of high resolution images over a 54Mbit connection.
WUSB is not an essentia protocol I admit, but it sounds like it will be damn convenient.
I thought that too, but then I'm not in the US and it continually suprises me hearing how conservative many (although I know not all) Americans are (Janet Jackson incident as a prime example) so I guess it's quite probably that soft drug use in the US is considerably rarer than here in the UK.
Firefox comes with a link saying 'Mozilla Firefox help' right there on the toolbar. It takes you to texturizer.net which has a vast quantitiy of helpful hints and combinations of options to set in order to do almost anything you need to do with the browser.
While Fedora may have done the wrong thing with the concept, Mozilla Firefox has it perfect IMO. The standard options are in Tools -> Options and nothing too big can be accidentally broken by anyone but the most resourceful newbie/moron. All the power user options which are extremely useful (number of simultaneous connections, page render delay etc. etc.) but would scare the average user or enable them to easily break stuff (page render delay 10000 = why is my internet b0rked?) are only accesible though the about:config menu. If you don't understand the options shown or know enough to know what you should leave well alone, you sure as hell won't have found out that you can access these options by typing that particular command into the address bar. Anyone who feels the need to alter the number of simultaneous connections allowed will quickly find how to access that menu with the most minimal Googling.
The purchaser gets the chance to be part of the design and testing of the spacecraft before launching whatever onto the surface. I sure as hell know I'd pay a fair amount for the chance to be involved in something that interesting. I'm sure I could think of something useful to put there by the end of the construction process too:-)
Isn't this the exact purpose of Freenet? It's simply more anonymous than your average P2P application to prevent people from being forced into self-censorship.
This will help with the companies like Limewire who are pretty much legit but morally questionable, which is good.
Unfortunately, however, the worst spyware/malware I've seen, the stuff that really grinds computers into the ground and makes people call me to fix their computer that 'just broke' is porn browser bars, porn autodialers etc. These are the kind of companies who are just below the bar of complying to the law but still a little way above outright theft. The legislation is a good idea, but what it'll mean is that there's less spyware out there and what does stay active will be all the worse and better hidden too.
American cinephiles will soon be able to enjoy their movies without sex, violence, swearing - indeed, without any of the interesting bits. (emphasis mine)
Shows the real differences between two cultures that look, on the surface, very similar.
It's extremely simple to input data, but they're using the wrong software. MS Access, which the machines are based on, is not really extensible.
To carry your website example, look at forums (simply because I've got a bit of experience to go on). A forum running on a server with an Access backend can handle a realistic maximum of 5 concurrent users, no matter how powerful the server is - MS even say that in their documentation somewhere. The same forum on even a moderate server running MySQL can handle 300+ concurrent users (and remember this is doing multiple queries per page). On fast hardware and using PGSQL it can easily stretch to over a thousand without problems.
There's a simple test - if we start seeing cowboyneal options on the next US election we know that the real source was released to, and hacked by, the/. community.
Re:Good... down with Real
on
Real Problems
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Real need to take a leaf out of Adobe's book. Look at the acrobat reader - it's free, easy, multi-platform and does what it is supposed to and nothing more
The iPod battery does last for a few years under standard use, just like most other batteries. The reason there was all the fuss about it was back then there was no way to replace them - that's why it was a problem. It was known it would die, but the fact that it killed the iPod and there was no way to fix it (unlike most appliances where you just slide the back off and put a new battery in) was why people had a problem.
It's a non-issue with most existing batteries, so I guess these are similar. Batteries aren't that expensive and you'll get 1000+ charge cycles from them. That equates to several years of standard use from something that costs less than a can of coke, if these become unusable considerably faster than normal they wouldn't risk the bad publicity until they'd fixed it.
I was thinking just copy+paste and then decrypt it, it doesn't really seem like much hassle if you have something so important that you can't let it be traced to your own server or sent in plain text. I've never needed to use anything like that, but I'm sure there are people who do and it's not like it'd be something you would do on every message (I guess) so for the odd message the time to do the copying wouldn't be an issue. Everyone else can just let the scans go as normal or use their own server (provided they aren't sending anything that matters if it's tracable).
While I wouldn't want anything that's really private on this account, I wouldn't want it on hotmail either. I'd either use encryption over existing free services (less tracability) or just use my own mailserver.
Things like credit card numbers, bank data, passwords etc. will be perfectly safe, even if the data is scanned. Google are smart enough not to have the publicity problems they would get if they revealed any private info, and it's not really as if anyone cares what my email says. They are scanned for advertising purposes, they are not proof read to see if anything interesting is happening in my life. I feel safe because I know Google won't do anything with my financail details because they have PR people who know that would cripple their service uptake and I know they couldn't care less about my personal life.
