if you really need an organizer so much that you carry one around all day then a pda (or trusty old pack of dead tree) is certainly the best for you. but there are enough people who don't need the functionality enough to justify all that carrying stuff around business.
it was a mistake (but a somewhat understandable one) how mobile phone makers used to target the first phones with organizer functionality at the businessman, he will always use the real thing. but in the mainstream market they do a great job at filling the gap between not having an organizer system at all and carrying around a second device, complete with all the hassle of keeping batteries charged, setting quiet mode during meeting etc. in the end it's all software running on some microcontroller anyway, technically it does not make much difference wether you stick gsm on a pda or slowly enable the phones to do the pda's job.
wait, there's exactly one difference (or two, considering the "cellular network provider pays for the phone" issue mentioned elsewhere):
pda are completely associated only with work by everyone exept the most die-hard geek while phones are also seen as a way to stay in touch with friends and family etc, so ironically the _p_da end up being perceived as much less personal than a phone. people (those not on/.) generally tend to have trouble accepting electronics invading more and more of their everyday life, i think said more personal connection to their phones (or, thinking of the ipod, their personal music collection) could well be the means by which new applications sneak into people's lives that would fail coming in a seperate device like a pda, where the less liked work functionality stands in the focus while leisure functions come second.
ps: now one could speculate about how many of those "i want a phone that phones and nothing more" are people who are called more frequently by their boss/customers than by friends/family;-)
Re:What's with all the Apu comments?
on
Homer Becomes Omar
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
guess those are the people who internally translate everything like "arab" or "islamic" into "raghead". those people scare me as much as suicide bombers.
... that every time i happen to touch a mouse on a windows machine minesweeper and freecell windows will inevitably open themselves without me even realizing before i nearly finish the game?
It's worst while i'm on the phone, i will regularly stop in the middle of a sentence because i realize that i nearly solved a minesweeper field that wasn't there when i started that the sentence mentioned above.
i don't think they'd need better homvee windshields if it did.
and why would the corporations bombed into control of the oil fields be that much interested in lower oil prices? besides, the oil business is a very slow one, you don't just drive by with a tank and take away all the oil, even rebuilding previously existing infrastructure takes many years, more if you have to deal with partisan activity.
all he is saying is that "alumina" is not yet another dumbed down spelling for aluminium, in this context it makes a lot of sense to remind of what is already there.
i think you remember what happened when "they" introduced extended characters in the DNS: the only people who really used them were the phishers who could now create domain names with the new characters that looked very much the same as the names they were trying to imitate so browsers had to make a 180 for security reasons.
source code is a slightly different environment, but there it can already be different enough to visually distinguish between l and 1 in many fonts, or the various variations of an empty circle (oO0). You may argue that nobody willingly uses variable names like ll1O0, l1100 and lllOO, but rare those bugs _will_ happen more often once people start using exotic characters in source. source code has to be as unambigous as possible on every level.
ps: and while standard encondings exist it is still commonly seen that nonstandard characters get lost for example in cvs, "why waste time on configuring when only some umlauts in comments get lost?", but well, there are "standards", not "one standard", that makes great difference.
> A Libertarian tends to believe that the companies which treat their employees > fairly and those that aren't greedy will be the ones that succeed in a "real" > free market. Buying congresscritters and lobbying for unconstitutional laws > would not be an option for companies in that market.
This is nothing but wishful thinking of the worst kind. It boils down to "vote with your wallet", and that will never ever work. Relying on "vote with your wallet" effects is about as stupid as saying "everybody pays as much or little money for the sewage system as he sees appropriate" and then expecting that enough money to keep it serviced will show up because people do want a working sewage system.
The differences between Mac OS X and Windows can be handled by an API layer like wine, the differences in PPC and x86 CPUs can be handled by CPU emulation like virtualPC. Both are complex tasks and likely to never reach perfection, but there is a huge performance in performance hit.
> And WINE is unreliable at best, which x86 OSX won't change.
x86 OSX will roughly double the wine user base, dunno how much difference that would make for wine development, but i'm sure it's more than nothing.
and another thing: companies that make applications for windows are used to target multiple (sometimes quite different) versions of that OS. agreed, "system requirements: windows 2000/XP/vista or wine vX.Y.Z or newer" does sound utopic, but not _that_ utopic.
the sound engineer is the artist we are talking about.
why do the processing decentrally a thousand times with some magic cure-all algorithm in every single sound card if it could be done once by the sound engineer who has access to all the expensive toys? what is left is adopting the signal to crappy speakers, but in this case i'd rather throw better speakers at it than any number of transistors. oh, and a good sound engineer recognizes music that is more likely to be played on the crappy speakers and cares for that (think britney).
