CF is for IO expansion. At least on the Zaurus, typically you'd put memory in the SD slot and an 802.11B or Bluetooth in the CF slot. You can get SD 802.11B or Bluetooth cards, so maybe they'd be better off with 2 SD slots, but I'm dubious: most CF IO cards are slightly bigger than the slot, I'd hate to see you much an SD IO card protudes.
Patenting and enforcing the patent on your idea is the best way to throw the indivdual inventor out of business.
You can't build anything today without infringing on patents. There's millions of them out there: if you make anything, I guarantee you're stepping on somebody's patent somewhere.
But as a little guy, the big guys will ignore your infringement on their stuff. Most big guys work in defensive mode only.
But if you threaten them, they pull out their massive portfolio and lawyer you to death.
The only way to make money as an individual patentor is to patent something obvious and then not build it. Since you're not building anything, you're not infringing. It has to be obvious so that somebody will infringe sometime. Then you sue them.
You win a little, the lawyers win a lot, and society loses big time.
Considering that I'm having trouble keeping the two apart during the discussion, you definitely have a good point.
If you love one, you'll love the other.
However, they are very different books, both with some very cool concepts, and a good detective story.
It's probably just that I read too much and things get jumbled together in my brain. I read for pleasure, and don't retain much. (Which is cool, I can reread good books many times and they don't get old...)
Bryan
Re:I assume it touches on copying
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Copying is very much illegal, but is an integral plot point. The rich & powerful & kinky use it to good effect.
But it's not central to the story: it's a detective story. I think you'd enjoy it.
1. Read headline 2. Make reasonable comments on the headline, saying "I disagree, here's why". 3. (Score:5, Insightful) 4. read posts pointing out that you actually probably agree with the article.
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have realized that the author agrees with you that nice graphics or an involved, non-interactive plotline do not make a good game.
I once had a cool job where I was able to switch to a 28 hour day. 28*6=24*7, so I had a regular schedule. They were ecstatic, they knew exactly when I'd be at work: it was easy for me to keep a regular schedule.
I'm not as bad anymore. 2 hours of exercise a day makes 24 hour days possible.
ATI was trying to make my Quake3 faster. That's good. They screwed up and hampered my image quality. Innocent mistake while trying to make my life better.
nVidia was blatantly cheating by hardcoding viewpoints. That's bad. You can't do that in a real-world driver, so it's blatant and evil.
You can't compare these two incidents. Maybe ATI has done similar things, but they have not been caught at anything as bad as this.
Optimizing a game provides real benefit to me: my game runs faster.
Optimizing a benchmark hurts me: I might be tricked into making a decision based on incorrect information.
All compilers used for SpecINT/FP must be released within 6 months of the benchmark results being contributed. However, they are allowed to put in special options just for the tests, as long as it's available to everybody. They also have code that recognizes special SPEC sequences, but these may also theoretically help random code that just happens to be set up the same way.
ATI was caught optimizing Quake3. In theory, this is a *good* thing. Quake3 is used by a lot of people, and was/is the engine for many of the games that people buy top end video cards for.
I'm sure nVidia does the same thing: new Detonator driver releases have been known to get amazing improvements for specific games.
ATI screwed up by affecting the visual quality. Well, screwing up visual quality would be acceptable if there was a documented setting to turn that particular optimization off, but there wasn't, so public chastisement followed.
In other words, it was an implementation problem. It sucks, but I write software for a living, and I can guarantee that every piece of software I have in the wild has at least one bug.
nVidia was caught optimizing benchmarks. No excuse. A public flaying is in order.
It's not going to be blockbuster selling these things. They want you coming back, as many have pointed out. It's the grocery stores and convenience stores that are set up to sell things once, but aren't set up for the whole rental thing. They're not undercutting an existing business, just adding a new one.
It'd work great for me. I never go to blockbuster. I watch movies once every couple of months, and only when I feel like sitting on my ass for a couple of hours. If I feel that way, I'm not going to be walking a mile to Blockbuster. I used to use PPV, but I cancelled my digital service because the roommate who actually watched TV moved out. I'd pick up a few movies during a grocery or Walmart expedition and let them collect dust on my shelf until I need two hours of mindless & muscle-less entertainment.
"Even when learning about the classic waterfall method in college it was obvious that unit test cases belonged in the design phase before coding. And that's how it's always been on the projects in which I was involved."
But that's not test first programming. Test first programming XP style is more like "test simultaneously" programming.
Typically, you write one unit test before you code a unit, then you write several more afterwards. The tests verify you coded what you thought you coded, no more, no less. They don't say anything about whether or not you coded what the project needed to be coded: those are functional tests, and they should be written during design, whether waterfall or XP methodology.
