I agree on all counts - and have said the same elsewhere - but you summarize my opinion very well.
Thanks. That $20 check is in the mail.;-)
I would no more want to be able to hack that device than I would want to be able to hack my TV Remote - I just want it to work.
Exactly that. There's a time for hacking--I have a couple of older computers running various flavors of Linux and a Windows XP machine I use with my ham radio equipment. None of those computers are vital so I don't mind too much when I try out something new and end up having to reload the OS. That's fun stuff. But sometimes I need to get work done without worrying about fussing with the hardware; that's what I reserve my laptop for--when I just want things to work. I don't experiment with that one so whether it's open or closed doesn't matter to me at all. For a lot of people, that's the way it is for all their computers all the time. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's certainly nothing wrong with Apple or any other company building hardware that meets that need.
a Linux user asking for tips on advanced uses of virtual desktops is like an off-road rally racer asking for tips on configuring the differentials on a 4x4. Your answer is "use a Ford Taurus".
Your car analogy makes more sense, in fact, since the largest purchasers of the Ford Taurus were car rental agencies. Everyone knows that the best off-road vehicle is a rented vehicle.
Personally, I don't see the benefit of such a device - - i must not be the target demographic.
Bingo--very few of us here on Slashdot are the in the target demographic for this device. We all want something we can play with, hack, turn into a toaster or whatever we choose to do with it. The thing we tend to lose sight of is this: the vast majority of computer users out there don't give a fuck about that! They want something that they can pick up and use without worrying about the nuts and bolts behind it and that's what Apple offers. The iPad is no more a general purpose computer than an iPod is; in fact, like an iPod, it's an appliance for viewing various sorts of media in a easy-to-use way and that's all a lot of people want. In fact, if I hadn't already given my wife my old MacBook, it would be the perfect device for her since all she does with her laptop is surf the Web, send an occasional e-mail and view stuff on YouTube--all things the iPad will no doubt excel at doing.
Apple isn't going to sell many iPads to people like us but I'll bet they'll sell a lot of them to people like my wife.
If it makes you feel any better, I sold that old Ford almost thirty years ago. I do currently drive a pickup truck, but it's one of those little ones with a four-banger in it and it's studded all over with ham radio antennas. That's pretty nerdy/geeky, no?
Nerds buy geeky cars. Saab is a geeky car. At one point they had sodium inside the valves for cooling. They had standard turbochargers whey you couldn't get turbocharges.
At one point they also had 2-cycle engines (you had to add oil to the gas tank every time you filled it up) and, if you did it right, you could get the engine running backwards, giving you a car with one speed forward and four in reverse. If that ain't geeky, I don't know what is. You could probably win a lot of bar bets with it.
Sodium-cooled valves isn't all that geeky, though. The 292 CID V-8 in my 1964 Ford F-150 pickup had them, as do a lot of other heavy-duty vehicles.
Honeycomb composite control surfaces (ailerons, rudders, elevators) have been common in military aircraft since the 1970's
I'm not 100% sure on this but I believe that the Boeing 707, designed in the late 1950s, used honeycomb composite in it's landing gear doors and possibly other places.
As for unplugging... what does that? Kernel panic sounds very linuxy, but I've never had that happen, and I've been plugging 'n unplugging up to three usb drives at a time
I think what he was trying to get at is what sometimes happens on a Mac if a user unplugs an external drive without un-mounting it first, a quirk that Macs have had since at least the System 7 days. I'm not sure why OS X will still occasionally have trouble handling that situation gracefully (although ninety-nine times out of one hundred the only "bad" result is a dialogue box that pops up advising you not to do that again) but it's not really a big deal as long as you remember to follow the proper procedure for disconnecting an external drive on any OS.
Some hams still use [Hellschreiber}, for kicks. It's got good performance in noise (weak signal mode).
Easy on your transmitter too (low duty rate) and a pretty narrow bandwidth (75Hz), but slow (35WPM) compared to PSK31. Hell does have a couple of big advantages, though, one being that the operator is in the translation process and can interpret when the reception gets dodgy. Another is that, being a facsimile process, the sender can use any font he/she chooses. And it sounds cool, too--sort of like crickets.
Just because X% of people who don't pay attention are on cell phones does not mean that the problem is the phone. The problem is people who don't pay attention to the road and who think the phone is more important than driving.
Got to disagree with you here--the phone is the problem.
I'm a commercially-licensed professional driver, by definition more rigorously trained, more experienced and held to a higher standard than the average driver. None the less, I've found that I can get distracted by a cell phone call no matter how hard I try to pay attention to the road. In fact, I will no longer use my cell phone while I'm driving a commercial vehicle and even in my personal vehicle will only answer calls if I can pull over safely within a few seconds of taking the call.
