Most retailers utilize thermal printers at their registers. What a number are doing now is buying a paper with two ink layers on it to make a colored thermal receipt. Some are even going to Epson inkjet based POS printers.
This is a great loss prevention mechanism against printing your own receipts. The average joe can get thermal paper - they can't get two color thermal paper as readily.
the made a doublewide assload of money. a big momma assload of money.
i can't imagine any other reason for them to go public. by doing so they're able to setup away from their company if they ever wish to do so. (the could do this in a private company too)
i'd like to see what else they have to offer. i think that their biggest opportunity for selling marketing time is taking over TV and movies. they're clearly working on something already - they've got Movie review/time search, they've got TV capation search.
i wonder if they will ever charge their customers (us who search) anything? will there ever be a charge for Google's service?
if there is it will be the end of the Google that we knew and the beginning of a more "evil" Google.
bring on free TV
PS. This article really blew - what a waste of time.
it was on Slashdot just the other day too: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 5/02/1 9/1434244&tid=191&tid=14 Study Points to Sixth Sense in Humans
that's interesting. i didn't really put much thought into the username that i set up, apart from the fact that people were joining left and right. I had an account that was in the 600000s range but I lost the password and possibly the email address of the account. So, having lost all of my karma, etc I created a new user id but I saw that they had jumped leaps and bounds (or so it seemed).
I've had that sig for almost a year now (i believe). I guess it's not really just around the corner. 1/06 isn't too far away you know...
Personally I hope it does cost them a lot of money. As for his share - it's smaller than what he thought. It's averaging out at $1 US per click. He speculated that this could be because the traffic hasn't picked up yet.
Slashdot will improve his traffic numbers.;)
PS. I'm willing to whore myself out to blog on anything too. Woohoo.
For me? Comcast cable was great. SBC Yahoo has no problems. I'm into year two now. It's 1.5Mbps (averages at 1.4Mbps) and I don't have disconnects or anything. Of course *gasps* it could be your hardware.
As for ATT Wireless? I've been with them for almost 5 years. 4 of them on TMDA - no problems. The main problem that I have with ATTWS is the customer service. TDMA department/GSM department are seperate... enough said? I think so. Cingular with the Blues' business accounts will probably end up being pretty decent.
I got an iPod for christmas. The ipodlinux project was one of the main reasons for my choice and so I started exploring the iPod as far as I was able to. I patched the bootloader and got some basic code to run but there was no way to access any hardware other than the two CPUs yet. To get the LCD, Clickwheel and the harddisk working we needed to reverse engineer the bootloader in the flashrom. But to do that we first had to find a way to get that code. Seems quite impossible without any knowlegde about the IO-Hardware but I found a solution...
The whole idea started last week when leachbj gave me a piece of code that caused the piezo in the iPod to make some *squeek*-sound. I played around with that code, changed some values and somehow was able to produce different sounds. Just for fun I came up with the idea of using this different sounds for transferring data. Some minutes later I dropped the idea because I thought that just won't work and I won't be able to write a decoder for that. Two days later I woke up and somehow just tried encoding a 32bit value into different beeps. It worked so made a loop around it to dump about 4kb of memory.
The problem with that idea was that I could only transfer 8bit/s. Anyway, I tried writing a decoder and it seemed to work. Well, it didn't really work but it decoded about the first 256 bits correctly. The decoder was some Perlscript that loaded the whole audio into RAM and used about 1GB RAM for a 20MB audio file. It worked ok with some tweaking but still the RAM usage was way to high because if I wanted to dump the whole 64kb I would have an 1200MB audio file or something.
Some ideas came to my mind after thinking about the problems I had. The first one was to use compression so the transfer won't take too long. It would have taken about 45hours with the code we had. With compression maybe only 22h. To solve the memory problem I decided to rewrite the decoder in C that only reads about 96bytes chunks of audio data and then decodes that. Davidc_ helped me with that.
This was the first time I thought I this could really work. Again I played with the piezo code and figured out, how the piezo really works. I was able to produce some more unique beeps. Later I made the beep for 0 (the last bleep you can see in the picture) much shorter so it sounded more like a click. I even managed to make the first bleep shorter so I got about 5byte/s.
When we thought we got the encoder in the iPod with zlib and the decoder working, I decided to try recording the whole dump at night. So I put the iPod in the "iPod Recording Studio" and went to sleep. The iPod is just a cardboard box in which Samsung send me my laptop back. It has foam in it so I thought it would be ideal for recording the bleeping of the iPod. (Move your mouse over the picture.)
The next day I woke up quite early. The first thing I did was looking at the recording. I heard the iPod stopped bleeping so I thought everything went fine. In fact nothing worked at all. I recorded 8 hours full of zeros. Furthermore, the iPod's battery became empty though it was plugged into the USB port of my laptop the firmware wasn't loaded so it didn't request power over USB. So what you can see in the picture is the harddrive spinning down, then the iPod goes off for some minutes and then reboots. The harddriver was spinning during the whole recording session because there was no way to turn it off.
