By 'certain brand' I assume you mean an iPod... iPods also support USB2 now. But I don't know if it can be used as a boot volume. Even as a firewire drive I think it can only be used to boot MacOS (because of the flexibility in the MacOS OpenFirmware bootloader).
The photoelectric effect led to quantum mechanics, since QM is a very easy way to understand how the PE effect works. But figuring out how to make a wheel isn't the same thing as creating an entire automotive industry.
Dialtones are included in the cost of a line. But it's one of the many nickel-and-dime "hidden charges" they add on. Read your itemized bill someday. Though this could be something they inherited from US West.
I wonder how well it scales. The big problem is that if you have all of the transmitters on the same channel then you run into serious contention problems, and ad-hoc routing is actually quite difficult to do for wireless networks.
Most wireless APs won't relay connections to each other. You can't just take a pile of APs and set them up within a building and expect it to work. At the very least you need to plug each AP into a wireless->wired receiver (like the ones intended for the XBox and PS2), and even then you get lots of wonky latency problems and other gaming-unfriendly issues cropping up (since now you're also sharing the spectrum with multiple WLANs).
Supposedly the FCC number portability rules apply to landlines as well as cellphones, though it's still a bit hazy whether it applies to VoIP or not (I think it's supposed to though).
Linux support-wise, Vonage supposedly supports Linux, though honestly I'd go with one of the hardware VoIP phones anyway, just for matters of simplicity (like when it comes to devices grabbing your hardware and fighting between mp3 playback and phonecalls, and just simple matters of Linux audio sometimes being a pain to deal with).
Personally I just use a cellphone for my primary phone line, but it sounds like you make way more calls than I do.
ARM-based Palms have basically taken over for the old Dragonball series at this point. Anyone who is interested in playing games on their PDA will have upgraded already.
There's plenty of resources for homebrew GBA dev, but if you want to market a game commercially then you're out of luck unless you decide to try selling the game to a Nintendo developer. It's not inconceivable, but highly unlikely.
I don't think any of the other platforms you mentioned are worth considering at this point. I don't even know of anyone who has bought a TapWave or an N-Gage. In the future, PlayStation Portable might be interesting but knowing Sony they'll not go out of their way to make it easy for third-party developers (but again, you can always try selling the game to another publisher, like Crave). Sony is very homebrew-dev-friendly, though.
But yeah, PocketPC and PalmOS are really the only two choices if you want any chance at selling it as a shareware/independent effort.
Electronic invoices seem to get "lost" much more readily. It's hard to go back on your credit card account and find out when exactly they jacked up your 12.99% fixed-rate APR to 16.99% if they don't keep the paperwork available.
A paper trail is harder for the other guys to get rid of.
I can just imagine a deadlock condition emerging where there's a 5x5 grid of full-to-capacity regions (due to, say, a flash mob or similar), preventing any of the people in the inner 3x3 subregion from actually going anywhere.
Wait, I think that's how it was when the local Best Buy first opened...
What would be even better is if the video card makers would just do it all in OpenFirmware to begin with, and get Intel to put an OF module into EFI by default.:)
Okay, so EFI can emulate standard BIOS through a module. Which means that it can also obviously emulate OpenFirmware.
Since OpenFirmware is also totally programmable, does that mean that OF could emulate EFI?
It'd be interesting to see if future video cards decided to support EFI instead of x86-specific BIOS code. One of the big problems with getting video cards on the Mac is that they use x86 BIOS code which means that vendors need to make two versions, one PC and one OpenFirmware, and since the PC market is so much bigger the OpenFirmware version is usually 2-3x as expensive (and because of the development effort in making the OpenFirmware version, ATI et al do whatever they can to prevent people from just flashing the x86 version of the card with the OpenFirmware firmware).
It sure would be nice to not have to pay $200 for the Mac version of a $75 Radeon...
Currently they're giving top billing to old Atari 2600 games. I would have hoped Apple would try harder to kill the illusion that Mac only has games which are already at least three years out of date...
I was recently pleased to find that DosBox can run Impulse Tracker pretty well, which is to say better than Windows XP. Not fast enough to be useful on my G4/450 but I'm definitely saving up for a dual G5.:)
All of the Zauruses have a 240x320 screen except for the clamshell ones which are 640x480.
I wonder how much Lycoris has improved OpenZaurus. I ran it for a while on my SL-5500 but a lot of stuff was broken and frungy. Finally when it hosed itself during a self-upgrade I decided to switch back to the official Sharp ROMs and it's working much better now. Not that I use it for much besides a little palmtop web terminal (mostly for reading in bed and for quick WiFi access when I'm out and about) since there's still no iSync support.:/
It was Comp-U-Plus which had the cheapest price on Yahoo Shopping. I've bought a lot of stuff from them in the past, but yeah, they seem to move their prices around totally at random. Maybe in a few more days it'll be back down to $15.:)
Okay, it must have not liked the/. referer then, though since I copy-pasted the URL it shouldn't have gotten a referer to begin with. Odd. But the direct browsing did work.
Depends on the problem. Embarrassingly-parallel problems (i.e. problems which don't require a whole lot of cross-node synchronization) and whose work units can be doled out without much information do perform basically linearly with the number of compute nodes. rc5des is a perfect example of this.
