They changed our anti-virus from Symantec, which ate about 10% CPU time when checking, to McAfee, which eats about 40%. I/O heavy processes that used to take around 2 minutes now take 8. They got McAfee free in a bundle - it's a shame about the cost to our productivity. The snoopware that checks every path on your drive - including ones inside archives (yes, including jars - we're mostly Java developers) will thrash your disk for about 20 minutes and then will consume a whole CPU core for another 10 zipping up the list to send back to base. Since the change of antivirus, reading all those files of course also thrashes the CPU. This grinds some of our machines to a halt so well that you can watch the display being rendered, one raster line at a time.
We have a similar situation. On "Virus Wednesdays", our MacAfee scanners go hog-wild, and our. pee. cees. slow. to. a. crawl. A 40% drop in performance would be nothing. Twenty minutes? These scans usually take 18 hours or more. On our build machines, the virus scan takes upwards of four days (Wed, Thu, Fri, and often part of Saturday). A normal two hour build takes over a day.
More importantly, our core application - that which we are employed to build, sell, enhance, and support, in other words, the reason for our business' existence - cannot be run, because the serial and network connections all time out. We have about a 500ms window for comm traffic, and normally it's in the 100ms-200ms range. When the virus scanner runs, those packets can take 8-10 seconds each to process, so we have a timeout rate of 100%, with resultant application failure. It's like trying to test a new web browser when the network is disconnected. And this is in loopback mode, I might add.
Initially, developers were using task manager to lower the priority of the scanner so it didn't cripple the machine. IT discovered that their end of week reports were showing that the development machines weren't completing the scan by the expected time, so they locked the process such that developers couldn't change it. So, developers started rebooting their PCs to escape the process. The next step was to have the scan restart after every reboot so that it was inescapable.
Not a day goes past without my colleague cursing because his machine is doing the bidding of the IT department instead of compiling his code.
We have the same. Since my company is currently in one of those "efficiency initiative" drives where staff can suggest to management ways to improve the company, it was suggested that maybe these performance-sapping scans could be run, like, overnight rather than in core hours? Or on a weekend? Some in my department did the math, and showed that the performance hit was effectively the same as four full time developers in terms of hours being chewed up uselessly.
The IT director's response was "since the development department is showing that they are still able to make deadlines with the virus scan running, an alternative cost saving would be to move the virus scan to non-core hours, and terminate four positions from the development department". He put that in writing, in the "efficiency initiative" wiki.
Management is now scratching their heads, inquiring as to why suggestions have dried up, and no one seems to be submitting any new ideas for efficiency savings.
Of course, management is starting to take notice, because a major customer made an urgent request, and made the mistake of asking for it on a Tuesday. Of course, the "we must ship by Friday" edict ran head first into the "virus scan on the build machine means the build can't complete until Saturday" problem, which hopefully might escalate the problem to the point where it's taken seriously. But it's a shame that it had to negatively impact a customer deliverable before it's given serious attention.
It's not your problem. Don't make it your problem.
I have a personal domain which has the same problem. My domain name is a four letter latin word (not wanting to slashdot my poor server, I won't mention the name). There's a Belgian rock band with the same name, a video game with a similar name, and at least one medical ward in a Boston hospital which uses a typographical variation.
I used to be inundated with (a) Flemish grunge fans who were indignant that I had "stolen" the name of "their" band's website (fans, not the band itself), (b) people asking/demanding help in the game, and (c) confidential reports from the hospital. And when I say inundated, I mean I was getting between 3,000 and 7,000 spam/misdirected email a day. Probably 50 of those a day were misdirected emails that weren't flagged as spam.
Ten years ago, I used to send back a boilerplate "this isn't the web site you're looking for" response to these guys (I set up a script in the Bat mailer I was using at the time). The results I got for this were:
a) the grungers demanded I give "back" my domain to their favourite band;
b) the gamers told me "I'll never buy another one of your effing games again"; and, for the win
c) the hospital types said "you have illegally intercepted confidential medical data, we're going to sue you into the ground"
To be fair, there were a number of "oops, sorry, thought you were the other guys" apologies (and one rambling email in Portuguese from a woman who wanted to know if she should marry her boyfriend whom she didn't love, and should wait for Mr. Right instead)
Nothing ever came from it, other than my deciding to say the hell with it. Most of it was nonsense, but it could easily become a time suck.
More recently, I've started getting "confirmations" from companies that my application has been pre-approved. This isn't spam, it's actually some bozo using my email address, despite giving different address/phone information when applying. The fact that he's getting these pre-approvals says something about the approval process, to be sure. I called the first few, thinking maybe my account had been hacked, but it's just someone else (it's always the same address he gives) who doesn't seem to know his own email address.
