I too bought a Treo 650 back in February, mostly to replace my horribly outdated Palm and also to converge so I was only carrying one device. Since I already had a Palm I just continued to do all those things on my phone, and added mobile web browsing, mobile email with my gmail account in VersaMail and portable videos since I now had a video-capable Palm. I had a lot of downtime at work so the Treo came in handy to stave off boredom.
Now that I've gotten a promotion and a full-day workload every day, I pretty much just use the Treo as a phone and to read e-books before bed. I still won't go to the iPhone though, even if AT&T were to start giving them away. I like the relative openness of my Treo and the thought of a locked down phone/pda is unbearable.
I don't know about you guys, but I've completely stopped listening to regular radio. To me, regular radio has degenerated into commercials and the same 10 songs in repeat. Now I listen to my iPod on my commute to work. I'm very sure that many people are doing the same.
Same here, except I listen to Ogg files on my Samsung player. I also still listen to NPR as there is now a local NPR broadcaster along with the one out of Atlanta that I can pick up once I get close to work. I did have Sirius satellite service, and I still do have the radio itself, but right now I don't listen enough to keep my subscription current. That being said, I did find a bunch of great indie bands (Shiny Toy Guns, Clear Static, etc) thanks to satellite. I may turn it back on one day in the future, but right now I'm waiting out the merger to see which way it goes.
Bill Lumbergh: So, Peter, what's happening? Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon? Peter Gibbons: No. Bill Lumbergh: Ah. Yeah. So I guess we should probably go ahead and have a little talk. Hmm? Peter Gibbons: Not right now, Lumbergh, I'm kinda busy. In fact, look, I'm gonna have to ask you to just go ahead and come back another time. I got a meeting with the Bobs in a couple of minutes. Bill Lumbergh: I wasn't aware of a meeting with them. Peter Gibbons: Yeah, they called me at home.
Wow, how very snarky of you! You could have done like the other three people here and kindly explained to me that there is a vast difference between what I had in my head (quantum physics) and quantum computing. But no, you had to show your obvious superior wit and intelligence by saying the infinitely wise "no shit".
Oh, wait, you posted a link to wikipedia. Perchance, that is the limit of your knowledge on the subject as well then?
I'm no quantum theory expert by a very long shot, but it was my understanding that there are 32 quantum states of electrons, not just on/off (1/0) like in the binary computer world. So, if we now have a quantum NOT gate, doesn't that mean there are 32 possible states of the NOT gate? Also, according to the article the CNOT gates they created can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously. In my mind this would cause errors and actually stop the flow of information instead of speeding it up.
Someone with some understanding of this stuff please elaborate, before my head asplodes.
Quantum entanglement is a great way to get information from one location to another at faster than the speed of light but offers no way to transmit matter.
Sure it does! We just haven't figured out that "Step 2: ???" part yet. You know, the one about converting matter into energy without energy loss (and therefore matter loss).
On a related note, read "Timeline" by Michael Crichton for an interesting fictional take on time travel by harnessing quantum states to visit other universes in the multiverse that are just like ours but several hundred years in the past. I just finished it, and it's quite entertaining, though obviously not possible for at least the next hundred years or so (if at all).
You forgot "pwned" and its variants. Yes, I know it's more of an online gaming word than strictly internet, but these days you can't go onto even a halfway serious forum without at least one juvenile-minded individual spouting that unfunny misspelling.
Actually it has happened...the user friendly free OS, that is. About a year before they were bought out, Be Inc. released a free version of BeOS R5. I can honestly say that was the easiest-to-learn OS I've ever installed or run, and I've been playing with alternative OSes for about 12 years now. Yes, the version they gave away was meant to run from within a Windows virtual drive, but it was trivial -- even, dare I say it? User-friendly -- to install it to a real partition or even as the only OS on the system.
Unless of course, you meant "free as in freedom" (I took you to mean "free as in beer")? In that case, no, there hasn't yet (in my opinion) been a truly user-friendly-for-the-masses free OS. Ubuntu is close...very, very close. But then, that is coming from someone who considers Slackware to be user-friendly.
