Microsoft's office suite is damn good. Some may argue that it's "good" because of anti-competitive integration with the operating system, but regardless, objectively, it is a feature-rich, fast, and easy-to-use suite. Nobody I know has ever had a problem learning Word.
MS Office is mediocre and not improving. I use it extensively, and it's definately a mixed bag. It's a feature landfill.
Take Word for example, since it is the app I know best. You CAN get it to work for most jobs, but you usually have to know how to work around its shortcomings. It has lots of features, but they aren't always usable, and many of them have been poorly implemented, like the Master Document feature which nobody uses because it just doesn't work. Some of the new features are crap, like being able to format your document with blinking Las Vegas lights around the titles (I'm not kidding). In addition, there are many features that I turn off because they get in my way, like auto spell-checking, which is distracting, and auto grammar checking, which is distracting and inaccurate and doesn't always catch errors. Lastly, there are the features I wish I could undo, like the WYSIWYG Styles list in the toolbar, which is slow, doesn't display white text, and is sorted in no comprehensible order. It's been a complaint of writers since it was introduced, and it isn't going away.
A deeper problem with Word and other Office apps is that Microsoft hasn't been able to fix the deep bugs in the apps, so that they're not nearly as reliable as a 6th generation app is supposed to be. There is a well-known bug in Word where "next page" section breaks turn into continuous section breaks. It's been there since Word for Windows 1. It's still there in Word 2000. There was a major bug in the automatic numbering system for Word 97, which forces users to go back to manual numbering, because the automatic numbering just can't be relied upon. It's still there in Word 2000.
Getting rid of Word is a major professional goal of mine.
If you go to your local gun store, they sell black paint markers for touching up scratches on a gun's finish. They come in gloss and matte, and they worked really well on my DVD-ROM drive!
Just make sure you mask off anything you don't want to paint with masking tape.
I'm wondering how this would compare to the Berlin windowing system or GGI? With the goal of running embedded, I'd guess QT's new system is simpler, and less cross-platform. Basically a way to get QT apps ported to handhelds really quickly, rather than a general replacement for X. I'll freely admit, though, that I don't know much about GUI framework design. Anyone out there in the know and willing to comment?
I have to wonder, though, how many X apps will really work well on a handheld? It's a different environment, after all, with somewhat different inputs and uses. Just dumping X apps to a PDA would be like the approach MS used for WinCE, and it didn't really work.
Jon
It's Penny Wise, Pound Foolish.
on
King's New eBook
·
· Score: 2
I feel that $2.50 is overpriced for a, what, 60-page novella? That's close to the cost for a printed full-color 120 page magazine delivered to a store near me. Granted, they get less advertising income than from a magazine, but production and distribution are orders of magnitude less expensive (the publisher is handing most of those costs over to the resellers running the websites).
This is typical of the electronic distribution schemes I see for music, etc: they're just too greedy. And in the long run, it costs them money and denies them a major opportunity. Here's why:
Books today cost an arm and a leg. New paperbacks run from 5 to 10 dollars, nearly double the cost a decade ago. As a result, readers are sticking to the authors they know, because it costs too much to speculate on an unkown author and maybe get burned. This is why Stephen King and etc. are doing okay, but the midlist and lower end authors who aren't household names are getting crunched hard.
The problem is, this leads to market shrinkage in the long term, because hot authors grow cold, or at least taken for granted, and then they don't sell as well. If people haven't been experimenting with new authors, when their fave gets boring, they stop buying as many books. You need the consumers to keep discovering new authors to keep the market from collapsing.
E-books are a really good solution to this problem. Firstly, the production and distribution costs are orders of magnitude less than for printed materials, so publishers can reduce the costs and still get their slice of profits. The overall cost can be reduced to the point where, for consumers, it becomes a viable impulse buy. I'm thinking around $1.00 (American).
Secondly, e-books are inherently ephemeral. You just don't tend to keep them around, because you're reading them on a handheld with limited storage space. Sure, you could store them on your desktop computer, but it's the computer, you don't sit in front of it to relax and read. It's the same reason why, once we got a DVD player in the living room, I stopped watching movies on my desktop DVD drive. You want the experience in the surroundings designed for it.
Lastly, E-books are likely to actually drive sales of printed books. If you do read an e-book you like and decide you want to own, you'll probably want a paper copy. For fiction, at least, a nicely bound copy you can take down off the shelf is a lot more satisfying than some bits on a computer somewhere. Moreover, if prices are cheap, you'll be a lot more likely to find new authors you want to read, and that's a vital thing for the publishing industry to foster.
