Jerry Farwell is a cyborg, the little old nun you see on late night cable is actually an Aibo in a brown sheet, and George Bush is a terminator from T2. _______________
I've been the happy user of a Nokia 6000 series for over 2 years now. The battery life is great (especially with the big battery), and the voice quality is ok. The problem with all these tiny digital phones is that they're not 3Watt phones.
For those of you who have never had a 3W phone installed ina car with a great antenee, you don't know what you're missing. There's nothing clear about digital phones except the money it makes for the provider.
I see comercials on TV using word like "Crystal Clear" and "Digital Clarity" and I just have to laugh. They all use less than 3W of power, and the quality suffers as a result.
So get whatever phone you want, but take a trial period, carry it around for a week or 2 and make sure the coverage is good. As a previous poster said, it's all about coverage, if they ain't got it, you ain't dialin'. _______________
from the knowing-your-OS dept. Money__ asks: "Since there are now so many different flavors of Windows out there (1.0, 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2K , etc...) what do they all have in common that lets these all be called Windows? Programs written for one flavor of Windows typically cannot be ported to another without considerable effort. The features offered by the different implementations vary widely: some are more secure than others, some cluster better than others, some offer journaling file systems, some are more robust. The differences between the different kinds of Windows seem to be as great as the differences between any particular implementation and other OSs. Could one port all the standard GUI utilities to GNOME, clone one or two of the popular GUI features, set up the directory structure in the standard Windows layout and call it WINDOWS/UNIX?"
You bring up some interesting points. If you do all the design work ahead of time using virtual legos, and then make your finished solid part on a stereo lithography machine, it could work and here's why.
When the UV laser fires down into a liquid bath of resin, it hardens that liquid into a solid (usually to a depth of appx..010 of an inch). By programing the laser to move around and, changing the depth of the bath, you can harden the liquid resin into a hard plastic of any shape.
The slicing software used in todays machines makes a series of "3D latices" in each layer that it cures. These cross-beams inside the part lower the curing time (by lowering the surface area that the laser has to harden) without giving up part strength.
The end result is, if you ask the machine to make a solid brick, it won't make it solid. The inside of the brick will look like a 3D honey-comb.
I've personaly made some molds that make Logo, conectix (and countless other "toys of the year" that don't make it past prototype).
The only missing link in your idea is a means to make the open sourced lego CAD data into an actual lego. Currently, they're running in 24 and 36 out Plastic Injection Molds . These machines are the size of a buss and the price of a few sports cars and not exactly a "desktop solution" for turning open sourced lego CAD data into a viable part.
If you're interested, there is a process called stereo lithography that can "grow" your custom designed lego parts using a UV laser to cure a resin. This process can be had for a little better cost (~50k-100k). The definition and consistancy (they wouldn't snap together, they would 'mush' together) isn't nearly as good as you would get with the presure and heat being used in a PIM, but it could work.
There is a similar rapid proto-typing process that uses a powder sprayed from a inc-jet printer nozzel that hardens after being sprayed. The kewl thing is, you just add water, and your lego crumbles, allowing you to re-use the powder. This makes for a rather weak structure, but it's even more cost effective. ~25-50k.
If more work can be done to the Stereo Lithography process to bring the cost of ownership down, and some material research to increace rigidity, it could be your very own lego factory. _________________________
Re:It's only an operating system, folks. Admittedly a fairly crappy one, but it's not actually the antichrist, AIDS, and a stubbed toe rolled into one.
It's all that and more. w2k is a nastly little ball of mouse traps waiting to be triped, with no source. Oh!, and I would add "infected toe" to the list.
And if you're going to bash it, your words will carry more weight if you at least give a token nod in the general direction of honesty.
micros~1 spends millions each quarted blabing how wonderful their little progies are. I see/. as equal time.
Our little (and ever growing)/. is hub for good honest people with hands on expierience. I value their opinion and respect their strength when their willing to tell the truth. _________________________
HDs and RAM is where Suns high margin is. I can understand (from a finacial point of view) why they would want to keep their profit center up.
