So yeah, they're new phones with a speaker on one end and a microphone on the other and some buttons between -- what's the BFD?
Well, as a wireless developer, I'll tell you:
2.5/3G -- almost all of the phone designes showcased support some sort of high speed wireless connection (high speed as a releative term to what came before). I-mode, M-Mode, GPRS, whatever, it all translates into "get data to the the phone faster than before".
Displays -- lot of them also offer colour displays, and those that don't are at least super-size STN screens. While you're right in assuming that colour screens are overkill, having a screen that can display at least 8+ lines is always good.
bluetooth -- even though bluetooth is a bit of a "lame duck", it's still more convenient then directional IR or tethering the phone to the laptop with a cable.
GPS -- while the "big brother" factor is pretty big here, as well as location-dependent SMS advertising, it's also useful for your average user -- like, say, telling your phone to use BLuetooth to sync only when you're a certain computer at XY coords, or a yellow-pages/direction system that can tell "you are here".
Polyphonic Sound -- I lied, this is not one of the reasons they're cool. This is one of the reasons why I will get pissed at people who have a CD quality Britney Spears sample as their ring tone while in a theatre while I'm trying to watch Matrix 2 and Matrix 0.
Point is, web server logs are as meaningful as web polls.
Are you sure they're meaningless? I have the PROOF that the meat industry has paid good money for market research! After all, how else could 'Neal afford his Mountaineer? Subscriptions? Pshaw!
In reading some of the the papers on pan, it seems have a lot in common with that other Image Description Langage, Postscript, albeit on a finer level.
Of course, here is where I insert the knee-jerk comment about having code embedded in an object with Microsofts reputation for security regarding such things.
However, while the technology is very compelling at first glance (Inovation? From Microsoft? Faugh!), I'm just disheartedened that there is little chance it will make it to the world outside Microsoft products, if it even survives at all (there is little real world interest in these sort of things at the moment).
.. an experimental treatment I remember hearing about a few years ago-- A while ago there was talk of a similar approach using thalidomide, a drug banned a few dacades ago. In the 1950's it caused a large number of deformed infants (so-called "flipper babies") when their mothers took it while pregnant.
It works by inhibitiing the growth of blood vessels. Which is fine for adults because grown people don't grow new vessels very often under normal circumstances, but when a tumor is growing, it does need new vessals-- thalidomide inhibits that and the tumour is starved of blood supplies.
Quite sure -- I believe it was meant as a joke. That's why it's funny, you're so used to seeing "this page intentionally left blank" all the time when, in fact, the page isn't black after they put those words on it. It was some IBMer's silent jab at his corporate image.
Ah, here it is: "Environmental Record Editing and Printing Program (EREP) User's Guide and Reference", (C) 1988, Page 344.:)
If a homeless person has a funny sign- he hasn't been homeless that long; a real homeless person is too hungry to be funny...
Well, in the software development world we have a corrolary to that:
If a software company writes a funny manual, they haven't been in the business that long; a real development house is too poor and it's geeks to tired to be funny..
...oh come one, you know I'm right.
Seriously, writing documentation is the worst part of programming, at least for the one writting the software. Most places can't afford a on-staff tech writer and so the people writing it are just developers on their coffee breaks. They want to get it done as quickly as possible.
Though, to be fair, an old IBM manual (from a system 390, if you care) iI have read, on teh very Last page "This page intentionally not left blank". I guess that was a laid back as IBM got in the 1980's..
One thing I noticed is that it has a watchdog timer -- that leads me to think they are posing it for the embedded market; specifically for those who want to integrate it as part of a high-end audio gear setup that requires minimal user interaction.
As an aside, don't tubes kick out a lot of heat? Any bets as to when we're going to see a Thermaltake Golden Orb for tubes?:)
a) eventually b) at lower quality and/or performance.
c) and on a TV.
On a TV. I mean really. You want to take a game like that, meant to be seen at 1024x764 and put in on a screen that can squeeze out only 400x500 if you're lucky? Would you like me to kick you in the nuts while you're playing, too?
I'm an "old timer", but still I'm not old enough to have been concious of when this phenomenon actually began; there was a fundamental change somewhere in the last 15 years where things shifted from games using existing hardware fully to where games became the reason themselves to create new, faster hardware devices.
Not that this is bad, nit by any means, but it does give one interesting meat to consider; no one will argue that games are what's driving things like new video card technologies -- when did the chicken outdo the egg?
I'm going to write some fantastic whizz-bang piece of software just for the pleasure of writting a EULA with a clause that goes "The lisencee of this product must wear a gorilla suit while using said product. Upon violation of this clause, the lisencee agrees to send the author Five (5) kiliograms of Reeses-Pieces(TM) Brand Peanutbutter candies."
