After calander, phone book, notepad and music player got absorbed by the mobile phone there was only one application that people use paper for on the move that hadn't been succesfully ported to their platform - eBooks.
Sure there was software, but reading a book from a palm was a great way to get eye strain and frustrated. It needed to be better than a book. It was worse.
IMHO they dropped the ball on RSS too. I don't have to connect my newspaper to the internet once I've read the first paragraph. I shouldn't have to connect my palm either.
"you just tapped one of the major problems with open source on the head.
every bastard just sits back waiting to use someone elses hardwork for nothing."
This isn't the problem, its the reason for its success. If everyone ran out and worked on the same problem it wouldn't get done any faster. We're all creative people, and we all know that in order to be creative you need to invest in a project emotionally. You are right, people could articulate their problems with the code better, but you only need a few people to that. Thats why improved communications arn't always a good thing. Making it easier to transmit may improve the signal, but it will necessarily decrease the noise. You need the right tool for the job, you need somebody that cares enough, not just to do it, but to think about it first.
Sometimes you can buy that kind of commitment, I find it much easier to become passionate about a project when I'm hungry. I doubt, if it didn't pay well that I would ever chose to do this work. And if the conditions weren't good, I don't think I'd be as good as I am at it.
If no one is willing to pay, then its got to come from those that really want this project to succeed. If I went and bought this kit, I know that I would build it then forget about. I could be sat on a desert island for 20 years with all the tools in the world, and not come up with the solution that will eventually bring this product to market. Its not that I don't want to be a part of the ePaper revolution, I just know that I don't have the skills, and I'm not hungry enough to develop them. Its the same reason I'm fat and I can't run the hundred meters in under 11 seconds. I don't need to do it to eat, so I don't, 16 seconds is fast enough to sprint for the train - I'm happy with that.
Linford Christie however was passionate about it. He devoted a huge chunk of the prime of his life to honing his skills. Sure he was ultimately rewarded, but why did he get out of bed and start training for all years before he got paid?
Its the same thing with technology. We're just waiting for the right mind to be in the right place. Kits like this are catalysts. Maybe the next Woz will be motivated enough to convince his parents that he needs one for a science project, or look on the internet and realise they could build a better one with few parts for less money.
The real problem is that too many people are being paid to be passionate against their will. You may get results, you just have worry about the quality of those results. There is no point blaming people for not being that mind. The trick is to keep reading and looking for that one thing that you are passionate about, and when the oppertunity is there... grab it with both arms.
RIAA: So it makes us, I mean out artists, richer? Microsoft: Sure.. why not? RIAA: Let me get this straight. You line all these ones and zeros up and it makes music. Microsoft: Yep, on a little disk we like to call a MicroDisk TM. RIAA: And this can be done for 100th of the price of pressing a vinyl record. Microsoft: Sure can. And its easy too. The whole point of digital technology is that you can make zillions of 1s and 0s line up for no money whats so ever. Anyone can do it! RIAA: Anyone? Microsoft: Err.... I mean anyone who can remember these magic words (which are a big secret) whilst waving this MicroWand TM can do it. RIAA: Ah! Theres the catch!... How much is the wand?
The BBC reported last night that there are 10m broadband subscribers in the UK. Thats 1/3 of all homes! The price of wireless routers is dropping every day, and most providers offer 'wireless' installation for a nominal extra. In the small backwater where I live, I'm already competing for channels with 2 other wireless networks in my home, and most of my town is covered with a wireless network.
This should be a wake up call to POTS / GSM / 3G providers.
We are so close to no longer needing POTS or GSM its scary. Now I don't think we'll ever get rid of either of them for good, they both have advantages that arn't catered for by VoIP, but I've already abandoned POTS in favour of GSM and cable, and would be even happier to rid myself of the £30 a month I'm paying for GSM if only I wireless internet was free and ubiquitous.
Would you invest in a 3G company, now that WiMAX is slowly rolling out?
What we really need is a cheap, wireless, broadband aggregation product. Whereby, you plug it into your internet connection, it detects local carriers and you are provided with a connection for all the other wireless routers on that scheme and aggregates the bandwidth that all of them have available - viral wireless internet. Network providers are kept happy because it should reduce the free loaders (you need to provide a node in order to use the service). With technologies like zeroconf, WPA2 etc, I'm not really sure why this isn't happening already.
I'm in the broadband backwater that is the UK. Until this anouncement we were supposed to be pleased when they let consumers have 4Mbps - never mind 24Mbps. I'm a cable modem user, and I pay £20 a month for 1Mbps - apparently I'm getting upgraded for free to 4Mbit in the next few months, and 2Mb subscribers are getting beefed up to 10Mbps. After this announcment, and a quick read throught the other comments (I want to live in Tokyo), I'm left thinking thats not enough.