What I don't agree with is their tactics of using patents to try and keep Kingston at bay. They should be looking for value in the product, not the courts. _________________________
Re:I'm paying *you* to be "clued-in"
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
Re:If I need to check my syntax, I have reference books within easy reach. If I need help paring down the code or figuring out an algorithm, there are people I can email, mailing lists and newsgroups, search engines, etc... If I need quick answers, there's always IRC (or ICQ if someone clued-in happens to be on)."
Taking the perspective of your boss for a moment, I'm paying *you* good money to be "clued in". If you're constantly asking script kiddies you meet at random how to do you're job, I'll search the IRC logs and hire the script kidie at 1/2 your salary and ask you to try on the hat you'll be wearing at the local BK drive-thru. _________________________
Re:Calulators in math class
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
I have 3:) They all belonged to my father and are not for sale (they even has scratches and notches in the locations he used a lot). As they serve no practicle purpose today, I keep them more for sentimental reasons that for anything else. If you really want one, start biding at: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPIC ommand=GetResult&ht=1&query=slide+ruler& SortProperty=MetaEndSort
(Am I the only one that sees the irony in the need to use a distrubeted world wide network to aquire even the most basic tools around?):) _________________________
Re:== Cheating. Humans as IO ports?
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 2
Do you want to me just another IO port on your network? Just another printer port?
A) Reading text off the sreen is not a skill (I have software that will do that).
B) C&Ping text from one document to another is not a skill, (I can do that)
C) Figuring out how to quickly find data is not a skill. (I have search engines that will do that).
D)Organizing and filing this information is not a skill. (I have a database do that).
If you really want to set your sights on achieving such resume' items such as Google master, and Dogpile guru you're setting your sights to low, and people won't pay well for those services.
What companies need is people who have a deep understanding of the issues challenging the company, and how to take the next step with confidence. This requires a person to work well with a team to provide intuative answers everyday, all day, off the top of your head in order to form and consesis and build enough confidence to move forward.
If you're asked questions by your fellow co-workers and are constantly refering to a web site for trivial answers on the topic you've majored in, then you're selling me on the web site, not yourself. What the company would need to do, in that case, is get the team access to the sites you're refering to and stop wasting time asking you questions. _________________________
Calulators in math class
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 5
I can vividly remember my father (who was a slide-rule toting engineer) being utterly discusted with my school when they asked parents to buy their kids a calculator for math class. I even remember my father taking me down to meet one on one with the math teacher, and my dad getting up on the board to show the teacher a thing or 2 about the subject he was teaching, then going on to argue that the subject of math requires not only the solution, but the means of acquiring that solution.
Interestingly, one of the other students in the class took it uppon himself to memorize the button locations on his calculator that produced the desired result. When his calculator broke and was replaced with a new one (one of those old TIs with the row of red numbers) he was lost, and had to learn the interface all over again. The problem there was, he was concentrating on the answer instead of the process (the what, not the why).
The same problem still exists today with the use of internet gateways in the learning process. It can speed things up a lot, but the emphisis should be on the content, not the means of aquireing it. Supose little johnny builds himself a well anotated bookmark file of content rich sites that provide him with the answeres being posed in the class. This may get him through the semester, but without understanding the relationship between those answeres (the why behind the what) nothing is learnd. Sure, little johny has learned how to query his favorite search engine and filter content, but after graduation, when he's asked one day to come up with a presentation on the subject he's majored in from a hotel room, with no net access, the depth of his understanding will be tested.
Everyday, little johny will be relied upon from his co-workers as a source of knowledge on the topic he majored on. Being able to provide the team with the answers they need (on the fly, every day, all day )is a the key to a successfull team. _________________________
They have always been a fantastic source for unbiased and acurate reporting on computer trends from the hobby days of computing up to present day world-wide distrubution on the web.
Any platform, any language, any diciplin, Byte has always been an interesting and informative read for many many people in the IT field. I miss the articles, and I miss the unbiased insights. I still have my "wall-o-Byte" archive on the bottom row of my bookshelf and would like to continue adding more print editions in the future. What does it take to publish a magazine these days? _________________________
Regarding your comments:"We can put a final and permanent stop to "intellectual property" in the United States, by means of a Constitutional amendment banning the very idea of IP forever."