After this I was really disappointed and I dropped the project for the rest of the day but in the evening I tried again with a better decoder. It worked quite well but we weren't able to decompress the file. I concluded that was caused by the malloc() hack and zlib would allocate the same memory twice or something like that. Anyway, I haven't had much sleep that weekend so I was tired and just went to bed and thought about dropping the whole
Agreed that media bay, pcmcia slot, and external power supply could help but I think that there is one single problem.
Intel. As long as it's Intel they'll never meet that price point. And why would they want to?
The PC dominates the market share - Apple doesn't. I think that PC makers will counter the mini but I don't think it will ever really match. Most likely they could end up with a VIA or Transmeta chip that would offer the solution but it wouldn't be nearly as powerful as the Apple.
An Intel (x86) solution would require a chipset, a USB controller, a FireWire controller, a wireless chipset, a mini-PCI wifi card, a number of things that they can't really integrate yet on to a motherboard that small.
I would recommend carbon nano-tubes but the joke was referring to the fact that this is a space article, the Google offered a job on the Googleplex on the Moon and that no one really knowns what Google is going to do with it. It's kind of a ha ha thing.
Especially with the way that people bitch about the article selection. If the editors weren't busy with the newspapers they run they'd be fine. (Well I don't know if they run papers but it seems like a few of them read www.msnbc.com, wwww.nytimes.com, and www.washingtonpost.com
Blue Origin's Web site says the company doesn't intend to stop with a suborbital vehicle. The ultimate goal is to establish an "enduring human presence in space," and Bezos told Reuters in November that his company hopes to progress to orbital vehicles.
Sounds like he might be trying to obtain the Bigelow space race for a space station. 50 million dollars is a nice prize.
On a side note Google buys enough dark fibre to make a space elevator thus obtaining total control of the globe with the only cheap way to get to orbit.
This is a good point that you bring up. The author of this article leaves a lot of angles out. Such as the development in smaller hard drives such as 1.8" and less. The increase in speed for 9mm 2.5" drives. The fact that more corporations would like to remain on drives that don't impact images when changed. Compaq plans on offering their 15K 146.8 GB drives until mid-07 that's production. They'll be around for longer than that. Desktop side too - the bandwidth hasn't really increased - the new Intel chipsets are pushing for SATA drives which means higher capacity too.
Where did this author come from? He probably attended a roadmap for Hitachi and decided that there wasn't anything useless for the people who read is articles? Screw that.
A lot of the major drive makers are focusing on the next generation of the DVD media too.
Plus the gases diminish in quality over time. If you look at a Plasma that has been in use for two years next to the very same plasma tv you'll see the difference. I've done this very same thing. Plus the gases don't work as well in higher regions such as Colorado.
No problem with LCDs in Colorado and also no problems with burn in or quality decreasing over age. Also LCD TVs are lighter. A plasma TV weighs in at 60-100 LBs (average).
What is your take on Nextel and their iDen network? I understand that it is TDMA based right? Are they worth looking into now?
What would you say for people looking to purchase now / go with the GSM which is more widely adapted or select a carrier VW or Sprint for CDMA services?
Correct parent was entirely uneducated in most importantly a technical aspect. Look at it from a coverage/usage aspect:
Who has greater nationwid coverage? Who has more telecom providers adapting it?
I think GSM wins there. CDMA isn't being used by very many providers. I couldn't get a definite answer on whether Verizon uses CDMA or GSM but it looks like they used CDMA (still offer support for it) but have switched to GSM.
Perhaps this is really just proof that companies sell out to the standards that are more widely used.
"Palm OS. It's a thin client OS, I know that much."
I guess I spoke too soon. That's a good point though. The interface is very nice, clean and curvy. It very well could be anything - probably not Palm. *shurgs*
Slashdot Mirror
Most retailers utilize thermal printers at their registers. What a number are doing now is buying a paper with two ink layers on it to make a colored thermal receipt. Some are even going to Epson inkjet based POS printers.
This is a great loss prevention mechanism against printing your own receipts. The average joe can get thermal paper - they can't get two color thermal paper as readily.
yes all you flamers - TV is free right now. i meant free legal TV that we can download and search, etc.
you know what i meant - don't be an ass.
the made a doublewide assload of money. a big momma assload of money.
i can't imagine any other reason for them to go public. by doing so they're able to setup away from their company if they ever wish to do so. (the could do this in a private company too)
i'd like to see what else they have to offer. i think that their biggest opportunity for selling marketing time is taking over TV and movies. they're clearly working on something already - they've got Movie review/time search, they've got TV capation search.
i wonder if they will ever charge their customers (us who search) anything? will there ever be a charge for Google's service?
if there is it will be the end of the Google that we knew and the beginning of a more "evil" Google.
bring on free TV
PS. This article really blew - what a waste of time.
