How about we delare Linux as a video game. Then MS will have to sign it if we are willing to pay royalty which runs at $10.00 a piece. Then instead of selling it, just distribute it for free! I guess we might lend up paying some minimum royalty, but I don't think that would be too much higher than $100,000.
has:
> - MP3
> - Expandable storage
> - Color
> - keyboard
> - Cellphone
> - some type of belt clip/holster
> - flat rate for internet service
> - OS: Palm or WinCE. Most would probably prefer Palm
> - Nice to have webcam
i for one, don't care for cell phone, keyboard, color, clip, flat rate internet etc. so my list is:
1) voice recorder
2) 802.11b connectivity (either built-in or through compactflash card). The reason for compact flash card is so that it can be used with other devices including laptops.
3) mp3
4) decent price
5) expandable storage via compactflash
Unfortunately, no pda with above feature is available for less than my budget of USD 300.
> Looking at the press release, Intel outlined three priorities:
> o extended battery life
> o thinner and lighter form factors
> o outstanding mobile performance
All new intel mobile chips have above characteristics. Go and check their previous press releases.
i saw few months ago, toshiba 2 gig pcmcia drive for $13 after $100 mail in rebate. Currently, 5 gig versions are on sale for about $150. that would make it about 3 cents/mb which is about 30-60 times cheaper than speculated price of $1-2 for BitMicro.
b4 u think hst is obsolete, note that the adaptive optics can only compensate the waveform deformation in a very narrow field. this is good to study binary stars, quasars, galactic neclei etc which are essentially tiny dots in the sky. hst has no waveform deformation at all, so it can use wide field imaging with full resolution; something which is not yet possible with adaptive optics. also adaptive optics requires that either the object is very bright itself or it has some bright objects very close by. hst has no such limitations.
much simple solution exist for peeking through women's clothes. remember sony camcorder night vision mode? if used in day time and if a woman is wearing tight clothing which is transparent to IR light, then that IR light gets reflected by your body. So by using an IR filter, you can almost see through. Sony removed this feature in new camcorders (they added a sensor, so it can't be used in day light. i guess, it can still be fooled. also, there is some rumor that they changed the CCD chip somewhat). This was all sometime in 97-98.
my sincere advise to OSS, GPL advocates would be not to go after these small firms. they are doing their best to avoid MS and using OSS code (although not legally). what do we have to lose? what are we going to do even if their code is open? on the other hand, by allowing this kind of piracy, we are effectively gaining more linux users which is a nice thing. note that, many commercial firms allow piracy deliberately when making money is harder in that market segment. when they grow big, go after them and force them to release source code. so if Sun uses 1000 lines of GLP code, keep quiet. once they use 1000,000 lines of code, go after them. at this point, they won't have much choice but to release the source code.
if u go to eye doctor and s/he serves you a false chart to make u buy a pair of glasses that u don't need then it is called malpractise. how is this not?
* i have a digital camera that uses floppy (well, it can use superdisk too; but dell is talking about getting rid of floppy and not replacing with something compatible).
* when i have guest at my place and i take some digital photos, i give them on floppy. i can't use USB flash disk for this (too expensive).
* i have lots of floppy which i got free from my company trash
* does bios support booting on USB flash?
* i can boot a pc using a floppy and duplicate the boot floppy immediately. haven't found a way to do this with cd-rw. many PCs do support boot by CD, but the CDs don't contain cd-rw driver in a way that i can duplicate boot cd (without going through other hassles of installing and configuring).
* Easy to label floppy than CD or USB flash disk.
* Incremental changes on floppies are much more trivial than on cd-rw.
* old hardware
* old archived floppies
* guaranteed compatibility
* NT doesn't support USB. Does it support bootable CDs?
* Older linux doesn't support USB. Many have trouble using CD-RWs too.
