Back in May on Slashdot there was this article on the Sony Little Vaio. It seems to have comparable specs, but I think I like the way the pointer works better. There is a stick on the right side of the keyboard that is made for you to move and click with your right thumb.
It is kind of interesting how vendors are coming at the portable market from different angles. You have devices like these superlights from JVC/Sony/etc., then you have the smaller PDA's from Palm/Sony/HP/Sharp. Then of course there are the mobile phone makers developing organizers, etc into their phones. And finally there are a plethora of companies making "webpad" devices.
I guess what I am waiting for is the ideal convergence of these devices. I like the superlights because they have the keyboard, pointing device, and the clamshell design, but they are still a little large for casual carrying around (ie. can't fit in the pocket.)
Hey folks,
MTV does not do the Movie Awards live and I believe it was even filmed days ago and most of the mainstream media was issued releases of who won what a few days ago. There is no suprises with the Movie Awards since it is taped. People only really watch it for the skits and shit.
Come to think of it I saw all the winners on one of those entertainment tonight shows or something the other day.
If you are running a Sun server chances are you won't have any of this shit running - well at least if you have a clue. Why use system resources and have services running, and also providing the machine with more ways to be compromised if it is a server?
If I am running a production server, there won't be shit for a GUI on there. Who needs it...
I have never been a big fan of Flash. Not that it is a bad technology, but just like anything else that is remotely cool people use, abuse, and misuse it to the point where the cons outweigh the pros.
I guess my biggest beef with Flash is that people make IT the content as opposed to using it to accent the content. Ever been to a site where you can't bookmark shit and none of the browser navigation does shit because hitting back only restarts the whole thing? That is the kind of stuff that drives me nuts...
This one company I have been keeping my eye on called Millennium Cell has a technology called Hydrogen on Demand that seems pretty cool. They invented a way to store hydrogen in a borax solution and extract it only when needed to generate energy. The cool thing about Millennium Cell's technology is that they figured out a lot of other issues competing fuel cell companies have not. For example, they can retrofit an internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen, and it's exhaust would be 100% free of carbon monoxide. They also even worked in gas stations into the equation and have figured out how to retrofit them to "refill" the hydrogen fuel cells. Also of note is that their fuel cells have a range similar to that of a full tank of gas, and takes up slightly smaller area of space. Definitely some cool R&D going on out there...
If this artcile doesn't show you why you should avoid Microsoft technologies for application development I don't know what would. Microsoft has a long history of the "Embrace and Extend" tactics.
Microsoft is positioning the pieces right now and a lot of people are taking the bait. Once there is an established user base using these technologies (WSDL,.Net, etc.) they will all of a sudden come up with a "new standard."
I am all for corporations making a profit from their software, but trying to set yourself up for a "tollbooth" at the expense of everyone who embraces the "standards" you contribute to the public, well, that just plain sucks.
I wonder if using Titanium instead of steel in the World Trade Center would have saved some lives? They say the main reason the towers collapsed was the heat from the buring jet fuel destabilizing the steel. The steel weakened and could no longer support the potential energy from the floors above.
Now titanium they say has a higher temperature resistance, as well as weighing half as much as steel. That means that there would have been more time before the towers collapsed (if at all) for them to evacuate people.
We had this discussion on slashdot back in the day and it seems to be a trend. The fact is that with all the progress made in computing technology, those spinning platters and movable arms have been the bottleneck for some time.
While this is true, we as a public still have the right to contest a licensee's right to a band. Last time I looked one could contest a license on the context of whether or not it is serving the public interest.
I would argue that 802.11 serves the public interests much more so then some queer satellite radio service...
Except that the Army has switched to Macs because of security headaches.
Seriously? Where did you hear that? I find that interesting.
I have never been much of a Mac fan and as user-friendly their OS was, before OS X it performed like a pig and lacked such common features as preemptive multitasking, etc.
Good for Apple. It would be nice to see them gain some market share. Now only if their hardware was more affordable...
From the article: Gilligan, former Energy Department CIO, has discussed security most often with executives at Microsoft. "They are the biggest supplier to the Air Force, and my attempt has been to encourage them to set an example," he says.
I am guessing if M$ is a major supplier of software to the Air Force, it is probably the same for the other branches of service as well.
Now I see why all of our helicopters and planes have been crashing without being shot down. Brings a whole new meaning to "Fatal Exception"
This is indeed very sad news, but I think everyone saw the writing on the wall.
Since it was written as a media OS it handled sound and video recording much better than Windows.
Latency to video and audio hardware was often as much as 90% less than same hardware running Windows or even Linux and a lot of people that used proprietary recording software on BeOS would be the first to tell you how awesome this OS was.