The biggest reasons to write unit tests are all ancillary, they're great documentation, they make refactoring easy, and they ensure that nobody else @#%s up your code.
Dumping my Treo to get a Zaurus...
on
Zaurus 5600 Announced
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As a long-time Palm user, I used to think that PalmOS was the way to go for an Organizer: tons of apps available, all optimized to be simple, as few clicks as possible to do what you want. With a black and white model, your battery lasts forever, which is more important than colour anyways.
Then I got a Handspring Treo. At first it was awesome. Now I was only carrying around a single device, which was smaller the cell phone it replaced, not to mention the Palm. One device, and it fit in my pocket. Added bonus was the integration of my contacts list. Of course, all the apps were originally designed to work with a pen rather than a keyboard, so they were no longer optimally designed, but I still prefered the keyboard to Graffiti.
Then I hooked up GPRS Internet. Suddenly PalmOS didn not seem so hot anymore. When you're on the internet, you want a real computer, period. PalmOS has about 8 different email programs. They all suck for one reason or another, and they all cost real money. SSH sucks. There are a couple of good web browsers, considering, but they're slow and can't do a lot of things.
It really reminds me of 1993 when I was running Linux with SLiRP and it's predecessors giving me real internet access and the windows users were using ProComm or something and only got a single command prompt.
Well, I've only got slightly less than a thousand, but I've started the process of backing mine up.
So far I've had:
3 CD's with scratches on them making a good song unplayable on many players. 2 CD's gone missing. 1 CD left at an ex-girlfriend's house, and I don't have the guts to go get it back.
But mainly, I keep my CD's in a highly portable manner (in 100 - 200 CD folders) and carry them around all over. If one of them goes walking, I'd rather have backups than having to search every pawn shop in town....
And include me in that 60 percent. If I purchase Cable TV, a novel or a newspaper, I'm buying it for the whole family, just not for myself. Why should a CD be any different? And if two separate copies makes it easier to share with the family, I'll make two copies. Apple obviously agrees: Mac OSX upgrade is a "family license".
If local businesses are charged taxes and mail order businesses aren't, this is a non-level playing ground, which is in inefficiency in the system, which is bad for the consumer.
Many people have mentioned that they bought over the internet because they didn't have to pay tax, but they otherwise would have purchased locally. Purchasing locally you get to visually inspect the merchandise, which is a benefit to you, but one that you are not willing to pay X% for.
But somebody has to pay that tax anyways. Basically you all are saying, "let's take that tax out of the pockets of the technically incompetent instead." Why not just lobby for a special tax break for Slashdot readers and get it over with?
Of course, you Slashdot people also like it because it's a special subsidy for web merchants. Of course, you're free to whine when your tax money is going to any other special interest business. How about a subsidy for Microsoft? It may well be the most successful racket anybody has going to transfer money from the rest of the world to the United States. Surely that's a worthy cause?
The internet has been great for lowering prices: it reduces the cost of information. It'll continue to do so in the future even if a few borderline dot coms go under and a few more bricks and mortar shops do well. pricewatchSanFransisco.com may become more useful than pricewatch, but that's about it. The market for computer hardware is one of the most cutthroat around, and it'll stay that way.
From the Jargon file,...snip... `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense..... snip...
Seems about right to me. "Fatally incompatible" sums it up pretty well.
He sold virtually all of his Canadian newspapers. Izzy Asper bought them. Izzy is even worse than Conrad was: he fired the editor of the Ottawa Citizen because of an editorial stance, for instance. But since Izzy Asper is a left-wing friend of the establishment and Jean Chretian, nobody complains about him the same way they did about Mr Black, who gave up his Canadian citizenship in a fight with Mr Chretian over his knighthood.
'But to state "there are no limits" is to state nonsense.'
The only limit is the energy content of the universe. And we're so far away from that there are no limits.
Sure, there are limits to traditional irrigation practices, but who cares? He's already specified something else that is far from hitting a limit, which you completely ignored. If you filled Arizona with greenhouses, you could feed the entire world. The only reason we haven't done that yet is because we haven't needed to: we've got enough food to feed everybody, starvation is a distribution problem.
Bryan
may actually be more environmentally friendly...
on
Jet Turbine Locomotives
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Unfortunately, this train doesn't really address that issue very well, as it still uses fossil fuel"
Actually, it addresses it very well. With the JetTrain, you have a fossil-fuel turbine generating electricity which turn electric motors on the train wheels. With an electric train, you probably have a fossil-fuel turbine generating electricity which turn electric motors on the train wheels.
