From the look of things, they go the way of the do do. Their serious lack of smart choices has really put them behind the Windows Mobile devices.
They don't listen to their customers. They STILL haven't released a PalmOS Cobalt device after what... a year? They're still using a crappy, old, severely limited, non-multitasking operating system that's getting its ass handed to it by the infamous Windows CE for god's sake.
They have great hardware (well, I consider the Tungsten C the penultimate in PDA's right now)
My gripes have been it's been challenging to set up, and displaying the user interface on the PVR-350 is problematic. (The PVR-350 problems are almost certainly the driver's fault, not SageTV's. Other software that puts a UI on the PVR-350, MythTV and GB-PVR, have the same problems).
They must be a driver problem. It wasn't any effort to get everything going out the SVIDEO OUT on my PVR-350 card with SageTV. There's some setting to "send gui out the SVIDEO port" in SageTV and it just works.
The PVR-350 and MythTV, is of course, a nightmare, but once you know how to do it it tends to stay easy. You need to absolute latest ivtv drivers and the latest ivtv fb driver for X and they MUST be the same version. The dev for this X driver isn't very organized, so it turns into a lengthy affair.
The advantages to this setup over other TiVo or MCE, is that the files can easily be edited and burned to DVD for safe keeping, plus you can use your computer to play games, view pictures, downloaded moview, etc.
Yep. I routinely use my PC normally whilst all the SageTV junk is running out the video out port of the PVR-350. I even play a lot of GTA:VC while its on and don't notice a performance degradation except for occasionally high cpu usages.
Is there anyone who can offer genuine non-zealous commentary on Microsoft's MCE2005?
I'm currently running SageTV (http://www.sage.tv) for my PVR needs. Before that I was running MythTV which I really liked, however it was really flakey.
I wonder how MCE2005 compares to either or both of the two.
Are they really "developmentally delayed" when they don't really have the potential to develop beyond a certain threshold? Delayed seems like the wrong term here.
Along the way to its completion, the original script for the movie Rain Man underwent a number of modifications. While Kim Peek served as the initial inspiration for the story, Raymond Babbitt, as portrayed so admirably by Dustin Hoffman, is a composite savant with abilities drawn from a number of different real life individuals. The main character in that movie, Raymond Babbitt, was modified to be an autistic savant. The story thus is that of a person who is autistic but also has savant skills grafted on to that basic autistic disorder. It is important to remember, therefore, that not all autistic persons are savants, and not all savants are autistic. In preparation for his role, Dustin Hoffman spent time with several other autistic savants and their families, as well as with Kim.
Fran Peek describes his son this way: "Kim is not behaviorally autistic. He has a warm, loving personality. He truly cares for people and enjoys sharing his unique skills and knowledge capacity.
It is important to distringuish that Kim Peek does not demonstrate the disassociation portrayed in the Rain Man movie.
In fact, Kim Peek (along with his dad, Fran) spends a lot of time doing "charity work" with elderly people.
Supposedly, he's quite a nice guy to talk to, if a bit mentally retarded (or whatever the proper term is these days).
Hello. I would like to discuss a neat little command line utility included in Mac OS X that doesn't get enough attention in my humble opinion. Living in/usr/bin/, this simple Open Source tool is something that I just can not live without. What is this wondrous textual utility that I'm talking about? It's none other than strings!
This prevents you from from having to do something stupid like open up a binary file with TextEdit.
My point there was that smart guns don't really buy you anything.
A "smart gun" is a plain old gun with a smart, well-trained user who keeps his finger off the trigger until he's ready to shoot, always assumes his gun is loaded, doesn't point his gun at anything he doesn't destroy, and knows his weapon and the operation of said weapon, inside and out.
Let's not forget that cops aren't trained to act like cowboys, which is to say they don't draw and shoot. When a cop fires his weapon, he's usually been aiming his gun for some seconds or minutes in the classic two-hand stance (which, btw, provides some natural redunancy for the gun's recognition device, if both his hands are chipped).