I had to help my mother with this, but there is a way in AOL to opt out of their marketing crap. I can't remember the top level menue, but it is somewhere hidden in the MyAOL section where you can set your preferences. There are a series of marketing prefences that allow you to opt out of AOL emails, AOL service pop-up ads, etc. Of course they make you click no to each individual type to be a pain in the ass, but the option is there.
Doesn't this kind of remind anyone of the movie Seven? In the movie Seven Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman eventually track down the murderer by using FBI data from the library system.
Freeman tells Pitt that it is a secret and it is a "gray" area, but for years the Feds have been monitoring reading habits. If people take out certain flagged books, for example a book about nuclear weapons, their library records are fed to the FBI computer. Since you need to have some form of ID and residence to get a library card, they have access to your name and address too. Nice and convenient.
While this movie is a work of fiction, I would not be suprised if it were true. Over the last 20 years the Federal government has spent billions on wiring up the libraries and replacing the card catalogs with computers that can be used to both search for books and Internet research. It would be pretty conveneint for the FBI to say, "Hey, we are already putting computers into the libraries. Why don't we add a little something to them to give them value to us."
ONE OF NEW JERSEY'S MOST BAFFLING MYSTERIES came in the form of a silver "thread" that was suspended for days over the house of Mr. and Mrs. A.P. Smith of 85 Forest St. in the quiet suburb of Caldwell in Essex County.
What's with all the Sun bashing going on here? What problem has Larry got with Sun? Sure Solaris is as dead as the dodo save for sun hardware, much like osx is only going to thrive on mac hardware. solaris for intel has always been a joke.
Solaris is dead? What the heck have you been smoking? Solaris is so much more robust and stable at this point and will continue to be the platform of choice for most RDBMS vendors for a while. The features that have finally made it into Linux over the past year have been in Solaris for years.
I must be missing something here because I actually don't get it. How can they justify the $199? As far as a Linux box goes, the only thing it has going for it is an ill graphics engine, which when you figure in the purchase price of the console is comparable price/performance to a GeForce 3 card. Not bad there, but for $199 I sure hope it comes with more then just a CD, mouse and keyboard. Nowadays you can actually build a lower end box for $200.
I do have to say that I am sure I would be pleased justr to get bash prompt on a PS2, but one would have to think that $20-30 bucks would be a more reasonable price.
Oracle is big and mean enough that they could crush Windows for such a move if they had a case. Don't think Larry isn't salivating at that possibility. He might be an ass, but he doesn't like Bill. Or so I hear.
Yeah, Oracle's DB pounds the hell out of anything MS makes, BUT, Oracle does not have the market leverage that Microsoft does. When you have a monopoly like Microsoft admittedly has, superior quality doesn't go as far as superior market share.
Remember when Microsoft wanted to get into the enterprise DB game? What did they do? They went out and bought the rights to SQL Server from Sybase.
Last I heard Microsoft had something like $36 BILLION in their "war chest" so if something gets in their way, they can either by it, or by some thorns in its side.
Don't ever underestimate the determination of a monopoly:)
faster Mac OS X machine? No way dude. If you are looking purely at mhz, yeah, the Mac is faster, but the architecture is vastly different. The address bus and memory bus are larger, and even if most people think IRIX is a pile, it was designed for graphics i/o.
I wouldn't mind having one of these, but I wish they would bring back their old logo:)
Want a really fun machine? Get the Origin 2800 w/ 250 CPU's:)
LOL, Windows XP is already peer-to-peer, though inadverently:)
Seriously though, they do need to make some drastic changes to the OS. Any OS that is going to be used by 90% of Americans needs to be more reliable. Nothing worse then having to be tech support because you are the only one in the family that can figure it out.
The move has antitrust implications: it potentially puts Microsoft at an advantage over Oracle and other competing SQL implementations every copy of Windows will effectively come with a light version of Microsoft SQL Server.
Ahh, now I see. I can just see the high-ups at Microsoft, "Hey, we can't make an RDBMS as good as Oracle or IBM's, so let's make our OS one, then when people run SQL Server on it it will be like 10 times faster, and SQL Server will capture the high-end database market."
I hope many of you submitted feedback for the Tunney act before yesterday's deadline or we will see a lot more anti-competitive behavior over the next year.
The one comment in his eBay profile that caught my eye was the one that said he ordered the Dokken video tape. LOL, and I thought he only looked like an 80's reject:)
--Jon
Slashdot Mirror
Back in May on Slashdot there was this article on the Sony Little Vaio. It seems to have comparable specs, but I think I like the way the pointer works better. There is a stick on the right side of the keyboard that is made for you to move and click with your right thumb.
It is kind of interesting how vendors are coming at the portable market from different angles. You have devices like these superlights from JVC/Sony/etc., then you have the smaller PDA's from Palm/Sony/HP/Sharp. Then of course there are the mobile phone makers developing organizers, etc into their phones. And finally there are a plethora of companies making "webpad" devices.