* Server machines usually have a floppy drive but no CD-RW. Some don't have USB support
* Floppy drives are cheap and takes only a small volume
Having said all these, I haven't used a PC floppy drive for last two years, but i would still prefer, that some robust, stable alternative to exist before removing floppy drive altogether.
once u become a public figure, press can write anything about u. it is u who now needs to prove that those allegations are false. if u r a private person and press writes anything bad about u, the responsibility of proving it right falls on the press. by the time markoff wrote about kevin, kevin had already become public figure and press has a right to write anything with even a slightest evidense or even based on guess work. kevin would only be able to sue markoff if he can prove that markoff wrote false thing about him with a prior knowledge that that was false. this would be hard, since kevin had refused interview to markoff. whether fair or not, markoff acted entirely within his legal rights and nothing much can be done about it.
everyone cares about the poor buyers of these failed consoles but nobody cares about the poor shareholders who went bankrupt. oh well, this is/. where u expect more poor grad students than shareholders. atleast the console buyers can impress girls with their collectibles.
the thing that i don't like about dtd as well as schema is that they flag documents as invalid if it contains extra stuff. i guess there should be a validation mode which should flag document as valid as long as it contains atleast those stuff that i need it (and ignore additional stuff). e.g. a document may contains book name, author and price. I may be interested only in name and price. why should I consider such a document to be invalid? also, why should I validate whether the author name is in the correct format? can i just apply partial DTD (which contains only name and price) and ask the parser to validate the doc? Not at the moment.
I don't agree with you that schema validation is useless. In many cases the documents are fully processed for business rules much later, but you want acknowledgement that your document has reached correctly and it passes atleast the most basic validation (e.g. dtd or schema validation). XML Schema do wonderful job at that. In our case, we always keep schema validation on new doc types until the system is stable and bug free and then remove validation for efficiency (for internal docs). We have discovered many subtle bugs in system which would have been extremely hard to track by looking at application error but were easier to find by looking at parser errors.
A typical computer has about 36 DRAM chips. Assuming people use computer for 3 years before buying a new one, we are talking about 1 chip per month per computer.
32 gallons of water: Needed to make an ounce of beef
1.6 kg of fossil fuel: needed for 3 pounds of beef
72 grams of chemicals: Needed to produce 2-5 grams of beef
there are too many shortcomings for a PDA of the future. Among them are
320x240 screen: Sony clie has 320x320 screen for a long time and new ones have 320x480 screen.
slow processor: current generation of PocketPC processors run upto 400 MHz, which is faster than proposed IBM processor.
power supply: no word on power supply
Bluetooth: why not 802.11b?
no hard drive: Shouldn't the futuristic PDA have a hard drive? I know HDs are not as reliable, but they can be used for less essential stuff like photos, videos, songs etc
USB 1.1: Shouldn't we have USB 2.0 or Firewire?
AC Power in: do you really want to input 110/220 V to this device?
No keyboard, No camera: Sony Clie users would surely miss them.
MS Office docs support: Not really relevent to slashdotters, but many would need them. Even Palm OS based devices have support for them
nothing new: there is nothing new compare to Zaurus, PocketPC, Sony Clie etc.
the question is not about anonymity to avoid prosecution. the question is about who should be forced to cooperate at what cost for what crime. verizon or any other isp now needs to comply with potentially millions of subpeona automatically generated through viruses and worms by RIAA. they must not make mistake, lest they get sued by users for violating their privacy. this is a huge burden on any isp. in the past, it was presumed that isps just carry information and they should not need to comply with such subpeonas, but now that has changed.
what are we seeing, another dataplay.com in the making? dataplay had 500 MB capacity, costs $5, it is smaller than credit card and still failed. IOmega has 40 MB click drive which is another failure. Sanyo, Olympus etc had PhotoId, slightly bigger than credit card, had 200 MB (or so), cost about $5-$10, still failed. Ofcourse, there were many others: superdisk (i have one), minidisc (i bought and returned). it seems that 9 out of 10 new tiny storage devices are failing because they are non-standard, closed, proprietary architecture being launched prematurely by often underfunded companies. Even mighty Sony has closed down memory stick (replaced with incompatible memory stick pro), smart media has stalled at 128 MB. MMC cards are on decline. mini-dvd, mini-cd sales are dismal.
When are these storage companies going to learn lesson, that they need to cooperate, need good standard, broad industry support for a new device to succeed? So far the most successful is CompactFlash, CD, floppy and DVD. Not necessarily anyone of them is due to technical superiority alone (except CD. they were technically way ahead of any alternative available then). CF succeeded due to PCMCIA compatibility. DVD had its share of success due to CD compatibility (not many people would have bought DVD drive in their computer, if that couldn't play CDs). Floppies had huge industry support.
LCD TVs cost more, because of low production (1/10th of LCD monitor, 1/100th of Tube TV). The second part is that, you have to now miniatuarize the TV components too (monitor doesn't have to do, neither do tube TV). Expect to see the cost difference between LCD and tube TV to drop below 2:1 by next year as the volume ramps up.
