I would pay the price for this over priced item if:
It came with a development kit, or other sufficient information, to write my own firmware code for this device, and
It comes with a detailed pin out and explanation so that I can make my own "addons"
I mean with a 24bit 96kHz D/A playing usual MP3s is a waste. It should be doing cool DSP synthesis and such things. If only the space req. didn't require the lack of a swappable memory modlue (like compact flash, or [shudder] sony's memory stick).
Also the fact that its currently hosted with windows and such too sucks. There's gotta be at least a workaround for that.
Damn./. was all slow.. and then somehow I deleted a portion of my message. [no previewing just wasn't working right now] I should have said:
If your so hot out of highschool that you can get a good job in IT without going to college then two things apply:
You can afford it since your base pay will statistically increase enough through a BS; or someone else will pay, be it the government a scholarship fund, or your company.
you could do it in 1-2 years and get a BS in CS. I know some people who have, I know of one who is wrapping up a 4year program to get a double major (BS) in CS and ECE as well as a Masters in both CS and ECE.
Now, Its unlikely that MIT will let you get a BS in one year even if they'd gladly accept you, but a place like WPI might, and I assume lots of places are
somewhat willing to bargain.
That's not to say that anyone could actually find WPI an amusing time of your life, but why rush off and work day in day out for the rest of your life
and get married young?
unlikely that MIT will let you get a BS in one year even if they'd gladly accept you, but a place like WPI might, and I assume lots of places are somewhat willing to bargain.
That's not to say that anyone could actually find WPI an amusing time of your life, but why rush off and work day in day out for the rest of your life and get married young?
The reason why many engineers I know dislike unions is because they haven't
figured out that this seniority pay thing is abhorrent to most engineers.
I was told that most CS styled jobs are considered, by the US government, to be intertwined with national security, and as such are not allowed to unionize. Personally I wouldn't be against a union as long as it doesn't just model itself after other unions. It does, as you mentioned, have to serve the people.
Very cheap is statement of opinion probably based on useing anything decent. But prak's IIci running netbsd shows its age initiating an SSH conneciton. Imagine a capable machine that serves thousands being asked to multiply its workload through encryption. I'm not saying that you shouldn't but maybe you rather wouldn't.
Think of cell phones for example; manufacturers just don't want to put anything good in there due to power usage. Here I'd be on the side of encrypting anyway.
do think though about what everything implies. In the context of the 3com founder saying it (something like "I invented ethernet, but I should have thought about encrypting everything"), it seemed to imply that every network card on every machine would do some encryption point to point with every other network card. That means every route has its own encryption layer over any other layers. I think that would have a huge speed impact on any internet (present or future).
Oh, but I should point out that E-Mail isn't everything. I'd agree that all personal communications should be encrypted. Sure that's a lot of what most people worry about, but I'm not sure that something like/. should be encrypted, even though/. has messages attributed to persons in it.
The misunderstanding here concerns whether I asked Zimmerman's opinion or not. Actually I wanted to hear what people on/. thought. As noted, asking Zimmerman anything should take place elsewhere, but hey, I respect his opinion and am glad you mentioned it.
On NPR I heard a pundit espouse that realistically everything on the internet should be encrypted. [this was the founder of 3com btw]. But I'm of the opinion that this is incorrect in that a lot of stuff doesn't really matter; why for example should you recieve encrypted ad banners (and I'm sure someone will think of a reason they're comfortable with). Arn't we forever going to run into a case where speed is more desireable for some applications (i.e. multicasted video)?
This has to do with the interview topic of encryption as you may be able to see
I noticed the unix network programming book in wayne's world II, and I recognized it as a good book, but it rarely occurs to me to think much about the author, which I suppose is a pitty.
The reason fro there being no history in computing science, is that history is quite a difference subject from the science of computing. I'd agree though that some sort of perspective can be very usefull. In general though, as with actors, directors, authors, polititians, musicians and almost all people (like what does RMS stand for anyway) I don't think of names as being the important part.
