I think you misunderstand the comment. I understood that JDotBomb was saying that any agency that had a quantum computer (therefore able to break RSA type encryption in a blink) wouldn't be spending money on or trusting an RSA system. They'd be using one of the encryptions that aren't broken by the tool that quantum.
Every person telling a "I don't use my Palm" story is a person that hasn't used Vindigo.
I agree that using a Palm to hold phone numbers and addresses is a waste of a device. Paper can do that. The useful part of a PDA is it's extension of your computer.
When I first got my Palm, and saw all the fancy net-capable ones as well, and each time I needed directions, I wished I had one. MapQuest was the part of my computer that I wished I had with me when I wasn't at my computer. Vindigo does that for me.
Vindigo costs me about $25 per year, and I can load any collection of cities from their list. I mostly just use Atlanta (since I live here), but load vacation cities when I travel. The information they have on each city contains (but probably isn't limited to)
-every resteraunt and bar, with address and phone number, organized by price and location and genre
-movie times and locations and summaries
-maps of the area, with the ability to zoom in and out, AND give walking or driving directions from any location to any other. This feature is linked with the above databases of addresses.
Now, the information is never completely up to date. It only updates when I synch. But I never need information that's newer than a week old. I needed connectivity on my Palm, but I was ok with a week lag.:)
Most of what I use my Palm for is Vindigo, now. I still hold phone numbers and addresses and stuff, but when I leave my Palm in my other pair of pants, I can get by without everything except Vindigo.
Sam
(Usual disclaimers apply. I don't work for Vindigo. Just a happy customer.)
Do you know about whether there's Vindigo? I LOVE Vindigo. It has all the movie times and resteraunt locations and maps and directions I could ever want in my city, and they have data packages for most big cities.
I'd be sad without it.
As comps and phones collide, who's # Pad wins?
on
The Ultimate Phone/PDA?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Look at the number pad on your keyboard, and then look at the number pad on your phone. They're opposite. The keyboard starts at the bottom and works it's way up, while the phone starts at the top and works down.
Each are standard in their own field; You'll never find a keyboard with a phone-style pad and you'll never find a phone with a keyboard-style pad, but they're opposite from eachother. When I finally get a computer/phone combination, what kind of pad will it have? And who was the monkey that allowed these standards to differ so drastically?
I don't think I want my PDA to run Symbian. Am I wrong?
I've always found that the most useful part of my PDA was software support. With PalmOS, I get Vindigo, which is one of the most impressive parts of my Pilot. I get AvantGo for stationary web stuff (I guess that's void with net-access pda) and I get a few closed-source medical databases of meds and prescription data. (I'm a MD.) I think all 3 of these are closed to other operating systems.
It seems like I'll lose all this when I switch to a different OS? Am I wrong? Has anybody had a great experience with an OS besides Palm?
Given an infinite amount of processing power and memory, could someone "solve" the game of chess?
Inifinite? Yes. Realistic? No.
If you look at this in the TuringMachine sense of a computer, you can definitely "beat the game". However, a TM differs from a computer in one important detail. A TM has an infinite tape.
Now, I never really considered this to be an important difference before. You just buy more memory, till you have enough. The problem is that "enough" is quite large for chess. If you somehow had such efficient memory that you could store a combination of moves on a single atom of memory, then the total mass of your memory would still be larger than the recent estimations of the mass of the universe.
In other words, if you naively, exhaustively code Chess, you'll need more memory than there is mass. Anywhere.
Quoth the caption:
A U.S. soldier scans the horizon as the moon rises behind him in Kandahar, Afghanistan. A physicist claims solar energy reflected from the moon could provide endless clean energy
Do they just have stock footage of Afghanistan lying around? Is this the best moon picture they could come up with?
Maybe they just searched through the pictures lying on their desk, till they found one with the moon in it. We're lucky we didn't get a snap-shot of the author's poodle with the moon in the background.
Quoth the review: It is FINALLY time to get rid of that old mouse... While you're at it, toss out that old Dot Matrix printer, and even the $13 keyboard with the ASDFJKL: keys completely rubbed off!
Ya know, I really like my peripherals. I have a great Gateway Programmable keyboard that has built-in hardware macros (so it's not OS dependant) and a slick logitech trackball that fits my hand well. My printer is pretty crummy, but it has this great ability to turn text into physical paper, which is all I need.
Having a motherboard which boasts of the ability to make me buy new hardware isn't quite what I'm looking for.