You Da Man Literaly In the following example, you're the man who makes decisions at a company called XYZ. You da CEO.
Your company has been wracked with 2 unprofitable quarters in a row, and cutbacks (layoffs/downsizing) seem like the only way to keep the company afloat. The tteam you assembled to help you with the problem is recomending you start by firing some of the research staff.
You hesitate, of course, because you're an engineer yourself and still have a lot of friends in research that you don't want to see go hungry.
Then, one day, like a gift from above, the same research team you were considering laying off makes a startling presentation. They've been working on a new process that would allow you lower your price to the consumer by 25%. All they ask is 2 more years of research dollars to complete the task.
The problem is, with the recently passed "Freedom from IP" act, you have no garantee you will ever see one thin dime out of the 2 years of research you're about to fund. You fight to keep your engineers by taking the idea to your board, but they vote you down because they know that without protection for intelectual investment, the company will never see any return on the 2 year investment.
You're company sinks further into debt, and your forced to layoff your team of engineers.
You're not the man anymore.
This is just one small example of why IP exists and why it's a good thing for help research move forward. _________________________
we're just seeing its remnants thrash about cluelessly. when does anyone ever recall zurk saying anything usefull in his posts. unfortunately the drive is lost and the budgets going down the tube - anyone else wanna volunteer to replace zurk? _________________________
micros~1 spends millions each quarter slamming their message in my face about how wonderful their pithy little products are. I see/. as equal time.
Our humble little/. is only a tiny little blip compared to the mountian of marketing garbage that micros~1 spews out every day. I, for one, welcome the editorializing about micros~1 in order to have a balanced opinion of the facts.
Where can I turn to find real-world, hands-on evaluations of micros~1 products? MS? ummmm no. They're so in love with their stock options you hear actual ms "product managers" using phrases like 'this __DOS2.1-DOS3.0-Win1.0-Win3.0-MsBOB-WinCE___ is an exciting new paradigm shift'.
The best anology I can think of is watching your network evening news (liberal) and tuning into Rush (conservative). Neither may be perfect, but by sampling content from both sources, I get to decide what's signal and what's noise.
The problem is that you're so conditioned to reading the "ZDnet ms press release" on a daily basis that this is the first time you're hearing "The emperor has no clothes". _________________________
Slashdot Mirror
Jerry Farwell is a cyborg, the little old nun you see on late night cable is actually an Aibo in a brown sheet, and George Bush is a terminator from T2.
_______________
Am I the only one who danced a little jig when reading this?
_______________
For those of you who have never had a 3W phone installed ina car with a great antenee, you don't know what you're missing. There's nothing clear about digital phones except the money it makes for the provider.
I see comercials on TV using word like "Crystal Clear" and "Digital Clarity" and I just have to laugh. They all use less than 3W of power, and the quality suffers as a result.
So get whatever phone you want, but take a trial period, carry it around for a week or 2 and make sure the coverage is good. As a previous poster said, it's all about coverage, if they ain't got it, you ain't dialin'.
_______________
My interpretation of the saying is look in yourself before judging others.
_______________
It's like a drunk making fun of Budweiser while finishing off the last drop in his 40oz bud.
_______________
In this age of unlimited interconnectivity, it's amazing what we consider "Old News" these days.
_________________________
The picture Phat dady Linux is here: http://www.twomobile.com/images/new_032400_linux_r apper_large.jpg
_________________________
Money__ asks: "Since there are now so many different flavors of Windows out there (1.0, 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2K , etc...) what do they all have in common that lets these all be called Windows? Programs written for one flavor of Windows typically cannot be ported to another without considerable effort. The features offered by the different implementations vary widely: some are more secure than others, some cluster better than others, some offer journaling file systems, some are more robust. The differences between the different kinds of Windows seem to be as great as the differences between any particular implementation and other OSs. Could one port all the standard GUI utilities to GNOME, clone one or two of the popular GUI features, set up the directory structure in the standard Windows layout and call it WINDOWS/UNIX?"