This gets even more interesting: Jamba was founded by the Samwer brothers with money they made from selling alando, one of the more successfull ebay-ripoffs in germany, to ebay germany.
Personally, I'd rather have a car designed to absorb that impact at the cost of itself rather than just passing it along to me... heck, maybe I'm just weird that way. Forces have to go somewhere, don't'cha know.
If it packs enough mass those forces will simply go into the other vehicle involved. Just don't try to hit another SUV, i abolutely see your point:-)
(a) less "boys and girls" involved in doing risky things in foreign countries
or
(b) the same number of "boys and girls" doing risky things in more foreign countries
i'm afraid that (b) might be closer to the future we will see, including more people to take a try at asymmetry.
still the technophile in me enjoys to see how technology advances and i guess it would happen anyways. and besides, this way of getting universities etc involved is definitely better than the usual opaque shifting of defense budget billions typically involved whenever the words "military" and "technology" appear in the same sentence. but we will probably seeing enough of that about autonomic vehicles later.
we all know the real challenge will be autonomously driving a tanker truck filled with nothing but sand while hordes of insane punks on jury-rigged buggies are trying to stop the vehicle.
but you are surely right about the the mars rover scenario, it is most likely just a cheap excuse to keep pacificsts who are able to resolve some levels of indirection from shouting "murderers" at the teams. after all we wont be seeing any humvee-sized mars rovers anytime soon and vehicle speed is not a bottleneck as the prolonged mission of the current rovers shows.
About time someone tries to make something out of the way most of those "profile sites" (you know the places on the net where all the disoriented teen girls and leftover 30+ show off their latest piercings) sooner or later turns into an inofficial MMOG, where having a long "friends" list and many "woah, u so s3ksah" (or however the current spelling is) in the diary comments equals the levelling efforts in other games. Just look at the friends list of every randomly selected brasilian on orkut for example, that's pure hunting and gathering, and putting somebody on that list is probably about as personal as your relation to the last minion-monster you slayed in diablo 2.
This project can easily fail, mostly because there is not much experience with the genre to build upon, but i see great potential. Some form of convergence between profile sites and MMORGs could easily be "the next big thing".
compared to the price of the high end-cards (the middle range is supposed to be available in an agp version iirc) the extra cost for a new mainboard is barely measurable. i would not be surprised if the agp-fraction of the high end market would be so small by now that the low numbers would drive up the price into regions where new board + slightly more mass-market graphics card would actually be cheaper.
the market for new-high-end-GPUs-in-old-boards is probably way too small to justify any investment into an AGP version:
> If I'm going to spend twice as much on a video card than any processor I've purchased in the last 5 years
In which case the extra cost to replace your socket 754 board & cpu with a similarly performing socket 939 cpu plus matching pci-e board would not make that much of a difference anymore, especially since you could reuse all that "plenty of RAM to spare". you could probably even manage to squeeze some money out of the lucky person who gets all your old gear for boosting your old (now his) system with taht relatively new 64 bit cpu.
As a bonus you would get the first ever real cpu-upgrade possibility since the invention of the socketed cpu, as the range from entry level athlon64 to dual core chips supported by current boards is bigger than anything ever to come in the same socket form factor and without front side bus ramping making the old boards obsolete despite having the same socket.
> Obviously, they have much less to lose since they all have "real" jobs and families
honestly, that's the only way to really say "screw you, riaa" and i am glad someone pointed it out. i think the long term effect of the whole concept of making big money with music being a fading memory will change a lot of our perception of music. i don't think that those who have decided/accepted that they will not make money are completely immune to "the rock star meme", since that's what we have all grown up with and humans are simply not that much rational to completely get stuff like that out of our brains in a lifetime.
what will happen? more focus on music that works with low monetary investment? more focus on local music because after the fall of big marketing budgets the personal presence in the local scene will have more impact? more focus on social elements of music making (playing together in a band) than on creating your own unique new songs at all costs because of the concept of "owning them"?
