Conclusion: it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. If it's natural, there's nothing we can do about it, and if it's man-made, it isn't going to be arrested any time soon.
People with that attitude must all be 800 pound fatsos.
I'm consuming more calories than I sweat off, maybe that's why I'm getting fatter. It'll be hard to change my ways and maybe I'm getting fatter for other reasons (genetics!? aliens!?), so why do anything?
There's a huge difference between being 30 pounds overweight and being 500 pounds overweight. There's a huge difference in future climate between 380 ppmv CO2 and CO2 levels busting through to 400, 450, 500??
Every person, every company, every nation, needs to do a hell of a lot, IMMEDIATELY.
Why not recharge the batteries from a bio-nano-proteome technology that also runs on ethanol, or carrots, or beef jerky: human muscle power!
I'll tell you why: a hand crank solution has no expensive consumables to sell to consumers over and over. Also, there's the social stigma of physical effort in public.
Is there any relationship or code sharing between Mugshot and the "Sugar" interface for the One Laptop Per Child project? Red Hat's Chris Blizzard blogs about Sugar that "kids can communicate in every app, that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating", which sounds like parts of Mugshot.
To start hacking on the awesome Semantic MediaWiki extensions, I downloaded XAMPPLITE (MySQL, PHP, Apache, and phpMyAdmin all nicely bundled for Windows) and the MediaWiki source. I had it up and running on Windows XP in 10 minutes!
For PHP development, I downloaded Eclipse and the PHPEclipse extension. I already had Cygwin and Vim installed, but I don't think you need them.
I've also used TWiki at work. The benefit of MediaWiki is the users' familiarity with Wikipedia.
Semantic MediaWiki adds attributes to articles (e.g. [[telephone:=555-1234]] ) and typed relations between articles (e.g. [[works for::Joe_Smith]] that you can query. So you can get information from articles without reading each one. Amazing stuff.
Instead of paying "Samsung Fuel Cell Co" $5 every time your phone runs low, get a hand-cranked mini generator to charge up your phone (and radio, and portable lights). One-time payment, then it runs off junk food forever. But there's no recurring revenue stream for Samsung, Duracell, Energizer, etc., hence you don't see these promoted.
new classic Microsoft-speak option in UAP fiasco
on
How Vista Disappoints
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· Score: 1
From his example of trying to remove an icon created during installation, check out this screenshot:
"[ ] Repeat my answer each time this occurs"
WTF is "this" referring to? Any attempt to delete a file for the rest of all time? Everything in this particular adminstration operation? Every file delete during this operation? Who knows?!
Also note there's no Tooltip help for this. It's like playing Jeopardy, "I'll take 'Skip' for $400 $600 and $800, Alex, now what was the question again?"
Argggghhh, this is worse than the DLL Hell questions during program uninstall.
On Linux or Mac the app makes you sudo to get elevated permissions, and stays with them for a minimal time, guaranteed to end at the end of the install. It looks like Windows Vista can't, or doesn't, do this.
Too bad that the Semantic Web is a pipe dream at the moment.
You can download the Semantic MediaWiki extension right now and add semantics to a wiki. Currently all the links between pages in a MediaWiki have no meaning, and all the facts in each page can only be extracted by humans reading it. With the upgrade a page can state [[is located in::California]] to explain the type of relationship implied by a link, and can express attribute values like [[population:=1,305,736]]. The current version summarizes all such facts in each page and can export them as RDF. It's a simple extension, but once it's implemented in Wikipedia, you could query for, e.g. the population of every major city in California. Doing such semantic queries using Google is basically impossible, you'll just get a list of pages and have to read and filter each one to create your own list.
Sharing semantics between datastores would require people agreeing on ontologies, which according to people like Clay Shirky is indeed a pipe dream. I'm not so sure, that's like saying categories in Wikipedia are useless because they're disorganized. Just using the Dublin Core metadata to identify authors of information in a common way would be a big breakthrough, and there are simple enough ways to do it in XHTML that I think it'll pick up steam in the next few years.
When you cram the functionality of a handful of different devices into a single form factor, you get something that does a lot of jobs poorly due to the inherent compromises that must be made.