I'm sorry that your high school didn't have a good programming class. I sympathise. In ancient times, when I was in high school, we had to use Commodore PETs that didn't even fricking work most of the time. I should have taken a study hall instead, I would have learned more.
However, who elected this mayor? It's YOUR TOWN. Your parents CAN do something about it. Talk to your parents about what's going on. Let them talk to their grown-up friends. Get your friends to talk to their parents. Maybe you can get some "push-back" going in your community.
Solving a problem is a lot better than just complaining about it.
You know, this is one thing I'd really like to see addressed, whther it be with a new law, or a constitutional amendment, whichever it would take. I mean, name me one other right that you can legally lose by failing to sue someone? It would be like if you let someone stand in your hotel lobby during a rain shower, and then couldn't evict squatters afterwards.
This situation just creates stupid lawsuits and forces companies to do things which don't really help them and only create bad will. For example, a few years back, Disney had to tell a daycare (maybe it was a preschool) to get rid of the paintings of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse they had up on their walls. Disney didn't have a choice, because of the way the trademark law is set up. But if they had had the choice, I really doubt that they would have sent the daycare a cease & desist letter. After all, it's really free advertising for them.
I know that in Japan, companies have a lot more flexibility to ignore some uses of trademarked characters (fanzines, for instance) and prosecute others (out and out piracy). I would love to see that made possible here.
Still, I think Apple would have done better contacting the authors of the themes directly, and asking politely instead of ordering. If done properly, it might have actually built them good will ("hey, Apple was really cool about it"), instead of reminding everyone of their propensity to sue.
There's a phrase that was coined at the end of the 1800's: "soi-de-cent." It's French for "end of the century," and it was used to refer to the mood of the times. Very backwards-looking, some gloom and feeling that everything important had already been done. It's just natural for people at the end of a century to look back over where they've (collectively, at least) been.
Things should be clearing up on this front fairly soon, if history repeats itself. I for one am more than ready to start looking forwards.
As I see it, the Lone Gunmen are primarily journalists, trying to get the word out, maybe get that big break that will let them spread the Truth to everyone. Maybe this female nemesis could be a reporter for a big-name news agency, and she keeps poaching their stories.
One problem they're going to have is that at first nobody wants to listen to them, and then when the story gets out, everybody watches it on CNN instead. So they're stuck on the bleeding edge of journalism, turning over rocks to find something interesting, and then trying to make themselves heard in the stampede.
Another difference between Mulder and the Lone Gunmen is that Mulder never gets a false lead, probably because anything that comes to his attention has already been filtered once through FBI investigators. It's always a real monster. The Lone Gunmen aren't going to have nearly as good a hit-to-miss ratio, because they're tracking down rumors and innuendo. But maybe they could come across something worth investigating while tracking a false lead, too...
Lastly, if the Lone Gunmen are Mulder's wild and out-there contacts, I wonder what their wierd friends are like...
In Man Out Of Time, it's said that he would produce a smallish "fireball" out of thin air as a parlor trick when visitors came by the lab (Note: Tesla's lab was the model for the classic "mad scientist" lab from every movie in the 30's.).
People aren't sure what it really was, but it could have been ball lightning, or some kind of plasma effect. Or something else enterely, we really don't know.
Firstly, Tesla developed his AC generating system at the beginning of his career, BEFORE he did his work on broadcast power, so saying they picked AC over broadcast ower is simply untrue. At the time, the choice was between AC and DC.
Secondly, the reason many of Tesla's experiments were safe to be around is because he was working with very low voltage (amperage?). The frequency isn't what you have to look out for. Many of Tesla's later experiments used current which was definately powerful enough to be deadly, like the lightning generator he made out in Colorado.
Thirdly, broadcast power DIDN'T WORK. What Tesla ended up inventing was radio, though that's not what he was trying for. It won't EVER work, because the power of the broadcast signal drops off exponentially as the distance from the transmitter increases. Basically, the same energy gets spread over an ever-increasing area. This is why the major radio stations in a city have to have 50,000 watt transmitters in order to send a fairly weak signal out to the suburbs.
Lastly, even if the laws of physics didn't make broadcast power impossible, it would have been economically infeasible precisely because it couldn't be billed for in proportion to its use. Do you think kilowatt-hours grow on trees?