Hmmmmmm
_________________________
For a real-ime track of every little zippy thing cruising the planet, point your Java enabled browser at:http://liftoff.msfc.n asa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/3D/JTrack3D.html
_________________________
You bring up some interesting points. If you do all the design work ahead of time using virtual legos, and then make your finished solid part on a stereo lithography machine, it could work and here's why.
When the UV laser fires down into a liquid bath of resin, it hardens that liquid into a solid (usually to a depth of appx. .010 of an inch). By programing the laser to move around and, changing the depth of the bath, you can harden the liquid resin into a hard plastic of any shape.
The slicing software used in todays machines makes a series of "3D latices" in each layer that it cures. These cross-beams inside the part lower the curing time (by lowering the surface area that the laser has to harden) without giving up part strength.
The end result is, if you ask the machine to make a solid brick, it won't make it solid. The inside of the brick will look like a 3D honey-comb.
_________________________
Dyson spheres need great big walls
To keep the world from spilling out
They make them out of buckyballs
And use gravitons for grout
_________________________
Did he read a story to his shell theory before tucking it into bed?
"Good night F = (GMm/2R)(1/2r^2)[sqrt(R^2-r^2+2ru)-(r^2-R^2)/sqrt( R^2- r^2+2ru)]_{r-R}^{r+R} "
_________________________
The only missing link in your idea is a means to make the open sourced lego CAD data into an actual lego. Currently, they're running in 24 and 36 out Plastic Injection Molds . These machines are the size of a buss and the price of a few sports cars and not exactly a "desktop solution" for turning open sourced lego CAD data into a viable part.
If you're interested, there is a process called stereo lithography that can "grow" your custom designed lego parts using a UV laser to cure a resin. This process can be had for a little better cost (~50k-100k). The definition and consistancy (they wouldn't snap together, they would 'mush' together) isn't nearly as good as you would get with the presure and heat being used in a PIM, but it could work.
There is a similar rapid proto-typing process that uses a powder sprayed from a inc-jet printer nozzel that hardens after being sprayed. The kewl thing is, you just add water, and your lego crumbles, allowing you to re-use the powder. This makes for a rather weak structure, but it's even more cost effective. ~25-50k.
If more work can be done to the Stereo Lithography process to bring the cost of ownership down, and some material research to increace rigidity, it could be your very own lego factory.
_________________________
It's all that and more. w2k is a nastly little ball of mouse traps waiting to be triped, with no source. Oh!, and I would add "infected toe" to the list.
And if you're going to bash it, your words will carry more weight if you at least give a token nod in the general direction of honesty.
micros~1 spends millions each quarted blabing how wonderful their little progies are. I see /. as equal time.
Our little (and ever growing) /. is hub for good honest people with hands on expierience. I value their opinion and respect their strength when their willing to tell the truth.
_________________________
What I don't agree with is their tactics of using patents to try and keep Kingston at bay. They should be looking for value in the product, not the courts.
_________________________
Taking the perspective of your boss for a moment, I'm paying *you* good money to be "clued in". If you're constantly asking script kiddies you meet at random how to do you're job, I'll search the IRC logs and hire the script kidie at 1/2 your salary and ask you to try on the hat you'll be wearing at the local BK drive-thru.
_________________________
(Am I the only one that sees the irony in the need to use a distrubeted world wide network to aquire even the most basic tools around?) :)
_________________________
A) Reading text off the sreen is not a skill (I have software that will do that).
B) C&Ping text from one document to another is not a skill, (I can do that)
C) Figuring out how to quickly find data is not a skill. (I have search engines that will do that).
D)Organizing and filing this information is not a skill. (I have a database do that).
If you really want to set your sights on achieving such resume' items such as Google master, and Dogpile guru you're setting your sights to low, and people won't pay well for those services.
What companies need is people who have a deep understanding of the issues challenging the company, and how to take the next step with confidence. This requires a person to work well with a team to provide intuative answers everyday, all day, off the top of your head in order to form and consesis and build enough confidence to move forward.
If you're asked questions by your fellow co-workers and are constantly refering to a web site for trivial answers on the topic you've majored in, then you're selling me on the web site, not yourself. What the company would need to do, in that case, is get the team access to the sites you're refering to and stop wasting time asking you questions.