Like Apple putting address book, video playback, and some games into the iPod?:-)
But you're right that there are compromises. I have a hard time remembering which button does what on the sides of my multimedia phone and Palm phone
Word quickly gets out, and the product dies.
It's the other way around. Multimedia phones do so much that most users are unaware of all the features; and magazines and Web reviewers do an awful job of telling you which features are well implemented. This suits the cell phone carriers trying to cram $2 ringtones, $3 songs, $6/month mobile applications, etc. down their users' throats, but the hardware manufacturers are still competing on features and they're all slowly improving.
people don't mind carrying multiple single-purpose devices that do their jobs very well
You're joking?! Who are these people? The tiny fraction of the cellphone market that carry around a portable game player? The few people that always carry their digital camera with them? The average person doesn't have a Batman utility belt.
All the Slashdot whiners who get upset that phones are relentlessly eating into the markets for other portable electronics should introduce shareholder resolutions at Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, LG, Samsung, Sanyo, etc. to return to making back-to-basics quality phones. You are a lot smarter than the people running these companies, who are apparently clueless despite their 100,000,000's of users.
Cell phone companies seem to want to LOCK people into buying songs over their networks.
They want to, but higher-end multimedia phones allow easy end-runs.
And, the two phones out that work with iTunes limit you to 100 songs.
1. Plug Sanyo MM-9000 with 1GB miniSD (only $50 these days) into your PC; its miniSD shows up as a removable USB drive. 2. Drag all your.m4a (AAC) and.mp3 files from the iTunes Library window to the MEDIA folder of miniSD. Done! If your phone doesn't show up as a USB device, you can always remove its memory card and plug it into a cheap reader, or use the open source BitPim software.
Maybe you mean phones that work with songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. Yes, Apple's protection and iPod lock-in sucks, and DVD Jon's fine DRM removal tools don't t yet work with iTunes > 5. So I simply don't buy songs from iTunes store. (The burn CD, rip songs back unprotected workaround doesn't appeal to me.)
Apple must be praying that lots of people commit to an library full of songs from the iTunes music store, forming a barrier to entry for multimedia phones.
What would replace an iPod is an iPod with cellphone features.
I agree 100%. I'd love a better music player UI than the current multimedia phones.
I don't need games on my phone.
So you and many large-pocketed Slashdot readers keep saying about every higher-end phone feature. I love having a do-all device, so do half a billion other people, and YES THIS WILL CUT INTO (though not eliminate) EVERY OTHER DEVICE'S MARKET!!! Wake up and smell the coffee, digital camera, music player, dedicated PDA, and portable game player fanbois! My other pocket has money and keys in it, so if Apple doesn't come out with a multimedia phone, my limited space and money goes to someone else.
I like having the camera, but it is a pain to get pictures off it (I have a RAZR).
Try BitPim, otherwise make sure your next phone has a USB driver and removable flash memory card.
(Note to self: try converting the SouthPark scientology episode to.m4v format to play on the phone.)
In 2003, she installed filters in a Toronto private school... Half of the teachers who responded to her questionnaire said they felt health improvements...
Wow, this is just the shot in the arm the audiophile cable industry needs, they've been preaching the nebulous benefits of smoother AC power for years. From a quick scan of Music Direct, may I suggest Nordhost Valhalla AC Power Cords ($2,750 each), raised from room boundaries by Cable Elevators ($160 for 8), lightly resting on Shakti "electromagnetic stabilizer stones" ($199 each), plugged into PS Audio P1000 Power Plant regenerators ($3,495 but a steal since each has 10 outlets). Operators are standing by!
(I am a middling audiophile, and believe all those accessories could slightly increase your long-term appreciation of an insanely high-end setup.)
Good, because it's ISO8601, a great universal worldwide standard. Get all the blogs, bulletin boards, web pages, etc. you use to standardize on it, so many of them are still stupidly trying to localize a WorldWide-Web with "26/3", "03-26-06" or other abominations.
Like in 1's and 0's and XOR's? You mean complimentary. Most people garble the other usage, e.g. "A good compiler is an essential complement to advanced hardware".
Also "upbeat" is one word.