They do have a manufacturing agreement with IBM. Apparently one of IBM's fabs has already been dedicated to Crusoe processors.
The mentioned later in the speech that the TM3120 is already in production, and that the TM5400 will be out later this year. Apparently they started production last year.
They have the chips now, the presentation was run on Crusoes.
Jon
Netscape wasn't free for businesses.
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 1
Netscape Navigator was free-as-in-beer since day 1.
It wasn't free for business users, and that was where the money was. I've worked for many businesses which bought Netscape licences for all of their employees. I'm sure their business revenues were way higher than the revenues from individual consumer sales.
Selling their server software was also a big profit center.
Microsoft gave both of their competing product away free to everyone. They were NOT imitating Netscape, they were undercutting them via dumping techniques to drive them out of the market. Classic monopoly screw tactics.
Jon
Clarke and the transformation of humanity.
on
Childhood's End
·
· Score: 1
Clarke's big theme in his writing was the transformation of humanity and the dawn of higher states of being. Childhood's end is one of the earlier of his books to explore the theme. He also did the first story about the global communications network becoming sentient one it has a certain number of switches acting like neurons.
One warning about Clarke: his novels sometimes drag, as they are written around ideas, not people. For this reason, I recommend trying some of his collections of short stories instead. Expedition to Earth, Tales from the White Hart, and Reach for Tomorrow are all great books. If you can find it, Out of the Sun is another nice collection of cold war stories, but I think it's out of print.
Or do you want the USB port on the Palm itself? I can think of reasons why the conventional serial port was a better choice when the Palms came out (USB wasn't really there yet at the time, plus you can't telnet in on a USB port, can you?). Plus, it would be instantly incompatible with all of the existing gear for palm.
FYI, there's also work going on on a cradle that hooks up to your network via Ethernet. Now THAT'S a fast sync!
Oh, I agree with you that some people deserve to fail, and I'd hate to lower standards in order to bring up grades. But in a lot of cases the mass failouts in courses is not because the students can't or don't want to learn, it's because the instructors are TAs without proper instructional training and the textbooks are so bad you can't learn the material from them on your own.
When 5-10% of the class fails, I'd put the blame on the students. But there are classes which regularly fail out more than half of the students that take them, semester after semester after semester, and it's because the material is taught incompetantly. Proper instruction makes all the difference in the world some times. I've seen classes where straight-A students are struggling to get C's.
I can remember one CompSci class where my Pascal code didn't compile, and nobody could explain the error message I was getting so that I could fix it, not even the instructor. I was stuck randomly changing things to try and fix it. They told me to redo it from scratch.
I swear to God colleges keep courses like that around so they don't have to spend the bucks on expensive engineering instruction.
This is an annoying policy which is designed to make Clinton LOOK like he's doing something, but which will a) not actually fix the problems and b) have bad side effects.
Firstly, you can bet that the majority of that 91 million is NOT going into scholarships. The 91 million pays for the entire set of programs being set up, the scholarships are just being trotted out as the poster boy.
Secondly, how exactly is it good to be doling out money for scholarships? Yes, it's nice to be giving bright-eyed young students money for college, but remember that the money that's being given away was collected from the other bright-eyed young students who are having to work their way through school. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Thirdly, the new Clinton program includes the establishment of a new federal beaurocracy that, as usual, will be accountable to NOONE. Like, say, OSHA, or the EPA, agencies who are not directly accountable to the voting public but whose decisions carry the force of law. This is a Bad Thing.
Lastly, it doesn't even address the major problem of technical education in the US, which is that the majority of students that enroll in technical majors get weeded out DELIBERATELY by the universities and colleges that are getting paid to teach them. If only 80% of the people who went into those program graduated from them, we'd double the supply of high-tech workers and researchers immediately! It infuriates me that the attitude (at Penn State, at least) is that "oh, well, 60% will drop out or become business majors, nothing we can do." That should be a mark of failure for the university! An airline which only delivered 40% of its passengers to the destination they desired would be out of business damn fast, let me tell you.
What would I do make the situation better? I'd make the funding given out to colleges and universities dependent on the percentage of people who graduate from the majors of their choice (ignoring voluntary changes of major, and maybe not even then if the voluntary changes aren't really voluntary). Make the institutions of learning have to KEEP their students to earn their suppers!