_________________________
Interestingly, one of the other students in the class took it uppon himself to memorize the button locations on his calculator that produced the desired result. When his calculator broke and was replaced with a new one (one of those old TIs with the row of red numbers) he was lost, and had to learn the interface all over again. The problem there was, he was concentrating on the answer instead of the process (the what, not the why).
The same problem still exists today with the use of internet gateways in the learning process. It can speed things up a lot, but the emphisis should be on the content, not the means of aquireing it. Supose little johnny builds himself a well anotated bookmark file of content rich sites that provide him with the answeres being posed in the class. This may get him through the semester, but without understanding the relationship between those answeres (the why behind the what) nothing is learnd. Sure, little johny has learned how to query his favorite search engine and filter content, but after graduation, when he's asked one day to come up with a presentation on the subject he's majored in from a hotel room, with no net access, the depth of his understanding will be tested.
Everyday, little johny will be relied upon from his co-workers as a source of knowledge on the topic he majored on. Being able to provide the team with the answers they need (on the fly, every day, all day )is a the key to a successfull team.
_________________________
They have always been a fantastic source for unbiased and acurate reporting on computer trends from the hobby days of computing up to present day world-wide distrubution on the web.
Any platform, any language, any diciplin, Byte has always been an interesting and informative read for many many people in the IT field. I miss the articles, and I miss the unbiased insights. I still have my "wall-o-Byte" archive on the bottom row of my bookshelf and would like to continue adding more print editions in the future. What does it take to publish a magazine these days?
_________________________
You Da Man
Literaly
In the following example, you're the man who makes decisions at a company called XYZ. You da CEO.
Your company has been wracked with 2 unprofitable quarters in a row, and cutbacks (layoffs/downsizing) seem like the only way to keep the company afloat. The tteam you assembled to help you with the problem is recomending you start by firing some of the research staff.
You hesitate, of course, because you're an engineer yourself and still have a lot of friends in research that you don't want to see go hungry.
Then, one day, like a gift from above, the same research team you were considering laying off makes a startling presentation. They've been working on a new process that would allow you lower your price to the consumer by 25%. All they ask is 2 more years of research dollars to complete the task.
The problem is, with the recently passed "Freedom from IP" act, you have no garantee you will ever see one thin dime out of the 2 years of research you're about to fund. You fight to keep your engineers by taking the idea to your board, but they vote you down because they know that without protection for intelectual investment, the company will never see any return on the 2 year investment.
You're company sinks further into debt, and your forced to layoff your team of engineers.
You're not the man anymore.
This is just one small example of why IP exists and why it's a good thing for help research move forward.
_________________________
I agree that HTML should be used where and when ever posible, but PDF fills a need nothing else can.
_________________________
1982: 1200 bps
1986: 2400 bps
1991: 9600 bps
1992: 14.4 Kbps
1996: 28.8 Kbps
1998: 50.0 Kbps
2000: 128.0 Kbps(DLS)
_________________________
we're just seeing its remnants thrash about cluelessly. when does anyone ever recall zurk saying anything usefull in his posts. unfortunately the drive is lost and the budgets going down the tube - anyone else wanna volunteer to replace zurk?
_________________________
Our humble little /. is only a tiny little blip compared to the mountian of marketing garbage that micros~1 spews out every day. I, for one, welcome the editorializing about micros~1 in order to have a balanced opinion of the facts.
Where can I turn to find real-world, hands-on evaluations of micros~1 products? MS? ummmm no. They're so in love with their stock options you hear actual ms "product managers" using phrases like 'this __DOS2.1-DOS3.0-Win1.0-Win3.0-MsBOB-WinCE___ is an exciting new paradigm shift'.
The best anology I can think of is watching your network evening news (liberal) and tuning into Rush (conservative). Neither may be perfect, but by sampling content from both sources, I get to decide what's signal and what's noise.
The problem is that you're so conditioned to reading the "ZDnet ms press release" on a daily basis that this is the first time you're hearing "The emperor has no clothes".
_________________________