$23 is only $2 less than I pay for really fast DSL (3.0 Mbps/768 kbps) from Verizon. (It's a $30 plan, minus a $5 discount because I get their phone service too. Quite a nice deal, and fast. But they block port 80.)
Seriously, though--ipw2200 is one of the best Linux wireless drivers I've seen. Intel puts a good amount of effort into creating these drivers, and seems to be the only company that actually cares about Linux driver support. I will also tell you that the "Centrino platform" does provide pretty awesome battery life under Linux. I would encourage you to patronize Intel because they are actually attempting to be friendly to Linux users!
OS X does not provide a legacy database so you can't store metadata for files on filesystems such as found on removable drives.
Are you sure? Every time anyone with a Mac goes anywhere near a folder of mine on a PC network share or disk, it spatters folders called ".DS_Store" on them, and for many files it creates a file named "._filename". Aren't these used for generic metadata storage? If not, what are they for?
Ah. I read Amusing Ourselves To Death for summer reading this past summer. It was indeed a good look at what newer, more "glitzy" forms of media have done to the basic ways we communicate information. One example was television news: In "olden times," you would get your news from a local newspaper, and it tended to be things relevant to you personally, or to people you knew around the neighborhood. But now that we have satellite links and the ability to basically broadcast video to everyone's houses from anywhere in the world, news has become much less personal. It sounds ironic, but Postman said that, basically, habitually seeing news from other places that doesn't affect us, makes us want our news in little "packages" that have no relation to the real world. We want to hear what's going on in the world, not just the much smaller set of things that is actually important to us.
I've gotta say, I find most educational games ridiculous as education. I see no problem with educational games as a type of entertainment, but to replace "real" classroom education with crap like that is just asking for trouble. I have no trouble with people bringing lots of technology in the classroom, as long as its use is warranted and based in reality, not marketing. I can see a type of application that, instead of replacing a teacher's teaching, simply assists with small things. Something that spots and tells students about little careless mistakes in math problems (but requires them to fix them), something that functions as a dictionary for foreign language classes, and possibly something of a grammar reference... basically an electronic reference and person-hovering-over-your-shoulder-helping, not an electronic textbook and teacher.
This is fucking depressing. You're basically right. Never mind Score:3, Funny, that ought to be Score:5, Insightful.
Living in a day and age where helping people out with security problems makes you a "hacker" and a "criminal" is really shitty. I'm happy that the tech people at my school are friendly and happy to discuss security issues. (It helps when it's a consultant, and not their own jobs that are at stake:-b)
Heck, I have this set up at home on my Linux router. It prioritizes TCP ACKs, pings, NTP, and SSH over everything, and BitTorrent under everything. (Three classes: fast stuff, everything else, and BitTorrent). It actually works great to prevent BitTorrent from destroying everything else. It's a good idea as long as it's done by protocol and for good reasons. (I wouldn't disagree with prioritizing a certain amount of VoIP traffic over P2P, as long as it's provider-agnostic and just detects any VoIP protocol.)
I'll play devil's advocate for a moment... if eBay acted very quickly on fraud complaints, we would be in a situation like DMCA copyright takedowns, where anyone can "suggest" that there *might* be *something* wrong with an auction, and it gets taken down immediately. If they're being lazy and slow, shame on them. If they're investigating things before just acting without knowing the whole story, then perhaps there's a better reason for the delays. Still, though, the lengths of time they're taking are excessive anyway. Just be aware of the other extreme.
Hmm... first, right now, cellphone internet is too expensive.
However, with Verizon's EV-DO, Cingular's new HSDPA network, and Sprint's, er, whatever Sprint has, many cell providers can offer decent internet browsing. If they just figured out a way to popularize it and sell it at a cheaper price, it could be a partial solution to this. I would say that places like Starbucks, where T-Mobile puts AP's now, could just offer authenticated access to T-Mobile's cell phone network instead.
It's an idea...
But having unregulated WiFi rocks. My school has it (one of last year's seniors [he graduated, he's a freshman in college now] and I helped set it up) and it's really great to get on the internet anywhere in the school. Most places couldn't afford radio spectrum, so it's good there's an unregulated alternative.
I'm not sure if your comment was intended as a pointed jab at the buzzword status of AJAX or a serious suggestion that JavaScript is crappy, but I'm assuming the second.
There are some things about JavaScript that are really annoying. First, the object orientation seems very odd. It is well-rooted in the language, but it is quite annoying not to have real object namespaces (yes, you can use closures, but they're annoying and kludgy), real constructors, and that sort of stuff. It's almost as bad as Perl's hash + namespace = object idea, and worse in some ways.
