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User: Fnkmaster

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  1. Re:This Is For on iPod Your BMW Officially Launched · · Score: 2, Funny
    Yeah those yuppie bastards, oppressing us with their corporate whoring.


    All I want to know is, will this work with my 2003 M3 (they don't have the M's listed)? If so, I'm getting an iPod, baby! :)

  2. Re:I did... on Networking in the Danger Zone? · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Agreed with the others, the comparison between Johannesburg and Baghdad just doesn't hold water. My good friend is in Iraq right now, working for the CPA, about to start working for the US Embassy. One of the guys in his office (Ministry of Interior, CPA), a 22 year old kid, was hit 4 or 5 times and almost killed a week or two ago when his SUV was shot up as he returned to the Green Zone. Several others have had "near misses", and they have incoming artillery or rockets to the palace compound every day or two. When they leave the GZ, they wear full body armor and tote assault rifles. Several people to an SUV, rifles hanging out the windows, safeties flicked off when a suspicious car gets too close.


    I've been in some crappy neighborhoods, had friends mugged or beaten up, here in New York, when I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, and so on. These places can be dangerous, and I've heard Johannesburg, Mexico City and the lot can be much worse. And actually, aside from 9-11, I haven't known anybody who's died by an act of random violence in New York, and I don't even know anybody that's been robbed or mugged since Giuliani was elected mayor. In any case, there's dangerous, then there's just fucking crazy.

  3. Re:I love it on SpaceShipOne to Try for Space on Monday · · Score: 1

    ... and raise or supply himself a whole buttload of cash. Never underestimate the importance of the money.

  4. Re:Reuters: You Fail It! on France Considers Open Source · · Score: 1
    "Copyleft" isn't the only potentially confusing term. "Free Software" itself is a potentially confusing term, especially when spoken to journalists in phone interviews and the like, where the distinction between "Free" and "free" isn't clear. Richard Stallman, whatever you may think about him, clearly isn't good at packaging or marketing concepts in a way that will communicate effectively with regular people.


    "Open Source" may not be a perfect term, because it doesn't distinguish between the right to just look at the source, and actually change it (of course, OSI-compliant means much more than just looking at code, just as Free means much more than just free). But it's ludicrous that RMS has been known to attack the Open Source camp with ridicule about how "Shared Source" and the like are just doing exactly what the Open Source people tell them is important.


    It seems that some better, more appealing and more clear terminology is needed. I'm sick of "Free as in beer", "Free as in herpes", "Free as in Freedom", "Free as in libre"... jesus christ, this is confusing for me and I know what I'm talking about. No wonder the journalists get screwed up.

  5. Re:Another waste of money on Moon Rocket Scrubbed and Blown Dry · · Score: 1
    Well that sounds nice and all, but do you have any idea what would happen if everybody could just choose to write poetry all day and draw a salary for it? Presumably, society can only afford a certain number of poetry writers - either there has to be a market for their poetry (in books, anthologies, as songs, or something) or they have to find their way into the university system and teach others as well as writing their own poetry.


    I don't think this part of our system is so bad. I do agree with you that forcing people into massive debt so they have no choice but to take jobs in investment banking, management consulting, technology, or go to law school, med school or something. That basically sums up about 80% of my graduating class at Harvard.


    Many of the best and brightest people I knew at Harvard didn't go into academia, though some still have plans to go back in that direction after a while. That's sad - some of these people would have been able to make some really great contributions to humanity, but the financial imperatives of our society exert a lot of pressure. Instead, they will do big deals, move around a lot of money, get big clients and drive nice cars. Hopefully some of them (like me) will start companies that bring new products to market and make peoples lives better in small ways.

  6. Re:Great idea but.... on 'Open Funding' For Driver Development · · Score: 1
    The SD 802.11b problems are power-related - but SD BT draws substantially less power than 802.11b. The consensus seems to be that this isn't a technical blocking issue for SD BT drivers.


    The other issues, I agree with, both the technical issue of getting native ARM drivers (well, that's pretty much the whole issue here), and the political issues of working with PalmOne which has become a nasty little company in many ways.

  7. The odd thing... on 'Open Funding' For Driver Development · · Score: 5, Informative
    I started mildly hacking on this very project about 2 days ago because I was so frustrated by my Treo 600's lack of Bluetooth, when the SDIO Bluetooth cards are right there for a reasonable price, but PalmOne refuses to release OS 5 driver support to avoid cannabalizing sales of their precious high-end OS 5 PDAs with integrated BT. The best starting point I found was this guy's site. Which prompted me to download the bluetooth drivers I could find from PalmSource and the remnants of the PluggedIn program from PalmOne. This segregation of Palm into a hardware and OS company has made it mighty difficult to even get decent developer information these days.