What is truly sad is that your three cylinder, 1.3 liter Metro with around 75hp gets 44 highway MPG, while my 1989 Honda Accord LX with a four cylinder, 2.0 liter 98hp engine gets only 27 highway MPG. Granted, my car weighs probably twice what yours does, and also has a carburetor and not fuel injection. Still, it makes me wonder why Honda didn't just put the Civic's 1.5 liter four-banger in the Accords of that era. The horsepower would have been roughly the same and the gas mileage much better, not to mention one less type of engine to have to design and manufacture. I adore Honda as a general rule, but from time to time they really screw up (third-gen Accords and Preludes, I'm looking at you).
Oh, and I can't turn on the AC either (which still works! Go Honda!) without bogging down the car, especially on hills.
I feel you on that one. I had a 1991 Honda Civic hatchback that got 42/36 (highway/city). The newest Civics only get 40/30, and while they look a lot cooler than my old '91, they are also about $5,000 more than the sticker price of the 1991. Granted, inflation is a bitch, but then you have the Civic Hybrid. For $8,000 more you only get 51/49, or an average of about 14mpg gain, and a car that will need specialty maintenance only available at a Honda dealership. My point being, why are cars becoming less and less efficient as the years go by, even though oil prices are rising at two to three times the inflation rate?
I understand your point, but your analogy is flawed. It would have been better to say that, in order to buy and eat that one good meal you really love each day, you are forced to buy (but not necessarily eat) 100 other meals each day.
Or how about have to sign in if you enter any public building...
Which pretty much destroys the entire concept of it being a public building. Further down this path, we sign in to the museum, then the public park. Finally, we must provide our thumbprint or retinal scan to leave our own front door.
Actually it depends on which country or even which state the transaction occurs in. Where I live (Georgia, United States) it's called Theft By Deception. There is a parallel charge called Deceptive Business Practices, which covers businesses and individuals claiming to be a business that attempt a fraudulent transaction. If they actually succeed in selling a bogus product or service, and money exchanges hands, they are hit with the theft charge as well.
Assuming we're talking about the U.S., since when is it illegal for a minor to own/operate a car, and since when is it illegal for a person not licensed to drive, to own a car? My grandmother owned several cars in her lifetime despite never once having a driver's license. My mother and her brothers and sisters drove the cars, but they were registered to my grandmother. When I was 17 (a minor in this state), I owned and drove a car, titled in my name.
It comes up fine here, and I'm on AT&T DSL (formerly Bellsouth here in Georgia). Try going through a proxy web service and see what happens. Also, check your HOSTS file to make sure that address hasn't been blacklisted, though I doubt it unless you did it yourself, or you installed any software from the DSL provider that may have done it behind your back.
Also, what exactly does the error message say? If it's a standard "403 Forbidden", "404 Not Found" or "500 Internal Server Error" then it's on TPB's end, not you or your service provider. If it's a proxy error, then chances are it's on your system (if it's filtered at the provider, you're SOL). There may or may not be a way around that, again depending on whether you installed any software as part of your DSL installation. Contrary to what the DSL providers would have you believe, you don't need any software whatsoever to connect to them, as long as you use the Ethernet port on the modem and not the USB port. The latest modems, though, are also routers (possibly filtering at that level) but you can disable the routing and have it act as a standard DSL modem; google the model number to find out how. It usually involves logging into the modem with a private IP and changing a setting, then rebooting the modem.
I take it you have never heard of a Palm Treo? Or perhaps you are only speaking of plain cellphones and not smartphones? That's where I'm confused with the iPhone; it seems to sit precisely on that line between cellphone and smartphone. It's more powerful than the average cellphone, yet not as expandable and functional as a smartphone. Apple is touting it as the only portable device you'll ever need, but if I can't expand it the way I do my Treo, what's the point? It's really nothing more than the next logical stepping stone for the RAZR crowd.
Bottom line, I'll never again settle for a phone that I can't load third-party apps, play music and video, get push email and browse the real web as opposed to WAP-only sites. With the exception of the third-party apps, the iPhone has me covered; it's that exception that breaks the deal though. While I may get one for my girlfriend when she outgrows her Samsung flip-phone, I just can't see myself being that limited again.
Note it doesn't say "without notification," it says "without consent." Important difference.
