I'm about to move to Madison, WI and wonder if anyone that happens upon this has any experience with cell service there. I would prefer a bluetooth phone and a reasonable data plan, but so far I get the feeling that may not happen - at least if the T608 doesn't come out for Sprint. T-Mobile claims service coverage there, but doesn't offer phone numbers that are local to the area. Any suggestions?
Last year I bought myself a Minolta Dimage 5 and my main concern was that people told me it ate batteries like crazy. Well, I bought myself three sets of NiMH batteries for it and a Rayovac 1-hour charger and I've been very happy. When I was at the Grand Canyon, I'd burn through all 12 batteries each day and then just pop them back in the charger four at a time when I got home. I also started to use them in other things, like my ham radio. I haven't had to buy a AA battery in over a year now.
I will clarify, my experience has been mostly with the AA's, which have been great (as long as you buy the higher milliamp hour batteries). I bought a set of AAA for my palm and I wasn't quite as pleased with those, though I guess it could have just been a bum set. I don't get the impression that brand on the batteries is as big of a deal as the milliamp hour ratings.
Find someone to teach you handball. You can break a sweat just practicing a drive serve, it's a full body workout, and damn fun to boot. Heck, it even gives your eyes some exercise after staring at a screen all day. Frankly, handball is the answer to everything:P
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of current linux users bailed off windows after using like ME or '95 and use that as a reference for how stable windows is. And if someone wants to try to tell me that ME wasn't a PoS, then I want to know how much Microsoft is paying you.
The NT, 2000, and XP line on the other hand are quite nice. Sure, an individual program will lock up/crash now and then, but I honestly can't remember the last time I was forced to reboot my work machine with 2000 on it. Same machine with a different harddrive running Redhat has frozen up on me a couple of times and didn't respond to anything without powering down.
My 2000 home machine on the other hand crashed on me when I fired up RtCW while I have the TV tuner on the card already going, which I figure was just kind of silly of me in the first place. Frankly, I think both just boil down to knowing how to deal with a potential freeze and not setting your system up some stupid way that makes it crash.
Yes, I know linux is a kernel, but for the typical desktop user (the subject at hand), a kernel is useless without a good associated GUI. And yes, I've edited the windows registry.. and thank god I don't have to touch it unless I did something incredibly stupid in the first place. If you're going to compare config files to the windows registry, you've proved my point completely.
Yeah, I've always liked MacOS. I did about three years+ on it due to journalism back in high school. Also had some intro CS classes in 68k assembler on them. I've thought about moving over to it before, but issues always came up.. maybe if I had multiple machines I'd be happier doing that. I have yet to use OSX, though I think I'll be able to play with it a little starting in August.
And I will admit that some things in windows aren't obvious where they are, but if I poke around the menus for a few minutes, I'm destined to run into it eventually - assuming they thought about the setting at all. Perhaps I should have said 'more intuitive' - most of the system settings I change often are in the control panel somewhere, or in the options/preferences menu of the window I don't like the behavior of.
On the application side of things, there are two things keeping me on Windows - Visual Studio, and games. kdev was close to making me happy though. But of the openGL work I've done, linux has been significantly slower with the same code on the same machine. Perhaps that gap has closed in the last two years - I know that installation has become a heck of a lot better since then.
Really my main beef with linux is how hard it is to set the thing up when you haven't gone through the process in the last six months. I generally forget what the config file is named that I'm interested in, or where it happens to be located. Frankly, any setting that most users will have to change at some point in their life should be easily accessible through the GUI menu system.
I will admit that it is a heck of a lot better than it used to be, but I still have to do a bit of googling to get my linux system usable. Windows on the other hand, you can go to the control panel and what you want to change will likely be in there somewhere, unless it's application specific, and you don't have to read any manuals or docs to figure out how to configure your system - it's intuitive.
First off, it's hard to export anything with good encryption. I seem to recall a product that we shipped with an old version of IE because it had weak encryption and anything newer would add a mess of export legal issues. Well, nowadays some systems, like IBM's, have chips in them that handle encryption, so I have to imagine that there are several issues with that in addition to the processing power that someone else mentioned.