Does anyone else know whats stopping Telewest from rolling out an ADSL killer (where available)?
Hypothetical 1: A child draws a picture of Nemo. Its pretty good and their parents are so proud that they scan it and distribute it to all their friends and family, and put it on a public site so that anyone can look at it, if they choose. Is that copyright infringement? I would have thought it would have been concidered a derivative work - as it was an original work inspired by a copyrighted object.
Hypothetical 2: A/. reader is messing about in Lisp and creates an AI that can interpret a conventional image and then reproduce a derivative work that looks similar. The/. reader is so proud, that he places a few of these images on/. Is that a copyright infringement?
Hypothetical 3: As the/. readers code was GPL, a few uber geeks get together and modify the code so that it creates near perfect derivative works. If you look closley you can see that the image is nothing like the original, but within human contraints it would be concidered almost the same. They quickly realise that this method creates files substancially smaller than the original, and even though they are not copies, those who didn't study compression technologies wouldn't really be inclined to notice a difference. The files are clearly marked as genereated by this program and distributed for free. Nobody is claiming that they are copies, they arn't they are inspired works of art and distributed under the creative commons licence. Is that copyright infringement?
Hypothetical 4: Joe Cracker rips a DVD, removes the CSS and Macrovision and decides to create a private members website that charges $10 a year to access on an all you can eat download basis. Other that removing the encryption no work is done the file and it is essentially the same as it was when it was sold on Amazon. Now thats got to copyright infringement, right?
This is a/. post so its not exactly a well positioned argument, but I think it shows a clear progression and abuse of the copyright law. I'm not convinced that the use of a lossy compression algorithm on copyrighted works could be concidered anything other than a synopsis of that work - if that. If you compared an MPEG2 to a DivX and H.264 created from that stream would even a single line of the source code be the same? And does the derived file have any value without an interpretor?
I'm sorry sir, we're going to have to ask for your geek card. WiFi Passwords are for people that don't have time to crack the network. As a/. member you are expected, ney, demanded to crack that password.
Now, don't come back until you've cracked that password and distributed to everyone you know. At the very least man, don't admit that you don't know how to break the security!!!
-- This is a JOKE. It may not be very funny. But I at least want to know that when people mod it as a troll, they are doing it because its not funny, and not because they think I'm a terrorist.
I just can't make my mind up about this. PVR has changed the way I watch TV. I now record the shows I want to watch and then play them back on my PowerBook in whatever room I'm in, and sometimes at work.
There are certain things that I like about this set up. Its hands free, I can just place my laptop on any flatish surface, it has loud speakers, which allow me and anyone else in the room to watch it to, and the picture quality is better than watching it on my cheap CRT TV.
I know I wouldn't want to watch an entire movie on a small screen - I can count the number of times I've watched a movie on my laptop on one hand and all of those were on flights. But I'm pretty sure I could watch a 30 minute show with ease.
I use my iPod in my car, whilst I'm walking, whilst I'm working, I use it to power my stereo. The only time I can think I would have any prolonged use out of a iPod video was if I had a daily 30 minute commute on public transport or if I wanted to take a TV show or movie round to a friends house (assuming it plugged into a TV with no obvious loss of quality). Of those only the 30 minute commute would be worth it to me.
The killer app for an iPod is still the music playback, but that doesn't mean I'm not seriously concidering upgrading to the iPod photo (which I'd probably have less use for than the video). I'll always see video playback as icing, rather than the raison d'etre, so if the price is right, and I'm still essentially buying an iPod, I'll probably buy a iPod video when it comes out.
Chip and pin was bad enough. Clerks still handle my card, and from a mugging perspective, its far easier to beat a 4 digit pin out of me, than the ability to write my signiture (at least forgery was skill?). But chip and pin does represent a step in the right direction (one step backwards, two steps forward). Not using a clerk to verify your identity is probably a good move in the long run, and keeping the pass phrase in plain site was never a good idea.
What I'm not sure about with these RFID is where is the feedback that the transaction was successful? If you still have to wait for the terminal to handshake with the central database and process the transaction, it still takes as long as a conventional credit card - then there is no improvement. If there is no identification process, short of possessing the card how is that better for my security? If its part of the build up of biometric ID, is that really going to be any quicker, more convient or secure than using a human to identify another human.
My girlfriends father has banked with the same branch his entire life. When he walks into the bank the people know him. Now don't get me wrong, he "Hates the bastards", but he won't change branches because, when he sent his new accountant into withdraw some cash, they took the accountant to one side and refused the transaction until they had verified his identify via a phone call. It was quick and painless. The trust was human, the identification was human.
The interesting thing about that story is that it identifies the absolute reason we need human trust mechanisms (because they work and are intuitive) and the absolute reason we need automatic trust - I don't want to have to make friends with every clerk/manager in the world before they'll accept my credit card - and I want the freedom to change banks.