How do you "calibrate" a system that accommodates both the Steven Wrights of the world, and the Sam Kinisons, at the same time?
One of the problems reported in some airline crashes is that professional airline pilots can be too professional. In one case, a pilot was calling a mayday and was pretty much ignored because his voice was a monotone, as he'd been trained.
My mom was an emergency room RN, and I found out early as a child that it's possible to be too dispassionate about things. On the one hand, when I was stabbed, it was really good to have a professional trauma nurse for a mom. On the other, it took a while to get the neighbours to react (phoning the hospital to know we were coming, getting a ride, clearing the streets, etc), because Mom wasn't running around screaming and attracting attention the way a normal civilian would, to get attention. Fortunately, my grandmother (whose dials started at 11, and worked up from there) was available to provide the necessary hysterics that got the neighbourhood going.
I never thought I'd see the day when Apple is considered an "evil empire", and Microsoft is kind of the underdog/good-guy.
Well, I never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft was considered an "evil empire", and IBM was kind of the underdog/good-guy. But it happened.
Corporations are not inherently virtuous or villainous; they work in their own best interests. When they are the top dog, they will want to maintain the status quo, and treat such changes as a potential (or real) threat. The further back in the pack the company is, the more it will try to change the status quo in their favour.
Unfortunately, a lot of people romanticize it, and tend to form emotional attachments to companies and their products. This results in a correspondingly wildly unrealistic viewpoint. You'll see people lambaste Microsoft as evil and monopolistic for their practices, yet absolve Sun or Apple for the exact same behaviour, if not worse.
The problem is that the company will inevitably do something you disagree with. If you think of it as a company, it makes sense. But if you're viewing it as a morality play of good versus evil, all of a sudden it's a betrayal, and the company is "turning its' back on people", etc.
I've seen this happen to IBM, to Sun, to AT&T, to Apple, to Microsoft, and it's now happening with both Google and Nokia. Eventually, the markets will shift, behaviours will adapt, new players will enter the market, and the cycle will restart, with Google as the scrappy competitor again.
Linux has been around since 1991. Windows did not really take off until 1995.
Conversely, Windows has been around since 1985, and Linux did not really take off until around 1998 or so. Both were either hobbyist projects (Linux) are in-house R&D efforts (Windows) that were really only suitable to hacker types.
I'd say Windows "took off" around May 1990, when Windows 3.0 came out (and basically buried OS/2 v1), and Linux "took off" probably when Red Hat kicked out their 1.0 release in 1994.
I still recall hacking my phone to enable basic features like the ability to transfer files over USB instead of having to spent $0.75 a shot emailing *my own* pictures to myself or being able to upload custom ringtones instead of having to buy them from the telco's ringtone store.
That's one of the reasons I chose my Nokia 6585 in the first place. Never mind wanting $.075 to send pictures to yourself; they wanted me to spend money to put a calendar entry into my phone. And using my own MP3? Why would I want to do that?
PC Suite was the major selling point for me. I could, and have, ditched one Nokia phone for another, and the syncing process was 15 minutes, and free. In the beginning, I had to crack the phone, just to be able to hook it up, because the carrier locked it down. To switch to a Samsung, or Motorola, or LG, my carrier wanted me to pay them to move my own data between my own devices. Sod that.
Even moving between one Samsung to another (as a friend did) was a nightmare of lost data and manually re-entering stuff. You're right; if Steve Jobs did nothing else, he did that. Not because he was brilliant, but because he had enough weight behind him to get his way.
While the "trojan horse" idea may appeal to the conspiracy theorist and the anti-MS crowds, Occam's razor would lead me to believe the opposite.
Which is more likely? That Nokia brought an ex-Microsoft exec on board to run the company and are shocked, shocked to discover that he's partnering them with MS? Or that the Nokia board already considered an MS/Nokia deal as likely/possible/inevitable, and got someone previously with Microsoft onto their side in order to be able to better negotiate terms? Personally, I'd suspect the latter.
I'm not keen on a Nokia/Microsoft partnership, but given that their choices are either (a) go under, (b) go Android, or (c) go W7, I don't think it's the worst choice.
I would have loved for them to buy Palm last year and put WebOS on Nokia hardware, but that ship has sailed. And getting Meego out the door in time was sounding increasingly unlikely; and it has its' own set of problems, too.
Going with Android was the easy (and obvious) choice. But the problem there is that Nokia becomes just one more vendor swimming in the shark pool. With MS, they've negotiated preferential treatment over other W7 providers, so the will be able to differentiate themselves from the other W7 vendors.
I'm still irritated that this happened, but I'm not writing Nokia off yet. The irony is that living in Canada, I'm much more likely to see Nokia's in a year than I am now, simply because they are much more likely to be able to be carried by some of the major carriers.
it's a great pocket computer with phone capabilities
And therein lies the problem. It's a great phone for the/. crowd, but that's not what will make or break the company.