I guess what I am waiting for is the ideal convergence of these devices. I like the superlights because they have the keyboard, pointing device, and the clamshell design, but they are still a little large for casual carrying around (ie. can't fit in the pocket.)
Who knows where things will end up.
--Jon
Check this out: http://www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID =189&L1=10&L2=10&L3=0&L4=0&L5=0
:(
This site has stills and videos. Unfortunately I cannot get the videos to work. Looks like they may be some kind of Windows Media Player format
--Jon
Hey folks,
MTV does not do the Movie Awards live and I believe it was even filmed days ago and most of the mainstream media was issued releases of who won what a few days ago. There is no suprises with the Movie Awards since it is taped. People only really watch it for the skits and shit.
Come to think of it I saw all the winners on one of those entertainment tonight shows or something the other day.
--Jon
If you are running a Sun server chances are you won't have any of this shit running - well at least if you have a clue. Why use system resources and have services running, and also providing the machine with more ways to be compromised if it is a server?
If I am running a production server, there won't be shit for a GUI on there. Who needs it...
--Jon
I have never been a big fan of Flash. Not that it is a bad technology, but just like anything else that is remotely cool people use, abuse, and misuse it to the point where the cons outweigh the pros.
I guess my biggest beef with Flash is that people make IT the content as opposed to using it to accent the content. Ever been to a site where you can't bookmark shit and none of the browser navigation does shit because hitting back only restarts the whole thing? That is the kind of stuff that drives me nuts...
Just my $.02...
--Jon
Looks like some kind of scam organization to me...
This one company I have been keeping my eye on called Millennium Cell has a technology called Hydrogen on Demand that seems pretty cool. They invented a way to store hydrogen in a borax solution and extract it only when needed to generate energy. The cool thing about Millennium Cell's technology is that they figured out a lot of other issues competing fuel cell companies have not. For example, they can retrofit an internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen, and it's exhaust would be 100% free of carbon monoxide. They also even worked in gas stations into the equation and have figured out how to retrofit them to "refill" the hydrogen fuel cells. Also of note is that their fuel cells have a range similar to that of a full tank of gas, and takes up slightly smaller area of space. Definitely some cool R&D going on out there...
--Jon
If this artcile doesn't show you why you should avoid Microsoft technologies for application development I don't know what would. Microsoft has a long history of the "Embrace and Extend" tactics.
.Net, etc.) they will all of a sudden come up with a "new standard."
Microsoft is positioning the pieces right now and a lot of people are taking the bait. Once there is an established user base using these technologies (WSDL,
I am all for corporations making a profit from their software, but trying to set yourself up for a "tollbooth" at the expense of everyone who embraces the "standards" you contribute to the public, well, that just plain sucks.
--Jon
I wonder if using Titanium instead of steel in the World Trade Center would have saved some lives? They say the main reason the towers collapsed was the heat from the buring jet fuel destabilizing the steel. The steel weakened and could no longer support the potential energy from the floors above.
Now titanium they say has a higher temperature resistance, as well as weighing half as much as steel. That means that there would have been more time before the towers collapsed (if at all) for them to evacuate people.
Just a thought...
--Jon
Unable to connect to the database. Please email
:)
Guess they been slashed
--Jon
We had this discussion on slashdot back in the day and it seems to be a trend. The fact is that with all the progress made in computing technology, those spinning platters and movable arms have been the bottleneck for some time.
--Jon
Sirius is a licensed service. 802.11 isn't.
While this is true, we as a public still have the right to contest a licensee's right to a band. Last time I looked one could contest a license on the context of whether or not it is serving the public interest.
I would argue that 802.11 serves the public interests much more so then some queer satellite radio service...
--Jon
Except that the Army has switched to Macs because of security headaches.
Seriously? Where did you hear that? I find that interesting.
I have never been much of a Mac fan and as user-friendly their OS was, before OS X it performed like a pig and lacked such common features as preemptive multitasking, etc.
Good for Apple. It would be nice to see them gain some market share. Now only if their hardware was more affordable...
--Jon
From the article:
Gilligan, former Energy Department CIO, has discussed security most often with executives at Microsoft. "They are the biggest supplier to the Air Force, and my attempt has been to encourage them to set an example," he says.
I am guessing if M$ is a major supplier of software to the Air Force, it is probably the same for the other branches of service as well.
Now I see why all of our helicopters and planes have been crashing without being shot down. Brings a whole new meaning to "Fatal Exception"
--Jon
This is indeed very sad news, but I think everyone saw the writing on the wall.
:(
Since it was written as a media OS it handled sound and video recording much better than Windows.
Latency to video and audio hardware was often as much as 90% less than same hardware running Windows or even Linux and a lot of people that used proprietary recording software on BeOS would be the first to tell you how awesome this OS was.