I don't think RFID for credit cards is a good idea. In fact I don't think credit cards are a good idea - they are a hack. They are a machine readable identification tool - what we need is a technology that identifies you by looking at you, talking too you, smelling you. If my moms Lhasa Apso (possibly the stupidest breed of dog on the planet) can identify me from a line up then at some point we need a technology that has a similar capability.
Nobodys sure how to make money out of linux yet. It clearly provides something that people want, and creates a lot of market interest whenever you say it loud enough, especially when you say your going to give it to them for free, but how do you turn free into profit. Who knows how to convert free to profit? Here are the options as it stands:
Include the price of the OS in new hardware.
Include advertising within the OS
Charge for support.
None of these options are viable at the moment because of the cost of transfering (mainly time and training) to Linux and the quality of the product compared to Windows for home users (everything is in the 'wrong' place, and it doesn't have MS Office). But once somebodies figured out what option four is in that list, you want to have your own distro ready and raring to go so you can get some profit too
The rate determining step in book copyright infringment is page turning. Single sheet documents can, and have, been easily pirated since the invention of the pen and notepad. I remeber going into a linrary when I was at high school and writing down passages that I thought I could use in an essay. This technology is only slightly faster than that, and is really much closer to the Iris reader pen.
In our office we have a high speed copier that could scan 10s of pages in a minute, but of course it can't copy books, because they are bound.
Now, can I scan a passage, page or chapter easily with this technology? Sure! But then I could do that already.
However, what the internet might let us do is collate our efforts. If 20 people, lets call them students, can be convinced, lets call that poverty, to all go into different books stores at different times of the day and each scan one chapter, or a series of pre arranged pages then they could collate and distribute their efforts very quickly - but theyn, if they really wanted too they could do this already, and they do.
The reason why people don't do it as much as music is that music through cheap head phones sounds the same whether its on tape, CD, radio or MP3. DVDs look nearly as good distributed via DivX or H.264 (but then your only really looking at it for a few hours and from a distrance). Books are read for hours at a time, in close quarters. Books don't run out of batteries. Books are cheap, books don't have verioning issues and work universally across continents without the need of adapters. In most parts of the world, they operate during waking hours with little or no external power requirements, and if push comes to shove you can run from burning any domestic combustable with no further modification.
Just so you don't feel like this has fallen on deaf ears...
I really like this idea. There are very few applications where its a PITA to transfer between systems. Web browsing I really don't mind using other people set-up. I never really been a big fan of bookmarks, and I can take or leave tabbed browsing. Word processor? Well everyone uses Word right?
In fact of all the killer apps I use on a daily basis its only really eclipse and my mail that I really can't be arsed to configure between systems. Both of these are Java so having them on a USB key makes a lot of sense to me. However, if someone came up with a office suite than ran on Java I'd probably lump that on too.
... I dug out my old NES a few weeks ago, and one thing struck me, the old games were as good as we remember, except a few of them. SMB3 is still a fantastic game, but even better is Bionic Comando. That game excites me to this day, and boy does it need porting to Revolution...
The nunchuka in one hand controlling the weapons and movement, the wand thingy controlling the grapling hook, all in glorious 3D, with an emphasis on stealth and skill over brute force - magic. Hell, they could even include the ability to jump!
This is all about the spirit of free enterprise. We need research and development in order to progress as a society, but like all good things R&D involves time and resources and both thoses things cost money.
Where does that money come from?
Democrats/Librals believe that if the people pay for it, the people own it the benefit to this is that scientists are free to access the real pay dirt - information.
Republicans/Red-Necks believe that a grant is just that, a gift of money and that scientists should be free to profit from their innovation - the benefit of this is that you attract brighter minds and the industry can run itself relieving the tax burden of a constant stream of grants.
The question really is what is more important, a free market or a freedom of information?
Thats not an easy question to answer. People would say that Russia was a perfect example of why the Republicans are right. Others might say that America is a perfect example of why the Democrats are right. I say the truth is that both sides have fudged the system to a point where neither can be right.
I would have more sympathy for big R&D companies if I thought for one second that they had stopped asking for research grants or tax cuts to support their work. I would have more sympathy for big R&D companies if they could be trusted to return their products back into the public domain where it belongs. I would have more sympathy for R&D companies if they could be trusted to act with compassion where the bottom line must be second to the saving of lives and removal of people from absolute poverty. The one thing these companies can be trusted to do is protect their investors money, but thats about the only thing they are obligated to do by law.
Exactly. The reason I got into computers and not cars was that when I was 8 I broke my dads computer and had to fix it before he got back from work... and I did. This was an important lesson and a massive ego boost.