Nokia is getting stomped by the iPhone. Can anyone seriously say that iOS is superior to Symbian in terms of capabilities? No, the iPhone wins on services, ease of use, applications, etc. And that's what Nokia is looking to buy into with W7.
I really like my 5800, but I'm under no illusions that it will convert over anyone but techies from an iPhone. Sure, I know a lot more about the insides of my Nokia 5800 than most of my friends with iPhones know about theirs, but their money is just as good as mine. So what if their criteria for choosing a phone is different than mine?
How did this get ignored for so long in iOS and Windows phone?
Because other than in a bullet chart, multitasking doesn't show up in marketing.
I have a Nokia 5800. I have several friends with iPhones (3 and 4), and they're constantly trying to prove that the iPhone is "better". Sure, Symbian multitasks like no one's business, but the iPhone has more apps and a better UI. So iPhone grabbed something like 70% of the Japanese smartphone market in 3 years, while Nokia has had to partner with Microsoft just for survival.
Another example was OS/2. OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking years before the Windows operating system(s) it was competing against, but it looked like crap, and users stayed away in droves. The same was true comparing Windows 95 to MacOS prior 1995; it wasn't until Apple went to a Unix based system in 1997-ish (my memory's fuzzy about the dates) that the Mac got features like pre-emptive multitasking and proper dynamic memory allocation.
Tech features may sell to slashdotters, but most of the population cares a lot more about the UI than what's under the hood.
Like most of my geek buddies, on Friday, I looked at Nokia's partnership with MS as one of the longer suicide notes in history. On Saturday, I was out with friends who aren't all techs, and I was surprised that many of them considered it a good thing, and were interested to see what a NokiaSoft phone would look like.
That's the insane part, since Microsoft is supposed to be outright draconian about the hardware spec. Under this deal, Nokia basically get to choose the colour of the device, AFAIK.
Actually, that was one of the issues Esop addressed, Nokia can modify W7, something that HTC cannot do. He said that they probably won't, though.
I think that Nokia is basically supposed to become the reference platform for W7. How well that will work out is another story.
1999: Nokia 282 2000: Samsung 3530 2005: Nokia 6585 2007: Nokia 6275i 2009: Nokia 5130 2010: Nokia 5800, C3
My first PDA was a Palm Pilot 1000 in 1996 and my last, a Palm Tungsten T3 in 2005.
1997: USR Palm Pilot 1000 1998: 3Com Palm Pilot 2000: Handspring Visor
I ran with the Visor and the Samsung 3530 concurrently until I got the 6585, at which point, some of the Visor functionality (calendar, address book) moved to the phone. With the 5800, I can't see anything in the Visor that I can't do with the phone.
Too bad they didn't cooperate back then. Palm and Nokia: you will be remembered.
Oh, I so wanted Nokia to buy Palm. The Palm Pre phones get rave reviews for WebOS, but has no real presence; and all of Nokia's smartphone reviews read as "terrific hardware, horrible operating system". Nokia with WebOS would have been such a win, but it didn't happen.
I see this NokiaSoft alliance as being either really stupid or really smart. I'm not sure which, though. Nokia didn't want Android since they'd be nothing but a hardware vendor at that point. But there aren't a lot of phone OS options out there. WebOS would have been perfect, IMHO, but HP snapped that up, so what was left?
I hope they can pull it off. But it's a tall order. I'm not writing them off (as many/most slashdotters are), but they're going to have to release some impressive offerings reasonably soon. And I don't mean 18 months from now.
Implementation is something else. What so-called 'idea people' don't realize is that without implementation, ideas are worthless. And you know what? Implementation is hard.
Isaac Asimov was constantly approached by wannabe writers who always had the next Great Idea who proposed "I'll do the ideas, you do the writing, and we'll split it 50-50". Asimov always countered that ideas were easy, writing was hard. When the wannabe would handwave that aside, Asimov would counteroffer that he had lots of great ideas too, so why didn't they just use his idea, and let the other guy do the writing? All of a sudden the writing didn't look so trivial...
I used to work with such a wannabe. Back in the 1990s, every time a 25 year old became an internet-based millionaire, he would snark that "I could have done that easily". Yes, so could I. But we didn't. Everything's easy in hindsight.
People see the success of others and forget the hard work and risk taking that went into that success. If they recognize it at all, they write it off as simple luck.
I've been approached, as have probably most of the slashdot crowd, by any number of these "my idea, your code" types. Despite being certain that it will net fifty krillion dollars in the first year of operation, which I'd get 50% of, not one of them has been willing to buy out my 50% ahead of time for a mere $500,000. Funny, that.