Without your e-mail address, Ms. Edna Krabappel can only correct in public.
I'm no physicist, but no one else has responded to your bizarrely modded-up posting.
This constant pressure REQUIRES A CONSTANT EXPENSE OF ENERGY.
No! In classical mechanics, p = Force/Area. There's no motion, thus no kinetic energy.
With respect to your thought experiment of electrons bouncing around (classical mechanics not quantum mechanics), they impart kinetic energy to each other all the time. You're just describing Brownian motion. You write "they will constantly be exposed to electrostatic acceleration which implies the expenditure of energy." No, it implies the conversion of energy. The electrostatic potential energy of the electrons increases as they come closer, reducing their kinetic energy (they slow down), and then the potential energy turns into kinetic energy as they fly apart. Read about Potential Energy.
If you're referring to the "magic" that the electrons keep bouncing around "forever", learn more about the second law. When they hit the container holding them they may transfer energy to it because it's colder, or vice versa. It's not a closed system.
People want to push the ON button and be able to make calls, check emails, text each other and just have it work.
Then PalmSource is doomed. You can do all that with a generic closed handset.
PalmOS's value is the strong PDA integration and available third-party apps. You're right that a lot of users don't care about those benefits: Sanyo and Samsung sell better high-end multimedia phones that don't use PalmOS (or WinCE, or Symbian).
Get cell providers and manufacturers, etc on board and you're set.
But U.S. cell providers don't want rich extensible devices, they want to sell you $2 ringtones, $3 music downloads, $10/month online photo albums, and address book backup for $2/month. An extensible smart phone with PC syncing works against their business model. As WebCowboy wrote,"it circumvents their revenue-generating content-delivery system, and furthermore they would lose control over the environment".
I really wish PalmSource/Access well. I'm using and loving a Samsung sph-i500 PDA phone, with the included Chapura PocketMirror syncing my Outlook contacts, the excellent Novii Remote acting as an infrared A/V control, and GNU Keyring to secure my passwords. It's over three years old, and no other flip phone comes close to meeting my needs. There are PalmOS-based phones (GSPDA, Xplore M68) available elsewhere in the world, but the market in the US has shrunk to the fine Treo 650.
I used Google Pack to install some programs. When I ran the newly-installed Ad-Aware SE, it informed me my definitions are 120 days old, I had to click its Connect button to get new definitions. And when I ran the newly-installed Google Earth, it displayed "A new version of Google Earth beta is available". Google Pack's Google Updater didn't offer either of these.
So now I have Adobe's Check for updates now, Firefox's Check for Updates, Google Earth's Check for Updates Online, Norton's LiveUpdate, and Ad-Aware's Connect for updates, and Google Updater. This is progress?
Read the
slides (PDF), they acknowledge photosynthesis. Yes, it's just college students engineering new functionality as part of a competition, but that itself is pretty cool. I didn't know there is already a registry of standard biological parts for this sort of hacking. They add photosensitivity to the bacterium membrane, add pigmentation change, and hook them up.
The same UCSF lab is also working on an AND gate to combine two sensors, which gets us closer to bacteria delivering lethal payloads to tumors.
The lab's home page is http://www.voigtlab.ucsf.edu/ , but they don't have a news item for this yet. The work seems to be
Engineering E. coli to see light and will be in Nature according to their Papers section.
We had a fabulous chat channel where I worked, everyone was on it for technical issues such as "OK if I restart Apache?" or "Anyone having login problems with new build?", as well as "So who's replacing the VP of IT?" I would leave IRC running with screen(1) and return to answer questions from India and USA East coast, and became close to people I rarely met.
But around 2003 it started dying. New hires wouldn't stay on it, they'd disconnect. I realized they were all using IM instead, even though we told users about multi-protocol clients like Trillian and Fire. Also, managers on Crackberrys and GoodLink push e-mail wanted all their interactions via e-mail. So one-to-one IM's and e-mails to small groups replaced many-to-many, even though 1-1 is so bad at those three examples I gave above.
If you read the ideas behind 9P and Reiser4, it seems time for apps to move beyond the UNIX file semantics we've had for 30 years. The 9P2000 USENIX paper (search for "Grave Robbers from Outer Space Using 9P2000 Under Linux" in the Google cache) mentions specific apps built on 9P, are they going to be part of Linux distributions?