But then I did find it amusing recently to find that Donald Knuth basically stopped writing his series in order to nit-pick about the formatting through writing Tex. Well, I'm sure that's otherwise commong knowledge.
I see
no reason why everyone (and every distro) shouldn't have both installed by default, with a pull-down menu on the login screen.
They're both huge in comparison to a minimal X usage eith blackbox maybe? After all, a lot of the feautres are kind of like cup holders on cars, they don't make the engine any smoother or the brakes any better.
I think a default X should go very minimal to allow for slower machines, smaller machines, more dedicated machines to still have X. Then there may be a further distro's X install process (post actually putting in the base X stuff) that explains what window managers are, what KDE, gnuStep, and gnome are, how you could do without both, and what options you have in each... all with some screen shots and a bt of explanation of the programming internals and some of the popular apps that you'd get with one or the other.
Actually, with the exception of some Red Bull... really haven't noticed
caffiene affecting my sleep patterns one way or the other.
That might be because red bull has the regular soft drink style caffine, the caffine from that higher yeild south american plant (starts with an I... someone help me out here), and Torine, a synthesised bull hormone, that supposedly acts as a strong stimulant too but not with the same side effects as Red Bull. I think Red Bull is so popular in england because it can, with a couple glasses of water aid geting over a hang-over by upping your circleation, and it can let you drink a lot and be quite drunk without feeling as ill or drowsy. Personally I don't appreciate either of these applications.
I know slashdot is a bit silly at times, but we're not going to splice a caffine gene into a human any more than we're going to make giant ants as ecologically sound cars or wet-wire a universal remote control into our pets ("here fido, go to the sci-fi channel, go on, go on, go to the sci-fi channel..... good dog fido good dog.")
A realistic use of this gene, other than figureing out how to prevent its environmental enabling, or just removing it, would be to have special bacteria produce caffine for our softdrinks; but then isn't there a synthetic method for caffine?
There might be a call to splice the gene into the adrenal gland if its malfunctioning, but I figure that this person's long dead before the "gene therapy" has a chance to help out.
Clearly caffine is more akin to adreneline; and its also sufficiently similar to ADH, which reduces the amount of reabsorbsion in the kidneys such that more water goes into ones bladder than back into one's blood-stream. This would be why caffine is good at dehydrating people.
While we're on the topic, this is a very useful, and optionally free, resource for doing various network tasks using linux, but has anyone found a good free description of how to use NAT under NetBSD (or any BSD)? I don't feel the man pages are helping me, and I havn't found a long enough discussion of its use.
Its obviously a very kind idea. This way the information people want is available without having to hunt through a poorly stocked book store for it, nor paying for it on the promise that it might serve its purpose. Now if only there were some option to support this effort through a more environmentally concious method than actually buying the book.
The only potential problem I see with this approach is that an early released free book on a topic might gain defacto common popularity even if it isn't quite perfect, then a subsequent free book on a similar topic might never be attempted, or if it were put out, might not get the deserving attention. The argument against this is that under persistant free availability, time will tell the best apart. However with a technology topic such as this I don't believe that the information is usefull for a sufficient period of time to alow a mass of people to recognize the merit, and with all the attention on the imperfect book should get more updates and grow faster than the better founded book. Somewhat like software really.
I bought a mac 5 years ago, and then 4 years before that. with my more recent purchase I was buying under the assumtion that a new OS would be out for it in a year. By the time 8 came out with its all PPC native code, it had been more than a year, and it wasn't the OS I was thinking of.
When the iMac was released, and then with the g3 powerbook, and the G4 desktop, I wrote apple some mail that I wish I could buy they're product, but I made a vow that I wouldn't buy anything until the next generation OS shipped with it (as now I couldn't even dream of running osX on an 8500/120). By next gen OS I mean something with premptive multitasking and decent memory management, the other features don't need to change, although its an effort to support everything a desktop style os must do these days.