You're missing his/her point. What TauZero was saying is that since you have to inject the damn things anyway, why bother with nano? If you have the ability to inject something into the target/victim/enemy, why not just inject poison and save the extra cash? Nano-capsules won't be cheap, potassium cyanide is.
Note too that the hard part is injecting the stuff, and nobody is saying how that is going to be accomplished.
There's this thing called the Bill of Rights, which among other things guards against unreasonable search and seizure.
No, the government is NOT allowed to just seize your property whenever the hell they feel like it! They have to have a good, clearly defined reason for doing so, and even then it's going to be difficult. Building new highways is very difficult, because it takes the government years, sometimes decades to clear the legal hurdles.
While the previous poster WAS mixing issues to some extent, and while he did mention the Nazis, I still think his point is well taken.
This sounds like the Steve Jackson Games raid all over again. Most likely Mr. Ramsey will have to sue to get his inventory back, and from the sound of things, most likely he'll win, but it will probably drag on for years in the courts.
You know, it's sad that a woman can spill coffee in her lap and get millions of dollars, but someone like this will be lucky to get their legal expenses covered.
People keep talking about problems with heat dissipation. One possible solution to this might be to submerge the entire computer in mineral spirits. I saw a picture of a computer that was set up this way once, in order to provide cooling for overclocking (sorry, can't find the URL, but search Ars Technica for a link). Mineral spirits are nonconducting, and have been used in electrical transformers. If you put the computer in a ridged metal box, you should get okay heat transference from the box to the outside. You could even put heat sinks on the outside of the box if need be.
I don't knwo what this would do for other environmental issues like cold or moisture.
I have no idea if this would work, but I thought it might be helpful, and it shouldn't be too expensive.
I have no problem with Apple licensing the PalmOS, I just don't want them to OWN it! By all means, let them produce a Palm OS widget so long as its software remains interoperable with the other Palms.
Slashdot Mirror
MS Office is mediocre and not improving. I use it extensively, and it's definately a mixed bag. It's a feature landfill.
Take Word for example, since it is the app I know best. You CAN get it to work for most jobs, but you usually have to know how to work around its shortcomings. It has lots of features, but they aren't always usable, and many of them have been poorly implemented, like the Master Document feature which nobody uses because it just doesn't work. Some of the new features are crap, like being able to format your document with blinking Las Vegas lights around the titles (I'm not kidding). In addition, there are many features that I turn off because they get in my way, like auto spell-checking, which is distracting, and auto grammar checking, which is distracting and inaccurate and doesn't always catch errors. Lastly, there are the features I wish I could undo, like the WYSIWYG Styles list in the toolbar, which is slow, doesn't display white text, and is sorted in no comprehensible order. It's been a complaint of writers since it was introduced, and it isn't going away.
A deeper problem with Word and other Office apps is that Microsoft hasn't been able to fix the deep bugs in the apps, so that they're not nearly as reliable as a 6th generation app is supposed to be. There is a well-known bug in Word where "next page" section breaks turn into continuous section breaks. It's been there since Word for Windows 1. It's still there in Word 2000. There was a major bug in the automatic numbering system for Word 97, which forces users to go back to manual numbering, because the automatic numbering just can't be relied upon. It's still there in Word 2000.
Getting rid of Word is a major professional goal of mine.
Jon
If you go to your local gun store, they sell black paint markers for touching up scratches on a gun's finish. They come in gloss and matte, and they worked really well on my DVD-ROM drive!
Just make sure you mask off anything you don't want to paint with masking tape.
Jon
I'm wondering how this would compare to the Berlin windowing system or GGI? With the goal of running embedded, I'd guess QT's new system is simpler, and less cross-platform. Basically a way to get QT apps ported to handhelds really quickly, rather than a general replacement for X. I'll freely admit, though, that I don't know much about GUI framework design. Anyone out there in the know and willing to comment?
I have to wonder, though, how many X apps will really work well on a handheld? It's a different environment, after all, with somewhat different inputs and uses. Just dumping X apps to a PDA would be like the approach MS used for WinCE, and it didn't really work.
Jon
I feel that $2.50 is overpriced for a, what, 60-page novella? That's close to the cost for a printed full-color 120 page magazine delivered to a store near me. Granted, they get less advertising income than from a magazine, but production and distribution are orders of magnitude less expensive (the publisher is handing most of those costs over to the resellers running the websites).