I have a Mitsubishi t250 CDPD phone with AT&T as the carrier -- I was reluctant to go with At&t at first, with it's reputation as the "evil empire", but they were one of the few carriers at the time that offered flat rate unlimited WAP. I went with them as have been pleasantly surprised.
Granted, *typing* email on a phone is dubius at best (with the keypad, et al), but I've had little in the way of connectivity problems.
For a while last year I also was with Sprint, and although they were a pay-by-the-minute company, I found it reliable for the little bit I used it.
DO NOT USE QWEST. They are an EVIL, EVIL company. Their WAP service sucks (unreliable to the extremes), and their customer service (for the wireless division, anyway) sucks worse.
Well, since Cliff is in charge of Ask.Slashdot.org, and he decided to post it, then clearly that is what it is for, or else he wouldn't have posted it.
(Attention moderators: this comment is offtopic and you won't hurt my feeling moderating it as such.)
This is not entriely a freedom of speech issue -- it's actually more of an Individual Rights/Freedom of Access issue -- and when you put it like that, it makes sense.
The issue at hand is not "are we going to make video games illegal", it's "Who are we going to let see certain games". This is the same issue as movies -- whether or not you believe in movie ratings is up to you.
The reason why this is legal to do is that "children" are not "complete" citizens, as per US Judicial Code Title 42, Chapter 21 -- this is why the government can also disallow children to vote, serve in the military and enter into legal contracts.
Again, whether or not this is the correct way for a government to behave is left as an excercise to the reader.
..I as because I, like so many others, have a client for a distributed computing project installed on the PCs that I use regularly. In my case it's the Dnet OGR client, and it runs in super nice mode, sucking up any spare cycles that fall through the other processes. In this scenario, techically, almost all of my CPU time (with the exception of a micron here or there) is used.
Not, I don't know how brilliant's distributed system works, but if it's like any others it will do the same thing as my Dnet client and put itself in the lowest priority group, right next to my Dnet client which means that they will be splitting the remaining cycles -- yet these are not cycles that were unused, they are cycles one client too from another I had previously installed!
You obviously have no concept of Object Orientated coding, which is a shame because there is one important point to learn from it:
I don't see how this went from web site design to progamming, but whatever, it's your ballgame.
You obviously have no concept of Object Orientated coding, which is a shame because there is one important point to learn from it:
I'm sorry to say either you're mixing methaphors very bady or you have no concept of computer languages at all, otherwise you wouldn't have said this; But you did, and well, let me say this: Lets suppose you write a library for a program. You finish that program and are done with it. You start another -- do you really expect the compiler/IDE to do your job for you and load up your previous base codebase for you?
Saying behaviour should be default is one thing, but comparing Apples to Tree Sloths is another...
This is slightly differnt then divx, however, because when Divx you were paying less (like $5.95), and you were getting less (2 days of play time or somesuch, no extra features). With CDs like this you are still paying the full price ($18+) and getting yet getting less.
This happened to my company a few weeks ago, and I was hopping it was just me;
It happened about a week after we transfered registrars. we started getting renewal notices about or domains even though they were paid up until December. The Verisign people said that it was a "glitch" and that there was nothing they could do to effect a domain name once it had left their ownership.
WHile not strictly a case in server room design, make sure you take time to organize cables, cable runs and system placement.
The system that has worked for me in our midsize machine room (3 Unix, 3 NT, 1 2K, Phone Switch, and UPSes) is a compination of color and labeling:
on each cable, put a tag attached to each end saying what that end plugs into and where the other end goes - you can also use numbers and a lookup sheet, but that was too tedious for me. Another good idea someone showed me is used specific cable colours for specific connections (i.e. Blue for Workstations to hubs/switched, Green for Servers, yellow for hubs/switch/router to hub/switch/router, etc) -- it make visualization of your setup a bit easier to contemplate.
Of you're using human-sized UPSes, UPS everything. Each machine should have it's own 20-25 minute (exluding monitor) UPS, and put maybe 1-2 (maybe three, if they're small) pices of networking equipmnt (hubs, DSL routers, etc) to a UPS.
If you have the interesting chance to also work with the electrical wiring and want the extra piece of mind, have a power receptical every 4 feet (I've found that works well in my experince in the case of unpowered racks) -- and if you want to REALLY overplan, have a serpeate curcuit breaker for every wall/group of plugs.
For those of you who don't know, Prof. Mann is generally considered to be the "Father" of Wearable computers, having contstructed one of the first ones out of an Apple 2 in the early 80s to portably control his photographic equipment. He is now a professor at the University of Toronto; he also has an informative personal web page.