In-house DC power supply does make sense—anything to get rid of those buzzing crappy Chinese wall-warts—but you need a standard. Fat auto 12V adapter holes aren't going to succeed.
I think Power over Ethernet could be one way this takes off. I'm wiring a new house with Ethernet jacks in every room, and as more devices get smart I hope they'll support powering from this. From Wikipedia, "IEEE 802.3af provides 48 volts DC over two pairs of a four-pair cable at a maximum current of 350 mA for a maximum load power of 16.8 watts."
USB and FireWire also provide DC power and ThinkGeek has numerous USB-powered gizmos but I've not heard of any house wiring including USB.
PDA-merged-with-communication-devices are doing well. Corporations buy lots of Treos and wireless iPaqs and Blackberrys because of the calendar and e-mail sync with corporate.
I love using my PDA phone to stay organized, browse the web (Wikipedia, BBC news, Google mobile are all usable), run simple apps and games, but I want more convergence. After wallet and keys I only have one pocket left, and I only have two ears for the headset. It's not that hard, just take a pocket-sized clamshell device and put:
mute/phone answer/hangup on the headphones
music player controls on the closed lid
track display/incoming call info on the closed lid's display
camera lens near the hinge (full depth)
dedicated camera button on one side edge
phone ringer up/down on the other side edge
flip open for a substantial touch-sensitive screen for PDA functions and video
flip open for D-pad, phone buttons, and phone keypad below the screen
SD slot for GB's of music, videos, personal files
There's no reason why the UI and quality of all these functions can't be every bit as good as dedicated devices. It's a general-purpose computer already, it's got enough storage, buttons, and screen real estate for all these functions bar heavy typing!
Samsung announced such an über-device over two years ago, the Palm-based sph-i550. But they cancelled it, supposedly due to software bugs and cost. It seems the latest Europe-only Nokia and Sony-Ericsson multimedia phones are moving towards the same comprehensive feature set; has anyone tried using them for all these functions?
The problems with doing so much include focus and marketing. And it's a huge software bundle and is likely to have lots of bugs and substandard applications for months or years. What would help is an open platform so you can install a better music player or calendaring app, but it's got to have a ton of well-defined API's so the different functions can share the buttons appropriately, yield to each other on incoming calls, and cooperate on sharing/sync'ing with a PC.
Will older iPods support video at all through a firmware upgrade? What happens if you download a video to an older iPod? They have lower resolution screens but could still show something.
The nano doesn't have TV out, but the new universal dock has S-video out. If you drop a nano onto it, can you display photos from it on a TV?
At some point resistance is futile, just buy iPod + nano + Airtunes Express + iMac and worship Jobs (I'm not being sarcastic!). One missing piece is an iMac or Mac mini doesn't function as a PVR (although my Windows XP desktop with ATI All-in-Wonder crashes whenever I schedule a TV recording).
The perfect speakers... are currently amp-free
on
TCP/IP Speakers
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· Score: 1
One DAC, in the speaker, directly attached to the amp which is tuned exactly to the speakers and directly attached with no noise or tranmission loss.
You'd think so. Meridian has sold such speakers for years using their own digital link, and yet listening to their DSP3000/DSP3500 integrated speakers, spouse and I were mostly unimpressed. I was fully disposed to buy their vision, but wound up with separate conventional CD+DAC, amplifiers, and speakers (Linn, VTL and Magnepan, each 5+ year-old designs) because it sounded hella better. This is at the "mere" $10,000 system price level. I've heard the even more expensive Meridian DSP6000 and 8000 speakers and respect them, but for that sort of money there are some sensational speakers like Soundlab and Wilson whose makers have no interest or ability in amplification. Specialization continues to win over integration's undoubted benefits.
Users clearly DO care about the functionality of their phones: they want a phone with a camera and customizable ringtones. Those aren't "stupid bells and whistles" to hundreds of millions of people. And coverage inside a building is more a function of the cellular network than the phone.