10 years later I broke my dads car. I didn't fix it in time and I ended braking it more, covered in crap and in a whole lotta trouble.
Its a shame chix dig cars and money over chips and body oder.
330 pages a minute. Thats 5.5 pages a second. Which is about the same as the frame rate I get on Doom 3 on an iMac G5 on high quality. Still I didn't buy my mac for games... at least thats what I keep telling myself.
Cock-Soc (Cocktail Society): Fill a few (clean) dustbins with as much vodka, orange juice lemonade etc as you have in the budget. Then charge £2 a pint. --In Nottingham / Leeds I've actually seen Ambulances queing.
Bar Crawls: Ottley run starts two miles out of town with 18 bars between you and the city centre. You are supposed to have a pint in each one on the way. Nottingham: the campus 14. There are 14 bars on campus, can you have a pint in each one before closing?
The list goes on. The fact is that college kids are bright and free from their parents for the first time. They can do anything they put their mind to and have little respect for limits impossed by law. Unfortunately most of the time, that involves getting drunk or stoned... shame its not world peace really.
The fact is you could make alcohol illegal and people would still get sh1tfaced - I know, I brewed my own at college.
"I still like the original idea of the iPod: all your music with you all the time". Here! here!
But now that digital music is mainstream is it still achievable? 60GB is about enough storage for 1000 albums. Thats not that much over a life time. Hell, I'm only 25 and I've got 400 (all bought and paid for, storing the jewel cases is a PITA, and I've thrown away a lot of the damaged ones) or so now. At some point in the future I may have to stand up and admit that having nearly a years worth or music, but only half a days worth of battery is a little bit of an imbalance - the cost of which is the size of the device. As small as it felt when I bought it, my 40GB 3G iPod is too big an bulky - especailly when compared to the nano.
As it is, the battery on my 3G is dying. I was just going to replace it, but to be honest, 4GB, and the ability to take slideshows to people houses (something I'm currently doing with my powerbook) is probably all I need. I've already found myself paring down the music on my iPod as, although the interface is great, having to scroll through music that I 'grew out of' 3 years ago is a PITA - I guess I'm probably not the "all your music with you all the time" kinda guy I thought I was.
I'm inclined to agree with you. I'm usually against phones, mp3 players having too much additional functionality. But these devices are ultimately output devices T9 is not a keyboard replacement, and a scroll wheel doesn't replace a mouse.
A game device is an input device, the DS, especially so. Two reasonable screens, a decent processor and ram, touch screen. Its crying out to be used as a web browswer, PIM even a Skype Phone (pushing it slightly). If someone could port NewtonOS to it they would really be on a winner.
Wireless keyboard I get. Wireless keyboard with track[pad|ball] I really get. But unless you've got a wireless desktop I just don't get why you need a wireless mouse - and I own one.
The problem I've found with wireless, optical mice is that they still only really work when they're on a mouse mat, so when you zoom across the office on your overpriced executive chair (because you can) you're keyboard works, but your mouse is useless. The only time I've used it recently is when I wirelessly patched my G5 into my TV. There was then a wall between me and the computer, and a coffee table infront of me. But to be honest, using a mouse to control your TV feels clunky. I ended up using SallingClicker and do the whole thing from my phone.
The only real benefit is clutter reduction. Not as big a benefit as I originally had hoped. It seems everytime I find a way of making something wireless, I find a new way of using up the port it was in. YMMV.
My Apple bluetooth mouse has been telling me my battery is low for years (I really should change it).
As for telling me when I get email... isn't that what the screen and sound cards are for? I don't own a PC, or run linux, but I'm guessing that these operating systems already have a system for telling you when you've got mail too.
10 buttons? Meh. I've got 113 keys right next to my mouse. I have two hands, so I find that I can press these buttons whilst I'm using the mouse.
I was shocked at how few people actually know what a PDF is, yet alone how to open it.
I did start out by sending my CV in PDF, the few that replied asked me to resend it as a word doc. Thats when the 'fun' started. I found out that people routinely cut and paste Word doc CVs into an internal format so that it can be reviewed faster by HR. Its not that you can't do this with a pdf, its just that the people who they employ to do that task, don't want to know.
Obviously, this may be related to the type of job I was going for (faceless, corporate, code monkey) and once I'm worth something to a company they may be more flexible with regard file format of CVs, but as a grunt, they didn't want to know unless it was in Word.
Why is this an issue? If people don't like the way Internet Explorer works, why don't they release a virus that targets IE, downloads Firefox, patches it so that it looks like IE, and then uninstalls IE.
That is why Microsoft have made IE so full of holes isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Because they couldn't get together a book killer.
After calander, phone book, notepad and music player got absorbed by the mobile phone there was only one application that people use paper for on the move that hadn't been succesfully ported to their platform - eBooks.