Excellent point. Here in Georgia, it's "without notification". You can audio-record any conversation as long as at least one party has foreknowledge of the recording. That's why it's legal to record your conversation with the asshole who is prank calling you, but it is illegal to surreptitiously record your spouse and his/her lover having phone sex.
Also, the law the article quoted seems overly broad; "wiretapping" should mean tapping wires, correct? Or in other words, recording a telephone/internet/radio communication, not a live conversation in a public space.
It is my experience (been next to a place that was raided one time) that the police generally don't just kick in the front door - they knock and ask to come in first.
IANAL, but I do work with cops and lawyers every day. There are some cases where a judge will grant what is called a "no-knock" warrant, but that is only supposed to be when there is a good chance that knocking will give the subject of the warrant time to either destroy the evidence sought or grab a gun and shoot first. I can't imagine a judge granting a no-knock for a "piracy" bust, but then stranger things have happened in my eight years in law enforcement-related work.
Torpark (actually XeroBank now) isn't necessary unless you need anonymous proxied internet access. It's also slower than PF and, depending on how paranoid your IT staff is, it won't even run on some workstations. Not knocking your choice, just clarifying that it's not necessarily better depending on what you need.
I don't know if they still make it (hell I don't know if they still make TVs) but I once owned a Magnavox TV set that had a volume normalization setting that addressed this specific issue. It would detect and automatically reduce loud sounds within a fraction of a second. Once the sound level returned to "normal" it would ramp back up to the volume you had preset. It worked extremely well against those annoyingly loud "OxyClean" ads and such. The only downside was that you had to remember to turn it off for action movies or you'd never get that satisfying explosion effect when a bomb went off or a car crashed.
None of that matters to me. The few shows I actually watch on TV, I can either get from their website as streaming video or through BitTorrent if the network doesn't stream that show. I'm not that much into TV tech so watching on my computer monitor is good enough for me. Call me a Luddite, but I don't need no stinkin' HD picture.
Agreed. My favorite thing about Miranda is that it runs very well from a USB thumb drive. Put it with PortableFirefox, PortableThunderbird and a few other flash-friendly apps and you can take your entire internet desktop with you.
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I too bought a Treo 650 back in February, mostly to replace my horribly outdated Palm and also to converge so I was only carrying one device. Since I already had a Palm I just continued to do all those things on my phone, and added mobile web browsing, mobile email with my gmail account in VersaMail and portable videos since I now had a video-capable Palm. I had a lot of downtime at work so the Treo came in handy to stave off boredom.
Now that I've gotten a promotion and a full-day workload every day, I pretty much just use the Treo as a phone and to read e-books before bed. I still won't go to the iPhone though, even if AT&T were to start giving them away. I like the relative openness of my Treo and the thought of a locked down phone/pda is unbearable.
Obligatory Rand quote? I expected something more like "blood and bloody ashes!" or "I am the Lord of the Morning!"
...what?
Same here, except I listen to Ogg files on my Samsung player. I also still listen to NPR as there is now a local NPR broadcaster along with the one out of Atlanta that I can pick up once I get close to work. I did have Sirius satellite service, and I still do have the radio itself, but right now I don't listen enough to keep my subscription current. That being said, I did find a bunch of great indie bands (Shiny Toy Guns, Clear Static, etc) thanks to satellite. I may turn it back on one day in the future, but right now I'm waiting out the merger to see which way it goes.
Obligatory:
Bill Lumbergh: So, Peter, what's happening? Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?
Peter Gibbons: No.
Bill Lumbergh: Ah. Yeah. So I guess we should probably go ahead and have a little talk. Hmm?
Peter Gibbons: Not right now, Lumbergh, I'm kinda busy. In fact, look, I'm gonna have to ask you to just go ahead and come back another time. I got a meeting with the Bobs in a couple of minutes.
Bill Lumbergh: I wasn't aware of a meeting with them.
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, they called me at home.
Wow, how very snarky of you! You could have done like the other three people here and kindly explained to me that there is a vast difference between what I had in my head (quantum physics) and quantum computing. But no, you had to show your obvious superior wit and intelligence by saying the infinitely wise "no shit".
Oh, wait, you posted a link to wikipedia. Perchance, that is the limit of your knowledge on the subject as well then?