I only have one pocket available. I want the device in it to be a PDA, camera, music player, Web browser, GPS navigator, and phone. Size, PDA, and a touch screen are important to me, so PalmOS-based phones (Samsung sph-i300 and then sph-i500) came close. I hope someone else besides Microsoft integrates the remaining features (music player and GPS). The limitations on the integration seem no longer technical but rather the damn US cellular carriers wanting to milk another $6/month for every feature.
It's a good article, but it could be summarised in three lines:
1) Install Apple's X server from your OS X CD
No, RTFA. I ran KDE on Apple's X server, but the article recommends installing xfree86 using fink. (And probably should recommend `fink install xorg` to get X11 R6.8 instead of xfree86.)
The really exciting project is native KDE using Qt/Mac instead of Qt on X11. But Ranger Rick's progress on that has stalled while he does a great job maintaining KDE on X11 and a truckload of other projects for Fink.
Slashdot Mirror
People with that attitude must all be 800 pound fatsos.
I'm consuming more calories than I sweat off, maybe that's why I'm getting fatter. It'll be hard to change my ways and maybe I'm getting fatter for other reasons (genetics!? aliens!?), so why do anything?
There's a huge difference between being 30 pounds overweight and being 500 pounds overweight. There's a huge difference in future climate between 380 ppmv CO2 and CO2 levels busting through to 400, 450, 500?? Every person, every company, every nation, needs to do a hell of a lot, IMMEDIATELY.
Why not recharge the batteries from a bio-nano-proteome technology that also runs on ethanol, or carrots, or beef jerky: human muscle power!
I'll tell you why: a hand crank solution has no expensive consumables to sell to consumers over and over. Also, there's the social stigma of physical effort in public.
Is there any relationship or code sharing between Mugshot and the "Sugar" interface for the One Laptop Per Child project? Red Hat's Chris Blizzard blogs about Sugar that "kids can communicate in every app, that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating", which sounds like parts of Mugshot.
To start hacking on the awesome Semantic MediaWiki extensions, I downloaded XAMPPLITE (MySQL, PHP, Apache, and phpMyAdmin all nicely bundled for Windows) and the MediaWiki source. I had it up and running on Windows XP in 10 minutes!
For PHP development, I downloaded Eclipse and the PHPEclipse extension. I already had Cygwin and Vim installed, but I don't think you need them.
I've also used TWiki at work. The benefit of MediaWiki is the users' familiarity with Wikipedia.
Semantic MediaWiki adds attributes to articles (e.g. [[telephone:=555-1234]] ) and typed relations between articles (e.g. [[works for::Joe_Smith]] that you can query. So you can get information from articles without reading each one. Amazing stuff.
Instead of paying "Samsung Fuel Cell Co" $5 every time your phone runs low, get a hand-cranked mini generator to charge up your phone (and radio, and portable lights). One-time payment, then it runs off junk food forever. But there's no recurring revenue stream for Samsung, Duracell, Energizer, etc., hence you don't see these promoted.
From his example of trying to remove an icon created during installation, check out this screenshot:
WTF is "this" referring to? Any attempt to delete a file for the rest of all time? Everything in this particular adminstration operation? Every file delete during this operation? Who knows?!
Also note there's no Tooltip help for this. It's like playing Jeopardy, "I'll take 'Skip' for $400 $600 and $800, Alex, now what was the question again?" Argggghhh, this is worse than the DLL Hell questions during program uninstall.
On Linux or Mac the app makes you sudo to get elevated permissions, and stays with them for a minimal time, guaranteed to end at the end of the install. It looks like Windows Vista can't, or doesn't, do this.
You can download the Semantic MediaWiki extension right now and add semantics to a wiki. Currently all the links between pages in a MediaWiki have no meaning, and all the facts in each page can only be extracted by humans reading it. With the upgrade a page can state [[is located in::California]] to explain the type of relationship implied by a link, and can express attribute values like [[population:=1,305,736]]. The current version summarizes all such facts in each page and can export them as RDF. It's a simple extension, but once it's implemented in Wikipedia, you could query for, e.g. the population of every major city in California. Doing such semantic queries using Google is basically impossible, you'll just get a list of pages and have to read and filter each one to create your own list.