This is not the case. In most of the cases where they draw their gun and have time to get into a proper stance, things don't end in a shooting.
The cases where a cop ends up shooting tend to be the PULL GUN NOW! SHOOT QUICK!
I encourage you to discuss this with an officer you may know. I think they will agree with me.
There's a future in law enforcement for well-designed and well-tested smart weapons.
I agree, but that time isn't now, and not with the current technology out there. It's going to be a long time.
Look how long after the military started using semi-automatic pistols it took cops to switch from revolvers: decades.
Cops need that quick speed and dependability. Not the latest battlefield gadgets.
But there's an even bigger future for nonlethal wepaons.
Not to nitpick, but it's "less lethal" as unfortunately demonstrated by the girl who just died from an OC paintball. There's currently no such thing as a "non-lethal" weapon. If you use "non-lethal" an officer will probably correct you.
I've read a few things that suggest.223 might actually overpenetrate less
If it weren't doing 3000-4000+ fps, sure. The.223 is a tiny bullet, but when it's going that fast, it's a drywall/stucco/person killer.
Many cop agencies were using the.223 HK33 (not sure if thats right, but basically the MP5-like sub gun), but stopped because of overpenetration during SWAT raids.
This is something I've looked at quite a bit. That and I've had experience shooting through buildings with an M-16;)
A lot of serious gun owners won't even use handguns with a safety. Because if the safety is on in the fraction of a second you it to work, you're dead.
This I disagree with.
If you have a double-action Sig or something with a 12lbs trigger pull, yeah, you're probably okay without a safety.
If you have a 1911-style gun, well, safety off is scary. You need to learn how to disengage the thumb safety and shoot. It's quite easy to become accustomed to in an evening of practice.
Many guns such as the hugely popular Glocks and Springfield XD's ARE equipped with safeties. Trigger safeties, grip safeties, yadda yadda.
Gun owners who think they're such an expert that they can forgo the safety features of a weapon scare me about as much as people who think a.223 rifle is a good home defense weapon.
This is SO , SO WRONG. Cops do not look kindly at this technology. They want brain->finger->trigger->boom. Any attempts to mess that up or add things to it are met with great distaste.
When a cop pulls a gun to shoot a bad guy, it's to save their or a victim's life. They don't want any chance of that getting fucked up.
Here are some scenarios:
You chip a cop's shooting hand/arm. That arm is disabled in a gun fight. He has to shoot with his weak hand. Oh whoops, can't authenticate to my gun!
Ok, so we'll increase the range of the chip/gun transmissions to 2 feet or so. Now the gun is virtually authenticated all the time. The bad guy can even use the gun to kill the officer, as long as he's within range.
Ok, so we'll chip both arms/hands of the officer. Same deal as the above paragraph. The bad guy has disarmed the cop and has the gun pointed at the cop's head. The cop can't reach out and try to grab the guy's hand, or he'll authenticate the gun and boom!
Fingerprint scanners? You try firing a gun under stress and see how well that works.
It's just a bad idea to muck with such a time sensitive process. You're talking milliseconds, and human thinking isn't good when dealing with milliseconds. We rely on reflex and instinct.
Maybe we should try getting Novell interested in the wonderfullness of.Net.
I'm not sure if that was a pun or not, but Novell owns Ximian and employs Miguel and Nate and some of the other Mono (a free.NET implementation) programmers.
First there was FTP, downloaders were at the mercy of said server's selection and disk space. It was easy to send legal threats to the site's owner and get things shutdown.
Then we had Napster, people traded a song at a time. Things got a little rougher for the suers, but they eventually got Napster shut down.
Next, they used GNUtella, people traded all kinds of files like mad. It was impossible to "shut it all down", but they could sue individual users.
Now we have BitTorrent, you can get entire albums or sets of software media with a single click. The more people you had on a torrent, the faster it went, so people handed out torrent links like mad.
Seems to me like these suers are making life more and more difficult on themselves. They should probably stop before the uber-crypto, super compressed multicast version of BT comes out.
You don't stop piracy, you just force them into better and better (for them) situations and give yourself a damned headache.