I know the obvious answer here are "Ebay" or "pricewatch" or whathaveye, but at the risk of bucking the trend, I've learned that the best deals now a days are comming more and more from simply having connections;
An example is a Compaq Armada (7380DMT, if you care) I bought used a little under a year ago; It was at a local computer sotre where I know the owner, and she knew I was in the market for a new(er) laptop; At the time, these machines where going for $450 easy on Ebay, but since I was already ready to buy, she was willing to cut me a deal because I was a willing buyer -- she woudln't have to go to the trouble of listing and shipping, and so I got it for $150 off the ebay price, or $300.
Now, I had to wait a few months in this scenario, and I really couldn't pick and choose, but since you're not wanting to spend much money, you probably don't care about picking and choosing anyway.
The reason I pick on ebay is that since more and more people areusing it, prices are being driven up to teh point that it's not always the best deal anymore.
Okay, so he lied. He was bait and he got ate and it's his own damn fault. What does this mean in real terms?
Not a damn thing.
How many people watched that speech? Million--Tens of millions--Maybe hundreds of millions. How many people know about him being debunked as a fraud? Perhaps a million if you stretch the figures.
It's not a great leap to assume he willfully lied -- and why shouldn't he? It was a carefuly crafted gamble. So what if even half of the people who watched that speech believe he's a charalatan? He has still indoctrinated is message in the remainder of the people who don't know any better.
He either lied or didn't bother to follow the real figures, not because thought he could get away with it, but because he knows that it doesn't matter if he gets away with it or not. Public relations people everywhere know that a lie is only a lie if you know about it.
The reason it's only WiMP 6.4 and not 7 or 8 is not a technical reason, but a legal one.
I can't remember where I read it (it is on the Codeweavers site, though), that the reason WiMP wasn't supported from the get-go was that the license says something about how it can only be installed in the Windows platform, and Crossover/Wine kinda doesn't qualify.
Ah, yes, here is the snippet from the support forums (Tue, 28 Aug 2001):
We've put some energy into WMP 7.1, but if you look at the license for WMP, there is a potential barrier. At this point, it would appear (based on the MS license) that the only legal way we could support WMP is if it were already installed on an existing MS partition. However, IANAL, and we're still looking into this.
..but I'm not going to complain or anything, of course! Now the only thing I need my MacOS and Windows boxed (any work, anyway) for is, well, games!
Computer and video-device companies need to sit at the table with the movie industry.
What they forgot to talk about is the seating arrangment they want; where the computer companies are sitting under the table performing fellatio on the Industry Associations.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got your small phone... RIGHT HERE!
So yeah, they're new phones with a speaker on one end and a microphone on the other and some buttons between -- what's the BFD?
Well, as a wireless developer, I'll tell you:
2.5/3G -- almost all of the phone designes showcased support some sort of high speed wireless connection (high speed as a releative term to what came before). I-mode, M-Mode, GPRS, whatever, it all translates into "get data to the the phone faster than before".
Displays -- lot of them also offer colour displays, and those that don't are at least super-size STN screens. While you're right in assuming that colour screens are overkill, having a screen that can display at least 8+ lines is always good.
bluetooth -- even though bluetooth is a bit of a "lame duck", it's still more convenient then directional IR or tethering the phone to the laptop with a cable.
GPS -- while the "big brother" factor is pretty big here, as well as location-dependent SMS advertising, it's also useful for your average user -- like, say, telling your phone to use BLuetooth to sync only when you're a certain computer at XY coords, or a yellow-pages/direction system that can tell "you are here".
Polyphonic Sound -- I lied, this is not one of the reasons they're cool. This is one of the reasons why I will get pissed at people who have a CD quality Britney Spears sample as their ring tone while in a theatre while I'm trying to watch Matrix 2 and Matrix 0.
Are you sure they're meaningless? I have the PROOF that the meat industry has paid good money for market research! After all, how else could 'Neal afford his Mountaineer? Subscriptions? Pshaw!
In reading some of the the papers on pan, it seems have a lot in common with that other Image Description Langage, Postscript, albeit on a finer level.
Of course, here is where I insert the knee-jerk comment about having code embedded in an object with Microsofts reputation for security regarding such things.
However, while the technology is very compelling at first glance (Inovation? From Microsoft? Faugh!), I'm just disheartedened that there is little chance it will make it to the world outside Microsoft products, if it even survives at all (there is little real world interest in these sort of things at the moment).