Then there are issues with translation/foreign equipment. Generally, you want to sell a product in the language of the land that works with the hardware of the land, and it doesn't make sense to go through all of the legal processing for export licensing if it's not. This is not a cheap, fast, nor easy process.
For software, even for a relatively small product, translation, re-testing, installation changes, and bug fixes to work with all major languages seems to take at least six months in my experience, if not more. And yes, there will be bugs - maybe everything's MBCS and someone forgot to cast a string or check whether a character was one byte or two.. or some assumption was made based on a string. And foreign hardware opens up a whole other can of worms. Ever seen a japanese keyboard?!
And I'll leave off with one more - locally popular modules. Say your product uses a great speech engine, but it's English based. Now you need it for a product in Japanese, but the engine you used couldn't do Japanese well so it couldn't compete in Japan. So to sell your product there, you now have to make your code play nice with a new speech engine, and perhaps an entirely different set of capabilities.
You are not likely the common consumer in the region.
We take a simple approach at the University of Texas, where we make liquid nitrogen ice cream several times a year for various events for the kiddies. We take two boxes of vanilla powder, 1/3-1/2 gallon of milk, food coloring for fun (orange on halloween), and sometimes chocolate/strawberry syrup either before or after freezing. And most of us are just general science majors, so I don't know what the guy's talking about trained chemists for:P
It generally attracts a pretty good crowd. It's also amusing listening to people's misconceptions. "So is that like liquid dry ice?" or "Is that much nitrogen safe to eat?". The only scary part is driving around downtown Austin with ten liters of the stuff in your back seat.
If you do 12/7 for four weeks, that's 176 hours of overtime, so they seem to think at normal schedule would take about 8-9 weeks to do. Therefore, after completion in 4 weeks, there shouldn't be anything scheduled for 4-5 weeks after that. I would think any reasonable manager would exchange the 12/7 work for the next 4-5 weeks as paid vacation, if not 6-7 for time&half. And if they're really nice, allow you to defer that vacation for when you're ready to take it. I think you need to sit down with your manager and have a chat about alternative compensation instead of instantly threatening lawsuits.
On the other side of the issue, laptops are distracting. The continuous clickety-clack in a room that is silent other than the professor talking is annoying as all get out. And it's better to use paper for anything requiring diagrams or equations anyway, which was probably 90% of what I bothered to write down.
I do recommend having a laptop though. I got my Thinkpad my junior year and it was definitely worth the money. I was co-oping, doing research, and taking classes at the same time.. and it allowed me to do anything at any time no matter where I was. I could do research at home, work from the CS labs, and my schedule was no longer centered around where I was, but instead on what needed to get done.
The modifier keys all have locking states, if you read the part of the article about using the shortcuts. Granted, it takes longer, but it's doable. I don't see how you play quake on this though.. unless you're a major camper.
Apparently the guys that were actually working on it. In fact, no hoax at all. The claim of a hoax was apparently premature and uninformed. The project was real, but now it's just dead - obviously because of the poor PR it received. 'Uh, yeah.. we're not dumb enough to do that.. it was a hoax' *wink*.
The short answer, because it's easier to add Bluetooth. I currently own a Tungsten T, which is the first Palm I've actually loved, but it has two main flaws from my view and both of these are fixed in the Tunsten C.
1) T comes with Bluetooth built in, but I can buy a Bluetooth card from Palm. I can't seem to find an 802.11b card for the life of me. Though different companies claim to have card designs that they've sold to other people, nothing has made it to market yet that I'm aware of.
I could be up and running with 802.11b, but since I have Sprint, and Sprint hasn't come out with a bluetooth phone yet (Though SonyEriccson is rumored to have the T608 coming out this quarter), I have no internet connectivity with my Palm.
2) I used to own a Treo 300, which had a keyboard and I must say it's a heck of a lot faster to type on that mini-keyboard once you get used to it than to write grafitti. I'm kind of neutral, but somewhat leaning toward keyboard designs - especially now that the OS supports some keyboard navigation.
