See I think guy nailed it when he mentioned the learning curve on a PPC. People complaining about the storage -- honestly a 2GB CF card costs like 90 bucks these days and fits 20+ albums which is fine by me.
The problem is there's tons of great software out there you just need to know what it is. At school the other day I couldn't find my profs class, so I whip out the PPC, open up my VOIP app and call my roomies to double check. Alternately on the front page I have updated weather information for my hometown, university, etc as well as recent news streamed through RSS. I hit one button to open my mp3 player and hit that same button to turn the screen off while it plays, giving me ~6 hours battery life listening to music -- enough to get me to lecture, where I use a bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket to type class notes.
If I'm looking at fooling around my X50V can run Playstation games at close to full speed as well as gameboy advance, snes, etc. Not to mention I also use it as a digital guitar tuner, photo viewer (just pop in your camera's memory card and bam), internet browser which is suprisingly good at scaling pages, MSN client, and can play H264 video along with basically every other format. Pocket streets allows me to figure out where I'm going when I go up to Toronto etc and is great for pinpointing and marking landmarks and looking up addresses. And that's not getting into the great PDF support and full-featured word processor Textmaker I use for notes. Did I mention it has built software for controlling my home computer via terminal services client, useful when I forget something at home and need to send it to myself on the PDA.
Again it's taken a few months to get a grasp on the unit but now I could honestly set anyone else's up in a hour. If you have someone to show you the ropes these devices in incredibly useful and fairly stable if you tweak them right. iPods have their place but right now my Dell Axim beats the hell out of any other unit for functionality and value.
I think this, combined with the recent tech allowing the projection of images into mid-air could be a powerful and dangerous tool in the hands of corporations. The type of immersive advertising seen in Minority Report is basically possible now, it's just a matter of whether people would put up with it..
Alright what's going on here.. several searches later I find the comments void of Bobba Fett jokes of any shape or size? What.. not even subtle nod towards carbonite, the fashionable substance that gave birth to advancements in stasis such as these?
Truly this is a dark day for Slashdotters everywhere...
I was referring to the fact that while some species died life as a whole went on.
As far as major cataclysmic events we've had 5 major ones over the past 4 billion years so I'd say we're not doing too bad.
Again, humans have been around for 2 million years roughly.. consider that moden human history as it stands spans some 4000 years or so, and compare that to the speed at which we develop weapons and consume resources.
As it said in the article, 450 million years ago we had a mass extinction event. After this point species became extinct basically due to ecosystem changes, disease pandemics and hunting by humans. The point is that a gamma bust is phenonenally unlikely/completely hypothetical while changes in our ecosystem are incredibly drastic.
And as per this colonialistic idea that just because there's a universe out there it's our 'duty' to overtake it, Earth was doing pretty fine before we rolled along. Sure we are able to 'appreciate' our surroundings more than the average animal but in the grand scheme of things is that significant?
Of course we're straying into philosophy here as an appropriate analogy would be "if a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?"
The world goes on without us, but this is a good example of the egocentric attitude that allows many of us to turn a blind eye to what's happening in our own backyards.
Here's a breakdown from the article, I forget if it was BBC news or CNN...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/aximxp/_409 76441_ecosystems_gra416.gif
I think it's great how preoccupied so many people are about these completely obscure hypothetical apocalypse events. If life has been ticking for hundreds of millions of years without a hitch you can be damn sure that the least of our worries are going to be random gamma radiation.
How about the fact that we've lost almost 50% of all types of tropical, mediterranean and temperate forests as well as 30% of deserts over the past 100 years.
Stop staring at the sky waiting for asteroids and mythical dragons to swoop down and annihilate the human race, the SUV in your driveway is a much more likely candidate people...
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See I think guy nailed it when he mentioned the learning curve on a PPC. People complaining about the storage -- honestly a 2GB CF card costs like 90 bucks these days and fits 20+ albums which is fine by me. The problem is there's tons of great software out there you just need to know what it is. At school the other day I couldn't find my profs class, so I whip out the PPC, open up my VOIP app and call my roomies to double check. Alternately on the front page I have updated weather information for my hometown, university, etc as well as recent news streamed through RSS. I hit one button to open my mp3 player and hit that same button to turn the screen off while it plays, giving me ~6 hours battery life listening to music -- enough to get me to lecture, where I use a bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket to type class notes. If I'm looking at fooling around my X50V can run Playstation games at close to full speed as well as gameboy advance, snes, etc. Not to mention I also use it as a digital guitar tuner, photo viewer (just pop in your camera's memory card and bam), internet browser which is suprisingly good at scaling pages, MSN client, and can play H264 video along with basically every other format. Pocket streets allows me to figure out where I'm going when I go up to Toronto etc and is great for pinpointing and marking landmarks and looking up addresses. And that's not getting into the great PDF support and full-featured word processor Textmaker I use for notes. Did I mention it has built software for controlling my home computer via terminal services client, useful when I forget something at home and need to send it to myself on the PDA. Again it's taken a few months to get a grasp on the unit but now I could honestly set anyone else's up in a hour. If you have someone to show you the ropes these devices in incredibly useful and fairly stable if you tweak them right. iPods have their place but right now my Dell Axim beats the hell out of any other unit for functionality and value.
I think this, combined with the recent tech allowing the projection of images into mid-air could be a powerful and dangerous tool in the hands of corporations. The type of immersive advertising seen in Minority Report is basically possible now, it's just a matter of whether people would put up with it..
Alright what's going on here.. several searches later I find the comments void of Bobba Fett jokes of any shape or size? What.. not even subtle nod towards carbonite, the fashionable substance that gave birth to advancements in stasis such as these?
Truly this is a dark day for Slashdotters everywhere...
Sorry, clearly I'm a huge Slashdot newbie... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/aximxp/_409 76441_ecosystems_gra416.gif
I was referring to the fact that while some species died life as a whole went on. As far as major cataclysmic events we've had 5 major ones over the past 4 billion years so I'd say we're not doing too bad.
Again, humans have been around for 2 million years roughly.. consider that moden human history as it stands spans some 4000 years or so, and compare that to the speed at which we develop weapons and consume resources.
If you're looking for a more tangible mass extinction to debate may I suggest http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4797
As it said in the article, 450 million years ago we had a mass extinction event. After this point species became extinct basically due to ecosystem changes, disease pandemics and hunting by humans. The point is that a gamma bust is phenonenally unlikely/completely hypothetical while changes in our ecosystem are incredibly drastic.
And as per this colonialistic idea that just because there's a universe out there it's our 'duty' to overtake it, Earth was doing pretty fine before we rolled along. Sure we are able to 'appreciate' our surroundings more than the average animal but in the grand scheme of things is that significant?
Of course we're straying into philosophy here as an appropriate analogy would be "if a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?" The world goes on without us, but this is a good example of the egocentric attitude that allows many of us to turn a blind eye to what's happening in our own backyards.
Here's a breakdown from the article, I forget if it was BBC news or CNN... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/aximxp/_409 76441_ecosystems_gra416.gif
I think it's great how preoccupied so many people are about these completely obscure hypothetical apocalypse events. If life has been ticking for hundreds of millions of years without a hitch you can be damn sure that the least of our worries are going to be random gamma radiation. How about the fact that we've lost almost 50% of all types of tropical, mediterranean and temperate forests as well as 30% of deserts over the past 100 years. Stop staring at the sky waiting for asteroids and mythical dragons to swoop down and annihilate the human race, the SUV in your driveway is a much more likely candidate people...