    Anyway, it sounds like Peter Easton at Whizoo has already suggested a starting point - rip the BT drivers from the Tungsten|T and rewrite the Palm OS 4 SD-BT transport layer PRC for ARM/OS 5. If all this driver does is receive calls from the main BT driver and dispatch calls/receive callbacks to/from the documented SD API, then perhaps it's not too difficult to rip it apart and figure out what it's doing and rewrite it? That's a big if of course. I've never really reverse engineered a Palm app myself, though I've done a decent amount of Palm OS programming (games and apps).


    But apparently IDA Pro supports Palm OS and M68k, so that might provide a reasonable route to disassembling the OS 4 transport layer PRC. Anyway, that's about as far as I've gotten with this - if anybody is interested, let me know, I do have some free time right now and I wouldn't mind putting it into solving this rather annoying problem (no, I don't really give a hoot about the bounty, but I'm going to go contribute 50 bucks to it anyway - I'd pay 100 bucks right now just for a copy of a BT driver that let me use my damn Treo 600).

  8. Re:A soul? on Ars Technica Interviews Scott Collins · · Score: 1
    LOL. "Unknown persons"... you mean somebody I gave permission to use my computer to? I understand the concept of account privileges, but it's just not worth the effort with my desktop Windows box that doesn't get used by anybody who doesn't live in this apartment, generally. Like I said, it's happened twice, and it took me far less time to clean up than it would to properly set up a locked down Windows machine. My laptop, on the other hand, I do have set up with a Guest account, since I often let other people use it.


    In any case, I have no interest in acting as a full-time sysadmin on my personal computers. They never get viruses or malware when I use them, which is 99.9% of the time, since I simply don't use IE and know how to avoid such gunk. I just accept that the occasional cleaning out is par for the course if you choose to run Windows on your desktop.

  9. Re:A soul? on Ars Technica Interviews Scott Collins · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Don't forget about the ActiveX "features". The best reason not to use IE is that ActiveX makes it an excellent vector to infest your computer with spyware. Every time I go away for a few weeks, I come back and discover that my roommate's girlfriend has been browsing the web on my computer using IE. At least 2 or 3 of those times, I've found all sorts of malware on the computer that required several Ad-Aware runs and in some cases manual intervention to fully get rid of. Major PITA.


    The real question is what on earth could the reason be to switch back to IE if you're already using Firebird/fox? There are still a couple of annoying bugs that crop up occasionally, but for me, a crash or memory leak that springs every three or four days and requires a browser restart doesn't get in the way of basic usability. Furthermore, I've found that IE has at least as many crasher conditions on my XP box, if not substantially more - it would seem to crash at least once or twice a day when I use it more frequently.

  10. Re:TOS on Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice · · Score: 1
    What you described *is* essentially promissory estoppel, or rather, promissory estoppel is when party B has relied on that promise to their detriment. The problem is here, what the hell is the monetary value of the detriment caused to these people? I guess their personal drivellings will be offline for a few weeks, but in the meantime, they are free to start blogging elsewhere, and after that, they can always import the archived stuff that Mr. Winer gives them back on July 1st. Basically they've lost access to some of their writings for two weeks - the work they are going to, they'd have to do any way since the free service on weblogger.com was coming to an end. I'm sure this is worth something to them, but good luck convincing anybody in a courtroom to care.


    Morally, if the guy is really dealing with personal illness, I feel for him, I have dealt with illness in my family and myself and that sucks - but it doesn't excuse screwing over 3000 people. He should have just posted something saying "hey, the sites may not be working well over the next few days, we need bigger iron to host this stuff, if nobody comes forward in the next week to take over with hardware and labor, I'm going to have to flip the switch off". Or he shouldn't have agreed to host it himself in the first place if he didn't have the interest, hardware or cash to do so and cause people to miss the opportunity for a more orderly transition at an earlier point in time. So I concur with the general opinion that he's pulling a dick move. Clearly despite whatever he says, the site WAS working for most people most of the time prior to today - he could have just handed this stuff off to somebody else, I'm sure somebody would have volunteered to help transition to other hardware if anybody had known what was going on.

  11. Re:java *can* be fast... on Java Faster Than C++? · · Score: 2, Informative
    Yes, EJBs are generally layers of needless cruft. There are lots of perfectly good situations that require distributed systems, and EJBs provide one of the worst models to solve truly partitionable problems and effectively distribute load, and if you just want reliability or failover capabilities, there are plenty of easier ways to get that than using EJBs.


    I agree with you - the only business apps I've seen that really NEEDED C++ were some very tight-loop mathematically intensive things where the 2x-4x performance difference imposed by lots of array bounds-checking became a limiter to performance optimization with the Java VM implementation - and that was easily solved by a small chunk of JNI code implementing the iteration over the arrays.