So, I don't know anything about TV cards. At all. But I bought a super-cheap version a while ago at a surplus store for $25. I don't really watch cable television, but I wanted an easy way to plug my video game consoles into my computer, instead of leaving a television on my desk just for video games.
The issue is, the screen shakes a tiny bit all the time. You get dizzy if you play mario for more than an hour at a time (which has become a sort of built-in self-restraint.) Now, the reason I'm getting shitty performance is that I bought a shitty card. I understand that. But is there some hardware specs that would have clued me into that fact? Besides the price tag?
I'm happy to shell out more for a better card, but I'd like to be able to point to SOMETHING in the specs and say "That's what I'm paying for."
It's hard to believe this is anything more than an entertaining collection of Simpson's jokes.
Do you really think students are learning ANYTHING about math from this list? I'm sure they're enjoying the talk, just as much as they would if it were a collection of Simpson jokes about being fat, but it feels like they're learning as much math from the Simpsons Math Lecture as from the Simpsons Fat Jokes.
The Simpsons does amazingly well at delivering jokes that fly over some viewer's head. Especially for younger viewers, there are many jokes that just aren't in their demographic, so the viewer ignores them. Ironically or not, I bet some viewers just assume that Math isn't in their demographic.
So, you can park your laptop, order a burger/beer, then email in a movie review all w/o disturbing your fellow patrons.
I hate to burst this capitalistic bubble, but I'm pretty sure I would be disturbed by my fellow patrons typing and ordering.
We've all sat in computer labs before, and I bet we go somewhere else to watch movies.
Now, if they used this networking to offer HEADPHONES for the movie, I'd be psyched. Not only would it block the munching and tapping, but it would allow much stronger stereo and volume.
I use the same crummy word for a lot of my passwords. If the service makes me use upper case, I capitalize the first letter. If they demand numbers, I turn the 'e' into a '3'. That's because all of these accounts are passwords that I DON'T MIND IF PEOPLE CRACK.
You're not going to do ANY damage if you somehow managed to crack into my NewYorkTimes account.
ICQ makes me create a password that half the clients out there don't authenticate. If you got in, you'd suddenly be able to forge messages from me. Just as you could before.
For real accounts (root, stuff involving my credit-card, etc.) I use simple hash involving the name of the service and a secure string of letters and numbers. But there are a lot of accounts that won't bother me if they get cracked, but WILL be a pain if I forget the password.
We all really really like this company. Google has a LOT of fans on Slashdot. Why is that none of you think that actively supporting a company you like is a Good Idea?
I make an effort to click on an ad when it follows from my search anyway. If I'm looking for Linksys's support page, and it turns out that LinkSys has paid for an ad at the side, I'll click through. It's not so hard.
I want Google to survive, so I'll glance at their ads, and I'll use them when I can.
Read John Brunner's _Shockwave_Rider_. It's a really good read.
Brunner had this idea in the 70s that, in the future, we would hook lots of computers together, and make a sort of connected network of data-sharing. This web of computers would be able to collect buyer information, and provide a global information age.
The guy invented the internet. Pretty cool. Definitely worth a read. You should read his _Stand_On_Zanzibar_, too. Very good projection of advertising and culture in a connected time.
the original layout was not meant to slow down the typist, but to reduce the chance that two letters next to each other in a word
The speed of a typist is pretty inversly related to the distance between keys. If the keys are far apart, then you hit them slower. So, yeah, designing a layout to move the keys farther apart is designing a layout to slow you down.
So, in fact, the querty layout was designed to speed up typing, by requiring less of an artificial pause between keystrokes.
You're confusing yourself. The user is as slow as the keyboard needs, so the keyboard doesn't need to impose an artificial pause. If the keyboard doesn't need to cripple the user, it's because the user's already as crippled as necessary.
I LOVE my Compaq1800T. It's great. Good integrated ethernet, BEAUTIFUL screen, strong speakers, etc.
The only problem is the windows side. (I know we're not supposed to care about this, but I still play games on the go.)
Compaq doesn't give you a Windows disc. They basically give you a CD with a Ghost image on it, so you can wipe your harddrive and make it factory-fresh if you need to re-install, but that's not exactly Linux-friendly.
It says in the article that they don't have aleft handed version, but are considering one.
Yeah, of course the're "considering one". If they manage to sell gobs and gobs of these things, they might make a left-handed one.
Leatherman's said the same thing about The Wave. The Wave's impossible to do the uber-sexy, one-handed draw with your left hand. I'm left-handed, but mouse with my right. Guess I get to use a Claw, but not the Wave.
I used to actually believe that the quality of the system itself matters when predicting the success of a new system.I no longer believe any such thing. Look at the GameBoy.