Not that I'm shedding any tears for this guy but does "Anonymous person accuses other person by name on the basis of sketchy circumstantial evidence!" really merit this degree of publicity?
When said anonymous person's report lists some pretty damning evidence, such as header and code comparisons and analysis, ermm yes.
ask yourself why the Democrats couldn't come up with a better candidate than Kerry.
They had their chance with Dean and perhaps one or two people I believe would've made a much better candidate. Instead, they made the "safe" choice, and lost lost lost.
As before, the study ignores the thousands of automatically-spreading viruses for Windows.
So do I, because I keep my Windows machine at work properly patched and run A/V software. Is it that hard to do? Apparently it is, BlackIce reports thousands of attempted connections from infected machines.
That said, I do my "real" work on my Power Mac G5 at home, and you'll have to pry my OS X machine from my dead, cold hands.
Aside from the bazillion other problems and worries with Windows, it's nice not having to worry about worms (ipfw, and the fact there arent many for OS X). It's also nice because I can clean my machine easily, if needed (you know, pr0n and hacking logs;)
Encrypted.DMG files are great for Quicken, et al. (No, this is not what Microsoft's EFS is for)
Slashdot Mirror
I know what the fucking word means, thanks Bryce.
The ultimate PDA would be the Tungsten C with a sturdier casing, PalmOS Cobalt, and maybe an even longer battery life.
But thanks for the pointless, dipshit troll post!
What does PalmOne do?
From the look of things, they go the way of the do do. Their serious lack of smart choices has really put them behind the Windows Mobile devices.
They don't listen to their customers. They STILL haven't released a PalmOS Cobalt device after what... a year? They're still using a crappy, old, severely limited, non-multitasking operating system that's getting its ass handed to it by the infamous Windows CE for god's sake.
They have great hardware (well, I consider the Tungsten C the penultimate in PDA's right now)
"When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there"
Those "idiots" often being trusting elderly people who don't know any better,perhaps your mother, your father, your grandmother.
Ok, due to the "Windows Dancer" I will not be further evaluating MCE2005:
d an cer.jpg
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/CE/MCE2005/
Who in the HELL at Microsoft thought that feature up?
Thanks for the link to your site, Steve.
My gripes have been it's been challenging to set up, and displaying the user interface on the PVR-350 is problematic. (The PVR-350 problems are almost certainly the driver's fault, not SageTV's. Other software that puts a UI on the PVR-350, MythTV and GB-PVR, have the same problems).
They must be a driver problem. It wasn't any effort to get everything going out the SVIDEO OUT on my PVR-350 card with SageTV. There's some setting to "send gui out the SVIDEO port" in SageTV and it just works.
The PVR-350 and MythTV, is of course, a nightmare, but once you know how to do it it tends to stay easy. You need to absolute latest ivtv drivers and the latest ivtv fb driver for X and they MUST be the same version. The dev for this X driver isn't very organized, so it turns into a lengthy affair.
The advantages to this setup over other TiVo or MCE, is that the files can easily be edited and burned to DVD for safe keeping, plus you can use your computer to play games, view pictures, downloaded moview, etc.
Yep. I routinely use my PC normally whilst all the SageTV junk is running out the video out port of the PVR-350. I even play a lot of GTA:VC while its on and don't notice a performance degradation except for occasionally high cpu usages.
I'll have to check out BeyondTV, hmm
Is there anyone who can offer genuine non-zealous commentary on Microsoft's MCE2005?
I'm currently running SageTV (http://www.sage.tv) for my PVR needs. Before that I was running MythTV which I really liked, however it was really flakey.
I wonder how MCE2005 compares to either or both of the two.
TIA
Are they really "developmentally delayed" when they don't really have the potential to develop beyond a certain threshold? Delayed seems like the wrong term here.