The JetTrain would use slightly more energy because it has to push a large engine and a big tank of fuel around. It's minimal compared to the weight of the load, though.
An electric train would use massive amounts of energy and resources to build out electric tracks over thousands of miles.
it's a one time versus an ongoing cost.
Compared to SUV's, the savings are fricking massive.
But at some point in time, convergance devices become "good enough" and the benefit of carrying one device outweighs the negative.
Myself, I've got a Treo and I love it. It fits in my pocket (my old Visor didn't, and my old phone was uncomfortable there). Sure, there's things I don't like about it, but it's a heck of a lot better than carrying two gadgets around.
Let's face it, Palm's and phones are mature technologies. The biggest differentiator between two different non-wireless Palms or two different GSM phones is LOOKS. Other differences are minor.
Even if Bluetooth delivered on it's promise, I'd still be using a Treo, because I'd be only carrying around one gadget rather than two.
I can't find this omnibus edition the review is talking about. Amazon has both books seperately, as well as the referenced website, but no omnibus edition. How do I order it?
Preannouncing things is a logical thing to do. Many times I WANT to hear about things before I buy it, so I can plan things out.
But such a preannouncement must contain something like the statement "X will be available on Oct 37th", and it better be available when they say it will be.
But it's usually in the company's best interest not to preannounce: it produces the "Osbourne syndrome". Osbourne went bankrupt because nobody bought the Osbourne 1 while they were waiting for the amazing new Osbourne 2 to come out.
And the biggest news: they're calling it the 2600 when it would have been called the 2700 under their old scheme. In the meantime Intel has increased their cache size and FSB speed, so calling it a 2700 would have been a disservice to the customer. They seem to be committed to integrity in the PR rating scheme. Imagine that, a marketing program with integrity. What's next, icicles in Hades?
Hopefully they can undo the damage that Cyrix did, releasing a "PR400" part that was 400 only when compared to a theoretical Pentium with a FSB of 66MHz running Doom, but only had about the performance of a 266Mhz P2 running Quake, which would have made a much more reasonable comparison for the time period.
For a much better discussion of the subject, check out JC's.
Slashdot Mirror
CF is for IO expansion. At least on the Zaurus, typically you'd put memory in the SD slot and an 802.11B or Bluetooth in the CF slot. You can get SD 802.11B or Bluetooth cards, so maybe they'd be better off with 2 SD slots, but I'm dubious: most CF IO cards are slightly bigger than the slot, I'd hate to see you much an SD IO card protudes.
Bryan
Patenting and enforcing the patent on your idea is the best way to throw the indivdual inventor out of business.
You can't build anything today without infringing on patents. There's millions of them out there: if you make anything, I guarantee you're stepping on somebody's patent somewhere.
But as a little guy, the big guys will ignore your infringement on their stuff. Most big guys work in defensive mode only.
But if you threaten them, they pull out their massive portfolio and lawyer you to death.
The only way to make money as an individual patentor is to patent something obvious and then not build it. Since you're not building anything, you're not infringing. It has to be obvious so that somebody will infringe sometime. Then you sue them.
You win a little, the lawyers win a lot, and society loses big time.
Bryan
5. post being criticized gets modded down, everybody else making the same mistake with less intelligent posts gets modded up.
Bryan
Considering that I'm having trouble keeping the two apart during the discussion, you definitely have a good point.
If you love one, you'll love the other.
However, they are very different books, both with some very cool concepts, and a good detective story.
It's probably just that I read too much and things get jumbled together in my brain. I read for pleasure, and don't retain much. (Which is cool, I can reread good books many times and they don't get old...)
Bryan
Copying is very much illegal, but is an integral plot point. The rich & powerful & kinky use it to good effect.
But it's not central to the story: it's a detective story. I think you'd enjoy it.
1. Read headline
2. Make reasonable comments on the headline, saying "I disagree, here's why".
3. (Score:5, Insightful)
4. read posts pointing out that you actually probably agree with the article.
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have realized that the author agrees with you that nice graphics or an involved, non-interactive plotline do not make a good game.
thank you,
Bryan
I once had a cool job where I was able to switch to a 28 hour day. 28*6=24*7, so I had a regular schedule. They were ecstatic, they knew exactly when I'd be at work: it was easy for me to keep a regular schedule.
I'm not as bad anymore. 2 hours of exercise a day makes 24 hour days possible.
Bryan
It's not the same.