There used to be a time when people were making good money from painting portraits of people, nowadays this market is practically nonexistent. but painting is still around in different forms. maybe the recording artist will fade away as the portrait painter did, but music (and professional musicians, for commercials, movies, festivities etc) will never cease to exist.
yeah, never heard of that band and i don't even remember the name right now, but nowadays quite a lot of the music i am listening to is from personal musician sites or netlabels.
might have something to do with production costs of rock music vs production costs of everything that does _not_ claim to be so damn "authentic" that they need 20 engineers plus a year's wage of an average worker class family worth of microphones and fx processors to record it.
but the most important point remains, most people just want their music spoon-fed, and because they don't want to admit that they shout at the industry that does the spoon-feeding to distract from their shared folders full of streamlined, target audience engineered crap.
WoO was a classic 'time loop' episode. You could argue there were a very large number of reset buttons in it, but I think that's rather required in a time loop episode. (And sci-fi shows are required by law to do time loop episodes.)
I am amazed that there are people like you who don't call those episodes "time loop" instead of "Groundhog Day". But the groundhog day episode was certainly one of the best of sg-1, if you want to find out what is so good about sg-1 compare their groundhog day episode to those of other series.
PS: i definitely prefer a series where each episode the makers just try to tell the most interesting story they can think of, from beginning to end and don't care much for a bigger plot. i think st:tng got the balance right, they had a few great episodes with a bigger plot but the majority of episodes just tried to be good in itself, even taking a rather liberal view on established canon. if you can't tell your best story because it does not fit the setting/bigger plot then you have sacrificed a good story for a plot that only a fraction of the viewers will follow. (remember: the hardcore "have to watch all episodes" viewers are only the tip of the iceberg of the viewer market, they just happen to be much more vocal about their desires than the masses)
don't _ever_ underestimate the speed at which gato runs on a modern system. set a circling course and minor imperfections in the calculation of the circle will take you everywhere on the map within seconds.
(yes i know about the possibility to use an emulator instead)
i always thought that the thinkpads were the only laptop computers that did not look cheap. some of those mac things aren't too bad either but there is so much fake metal finish around on the supermarket shelves that the real deal reminds me more and more of the cheap stuff, not the other way like the cheap makers intended. thinkpads otoh were immune to that effect.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't really see who would need 60 gigs of storage for just music.
> I mean, if you have that many songs, you might as well listen to the radio
You _are_ aware that there is more music out there than what is played on the radio? and, omg, it won't even fit in 60gb!
all the different songs you could hear on an average day worth of radio would probably fit on a 64 mb flash card...
if you really need an organizer so much that you carry one around all day then a pda (or trusty old pack of dead tree) is certainly the best for you. but there are enough people who don't need the functionality enough to justify all that carrying stuff around business.
/.) generally tend to have trouble accepting electronics invading more and more of their everyday life, i think said more personal connection to their phones (or, thinking of the ipod, their personal music collection) could well be the means by which new applications sneak into people's lives that would fail coming in a seperate device like a pda, where the less liked work functionality stands in the focus while leisure functions come second.
;-)
it was a mistake (but a somewhat understandable one) how mobile phone makers used to target the first phones with organizer functionality at the businessman, he will always use the real thing. but in the mainstream market they do a great job at filling the gap between not having an organizer system at all and carrying around a second device, complete with all the hassle of keeping batteries charged, setting quiet mode during meeting etc. in the end it's all software running on some microcontroller anyway, technically it does not make much difference wether you stick gsm on a pda or slowly enable the phones to do the pda's job.
wait, there's exactly one difference (or two, considering the "cellular network provider pays for the phone" issue mentioned elsewhere):
pda are completely associated only with work by everyone exept the most die-hard geek while phones are also seen as a way to stay in touch with friends and family etc, so ironically the _p_da end up being perceived as much less personal than a phone.
people (those not on
ps: now one could speculate about how many of those "i want a phone that phones and nothing more" are people who are called more frequently by their boss/customers than by friends/family
guess those are the people who internally translate everything like "arab" or "islamic" into "raghead". those people scare me as much as suicide bombers.
(good bye, sweet karma)
... that every time i happen to touch a mouse on a windows machine minesweeper and freecell windows will inevitably open themselves without me even realizing before i nearly finish the game?
It's worst while i'm on the phone, i will regularly stop in the middle of a sentence because i realize that i nearly solved a minesweeper field that wasn't there when i started that the sentence mentioned above.
so you are saying it all worked out as planned?
i don't think they'd need better homvee windshields if it did.
and why would the corporations bombed into control of the oil fields be that much interested in lower oil prices? besides, the oil business is a very slow one, you don't just drive by with a tank and take away all the oil, even rebuilding previously existing infrastructure takes many years, more if you have to deal with partisan activity.
all he is saying is that "alumina" is not yet another dumbed down spelling for aluminium, in this context it makes a lot of sense to remind of what is already there.