Sharing semantics between datastores would require people agreeing on ontologies, which according to people like Clay Shirky is indeed a pipe dream. I'm not so sure, that's like saying categories in Wikipedia are useless because they're disorganized. Just using the Dublin Core metadata to identify authors of information in a common way would be a big breakthrough, and there are simple enough ways to do it in XHTML that I think it'll pick up steam in the next few years.
Like Apple putting address book, video playback, and some games into the iPod? :-)
But you're right that there are compromises. I have a hard time remembering which button does what on the sides of my multimedia phone and Palm phone
It's the other way around. Multimedia phones do so much that most users are unaware of all the features; and magazines and Web reviewers do an awful job of telling you which features are well implemented. This suits the cell phone carriers trying to cram $2 ringtones, $3 songs, $6/month mobile applications, etc. down their users' throats, but the hardware manufacturers are still competing on features and they're all slowly improving.
You're joking?! Who are these people? The tiny fraction of the cellphone market that carry around a portable game player? The few people that always carry their digital camera with them? The average person doesn't have a Batman utility belt.
All the Slashdot whiners who get upset that phones are relentlessly eating into the markets for other portable electronics should introduce shareholder resolutions at Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, LG, Samsung, Sanyo, etc. to return to making back-to-basics quality phones. You are a lot smarter than the people running these companies, who are apparently clueless despite their 100,000,000's of users.
They want to, but higher-end multimedia phones allow easy end-runs.
1. Plug Sanyo MM-9000 with 1GB miniSD (only $50 these days) into your PC; its miniSD shows up as a removable USB drive. 2. Drag all your .m4a (AAC) and .mp3 files from the iTunes Library window to the MEDIA folder of miniSD. Done! If your phone doesn't show up as a USB device, you can always remove its memory card and plug it into a cheap reader, or use the open source BitPim software.
Maybe you mean phones that work with songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. Yes, Apple's protection and iPod lock-in sucks, and DVD Jon's fine DRM removal tools don't t yet work with iTunes > 5. So I simply don't buy songs from iTunes store. (The burn CD, rip songs back unprotected workaround doesn't appeal to me.) Apple must be praying that lots of people commit to an library full of songs from the iTunes music store, forming a barrier to entry for multimedia phones.
I agree 100%. I'd love a better music player UI than the current multimedia phones.
So you and many large-pocketed Slashdot readers keep saying about every higher-end phone feature. I love having a do-all device, so do half a billion other people, and YES THIS WILL CUT INTO (though not eliminate) EVERY OTHER DEVICE'S MARKET!!! Wake up and smell the coffee, digital camera, music player, dedicated PDA, and portable game player fanbois! My other pocket has money and keys in it, so if Apple doesn't come out with a multimedia phone, my limited space and money goes to someone else.
Try BitPim, otherwise make sure your next phone has a USB driver and removable flash memory card.
(Note to self: try converting the SouthPark scientology episode to .m4v format to play on the phone.)
Wow, this is just the shot in the arm the audiophile cable industry needs, they've been preaching the nebulous benefits of smoother AC power for years. From a quick scan of Music Direct, may I suggest Nordhost Valhalla AC Power Cords ($2,750 each), raised from room boundaries by Cable Elevators ($160 for 8), lightly resting on Shakti "electromagnetic stabilizer stones" ($199 each), plugged into PS Audio P1000 Power Plant regenerators ($3,495 but a steal since each has 10 outlets). Operators are standing by!
(I am a middling audiophile, and believe all those accessories could slightly increase your long-term appreciation of an insanely high-end setup.)
I find 2006-03-26 to be most useful
Good, because it's ISO8601, a great universal worldwide standard. Get all the blogs, bulletin boards, web pages, etc. you use to standardize on it, so many of them are still stupidly trying to localize a WorldWide-Web with "26/3", "03-26-06" or other abominations.
Like in 1's and 0's and XOR's? You mean complimentary. Most people garble the other usage, e.g. "A good compiler is an essential complement to advanced hardware".
Also "upbeat" is one word.
Without your e-mail address, Ms. Edna Krabappel can only correct in public.
