He's actually using this time to tell a racist joke involving the pope, a frenchman, and a japanese lady on his website. It's quite funny. I'm sure the site will be accessible as soon as he is done, and will be back up shortly.
I didn't know mozilla was DoS hacking software! That explains why every site I try to go to that is at the top of slashdot crashes when I try to view it. Now to view the kerry site with mozilla and bring it down!
When anyone buys a basic stamp, your paying for curriculum. Compared to even a slow avr(or pic for that matter, even though the basic stamp is based off the pic 16 series-I think) the basic stamp has no where near the speed or operational capabilities. If anyone is looking for hobby projects for little money, the first place I would send them is toward an 8-bit microcontroller. Compare the price of a single basic stamp($50) that can preform 4k operations/sec to a sub $1 avr that can do 8M operations/second...the only problem is there isn't a curriculum for beginners to get people started with the avrs. And it's not that they are that much harder to use, you can natively program them in C, but there are software packages that allow you to program them in BASIC. As far as hardware interfacing it is the same as the basic stamp, but you actually have to figure it out on your own instead of reading instructions out of a book. As I said, when you buy a basic stamp your buying curriculum...not performance that can even be compared to avrs/pics...ect.
I have bought stuff from froogle links, and its now one of many places I commonly use to look for parts. I also use gmail, and I don't understand why you think its "still crap". It's simple, clean, and easy to use. Maybe it can't import all your old email, and contacts...and doesn't have a thousand features that barely get used by the average use...but I wouldn't use that to call it "crap".
and what about carrier pigeons? Have bike carriers, letter mail, email, telephone, and voip rendered the helpless birds useless?
I don't know about anyone else, but for the last few years, I haven't gotten a single response from my carrier pigeon messages. I pick up the fat little birds at the park, attach office documents, assignments, and reports and watch them struggle to get off the ground. They fly away and I never hear from them again.
I've had to resort to email just to get my documents to family and friends. In extreme cases I even have to pick up the phone and call them! Is it a matter of time before these birds are no longer a usefull communication tool?
I've been using the astroflight 110D for a few years on my battlbot batteries(3 Ah NiCD and NiMH). Its worked great for me. Recentely I've gotten into small robots and am starting to use li poly batteries, so I went ahead and replaced it with the triton chargers...its worked great so far. You can get either one from robotcombat
I'm surprised no one has suggested a Basic Stamp. Personally I have stopped using them because I started needing more power on my projects, but for simple robot platforms, they are a pretty good teaching tool. If you get a BS2 kit with one of the books to go a long with it, you'll basically have everything you need to get started. You wont have laptop control, but if you are interested in controlling it with a laptop I would try rentron and get some transmitters/receivers and play with making it wireless. The basic stamp is limited in it's ability, but its hard to find any other kind of robot kit that comes with an entire curriculum like anything from parallax does.
your not missing much. Just about the only thing I use dreamweaver for is the visual layout of the page, after that I close it and edit the code manually.
I find that most tools that are supposed to help you do everything are only good for about 1% of the actual work. But they're very good at that 1%!
I do agree that flash shouldn't be used for an entire website. It's really unprofessional, and people that make entire sites using flash usually make the whole site to dark/light and way to flashy. Flash is good for homepages though, where the audiance is personal friends and only people that would find the site based on someone telling them about it.
But just because I don't prefer it for whole sites doesn't mean that it can't be done. There are specific instances where a whole flash site is done well and is useful.
if you justify calling it an add client based on the way one group of people uses it, then you could do that with any other language. I could just a well say java is for crappy game programming, but its not. That is just what a large group of people use it for. If you have ever been part of the flash development community you would understand that flash has many other uses.
Calling flash an ad engine because the way 10% of flash developers use it for ads is just short-sighted.
If you really want to learn what flash is take a look at the trial, and make a few swfs. If not, you can continue to try and validate your shallow assumptions about it based on a few websites you've seen.
yes, they may limit their site to the 20% of the people surfing the internet that don't have some sort of flash plugin, but sites like his aren't meant for everyone on the net to see. Most sites for university projects are simply meant to plesent abstract information to impress professors.