.. an experimental treatment I remember hearing about a few years ago-- A while ago there was talk of a similar approach using thalidomide, a drug banned a few dacades ago. In the 1950's it caused a large number of deformed infants (so-called "flipper babies") when their mothers took it while pregnant.
It works by inhibitiing the growth of blood vessels. Which is fine for adults because grown people don't grow new vessels very often under normal circumstances, but when a tumor is growing, it does need new vessals-- thalidomide inhibits that and the tumour is starved of blood supplies.
Quite sure -- I believe it was meant as a joke. That's why it's funny, you're so used to seeing "this page intentionally left blank" all the time when, in fact, the page isn't black after they put those words on it. It was some IBMer's silent jab at his corporate image.
:)
Ah, here it is: "Environmental Record Editing and Printing Program (EREP) User's Guide and Reference", (C) 1988, Page 344.
Well, in the software development world we have a corrolary to that:
...oh come one, you know I'm right.
Seriously, writing documentation is the worst part of programming, at least for the one writting the software. Most places can't afford a on-staff tech writer and so the people writing it are just developers on their coffee breaks. They want to get it done as quickly as possible.
Though, to be fair, an old IBM manual (from a system 390, if you care) iI have read, on teh very Last page "This page intentionally not left blank". I guess that was a laid back as IBM got in the 1980's..
One thing I noticed is that it has a watchdog timer -- that leads me to think they are posing it for the embedded market; specifically for those who want to integrate it as part of a high-end audio gear setup that requires minimal user interaction.
:)
As an aside, don't tubes kick out a lot of heat? Any bets as to when we're going to see a Thermaltake Golden Orb for tubes?
c) and on a TV.
On a TV. I mean really. You want to take a game like that, meant to be seen at 1024x764 and put in on a screen that can squeeze out only 400x500 if you're lucky? Would you like me to kick you in the nuts while you're playing, too?
Seriously.
I'm an "old timer", but still I'm not old enough to have been concious of when this phenomenon actually began; there was a fundamental change somewhere in the last 15 years where things shifted from games using existing hardware fully to where games became the reason themselves to create new, faster hardware devices.
Not that this is bad, nit by any means, but it does give one interesting meat to consider; no one will argue that games are what's driving things like new video card technologies -- when did the chicken outdo the egg?
Actually, all you have to do is just use UFS as you filesystem (as opposed to HFS+) you can get around that issue.
I'm going to write some fantastic whizz-bang piece of software just for the pleasure of writting a EULA with a clause that goes "The lisencee of this product must wear a gorilla suit while using said product. Upon violation of this clause, the lisencee agrees to send the author Five (5) kiliograms of Reeses-Pieces(TM) Brand Peanutbutter candies."
I have a Mitsubishi t250 CDPD phone with AT&T as the carrier -- I was reluctant to go with At&t at first, with it's reputation as the "evil empire", but they were one of the few carriers at the time that offered flat rate unlimited WAP. I went with them as have been pleasantly surprised.
Granted, *typing* email on a phone is dubius at best (with the keypad, et al), but I've had little in the way of connectivity problems.
For a while last year I also was with Sprint, and although they were a pay-by-the-minute company, I found it reliable for the little bit I used it.
DO NOT USE QWEST. They are an EVIL, EVIL company. Their WAP service sucks (unreliable to the extremes), and their customer service (for the wireless division, anyway) sucks worse.
Well, since Cliff is in charge of Ask.Slashdot.org, and he decided to post it, then clearly that is what it is for, or else he wouldn't have posted it.
(Attention moderators: this comment is offtopic and you won't hurt my feeling moderating it as such.)
This is not entriely a freedom of speech issue -- it's actually more of an Individual Rights/Freedom of Access issue -- and when you put it like that, it makes sense.
The issue at hand is not "are we going to make video games illegal", it's "Who are we going to let see certain games". This is the same issue as movies -- whether or not you believe in movie ratings is up to you.
The reason why this is legal to do is that "children" are not "complete" citizens, as per US Judicial Code Title 42, Chapter 21 -- this is why the government can also disallow children to vote, serve in the military and enter into legal contracts.
Again, whether or not this is the correct way for a government to behave is left as an excercise to the reader.
..I as because I, like so many others, have a client for a distributed computing project installed on the PCs that I use regularly. In my case it's the Dnet OGR client, and it runs in super nice mode, sucking up any spare cycles that fall through the other processes. In this scenario, techically, almost all of my CPU time (with the exception of a micron here or there) is used.
Not, I don't know how brilliant's distributed system works, but if it's like any others it will do the same thing as my Dnet client and put itself in the lowest priority group, right next to my Dnet client which means that they will be splitting the remaining cycles -- yet these are not cycles that were unused, they are cycles one client too from another I had previously installed!