You may think you can use your phone safely while driving but you are wrong and your argument sounds a lot like those I've heard from people who claim to be able to drive while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Don't kid yourself; pull over before you use your cell phone in the car.
I took some art courses working on an undergrad Fine Arts program at 2 different colleges and I didn't see an unusually high number of gay students.
Yeah, I was an art major too--in graphic design, no less, a profession that has a reputation for having a high percentage of gays--and while there were a few men who swung the other way, most of us were straight. In fact, with the large female-male disparity, us guys would frequently talk among ourselves about that period being the only time in our lives that we had a reasonable chance to get a date on a regular basis.
On the other hand, one of our projects was doing posters for the theater department. While I'm reluctant to make a broad generalization, it certainly appeared that there was a much higher gay-to-straight ratio in that area than in the fine arts.
Haven't you forgotten T-mobile? They use GSM, just like AT&T.
Actually, not quite just like AT&T. T-Mobile uses a slightly different 3G UMTS network and current versions of the iPhone are only compatible with T-Mobile’s slower 2G GSM network.
I'm not saying that Apple will never drop it's exclusivity agreement with AT&T, only that if it does, it's not likely to go into effect until the iPhone v.4.0 comes out this summer rather next week as TFA claims.
Rumors about AT&T losing it's iPhone exclusivity have been circulating for a couple of years now and still, if you want an iPhone, you have to sign up with AT&T. Since Apple has repeatedly said that they have no interest in building a phone that will operate on the soon-to-be-obsolete CDMA networks and it will be at least two more years before any other U.S. carrier will roll out a next generation LTE network, AT&T will retain it's U.S. exclusivity by default.
These rumors could very well be FUD circulated by some other carrier (Verizon) in an attempt to cause people considering switching to AT&T for an iPhone to wait just a little bit longer.
I wonder, do you guys have a trade group of sorts? Is there some sort of International HAM Radio operator organization?
Not so much international but each country generally has it's own group. Here in the U.S. the ARRL (American Radio Relay League) is the general amateur radio advocacy/lobbying group.
As an aside, where would be a good place to get started on lurnin 2 HAM?
Well, the aforementioned ARRL has an entire section on their Web site for new hams, that might be one place to look. The best way to start learning, though, is to find your local amateur radio club (the ARRL site will help you do that) and attend a meeting. Tell them you're interested in getting your ticket and they'll point you to local classes and other resources that are generally free or very low cost. Pretty much any ham will go out of his/her way to help someone else get started in amateur radio.
BTW, the entry-level (technician) class license is very easy to get--no more Morse code required.
Well, this is a good opportunity to invite your neighbors into your radio shack to listen to the ham traffic out of Haiti.
I've done that, in fact. Not so much with Haiti since my QTH isn't all that good for working that area but when my amateur radio club was hosting a VHF simplex net with simulated emergency traffic as an drill, I had a couple from across the street in my shack for a while. It turned out to be a good thing--they found it interesting and I offered to mentor them towards getting their Technician class tickets.
In reality, no one has ever complained about my antennas, which are mostly wire dipoles and not really noticeable unless you're looking for them. Other local hams with towers and beams haven't been so lucky, though.
sit there and watch while the REAL professionals take care of things.
The REAL professionals who's entire knowledge of radios consists of knowing how to use the push-to-talk button on the side of their walkie talkie, you mean? You guys wouldn't even know how to use the majority of the amateur radio frequencies. Go ahead, you show us all how to tune up an HF rig to use the 20 meter band. Right-- no clue.
That's why you "professionals" need to have a dedicated radio tech working for you. And that tech, more likely than not, is a ham.
Oh, and if you have an old Ranger pick'em'up you just as well better plan to park it if you want to hear anything besides alternator whine and spark plug noise.
How old? I have a '95 Ranger and have no problems with my 2 meter gear. Never tried any HF, though.
Yeah, and the ironic thing is that people complain about our "unsightly" antennas--right up until they need what we can do.
With the severe storms we've been having here in souther California this past week, I've been on standby with San Diego ARES in the event communications go down. No major problem so far but I have all my 2 meter gear ready to go if necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree on all counts - and have said the same elsewhere - but you summarize my opinion very well.
Thanks. That $20 check is in the mail. ;-)
I would no more want to be able to hack that device than I would want to be able to hack my TV Remote - I just want it to work.