Block Popup Windows ---- checked.
Is yours on? The default is on. I know that there are probably others ways to block popups in Firefox.
What do you use?
it was on Slashdot just the other day too:0 5/02/1 9/1434244&tid=191&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=
Study Points to Sixth Sense in Humans
I've had this trouble too just recently. I get one off and on at this site: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/index.php.
Call me crazy (ok don't) but I thought I had spyware. I certainly don't. I'm running Firefox 1.0.
Hopefully they don't catch on too quick.
You sound like a Microsoft customer. :) IE Proof of ownership (not the stealing part)
that's interesting. i didn't really put much thought into the username that i set up, apart from the fact that people were joining left and right. I had an account that was in the 600000s range but I lost the password and possibly the email address of the account. So, having lost all of my karma, etc I created a new user id but I saw that they had jumped leaps and bounds (or so it seemed).
I've had that sig for almost a year now (i believe). I guess it's not really just around the corner. 1/06 isn't too far away you know...
Personally I hope it does cost them a lot of money. As for his share - it's smaller than what he thought. It's averaging out at $1 US per click. He speculated that this could be because the traffic hasn't picked up yet.
;)
Slashdot will improve his traffic numbers.
PS. I'm willing to whore myself out to blog on anything too. Woohoo.
It all depends on the area.
For me? Comcast cable was great. SBC Yahoo has no problems. I'm into year two now. It's 1.5Mbps (averages at 1.4Mbps) and I don't have disconnects or anything. Of course *gasps* it could be your hardware.
As for ATT Wireless? I've been with them for almost 5 years. 4 of them on TMDA - no problems. The main problem that I have with ATTWS is the customer service. TDMA department/GSM department are seperate... enough said? I think so. Cingular with the Blues' business accounts will probably end up being pretty decent.
Who knows if it's location. I'm in SE Michigan.
Google Cache
The Sound of iPod
I got an iPod for christmas. The ipodlinux project was one of the main reasons for my choice and so I started exploring the iPod as far as I was able to. I patched the bootloader and got some basic code to run but there was no way to access any hardware other than the two CPUs yet. To get the LCD, Clickwheel and the harddisk working we needed to reverse engineer the bootloader in the flashrom. But to do that we first had to find a way to get that code. Seems quite impossible without any knowlegde about the IO-Hardware but I found a solution...
The whole idea started last week when leachbj gave me a piece of code that caused the piezo in the iPod to make some *squeek*-sound. I played around with that code, changed some values and somehow was able to produce different sounds. Just for fun I came up with the idea of using this different sounds for transferring data. Some minutes later I dropped the idea because I thought that just won't work and I won't be able to write a decoder for that. Two days later I woke up and somehow just tried encoding a 32bit value into different beeps. It worked so made a loop around it to dump about 4kb of memory.
The problem with that idea was that I could only transfer 8bit/s. Anyway, I tried writing a decoder and it seemed to work. Well, it didn't really work but it decoded about the first 256 bits correctly. The decoder was some Perlscript that loaded the whole audio into RAM and used about 1GB RAM for a 20MB audio file. It worked ok with some tweaking but still the RAM usage was way to high because if I wanted to dump the whole 64kb I would have an 1200MB audio file or something.
Some ideas came to my mind after thinking about the problems I had. The first one was to use compression so the transfer won't take too long. It would have taken about 45hours with the code we had. With compression maybe only 22h. To solve the memory problem I decided to rewrite the decoder in C that only reads about 96bytes chunks of audio data and then decodes that. Davidc_ helped me with that.
This was the first time I thought I this could really work. Again I played with the piezo code and figured out, how the piezo really works. I was able to produce some more unique beeps. Later I made the beep for 0 (the last bleep you can see in the picture) much shorter so it sounded more like a click. I even managed to make the first bleep shorter so I got about 5byte/s.
When we thought we got the encoder in the iPod with zlib and the decoder working, I decided to try recording the whole dump at night. So I put the iPod in the "iPod Recording Studio" and went to sleep. The iPod is just a cardboard box in which Samsung send me my laptop back. It has foam in it so I thought it would be ideal for recording the bleeping of the iPod. (Move your mouse over the picture.)
The next day I woke up quite early. The first thing I did was looking at the recording. I heard the iPod stopped bleeping so I thought everything went fine. In fact nothing worked at all. I recorded 8 hours full of zeros. Furthermore, the iPod's battery became empty though it was plugged into the USB port of my laptop the firmware wasn't loaded so it didn't request power over USB. So what you can see in the picture is the harddrive spinning down, then the iPod goes off for some minutes and then reboots. The harddriver was spinning during the whole recording session because there was no way to turn it off.