Unfortunately, most large-scale parallel processing tasks aren't so simple to break down. But a lot of them can be reduced to ones where you don't need terrible amounts of synchronization between nodes, or can use approximation algorithms to mitigate it or whatever. Second Life apparently runs its weather simulation using a grid running on the client systems, where each user's computer just computes the weather for the nearby "physical" area.
Hm... The URL you provided appears to only be available to registered developers or similar. But I'll update my knowledge base accordingly (you're right, I'd gotten that figure from some Mac advocacy site).
Slashdot Mirror
Grab an Ericsson R520m off of eBay. It seems to be what you want.
By 'certain brand' I assume you mean an iPod... iPods also support USB2 now. But I don't know if it can be used as a boot volume. Even as a firewire drive I think it can only be used to boot MacOS (because of the flexibility in the MacOS OpenFirmware bootloader).
The photoelectric effect led to quantum mechanics, since QM is a very easy way to understand how the PE effect works. But figuring out how to make a wheel isn't the same thing as creating an entire automotive industry.
Dialtones are included in the cost of a line. But it's one of the many nickel-and-dime "hidden charges" they add on. Read your itemized bill someday. Though this could be something they inherited from US West.
I wonder how well it scales. The big problem is that if you have all of the transmitters on the same channel then you run into serious contention problems, and ad-hoc routing is actually quite difficult to do for wireless networks.
Most wireless APs won't relay connections to each other. You can't just take a pile of APs and set them up within a building and expect it to work. At the very least you need to plug each AP into a wireless->wired receiver (like the ones intended for the XBox and PS2), and even then you get lots of wonky latency problems and other gaming-unfriendly issues cropping up (since now you're also sharing the spectrum with multiple WLANs).
Here they actually charge you for the dial tone on top of the normal phone service...
Gizmodo
and doesn't let him keep his phone number
but other than that, yes, it totally fits the bill!
Linux support-wise, Vonage supposedly supports Linux, though honestly I'd go with one of the hardware VoIP phones anyway, just for matters of simplicity (like when it comes to devices grabbing your hardware and fighting between mp3 playback and phonecalls, and just simple matters of Linux audio sometimes being a pain to deal with).
Personally I just use a cellphone for my primary phone line, but it sounds like you make way more calls than I do.
There's plenty of resources for homebrew GBA dev, but if you want to market a game commercially then you're out of luck unless you decide to try selling the game to a Nintendo developer. It's not inconceivable, but highly unlikely.
I don't think any of the other platforms you mentioned are worth considering at this point. I don't even know of anyone who has bought a TapWave or an N-Gage. In the future, PlayStation Portable might be interesting but knowing Sony they'll not go out of their way to make it easy for third-party developers (but again, you can always try selling the game to another publisher, like Crave). Sony is very homebrew-dev-friendly, though.
But yeah, PocketPC and PalmOS are really the only two choices if you want any chance at selling it as a shareware/independent effort.
A paper trail is harder for the other guys to get rid of.
Wait, I think that's how it was when the local Best Buy first opened...
What would be even better is if the video card makers would just do it all in OpenFirmware to begin with, and get Intel to put an OF module into EFI by default. :)
Since OpenFirmware is also totally programmable, does that mean that OF could emulate EFI?
It'd be interesting to see if future video cards decided to support EFI instead of x86-specific BIOS code. One of the big problems with getting video cards on the Mac is that they use x86 BIOS code which means that vendors need to make two versions, one PC and one OpenFirmware, and since the PC market is so much bigger the OpenFirmware version is usually 2-3x as expensive (and because of the development effort in making the OpenFirmware version, ATI et al do whatever they can to prevent people from just flashing the x86 version of the card with the OpenFirmware firmware).
It sure would be nice to not have to pay $200 for the Mac version of a $75 Radeon...
Currently they're giving top billing to old Atari 2600 games. I would have hoped Apple would try harder to kill the illusion that Mac only has games which are already at least three years out of date...
I was recently pleased to find that DosBox can run Impulse Tracker pretty well, which is to say better than Windows XP. Not fast enough to be useful on my G4/450 but I'm definitely saving up for a dual G5. :)
Also, ARM is hardly "obscure," considering it's what's used in practically every PDA these days.
I wonder how much Lycoris has improved OpenZaurus. I ran it for a while on my SL-5500 but a lot of stuff was broken and frungy. Finally when it hosed itself during a self-upgrade I decided to switch back to the official Sharp ROMs and it's working much better now. Not that I use it for much besides a little palmtop web terminal (mostly for reading in bed and for quick WiFi access when I'm out and about) since there's still no iSync support. :/
It was Comp-U-Plus which had the cheapest price on Yahoo Shopping. I've bought a lot of stuff from them in the past, but yeah, they seem to move their prices around totally at random. Maybe in a few more days it'll be back down to $15. :)
Where did you find them for that cheap? The best I can find on Yahoo Shopping is $30, and most places are still asking $150-$200 for it.
Okay, it must have not liked the /. referer then, though since I copy-pasted the URL it shouldn't have gotten a referer to begin with. Odd. But the direct browsing did work.
I'll have to pick one up. Thanks for the heads up. :)
Unfortunately, most large-scale parallel processing tasks aren't so simple to break down. But a lot of them can be reduced to ones where you don't need terrible amounts of synchronization between nodes, or can use approximation algorithms to mitigate it or whatever. Second Life apparently runs its weather simulation using a grid running on the client systems, where each user's computer just computes the weather for the nearby "physical" area.
Thanks.