>For half that price, you're better off with Rovio [wowwee.com].
I bought one and was very displeased with it. The camera on it is of poor quality (requires a very well lit room) and the little white LED it uses as a headlamp is almost useless. I toughed it out for a while but the audio over the internet just would break more often than it would work. Annoyingly there's no "press here to speak" button, it just picked up sound from your mic at whatever threshold, so you were usually broadcasting and sending static when it did work. The amount of bandwidth used was pretty high for just audio. Oh, audio was IE only.
The battery life on it wasnt too great either. I loved watching it dock, though. I ended up returning it. Perhaps the Rovio II will be better especially if they opened it up so I could get root easily. Perhaps even a basic serial or usb port for use by tinkerers so we can mount devices its not designed to use. There's a need out there for a good little telepresence robot at around that price point that is expandable and hackable. The Rovio is just a toy. The Blackfin at half the price would be perfect.
>by sacrificing things like onboard wireless (which adds ~$40 to the cost of the Kindle).
Its not wifi chips that are expensive its the EVDO and the deal Amazon has with Sprint that's expensive. I dont need a EVDO ebook reader. Wifi is good enough. Just give me an offline option if I cant get it on wifi someplace (copy file to USB drive and insert it into ebook reader). Really, there's a huge hole in the market for sub $150 dollar ebook readers. Its probably doable with a smaller eink screen and lack of bell and whistles. The Sony pocket edition reader is pretty close.
People have forgotten because with wear leveling its a fixed issue with most SSDs. Its MTBF is on par with mechanical disks.
The new hotness is to make sure your OS and disk support TRIM so you dont have performance issues down the line. I bought a 60gig OCZ drive a month or two ago and run Win7 on it (both support TRIM). 200+/mbs reads with no latency. Its pretty nice for gaming load times. I still have 2 500gig drives for storage. Works great. When the 120gig model goes on sale I'll switch to it and put the 60 in my laptop.
This is very interesting. This could all be attributed to a bad switch and lack of redundancy instead of what the media and other "know it alls" are saying, specially "OMG COMPUTERS ARE GOING TO KILL US. LETS GO BACK TO CARBERATEURS AND SOLID LINES!!!"
Err, how are we "leaving the internet alone" now? DMCA, ISP regulations, wiretap laws, computer crime laws, pedophile laws, copyright laws, etc etc etc. The only proof of a "big change" is an NTIA advisory article? What legislation has passed? Looks to me like the regulations are already here in the form of the laws I mentioned earlier and this is a just typical Register-style trolling to get ad impressions.
Ah, yes. Nothing like shooting animals extinct because ground up penis powder is "#1 GOOD BEST FOR ERECTION AND SKIN BLEACHING!!!!" Let it go, there's nothing of value in bullshit. A regular doctor can play the placebo game if need be by prescribing ibuprofen or vitamin C. Youd be surprised how often people feel better from prescription ibuprofen even when regular ibuprofen did nothing. No need to keep an army of kooks employed.
Oh, I agree. I think Vista is typical MS software and no worse than their other offerings, especially when they released SP1 and fixed a lot of minor annoying issues. My point is perception is as strong as reality. If people perceive Vista as a bad purchase, which many people did, then sales would be hurt, which is exactly what happened.
>And the world goes on. Even if Win7 had huge memory problems, it wouldn't have stopped people from buying it.
I doubt that. MS's Vista sales were hurt badly by its reputation. Most shops skipped over Vista completely. Apple got a little sales boost too.
>Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
Christ, what ever happened to basic responsibility? Or buy beware? How about reading reviews before buying something or returning the product if you dont like it? Is lawsuit now the default action?
They already are. When there's a credible threat you'll read about how no one suddenly had cell phones working for a short while.
I spoke to someone in the Air Force who does electronic jamming for a living. He's part of a small crew (4 or 5, I think) and they jam enemy sites suspected of having IEDs or anything remotely controlled. They have lots of toys on that plane, its pretty incredible.
As far as the enemy goes, well, these things are toys. If this was against a nation that wasnt a failed state, then they would quickly setup SAMs and take out all these predators and be done with it. Predators really not a threat against a country with a real military. Theyre only good against insurgents and other non-state actors.
Agreed, this is beyond stupid. You could do the same with XP if you like, but now its a little easier. I used to share a cellular card this way years ago. The "policing" and "lockdown" of "rogue" access points is like one click in group policy or a value in a reg key.