Exactly that. There's a time for hacking--I have a couple of older computers running various flavors of Linux and a Windows XP machine I use with my ham radio equipment. None of those computers are vital so I don't mind too much when I try out something new and end up having to reload the OS. That's fun stuff. But sometimes I need to get work done without worrying about fussing with the hardware; that's what I reserve my laptop for--when I just want things to work. I don't experiment with that one so whether it's open or closed doesn't matter to me at all. For a lot of people, that's the way it is for all their computers all the time. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's certainly nothing wrong with Apple or any other company building hardware that meets that need.
a Linux user asking for tips on advanced uses of virtual desktops is like an off-road rally racer asking for tips on configuring the differentials on a 4x4. Your answer is "use a Ford Taurus".
Your car analogy makes more sense, in fact, since the largest purchasers of the Ford Taurus were car rental agencies. Everyone knows that the best off-road vehicle is a rented vehicle.
Good point. It's overused, I should have left it off.
Why am I not surprised that they ended up in Tennessee?
Personally, I don't see the benefit of such a device - - i must not be the target demographic.
Bingo--very few of us here on Slashdot are the in the target demographic for this device. We all want something we can play with, hack, turn into a toaster or whatever we choose to do with it. The thing we tend to lose sight of is this: the vast majority of computer users out there don't give a fuck about that! They want something that they can pick up and use without worrying about the nuts and bolts behind it and that's what Apple offers. The iPad is no more a general purpose computer than an iPod is; in fact, like an iPod, it's an appliance for viewing various sorts of media in a easy-to-use way and that's all a lot of people want. In fact, if I hadn't already given my wife my old MacBook, it would be the perfect device for her since all she does with her laptop is surf the Web, send an occasional e-mail and view stuff on YouTube--all things the iPad will no doubt excel at doing.
Apple isn't going to sell many iPads to people like us but I'll bet they'll sell a lot of them to people like my wife.
Eat a dick you cock gargling dumb fuck.
Ah, nothing better than a witty and erudite reply...
Apparently, there [b]are[/b] also a lot of people out there that can't keep their grammar straight when pointing out spelling mistakes.
Apparently, there are also a lot of people out there that don't know how to use HTML tags properly.
'Yea' is a word.
Yea, verily.
$499 to $899, depending on how much memory you want and whether or not you want 3G.
Sorry.
If it makes you feel any better, I sold that old Ford almost thirty years ago. I do currently drive a pickup truck, but it's one of those little ones with a four-banger in it and it's studded all over with ham radio antennas. That's pretty nerdy/geeky, no?
Nerds buy geeky cars. Saab is a geeky car. At one point they had sodium inside the valves for cooling. They had standard turbochargers whey you couldn't get turbocharges.
At one point they also had 2-cycle engines (you had to add oil to the gas tank every time you filled it up) and, if you did it right, you could get the engine running backwards, giving you a car with one speed forward and four in reverse. If that ain't geeky, I don't know what is. You could probably win a lot of bar bets with it.
Sodium-cooled valves isn't all that geeky, though. The 292 CID V-8 in my 1964 Ford F-150 pickup had them, as do a lot of other heavy-duty vehicles.
Honeycomb composite control surfaces (ailerons, rudders, elevators) have been common in military aircraft since the 1970's
I'm not 100% sure on this but I believe that the Boeing 707, designed in the late 1950s, used honeycomb composite in it's landing gear doors and possibly other places.
As for unplugging... what does that? Kernel panic sounds very linuxy, but I've never had that happen, and I've been plugging 'n unplugging up to three usb drives at a time
I think what he was trying to get at is what sometimes happens on a Mac if a user unplugs an external drive without un-mounting it first, a quirk that Macs have had since at least the System 7 days. I'm not sure why OS X will still occasionally have trouble handling that situation gracefully (although ninety-nine times out of one hundred the only "bad" result is a dialogue box that pops up advising you not to do that again) but it's not really a big deal as long as you remember to follow the proper procedure for disconnecting an external drive on any OS.
Some hams still use [Hellschreiber}, for kicks. It's got good performance in noise (weak signal mode).
Easy on your transmitter too (low duty rate) and a pretty narrow bandwidth (75Hz), but slow (35WPM) compared to PSK31. Hell does have a couple of big advantages, though, one being that the operator is in the translation process and can interpret when the reception gets dodgy. Another is that, being a facsimile process, the sender can use any font he/she chooses. And it sounds cool, too--sort of like crickets.
KJ6BSO
Just because X% of people who don't pay attention are on cell phones does not mean that the problem is the phone. The problem is people who don't pay attention to the road and who think the phone is more important than driving.
Got to disagree with you here--the phone is the problem.
I'm a commercially-licensed professional driver, by definition more rigorously trained, more experienced and held to a higher standard than the average driver. None the less, I've found that I can get distracted by a cell phone call no matter how hard I try to pay attention to the road. In fact, I will no longer use my cell phone while I'm driving a commercial vehicle and even in my personal vehicle will only answer calls if I can pull over safely within a few seconds of taking the call.