ATI was trying to make my Quake3 faster. That's good. They screwed up and hampered my image quality. Innocent mistake while trying to make my life better.
nVidia was blatantly cheating by hardcoding viewpoints. That's bad. You can't do that in a real-world driver, so it's blatant and evil.
You can't compare these two incidents. Maybe ATI has done similar things, but they have not been caught at anything as bad as this.
Bryan
Optimizing a game provides real benefit to me: my game runs faster.
Optimizing a benchmark hurts me: I might be tricked into making a decision based on incorrect information.
All compilers used for SpecINT/FP must be released within 6 months of the benchmark results being contributed. However, they are allowed to put in special options just for the tests, as long as it's available to everybody. They also have code that recognizes special SPEC sequences, but these may also theoretically help random code that just happens to be set up the same way.
Bryan
ATI was caught optimizing Quake3. In theory, this is a *good* thing. Quake3 is used by a lot of people, and was/is the engine for many of the games that people buy top end video cards for.
I'm sure nVidia does the same thing: new Detonator driver releases have been known to get amazing improvements for specific games.
ATI screwed up by affecting the visual quality. Well, screwing up visual quality would be acceptable if there was a documented setting to turn that particular optimization off, but there wasn't, so public chastisement followed.
In other words, it was an implementation problem. It sucks, but I write software for a living, and I can guarantee that every piece of software I have in the wild has at least one bug.
nVidia was caught optimizing benchmarks. No excuse. A public flaying is in order.
Bryan
It's not going to be blockbuster selling these things. They want you coming back, as many have pointed out. It's the grocery stores and convenience stores that are set up to sell things once, but aren't set up for the whole rental thing. They're not undercutting an existing business, just adding a new one.
It'd work great for me. I never go to blockbuster. I watch movies once every couple of months, and only when I feel like sitting on my ass for a couple of hours. If I feel that way, I'm not going to be walking a mile to Blockbuster. I used to use PPV, but I cancelled my digital service because the roommate who actually watched TV moved out. I'd pick up a few movies during a grocery or Walmart expedition and let them collect dust on my shelf until I need two hours of mindless & muscle-less entertainment.
"Even when learning about the classic waterfall method in college it was obvious that unit test cases belonged in the design phase before coding. And that's how it's always been on the projects in which I was involved."
But that's not test first programming. Test first programming XP style is more like "test simultaneously" programming.
Typically, you write one unit test before you code a unit, then you write several more afterwards. The tests verify you coded what you thought you coded, no more, no less. They don't say anything about whether or not you coded what the project needed to be coded: those are functional tests, and they should be written during design, whether waterfall or XP methodology.
The biggest reasons to write unit tests are all ancillary, they're great documentation, they make refactoring easy, and they ensure that nobody else @#%s up your code.
As a long-time Palm user, I used to think that PalmOS was the way to go for an Organizer: tons of apps available, all optimized to be simple, as few clicks as possible to do what you want. With a black and white model, your battery lasts forever, which is more important than colour anyways.
Then I got a Handspring Treo. At first it was awesome. Now I was only carrying around a single device, which was smaller the cell phone it replaced, not to mention the Palm. One device, and it fit in my pocket. Added bonus was the integration of my contacts list. Of course, all the apps were originally designed to work with a pen rather than a keyboard, so they were no longer optimally designed, but I still prefered the keyboard to Graffiti.
Then I hooked up GPRS Internet. Suddenly PalmOS didn not seem so hot anymore. When you're on the internet, you want a real computer, period. PalmOS has about 8 different email programs. They all suck for one reason or another, and they all cost real money. SSH sucks. There are a couple of good web browsers, considering, but they're slow and can't do a lot of things.
It really reminds me of 1993 when I was running Linux with SLiRP and it's predecessors giving me real internet access and the windows users were using ProComm or something and only got a single command prompt.
Bryan
Well, I've only got slightly less than a thousand, but I've started the process of backing mine up.
So far I've had:
3 CD's with scratches on them making a good song unplayable on many players.
2 CD's gone missing.
1 CD left at an ex-girlfriend's house, and I don't have the guts to go get it back.
But mainly, I keep my CD's in a highly portable manner (in 100 - 200 CD folders) and carry them around all over. If one of them goes walking, I'd rather have backups than having to search every pawn shop in town....
And include me in that 60 percent. If I purchase Cable TV, a novel or a newspaper, I'm buying it for the whole family, just not for myself. Why should a CD be any different? And if two separate copies makes it easier to share with the family, I'll make two copies. Apple obviously agrees: Mac OSX upgrade is a "family license".
Bryan
If local businesses are charged taxes and mail order businesses aren't, this is a non-level playing ground, which is in inefficiency in the system, which is bad for the consumer.