The GameBoy came out at roughly the same time as the Sega GameGear. Both were portable systems riding on the coat-tails of new systems (SNES and SegaGenesis). One of the main differences I remember was that the GameGear had a BEAUTIFUL screen. It was back-lit, and was color. The GameBoy, as we all know, was in the classic Green&White.
However, the reason I have to remind you of the GameGear screen but we all know what the GameBoy screen looks like is that the GameGear flopped, while the GameBoy is still alive TODAY!
Can you believe that?!? The GameBoy is still being played by a new generation of 10-year olds. There's a new thin design, and there's a weak color version, but the console is the still the same technology as 10 years ago. Is there ANY other game system of any sort that has this sort of shelf life? I can't think of anything.
The reason the GameBoy is still around is the game support. Nintendo had a monopoly on the good games. The GameGear was killed because they just didn't get the good cartridges. It's all about the games. Mario and Zelda and FinalFantasy just beat the crap out of Sonic and PhantasyStar and so forth.
The test of whether the PS2 will survive will NOT be how much video ram it has. That'll help, sure. The real test will be what games they get and how well they implement them.
Learning C++ in Microsoft's Visual Studio environment is, in my opinion, a bad thing.
HEAR HEAR!!
Our begining courses in CS have recently switched to VisualCafe and JBuilder, and similar graphical coding. These are great programs, because they let the coder work on a higher level. User talks to GUI, GUI talks to language, language talks to compiler.
The problem is, all errors are still on the code level. If all compiler errors were "DUDE! You messed up that button over there." we'd be fine. The problem is that the errors are speaking in the same language the users is coding in.
If these begining CS students already understood how to program, I might not be quite as mad. As it is, this cute drawing code is all they know.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you misunderstand the comment. I understood that JDotBomb was saying that any agency that had a quantum computer (therefore able to break RSA type encryption in a blink) wouldn't be spending money on or trusting an RSA system. They'd be using one of the encryptions that aren't broken by the tool that quantum.
-Sam
> So what??
> (colleg freshman now)
It shows.
-Sam
Every person telling a "I don't use my Palm" story is a person that hasn't used Vindigo.
:)
I agree that using a Palm to hold phone numbers and addresses is a waste of a device. Paper can do that. The useful part of a PDA is it's extension of your computer.
When I first got my Palm, and saw all the fancy net-capable ones as well, and each time I needed directions, I wished I had one. MapQuest was the part of my computer that I wished I had with me when I wasn't at my computer. Vindigo does that for me.
Vindigo costs me about $25 per year, and I can load any collection of cities from their list. I mostly just use Atlanta (since I live here), but load vacation cities when I travel. The information they have on each city contains (but probably isn't limited to)
-every resteraunt and bar, with address and phone number, organized by price and location and genre
-movie times and locations and summaries
-maps of the area, with the ability to zoom in and out, AND give walking or driving directions from any location to any other. This feature is linked with the above databases of addresses.
Now, the information is never completely up to date. It only updates when I synch. But I never need information that's newer than a week old. I needed connectivity on my Palm, but I was ok with a week lag.
Most of what I use my Palm for is Vindigo, now. I still hold phone numbers and addresses and stuff, but when I leave my Palm in my other pair of pants, I can get by without everything except Vindigo.
Sam
(Usual disclaimers apply. I don't work for Vindigo. Just a happy customer.)
Do you know about whether there's Vindigo? I LOVE Vindigo. It has all the movie times and resteraunt locations and maps and directions I could ever want in my city, and they have data packages for most big cities.
I'd be sad without it.
Look at the number pad on your keyboard, and then look at the number pad on your phone. They're opposite. The keyboard starts at the bottom and works it's way up, while the phone starts at the top and works down.
Each are standard in their own field; You'll never find a keyboard with a phone-style pad and you'll never find a phone with a keyboard-style pad, but they're opposite from eachother. When I finally get a computer/phone combination, what kind of pad will it have? And who was the monkey that allowed these standards to differ so drastically?
Sam
I don't think I want my PDA to run Symbian. Am I wrong?
I've always found that the most useful part of my PDA was software support. With PalmOS, I get Vindigo, which is one of the most impressive parts of my Pilot. I get AvantGo for stationary web stuff (I guess that's void with net-access pda) and I get a few closed-source medical databases of meds and prescription data. (I'm a MD.) I think all 3 of these are closed to other operating systems.
It seems like I'll lose all this when I switch to a different OS? Am I wrong? Has anybody had a great experience with an OS besides Palm?