Having said that, for me and I'm sure plenty of other slashdotters it's a moot point - I have my own mailserver which I can check on my home machine via thunderbird, my phone via the built in GPRS mail client and from anywhere else with a browser via squirrelmail. 10GB storage, no attachment limits and unlimited addresses I can check from anywhere - it's easily worth what I pay for it.
In that case I apologise for my mistake - as far as I was aware the 3 network was provding 3G service. That service is (IMO) pretty bad, as I had described, and from what I have heard the 3 network is failing badly at meeting sales targets, hence my statement that 3G in the UK is failing.
Maybe I'm just jaded from testing and selling the damn handsets all day, but IMO the hardware is seriously crap and the network has major failings, not least the coverage. The data service is overpriced compared to GPRS and the speed isn't a huge advantage to most if you can only get it on certain networks in certain areas. Video calling is a joke, you must agree, and the time limited DRM'ed downloads onto your handset aren't really my cup of tea when I can get nice GPL software and rip DVDs onto my 2G smartphone. For the few people who need wireless laptop connectivity and aren't near WiFi hotspots and are in 3G network range I will agree it's pretty good (as long as you don't mind the phone itself not being as good as the 2G smartphones) but for everyone else IMO it's either unneccesary or downright undesirable.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to an iPod it's big, ugly, extremely heavy, poorly engineered, badly integrated with the computer and generally not in any way cool. The iPod is image blended with great functionality, the Zen has no image value and average functionality at best.
Almost right, but better phrasing would be 'the average computer user is ignorant'. They're not stupid, they just don't know how it works.
This is, in my mind, actually worse - you can't help being dumb but you can help not knowing what the hell you're doing. If I bought a car I would make a point of knowing roughly how it worked, how I should maintain it and how to fix basic faults when it goes wrong. I am not a mechanic but it seems to me common sense to understand how somthing I use often works. I would think that non-techies would have this attitude about computers (which they don't neccesarily care about but need every day) just as I have the attitude about cars (which I don't really care about but would use daily).
It depends what you're trying to figure out with your phone. I can attest that I and my friends were completely smashed when the idea came to us that we should all throw our phones at the floor and see which one bounced higher ;-)
Just what I was thinking. I actually still have some of these books based on Sonic the Hedgehog from back in the Megadrive (Genesis) era.
You could do this for a finite amount of time, and then the fixed magnets would degrade as their energy was lost. I'm not an expert on magnetics by any means, but AFAIK the basic concept is they are a store of potential energy and run down like batteries (oversimplifying greatly since I don't know the technicalities myself).
For a time you do get more energy out than you put in, just like a nuclear reactor, but then just like in the reactor you need to replace your fixed energy store.
Low range, high speed. It's damn irritating having cable spaghetti for all my current USB devices, locating the appropriate connector for device X, Y or Z when I need to attach it and then realising that I need to unplug device A to make space for whatever I just located the cable for.
Bluetooth is too slow for many USB applications. Keyboard and mouse, yes, but even synching my PDA over BT is irritating especially if I want to backup the 128MB memory card. WiFi in my digital camera is unneccesary and if I had a decent cam (which I will probably purchase when I actually have some cash) I don't want to have to transfer 1GB+ of high resolution images over a 54Mbit connection.
WUSB is not an essentia protocol I admit, but it sounds like it will be damn convenient.
I thought that too, but then I'm not in the US and it continually suprises me hearing how conservative many (although I know not all) Americans are (Janet Jackson incident as a prime example) so I guess it's quite probably that soft drug use in the US is considerably rarer than here in the UK.
Firefox comes with a link saying 'Mozilla Firefox help' right there on the toolbar. It takes you to texturizer.net which has a vast quantitiy of helpful hints and combinations of options to set in order to do almost anything you need to do with the browser.
While Fedora may have done the wrong thing with the concept, Mozilla Firefox has it perfect IMO. The standard options are in Tools -> Options and nothing too big can be accidentally broken by anyone but the most resourceful newbie/moron. All the power user options which are extremely useful (number of simultaneous connections, page render delay etc. etc.) but would scare the average user or enable them to easily break stuff (page render delay 10000 = why is my internet b0rked?) are only accesible though the about:config menu. If you don't understand the options shown or know enough to know what you should leave well alone, you sure as hell won't have found out that you can access these options by typing that particular command into the address bar. Anyone who feels the need to alter the number of simultaneous connections allowed will quickly find how to access that menu with the most minimal Googling.
What's the point?