I tend to get a response that it'll be out really soon, and sooner still we'll let you try it if you buy some of the nifty stuff. Oh well. What annoys me is that for the money I could have, and almost did buy, a BeBox... which would be at least a nice collectors item. Be doesn't really support the PPC anymore since all the good free apps compile with GCC and GNU tools, the former of which seems to be binarily incompatable with the codewarrior stuff. I'm not clear on the issues involved there, but Be really pollarized instead of being a cross platform thing. Although for any commercial intents it pretty damn cross platform.
Although admitting fault immediately looks on the surface like the best response in any situation such as this, one may find that its only a good response when a consumer is informed. By this I mean that when a consumer knows that the announcement is an appollogy that needed to be made so that people were aware of the problem, and that such problems do exist and are often covered up. But unfortunately, with the state of most reporting today, a consumer would mostly hear: "Yet another fault found in the honest company's product. They make such crap products chock full of faults." This would quickly mislead the majority of the consumers as to the true nature of what's going on.
Think of it like the railroad.
It may be good, it may better in many situations (I mean america is so full of commuters who don't really want to commute), but its just not profitable to connect a reletivly sparsely populated group.
Also, about standardization, in switzerland you can buy a train ticket from your local station to vinenna or venice (I think moscow too) and back without encountering much of a problem. London's a bit tricky because of the compeating carriers over the chunnel (or should that be under). America is a lot like that. Sure, there's a train station in worcester (MA) with connections to boston (MA), but if you want to go to Quebec you have to go to connecticut or springfield (MA) first, then you take a train to montreal. You get to figure out how your getting to Quebec on your own after that.
Hopefully you'll notice how there's some sort of attitude here that implies that the short run must be profitable, that anything that acts as a service for convenience can only be assosiated within the same company and has to show hard links to profit, and that working with your competetors to help all customers is a silly notion. Some places societal good is deemed more important.
It was my understanding that when you buy a DVD you do own the data. A copy of it, but the data none the less. The studio owns the copyright on the data, so you are restricted from copying/distributing it, but I figured other than that you could do whatever you want with it... like play it in a stream, or statistically analyze it, encrypt it, or decrypt it, as long as the results are also not stored anywhere (i.e. copied). Now deCSS itself decrypts it; but the over all utility does also store the result to your drive, hence copying it, which you're not supposed to do. Thats too bad really since it would be nice to be able to store it all in a huge tape library with duplicates incase something goes bad... oh and robots to let you retrieve portions that you wish to watch on a whim.
Why must soft copyright crimes always be likened to hard crimes? I mean "stealing" software or music or movies isn't stealing at all. Its "using without license." Of course the later wording brings into question not only the user but also the license restricter, i.e. why would someone not have a license to do what they seem to be doing just fine without hurting anyone (directly).
Well. Here we go with linking to DeCSS is like driving a burglar to the scene of the crime. Hence it follows that downloading DeCSS is like burglarizing a house. Hence downloading DeCSS is like permenently taking things that don't belong to you. Do I need to point out that its a bad analogy?
So why don't we say something like: driving a burglar to a hardware store where he can legitimatly purchace the tools he intends to use for his future crime. Lets say they're lock-picks. That likens downloading DeCSS with legally aquiring a set of lock-picks, and this only brings into question as to whether getting lock-picks should be legal. I'd say yes, but that doesn't seem to matter.
Lastly, I think a more accurate analogy would be driving an interested party to a library with full knowlege that he'll read about burglarizing techniques and how a tool he already owns (a computer in DeCSS's case) may be employed in such a process. Oh no! the party is gaining information that could be used towards either a crime or to preventing future crimes. Well this is just too accurately mushy for legal grounds, so we'd better make the case a bit harder huh.
But maybe I should point out that this book doesn't really inform anyone about stealing anything, rather it informs them how they can get access to something they have license to, such that they might (or not) distribute it to persons without such a license. Since this could be done the old fasioned way of copying the enitre data on the disc (if one had the equipment), how is it suddenly such a bigger crime?
This is pretty neat; but would anyone care to speculate how much money was paid to lego for this sort of construction, and how much money lego stands to make from such publicity?