So did the internet.
At least this invention won't wast so much of my time.
fewer bugs?
i think you remember what happened when "they" introduced extended characters in the DNS: the only people who really used them were the phishers who could now create domain names with the new characters that looked very much the same as the names they were trying to imitate so browsers had to make a 180 for security reasons.
source code is a slightly different environment, but there it can already be different enough to visually distinguish between l and 1 in many fonts, or the various variations of an empty circle (oO0). You may argue that nobody willingly uses variable names like ll1O0, l1100 and lllOO, but rare those bugs _will_ happen more often once people start using exotic characters in source. source code has to be as unambigous as possible on every level.
ps: and while standard encondings exist it is still commonly seen that nonstandard characters get lost for example in cvs, "why waste time on configuring when only some umlauts in comments get lost?", but well, there are "standards", not "one standard", that makes great difference.
> A Libertarian tends to believe that the companies which treat their employees
> fairly and those that aren't greedy will be the ones that succeed in a "real"
> free market. Buying congresscritters and lobbying for unconstitutional laws
> would not be an option for companies in that market.
This is nothing but wishful thinking of the worst kind. It boils down to "vote with your wallet", and that will never ever work. Relying on "vote with your wallet" effects is about as stupid as saying "everybody pays as much or little money for the sewage system as he sees appropriate" and then expecting that enough money to keep it serviced will show up because people do want a working sewage system.
The differences between Mac OS X and Windows can be handled by an API layer like wine, the differences in PPC and x86 CPUs can be handled by CPU emulation like virtualPC. Both are complex tasks and likely to never reach perfection, but there is a huge performance in performance hit.
> And WINE is unreliable at best, which x86 OSX won't change.
x86 OSX will roughly double the wine user base, dunno how much difference that would make for wine development, but i'm sure it's more than nothing.
and another thing: companies that make applications for windows are used to target multiple (sometimes quite different) versions of that OS. agreed, "system requirements: windows 2000/XP/vista or wine vX.Y.Z or newer" does sound utopic, but not _that_ utopic.
the sound engineer is the artist we are talking about.
why do the processing decentrally a thousand times with some magic cure-all algorithm in every single sound card if it could be done once by the sound engineer who has access to all the expensive toys? what is left is adopting the signal to crappy speakers, but in this case i'd rather throw better speakers at it than any number of transistors. oh, and a good sound engineer recognizes music that is more likely to be played on the crappy speakers and cares for that (think britney).
This gets even more interesting: Jamba was founded by the Samwer brothers with money they made from selling alando, one of the more successfull ebay-ripoffs in germany, to ebay germany.
maybe they are still in the process of uploading the results, you know, DARPA, having all the really really old internet hardware ;)
Personally, I'd rather have a car designed to absorb that impact at the cost of itself rather than just passing it along to me... heck, maybe I'm just weird that way. Forces have to go somewhere, don't'cha know.
:-)
If it packs enough mass those forces will simply go into the other vehicle involved. Just don't try to hit another SUV, i abolutely see your point
so you expect that less people will die then?
one question:
will this lead to
(a) less "boys and girls" involved in doing risky things in foreign countries
or
(b) the same number of "boys and girls" doing risky things in more foreign countries
i'm afraid that (b) might be closer to the future we will see, including more people to take a try at asymmetry.
still the technophile in me enjoys to see how technology advances and i guess it would happen anyways. and besides, this way of getting universities etc involved is definitely better than the usual opaque shifting of defense budget billions typically involved whenever the words "military" and "technology" appear in the same sentence. but we will probably seeing enough of that about autonomic vehicles later.
we all know the real challenge will be autonomously driving a tanker truck filled with nothing but sand while hordes of insane punks on jury-rigged buggies are trying to stop the vehicle.
but you are surely right about the the mars rover scenario, it is most likely just a cheap excuse to keep pacificsts who are able to resolve some levels of indirection from shouting "murderers" at the teams. after all we wont be seeing any humvee-sized mars rovers anytime soon and vehicle speed is not a bottleneck as the prolonged mission of the current rovers shows.
About time someone tries to make something out of the way most of those "profile sites" (you know the places on the net where all the disoriented teen girls and leftover 30+ show off their latest piercings) sooner or later turns into an inofficial MMOG, where having a long "friends" list and many "woah, u so s3ksah" (or however the current spelling is) in the diary comments equals the levelling efforts in other games. Just look at the friends list of every randomly selected brasilian on orkut for example, that's pure hunting and gathering, and putting somebody on that list is probably about as personal as your relation to the last minion-monster you slayed in diablo 2.