"Was right around the corner" isn't an option. It was a year off.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
It was inexpensive, but not compared to most PCs. And the killer for it was the serious lack of applications. The problem was that the company was good at games, but they were trying to release a business based PC without any compelling business software.
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then.
Actually, it was pretty much true. PC vendors also published the pinouts and entry points (some vendors, like Heathkit, published the source code of their BIOS), and some didn't.
The problem with the Apple, Amiga and the Atari ST was that they were single sourced. The PCs were competing not only with Apple/Atari/Commodore but with each other. So no matter what level of technical specs you wanted, there was always at least one vendor who'd run with it.
Windows 1.0 was clearly a proof of concept rather than a platform that was intended for serious use. The main reason to get it out the door was to show how it stacked up against the other PC-based DOS alternatives of the day: GEM, DesQ (later DesqView), and TopView. I believe that the idea was to just get it out the door so it was no longer vapourware, so people could see it head to head with the others.
For the most part, people fired it up, played with it for about 20 minutes, then shut it down and went back to work. I remember that every Windows application that was for sale at the time included a run-time version of Windows, so that you could run it whether you had a full copy of Windows or not.
I do remember you couldn't have overlapping windows. That's why many referred to it as "Microsoft Window". Also, it was so slow that the little corner thing was there to referred to as the vent, because of all the heat generated by the speed:-)
The name of the film was actually even Revenge of the Jedi
Heh. I still have my "Revenge of the Jedi" shirt from some 1982 convention or giveway. A little small, 30 years later, but I still pull it out to prove that yes, it was called Revenge originally.
As I recall, it was changed because Star Trek 2: The Revenge of Khan was due to come out, and Paramount was threatening Lucas about stealing "their" title. And as someone pointed out, Jedis aren't supposed to believe in revenge anyway, so they changed it to "Return". Of course, Star Trek also then changed their title to "Wrath", making the whole thing moot.
not that I expect you to believe me fully, I'm also a developer, and myself I don't believe what I can't verify
Why wouldn't I believe you? I'm a developer too (not in the cell phone or GPS arena, though). I thought you were over generalizing from a single data point, but I don't doubt what you were reporting. I just thought your blanket criticisms of all Nokias as unacceptable deserved a counterpoint.
As I said, I've got a 5800, you've got an E71, and we both know how much the "but they're exactly the same" argument means. Hell, I wouldn't be doubt you if 98% of the E71 users had opposite experiences; unless you know everybody's firmware revision, install applications, and configuration settings, everything's possible.
Free offline navigation is one of its key differentiators
Agreed. I replaced my old phone (a 5130) because with my poor eyesight, I wanted a larger display and higher resolution. At the time, I was also considering getting a GPS for my car, so when I checked out phones, I figured I'd see if the 5800's internal GPS was good enough. It was and is.
It's really a shame; Nokia (like Palm) has some really nice hardware, but doesn't leverage it properly. For all the buzz around Android and the iPhone, most people (in North America, at least) aren't even aware that Nokia's in the smart phone business.
I bought a (used) Nokia 5800 several months back. I use it primarily as a GPS/MP3 player/PDA/Calculator (also as a flashlight). It's pretty much just an emergency phone. I'm only spending $25 a year for air time (at 25 cents a minute), and I certainly don't have any data plan.
The Nokia 5800 GPS doesn't require a data connection. By default, it will use A-GPS, but that's just a configuration setting. Set it to standard GPS mode (Settings->Location->Positioning->Positioning Methods->Integrated GPS), and you're done. Your post goes into great detail about the problem with your E71, but you didn't mention if you'd changed the default from Assisted GPS. If you're still using that setting, the phone will look for cell towers first, and only use the internal GPS when all the cell connections fail. That might explain some of the problems you're reporting. Or, the E71 is different than the 5800.
Either that, or your unit is just a lemon.
For maps, as you mentioned. you can download them on a Mac/PC, and then use either the Nokia OVI Suite software or the Nokia Map Loader software (both free) to download maps from OVI into your phone.
As for battery life, the major drain isn't the GPS, but the display. If you've got a car charger, set the GPS backlight to "always on"; otherwise use the "Optimized" setting.
Of course, without a data plan, the GPS in the phone won't work inside buildings (where it depends on the A-GPS), you won't get traffic reports, and maps will only be as current as the last download you made. There will be to Google Maps support or the like.
A co-worker with and I often compare what the A-GPS in his $50/month iPhone 3G can do versus my four-month-old downloaded maps. Surprisingly, I've been able to do some things he can't; when in areas with poor reception, the "Search Offline" in the Nokia is extremely useful. Of course, he gets live traffic updates, Google street view, live restaurant reviews, and the like that I don't. My Turn-By-Turn display is also better than what he's been able to do (not saying it's not in the iPhone, but he hasn't found it). I also downloaded the (free) "surfer dude" voice, for amusement.