RIP BeOS
--Jon
I had to help my mother with this, but there is a way in AOL to opt out of their marketing crap. I can't remember the top level menue, but it is somewhere hidden in the MyAOL section where you can set your preferences. There are a series of marketing prefences that allow you to opt out of AOL emails, AOL service pop-up ads, etc. Of course they make you click no to each individual type to be a pain in the ass, but the option is there.
--Jon
Doesn't this kind of remind anyone of the movie Seven? In the movie Seven Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman eventually track down the murderer by using FBI data from the library system.
Freeman tells Pitt that it is a secret and it is a "gray" area, but for years the Feds have been monitoring reading habits. If people take out certain flagged books, for example a book about nuclear weapons, their library records are fed to the FBI computer. Since you need to have some form of ID and residence to get a library card, they have access to your name and address too. Nice and convenient.
While this movie is a work of fiction, I would not be suprised if it were true. Over the last 20 years the Federal government has spent billions on wiring up the libraries and replacing the card catalogs with computers that can be used to both search for books and Internet research. It would be pretty conveneint for the FBI to say, "Hey, we are already putting computers into the libraries. Why don't we add a little something to them to give them value to us."
Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?
--Jon
LOL, Found this article at Weird NJ
WeirdNJ.com
ONE OF NEW JERSEY'S MOST BAFFLING MYSTERIES came in the form of a silver "thread" that was suspended for days over the house of Mr. and Mrs. A.P. Smith of 85 Forest St. in the quiet suburb of Caldwell in Essex County.
--Jon
What's with all the Sun bashing going on here? What problem has Larry got with Sun? Sure Solaris is as dead as the dodo save for sun hardware, much like osx is only going to thrive on mac hardware. solaris for intel has always been a joke.
Solaris is dead? What the heck have you been smoking? Solaris is so much more robust and stable at this point and will continue to be the platform of choice for most RDBMS vendors for a while. The features that have finally made it into Linux over the past year have been in Solaris for years.
--Jon
I must be missing something here because I actually don't get it. How can they justify the $199? As far as a Linux box goes, the only thing it has going for it is an ill graphics engine, which when you figure in the purchase price of the console is comparable price/performance to a GeForce 3 card. Not bad there, but for $199 I sure hope it comes with more then just a CD, mouse and keyboard. Nowadays you can actually build a lower end box for $200.
I do have to say that I am sure I would be pleased justr to get bash prompt on a PS2, but one would have to think that $20-30 bucks would be a more reasonable price.
--Jon
You do realize the link that you posted is not optimum performance transaction leaders, but price/performance leaders right?
Yes, SQL Server is decent and can run on lower cost hardware, but Oracle and DB2 will stomp the shit out of it at the high-end.
--Jon
Oracle is big and mean enough that they could crush Windows for such a move if they had a case. Don't think Larry isn't salivating at that possibility. He might be an ass, but he doesn't like Bill. Or so I hear.
:)
Yeah, Oracle's DB pounds the hell out of anything MS makes, BUT, Oracle does not have the market leverage that Microsoft does. When you have a monopoly like Microsoft admittedly has, superior quality doesn't go as far as superior market share.
Remember when Microsoft wanted to get into the enterprise DB game? What did they do? They went out and bought the rights to SQL Server from Sybase.
Last I heard Microsoft had something like $36 BILLION in their "war chest" so if something gets in their way, they can either by it, or by some thorns in its side.
Don't ever underestimate the determination of a monopoly
--Jon
faster Mac OS X machine? No way dude. If you are looking purely at mhz, yeah, the Mac is faster, but the architecture is vastly different. The address bus and memory bus are larger, and even if most people think IRIX is a pile, it was designed for graphics i/o.
:)
:)
I wouldn't mind having one of these, but I wish they would bring back their old logo
Want a really fun machine? Get the Origin 2800 w/ 250 CPU's
--Jon
LOL, Windows XP is already peer-to-peer, though inadverently :)
Seriously though, they do need to make some drastic changes to the OS. Any OS that is going to be used by 90% of Americans needs to be more reliable. Nothing worse then having to be tech support because you are the only one in the family that can figure it out.
The move has antitrust implications: it potentially puts Microsoft at an advantage over Oracle and other competing SQL implementations every copy of Windows will effectively come with a light version of Microsoft SQL Server.
Ahh, now I see. I can just see the high-ups at Microsoft, "Hey, we can't make an RDBMS as good as Oracle or IBM's, so let's make our OS one, then when people run SQL Server on it it will be like 10 times faster, and SQL Server will capture the high-end database market."
I hope many of you submitted feedback for the Tunney act before yesterday's deadline or we will see a lot more anti-competitive behavior over the next year.
--Jon
The one comment in his eBay profile that caught my eye was the one that said he ordered the Dokken video tape. LOL, and I thought he only looked like an 80's reject :)
--Jon