>>For simple, cell animation like most of what I've seen in Flash, pretty much any format that doesnt require the installation of the "take over your screen and generally piss you off" ad client is superior.
since when is the flash plugin an ad client? Just becuase people us it for adds doesn't make it an add client. If you wanna complain about things that "take over your screen and generally piss you off" complain about javascript. The way you guys talk about flash, its like you think there are functions built into flash specifically for ads. Take a look at the function library for actionscript, your not going to find a pop_up_fullscreen_and_irritate_you().
oh, and if you really want power(and basically no mobility) check out the sager 8890 V. Have you ever seen a laptop with a radeon 9600 pro 128mb? its a beast.
if you want an alienware-etreme style laptop, just look at the manufacturer who makes them. http://www.sagernotebook.com . Alienware laptops are just the sager notebooks with pretty colors and an alienware sticker(you'll find many laptops on the market are made be the same manufacturer, with the campanies logo slapped on it). Also check out http://pctorque.com/ same situation, the alienware computer without the alienware hype. Deck out one of those and its gonna be half the price of a basic alienware. If you want power and battery life though, I would deffinately put out the money and get a pentium M based system. Your gonna pay more, but the performance is fantastic, and battery life is amazing.
look at the lower dell centrino's. For $2200(under $2300 mind you:-P ) you could get a top of the line laptop. I got a 1.4ghz pentium m, 384mb ddr,30gig, 64mb radeon 9000(6901 on 3dmark 2001:-D), 14.1" screen and dvd/cd-r for $1600. It weighs 5lbs and is like 1.3" think.
The same thing happened to me. I bought the 185a5 at bestbuy because of the beautiful widescreen and slot loading dvd/cd-r, what a mistake. Three days after I had it the screen began to wobble(like the old laptop I replaced with the purchase) so I took it back. So they gave me a new one, and when I got it home the paint on the bottom of it was chipping and it wouldn't sit flat on a table. So I take it back again and ask for a return----what a hassle. We argued for almost an hour about the restocking fee($200 or $300). FINALLY, they gave me my money back and I decided to wait for the pentium M's to come out before I bought again. Since then I got a Dell inspiron 600m and am very happy with it. I would suggest anyone looking at the VPR matrix to go for a more established brand, they're cool laptops but they just don't have the type of quality and reputation of a lot of manufacturers out there.
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There are websites outside the US? huh...ya learn something new everyday.
He's actually using this time to tell a racist joke involving the pope, a frenchman, and a japanese lady on his website. It's quite funny. I'm sure the site will be accessible as soon as he is done, and will be back up shortly.
I didn't know mozilla was DoS hacking software! That explains why every site I try to go to that is at the top of slashdot crashes when I try to view it. Now to view the kerry site with mozilla and bring it down!
The Bush site thinks I'm a terrorist! Everytime I view the site my browser crashes(firefox 1.0pr).
I hope Mr. Bush doesn't think I'm some kind of outsider, terrorist, or even worse...Canadian!
Apparently you don't agree with him, so who cares what you think?
Would you really take a reporter from a reporting agency with "enquirer" in the name seriously? I don't think I would.
When anyone buys a basic stamp, your paying for curriculum. Compared to even a slow avr(or pic for that matter, even though the basic stamp is based off the pic 16 series-I think) the basic stamp has no where near the speed or operational capabilities. If anyone is looking for hobby projects for little money, the first place I would send them is toward an 8-bit microcontroller. Compare the price of a single basic stamp($50) that can preform 4k operations/sec to a sub $1 avr that can do 8M operations/second...the only problem is there isn't a curriculum for beginners to get people started with the avrs. And it's not that they are that much harder to use, you can natively program them in C, but there are software packages that allow you to program them in BASIC. As far as hardware interfacing it is the same as the basic stamp, but you actually have to figure it out on your own instead of reading instructions out of a book. As I said, when you buy a basic stamp your buying curriculum...not performance that can even be compared to avrs/pics...ect.
possibly the best comment on this article I've seen.
I have bought stuff from froogle links, and its now one of many places I commonly use to look for parts. I also use gmail, and I don't understand why you think its "still crap". It's simple, clean, and easy to use. Maybe it can't import all your old email, and contacts...and doesn't have a thousand features that barely get used by the average use...but I wouldn't use that to call it "crap".
and what about carrier pigeons? Have bike carriers, letter mail, email, telephone, and voip rendered the helpless birds useless? I don't know about anyone else, but for the last few years, I haven't gotten a single response from my carrier pigeon messages. I pick up the fat little birds at the park, attach office documents, assignments, and reports and watch them struggle to get off the ground. They fly away and I never hear from them again. I've had to resort to email just to get my documents to family and friends. In extreme cases I even have to pick up the phone and call them! Is it a matter of time before these birds are no longer a usefull communication tool?