  12. Re:bottom up growth pattern of FireFox on A Look at the Newly Released Mozilla Firefox 0.9 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Firefox passes the "mom" test. Mom can sit down and use it on my computer without a problem. I'd install it on her computer, but strangely, she has become somewhat attached to Mozilla, and if it ain't broke... All that matters to me is getting family members to stop using IE. No IE == far, far fewer spyware/malware complaints and lengthy phone-based computer fixing sessions.

  13. Re:Quote from the article on Meet Joe Blog · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The only thing worse than Hannity and Colmes themselves is the guests they have on the show - a cadre of conservative intellectuals or at least articulate populists conservatives, and a lone, timid, whiny liberal who barely serves to represent a viewpoint at all. I don't watch the show really, but I've flipped it on for 2 or 3 minutes plenty of times, and this formula always seems to be followed to the T, on pretty much any issue they discuss.


    It's disgraceful that anybody thinks *that* is what liberal people think like, when there are hordes of very bright, well-educated liberal and moderate thinkers out there who would be far better representatives of an opposing viewpoint for the show if they were actually interested in a balanced debate.


    CNN's Crossfire, in comparison, does a pretty decent job of presenting a balance of conservative and liberal points of view. Dunno if there are any other comparable shows that are less terrible than H&C. Fox needs to stop pitching themselves as "Fair and Balanced", it just reinforces the loonies who watch that shit and eat it up into thinking that they are "moderates".

  14. Re:Limited market ... on Are PDAs Simply Finished? · · Score: 1
    You mean people who don't work in jobs that require them to manage lots of contact information, complex schedules, or similar problems don't need PDAs? That's true. But saying that is a limited market is like saying the market for Microsoft Outlook is limited - no, not every home user needs Outlook, but there are millions of businesses and offices around the world that actually need and use the features of Outlook that a regular email client program doesn't have (not saying that Outlook is a good program - it's decidedly mediocre in some ways and downright terrible in others, but lots of people need the contact management, groupware and scheduling features for their offices).


    Not every product needs to have a market of 100% of the population to be successful. And obviously the cross-section of the population that you have experience with sounds like it is teenagers, old-folks (by which I can only guess you mean your parents' age or older), and blue-collar people. Give the companies that make these devices a little credit - I don't think those people were ever in their target market for PDAs to begin with. If anything, the problem may be that the PDA market became too fragmented and crowded to be justified by the market size. A market big enough for 5-10 successful products is too small for 50-100 unsuccessful ones.

  15. Not gone, just changing... on Are PDAs Simply Finished? · · Score: 4, Interesting
    My old Clie has given up the ghost in favor of a shiny, new Treo 600. My good friend now uses a Samsung i500. Really, my biggest problem with the standalone PDA was that it made yet another gadget you have to plug in and charge every night, and if you lead a relatively mobile lifestyle, you need to bring chargers, cradles or sync cables with you everywhere you go. Now I have one device I need to remember the cables for when I travel and it pretty cleanly integrates the communications capabilities of a phone, portable email device, organizer, contact manager, handheld gaming system (at least as much as I need it to), and PDA.


    Anyway, the Treo 600 has it's flaws (most notably the mediocre screen resolution). But before I got this device, every PDA I ever had was something I used for a few months then it fell into general disuse because of the effort to charge it, sync it and use it. This is the first PDA device that I actually use regularly and believe I will continue to use regularly, and that convenience is worth a whole lot. So the PDA is dead... long live the PDA-phone.

  16. Re:How I WISH american companies would follow on Matsushita Designed Sleep Room · · Score: 1

    If you haven't noticed, when your body hits a certain point of exhaustion coffee doesn't really have the same reaction any more. In fact, I find that after a while, it just makes me more tired because the rebound from the caffeine (the crash) afterwards is so intense, it becomes physically impossible to fight it. After one of those insane weeks, I find I drink a cup of coffee, get about half an hour of solid work, then I'm ready to pass out. Which I guess is why I try not to do that any more.

  17. Re:Repeat 5th grade? on Saudi Webmaster Acquitted of Terrorism Charges · · Score: 2, Insightful
    You have obviously confused private schools with religious schools. In the rural, right-wing areas of the country, they may be the same, but for most of us on the Coasts and not in the god-forsaken middle-region of this country, private schools are where the best teachers and often the best students can be found. Yes, I suffered through the public school system for quite a few years when my family couldn't afford anything better, but when we finally could, I met far more intelligent and interesting people in one class of 150 students than you'd find in 3 or 4 schools of 3000 public high school students.


    Not to say there weren't some very bright people in the public schools I attended - there were. In any case, our public school system is incredibly broken in the US, primarily because it has shifted its focus entire from the best and brightest students to the lowest common denominator. Comparing my mother's descriptions of public high school when she was a kid - when they separated out the pre-college track students, and had a Group A, B and so on down the line grouped by their capabilities - to what I saw, it's clear that our system has fallen apart under the incredibly defective theory that spending 100 times as much on remedial programs as is spent on gifted programs will help this nation produce its next generation of scientists, engineers, doctors, and political and business leaders.