First, out of context, unless your dog learned how to program, the weakest link is always the human. Now to address your sticky.. your statement is exactly correct, but the key word is 'until'. A guy in Houston will never be able to look under my keyboard.
Let's look at it this way - the probability of getting my key given access to my sticky is near 1, but the number of people with access to my sticky with bad intentions is near 0 - they would have to break into my apartment, have the sense to know where to look, and be able to tie that number to something else meaningful. Therefore, my expected value is quite low. And I could even put it in some sort of safe with a key that I would keep with me and make it even lower.
Now with a database, the probability of compromise may be quite low, but every hacker in the world is going to poke and prod at it as many times as they want. Given enough time, you'll get a higher expected value. And when the database is compromised, the person doesn's just get one number.. They get 50,000 numbers, names, associated information, and can do some damage.
I bought myself a Thinkpad A21p about a year and a half ago. Just to prove to myself after reading this stuff that my battery was still actually in good condition, I unplugged it two hours ago and went on about my business. It's only down to 47% capacity remaining.
The only time I really run the battery down is when I try to play games on battery. Usually I don't do that for more than an hour though. No one expects the battery to last long when driving every peripheral constantly (An ATI mobility sucks up some juice). I've been given the impression that these batteries aren't really designed to deep cycle though.
But anyway, businessmen buy Thinkpad machines because they're solid and they give good support. I bought mine because I was working part time and doing programming research projects for two professors and needed to keep everything with me. The price made me think twice, but it's been the best money I've spent to date.
I've lugged this thing every day to work, campus, wherever. Even took it with me camping this last summer so I could dump hundreds of photos of the Grand Canyon and such off my digital cam. And after all of this wear and tear, the back of the case started to crack a little a few weeks ago. I called up support, they mailed me a box, paid for all the shipping, repaired it and had it back to me in two days.
And plus, touch pads are silly. Trackpoint beats touch pads any day:P But anyway, that's enough about that.
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I'm about to move to Madison, WI and wonder if anyone that happens upon this has any experience with cell service there. I would prefer a bluetooth phone and a reasonable data plan, but so far I get the feeling that may not happen - at least if the T608 doesn't come out for Sprint. T-Mobile claims service coverage there, but doesn't offer phone numbers that are local to the area. Any suggestions?
Last year I bought myself a Minolta Dimage 5 and my main concern was that people told me it ate batteries like crazy. Well, I bought myself three sets of NiMH batteries for it and a Rayovac 1-hour charger and I've been very happy. When I was at the Grand Canyon, I'd burn through all 12 batteries each day and then just pop them back in the charger four at a time when I got home. I also started to use them in other things, like my ham radio. I haven't had to buy a AA battery in over a year now.
I will clarify, my experience has been mostly with the AA's, which have been great (as long as you buy the higher milliamp hour batteries). I bought a set of AAA for my palm and I wasn't quite as pleased with those, though I guess it could have just been a bum set. I don't get the impression that brand on the batteries is as big of a deal as the milliamp hour ratings.
This and other wonderful translations of your software coming soon.
Find someone to teach you handball. You can break a sweat just practicing a drive serve, it's a full body workout, and damn fun to boot. Heck, it even gives your eyes some exercise after staring at a screen all day. Frankly, handball is the answer to everything :P
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of current linux users bailed off windows after using like ME or '95 and use that as a reference for how stable windows is. And if someone wants to try to tell me that ME wasn't a PoS, then I want to know how much Microsoft is paying you.
The NT, 2000, and XP line on the other hand are quite nice. Sure, an individual program will lock up/crash now and then, but I honestly can't remember the last time I was forced to reboot my work machine with 2000 on it. Same machine with a different harddrive running Redhat has frozen up on me a couple of times and didn't respond to anything without powering down.
My 2000 home machine on the other hand crashed on me when I fired up RtCW while I have the TV tuner on the card already going, which I figure was just kind of silly of me in the first place. Frankly, I think both just boil down to knowing how to deal with a potential freeze and not setting your system up some stupid way that makes it crash.