According to the following link, Kim Peek is not autistic, he's just a savant:
i mp eek.cfm
http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/k
Along the way to its completion, the original script for the movie Rain Man underwent a number of modifications. While Kim Peek served as the initial inspiration for the story, Raymond Babbitt, as portrayed so admirably by Dustin Hoffman, is a composite savant with abilities drawn from a number of different real life individuals. The main character in that movie, Raymond Babbitt, was modified to be an autistic savant. The story thus is that of a person who is autistic but also has savant skills grafted on to that basic autistic disorder. It is important to remember, therefore, that not all autistic persons are savants, and not all savants are autistic. In preparation for his role, Dustin Hoffman spent time with several other autistic savants and their families, as well as with Kim.
Fran Peek describes his son this way: "Kim is not behaviorally autistic. He has a warm, loving personality. He truly cares for people and enjoys sharing his unique skills and knowledge capacity.
It is important to distringuish that Kim Peek does not demonstrate the disassociation portrayed in the Rain Man movie.
In fact, Kim Peek (along with his dad, Fran) spends a lot of time doing "charity work" with elderly people.
Supposedly, he's quite a nice guy to talk to, if a bit mentally retarded (or whatever the proper term is these days).
err, readable.
Jesus, I thought that since mkentry.c was so obfuscated, and at the top that is was the winning entry.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that this was supposed to be normal, radable code.
You need a gf like mine, who enjoys watching you use your palm
Hello. I would like to discuss a neat little command line utility included in Mac OS X that doesn't get enough attention in my humble opinion. Living in /usr/bin/, this simple Open Source tool is something that I just can not live without. What is this wondrous textual utility that I'm talking about? It's none other than strings!
This prevents you from from having to do something stupid like open up a binary file with TextEdit.
_LETS_ continue to _TYPE_ like this _A LOT_. it's _PRETTY_ _COOL_ and gets my _POINT_ across really _WELL_!!!!
In scenario #2, what would happen if
In scenario #3, what would happened if
My point there was that smart guns don't really buy you anything.
A "smart gun" is a plain old gun with a smart, well-trained user who keeps his finger off the trigger until he's ready to shoot, always assumes his gun is loaded, doesn't point his gun at anything he doesn't destroy, and knows his weapon and the operation of said weapon, inside and out.
Let's not forget that cops aren't trained to act like cowboys, which is to say they don't draw and shoot. When a cop fires his weapon, he's usually been aiming his gun for some seconds or minutes in the classic two-hand stance (which, btw, provides some natural redunancy for the gun's recognition device, if both his hands are chipped).
This is not the case. In most of the cases where they draw their gun and have time to get into a proper stance, things don't end in a shooting.
The cases where a cop ends up shooting tend to be the PULL GUN NOW! SHOOT QUICK!
I encourage you to discuss this with an officer you may know. I think they will agree with me.
There's a future in law enforcement for well-designed and well-tested smart weapons.
I agree, but that time isn't now, and not with the current technology out there. It's going to be a long time.
Look how long after the military started using semi-automatic pistols it took cops to switch from revolvers: decades.
Cops need that quick speed and dependability. Not the latest battlefield gadgets.
But there's an even bigger future for nonlethal wepaons.
Not to nitpick, but it's "less lethal" as unfortunately demonstrated by the girl who just died from an OC paintball. There's currently no such thing as a "non-lethal" weapon. If you use "non-lethal" an officer will probably correct you.
I've read a few things that suggest .223 might actually overpenetrate less
.223 is a tiny bullet, but when it's going that fast, it's a drywall/stucco/person killer.
.223 HK33 (not sure if thats right, but basically the MP5-like sub gun), but stopped because of overpenetration during SWAT raids.
;)
If it weren't doing 3000-4000+ fps, sure. The
Many cop agencies were using the
This is something I've looked at quite a bit. That and I've had experience shooting through buildings with an M-16
Unfortunately, the thing is going to cost around a grand, as has been reported.
I can't wait for one of the new 9xxx's to ship that's priced around $600. I used to be a Palm lover, but Symbian is really remarkable.
A lot of serious gun owners won't even use handguns with a safety. Because if the safety is on in the fraction of a second you it to work, you're dead.
.223 rifle is a good home defense weapon.