Sam
Given an infinite amount of processing power and memory, could someone "solve" the game of chess?
Inifinite? Yes. Realistic? No.
If you look at this in the TuringMachine sense of a computer, you can definitely "beat the game". However, a TM differs from a computer in one important detail. A TM has an infinite tape.
Now, I never really considered this to be an important difference before. You just buy more memory, till you have enough. The problem is that "enough" is quite large for chess. If you somehow had such efficient memory that you could store a combination of moves on a single atom of memory, then the total mass of your memory would still be larger than the recent estimations of the mass of the universe.
In other words, if you naively, exhaustively code Chess, you'll need more memory than there is mass. Anywhere.
if other countries responded ... by dumping tiny bits of space junk (gravel, marbles, or the like) ... the result would be a LEO wasteland
I really like the idea of all the kosmonauts gathering together all their glassies and swirlies and launching them into space.
Russian children are all forced to undergo the great marble-sacrifice, so their toys may be used to destroy the capitalist space weapons.
Sam
Quoth the caption:
A U.S. soldier scans the horizon as the moon rises behind him in Kandahar, Afghanistan. A physicist claims solar energy reflected from the moon could provide endless clean energy
Do they just have stock footage of Afghanistan lying around? Is this the best moon picture they could come up with?
Maybe they just searched through the pictures lying on their desk, till they found one with the moon in it. We're lucky we didn't get a snap-shot of the author's poodle with the moon in the background.
Quoth the review:
It is FINALLY time to get rid of that old mouse... While you're at it, toss out that old Dot Matrix printer, and even the $13 keyboard with the ASDFJKL: keys completely rubbed off!
Ya know, I really like my peripherals. I have a great Gateway Programmable keyboard that has built-in hardware macros (so it's not OS dependant) and a slick logitech trackball that fits my hand well. My printer is pretty crummy, but it has this great ability to turn text into physical paper, which is all I need.
Having a motherboard which boasts of the ability to make me buy new hardware isn't quite what I'm looking for.
Sam
So, I don't know anything about TV cards. At all. But I bought a super-cheap version a while ago at a surplus store for $25. I don't really watch cable television, but I wanted an easy way to plug my video game consoles into my computer, instead of leaving a television on my desk just for video games.
The issue is, the screen shakes a tiny bit all the time. You get dizzy if you play mario for more than an hour at a time (which has become a sort of built-in self-restraint.) Now, the reason I'm getting shitty performance is that I bought a shitty card. I understand that. But is there some hardware specs that would have clued me into that fact? Besides the price tag?
I'm happy to shell out more for a better card, but I'd like to be able to point to SOMETHING in the specs and say "That's what I'm paying for."
Besides the extra 0 in the price tag.
It's hard to believe this is anything more than an entertaining collection of Simpson's jokes.
Do you really think students are learning ANYTHING about math from this list? I'm sure they're enjoying the talk, just as much as they would if it were a collection of Simpson jokes about being fat, but it feels like they're learning as much math from the Simpsons Math Lecture as from the Simpsons Fat Jokes.
The Simpsons does amazingly well at delivering jokes that fly over some viewer's head. Especially for younger viewers, there are many jokes that just aren't in their demographic, so the viewer ignores them. Ironically or not, I bet some viewers just assume that Math isn't in their demographic.
-Sam
So, you can park your laptop, order a burger/beer, then email in a movie review all w/o disturbing your fellow patrons.
I hate to burst this capitalistic bubble, but I'm pretty sure I would be disturbed by my fellow patrons typing and ordering.
We've all sat in computer labs before, and I bet we go somewhere else to watch movies. Now, if they used this networking to offer HEADPHONES for the movie, I'd be psyched. Not only would it block the munching and tapping, but it would allow much stronger stereo and volume.
I use the same crummy word for a lot of my passwords. If the service makes me use upper case, I capitalize the first letter. If they demand numbers, I turn the 'e' into a '3'. That's because all of these accounts are passwords that I DON'T MIND IF PEOPLE CRACK.
You're not going to do ANY damage if you somehow managed to crack into my NewYorkTimes account.
ICQ makes me create a password that half the clients out there don't authenticate. If you got in, you'd suddenly be able to forge messages from me. Just as you could before.
For real accounts (root, stuff involving my credit-card, etc.) I use simple hash involving the name of the service and a secure string of letters and numbers. But there are a lot of accounts that won't bother me if they get cracked, but WILL be a pain if I forget the password.
We all really really like this company. Google has a LOT of fans on Slashdot. Why is that none of you think that actively supporting a company you like is a Good Idea?