After this I was really disappointed and I dropped the project for the rest of the day but in the evening I tried again with a better decoder. It worked quite well but we weren't able to decompress the file. I concluded that was caused by the malloc() hack and zlib would allocate the same memory twice or something like that. Anyway, I haven't had much sleep that weekend so I was tired and just went to bed and thought about dropping the whole
yes azureus is a very nice client to use. I find it's processor heavy though so if you are using a notebook - make sure that it's plugged in.
grandparent obviously hasn't heard of it yet or is karma whoring.
If there is please post it here:
http://f.moya.scarywater.net/
BitTorrent Files for Slashdot Effect Victims
Hmmm... Not in the 499 price range. The problem is two fold. price and size. size has never been the issue. i'm talking about what Intel charges.
So in reflection... i misspoke. i meant to say in that price range.
*bangs head*
Agreed that media bay, pcmcia slot, and external power supply could help but I think that there is one single problem.
Intel. As long as it's Intel they'll never meet that price point. And why would they want to?
The PC dominates the market share - Apple doesn't. I think that PC makers will counter the mini but I don't think it will ever really match. Most likely they could end up with a VIA or Transmeta chip that would offer the solution but it wouldn't be nearly as powerful as the Apple.
An Intel (x86) solution would require a chipset, a USB controller, a FireWire controller, a wireless chipset, a mini-PCI wifi card, a number of things that they can't really integrate yet on to a motherboard that small.
I would recommend carbon nano-tubes but the joke was referring to the fact that this is a space article, the Google offered a job on the Googleplex on the Moon and that no one really knowns what Google is going to do with it. It's kind of a ha ha thing.
Especially with the way that people bitch about the article selection. If the editors weren't busy with the newspapers they run they'd be fine. (Well I don't know if they run papers but it seems like a few of them read www.msnbc.com, wwww.nytimes.com, and www.washingtonpost.com
Blue Origin's Web site says the company doesn't intend to stop with a suborbital vehicle. The ultimate goal is to establish an "enduring human presence in space," and Bezos told Reuters in November that his company hopes to progress to orbital vehicles.
Sounds like he might be trying to obtain the Bigelow space race for a space station. 50 million dollars is a nice prize.
On a side note Google buys enough dark fibre to make a space elevator thus obtaining total control of the globe with the only cheap way to get to orbit.
This is a good point that you bring up. The author of this article leaves a lot of angles out. Such as the development in smaller hard drives such as 1.8" and less. The increase in speed for 9mm 2.5" drives. The fact that more corporations would like to remain on drives that don't impact images when changed. Compaq plans on offering their 15K 146.8 GB drives until mid-07 that's production. They'll be around for longer than that. Desktop side too - the bandwidth hasn't really increased - the new Intel chipsets are pushing for SATA drives which means higher capacity too.
Where did this author come from? He probably attended a roadmap for Hitachi and decided that there wasn't anything useless for the people who read is articles? Screw that.
A lot of the major drive makers are focusing on the next generation of the DVD media too.
Parent is correct.
Plus the gases diminish in quality over time. If you look at a Plasma that has been in use for two years next to the very same plasma tv you'll see the difference. I've done this very same thing. Plus the gases don't work as well in higher regions such as Colorado.
No problem with LCDs in Colorado and also no problems with burn in or quality decreasing over age. Also LCD TVs are lighter. A plasma TV weighs in at 60-100 LBs (average).
This is great prespective for me.
What is your take on Nextel and their iDen network? I understand that it is TDMA based right? Are they worth looking into now?
What would you say for people looking to purchase now / go with the GSM which is more widely adapted or select a carrier VW or Sprint for CDMA services?
Correct parent was entirely uneducated in most importantly a technical aspect. Look at it from a coverage/usage aspect:
Who has greater nationwid coverage? Who has more telecom providers adapting it?
I think GSM wins there. CDMA isn't being used by very many providers. I couldn't get a definite answer on whether Verizon uses CDMA or GSM but it looks like they used CDMA (still offer support for it) but have switched to GSM.
Perhaps this is really just proof that companies sell out to the standards that are more widely used.
This is because you are using the CDMA version of the 650.
IMHO - Sprint and cdma service is not good in comparison to GSM and GPRS data services.
you forgot to mention that it's entirely open source hardware and runs linux!!
"Palm OS. It's a thin client OS, I know that much."
I guess I spoke too soon. That's a good point though. The interface is very nice, clean and curvy. It very well could be anything - probably not Palm. *shurgs*
This is available in the US too. Sharper Image has them and a few others do too.
I've used the TV itself it's nice - the image can get grainy.
I think that it's actaully Palm based, which would make more sense being that Sony Clie is a Palm OS. It's a thin client OS, I know that much.