This project can easily fail, mostly because there is not much experience with the genre to build upon, but i see great potential. Some form of convergence between profile sites and MMORGs could easily be "the next big thing".
compared to the price of the high end-cards (the middle range is supposed to be available in an agp version iirc) the extra cost for a new mainboard is barely measurable. i would not be surprised if the agp-fraction of the high end market would be so small by now that the low numbers would drive up the price into regions where new board + slightly more mass-market graphics card would actually be cheaper.
the market for new-high-end-GPUs-in-old-boards is probably way too small to justify any investment into an AGP version:
> If I'm going to spend twice as much on a video card than any processor I've purchased in the last 5 years
In which case the extra cost to replace your socket 754 board & cpu with a similarly performing socket 939 cpu plus matching pci-e board would not make that much of a difference anymore, especially since you could reuse all that "plenty of RAM to spare". you could probably even manage to squeeze some money out of the lucky person who gets all your old gear for boosting your old (now his) system with taht relatively new 64 bit cpu.
As a bonus you would get the first ever real cpu-upgrade possibility since the invention of the socketed cpu, as the range from entry level athlon64 to dual core chips supported by current boards is bigger than anything ever to come in the same socket form factor and without front side bus ramping making the old boards obsolete despite having the same socket.
> Obviously, they have much less to lose since they all have "real" jobs and families
honestly, that's the only way to really say "screw you, riaa" and i am glad someone pointed it out. i think the long term effect of the whole concept of making big money with music being a fading memory will change a lot of our perception of music. i don't think that those who have decided/accepted that they will not make money are completely immune to "the rock star meme", since that's what we have all grown up with and humans are simply not that much rational to completely get stuff like that out of our brains in a lifetime.
what will happen? more focus on music that works with low monetary investment? more focus on local music because after the fall of big marketing budgets the personal presence in the local scene will have more impact? more focus on social elements of music making (playing together in a band) than on creating your own unique new songs at all costs because of the concept of "owning them"?
There used to be a time when people were making good money from painting portraits of people, nowadays this market is practically nonexistent. but painting is still around in different forms. maybe the recording artist will fade away as the portrait painter did, but music (and professional musicians, for commercials, movies, festivities etc) will never cease to exist.
yeah, never heard of that band and i don't even remember the name right now, but nowadays quite a lot of the music i am listening to is from personal musician sites or netlabels.
might have something to do with production costs of rock music vs production costs of everything that does _not_ claim to be so damn "authentic" that they need 20 engineers plus a year's wage of an average worker class family worth of microphones and fx processors to record it.
but the most important point remains, most people just want their music spoon-fed, and because they don't want to admit that they shout at the industry that does the spoon-feeding to distract from their shared folders full of streamlined, target audience engineered crap.
WoO was a classic 'time loop' episode. You could argue there were a very large number of reset buttons in it, but I think that's rather required in a time loop episode. (And sci-fi shows are required by law to do time loop episodes.)
I am amazed that there are people like you who don't call those episodes "time loop" instead of "Groundhog Day". But the groundhog day episode was certainly one of the best of sg-1, if you want to find out what is so good about sg-1 compare their groundhog day episode to those of other series.
PS: i definitely prefer a series where each episode the makers just try to tell the most interesting story they can think of, from beginning to end and don't care much for a bigger plot. i think st:tng got the balance right, they had a few great episodes with a bigger plot but the majority of episodes just tried to be good in itself, even taking a rather liberal view on established canon. if you can't tell your best story because it does not fit the setting/bigger plot then you have sacrificed a good story for a plot that only a fraction of the viewers will follow. (remember: the hardcore "have to watch all episodes" viewers are only the tip of the iceberg of the viewer market, they just happen to be much more vocal about their desires than the masses)
don't _ever_ underestimate the speed at which gato runs on a modern system. set a circling course and minor imperfections in the calculation of the circle will take you everywhere on the map within seconds.
(yes i know about the possibility to use an emulator instead)
ps: cga rocks
i always thought that the thinkpads were the only laptop computers that did not look cheap. some of those mac things aren't too bad either but there is so much fake metal finish around on the supermarket shelves that the real deal reminds me more and more of the cheap stuff, not the other way like the cheap makers intended. thinkpads otoh were immune to that effect.