This is typical of the electronic distribution schemes I see for music, etc: they're just too greedy. And in the long run, it costs them money and denies them a major opportunity. Here's why:
Books today cost an arm and a leg. New paperbacks run from 5 to 10 dollars, nearly double the cost a decade ago. As a result, readers are sticking to the authors they know, because it costs too much to speculate on an unkown author and maybe get burned. This is why Stephen King and etc. are doing okay, but the midlist and lower end authors who aren't household names are getting crunched hard.
The problem is, this leads to market shrinkage in the long term, because hot authors grow cold, or at least taken for granted, and then they don't sell as well. If people haven't been experimenting with new authors, when their fave gets boring, they stop buying as many books. You need the consumers to keep discovering new authors to keep the market from collapsing.
E-books are a really good solution to this problem. Firstly, the production and distribution costs are orders of magnitude less than for printed materials, so publishers can reduce the costs and still get their slice of profits. The overall cost can be reduced to the point where, for consumers, it becomes a viable impulse buy. I'm thinking around $1.00 (American).
Secondly, e-books are inherently ephemeral. You just don't tend to keep them around, because you're reading them on a handheld with limited storage space. Sure, you could store them on your desktop computer, but it's the computer, you don't sit in front of it to relax and read. It's the same reason why, once we got a DVD player in the living room, I stopped watching movies on my desktop DVD drive. You want the experience in the surroundings designed for it.
Lastly, E-books are likely to actually drive sales of printed books. If you do read an e-book you like and decide you want to own, you'll probably want a paper copy. For fiction, at least, a nicely bound copy you can take down off the shelf is a lot more satisfying than some bits on a computer somewhere. Moreover, if prices are cheap, you'll be a lot more likely to find new authors you want to read, and that's a vital thing for the publishing industry to foster.
Jon
I'm sorry that your high school didn't have a good programming class. I sympathise. In ancient times, when I was in high school, we had to use Commodore PETs that didn't even fricking work most of the time. I should have taken a study hall instead, I would have learned more.
However, who elected this mayor? It's YOUR TOWN. Your parents CAN do something about it. Talk to your parents about what's going on. Let them talk to their grown-up friends. Get your friends to talk to their parents. Maybe you can get some "push-back" going in your community.
Solving a problem is a lot better than just complaining about it.
Jon
You know, this is one thing I'd really like to see addressed, whther it be with a new law, or a constitutional amendment, whichever it would take. I mean, name me one other right that you can legally lose by failing to sue someone? It would be like if you let someone stand in your hotel lobby during a rain shower, and then couldn't evict squatters afterwards.
This situation just creates stupid lawsuits and forces companies to do things which don't really help them and only create bad will. For example, a few years back, Disney had to tell a daycare (maybe it was a preschool) to get rid of the paintings of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse they had up on their walls. Disney didn't have a choice, because of the way the trademark law is set up. But if they had had the choice, I really doubt that they would have sent the daycare a cease & desist letter. After all, it's really free advertising for them.
I know that in Japan, companies have a lot more flexibility to ignore some uses of trademarked characters (fanzines, for instance) and prosecute others (out and out piracy). I would love to see that made possible here.
Jon
Ok, maybe that's too harsh.
Still, I think Apple would have done better contacting the authors of the themes directly, and asking politely instead of ordering. If done properly, it might have actually built them good will ("hey, Apple was really cool about it"), instead of reminding everyone of their propensity to sue.
Jon
There's a phrase that was coined at the end of the 1800's: "soi-de-cent." It's French for "end of the century," and it was used to refer to the mood of the times. Very backwards-looking, some gloom and feeling that everything important had already been done. It's just natural for people at the end of a century to look back over where they've (collectively, at least) been.
Things should be clearing up on this front fairly soon, if history repeats itself. I for one am more than ready to start looking forwards.
Jon
Eek the Cat! ruled. I also liked Terrible Thunderlizards.
"Sure, it never hurts to help!"
Jon
As I see it, the Lone Gunmen are primarily journalists, trying to get the word out, maybe get that big break that will let them spread the Truth to everyone. Maybe this female nemesis could be a reporter for a big-name news agency, and she keeps poaching their stories.
One problem they're going to have is that at first nobody wants to listen to them, and then when the story gets out, everybody watches it on CNN instead. So they're stuck on the bleeding edge of journalism, turning over rocks to find something interesting, and then trying to make themselves heard in the stampede.