I'm no quantum theory expert by a very long shot, but it was my understanding that there are 32 quantum states of electrons, not just on/off (1/0) like in the binary computer world. So, if we now have a quantum NOT gate, doesn't that mean there are 32 possible states of the NOT gate? Also, according to the article the CNOT gates they created can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously. In my mind this would cause errors and actually stop the flow of information instead of speeding it up.
Someone with some understanding of this stuff please elaborate, before my head asplodes.
Sure it does! We just haven't figured out that "Step 2: ???" part yet. You know, the one about converting matter into energy without energy loss (and therefore matter loss).
On a related note, read "Timeline" by Michael Crichton for an interesting fictional take on time travel by harnessing quantum states to visit other universes in the multiverse that are just like ours but several hundred years in the past. I just finished it, and it's quite entertaining, though obviously not possible for at least the next hundred years or so (if at all).
You forgot "pwned" and its variants. Yes, I know it's more of an online gaming word than strictly internet, but these days you can't go onto even a halfway serious forum without at least one juvenile-minded individual spouting that unfunny misspelling.
Actually it has happened...the user friendly free OS, that is. About a year before they were bought out, Be Inc. released a free version of BeOS R5. I can honestly say that was the easiest-to-learn OS I've ever installed or run, and I've been playing with alternative OSes for about 12 years now. Yes, the version they gave away was meant to run from within a Windows virtual drive, but it was trivial -- even, dare I say it? User-friendly -- to install it to a real partition or even as the only OS on the system.
Unless of course, you meant "free as in freedom" (I took you to mean "free as in beer")? In that case, no, there hasn't yet (in my opinion) been a truly user-friendly-for-the-masses free OS. Ubuntu is close...very, very close. But then, that is coming from someone who considers Slackware to be user-friendly.
What is truly sad is that your three cylinder, 1.3 liter Metro with around 75hp gets 44 highway MPG, while my 1989 Honda Accord LX with a four cylinder, 2.0 liter 98hp engine gets only 27 highway MPG. Granted, my car weighs probably twice what yours does, and also has a carburetor and not fuel injection. Still, it makes me wonder why Honda didn't just put the Civic's 1.5 liter four-banger in the Accords of that era. The horsepower would have been roughly the same and the gas mileage much better, not to mention one less type of engine to have to design and manufacture. I adore Honda as a general rule, but from time to time they really screw up (third-gen Accords and Preludes, I'm looking at you).
Oh, and I can't turn on the AC either (which still works! Go Honda!) without bogging down the car, especially on hills.
I feel you on that one. I had a 1991 Honda Civic hatchback that got 42/36 (highway/city). The newest Civics only get 40/30, and while they look a lot cooler than my old '91, they are also about $5,000 more than the sticker price of the 1991. Granted, inflation is a bitch, but then you have the Civic Hybrid. For $8,000 more you only get 51/49, or an average of about 14mpg gain, and a car that will need specialty maintenance only available at a Honda dealership. My point being, why are cars becoming less and less efficient as the years go by, even though oil prices are rising at two to three times the inflation rate?
I understand your point, but your analogy is flawed. It would have been better to say that, in order to buy and eat that one good meal you really love each day, you are forced to buy (but not necessarily eat) 100 other meals each day.
Indeed, especially since computers tend to be compared to cars a bit more often than to juice drinks.
Or how about have to sign in if you enter any public building...
Which pretty much destroys the entire concept of it being a public building. Further down this path, we sign in to the museum, then the public park. Finally, we must provide our thumbprint or retinal scan to leave our own front door.
And I'm not even the paranoid type.
Actually it depends on which country or even which state the transaction occurs in. Where I live (Georgia, United States) it's called Theft By Deception. There is a parallel charge called Deceptive Business Practices, which covers businesses and individuals claiming to be a business that attempt a fraudulent transaction. If they actually succeed in selling a bogus product or service, and money exchanges hands, they are hit with the theft charge as well.
Assuming we're talking about the U.S., since when is it illegal for a minor to own/operate a car, and since when is it illegal for a person not licensed to drive, to own a car? My grandmother owned several cars in her lifetime despite never once having a driver's license. My mother and her brothers and sisters drove the cars, but they were registered to my grandmother. When I was 17 (a minor in this state), I owned and drove a car, titled in my name.