As for using the phone as a GPS versus a dedicated GPS: it's fine for me, but there are some good reasons to prefer a dedicated GPS. For one thing, their maps tend to be a lot more details. My Nokia maps for all of Ontario, Canada, were about 63MB. In contrast, my friend's Garmin was something like 2.5GB for the same area. That's forty times the amount of detail. His GPS also does proper building addresses, where the Nokia maps only estimate street addresses based on the position within the street. That won't matter so much if you're camping or fishing, though.
My 5800 usually gets a lock within 90 seconds of going outdoors when in a car. It has taken up to six minutes on a very cloudy day. Walking, it seems to take longer, but that's more problematic. It won't get a fix if it's in a covered case/pocket/backpack, so you have to be holding the damn thing in your hand for it to work, and I'm rarely interested in holding it in my hand for six minutes while walking for it to get position. It does work, though, when I've stopped to sit down for a few minutes, and let it acquire a signal.
One major weakness for walking, though, is that sunlight readability of the 5800 at least (I don't know about other Nokias) is pathetic, practically nonexistent. Not really a recommendation for a unit when fishing/hiking/hunting. I don't know how other GPSes compare though.
So, to summarize: - you can use a Nokia phone as a GPS - you don't need a data plan - it will have the benefit of being an emergency 911 phone, even without a data or voice plan - battery life will be inferior to a dedicated GPS - it's not as accurate as a dedicated GPS - sunlight readability is a concern
So really, it's a judgment call as to whether it's a suitable replacement for a standalone GPS. For me, it is. For others, it won't be.
Re:Too much of a "good thing"?
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Lost Ends
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This is the exact reason why, when Babylon 5 started up, the actors were all signed on for five year contracts (the industry standard is seven, I believe). That was specifically so that when the story had been told, it would be too difficult/expensive to sign up the entire cast again to continue for a sixth season. jms wanted the series to end after five years, by design. And he knew that the networks would try to milk it if it were a money maker, so he sabotaged it from the start.
I've seen a number of actors from the B5 series express interest in doing a sixth season because "there was more we could do". True, but there was also things that could be done with Lord of the Rings after Sauron was defeated, but that's not the point. As someone on B5 (maybe Zathras) said, "This is the end of the story, there is no more to tell. But there will be other stories".
Some shows, like Firefly, straddle the line between having a story arc (Buffy, B5, Lost, BSG), and being standalone. Firefly had the mystery of the Reavers (even if you didn't know it was a mystery at the time), but the episodes weren't dependent on it.
I remember watching B5 when it originally aired, and then seeing something like TNG afterwards, and wondering why the Federation was stumbling around scratching their heads trying to solve a crisis that could have been resolved in five minutes with the tech that they'd discovered or invented about three episodes earlier.
The simple fact is that nothing really had consequences in TNG, or most shows. What should be universe changing tech (or religion, or social, or whatever) discoveries happened in an episode and were then promptly forgotten. In B5, what looks like a throwaway piece of tech in season one ends up being the resolution to Ivanova's situation in the finale of season four.
jms said that he saw the ending of the B5 storyline first, and then worked his way back. There were bumps along the way (actors leave, studios screw with you), but as he said, if you're telling the story of a Marine Corps unit in WWII, you still know that the Allies are going to win in the end, it's how you get there.
With stories like Lost (which I only saw the first season of) and BSG (which I watched with one eye open), it's obvious that the writers are just making up crap as they go along. In the BSG commentaries, Ronald Moore admitted that the writers were deciding the resolutions to mysteries only *after* the mystery had been aired. In other words, there was no logic to who the "final five" were; there was no point for the watchers to try to figure it out, because the writers had not figured it out yet themselves.
I watched the first season of Lost because everyone was raving about it. There were some good episodes, but overall, it suffered from the Chris Carter effect. There's a difference between having a complex story, and simply throwing unresolved mystery after unresolved mystery on the screen, hoping that something will stick, and then standing back and calling it "brilliant". B5 had just as many mysteries and subplots, and it managed to resolve them *all*.
If you're scratching your head after a planned series finale, the series is a dud, as far as I'm concerned.
the real difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 is *you*, not the films.
The real difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 is the difference between the 1970s and the 2000s.
Star Wars existed in a vacuum. Episodes 1-3 were planted in a forest.
People forget, or don't know, what the movie landscape was like in the mid to late 1970s. If you ever check out movie listings in 1970s newspapers, you'll get an eye full. In post-Watergate America, movies were depressing. Occult movies were all the rage, as were cops-on-the-take pieces. Movies almost uniformly presented a dismal view of the world. Everything was corrupt, evil, or pointless. The number of kid- and family-friendly movies was almost exclusively limited to Disney flicks.