They have actually measured the speed of gravity. however, the experiment assumes the speed of light and then deduces that the speed of gravity is same.
external devices with proprietary drivers (until now, you could buy any external device and use any third party driver you like. now you would only be able to use manufacturer recommended driver.
if you discover a secret command for your printer to take third party ink, then that would be a breach of DMCA
Photocopier to work only with manufacturer recommended plain paper. They will digitally encode information on each paper in watermark. Trying to tweak your photocopier to accept third party papers would be illegal.
by the time, you discover, you have been duped, it would be too late as in the case of garage opener. you bought a garage door and your opener mal-functions and original manufacturer charges you more than the new garage door. what will you do? consumers protests cannot work. for that to work, the case has to become public and only so many of them can become public which people can keep track of it. either get rid of DMCA or you are doomed! theoretically, it is legal under DMCA for auto manufacturer to device their engine in such a way, that it can detect certain brand of fuel and may deliberately refuse to work with non-affiliated brand. it would be a breach of DMCA to bypass such a device even if you could.
i have been using palm since 1999. last year, i bought pocket-pc and after six months, got rid of it. i didn't like two things about it: 1) not good at recognizing handwriting (it took me a day to learn graffiti; however, six months later, i couldn't master block letter writing). 2) too much windows cluttering. The reason, I bought pocket-pc in the first place was audio record-playback functionality. if palm gets rid of graffiti, maybe, my next upgrade would be a pocket-pc.
You are right that film SLR is much more cheaper than similar quality digital camera in low end market. However, at high end, the film cameras are becoming overall more price competitive. Professional often take hundreds of photos for every photo published in print magazine.
Also, as time goes, digital will overtake low end market too. Last March, I bought 4M pixel digital camera for just $250. Couple of months later, in a party, I used Canon SLR and this camera. I used standard ISO-200 film and developed at local grocery store for films. For digital, I used one of the digital labs which prints for just 14 cents a copy. My judgement is that digital prints are better. Besides, I only got the interesting ones printed. Also, no need to keep track of negatives. That was the last time, I used my SLR.
At the best quality level, film cameras are equivalent to 6-9 mega pixels. At regular quality (ISO-200 print film developed at grocery store), they are close to 2-3 mega pixels. A relatively cheap ($150) digital camera is likely to beat its P/S film counter part.
Anybody who wants to do new $150+ investment in photography, I would seriously advise him/her to consider digital alternative.
if the planet temperature is 3100 degree F, then it must be made up of heavy metal. The only abundant heavy metal in the universe is iron, so it must be made up of iron. If the planet is of the size of jupiter, then the iron density in such a high gravity situation would be about 20 times of water, which gives it s mass of about 100 times Jupiter. This is just about a critical mass for star formation (to excite internal nuclear reaction). How did such a planet formed? If it was mostly H2, He cloud at birth, then it would have been a star! Also, where did all the iron came from (more iron than out entire solar system has)?
I did some back of the envelope calculations, so I might be totally off track, but this seems really funny object.
Slashdot Mirror
How about we delare Linux as a video game. Then MS will have to sign it if we are willing to pay royalty which runs at $10.00 a piece. Then instead of selling it, just distribute it for free! I guess we might lend up paying some minimum royalty, but I don't think that would be too much higher than $100,000.
has: > - MP3 > - Expandable storage > - Color > - keyboard > - Cellphone > - some type of belt clip/holster > - flat rate for internet service > - OS: Palm or WinCE. Most would probably prefer Palm > - Nice to have webcam i for one, don't care for cell phone, keyboard, color, clip, flat rate internet etc. so my list is: 1) voice recorder 2) 802.11b connectivity (either built-in or through compactflash card). The reason for compact flash card is so that it can be used with other devices including laptops. 3) mp3 4) decent price 5) expandable storage via compactflash Unfortunately, no pda with above feature is available for less than my budget of USD 300.
> Looking at the press release, Intel outlined three priorities: > o extended battery life > o thinner and lighter form factors > o outstanding mobile performance All new intel mobile chips have above characteristics. Go and check their previous press releases.