This I disagree with.
If you have a double-action Sig or something with a 12lbs trigger pull, yeah, you're probably okay without a safety.
If you have a 1911-style gun, well, safety off is scary. You need to learn how to disengage the thumb safety and shoot. It's quite easy to become accustomed to in an evening of practice.
Many guns such as the hugely popular Glocks and Springfield XD's ARE equipped with safeties. Trigger safeties, grip safeties, yadda yadda.
Gun owners who think they're such an expert that they can forgo the safety features of a weapon scare me about as much as people who think a
Few have qualms about it
This is SO , SO WRONG. Cops do not look kindly at this technology. They want brain->finger->trigger->boom. Any attempts to mess that up or add things to it are met with great distaste.
When a cop pulls a gun to shoot a bad guy, it's to save their or a victim's life. They don't want any chance of that getting fucked up.
Here are some scenarios:
You chip a cop's shooting hand/arm. That arm is disabled in a gun fight. He has to shoot with his weak hand. Oh whoops, can't authenticate to my gun!
Ok, so we'll increase the range of the chip/gun transmissions to 2 feet or so. Now the gun is virtually authenticated all the time. The bad guy can even use the gun to kill the officer, as long as he's within range.
Ok, so we'll chip both arms/hands of the officer. Same deal as the above paragraph. The bad guy has disarmed the cop and has the gun pointed at the cop's head. The cop can't reach out and try to grab the guy's hand, or he'll authenticate the gun and boom!
Fingerprint scanners? You try firing a gun under stress and see how well that works.
It's just a bad idea to muck with such a time sensitive process. You're talking milliseconds, and human thinking isn't good when dealing with milliseconds. We rely on reflex and instinct.
Maybe we should try getting Novell interested in the wonderfullness of .Net.
.NET implementation) programmers.
I'm not sure if that was a pun or not, but Novell owns Ximian and employs Miguel and Nate and some of the other Mono (a free
First there was FTP, downloaders were at the mercy of said server's selection and disk space. It was easy to send legal threats to the site's owner and get things shutdown.
Then we had Napster, people traded a song at a time. Things got a little rougher for the suers, but they eventually got Napster shut down.
Next, they used GNUtella, people traded all kinds of files like mad. It was impossible to "shut it all down", but they could sue individual users.
Now we have BitTorrent, you can get entire albums or sets of software media with a single click. The more people you had on a torrent, the faster it went, so people handed out torrent links like mad.
Seems to me like these suers are making life more and more difficult on themselves. They should probably stop before the uber-crypto, super compressed multicast version of BT comes out.
You don't stop piracy, you just force them into better and better (for them) situations and give yourself a damned headache.
Nuclear, oil, coal... you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Well, unless you're using biodiesel or solar power...
Not that I'm shedding any tears for this guy but does "Anonymous person accuses other person by name on the basis of sketchy circumstantial evidence!" really merit this degree of publicity?
When said anonymous person's report lists some pretty damning evidence, such as header and code comparisons and analysis, ermm yes.
ask yourself why the Democrats couldn't come up with a better candidate than Kerry.
They had their chance with Dean and perhaps one or two people I believe would've made a much better candidate. Instead, they made the "safe" choice, and lost lost lost.
Oh well.
As before, the study ignores the thousands of automatically-spreading viruses for Windows.
;)
.DMG files are great for Quicken, et al. (No, this is not what Microsoft's EFS is for)
So do I, because I keep my Windows machine at work properly patched and run A/V software. Is it that hard to do? Apparently it is, BlackIce reports thousands of attempted connections from infected machines.
That said, I do my "real" work on my Power Mac G5 at home, and you'll have to pry my OS X machine from my dead, cold hands.
Aside from the bazillion other problems and worries with Windows, it's nice not having to worry about worms (ipfw, and the fact there arent many for OS X). It's also nice because I can clean my machine easily, if needed (you know, pr0n and hacking logs
Encrypted
Actually it does a lot more than that, as exampled in my earlier post, which you, perplexingly responded to with this.