What I'd like, I guess, is a language that is very similar to JavaScript, but has a real object-oriented system and better support for things like loading code dynamically. It's clear that JavaScript or some future variant of it is finally being used the right way--to make pages dynamic instead of just annoying--but right now it's very cumbersome. Loading Gmail, for example, is quite slow, because it (IIRC) downloads a huge chunk of code at the beginning. Perhaps someone (maybe me) could write a wrapper system in JavaScript that uses XmlHttpRequest to load JavaScript code on demand. But some sort of modular functionality ought to be officially added to JavaScript, before it's too late and we end up with the next "___ Wars"... this time it will be the fight between JavaScript frameworks.
I've been doing HIT's for Mechanical Turk over the last few days, and I've gotta wonder what they use as criteria for rejection. Yesterday, I did 152 of the "Album Artist Verification" HIT's (they show you an album cover and a list of possible artist names and you have to choose or enter the proper name in "First Last" format), and all 152 were rejected! Some of the names were verbatim off the album cover, so I wonder what they're actually doing. Perhaps they've realized they can get almost as much work out of people for much less cost by rejecting many of their answers?
I am going to mod you -1, Doesn't understand Mozilla history;-)
The reason Firebird was renamed to Firefox was that Firebird is also the name of an open-source (I think) database engine. So the Firebird they include is, I believe, the database engine.
Java-based DRM?! Isn't that tantamount to making DRM and then running it in an emulator (JVM)? I thought the point of things like Trusted Computing (TPM chips, specifically) was to make sure you had actual, authenticated hardware instead of an untrustworthy JVM? I mean GNU Classpath and Blackdown-JDK could write DRM classes that allow raw access to the video 'n' stuff!
it's not integrated with the OS in terms of style which annoys a lot of OSX users
Frankly, I think a lot of people could care. Someone's putting in a ton of effort to write a program, get it to read and write tons of formats, make it almost completely compatible with the main competitor (MS Office), and run it on multiple platforms, and you whine because it doesn't look like your other apps? Gimme a break! The mere fact that you refer to the UI as "style" instead of "user interface" shows that you're thinking along the lines of a Mac user who cares far more about how their OS looks and whether everything that moves on the screen is transparent, fades in and out, and is fuzzily antialiased. Thankfully, you disagree with that:
It doesn't annoy me, I can deal with whatever interface
But the whole Mac mentality of "aesthetics are all that matters; performance, compatibility, market share, software availability, and price don't matter" is stupid. That, and Apple's inane penchant for replacing useful parts of Unix (init, cron, inetd) with insanely large, bloated, and overengineered replacements (launchd) in the name of "enhancement".
The first-free-minute idea is cool. Nextel used to have first outgoing minute free, mostly to appease worries about racking up huge bills when you're repeatedly calling a busy number. When combined with free incoming calls, and mobile-to-mobile it meant almost all calls were free.
The card idea is a good one. SIM cards are already "restricted" in some ways; why not store actual billing info on them? If they're easily removed, you could also use them in pay phones. On the other hand, you could just use a credit card, and never have to worry about sending a bill. If the card gets rejected, it terminates the call (probably about 15 seconds in to it;-)
More ideas:
Use a different type of number: Look up some random "user ID" assigned to the phone. Bonus: If you borrow someone else's phone, or use a payphone, you can put in your user ID and have it bill your phone (yes, I know you can do this with a phone number, but the companies' marketing departments can spin this into a feature somehow;-)
Obfuscate the number: MD5sum the number, reverse the number, etc... and look that up.
Use a different type of balance: Store the account balance instead of the number of minutes, and subtract minutes * rate from it instead of just minutes. Bonus: You can charge more for long-distance/roaming/international calls, text/multimedia messages, web browsing, etc...
Use a different time unit: Store the number of years, months, days, hours, seconds, milliseconds, metric hours, metric minutes, or metric seconds instead.
The problem is that a single WiFi card can only transmit 54 Mbps. This card "virtualizes" itself into multiple cards by time-switching. Thus, if it is on two networks, each one gets a maximum of 27 Mbps, and probably much less with the delays in switching. You can't get more than 54 Mbps through a 54 Mbps pipe, even if you direct it at two different destinations.
Theoretically, but I don't imagine a video camera would provide enough information to derive all of the axes of motion that the phone would experience as you walk. For example, if you filmed it from the side, you would see vertical motion and forward/back motion, but not side-to-side (hips) motion. It seems iffy.
Running/Lift/Escalator: All you'd have to do is walk a few steps down the next hallway/sidewalk/etc... and it would work.
Bag/Coat pocket/car: I don't know, I guess they have to work that one out.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's higher, but the service is twice as fast.
$23 is only $2 less than I pay for really fast DSL (3.0 Mbps/768 kbps) from Verizon. (It's a $30 plan, minus a $5 discount because I get their phone service too. Quite a nice deal, and fast. But they block port 80.)