Another difference between Mulder and the Lone Gunmen is that Mulder never gets a false lead, probably because anything that comes to his attention has already been filtered once through FBI investigators. It's always a real monster. The Lone Gunmen aren't going to have nearly as good a hit-to-miss ratio, because they're tracking down rumors and innuendo. But maybe they could come across something worth investigating while tracking a false lead, too...
Lastly, if the Lone Gunmen are Mulder's wild and out-there contacts, I wonder what their wierd friends are like...
Jon
In Man Out Of Time, it's said that he would produce a smallish "fireball" out of thin air as a parlor trick when visitors came by the lab (Note: Tesla's lab was the model for the classic "mad scientist" lab from every movie in the 30's.).
People aren't sure what it really was, but it could have been ball lightning, or some kind of plasma effect. Or something else enterely, we really don't know.
Jon
Firstly, Tesla developed his AC generating system at the beginning of his career, BEFORE he did his work on broadcast power, so saying they picked AC over broadcast ower is simply untrue. At the time, the choice was between AC and DC.
Secondly, the reason many of Tesla's experiments were safe to be around is because he was working with very low voltage (amperage?). The frequency isn't what you have to look out for. Many of Tesla's later experiments used current which was definately powerful enough to be deadly, like the lightning generator he made out in Colorado.
Thirdly, broadcast power DIDN'T WORK. What Tesla ended up inventing was radio, though that's not what he was trying for. It won't EVER work, because the power of the broadcast signal drops off exponentially as the distance from the transmitter increases. Basically, the same energy gets spread over an ever-increasing area. This is why the major radio stations in a city have to have 50,000 watt transmitters in order to send a fairly weak signal out to the suburbs.
Lastly, even if the laws of physics didn't make broadcast power impossible, it would have been economically infeasible precisely because it couldn't be billed for in proportion to its use. Do you think kilowatt-hours grow on trees?
Jon Acheson
Linus has worked on a version of Linux called Mobile Linux (maybe this is common knowledge, but I hadn't heard of it).
They demonstrated a web-pad device supposedly running it, and also a desktop PC running Quake under Linux.
In the Q&A, they said that Mobile Linux will be open sourced, and that parts of the power conservation stuff have already been released.
Jon
They do have a manufacturing agreement with IBM. Apparently one of IBM's fabs has already been dedicated to Crusoe processors.
The mentioned later in the speech that the TM3120 is already in production, and that the TM5400 will be out later this year. Apparently they started production last year.
They have the chips now, the presentation was run on Crusoes.
Jon
It wasn't free for business users, and that was where the money was. I've worked for many businesses which bought Netscape licences for all of their employees. I'm sure their business revenues were way higher than the revenues from individual consumer sales.
Selling their server software was also a big profit center.
Microsoft gave both of their competing product away free to everyone. They were NOT imitating Netscape, they were undercutting them via dumping techniques to drive them out of the market. Classic monopoly screw tactics.
Jon
Clarke's big theme in his writing was the transformation of humanity and the dawn of higher states of being. Childhood's end is one of the earlier of his books to explore the theme. He also did the first story about the global communications network becoming sentient one it has a certain number of switches acting like neurons.
One warning about Clarke: his novels sometimes drag, as they are written around ideas, not people. For this reason, I recommend trying some of his collections of short stories instead. Expedition to Earth , Tales from the White Hart , and Reach for Tomorrow are all great books. If you can find it, Out of the Sun is another nice collection of cold war stories, but I think it's out of print.
Jon
There is good work being done today, stuff that will definately be considered classic material in the future.
Consider the following:
Note too that all of the "classic" artists you mentioned had their own influences who they probably felt they were unworthy to be compared to.
In short, don't overlook the possiblity that the "good old days" are happening right now.
Jon
They've got a cradle out already that connects to a USB port.
Or do you want the USB port on the Palm itself? I can think of reasons why the conventional serial port was a better choice when the Palms came out (USB wasn't really there yet at the time, plus you can't telnet in on a USB port, can you?). Plus, it would be instantly incompatible with all of the existing gear for palm.
FYI, there's also work going on on a cradle that hooks up to your network via Ethernet. Now THAT'S a fast sync!
Jon
Oh, I agree with you that some people deserve to fail, and I'd hate to lower standards in order to bring up grades. But in a lot of cases the mass failouts in courses is not because the students can't or don't want to learn, it's because the instructors are TAs without proper instructional training and the textbooks are so bad you can't learn the material from them on your own.