I make an effort to click on an ad when it follows from my search anyway. If I'm looking for Linksys's support page, and it turns out that LinkSys has paid for an ad at the side, I'll click through. It's not so hard.
I want Google to survive, so I'll glance at their ads, and I'll use them when I can.
Read John Brunner's _Shockwave_Rider_. It's a really good read.
Brunner had this idea in the 70s that, in the future, we would hook lots of computers together, and make a sort of connected network of data-sharing. This web of computers would be able to collect buyer information, and provide a global information age.
The guy invented the internet. Pretty cool. Definitely worth a read. You should read his _Stand_On_Zanzibar_, too. Very good projection of advertising and culture in a connected time.
the original layout was not meant to slow down the typist, but to reduce the chance that two letters next to each other in a word
The speed of a typist is pretty inversly related to the distance between keys. If the keys are far apart, then you hit them slower. So, yeah, designing a layout to move the keys farther apart is designing a layout to slow you down.
So, in fact, the querty layout was designed to speed up typing, by requiring less of an artificial pause between keystrokes.
You're confusing yourself. The user is as slow as the keyboard needs, so the keyboard doesn't need to impose an artificial pause. If the keyboard doesn't need to cripple the user, it's because the user's already as crippled as necessary.
I LOVE my Compaq1800T. It's great. Good integrated ethernet, BEAUTIFUL screen, strong speakers, etc.
The only problem is the windows side. (I know we're not supposed to care about this, but I still play games on the go.)
Compaq doesn't give you a Windows disc. They basically give you a CD with a Ghost image on it, so you can wipe your harddrive and make it factory-fresh if you need to re-install, but that's not exactly Linux-friendly.
Otherwise, I LOVE my laptop.
> and seven 7's is found at position 3346228, six 6's is found
> at position 252499, five 5's is found at 24466, and so on...
"and so on..." ?!?
That's not quite true. There exist numbers which have a PATTERN, but don't actually repeat.
.101001000100001000001...
For instance,
There's certainly a pattern (1 zero then 2 zeros then 3...) but the number never repeats.
Oh, come on Taco. How long do you think we'll have these cute little bound piles of wood? I can't wait till I start losing my book inside my laptop. :)
Sam
Ya know, for $10,000, you'd think maybe he could have worked a little harder on the web-layout.
Or at least turned off the caps-lock key.
It says in the article that they don't have aleft handed version, but are considering one.
:) )
Yeah, of course the're "considering one". If they manage to sell gobs and gobs of these things, they might make a left-handed one.
Leatherman's said the same thing about The Wave. The Wave's impossible to do the uber-sexy, one-handed draw with your left hand. I'm left-handed, but mouse with my right. Guess I get to use a Claw, but not the Wave.
(Well, I use a Wave, but as cool as I might.
I used to actually believe that the quality of the system itself matters when predicting the success of a new system.I no longer believe any such thing. Look at the GameBoy.
The GameBoy came out at roughly the same time as the Sega GameGear. Both were portable systems riding on the coat-tails of new systems (SNES and SegaGenesis). One of the main differences I remember was that the GameGear had a BEAUTIFUL screen. It was back-lit, and was color. The GameBoy, as we all know, was in the classic Green&White.
However, the reason I have to remind you of the GameGear screen but we all know what the GameBoy screen looks like is that the GameGear flopped, while the GameBoy is still alive TODAY!
Can you believe that?!? The GameBoy is still being played by a new generation of 10-year olds. There's a new thin design, and there's a weak color version, but the console is the still the same technology as 10 years ago. Is there ANY other game system of any sort that has this sort of shelf life? I can't think of anything.
The reason the GameBoy is still around is the game support. Nintendo had a monopoly on the good games. The GameGear was killed because they just didn't get the good cartridges. It's all about the games. Mario and Zelda and FinalFantasy just beat the crap out of Sonic and PhantasyStar and so forth.
The test of whether the PS2 will survive will NOT be how much video ram it has. That'll help, sure. The real test will be what games they get and how well they implement them.
HEAR HEAR!!
Our begining courses in CS have recently switched to VisualCafe and JBuilder, and similar graphical coding. These are great programs, because they let the coder work on a higher level. User talks to GUI, GUI talks to language, language talks to compiler.
The problem is, all errors are still on the code level. If all compiler errors were "DUDE! You messed up that button over there." we'd be fine. The problem is that the errors are speaking in the same language the users is coding in.
If these begining CS students already understood how to program, I might not be quite as mad. As it is, this cute drawing code is all they know.
Sam