Sure there was software, but reading a book from a palm was a great way to get eye strain and frustrated. It needed to be better than a book. It was worse.
IMHO they dropped the ball on RSS too. I don't have to connect my newspaper to the internet once I've read the first paragraph. I shouldn't have to connect my palm either.
"you just tapped one of the major problems with open source on the head.
every bastard just sits back waiting to use someone elses hardwork for nothing."
This isn't the problem, its the reason for its success. If everyone ran out and worked on the same problem it wouldn't get done any faster. We're all creative people, and we all know that in order to be creative you need to invest in a project emotionally. You are right, people could articulate their problems with the code better, but you only need a few people to that. Thats why improved communications arn't always a good thing. Making it easier to transmit may improve the signal, but it will necessarily decrease the noise. You need the right tool for the job, you need somebody that cares enough, not just to do it, but to think about it first.
Sometimes you can buy that kind of commitment, I find it much easier to become passionate about a project when I'm hungry. I doubt, if it didn't pay well that I would ever chose to do this work. And if the conditions weren't good, I don't think I'd be as good as I am at it.
If no one is willing to pay, then its got to come from those that really want this project to succeed. If I went and bought this kit, I know that I would build it then forget about. I could be sat on a desert island for 20 years with all the tools in the world, and not come up with the solution that will eventually bring this product to market. Its not that I don't want to be a part of the ePaper revolution, I just know that I don't have the skills, and I'm not hungry enough to develop them. Its the same reason I'm fat and I can't run the hundred meters in under 11 seconds. I don't need to do it to eat, so I don't, 16 seconds is fast enough to sprint for the train - I'm happy with that.
Linford Christie however was passionate about it. He devoted a huge chunk of the prime of his life to honing his skills. Sure he was ultimately rewarded, but why did he get out of bed and start training for all years before he got paid?
Its the same thing with technology. We're just waiting for the right mind to be in the right place. Kits like this are catalysts. Maybe the next Woz will be motivated enough to convince his parents that he needs one for a science project, or look on the internet and realise they could build a better one with few parts for less money.
The real problem is that too many people are being paid to be passionate against their will. You may get results, you just have worry about the quality of those results.
There is no point blaming people for not being that mind. The trick is to keep reading and looking for that one thing that you are passionate about, and when the oppertunity is there... grab it with both arms.
RIAA: So it makes us, I mean out artists, richer?
Microsoft: Sure.. why not?
RIAA: Let me get this straight. You line all these ones and zeros up and it makes music.
Microsoft: Yep, on a little disk we like to call a MicroDisk TM.
RIAA: And this can be done for 100th of the price of pressing a vinyl record.
Microsoft: Sure can. And its easy too. The whole point of digital technology is that you can make zillions of 1s and 0s line up for no money whats so ever. Anyone can do it!
RIAA: Anyone?
Microsoft: Err.... I mean anyone who can remember these magic words (which are a big secret) whilst waving this MicroWand TM can do it.
RIAA: Ah! Theres the catch!... How much is the wand?
Imagine if we could harness this energy, that would really piss off the oil companies.
The BBC reported last night that there are 10m broadband subscribers in the UK. Thats 1/3 of all homes! The price of wireless routers is dropping every day, and most providers offer 'wireless' installation for a nominal extra. In the small backwater where I live, I'm already competing for channels with 2 other wireless networks in my home, and most of my town is covered with a wireless network.
This should be a wake up call to POTS / GSM / 3G providers.
We are so close to no longer needing POTS or GSM its scary. Now I don't think we'll ever get rid of either of them for good, they both have advantages that arn't catered for by VoIP, but I've already abandoned POTS in favour of GSM and cable, and would be even happier to rid myself of the £30 a month I'm paying for GSM if only I wireless internet was free and ubiquitous.
Would you invest in a 3G company, now that WiMAX is slowly rolling out?
What we really need is a cheap, wireless, broadband aggregation product. Whereby, you plug it into your internet connection, it detects local carriers and you are provided with a connection for all the other wireless routers on that scheme and aggregates the bandwidth that all of them have available - viral wireless internet. Network providers are kept happy because it should reduce the free loaders (you need to provide a node in order to use the service). With technologies like zeroconf, WPA2 etc, I'm not really sure why this isn't happening already.
I'm in the broadband backwater that is the UK. Until this anouncement we were supposed to be pleased when they let consumers have 4Mbps - never mind 24Mbps. I'm a cable modem user, and I pay £20 a month for 1Mbps - apparently I'm getting upgraded for free to 4Mbit in the next few months, and 2Mb subscribers are getting beefed up to 10Mbps. After this announcment, and a quick read throught the other comments (I want to live in Tokyo), I'm left thinking thats not enough.