I'm no physicist, but no one else has responded to your bizarrely modded-up posting.
No! In classical mechanics, p = Force/Area. There's no motion, thus no kinetic energy.
With respect to your thought experiment of electrons bouncing around (classical mechanics not quantum mechanics), they impart kinetic energy to each other all the time. You're just describing Brownian motion. You write "they will constantly be exposed to electrostatic acceleration which implies the expenditure of energy." No, it implies the conversion of energy. The electrostatic potential energy of the electrons increases as they come closer, reducing their kinetic energy (they slow down), and then the potential energy turns into kinetic energy as they fly apart. Read about Potential Energy.
If you're referring to the "magic" that the electrons keep bouncing around "forever", learn more about the second law. When they hit the container holding them they may transfer energy to it because it's colder, or vice versa. It's not a closed system.
Then PalmSource is doomed. You can do all that with a generic closed handset.
PalmOS's value is the strong PDA integration and available third-party apps. You're right that a lot of users don't care about those benefits: Sanyo and Samsung sell better high-end multimedia phones that don't use PalmOS (or WinCE, or Symbian).
But U.S. cell providers don't want rich extensible devices, they want to sell you $2 ringtones, $3 music downloads, $10/month online photo albums, and address book backup for $2/month. An extensible smart phone with PC syncing works against their business model. As WebCowboy wrote,"it circumvents their revenue-generating content-delivery system, and furthermore they would lose control over the environment".
I really wish PalmSource/Access well. I'm using and loving a Samsung sph-i500 PDA phone, with the included Chapura PocketMirror syncing my Outlook contacts, the excellent Novii Remote acting as an infrared A/V control, and GNU Keyring to secure my passwords. It's over three years old, and no other flip phone comes close to meeting my needs. There are PalmOS-based phones (GSPDA, Xplore M68) available elsewhere in the world, but the market in the US has shrunk to the fine Treo 650.
I used Google Pack to install some programs. When I ran the newly-installed Ad-Aware SE, it informed me my definitions are 120 days old, I had to click its Connect button to get new definitions. And when I ran the newly-installed Google Earth, it displayed "A new version of Google Earth beta is available". Google Pack's Google Updater didn't offer either of these.
So now I have Adobe's Check for updates now, Firefox's Check for Updates, Google Earth's Check for Updates Online, Norton's LiveUpdate, and Ad-Aware's Connect for updates, and Google Updater. This is progress?
Read the slides (PDF), they acknowledge photosynthesis. Yes, it's just college students engineering new functionality as part of a competition, but that itself is pretty cool. I didn't know there is already a registry of standard biological parts for this sort of hacking. They add photosensitivity to the bacterium membrane, add pigmentation change, and hook them up.
The same UCSF lab is also working on an AND gate to combine two sensors, which gets us closer to bacteria delivering lethal payloads to tumors.
The lab's home page is http://www.voigtlab.ucsf.edu/ , but they don't have a news item for this yet. The work seems to be Engineering E. coli to see light and will be in Nature according to their Papers section.
The most recent presentation slides (PDF) are a hoot, that talk must have been fun.
Go UCSF!
We had a fabulous chat channel where I worked, everyone was on it for technical issues such as "OK if I restart Apache?" or "Anyone having login problems with new build?", as well as "So who's replacing the VP of IT?" I would leave IRC running with screen(1) and return to answer questions from India and USA East coast, and became close to people I rarely met.
But around 2003 it started dying. New hires wouldn't stay on it, they'd disconnect. I realized they were all using IM instead, even though we told users about multi-protocol clients like Trillian and Fire. Also, managers on Crackberrys and GoodLink push e-mail wanted all their interactions via e-mail. So one-to-one IM's and e-mails to small groups replaced many-to-many, even though 1-1 is so bad at those three examples I gave above.
Very sad.
If you read the ideas behind 9P and Reiser4, it seems time for apps to move beyond the UNIX file semantics we've had for 30 years. The 9P2000 USENIX paper (search for "Grave Robbers from Outer Space Using 9P2000 Under Linux" in the Google cache) mentions specific apps built on 9P, are they going to be part of Linux distributions?
What a great kernel!