    No, my friend, private schools are the places where they can afford to be selective about the students they admit and thereby avoid that utter claptrap. If your kids are dumb, I'm sorry, but keep them the fuck out of my kid's classroom.

  18. Re:Now what we need... on Bluetooth Gets Faster & Requires Less Power · · Score: 1

    Yes, something like that. Now a standards body needs to standardize it, and big name manufacturers need to get on board with it and it needs to be available to consumers.

  19. Re:Now what we need... on Bluetooth Gets Faster & Requires Less Power · · Score: 1
    You're missing the point. I want to not have to plug things in and mess with big hulking transformers. All these peripherals run on DC power anyway, so the 120V AC standard with all the ugly power bricks is really an unnecessary mess. And can't we use some sort of conductive pad with activation mechanism to transfer DC power directly without requiring lots of little cords or plugs to get in the way?


    Is this too much to ask? Wouldn't it be nice to say goodbye to our messy desktops?

  20. Now what we need... on Bluetooth Gets Faster & Requires Less Power · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What we need is a truly wireless desktop. Bluetooth is nice, but there are still power cords everywhere, or lots of batteries to replace or recharge. I'd like to have a single DC power standard, and a transfer mechanism for getting that power to my peripherals. Some sort of pad that you sit things down on (your cell phone, mouse, keyboard, PDA, whatever) so they get charged when you aren't using them. Now that'd be something I'd pay for.

  21. Re:could anybody explain... on FCC Settles Censorship Claims with ClearChannel · · Score: 1
    Could you get real please? Aside from Tipper Gore, have you ever heard of or met a real liberal who supports this kind of shit? I mean, where do you think the support for this comes from? Urban liberal areas like New York and Massachusetts? Because I can assure you with absolute certainty that isn't the case. Or the rural Republican midwest and south?


    Get it through your head - most Republicans are NOT freedom loving libertarians, okay? The freedom loving libertarians are much closer to moderate liberals on many issues than they are to the populist bulk of the Republican party.

  22. Re:Hosers on Ontario Schools License StarOffice · · Score: 1

    I don't know where you live, but I used to travel extensively to Ottawa. I have definitely heard people in the Ottawa area pronounce the word "about" somewhat like "aboot". Don't know if there's a specific part of Ontario they were from, and I know the "aboot" is recognizable as a backwoods Minnesota accent too, but I've certainly heard it in Canada.

  23. Re:Yay on A New Look For Firefox · · Score: 1

    Irrelevant, this isn't a personal email about his wife's sexual practices or that growth on his pecker or his performance problems at the workplace, it's official notice that the Mozilla project is ditching his theme as their official theme. It absolutely is appropriate to share this with the community. Some communications come with a reasonable expectation of privacy, and some do not. This decision impacts every user and advocate of the Firefox browser, so it's certainly appropriate for us to hear as accurately as possible what the decision-making process behind it was.

  24. Re:Fuck the Mozilla devs on A New Look For Firefox · · Score: 1
    OK, well if he's responsible for that heinous looking theme, then he's got a terrible aesthetic eye and has no business doing graphical UI work. He may have a decent sense of user experience - that doesn't really require much in the way of graphical or aesthetic skill per se, just an understanding of how people use an application. Firefox is a perfectly usable application (with the exception of the lack of easy access to advanced configuration options - a few things are buried in about:config that shouldn't require going there).


    But in general, the UI *design* for the original Mozilla suite (the Modern theme) was fairly ugly, and this proposed thing is substantially worse. If those were my UI design credits (and I haven't looked at his CV), then I wouldn't be bragging about them.

  25. Re:You need a bigger "but" next time on A New Look For Firefox · · Score: 4, Informative
    I've spent a lot of time on the Mozillazine forums and so have many others who've contributed code, artwork, testing and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of their time. I am talking here about the core developers from Mozilla.org who have actively displayed their arrogance repeatedly to the rest of the community. In particular, I think Ben Goodger has stood out as a tremendous prick. In fact, my original post said "Fuck Ben Goodger" in the title, but I decided it was too much of an ad hominem, when many of the others have stood up far too strongly for Goodger.


    Ben Goodger is the strongest anti-advocate for Mozilla I have ever seen. There are hundreds of other developers who have contributed lots of code to the original Mozilla project and the Firefox codebase. Many of these are great people who have quietly contributed tens of thousands of hours of their work over the years to the community. And those people I respect immensely. The ones who insist on repeatedly driving rifts through and disrespecting the fabulous community of Mozilla supporters that have evangelized their product and fought for a better, more standards-compliant internet everywhere else have been done a tremendous disservice to the rest of the Internet, and I have simply lost my respect for them.