First off, note that the palm uses a dragonball that was engineered to have extremely small code size (as well as have nifty built in abilities). The "66MHz 32 Bit NEC VR4181 MIPS" probably does not have that feature. In fact, if it bears reseblance to a MIPS processor, all its instructions should be 32bits in length; which has its benefits, but not in the realm of small code size.
My turn to nit-pick. But I think its all too often said that anything opensource will improve by its nature:
You give it a year, and it'll top all categories (including size of apps), because of the open source alone.
This is innaccurate of course, lets try something like: You give us a year, and it will top all categories (including size of apps), because of the open source programmers' dedication.
Now in light of this, does it become clear that if a couple hundred people own these, and most of them don't program, and the ones that do write apps, that the OS will not improve? I think so. What this needs it critical mass. The Palm has that, with or without open-source. Now its nice that if there were a critical mass, they could also work on the OS, but you'd better hope that work is done in a mildly centralized manner, particularly when considering changes that affect app size (binary compatibility issues?).
But compare 149$ to 800$ and then sure, one is nicer than the other. What are you willing to pay for? Granted the yopy is virtually ready, but who knows when the US will see it.
As mentioned in the Amiga RRD post some machines don't want to erase their ram on reboot, maybe because the OS isn't quite as dirty.
here's a fun thing to do with mac OS 7 (I did this with quadras, pmac8500s, the blue&white G3 the Gray and White G4 and the imac DVs... I think its just a software featuture that takes advantage of something thats been in apple rom for a while now)
Start your machine. Use the memory control panel to make a ram disk of sufficient size to hold a small (or full if you wish) system folder. with 128Mb of ram a 64mb ram disk usually does the trick with a bit of stripping out of crap. Also a minimal system 7.5.5 can be as small as 2-5Mb depending on the machine it supports. Now make that ram disk your startup volume and reboot. Notice how it boots pretty quickly by comparison to disk. Also on a quadra you'll notice the whole thing is faster because loading quicktime or something becomes trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
- It came with a development kit, or other sufficient information, to write my own firmware code for this device, and
- It comes with a detailed pin out and explanation so that I can make my own "addons"
I mean with a 24bit 96kHz D/A playing usual MP3s is a waste. It should be doing cool DSP synthesis and such things. If only the space req. didn't require the lack of a swappable memory modlue (like compact flash, or [shudder] sony's memory stick).Also the fact that its currently hosted with windows and such too sucks. There's gotta be at least a workaround for that.
-Daniel
If your so hot out of highschool that you can get a good job in IT without going to college then two things apply:
- You can afford it since your base pay will statistically increase enough through a BS; or someone else will pay, be it the government a scholarship fund, or your company.
- you could do it in 1-2 years and get a BS in CS. I know some people who have, I know of one who is wrapping up a 4year program to get a double major (BS) in CS and ECE as well as a Masters in both CS and ECE.
Now, Its unlikely that MIT will let you get a BS in one year even if they'd gladly accept you, but a place like WPI might, and I assume lots of places are somewhat willing to bargain.That's not to say that anyone could actually find WPI an amusing time of your life, but why rush off and work day in day out for the rest of your life and get married young?
-Daniel
That's not to say that anyone could actually find WPI an amusing time of your life, but why rush off and work day in day out for the rest of your life and get married young?
-Daniel
I was told that most CS styled jobs are considered, by the US government, to be intertwined with national security, and as such are not allowed to unionize. Personally I wouldn't be against a union as long as it doesn't just model itself after other unions. It does, as you mentioned, have to serve the people.
-Daniel
Think of cell phones for example; manufacturers just don't want to put anything good in there due to power usage. Here I'd be on the side of encrypting anyway.
do think though about what everything implies. In the context of the 3com founder saying it (something like "I invented ethernet, but I should have thought about encrypting everything"), it seemed to imply that every network card on every machine would do some encryption point to point with every other network card. That means every route has its own encryption layer over any other layers. I think that would have a huge speed impact on any internet (present or future).