There were movies for 5-10 year olds, mature movies for 18+ year olds. And porn. Teens had a choice between sneaking into R-rated flicks, or seeing "family fare" aimed at six year olds. I remember one weekend checking the movie listings, and out of something like 25 movies, 20 were R-rated, 4 were kid flicks, and one was a documentary.
Keep in mind that these were the days before the internet, before cell phones, and before personal computers. Television had three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. There were five for us Canadians, we got CBC and CTV too, but mostly they just showed American shows, so it wasn't all that different.
In other words, Star Wars didn't have a whole lot in the way of competition for people's attention, compared to today.
Star Wars was the first movie in years which a family could see together without boring the teenagers out of their minds, and without traumatizing the pre-teen set. It was the first movie in something like five years where parents didn't have to cringe going into the theater, and weren't afraid to take their kids to.
Star Wars was also a throwback to the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials that many of those parents had back in their own teenage years.
I think the original Star Wars trilogy was a good, fun, series. I don't think that it deserved the adulation it received. It was a decent film that happened to appear at exactly the perfect time for it to become a phenomenon.
Star Wars made theatrical movies fun again. It made it okay to make family friendly movies, something that even a year earlier would have been sneered at as unsophisticated.
So, basically, Star Wars got an unearned reputation as being the second coming of science fiction. People had low expectations, so they were pleasantly surprised by a fun film which, in all honesty, doesn't really stand up to deep inspection.
Episodes 1-3 were exactly the opposite. People had sky high expectations, and both TV and movie offerings of science fiction had blossomed since the 1970s.
That having been said, episodes 1-3 also sucked like a Hoover because they failed at storytelling. The original series fails the logic test, too. But it's interesting enough that it distracts most people from noticing that fact until after they leave the theatre. Episodes 1-3 had people physically rolling their eyes and groaning in the theatre.
This is essentially what I do. As always, security is a process, not a product.
For the really secure stuff, that's only done at home, on a separate browser instance that uses strong passwords. That browser is only used for banking and etc., has no plugins other than AdBlock and NoScript, and no bookmarks other the the financial/secure sites (no, not porn:-). Those passwords never leave the house, for any reason. They're kept in a KeepPass database on the PC.
For normal browsing, ie. web based passwords, I use XMarks to keep my work and home passwords in sync. My work version of Firefox is password protected, and I use a keyboard macro program to give the 32 character password (or at least 30 of the characters; I enter the last 2 manually), so I'm reasonably sure that's safe. Even if it isn't, the exposure is limited. I always generate large (20+ character) passwords, which aren't human readable, so I find that's the most effective guarantee to ensure I don't get lazy and enter an easily remembered/compromised password.
I keep a separate KeepPass database for those passwords that can travel. That database, and a copy of portable KeepPass (for various OSes), are on my USB thumb drive. My USB drive is on my key chain, which has my home and car keys, so I have to make a conscious effort to pull out my car keys to use it. That makes it pretty much impossible to forget somewhere, unlike numerous friends who use lanyards and free floating USB drives. Sadly, that's why I got rid of my otherwise fantastic Rally OZ drive: the plastic keyring attachment snapped off. The Diesel's not as fast, but it's still securely on the key chain.
On PCs that I frequent (such as at work), I have KeepPass installed, and I set up a shortcut to link only to the file on the USB drive. I replicate my USB drive to a directory on my home PC, and I have a script to reconcile if the home PC's version of the database is newer than the USB drive version, so I can add new passwords to either the home PC or the USB key when on the road.
As for the the password for the KeepPass database, I build passwords using a standard formula:
- special character #1 (ie. @) - special character #2 (ie. _) - friend's student ID - first letter of first sentence of saying/song/poem I associate with friend - original phone number of friend when I met him/her
So if my friend David's student ID was 9801938, his favourite saying was "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party", and his phone number was 555-1234, then the password is "@_9801938Nittfagmtcttaotp5551234". When I change the password, I update a hint file (not called hint) in an unencrypted file on the USB drive. In the example above, the hint is simply "David".
What does this all mean? Well, obviously I'm a raving paranoid, but it works well for me. If someone were to steal and crack my work desktop PC, nothing critical (ie. my banking) is there. And if it were stolen, I'd have my XMarks password changed in a minute, long before they cracked the TrueCrypt volume that Firefox is on, anyway. And if my USB drive was stolen, well, good luck cracking that password.
The root password is pretty complex, but after using that scheme for several years, it's not onerous at all.
Like the OP, I wanted something that was application, browser, and computer independant, was easily carried, and I'm not about to freak out if I lose it.