Yes, I know linux is a kernel, but for the typical desktop user (the subject at hand), a kernel is useless without a good associated GUI. And yes, I've edited the windows registry.. and thank god I don't have to touch it unless I did something incredibly stupid in the first place. If you're going to compare config files to the windows registry, you've proved my point completely.
Yeah, I've always liked MacOS. I did about three years+ on it due to journalism back in high school. Also had some intro CS classes in 68k assembler on them. I've thought about moving over to it before, but issues always came up.. maybe if I had multiple machines I'd be happier doing that. I have yet to use OSX, though I think I'll be able to play with it a little starting in August.
And I will admit that some things in windows aren't obvious where they are, but if I poke around the menus for a few minutes, I'm destined to run into it eventually - assuming they thought about the setting at all. Perhaps I should have said 'more intuitive' - most of the system settings I change often are in the control panel somewhere, or in the options/preferences menu of the window I don't like the behavior of.
On the application side of things, there are two things keeping me on Windows - Visual Studio, and games. kdev was close to making me happy though. But of the openGL work I've done, linux has been significantly slower with the same code on the same machine. Perhaps that gap has closed in the last two years - I know that installation has become a heck of a lot better since then.
Really my main beef with linux is how hard it is to set the thing up when you haven't gone through the process in the last six months. I generally forget what the config file is named that I'm interested in, or where it happens to be located. Frankly, any setting that most users will have to change at some point in their life should be easily accessible through the GUI menu system.
I will admit that it is a heck of a lot better than it used to be, but I still have to do a bit of googling to get my linux system usable. Windows on the other hand, you can go to the control panel and what you want to change will likely be in there somewhere, unless it's application specific, and you don't have to read any manuals or docs to figure out how to configure your system - it's intuitive.
First off, it's hard to export anything with good encryption. I seem to recall a product that we shipped with an old version of IE because it had weak encryption and anything newer would add a mess of export legal issues. Well, nowadays some systems, like IBM's, have chips in them that handle encryption, so I have to imagine that there are several issues with that in addition to the processing power that someone else mentioned.
Then there are issues with translation/foreign equipment. Generally, you want to sell a product in the language of the land that works with the hardware of the land, and it doesn't make sense to go through all of the legal processing for export licensing if it's not. This is not a cheap, fast, nor easy process.
For software, even for a relatively small product, translation, re-testing, installation changes, and bug fixes to work with all major languages seems to take at least six months in my experience, if not more. And yes, there will be bugs - maybe everything's MBCS and someone forgot to cast a string or check whether a character was one byte or two.. or some assumption was made based on a string. And foreign hardware opens up a whole other can of worms. Ever seen a japanese keyboard?!
And I'll leave off with one more - locally popular modules. Say your product uses a great speech engine, but it's English based. Now you need it for a product in Japanese, but the engine you used couldn't do Japanese well so it couldn't compete in Japan. So to sell your product there, you now have to make your code play nice with a new speech engine, and perhaps an entirely different set of capabilities.
You are not likely the common consumer in the region.
We take a simple approach at the University of Texas, where we make liquid nitrogen ice cream several times a year for various events for the kiddies. We take two boxes of vanilla powder, 1/3-1/2 gallon of milk, food coloring for fun (orange on halloween), and sometimes chocolate/strawberry syrup either before or after freezing. And most of us are just general science majors, so I don't know what the guy's talking about trained chemists for :P
It generally attracts a pretty good crowd. It's also amusing listening to people's misconceptions. "So is that like liquid dry ice?" or "Is that much nitrogen safe to eat?". The only scary part is driving around downtown Austin with ten liters of the stuff in your back seat.
If you do 12/7 for four weeks, that's 176 hours of overtime, so they seem to think at normal schedule would take about 8-9 weeks to do. Therefore, after completion in 4 weeks, there shouldn't be anything scheduled for 4-5 weeks after that. I would think any reasonable manager would exchange the 12/7 work for the next 4-5 weeks as paid vacation, if not 6-7 for time&half. And if they're really nice, allow you to defer that vacation for when you're ready to take it. I think you need to sit down with your manager and have a chat about alternative compensation instead of instantly threatening lawsuits.