Does anyone else know whats stopping Telewest from rolling out an ADSL killer (where available)?
Hypothetical 1: A child draws a picture of Nemo. Its pretty good and their parents are so proud that they scan it and distribute it to all their friends and family, and put it on a public site so that anyone can look at it, if they choose. Is that copyright infringement? I would have thought it would have been concidered a derivative work - as it was an original work inspired by a copyrighted object.
/. reader is messing about in Lisp and creates an AI that can interpret a conventional image and then reproduce a derivative work that looks similar. The /. reader is so proud, that he places a few of these images on /. Is that a copyright infringement?
/. readers code was GPL, a few uber geeks get together and modify the code so that it creates near perfect derivative works. If you look closley you can see that the image is nothing like the original, but within human contraints it would be concidered almost the same. They quickly realise that this method creates files substancially smaller than the original, and even though they are not copies, those who didn't study compression technologies wouldn't really be inclined to notice a difference. The files are clearly marked as genereated by this program and distributed for free. Nobody is claiming that they are copies, they arn't they are inspired works of art and distributed under the creative commons licence. Is that copyright infringement?
/. post so its not exactly a well positioned argument, but I think it shows a clear progression and abuse of the copyright law. I'm not convinced that the use of a lossy compression algorithm on copyrighted works could be concidered anything other than a synopsis of that work - if that. If you compared an MPEG2 to a DivX and H.264 created from that stream would even a single line of the source code be the same? And does the derived file have any value without an interpretor?
Hypothetical 2: A
Hypothetical 3: As the
Hypothetical 4: Joe Cracker rips a DVD, removes the CSS and Macrovision and decides to create a private members website that charges $10 a year to access on an all you can eat download basis. Other that removing the encryption no work is done the file and it is essentially the same as it was when it was sold on Amazon. Now thats got to copyright infringement, right?
This is a
I'd be interested to here what you think.
I'm sorry sir, we're going to have to ask for your geek card. WiFi Passwords are for people that don't have time to crack the network. As a /. member you are expected, ney, demanded to crack that password.
Now, don't come back until you've cracked that password and distributed to everyone you know. At the very least man, don't admit that you don't know how to break the security!!!
--
This is a JOKE. It may not be very funny. But I at least want to know that when people mod it as a troll, they are doing it because its not funny, and not because they think I'm a terrorist.
I just can't make my mind up about this. PVR has changed the way I watch TV. I now record the shows I want to watch and then play them back on my PowerBook in whatever room I'm in, and sometimes at work.
There are certain things that I like about this set up. Its hands free, I can just place my laptop on any flatish surface, it has loud speakers, which allow me and anyone else in the room to watch it to, and the picture quality is better than watching it on my cheap CRT TV.
I know I wouldn't want to watch an entire movie on a small screen - I can count the number of times I've watched a movie on my laptop on one hand and all of those were on flights. But I'm pretty sure I could watch a 30 minute show with ease.
I use my iPod in my car, whilst I'm walking, whilst I'm working, I use it to power my stereo. The only time I can think I would have any prolonged use out of a iPod video was if I had a daily 30 minute commute on public transport or if I wanted to take a TV show or movie round to a friends house (assuming it plugged into a TV with no obvious loss of quality). Of those only the 30 minute commute would be worth it to me.
The killer app for an iPod is still the music playback, but that doesn't mean I'm not seriously concidering upgrading to the iPod photo (which I'd probably have less use for than the video). I'll always see video playback as icing, rather than the raison d'etre, so if the price is right, and I'm still essentially buying an iPod, I'll probably buy a iPod video when it comes out.
Chip and pin was bad enough. Clerks still handle my card, and from a mugging perspective, its far easier to beat a 4 digit pin out of me, than the ability to write my signiture (at least forgery was skill?). But chip and pin does represent a step in the right direction (one step backwards, two steps forward). Not using a clerk to verify your identity is probably a good move in the long run, and keeping the pass phrase in plain site was never a good idea.
What I'm not sure about with these RFID is where is the feedback that the transaction was successful? If you still have to wait for the terminal to handshake with the central database and process the transaction, it still takes as long as a conventional credit card - then there is no improvement. If there is no identification process, short of possessing the card how is that better for my security? If its part of the build up of biometric ID, is that really going to be any quicker, more convient or secure than using a human to identify another human.
My girlfriends father has banked with the same branch his entire life. When he walks into the bank the people know him. Now don't get me wrong, he "Hates the bastards", but he won't change branches because, when he sent his new accountant into withdraw some cash, they took the accountant to one side and refused the transaction until they had verified his identify via a phone call. It was quick and painless. The trust was human, the identification was human.
The interesting thing about that story is that it identifies the absolute reason we need human trust mechanisms (because they work and are intuitive) and the absolute reason we need automatic trust - I don't want to have to make friends with every clerk/manager in the world before they'll accept my credit card - and I want the freedom to change banks.