Many people have mentioned that they bought over the internet because they didn't have to pay tax, but they otherwise would have purchased locally. Purchasing locally you get to visually inspect the merchandise, which is a benefit to you, but one that you are not willing to pay X% for.
But somebody has to pay that tax anyways. Basically you all are saying, "let's take that tax out of the pockets of the technically incompetent instead." Why not just lobby for a special tax break for Slashdot readers and get it over with?
Of course, you Slashdot people also like it because it's a special subsidy for web merchants. Of course, you're free to whine when your tax money is going to any other special interest business. How about a subsidy for Microsoft? It may well be the most successful racket anybody has going to transfer money from the rest of the world to the United States. Surely that's a worthy cause?
The internet has been great for lowering prices: it reduces the cost of information. It'll continue to do so in the future even if a few borderline dot coms go under and a few more bricks and mortar shops do well. pricewatchSanFransisco.com may become more useful than pricewatch, but that's about it. The market for computer hardware is one of the most cutthroat around, and it'll stay that way.
Bryan
From the Jargon file, ...snip... `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. .... snip ...
Seems about right to me. "Fatally incompatible" sums it up pretty well.
He sold virtually all of his Canadian newspapers. Izzy Asper bought them. Izzy is even worse than Conrad was: he fired the editor of the Ottawa Citizen because of an editorial stance, for instance. But since Izzy Asper is a left-wing friend of the establishment and Jean Chretian, nobody complains about him the same way they did about Mr Black, who gave up his Canadian citizenship in a fight with Mr Chretian over his knighthood.
Bryan
'But to state "there are no limits" is to state nonsense.'
The only limit is the energy content of the universe. And we're so far away from that there are no limits.
Sure, there are limits to traditional irrigation practices, but who cares? He's already specified something else that is far from hitting a limit, which you completely ignored. If you filled Arizona with greenhouses, you could feed the entire world. The only reason we haven't done that yet is because we haven't needed to: we've got enough food to feed everybody, starvation is a distribution problem.
Bryan
"Unfortunately, this train doesn't really address that issue very well, as it still uses fossil fuel"
Actually, it addresses it very well. With the JetTrain, you have a fossil-fuel turbine generating electricity which turn electric motors on the train wheels. With an electric train, you probably have a fossil-fuel turbine generating electricity which turn electric motors on the train wheels.
The JetTrain would use slightly more energy because it has to push a large engine and a big tank of fuel around. It's minimal compared to the weight of the load, though.
An electric train would use massive amounts of energy and resources to build out electric tracks over thousands of miles.
it's a one time versus an ongoing cost.
Compared to SUV's, the savings are fricking massive.
Bryan
But at some point in time, convergance devices become "good enough" and the benefit of carrying one device outweighs the negative.
Myself, I've got a Treo and I love it. It fits in my pocket (my old Visor didn't, and my old phone was uncomfortable there). Sure, there's things I don't like about it, but it's a heck of a lot better than carrying two gadgets around.
Let's face it, Palm's and phones are mature technologies. The biggest differentiator between two different non-wireless Palms or two different GSM phones is LOOKS. Other differences are minor.
Even if Bluetooth delivered on it's promise, I'd still be using a Treo, because I'd be only carrying around one gadget rather than two.
Bryan
"Or maybe this gets even easier, as you say, with bluetooth"
Exactly. Bluetooth is "cable replacement". The point of bluetooth is that it is your hardware interconnect standard.
You can buy bluetooth earpieces, for example.
Bryan
I can't find this omnibus edition the review is talking about. Amazon has both books seperately, as well as the referenced website, but no omnibus edition. How do I order it?
Bryan
I can with mine, but I might have had to buy some more batteries at the corner store.
My used mini-laptop is a Tandy Model 100.
Bryan
Sorry, I disagree.
Preannouncing things is a logical thing to do. Many times I WANT to hear about things before I buy it, so I can plan things out.
But such a preannouncement must contain something like the statement "X will be available on Oct 37th", and it better be available when they say it will be.
But it's usually in the company's best interest not to preannounce: it produces the "Osbourne syndrome". Osbourne went bankrupt because nobody bought the Osbourne 1 while they were waiting for the amazing new Osbourne 2 to come out.
Bryan
Hopefully they can undo the damage that Cyrix did, releasing a "PR400" part that was 400 only when compared to a theoretical Pentium with a FSB of 66MHz running Doom, but only had about the performance of a 266Mhz P2 running Quake, which would have made a much more reasonable comparison for the time period.
For a much better discussion of the subject, check out JC's.
Bryan