Look kid, the Olympics are a scam. Sales of Vonn's Brand French milk bath soaps are down 20%. I dont care if its tea berry or sandalwood, if she can't move product then she's out of the league!
Sure, youre dropping around 100 bucks per drop (less if you go with actiontec), but it saves you time and energy doing a cat5 conversion. The bitrates are pretty good too, although that depends on the quality and length of your wiring.
Powerline AV isnt bad, you can get a steady 40-50mbps with it, but that's pretty much wireless-N speeds, which is a lot cheaper.
Wait, what?! So you and another nerd (perhaps me) have an ssh service running. My dyndns username is a one letter from yours. You fat finger it, ignore the ssh key warning, and type in your username? You really think thats some hack? Err, time to take off the tin foil hat.
I doubt there's an army of dyndns typo domains just to get your password. Heck, how could you implement it? Lets say your domain is darguard.dyndns.org and the typo domain is dargard. How do they know it was dargaurd that visited and not dargarf or darfard? Typos are two way street. Regardless, this is why we have key change warnings.
Its difficult to buy a non-profit. You cant just put in an offer. You pretty much have to convince the board to switch to a private system and hand over the organization as a sale. I doubt Jimbo can even do this. The result would be a massive migration away from the Googlepedia and its collapse.
>It will be followed by actions which will make it impossible.
I think you're being overly cynical, which is trendy and will get you mod points, but doesnt mean youre correct.
Millions of people live within a couple hundred feet of fiber. The infrastructure is pretty much there. The real issue is the last line connection, which is almost there too. Right now I can get 50mbps internet via Comcast business if I really wanted it. Verizon's FIOS service also does 50mbps. Uverse tops out around 24mbps. So you're really just another hardware generation away from hitting 100mbps. DOCSIS 4, whatever will replace VDSL2, etc.
Adobe reader's web plugin simply opens PDFs without any warning. Nor does it warn if there is javascript running on the PDF. Its a cracker's dream. Most other applications give some kind of warning, especially if there's something scripted in the document. Adobe does none of this. Heck, you can disable Javascript but it will helpfully remind you that its disabled and offer to unblock it if you attempt to open a pdf with javascript. Its really an incredibly terrible way to handle security.
This thing should at least be shipping with js disabled and the only way to enable it is by going into Preferences. The web plugin should be retired and just force the pdf to open in the full reader. One can dream, right?
>If you voted for Bush the lefties already know who you are and where you live.
I can't exactly picture Al Franken and Russ Feingold sitting around smoking cigars and laughing while their servers churn away printing reports about opposition voters. Now Cheney on the other hand...
>Your Kenmore dishwasher is really a Whirlpool and Kirkland jeans are Wranglers.
It doesnt stop there!
Your wife is really a man named Todd in drag. Your Saturn coupe is really a Buick sedan with a slick paintjob. Your artificial heart is really a 1974 pool pump. Your premium dog food is just low quality Senior Chow. Your apple pie is really "Industrial Apple Taste #64" with some HFCS. Your idea of love is really some hormones and neurons going off. Your college is really just an expensive adult daycare. Your grandpa was really a drifter named "Smitty" who killed your real grandpa.
Thank you for being a loyal AT&T U-verse customer! We have received your email and have created a trouble ticket for you automatically by monitoring your web postings. Please submit both a fresh semen sample and a two day old fecal sample so our customer service reps can verify your information and begin to investigate the issue.
Its probably a surprise to a lot of people who dont investigate brands or dont understand why Kingston flash fails more often than other flash. Every so often we need to be reminded that "you get what you pay for" still works. Everytime I go to a deal site, I see Kingston RAM or flash on sale. I usually avoid them because I know they dont make their own stuff, but sometimes I'll pick some up for an application that doesnt need the best parts like disposable USB drives or RAM for a htpc.
Slashdot Mirror
>For half that price, you're better off with Rovio [wowwee.com].
I bought one and was very displeased with it. The camera on it is of poor quality (requires a very well lit room) and the little white LED it uses as a headlamp is almost useless. I toughed it out for a while but the audio over the internet just would break more often than it would work. Annoyingly there's no "press here to speak" button, it just picked up sound from your mic at whatever threshold, so you were usually broadcasting and sending static when it did work. The amount of bandwidth used was pretty high for just audio. Oh, audio was IE only.