I don't see how this went from web site design to progamming, but whatever, it's your ballgame.
I'm sorry to say either you're mixing methaphors very bady or you have no concept of computer languages at all, otherwise you wouldn't have said this; But you did, and well, let me say this: Lets suppose you write a library for a program. You finish that program and are done with it. You start another -- do you really expect the compiler/IDE to do your job for you and load up your previous base codebase for you?
Saying behaviour should be default is one thing, but comparing Apples to Tree Sloths is another...
This is slightly differnt then divx, however, because when Divx you were paying less (like $5.95), and you were getting less (2 days of play time or somesuch, no extra features). With CDs like this you are still paying the full price ($18+) and getting yet getting less.
This happened to my company a few weeks ago, and I was hopping it was just me;
It happened about a week after we transfered registrars. we started getting renewal notices about or domains even though they were paid up until December. The Verisign people said that it was a "glitch" and that there was nothing they could do to effect a domain name once it had left their ownership.
WHile not strictly a case in server room design, make sure you take time to organize cables, cable runs and system placement.
:)
The system that has worked for me in our midsize machine room (3 Unix, 3 NT, 1 2K, Phone Switch, and UPSes) is a compination of color and labeling:
on each cable, put a tag attached to each end saying what that end plugs into and where the other end goes - you can also use numbers and a lookup sheet, but that was too tedious for me. Another good idea someone showed me is used specific cable colours for specific connections (i.e. Blue for Workstations to hubs/switched, Green for Servers, yellow for hubs/switch/router to hub/switch/router, etc) -- it make visualization of your setup a bit easier to contemplate.
Of you're using human-sized UPSes, UPS everything. Each machine should have it's own 20-25 minute (exluding monitor) UPS, and put maybe 1-2 (maybe three, if they're small) pices of networking equipmnt (hubs, DSL routers, etc) to a UPS.
If you have the interesting chance to also work with the electrical wiring and want the extra piece of mind, have a power receptical every 4 feet (I've found that works well in my experince in the case of unpowered racks) -- and if you want to REALLY overplan, have a serpeate curcuit breaker for every wall/group of plugs.
But trust me on the wiring
For those of you who don't know, Prof. Mann is generally considered to be the "Father" of Wearable computers, having contstructed one of the first ones out of an Apple 2 in the early 80s to portably control his photographic equipment. He is now a professor at the University of Toronto; he also has an informative personal web page.
I know the obvious answer here are "Ebay" or "pricewatch" or whathaveye, but at the risk of bucking the trend, I've learned that the best deals now a days are comming more and more from simply having connections;
An example is a Compaq Armada (7380DMT, if you care) I bought used a little under a year ago; It was at a local computer sotre where I know the owner, and she knew I was in the market for a new(er) laptop; At the time, these machines where going for $450 easy on Ebay, but since I was already ready to buy, she was willing to cut me a deal because I was a willing buyer -- she woudln't have to go to the trouble of listing and shipping, and so I got it for $150 off the ebay price, or $300.
Now, I had to wait a few months in this scenario, and I really couldn't pick and choose, but since you're not wanting to spend much money, you probably don't care about picking and choosing anyway.
The reason I pick on ebay is that since more and more people areusing it, prices are being driven up to teh point that it's not always the best deal anymore.
Okay, so he lied. He was bait and he got ate and it's his own damn fault. What does this mean in real terms?
Not a damn thing.
How many people watched that speech? Million--Tens of millions--Maybe hundreds of millions. How many people know about him being debunked as a fraud? Perhaps a million if you stretch the figures.
It's not a great leap to assume he willfully lied -- and why shouldn't he? It was a carefuly crafted gamble. So what if even half of the people who watched that speech believe he's a charalatan? He has still indoctrinated is message in the remainder of the people who don't know any better.
He either lied or didn't bother to follow the real figures, not because thought he could get away with it, but because he knows that it doesn't matter if he gets away with it or not. Public relations people everywhere know that a lie is only a lie if you know about it.
I can't remember where I read it (it is on the Codeweavers site, though), that the reason WiMP wasn't supported from the get-go was that the license says something about how it can only be installed in the Windows platform, and Crossover/Wine kinda doesn't qualify.
Ah, yes, here is the snippet from the support forums (Tue, 28 Aug 2001):
..but I'm not going to complain or anything, of course! Now the only thing I need my MacOS and Windows boxed (any work, anyway) for is, well, games!
What they forgot to talk about is the seating arrangment they want; where the computer companies are sitting under the table performing fellatio on the Industry Associations.