I bet the new chip running at 1.6 GHz, will be marketed as Centrino 2000+.
i saw few months ago, toshiba 2 gig pcmcia drive for $13 after $100 mail in rebate. Currently, 5 gig versions are on sale for about $150. that would make it about 3 cents/mb which is about 30-60 times cheaper than speculated price of $1-2 for BitMicro.
no, i am not asking readers to sue the uspto. but it seems that ncr will sue uspto since uspto.gov is violating their patents too!
b4 u think hst is obsolete, note that the adaptive optics can only compensate the waveform deformation in a very narrow field. this is good to study binary stars, quasars, galactic neclei etc which are essentially tiny dots in the sky. hst has no waveform deformation at all, so it can use wide field imaging with full resolution; something which is not yet possible with adaptive optics. also adaptive optics requires that either the object is very bright itself or it has some bright objects very close by. hst has no such limitations.
much simple solution exist for peeking through women's clothes. remember sony camcorder night vision mode? if used in day time and if a woman is wearing tight clothing which is transparent to IR light, then that IR light gets reflected by your body. So by using an IR filter, you can almost see through. Sony removed this feature in new camcorders (they added a sensor, so it can't be used in day light. i guess, it can still be fooled. also, there is some rumor that they changed the CCD chip somewhat). This was all sometime in 97-98.
my sincere advise to OSS, GPL advocates would be not to go after these small firms. they are doing their best to avoid MS and using OSS code (although not legally). what do we have to lose? what are we going to do even if their code is open? on the other hand, by allowing this kind of piracy, we are effectively gaining more linux users which is a nice thing. note that, many commercial firms allow piracy deliberately when making money is harder in that market segment. when they grow big, go after them and force them to release source code. so if Sun uses 1000 lines of GLP code, keep quiet. once they use 1000,000 lines of code, go after them. at this point, they won't have much choice but to release the source code.
if u go to eye doctor and s/he serves you a false chart to make u buy a pair of glasses that u don't need then it is called malpractise. how is this not?
* when i have guest at my place and i take some digital photos, i give them on floppy. i can't use USB flash disk for this (too expensive).
* i have lots of floppy which i got free from my company trash
* does bios support booting on USB flash?
* i can boot a pc using a floppy and duplicate the boot floppy immediately. haven't found a way to do this with cd-rw. many PCs do support boot by CD, but the CDs don't contain cd-rw driver in a way that i can duplicate boot cd (without going through other hassles of installing and configuring).
* Easy to label floppy than CD or USB flash disk.
* Incremental changes on floppies are much more trivial than on cd-rw.
* old hardware
* old archived floppies
* guaranteed compatibility
* NT doesn't support USB. Does it support bootable CDs?
* Older linux doesn't support USB. Many have trouble using CD-RWs too.
* Server machines usually have a floppy drive but no CD-RW. Some don't have USB support
* Floppy drives are cheap and takes only a small volume
Having said all these, I haven't used a PC floppy drive for last two years, but i would still prefer, that some robust, stable alternative to exist before removing floppy drive altogether.
once u become a public figure, press can write anything about u. it is u who now needs to prove that those allegations are false. if u r a private person and press writes anything bad about u, the responsibility of proving it right falls on the press. by the time markoff wrote about kevin, kevin had already become public figure and press has a right to write anything with even a slightest evidense or even based on guess work. kevin would only be able to sue markoff if he can prove that markoff wrote false thing about him with a prior knowledge that that was false. this would be hard, since kevin had refused interview to markoff. whether fair or not, markoff acted entirely within his legal rights and nothing much can be done about it.
everyone cares about the poor buyers of these failed consoles but nobody cares about the poor shareholders who went bankrupt. oh well, this is /. where u expect more poor grad students than shareholders. atleast the console buyers can impress girls with their collectibles.
I don't agree with you that schema validation is useless. In many cases the documents are fully processed for business rules much later, but you want acknowledgement that your document has reached correctly and it passes atleast the most basic validation (e.g. dtd or schema validation). XML Schema do wonderful job at that. In our case, we always keep schema validation on new doc types until the system is stable and bug free and then remove validation for efficiency (for internal docs). We have discovered many subtle bugs in system which would have been extremely hard to track by looking at application error but were easier to find by looking at parser errors.
32 gallons of water: Needed to make an ounce of beef
1.6 kg of fossil fuel: needed for 3 pounds of beef
72 grams of chemicals: Needed to produce 2-5 grams of beef
So may i ask, "where is the beef"?