I don't think RFID for credit cards is a good idea. In fact I don't think credit cards are a good idea - they are a hack. They are a machine readable identification tool - what we need is a technology that identifies you by looking at you, talking too you, smelling you. If my moms Lhasa Apso (possibly the stupidest breed of dog on the planet) can identify me from a line up then at some point we need a technology that has a similar capability.
- Create your own Linux Distro
- ???
- Profit
Nobodys sure how to make money out of linux yet. It clearly provides something that people want, and creates a lot of market interest whenever you say it loud enough, especially when you say your going to give it to them for free, but how do you turn free into profit. Who knows how to convert free to profit? Here are the options as it stands:- Include the price of the OS in new hardware.
- Include advertising within the OS
- Charge for support.
None of these options are viable at the moment because of the cost of transfering (mainly time and training) to Linux and the quality of the product compared to Windows for home users (everything is in the 'wrong' place, and it doesn't have MS Office). But once somebodies figured out what option four is in that list, you want to have your own distro ready and raring to go so you can get some profit tooThe rate determining step in book copyright infringment is page turning. Single sheet documents can, and have, been easily pirated since the invention of the pen and notepad. I remeber going into a linrary when I was at high school and writing down passages that I thought I could use in an essay. This technology is only slightly faster than that, and is really much closer to the Iris reader pen.
In our office we have a high speed copier that could scan 10s of pages in a minute, but of course it can't copy books, because they are bound.
Now, can I scan a passage, page or chapter easily with this technology? Sure! But then I could do that already.
However, what the internet might let us do is collate our efforts. If 20 people, lets call them students, can be convinced, lets call that poverty, to all go into different books stores at different times of the day and each scan one chapter, or a series of pre arranged pages then they could collate and distribute their efforts very quickly - but theyn, if they really wanted too they could do this already, and they do.
The reason why people don't do it as much as music is that music through cheap head phones sounds the same whether its on tape, CD, radio or MP3. DVDs look nearly as good distributed via DivX or H.264 (but then your only really looking at it for a few hours and from a distrance). Books are read for hours at a time, in close quarters. Books don't run out of batteries. Books are cheap, books don't have verioning issues and work universally across continents without the need of adapters. In most parts of the world, they operate during waking hours with little or no external power requirements, and if push comes to shove you can run from burning any domestic combustable with no further modification.
Just so you don't feel like this has fallen on deaf ears...
I really like this idea. There are very few applications where its a PITA to transfer between systems. Web browsing I really don't mind using other people set-up. I never really been a big fan of bookmarks, and I can take or leave tabbed browsing. Word processor? Well everyone uses Word right?
In fact of all the killer apps I use on a daily basis its only really eclipse and my mail that I really can't be arsed to configure between systems. Both of these are Java so having them on a USB key makes a lot of sense to me. However, if someone came up with a office suite than ran on Java I'd probably lump that on too.
... I dug out my old NES a few weeks ago, and one thing struck me, the old games were as good as we remember, except a few of them. SMB3 is still a fantastic game, but even better is Bionic Comando. That game excites me to this day, and boy does it need porting to Revolution...
The nunchuka in one hand controlling the weapons and movement, the wand thingy controlling the grapling hook, all in glorious 3D, with an emphasis on stealth and skill over brute force - magic. Hell, they could even include the ability to jump!
This is all about the spirit of free enterprise. We need research and development in order to progress as a society, but like all good things R&D involves time and resources and both thoses things cost money.
Where does that money come from?
Democrats/Librals believe that if the people pay for it, the people own it the benefit to this is that scientists are free to access the real pay dirt - information.
Republicans/Red-Necks believe that a grant is just that, a gift of money and that scientists should be free to profit from their innovation - the benefit of this is that you attract brighter minds and the industry can run itself relieving the tax burden of a constant stream of grants.
The question really is what is more important, a free market or a freedom of information?
Thats not an easy question to answer. People would say that Russia was a perfect example of why the Republicans are right. Others might say that America is a perfect example of why the Democrats are right. I say the truth is that both sides have fudged the system to a point where neither can be right.
I would have more sympathy for big R&D companies if I thought for one second that they had stopped asking for research grants or tax cuts to support their work. I would have more sympathy for big R&D companies if they could be trusted to return their products back into the public domain where it belongs. I would have more sympathy for R&D companies if they could be trusted to act with compassion where the bottom line must be second to the saving of lives and removal of people from absolute poverty. The one thing these companies can be trusted to do is protect their investors money, but thats about the only thing they are obligated to do by law.
Exactly. The reason I got into computers and not cars was that when I was 8 I broke my dads computer and had to fix it before he got back from work... and I did. This was an important lesson and a massive ego boost.