<aol>Me too!</aol>
Seriously, though--ipw2200 is one of the best Linux wireless drivers I've seen. Intel puts a good amount of effort into creating these drivers, and seems to be the only company that actually cares about Linux driver support. I will also tell you that the "Centrino platform" does provide pretty awesome battery life under Linux. I would encourage you to patronize Intel because they are actually attempting to be friendly to Linux users!
Ah, I see. Perhaps Apple should use it for Spotlight as well.
Are you sure? Every time anyone with a Mac goes anywhere near a folder of mine on a PC network share or disk, it spatters folders called ".DS_Store" on them, and for many files it creates a file named "._filename ". Aren't these used for generic metadata storage? If not, what are they for?
Oh, if ONLY I had MOD POINTS! That is so true. I should make posters that say that and post them at public schools around my city. ;-)
Ah. I read Amusing Ourselves To Death for summer reading this past summer. It was indeed a good look at what newer, more "glitzy" forms of media have done to the basic ways we communicate information. One example was television news: In "olden times," you would get your news from a local newspaper, and it tended to be things relevant to you personally, or to people you knew around the neighborhood. But now that we have satellite links and the ability to basically broadcast video to everyone's houses from anywhere in the world, news has become much less personal. It sounds ironic, but Postman said that, basically, habitually seeing news from other places that doesn't affect us, makes us want our news in little "packages" that have no relation to the real world. We want to hear what's going on in the world, not just the much smaller set of things that is actually important to us.
I've gotta say, I find most educational games ridiculous as education. I see no problem with educational games as a type of entertainment, but to replace "real" classroom education with crap like that is just asking for trouble. I have no trouble with people bringing lots of technology in the classroom, as long as its use is warranted and based in reality, not marketing. I can see a type of application that, instead of replacing a teacher's teaching, simply assists with small things. Something that spots and tells students about little careless mistakes in math problems (but requires them to fix them), something that functions as a dictionary for foreign language classes, and possibly something of a grammar reference... basically an electronic reference and person-hovering-over-your-shoulder-helping, not an electronic textbook and teacher.
This is fucking depressing. You're basically right. Never mind Score:3, Funny, that ought to be Score:5, Insightful.
Living in a day and age where helping people out with security problems makes you a "hacker" and a "criminal" is really shitty. I'm happy that the tech people at my school are friendly and happy to discuss security issues. (It helps when it's a consultant, and not their own jobs that are at stake :-b)
Heck, I have this set up at home on my Linux router. It prioritizes TCP ACKs, pings, NTP, and SSH over everything, and BitTorrent under everything. (Three classes: fast stuff, everything else, and BitTorrent). It actually works great to prevent BitTorrent from destroying everything else. It's a good idea as long as it's done by protocol and for good reasons. (I wouldn't disagree with prioritizing a certain amount of VoIP traffic over P2P, as long as it's provider-agnostic and just detects any VoIP protocol.)
I'll play devil's advocate for a moment... if eBay acted very quickly on fraud complaints, we would be in a situation like DMCA copyright takedowns, where anyone can "suggest" that there *might* be *something* wrong with an auction, and it gets taken down immediately. If they're being lazy and slow, shame on them. If they're investigating things before just acting without knowing the whole story, then perhaps there's a better reason for the delays. Still, though, the lengths of time they're taking are excessive anyway. Just be aware of the other extreme.
There is. It's JavaScript. That's what Dashboard uses, at least.
Hmm, it's possible it only works for pre-existing URL's. I'm not 100% sure.
Have you tried entering a URL in the search box? That worked for me.
I didn't know Oprah could surf the web!
Hmm... first, right now, cellphone internet is too expensive.
However, with Verizon's EV-DO, Cingular's new HSDPA network, and Sprint's, er, whatever Sprint has, many cell providers can offer decent internet browsing. If they just figured out a way to popularize it and sell it at a cheaper price, it could be a partial solution to this. I would say that places like Starbucks, where T-Mobile puts AP's now, could just offer authenticated access to T-Mobile's cell phone network instead.
It's an idea...
But having unregulated WiFi rocks. My school has it (one of last year's seniors [he graduated, he's a freshman in college now] and I helped set it up) and it's really great to get on the internet anywhere in the school. Most places couldn't afford radio spectrum, so it's good there's an unregulated alternative.
I'm not sure if your comment was intended as a pointed jab at the buzzword status of AJAX or a serious suggestion that JavaScript is crappy, but I'm assuming the second.
There are some things about JavaScript that are really annoying. First, the object orientation seems very odd. It is well-rooted in the language, but it is quite annoying not to have real object namespaces (yes, you can use closures, but they're annoying and kludgy), real constructors, and that sort of stuff. It's almost as bad as Perl's hash + namespace = object idea, and worse in some ways.