It comes up fine here, and I'm on AT&T DSL (formerly Bellsouth here in Georgia). Try going through a proxy web service and see what happens. Also, check your HOSTS file to make sure that address hasn't been blacklisted, though I doubt it unless you did it yourself, or you installed any software from the DSL provider that may have done it behind your back.
Also, what exactly does the error message say? If it's a standard "403 Forbidden", "404 Not Found" or "500 Internal Server Error" then it's on TPB's end, not you or your service provider. If it's a proxy error, then chances are it's on your system (if it's filtered at the provider, you're SOL). There may or may not be a way around that, again depending on whether you installed any software as part of your DSL installation. Contrary to what the DSL providers would have you believe, you don't need any software whatsoever to connect to them, as long as you use the Ethernet port on the modem and not the USB port. The latest modems, though, are also routers (possibly filtering at that level) but you can disable the routing and have it act as a standard DSL modem; google the model number to find out how. It usually involves logging into the modem with a private IP and changing a setting, then rebooting the modem.
I take it you have never heard of a Palm Treo? Or perhaps you are only speaking of plain cellphones and not smartphones? That's where I'm confused with the iPhone; it seems to sit precisely on that line between cellphone and smartphone. It's more powerful than the average cellphone, yet not as expandable and functional as a smartphone. Apple is touting it as the only portable device you'll ever need, but if I can't expand it the way I do my Treo, what's the point? It's really nothing more than the next logical stepping stone for the RAZR crowd.
Bottom line, I'll never again settle for a phone that I can't load third-party apps, play music and video, get push email and browse the real web as opposed to WAP-only sites. With the exception of the third-party apps, the iPhone has me covered; it's that exception that breaks the deal though. While I may get one for my girlfriend when she outgrows her Samsung flip-phone, I just can't see myself being that limited again.
Note it doesn't say "without notification," it says "without consent." Important difference.
Excellent point. Here in Georgia, it's "without notification". You can audio-record any conversation as long as at least one party has foreknowledge of the recording. That's why it's legal to record your conversation with the asshole who is prank calling you, but it is illegal to surreptitiously record your spouse and his/her lover having phone sex.
Also, the law the article quoted seems overly broad; "wiretapping" should mean tapping wires, correct? Or in other words, recording a telephone/internet/radio communication, not a live conversation in a public space.
It is my experience (been next to a place that was raided one time) that the police generally don't just kick in the front door - they knock and ask to come in first.
IANAL, but I do work with cops and lawyers every day. There are some cases where a judge will grant what is called a "no-knock" warrant, but that is only supposed to be when there is a good chance that knocking will give the subject of the warrant time to either destroy the evidence sought or grab a gun and shoot first. I can't imagine a judge granting a no-knock for a "piracy" bust, but then stranger things have happened in my eight years in law enforcement-related work.
Root-kits, as well as squashing the only reliable source for the GP2X (lik-sang.com).
Torpark (actually XeroBank now) isn't necessary unless you need anonymous proxied internet access. It's also slower than PF and, depending on how paranoid your IT staff is, it won't even run on some workstations. Not knocking your choice, just clarifying that it's not necessarily better depending on what you need.
I don't know if they still make it (hell I don't know if they still make TVs) but I once owned a Magnavox TV set that had a volume normalization setting that addressed this specific issue. It would detect and automatically reduce loud sounds within a fraction of a second. Once the sound level returned to "normal" it would ramp back up to the volume you had preset. It worked extremely well against those annoyingly loud "OxyClean" ads and such. The only downside was that you had to remember to turn it off for action movies or you'd never get that satisfying explosion effect when a bomb went off or a car crashed.
None of that matters to me. The few shows I actually watch on TV, I can either get from their website as streaming video or through BitTorrent if the network doesn't stream that show. I'm not that much into TV tech so watching on my computer monitor is good enough for me. Call me a Luddite, but I don't need no stinkin' HD picture.
Agreed. My favorite thing about Miranda is that it runs very well from a USB thumb drive. Put it with PortableFirefox, PortableThunderbird and a few other flash-friendly apps and you can take your entire internet desktop with you.