-Daniel
Oh, but I should point out that E-Mail isn't everything. I'd agree that all personal communications should be encrypted. Sure that's a lot of what most people worry about, but I'm not sure that something like /. should be encrypted, even though /. has messages attributed to persons in it.
-Daniel
This has to do with the interview topic of encryption as you may be able to see
-Daniel
The reason fro there being no history in computing science, is that history is quite a difference subject from the science of computing. I'd agree though that some sort of perspective can be very usefull. In general though, as with actors, directors, authors, polititians, musicians and almost all people (like what does RMS stand for anyway) I don't think of names as being the important part.
But then I did find it amusing recently to find that Donald Knuth basically stopped writing his series in order to nit-pick about the formatting through writing Tex. Well, I'm sure that's otherwise commong knowledge.
-Daniel
They're both huge in comparison to a minimal X usage eith blackbox maybe? After all, a lot of the feautres are kind of like cup holders on cars, they don't make the engine any smoother or the brakes any better.
I think a default X should go very minimal to allow for slower machines, smaller machines, more dedicated machines to still have X. Then there may be a further distro's X install process (post actually putting in the base X stuff) that explains what window managers are, what KDE, gnuStep, and gnome are, how you could do without both, and what options you have in each... all with some screen shots and a bt of explanation of the programming internals and some of the popular apps that you'd get with one or the other.
-Daniel
That might be because red bull has the regular soft drink style caffine, the caffine from that higher yeild south american plant (starts with an I... someone help me out here), and Torine, a synthesised bull hormone, that supposedly acts as a strong stimulant too but not with the same side effects as Red Bull. I think Red Bull is so popular in england because it can, with a couple glasses of water aid geting over a hang-over by upping your circleation, and it can let you drink a lot and be quite drunk without feeling as ill or drowsy. Personally I don't appreciate either of these applications.
remember that Wipeout 2 was redbull sponsored?
-Daniel
A realistic use of this gene, other than figureing out how to prevent its environmental enabling, or just removing it, would be to have special bacteria produce caffine for our softdrinks; but then isn't there a synthetic method for caffine?
There might be a call to splice the gene into the adrenal gland if its malfunctioning, but I figure that this person's long dead before the "gene therapy" has a chance to help out.
-Daniel
Still its right about running.
Clearly caffine is more akin to adreneline; and its also sufficiently similar to ADH, which reduces the amount of reabsorbsion in the kidneys such that more water goes into ones bladder than back into one's blood-stream. This would be why caffine is good at dehydrating people.
-Daniel
I don't understand why you might have been modded down though.
-Daniel
The only potential problem I see with this approach is that an early released free book on a topic might gain defacto common popularity even if it isn't quite perfect, then a subsequent free book on a similar topic might never be attempted, or if it were put out, might not get the deserving attention. The argument against this is that under persistant free availability, time will tell the best apart. However with a technology topic such as this I don't believe that the information is usefull for a sufficient period of time to alow a mass of people to recognize the merit, and with all the attention on the imperfect book should get more updates and grow faster than the better founded book. Somewhat like software really.
-Daniel
I bought a mac 5 years ago, and then 4 years before that. with my more recent purchase I was buying under the assumtion that a new OS would be out for it in a year. By the time 8 came out with its all PPC native code, it had been more than a year, and it wasn't the OS I was thinking of.
When the iMac was released, and then with the g3 powerbook, and the G4 desktop, I wrote apple some mail that I wish I could buy they're product, but I made a vow that I wouldn't buy anything until the next generation OS shipped with it (as now I couldn't even dream of running osX on an 8500/120). By next gen OS I mean something with premptive multitasking and decent memory management, the other features don't need to change, although its an effort to support everything a desktop style os must do these days.