On the other side of the issue, laptops are distracting. The continuous clickety-clack in a room that is silent other than the professor talking is annoying as all get out. And it's better to use paper for anything requiring diagrams or equations anyway, which was probably 90% of what I bothered to write down.
I do recommend having a laptop though. I got my Thinkpad my junior year and it was definitely worth the money. I was co-oping, doing research, and taking classes at the same time.. and it allowed me to do anything at any time no matter where I was. I could do research at home, work from the CS labs, and my schedule was no longer centered around where I was, but instead on what needed to get done.
The modifier keys all have locking states, if you read the part of the article about using the shortcuts. Granted, it takes longer, but it's doable. I don't see how you play quake on this though.. unless you're a major camper.
Apparently the guys that were actually working on it. In fact, no hoax at all. The claim of a hoax was apparently premature and uninformed. The project was real, but now it's just dead - obviously because of the poor PR it received. 'Uh, yeah.. we're not dumb enough to do that.. it was a hoax' *wink*.
Well, they're advertising their BT SD card as an accessory to the C, so I would think that works.
The short answer, because it's easier to add Bluetooth. I currently own a Tungsten T, which is the first Palm I've actually loved, but it has two main flaws from my view and both of these are fixed in the Tunsten C.
1) T comes with Bluetooth built in, but I can buy a Bluetooth card from Palm. I can't seem to find an 802.11b card for the life of me. Though different companies claim to have card designs that they've sold to other people, nothing has made it to market yet that I'm aware of.
I could be up and running with 802.11b, but since I have Sprint, and Sprint hasn't come out with a bluetooth phone yet (Though SonyEriccson is rumored to have the T608 coming out this quarter), I have no internet connectivity with my Palm.
2) I used to own a Treo 300, which had a keyboard and I must say it's a heck of a lot faster to type on that mini-keyboard once you get used to it than to write grafitti. I'm kind of neutral, but somewhat leaning toward keyboard designs - especially now that the OS supports some keyboard navigation.
First, out of context, unless your dog learned how to program, the weakest link is always the human. Now to address your sticky.. your statement is exactly correct, but the key word is 'until'. A guy in Houston will never be able to look under my keyboard.
Let's look at it this way - the probability of getting my key given access to my sticky is near 1, but the number of people with access to my sticky with bad intentions is near 0 - they would have to break into my apartment, have the sense to know where to look, and be able to tie that number to something else meaningful. Therefore, my expected value is quite low. And I could even put it in some sort of safe with a key that I would keep with me and make it even lower.
Now with a database, the probability of compromise may be quite low, but every hacker in the world is going to poke and prod at it as many times as they want. Given enough time, you'll get a higher expected value. And when the database is compromised, the person doesn's just get one number.. They get 50,000 numbers, names, associated information, and can do some damage.
I bought myself a Thinkpad A21p about a year and a half ago. Just to prove to myself after reading this stuff that my battery was still actually in good condition, I unplugged it two hours ago and went on about my business. It's only down to 47% capacity remaining. The only time I really run the battery down is when I try to play games on battery. Usually I don't do that for more than an hour though. No one expects the battery to last long when driving every peripheral constantly (An ATI mobility sucks up some juice). I've been given the impression that these batteries aren't really designed to deep cycle though. But anyway, businessmen buy Thinkpad machines because they're solid and they give good support. I bought mine because I was working part time and doing programming research projects for two professors and needed to keep everything with me. The price made me think twice, but it's been the best money I've spent to date. I've lugged this thing every day to work, campus, wherever. Even took it with me camping this last summer so I could dump hundreds of photos of the Grand Canyon and such off my digital cam. And after all of this wear and tear, the back of the case started to crack a little a few weeks ago. I called up support, they mailed me a box, paid for all the shipping, repaired it and had it back to me in two days. And plus, touch pads are silly. Trackpoint beats touch pads any day :P But anyway, that's enough about that.