In-house DC power supply does make sense—anything to get rid of those buzzing crappy Chinese wall-warts—but you need a standard. Fat auto 12V adapter holes aren't going to succeed.
I think Power over Ethernet could be one way this takes off. I'm wiring a new house with Ethernet jacks in every room, and as more devices get smart I hope they'll support powering from this. From Wikipedia, "IEEE 802.3af provides 48 volts DC over two pairs of a four-pair cable at a maximum current of 350 mA for a maximum load power of 16.8 watts."
USB and FireWire also provide DC power and ThinkGeek has numerous USB-powered gizmos but I've not heard of any house wiring including USB.
PDA-merged-with-communication-devices are doing well. Corporations buy lots of Treos and wireless iPaqs and Blackberrys because of the calendar and e-mail sync with corporate.
I love using my PDA phone to stay organized, browse the web (Wikipedia, BBC news, Google mobile are all usable), run simple apps and games, but I want more convergence. After wallet and keys I only have one pocket left, and I only have two ears for the headset. It's not that hard, just take a pocket-sized clamshell device and put:
There's no reason why the UI and quality of all these functions can't be every bit as good as dedicated devices. It's a general-purpose computer already, it's got enough storage, buttons, and screen real estate for all these functions bar heavy typing!
Samsung announced such an über-device over two years ago, the Palm-based sph-i550. But they cancelled it, supposedly due to software bugs and cost. It seems the latest Europe-only Nokia and Sony-Ericsson multimedia phones are moving towards the same comprehensive feature set; has anyone tried using them for all these functions?
The problems with doing so much include focus and marketing. And it's a huge software bundle and is likely to have lots of bugs and substandard applications for months or years. What would help is an open platform so you can install a better music player or calendaring app, but it's got to have a ton of well-defined API's so the different functions can share the buttons appropriately, yield to each other on incoming calls, and cooperate on sharing/sync'ing with a PC.
Will older iPods support video at all through a firmware upgrade? What happens if you download a video to an older iPod? They have lower resolution screens but could still show something.
The nano doesn't have TV out, but the new universal dock has S-video out. If you drop a nano onto it, can you display photos from it on a TV?
At some point resistance is futile, just buy iPod + nano + Airtunes Express + iMac and worship Jobs (I'm not being sarcastic!). One missing piece is an iMac or Mac mini doesn't function as a PVR (although my Windows XP desktop with ATI All-in-Wonder crashes whenever I schedule a TV recording).
You'd think so. Meridian has sold such speakers for years using their own digital link, and yet listening to their DSP3000/DSP3500 integrated speakers, spouse and I were mostly unimpressed. I was fully disposed to buy their vision, but wound up with separate conventional CD+DAC, amplifiers, and speakers (Linn, VTL and Magnepan, each 5+ year-old designs) because it sounded hella better. This is at the "mere" $10,000 system price level. I've heard the even more expensive Meridian DSP6000 and 8000 speakers and respect them, but for that sort of money there are some sensational speakers like Soundlab and Wilson whose makers have no interest or ability in amplification. Specialization continues to win over integration's undoubted benefits.
This is modded 5 Insightful?
Users clearly DO care about the functionality of their phones: they want a phone with a camera and customizable ringtones. Those aren't "stupid bells and whistles" to hundreds of millions of people. And coverage inside a building is more a function of the cellular network than the phone.
I only have one pocket available. I want the device in it to be a PDA, camera, music player, Web browser, GPS navigator, and phone. Size, PDA, and a touch screen are important to me, so PalmOS-based phones (Samsung sph-i300 and then sph-i500) came close. I hope someone else besides Microsoft integrates the remaining features (music player and GPS). The limitations on the integration seem no longer technical but rather the damn US cellular carriers wanting to milk another $6/month for every feature.
No, RTFA. I ran KDE on Apple's X server, but the article recommends installing xfree86 using fink. (And probably should recommend `fink install xorg` to get X11 R6.8 instead of xfree86.)
The really exciting project is native KDE using Qt/Mac instead of Qt on X11. But Ranger Rick's progress on that has stalled while he does a great job maintaining KDE on X11 and a truckload of other projects for Fink.