IIRC, when jms started the show, he ran everything he could past the JPL (who were big fans) to get their take on things. Outside of the jump gates, which were a necessary plot point, everything had at least *some* grounding in real world science, however tenuous. The jump gates had some gag line about being "(C) Minbari/Centauri Consortium", and they deliberately didn't explain how they worked, so as to prevent humans from making cheap knockoffs.
B5 itself actually looked like some of the proposed space stations, using centripetal force for gravity, etc. The handheld weapons were PPGs rather than slug throwers, because handguns in space have all sorts of problems.
There was obviously a lot of "this is beyond you" technology (Minbari, Vorlon, Shadow, and Centauri), but the story was never about the tech. It was about the politics that used the tech.
In contrast, Star Trek just made up tech as required, and promptly forgot about it at episode's end. Need to transport Picard to another galaxy? Just sprinkle some plot dust over the transporter, and hey, he can transport 57.2 light years safely. It's not like the Federation would ever bother to research that for future use or anything. In one episode, Barcley became super smart and actually dragged the Enterprise (at something like warp 56) to a planet that had given him the brainpower to upgrade the Enterprise to the point that they'd come visit. Why aren't all starships doing warp 56 afterwards? No technical or military use?
In the first season of B5, they came up with an alien medical device that could be used to cure or kill. Surprisingly, in the second season, they actually remembered it, and used it to restore a character (at cost to two other characters). It was deemed too dangerous to use. Lo and behold, in season four, it showed up again, and this time it did kill someone. Can anyone honestly see that happening in Trek?
My problem with Trek was that the tech was nothing but a plot crutch. Engineers could research, develop, and implement a generation's worth of technology, in a day, on board ship, in order to solve a crisis. And it would promptly be forgotten. How many episodes would be resolved if they just used the magic wand they created six episodes back? Too many. So, they'd handwave it away.
In practice this obviously means (just 2 examples) : -> teaching data denying global warming -> teaching data agreeing with global warming -> teaching against evolution -> teaching for evolution
AND tolerating, without ridicule ANY conclusion any individual kid comes to.
Back in the day, in my grade 11 English class, we were required to debate. This was rules-based debating, awarding points based on rebuttals, etc. However, we had a touchy-feely teacher who objected to the concept, because often the "wrong side" would win. "Wrong" of course being defined as anything the teacher disagreed with.
Due to a quirk of scheduling, I managed to get two debates on consecutive weeks. The first was debating capital punishment, and my team drew the affirmative. The second was also debating capital punishment, and I was added to the negative team, who were short a debater.
In both cases, my team won the debate, by large margins.
The teacher promptly ordered the result of the second debate overturned, and gave me a poor grade, because "obviously" I must have cheated. I escalated it all the way up to the Board of Education. In one of the more memorable memories I had of high school, I witnessed the Board members drop their jaws to the floor listening to the teacher's justification for her grading. First off, she said I was being "intellectually dishonest" by arguing both sides of the same proposition. Ignoring the fact that I didn't *choose* what debates to be part of (they were assigned to us), whether you agree with your debate topic or not is irrelevant. In fact, it's quite beneficial to argue the merits of something you personally disagree with; it helps you judge the validity of your own position from a different view. That a teacher didn't realize (or accept) this was quite a shock to the Board.
But even more damning was the teacher's second argument for my grade. She gave an impassioned speech explaining how capital punishment was immoral, with numerous (irrelevant) emotional examples of why it was bad. Again, the Board pointed out that whether capital punishment was moral or not wasn't the issue, the issue was the debate.
At this point, she basically flipped her lid, and was practically yelling at the Board members. "Don't you understand? Capital punishment is *murder*! It's *wrong*! How can I give a passing grade to a student that advocates *killing*? You're asking me to reward immoral behaviour, and I won't do it!"
She didn't have to, as the Board directly upgraded my mark, and that teacher found herself removed from the debate process the next year. However, she was still in the system, evaluating her students using her moral criteria.
Sure, I won. But only because I wouldn't back down. The teacher wouldn't budge. The vice principal wouldn't do anything. The principal wouldn't do anything. It took me (and my mother) months to escalate this up to the Board, during which time, this teacher was teaching students that debate was a popularity contest and a way to show your moral superiority.
Sadly, they don't teach formal debate any more, and I see the effects of that in many places. Students are not taught to not become emotionally involved in a debate; over the years I've seen more and more that people are trying to shout each other down rather than debate.
I'm pro-evolution and a global warming "denier", and I'm more than happy to debate those topics with people. However, I find that many of my ideological opponents tend to (a) confuse an appeal to emotion with a logical argument, and (b) become hysterical when they feel they're losing.
I've won more debates than I've lost, but I've certainly lost a few in my time. And I've learned more from those debates than from the ones I won. Winning doesn't make you challenge your assumptions.