:-)
The purchaser gets the chance to be part of the design and testing of the spacecraft before launching whatever onto the surface. I sure as hell know I'd pay a fair amount for the chance to be involved in something that interesting. I'm sure I could think of something useful to put there by the end of the construction process too
Isn't this the exact purpose of Freenet? It's simply more anonymous than your average P2P application to prevent people from being forced into self-censorship.
This will help with the companies like Limewire who are pretty much legit but morally questionable, which is good.
Unfortunately, however, the worst spyware/malware I've seen, the stuff that really grinds computers into the ground and makes people call me to fix their computer that 'just broke' is porn browser bars, porn autodialers etc. These are the kind of companies who are just below the bar of complying to the law but still a little way above outright theft. The legislation is a good idea, but what it'll mean is that there's less spyware out there and what does stay active will be all the worse and better hidden too.
It's extremely simple to input data, but they're using the wrong software. MS Access, which the machines are based on, is not really extensible.
To carry your website example, look at forums (simply because I've got a bit of experience to go on). A forum running on a server with an Access backend can handle a realistic maximum of 5 concurrent users, no matter how powerful the server is - MS even say that in their documentation somewhere. The same forum on even a moderate server running MySQL can handle 300+ concurrent users (and remember this is doing multiple queries per page). On fast hardware and using PGSQL it can easily stretch to over a thousand without problems.
There's a simple test - if we start seeing cowboyneal options on the next US election we know that the real source was released to, and hacked by, the /. community.
Real need to take a leaf out of Adobe's book. Look at the acrobat reader - it's free, easy, multi-platform and does what it is supposed to and nothing more
The iPod battery does last for a few years under standard use, just like most other batteries. The reason there was all the fuss about it was back then there was no way to replace them - that's why it was a problem. It was known it would die, but the fact that it killed the iPod and there was no way to fix it (unlike most appliances where you just slide the back off and put a new battery in) was why people had a problem.
AA batteries in discount stores are about 0.60 each, and a can of coke is about 0.50. Seems even enough to me.
It's a non-issue with most existing batteries, so I guess these are similar. Batteries aren't that expensive and you'll get 1000+ charge cycles from them. That equates to several years of standard use from something that costs less than a can of coke, if these become unusable considerably faster than normal they wouldn't risk the bad publicity until they'd fixed it.
In a break from /. style I actually RTFA - it says 80 hours of MiniDisc use.
If that's accurate I want one for my iPod, I guess with less drive spinning than an MD it'd last even longer?
I was thinking just copy+paste and then decrypt it, it doesn't really seem like much hassle if you have something so important that you can't let it be traced to your own server or sent in plain text. I've never needed to use anything like that, but I'm sure there are people who do and it's not like it'd be something you would do on every message (I guess) so for the odd message the time to do the copying wouldn't be an issue. Everyone else can just let the scans go as normal or use their own server (provided they aren't sending anything that matters if it's tracable).
(o) Nano and XFCE
:-P
Nicer than any of the above
While I wouldn't want anything that's really private on this account, I wouldn't want it on hotmail either. I'd either use encryption over existing free services (less tracability) or just use my own mailserver.
Things like credit card numbers, bank data, passwords etc. will be perfectly safe, even if the data is scanned. Google are smart enough not to have the publicity problems they would get if they revealed any private info, and it's not really as if anyone cares what my email says. They are scanned for advertising purposes, they are not proof read to see if anything interesting is happening in my life. I feel safe because I know Google won't do anything with my financail details because they have PR people who know that would cripple their service uptake and I know they couldn't care less about my personal life.
Having said that, for me and I'm sure plenty of other slashdotters it's a moot point - I have my own mailserver which I can check on my home machine via thunderbird, my phone via the built in GPRS mail client and from anywhere else with a browser via squirrelmail. 10GB storage, no attachment limits and unlimited addresses I can check from anywhere - it's easily worth what I pay for it.
In that case I apologise for my mistake - as far as I was aware the 3 network was provding 3G service. That service is (IMO) pretty bad, as I had described, and from what I have heard the 3 network is failing badly at meeting sales targets, hence my statement that 3G in the UK is failing.
Maybe I'm just jaded from testing and selling the damn handsets all day, but IMO the hardware is seriously crap and the network has major failings, not least the coverage. The data service is overpriced compared to GPRS and the speed isn't a huge advantage to most if you can only get it on certain networks in certain areas. Video calling is a joke, you must agree, and the time limited DRM'ed downloads onto your handset aren't really my cup of tea when I can get nice GPL software and rip DVDs onto my 2G smartphone. For the few people who need wireless laptop connectivity and aren't near WiFi hotspots and are in 3G network range I will agree it's pretty good (as long as you don't mind the phone itself not being as good as the 2G smartphones) but for everyone else IMO it's either unneccesary or downright undesirable.