When 5-10% of the class fails, I'd put the blame on the students. But there are classes which regularly fail out more than half of the students that take them, semester after semester after semester, and it's because the material is taught incompetantly. Proper instruction makes all the difference in the world some times. I've seen classes where straight-A students are struggling to get C's.
I can remember one CompSci class where my Pascal code didn't compile, and nobody could explain the error message I was getting so that I could fix it, not even the instructor. I was stuck randomly changing things to try and fix it. They told me to redo it from scratch.
I swear to God colleges keep courses like that around so they don't have to spend the bucks on expensive engineering instruction.
Jon
This is an annoying policy which is designed to make Clinton LOOK like he's doing something, but which will a) not actually fix the problems and b) have bad side effects.
Firstly, you can bet that the majority of that 91 million is NOT going into scholarships. The 91 million pays for the entire set of programs being set up, the scholarships are just being trotted out as the poster boy.
Secondly, how exactly is it good to be doling out money for scholarships? Yes, it's nice to be giving bright-eyed young students money for college, but remember that the money that's being given away was collected from the other bright-eyed young students who are having to work their way through school. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Thirdly, the new Clinton program includes the establishment of a new federal beaurocracy that, as usual, will be accountable to NOONE. Like, say, OSHA, or the EPA, agencies who are not directly accountable to the voting public but whose decisions carry the force of law. This is a Bad Thing.
Lastly, it doesn't even address the major problem of technical education in the US, which is that the majority of students that enroll in technical majors get weeded out DELIBERATELY by the universities and colleges that are getting paid to teach them. If only 80% of the people who went into those program graduated from them, we'd double the supply of high-tech workers and researchers immediately! It infuriates me that the attitude (at Penn State, at least) is that "oh, well, 60% will drop out or become business majors, nothing we can do." That should be a mark of failure for the university! An airline which only delivered 40% of its passengers to the destination they desired would be out of business damn fast, let me tell you.
What would I do make the situation better? I'd make the funding given out to colleges and universities dependent on the percentage of people who graduate from the majors of their choice (ignoring voluntary changes of major, and maybe not even then if the voluntary changes aren't really voluntary). Make the institutions of learning have to KEEP their students to earn their suppers!
Polemically yours,
Jon Acheson
You're missing his/her point. What TauZero was saying is that since you have to inject the damn things anyway, why bother with nano? If you have the ability to inject something into the target/victim/enemy, why not just inject poison and save the extra cash? Nano-capsules won't be cheap, potassium cyanide is.
Note too that the hard part is injecting the stuff, and nobody is saying how that is going to be accomplished.
Jon
There's this thing called the Bill of Rights, which among other things guards against unreasonable search and seizure.
No, the government is NOT allowed to just seize your property whenever the hell they feel like it! They have to have a good, clearly defined reason for doing so, and even then it's going to be difficult. Building new highways is very difficult, because it takes the government years, sometimes decades to clear the legal hurdles.
While the previous poster WAS mixing issues to some extent, and while he did mention the Nazis, I still think his point is well taken.
Jon
This sounds like the Steve Jackson Games raid all over again. Most likely Mr. Ramsey will have to sue to get his inventory back, and from the sound of things, most likely he'll win, but it will probably drag on for years in the courts.
I recommend he talk to Steve Jackson, try getting a contact from Steve Jacson Games' website.
You know, it's sad that a woman can spill coffee in her lap and get millions of dollars, but someone like this will be lucky to get their legal expenses covered.
Jon
People keep talking about problems with heat dissipation. One possible solution to this might be to submerge the entire computer in mineral spirits. I saw a picture of a computer that was set up this way once, in order to provide cooling for overclocking (sorry, can't find the URL, but search Ars Technica for a link). Mineral spirits are nonconducting, and have been used in electrical transformers. If you put the computer in a ridged metal box, you should get okay heat transference from the box to the outside. You could even put heat sinks on the outside of the box if need be.
I don't knwo what this would do for other environmental issues like cold or moisture.
I have no idea if this would work, but I thought it might be helpful, and it shouldn't be too expensive.
Jon
I have no problem with Apple licensing the PalmOS, I just don't want them to OWN it! By all means, let them produce a Palm OS widget so long as its software remains interoperable with the other Palms.
Jon