The battery life on it wasnt too great either. I loved watching it dock, though. I ended up returning it. Perhaps the Rovio II will be better especially if they opened it up so I could get root easily. Perhaps even a basic serial or usb port for use by tinkerers so we can mount devices its not designed to use. There's a need out there for a good little telepresence robot at around that price point that is expandable and hackable. The Rovio is just a toy. The Blackfin at half the price would be perfect.
>by sacrificing things like onboard wireless (which adds ~$40 to the cost of the Kindle).
Its not wifi chips that are expensive its the EVDO and the deal Amazon has with Sprint that's expensive. I dont need a EVDO ebook reader. Wifi is good enough. Just give me an offline option if I cant get it on wifi someplace (copy file to USB drive and insert it into ebook reader). Really, there's a huge hole in the market for sub $150 dollar ebook readers. Its probably doable with a smaller eink screen and lack of bell and whistles. The Sony pocket edition reader is pretty close.
People have forgotten because with wear leveling its a fixed issue with most SSDs. Its MTBF is on par with mechanical disks.
The new hotness is to make sure your OS and disk support TRIM so you dont have performance issues down the line. I bought a 60gig OCZ drive a month or two ago and run Win7 on it (both support TRIM). 200+/mbs reads with no latency. Its pretty nice for gaming load times. I still have 2 500gig drives for storage. Works great. When the 120gig model goes on sale I'll switch to it and put the 60 in my laptop.
This is very interesting. This could all be attributed to a bad switch and lack of redundancy instead of what the media and other "know it alls" are saying, specially "OMG COMPUTERS ARE GOING TO KILL US. LETS GO BACK TO CARBERATEURS AND SOLID LINES!!!"
>I've been a Unix sysadmin all my life.
Why arent you in school? Your kindergarten teacher called.
Mom, I have to go work!! We lost a drive in the array.
Oh, ok. Dont forget your GI Joe lunchbox.
Err, how are we "leaving the internet alone" now? DMCA, ISP regulations, wiretap laws, computer crime laws, pedophile laws, copyright laws, etc etc etc. The only proof of a "big change" is an NTIA advisory article? What legislation has passed? Looks to me like the regulations are already here in the form of the laws I mentioned earlier and this is a just typical Register-style trolling to get ad impressions.
>Call me when they are 3m tall, blue, w/tail.
Call me when they are 3 apples high, blue, w/tail and little white outfit.
>Best of both worlds.
Ah, yes. Nothing like shooting animals extinct because ground up penis powder is "#1 GOOD BEST FOR ERECTION AND SKIN BLEACHING!!!!" Let it go, there's nothing of value in bullshit. A regular doctor can play the placebo game if need be by prescribing ibuprofen or vitamin C. Youd be surprised how often people feel better from prescription ibuprofen even when regular ibuprofen did nothing. No need to keep an army of kooks employed.
When I read comics, I read them for the story. I didnt see them as an investing opportunity. Shame so many did.
Oh, I agree. I think Vista is typical MS software and no worse than their other offerings, especially when they released SP1 and fixed a lot of minor annoying issues. My point is perception is as strong as reality. If people perceive Vista as a bad purchase, which many people did, then sales would be hurt, which is exactly what happened.
>And the world goes on. Even if Win7 had huge memory problems, it wouldn't have stopped people from buying it.
I doubt that. MS's Vista sales were hurt badly by its reputation. Most shops skipped over Vista completely. Apple got a little sales boost too.
>Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
Christ, what ever happened to basic responsibility? Or buy beware? How about reading reviews before buying something or returning the product if you dont like it? Is lawsuit now the default action?
They already are. When there's a credible threat you'll read about how no one suddenly had cell phones working for a short while.
I spoke to someone in the Air Force who does electronic jamming for a living. He's part of a small crew (4 or 5, I think) and they jam enemy sites suspected of having IEDs or anything remotely controlled. They have lots of toys on that plane, its pretty incredible.
As far as the enemy goes, well, these things are toys. If this was against a nation that wasnt a failed state, then they would quickly setup SAMs and take out all these predators and be done with it. Predators really not a threat against a country with a real military. Theyre only good against insurgents and other non-state actors.