I've been using the astroflight 110D for a few years on my battlbot batteries(3 Ah NiCD and NiMH). Its worked great for me. Recentely I've gotten into small robots and am starting to use li poly batteries, so I went ahead and replaced it with the triton chargers...its worked great so far. You can get either one from robotcombat
I'm surprised no one has suggested a Basic Stamp. Personally I have stopped using them because I started needing more power on my projects, but for simple robot platforms, they are a pretty good teaching tool. If you get a BS2 kit with one of the books to go a long with it, you'll basically have everything you need to get started. You wont have laptop control, but if you are interested in controlling it with a laptop I would try rentron and get some transmitters/receivers and play with making it wireless. The basic stamp is limited in it's ability, but its hard to find any other kind of robot kit that comes with an entire curriculum like anything from parallax does.
your not missing much. Just about the only thing I use dreamweaver for is the visual layout of the page, after that I close it and edit the code manually.
I find that most tools that are supposed to help you do everything are only good for about 1% of the actual work. But they're very good at that 1%!
I do agree that flash shouldn't be used for an entire website. It's really unprofessional, and people that make entire sites using flash usually make the whole site to dark/light and way to flashy. Flash is good for homepages though, where the audiance is personal friends and only people that would find the site based on someone telling them about it.
But just because I don't prefer it for whole sites doesn't mean that it can't be done. There are specific instances where a whole flash site is done well and is useful.
if you justify calling it an add client based on the way one group of people uses it, then you could do that with any other language. I could just a well say java is for crappy game programming, but its not. That is just what a large group of people use it for. If you have ever been part of the flash development community you would understand that flash has many other uses.
Calling flash an ad engine because the way 10% of flash developers use it for ads is just short-sighted.
If you really want to learn what flash is take a look at the trial, and make a few swfs. If not, you can continue to try and validate your shallow assumptions about it based on a few websites you've seen.
yes, they may limit their site to the 20% of the people surfing the internet that don't have some sort of flash plugin, but sites like his aren't meant for everyone on the net to see. Most sites for university projects are simply meant to plesent abstract information to impress professors. >>For simple, cell animation like most of what I've seen in Flash, pretty much any format that doesnt require the installation of the "take over your screen and generally piss you off" ad client is superior. since when is the flash plugin an ad client? Just becuase people us it for adds doesn't make it an add client. If you wanna complain about things that "take over your screen and generally piss you off" complain about javascript. The way you guys talk about flash, its like you think there are functions built into flash specifically for ads. Take a look at the function library for actionscript, your not going to find a pop_up_fullscreen_and_irritate_you().
oh, and if you really want power(and basically no mobility) check out the sager 8890 V. Have you ever seen a laptop with a radeon 9600 pro 128mb? its a beast.
if you want an alienware-etreme style laptop, just look at the manufacturer who makes them. http://www.sagernotebook.com . Alienware laptops are just the sager notebooks with pretty colors and an alienware sticker(you'll find many laptops on the market are made be the same manufacturer, with the campanies logo slapped on it). Also check out http://pctorque.com/ same situation, the alienware computer without the alienware hype. Deck out one of those and its gonna be half the price of a basic alienware. If you want power and battery life though, I would deffinately put out the money and get a pentium M based system. Your gonna pay more, but the performance is fantastic, and battery life is amazing.
look at the lower dell centrino's. For $2200(under $2300 mind you :-P ) you could get a top of the line laptop. I got a 1.4ghz pentium m, 384mb ddr,30gig, 64mb radeon 9000(6901 on 3dmark 2001 :-D), 14.1" screen and dvd/cd-r for $1600. It weighs 5lbs and is like 1.3" think.
The same thing happened to me. I bought the 185a5 at bestbuy because of the beautiful widescreen and slot loading dvd/cd-r, what a mistake. Three days after I had it the screen began to wobble(like the old laptop I replaced with the purchase) so I took it back. So they gave me a new one, and when I got it home the paint on the bottom of it was chipping and it wouldn't sit flat on a table. So I take it back again and ask for a return----what a hassle. We argued for almost an hour about the restocking fee($200 or $300). FINALLY, they gave me my money back and I decided to wait for the pentium M's to come out before I bought again. Since then I got a Dell inspiron 600m and am very happy with it. I would suggest anyone looking at the VPR matrix to go for a more established brand, they're cool laptops but they just don't have the type of quality and reputation of a lot of manufacturers out there.