10 years later I broke my dads car. I didn't fix it in time and I ended braking it more, covered in crap and in a whole lotta trouble.
Its a shame chix dig cars and money over chips and body oder.
330 pages a minute. Thats 5.5 pages a second. Which is about the same as the frame rate I get on Doom 3 on an iMac G5 on high quality. Still I didn't buy my mac for games... at least thats what I keep telling myself.
Yeah, right. Have you seen UK universities?
Cock-Soc (Cocktail Society): Fill a few (clean) dustbins with as much vodka, orange juice lemonade etc as you have in the budget. Then charge £2 a pint. --In Nottingham / Leeds I've actually seen Ambulances queing.
Bar Crawls: Ottley run starts two miles out of town with 18 bars between you and the city centre. You are supposed to have a pint in each one on the way. Nottingham: the campus 14. There are 14 bars on campus, can you have a pint in each one before closing?
The list goes on. The fact is that college kids are bright and free from their parents for the first time. They can do anything they put their mind to and have little respect for limits impossed by law. Unfortunately most of the time, that involves getting drunk or stoned... shame its not world peace really.
The fact is you could make alcohol illegal and people would still get sh1tfaced - I know, I brewed my own at college.
"I still like the original idea of the iPod: all your music with you all the time". Here! here!
But now that digital music is mainstream is it still achievable? 60GB is about enough storage for 1000 albums. Thats not that much over a life time. Hell, I'm only 25 and I've got 400 (all bought and paid for, storing the jewel cases is a PITA, and I've thrown away a lot of the damaged ones) or so now. At some point in the future I may have to stand up and admit that having nearly a years worth or music, but only half a days worth of battery is a little bit of an imbalance - the cost of which is the size of the device. As small as it felt when I bought it, my 40GB 3G iPod is too big an bulky - especailly when compared to the nano.
As it is, the battery on my 3G is dying. I was just going to replace it, but to be honest, 4GB, and the ability to take slideshows to people houses (something I'm currently doing with my powerbook) is probably all I need. I've already found myself paring down the music on my iPod as, although the interface is great, having to scroll through music that I 'grew out of' 3 years ago is a PITA - I guess I'm probably not the "all your music with you all the time" kinda guy I thought I was.
I'm inclined to agree with you. I'm usually against phones, mp3 players having too much additional functionality. But these devices are ultimately output devices T9 is not a keyboard replacement, and a scroll wheel doesn't replace a mouse.
A game device is an input device, the DS, especially so. Two reasonable screens, a decent processor and ram, touch screen. Its crying out to be used as a web browswer, PIM even a Skype Phone (pushing it slightly). If someone could port NewtonOS to it they would really be on a winner.
Wireless keyboard I get. Wireless keyboard with track[pad|ball] I really get. But unless you've got a wireless desktop I just don't get why you need a wireless mouse - and I own one.
The problem I've found with wireless, optical mice is that they still only really work when they're on a mouse mat, so when you zoom across the office on your overpriced executive chair (because you can) you're keyboard works, but your mouse is useless. The only time I've used it recently is when I wirelessly patched my G5 into my TV. There was then a wall between me and the computer, and a coffee table infront of me. But to be honest, using a mouse to control your TV feels clunky. I ended up using SallingClicker and do the whole thing from my phone.
The only real benefit is clutter reduction. Not as big a benefit as I originally had hoped. It seems everytime I find a way of making something wireless, I find a new way of using up the port it was in. YMMV.
No, no, no. You've got you mouse confused with your mom again.
My Apple bluetooth mouse has been telling me my battery is low for years (I really should change it).
As for telling me when I get email... isn't that what the screen and sound cards are for? I don't own a PC, or run linux, but I'm guessing that these operating systems already have a system for telling you when you've got mail too.
10 buttons? Meh. I've got 113 keys right next to my mouse. I have two hands, so I find that I can press these buttons whilst I'm using the mouse.
I was shocked at how few people actually know what a PDF is, yet alone how to open it.
I did start out by sending my CV in PDF, the few that replied asked me to resend it as a word doc. Thats when the 'fun' started. I found out that people routinely cut and paste Word doc CVs into an internal format so that it can be reviewed faster by HR. Its not that you can't do this with a pdf, its just that the people who they employ to do that task, don't want to know.
Obviously, this may be related to the type of job I was going for (faceless, corporate, code monkey) and once I'm worth something to a company they may be more flexible with regard file format of CVs, but as a grunt, they didn't want to know unless it was in Word.
Why is this an issue? If people don't like the way Internet Explorer works, why don't they release a virus that targets IE, downloads Firefox, patches it so that it looks like IE, and then uninstalls IE.
That is why Microsoft have made IE so full of holes isn't it?