Agreed, this is beyond stupid. You could do the same with XP if you like, but now its a little easier. I used to share a cellular card this way years ago. The "policing" and "lockdown" of "rogue" access points is like one click in group policy or a value in a reg key.
Slashdot has become the fox news of tech.
Look kid, the Olympics are a scam. Sales of Vonn's Brand French milk bath soaps are down 20%. I dont care if its tea berry or sandalwood, if she can't move product then she's out of the league!
Sure, youre dropping around 100 bucks per drop (less if you go with actiontec), but it saves you time and energy doing a cat5 conversion. The bitrates are pretty good too, although that depends on the quality and length of your wiring.
Powerline AV isnt bad, you can get a steady 40-50mbps with it, but that's pretty much wireless-N speeds, which is a lot cheaper.
Wait, what?! So you and another nerd (perhaps me) have an ssh service running. My dyndns username is a one letter from yours. You fat finger it, ignore the ssh key warning, and type in your username? You really think thats some hack? Err, time to take off the tin foil hat.
I doubt there's an army of dyndns typo domains just to get your password. Heck, how could you implement it? Lets say your domain is darguard.dyndns.org and the typo domain is dargard. How do they know it was dargaurd that visited and not dargarf or darfard? Typos are two way street. Regardless, this is why we have key change warnings.
Its difficult to buy a non-profit. You cant just put in an offer. You pretty much have to convince the board to switch to a private system and hand over the organization as a sale. I doubt Jimbo can even do this. The result would be a massive migration away from the Googlepedia and its collapse.
A bug in beta? From an MS product? Thanks slashdot!
>You can actually do this, in the Firefox prefs, under the Applications tab. (
Oh, I do. Id prefer to see it as the default for the application. Joe Sixpack isnt doing this.
>It will be followed by actions which will make it impossible.
I think you're being overly cynical, which is trendy and will get you mod points, but doesnt mean youre correct.
Millions of people live within a couple hundred feet of fiber. The infrastructure is pretty much there. The real issue is the last line connection, which is almost there too. Right now I can get 50mbps internet via Comcast business if I really wanted it. Verizon's FIOS service also does 50mbps. Uverse tops out around 24mbps. So you're really just another hardware generation away from hitting 100mbps. DOCSIS 4, whatever will replace VDSL2, etc.
Adobe reader's web plugin simply opens PDFs without any warning. Nor does it warn if there is javascript running on the PDF. Its a cracker's dream. Most other applications give some kind of warning, especially if there's something scripted in the document. Adobe does none of this. Heck, you can disable Javascript but it will helpfully remind you that its disabled and offer to unblock it if you attempt to open a pdf with javascript. Its really an incredibly terrible way to handle security.
This thing should at least be shipping with js disabled and the only way to enable it is by going into Preferences. The web plugin should be retired and just force the pdf to open in the full reader. One can dream, right?
>If you voted for Bush the lefties already know who you are and where you live.
I can't exactly picture Al Franken and Russ Feingold sitting around smoking cigars and laughing while their servers churn away printing reports about opposition voters. Now Cheney on the other hand...
>Your Kenmore dishwasher is really a Whirlpool and Kirkland jeans are Wranglers.
It doesnt stop there!
Your wife is really a man named Todd in drag.
Your Saturn coupe is really a Buick sedan with a slick paintjob.
Your artificial heart is really a 1974 pool pump.
Your premium dog food is just low quality Senior Chow.
Your apple pie is really "Industrial Apple Taste #64" with some HFCS.
Your idea of love is really some hormones and neurons going off.
Your college is really just an expensive adult daycare.
Your grandpa was really a drifter named "Smitty" who killed your real grandpa.
Sorry to hear about your grandpa.
Thank you for being a loyal AT&T U-verse customer! We have received your email and have created a trouble ticket for you automatically by monitoring your web postings. Please submit both a fresh semen sample and a two day old fecal sample so our customer service reps can verify your information and begin to investigate the issue.
Thank you. AT&T Customer Service.
Its probably a surprise to a lot of people who dont investigate brands or dont understand why Kingston flash fails more often than other flash. Every so often we need to be reminded that "you get what you pay for" still works. Everytime I go to a deal site, I see Kingston RAM or flash on sale. I usually avoid them because I know they dont make their own stuff, but sometimes I'll pick some up for an application that doesnt need the best parts like disposable USB drives or RAM for a htpc.