I tend to get a response that it'll be out really soon, and sooner still we'll let you try it if you buy some of the nifty stuff. Oh well. What annoys me is that for the money I could have, and almost did buy, a BeBox... which would be at least a nice collectors item. Be doesn't really support the PPC anymore since all the good free apps compile with GCC and GNU tools, the former of which seems to be binarily incompatable with the codewarrior stuff. I'm not clear on the issues involved there, but Be really pollarized instead of being a cross platform thing. Although for any commercial intents it pretty damn cross platform.
hmm getting carried away with the point there
-Daniel
-Daniel
Also, about standardization, in switzerland you can buy a train ticket from your local station to vinenna or venice (I think moscow too) and back without encountering much of a problem. London's a bit tricky because of the compeating carriers over the chunnel (or should that be under). America is a lot like that. Sure, there's a train station in worcester (MA) with connections to boston (MA), but if you want to go to Quebec you have to go to connecticut or springfield (MA) first, then you take a train to montreal. You get to figure out how your getting to Quebec on your own after that.
Hopefully you'll notice how there's some sort of attitude here that implies that the short run must be profitable, that anything that acts as a service for convenience can only be assosiated within the same company and has to show hard links to profit, and that working with your competetors to help all customers is a silly notion. Some places societal good is deemed more important.
-Daniel
-Daniel
Well. Here we go with linking to DeCSS is like driving a burglar to the scene of the crime. Hence it follows that downloading DeCSS is like burglarizing a house. Hence downloading DeCSS is like permenently taking things that don't belong to you. Do I need to point out that its a bad analogy?
So why don't we say something like: driving a burglar to a hardware store where he can legitimatly purchace the tools he intends to use for his future crime. Lets say they're lock-picks. That likens downloading DeCSS with legally aquiring a set of lock-picks, and this only brings into question as to whether getting lock-picks should be legal. I'd say yes, but that doesn't seem to matter.
Lastly, I think a more accurate analogy would be driving an interested party to a library with full knowlege that he'll read about burglarizing techniques and how a tool he already owns (a computer in DeCSS's case) may be employed in such a process. Oh no! the party is gaining information that could be used towards either a crime or to preventing future crimes. Well this is just too accurately mushy for legal grounds, so we'd better make the case a bit harder huh.
But maybe I should point out that this book doesn't really inform anyone about stealing anything, rather it informs them how they can get access to something they have license to, such that they might (or not) distribute it to persons without such a license. Since this could be done the old fasioned way of copying the enitre data on the disc (if one had the equipment), how is it suddenly such a bigger crime?
-Daniel
legos are great, but they cost so much.
-Daniel
First off, note that the palm uses a dragonball that was engineered to have extremely small code size (as well as have nifty built in abilities). The "66MHz 32 Bit NEC VR4181 MIPS" probably does not have that feature. In fact, if it bears reseblance to a MIPS processor, all its instructions should be 32bits in length; which has its benefits, but not in the realm of small code size.
My turn to nit-pick. But I think its all too often said that anything opensource will improve by its nature:
You give it a year, and it'll top all categories (including size of apps), because of the open source alone.
This is innaccurate of course, lets try something like: You give us a year, and it will top all categories (including size of apps), because of the open source programmers' dedication.
Now in light of this, does it become clear that if a couple hundred people own these, and most of them don't program, and the ones that do write apps, that the OS will not improve? I think so. What this needs it critical mass. The Palm has that, with or without open-source. Now its nice that if there were a critical mass, they could also work on the OS, but you'd better hope that work is done in a mildly centralized manner, particularly when considering changes that affect app size (binary compatibility issues?).
-Daniel
here's a fun thing to do with mac OS 7 (I did this with quadras, pmac8500s, the blue&white G3 the Gray and White G4 and the imac DVs... I think its just a software featuture that takes advantage of something thats been in apple rom for a while now)
Start your machine. Use the memory control panel to make a ram disk of sufficient size to hold a small (or full if you wish) system folder. with 128Mb of ram a 64mb ram disk usually does the trick with a bit of stripping out of crap. Also a minimal system 7.5.5 can be as small as 2-5Mb depending on the machine it supports. Now make that ram disk your startup volume and reboot. Notice how it boots pretty quickly by comparison to disk. Also on a quadra you'll notice the whole thing is faster because loading quicktime or something becomes trivial.
-Daniel