320x240 screen: Sony clie has 320x320 screen for a long time and new ones have 320x480 screen.
slow processor: current generation of PocketPC processors run upto 400 MHz, which is faster than proposed IBM processor.
power supply: no word on power supply
Bluetooth: why not 802.11b?
no hard drive: Shouldn't the futuristic PDA have a hard drive? I know HDs are not as reliable, but they can be used for less essential stuff like photos, videos, songs etc
USB 1.1: Shouldn't we have USB 2.0 or Firewire?
AC Power in: do you really want to input 110/220 V to this device?
No keyboard, No camera: Sony Clie users would surely miss them.
MS Office docs support: Not really relevent to slashdotters, but many would need them. Even Palm OS based devices have support for them
nothing new: there is nothing new compare to Zaurus, PocketPC, Sony Clie etc.
the question is not about anonymity to avoid prosecution. the question is about who should be forced to cooperate at what cost for what crime. verizon or any other isp now needs to comply with potentially millions of subpeona automatically generated through viruses and worms by RIAA. they must not make mistake, lest they get sued by users for violating their privacy. this is a huge burden on any isp. in the past, it was presumed that isps just carry information and they should not need to comply with such subpeonas, but now that has changed.
When are these storage companies going to learn lesson, that they need to cooperate, need good standard, broad industry support for a new device to succeed? So far the most successful is CompactFlash, CD, floppy and DVD. Not necessarily anyone of them is due to technical superiority alone (except CD. they were technically way ahead of any alternative available then). CF succeeded due to PCMCIA compatibility. DVD had its share of success due to CD compatibility (not many people would have bought DVD drive in their computer, if that couldn't play CDs). Floppies had huge industry support.
LCD TVs cost more, because of low production (1/10th of LCD monitor, 1/100th of Tube TV). The second part is that, you have to now miniatuarize the TV components too (monitor doesn't have to do, neither do tube TV). Expect to see the cost difference between LCD and tube TV to drop below 2:1 by next year as the volume ramps up.
They have actually measured the speed of gravity. however, the experiment assumes the speed of light and then deduces that the speed of gravity is same.
universal remote control
external devices with proprietary drivers (until now, you could buy any external device and use any third party driver you like. now you would only be able to use manufacturer recommended driver.
if you discover a secret command for your printer to take third party ink, then that would be a breach of DMCA
Photocopier to work only with manufacturer recommended plain paper. They will digitally encode information on each paper in watermark. Trying to tweak your photocopier to accept third party papers would be illegal.
by the time, you discover, you have been duped, it would be too late as in the case of garage opener. you bought a garage door and your opener mal-functions and original manufacturer charges you more than the new garage door. what will you do? consumers protests cannot work. for that to work, the case has to become public and only so many of them can become public which people can keep track of it. either get rid of DMCA or you are doomed! theoretically, it is legal under DMCA for auto manufacturer to device their engine in such a way, that it can detect certain brand of fuel and may deliberately refuse to work with non-affiliated brand. it would be a breach of DMCA to bypass such a device even if you could.
i have been using palm since 1999. last year, i bought pocket-pc and after six months, got rid of it. i didn't like two things about it: 1) not good at recognizing handwriting (it took me a day to learn graffiti; however, six months later, i couldn't master block letter writing). 2) too much windows cluttering. The reason, I bought pocket-pc in the first place was audio record-playback functionality. if palm gets rid of graffiti, maybe, my next upgrade would be a pocket-pc.
Also, as time goes, digital will overtake low end market too. Last March, I bought 4M pixel digital camera for just $250. Couple of months later, in a party, I used Canon SLR and this camera. I used standard ISO-200 film and developed at local grocery store for films. For digital, I used one of the digital labs which prints for just 14 cents a copy. My judgement is that digital prints are better. Besides, I only got the interesting ones printed. Also, no need to keep track of negatives. That was the last time, I used my SLR.
At the best quality level, film cameras are equivalent to 6-9 mega pixels. At regular quality (ISO-200 print film developed at grocery store), they are close to 2-3 mega pixels. A relatively cheap ($150) digital camera is likely to beat its P/S film counter part.
Anybody who wants to do new $150+ investment in photography, I would seriously advise him/her to consider digital alternative.
Well, after reading the article, I did realize, I was totally offtrack. just ignore the original post.
I did some back of the envelope calculations, so I might be totally off track, but this seems really funny object.