What I'd like, I guess, is a language that is very similar to JavaScript, but has a real object-oriented system and better support for things like loading code dynamically. It's clear that JavaScript or some future variant of it is finally being used the right way--to make pages dynamic instead of just annoying--but right now it's very cumbersome. Loading Gmail, for example, is quite slow, because it (IIRC) downloads a huge chunk of code at the beginning. Perhaps someone (maybe me) could write a wrapper system in JavaScript that uses XmlHttpRequest to load JavaScript code on demand. But some sort of modular functionality ought to be officially added to JavaScript, before it's too late and we end up with the next "___ Wars"... this time it will be the fight between JavaScript frameworks.
I've been doing HIT's for Mechanical Turk over the last few days, and I've gotta wonder what they use as criteria for rejection. Yesterday, I did 152 of the "Album Artist Verification" HIT's (they show you an album cover and a list of possible artist names and you have to choose or enter the proper name in "First Last" format), and all 152 were rejected! Some of the names were verbatim off the album cover, so I wonder what they're actually doing. Perhaps they've realized they can get almost as much work out of people for much less cost by rejecting many of their answers?
I am going to mod you -1, Doesn't understand Mozilla history ;-)
The reason Firebird was renamed to Firefox was that Firebird is also the name of an open-source (I think) database engine. So the Firebird they include is, I believe, the database engine.
Java-based DRM?! Isn't that tantamount to making DRM and then running it in an emulator (JVM)? I thought the point of things like Trusted Computing (TPM chips, specifically) was to make sure you had actual, authenticated hardware instead of an untrustworthy JVM? I mean GNU Classpath and Blackdown-JDK could write DRM classes that allow raw access to the video 'n' stuff!
Frankly, I think a lot of people could care. Someone's putting in a ton of effort to write a program, get it to read and write tons of formats, make it almost completely compatible with the main competitor (MS Office), and run it on multiple platforms, and you whine because it doesn't look like your other apps? Gimme a break! The mere fact that you refer to the UI as "style" instead of "user interface" shows that you're thinking along the lines of a Mac user who cares far more about how their OS looks and whether everything that moves on the screen is transparent, fades in and out, and is fuzzily antialiased. Thankfully, you disagree with that:
But the whole Mac mentality of "aesthetics are all that matters; performance, compatibility, market share, software availability, and price don't matter" is stupid. That, and Apple's inane penchant for replacing useful parts of Unix (init, cron, inetd) with insanely large, bloated, and overengineered replacements (launchd) in the name of "enhancement".
Comments:
The first-free-minute idea is cool. Nextel used to have first outgoing minute free, mostly to appease worries about racking up huge bills when you're repeatedly calling a busy number. When combined with free incoming calls, and mobile-to-mobile it meant almost all calls were free.
The card idea is a good one. SIM cards are already "restricted" in some ways; why not store actual billing info on them? If they're easily removed, you could also use them in pay phones. On the other hand, you could just use a credit card, and never have to worry about sending a bill. If the card gets rejected, it terminates the call (probably about 15 seconds in to it ;-)
More ideas:
Use a different type of number: Look up some random "user ID" assigned to the phone. Bonus: If you borrow someone else's phone, or use a payphone, you can put in your user ID and have it bill your phone (yes, I know you can do this with a phone number, but the companies' marketing departments can spin this into a feature somehow ;-)
Obfuscate the number: MD5sum the number, reverse the number, etc... and look that up.
Use a different type of balance: Store the account balance instead of the number of minutes, and subtract minutes * rate from it instead of just minutes. Bonus: You can charge more for long-distance/roaming/international calls, text/multimedia messages, web browsing, etc...
Use a different time unit: Store the number of years, months, days, hours, seconds, milliseconds, metric hours, metric minutes, or metric seconds instead.
Just my $0.02, er, I mean 2 minutes...
Hehehe, this is funny.
The problem is that a single WiFi card can only transmit 54 Mbps. This card "virtualizes" itself into multiple cards by time-switching. Thus, if it is on two networks, each one gets a maximum of 27 Mbps, and probably much less with the delays in switching. You can't get more than 54 Mbps through a 54 Mbps pipe, even if you direct it at two different destinations.
Theoretically, but I don't imagine a video camera would provide enough information to derive all of the axes of motion that the phone would experience as you walk. For example, if you filmed it from the side, you would see vertical motion and forward/back motion, but not side-to-side (hips) motion. It seems iffy.
Hey, it was just a thought. Relax.
Why don't they just make cars where you have to play a 10-second game of Simon before it starts? That would solve the problem!
Running/Lift/Escalator: All you'd have to do is walk a few steps down the next hallway/sidewalk/etc... and it would work.
Bag/Coat pocket/car: I don't know, I guess they have to work that one out.