You may think you can use your phone safely while driving but you are wrong and your argument sounds a lot like those I've heard from people who claim to be able to drive while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Don't kid yourself; pull over before you use your cell phone in the car.
People tend to overestimate their skill at certain things, especially when it comes to driving.
I think you misunderestimated me.
G.W. Bush
I took some art courses working on an undergrad Fine Arts program at 2 different colleges and I didn't see an unusually high number of gay students.
Yeah, I was an art major too--in graphic design, no less, a profession that has a reputation for having a high percentage of gays--and while there were a few men who swung the other way, most of us were straight. In fact, with the large female-male disparity, us guys would frequently talk among ourselves about that period being the only time in our lives that we had a reasonable chance to get a date on a regular basis.
On the other hand, one of our projects was doing posters for the theater department. While I'm reluctant to make a broad generalization, it certainly appeared that there was a much higher gay-to-straight ratio in that area than in the fine arts.
Haven't you forgotten T-mobile? They use GSM, just like AT&T.
Actually, not quite just like AT&T. T-Mobile uses a slightly different 3G UMTS network and current versions of the iPhone are only compatible with T-Mobile’s slower 2G GSM network.
I'm not saying that Apple will never drop it's exclusivity agreement with AT&T, only that if it does, it's not likely to go into effect until the iPhone v.4.0 comes out this summer rather next week as TFA claims.
And his brother is the guy who makes every moving car which rear ends a parked car go up in the air.
No, that's his cousin. His brother is the guy who makes every car that goes over a cliff in a movie burst into a spectacular explosion.
Rumors about AT&T losing it's iPhone exclusivity have been circulating for a couple of years now and still, if you want an iPhone, you have to sign up with AT&T. Since Apple has repeatedly said that they have no interest in building a phone that will operate on the soon-to-be-obsolete CDMA networks and it will be at least two more years before any other U.S. carrier will roll out a next generation LTE network, AT&T will retain it's U.S. exclusivity by default.
These rumors could very well be FUD circulated by some other carrier (Verizon) in an attempt to cause people considering switching to AT&T for an iPhone to wait just a little bit longer.
I wonder, do you guys have a trade group of sorts? Is there some sort of International HAM Radio operator organization?
Not so much international but each country generally has it's own group. Here in the U.S. the ARRL (American Radio Relay League) is the general amateur radio advocacy/lobbying group.
As an aside, where would be a good place to get started on lurnin 2 HAM?
Well, the aforementioned ARRL has an entire section on their Web site for new hams, that might be one place to look. The best way to start learning, though, is to find your local amateur radio club (the ARRL site will help you do that) and attend a meeting. Tell them you're interested in getting your ticket and they'll point you to local classes and other resources that are generally free or very low cost. Pretty much any ham will go out of his/her way to help someone else get started in amateur radio.
BTW, the entry-level (technician) class license is very easy to get--no more Morse code required.
73, and hope to hear you on the bands some day
KJ6BSO
Well, this is a good opportunity to invite your neighbors into your radio shack to listen to the ham traffic out of Haiti.
I've done that, in fact. Not so much with Haiti since my QTH isn't all that good for working that area but when my amateur radio club was hosting a VHF simplex net with simulated emergency traffic as an drill, I had a couple from across the street in my shack for a while. It turned out to be a good thing--they found it interesting and I offered to mentor them towards getting their Technician class tickets.
In reality, no one has ever complained about my antennas, which are mostly wire dipoles and not really noticeable unless you're looking for them. Other local hams with towers and beams haven't been so lucky, though.
KJ6BSO
sit there and watch while the REAL professionals take care of things.
The REAL professionals who's entire knowledge of radios consists of knowing how to use the push-to-talk button on the side of their walkie talkie, you mean? You guys wouldn't even know how to use the majority of the amateur radio frequencies. Go ahead, you show us all how to tune up an HF rig to use the 20 meter band. Right-- no clue.
That's why you "professionals" need to have a dedicated radio tech working for you. And that tech, more likely than not, is a ham.
>
Oh, and if you have an old Ranger pick'em'up you just as well better plan to park it if you want to hear anything besides alternator whine and spark plug noise.
How old? I have a '95 Ranger and have no problems with my 2 meter gear. Never tried any HF, though.
KJ6BSO
Yeah, and the ironic thing is that people complain about our "unsightly" antennas--right up until they need what we can do.
With the severe storms we've been having here in souther California this past week, I've been on standby with San Diego ARES in the event communications go down. No major problem so far but I have all my 2 meter gear ready to go if necessary.
KJ6BSO