In 1985, I'd spent about a year and a half doing contract PC work with various versions of Lattice C (2.0 bad, 2.01 better, 2.10 really bad, 2.11 bad, 2.12 good) and was looking for a new contract.
Two local shops were advertising for "DOS based C programmers" at the time, so I applied.
The first one rejected me because they were an Microsoft C shop, and all my experience was with Lattice. The fact that Microsoft was simply reselling Lattice C under their own name seemed to be a revelation to them.
The second shop was even more amusing. Despite being impressed with my credentials, all my experience was unfortunately on PC based, and, as the interviewer patiently explained to me as if he was speaking to a child, their shop in question had no PCs, they had (drum roll) the new IBM XT computers.
The frightening thing is that in those days HR (or Personel, as it was known back in the day) didn't interview tech positions, because they knew they didn't understand it. So the tech manager did the interviewing. So it was the management types, the people who would have been my immediate superiors, than didn't know the difference between a PC and an XT. For you youngun's: the XT has a hard drive, 7 bus slots instead of 5, and a 120 watt power supply rather than 63.5 watts. None of which really makes a difference to a C coder, but there you go.
I didn't get an offer from either shop. Of course, I didn't really want one. Working at places where I'd report to managers like that really wasn't a big draw.
deus ex machina: literally translated, means god from the machine. The expression is used to denote an unlikely agent which arrives to resolve an apparently hopeless situation; or, a contrived and inartistic solution of a difficulty in plot.
It's on my website:-)
SPOILERS HO
I expected the ending of BSG to be a tragedy. I didn't expect it literally, however. It was a tragedy not only in the modern sense, but in the historical "Greek tragedy" sense as well.
There were a lot of things to like about the new BSG. But there was a lot of silliness, too. The original idea, that humans were on the run from a relentless force that had a plan was intriguing, right up until the point where the plan was revealed.
The idea that the Cylons were hunting the humans in order to breed with them made zero sense. Occam's razor would dictate that if they wanted Cylon/Human hybrids, it would be a hell of a lot easier to do so when there were 12 planets teeming with humankind than it would be to wipe out 99.9999% of the human race, then hunt down the surviving 0.0001% and mate with them. Are we supposed to believe that they deliberately let the Galactica survive? Or did they only start working on this plan after they destroyed the colonies?
And boy, it was a lucky thing that the final Cylons just *happened* to all get together on that one ship, eh?
The running gag was that the Cylons had a plan, we just with that they'd let the writers in on it. Add to that the nonsense of "the final five", where in an interview, Ron Moore admitted that the writers had no idea who they were, and it's obvious that they were making the show up as they went along. It's kind of difficult to get involved with a complex plot when the writers are just throwing darts to create plot resolutions.
In the end, the finale was not the resolution of a multiyear story arc that culminated in a logical conclusion (see: Babylon 5). It was the writers looking at the wall, seeing the clock was running down, and realizing that they had 30 minutes to wrap up 4 years of plotlines.
Look at that last half hour. - Starbuck punches in random co-ordinates into the FTL drive (based on a song in her head) - said jump trashes the Galactica so it can never jump again (forcing an end to the series) - hey look! the fleet just happened to jump next to a perfectly suitable planet! - the planet has human life, just like the Colonials (odds against? "Astronomical") - the Colonials decide to destroy all their tech and go camping for 150,000 years
(with "surprisingly little dissent") - they destroy the entire fleet by driving it into the sun - what the hell, we wanted Earth, let's call this place Earth - 150,000 years later, it's Live From New York!
Wait a second. Wouldn't we have found evidence of a superior civilization that predates us by 150,000 years (see: Inherit the Stars)? No, they conveniently decided to chuck all that for no reason. What about the Battlestar and other vessels? Nope, trashed them too. What about a settlement? No, they spread out.
You're the last 35,000 members of your species. You've just landed on an unknown, unfamiliar, but inhabited planet. You don't know the wildlife, the flora, or the natives. You're led by professional soldiers. So what do you do? Throw away all your technology, and split up.
The only reason a hardened military unit that just came out of a running war would do something that stupid is that the writers decreed they had to. Because if they didn't, if they acted like their training and experience had conditioned them too, then there would be physical evidence of their existence, and that would blow the finale.
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They changed our anti-virus from Symantec, which ate about 10% CPU time when checking, to McAfee, which eats about 40%. I/O heavy processes that used to take around 2 minutes now take 8. They got McAfee free in a bundle - it's a shame about the cost to our productivity. The snoopware that checks every path on your drive - including ones inside archives (yes, including jars - we're mostly Java developers) will thrash your disk for about 20 minutes and then will consume a whole CPU core for another 10 zipping up the list to send back to base. Since the change of antivirus, reading all those files of course also thrashes the CPU. This grinds some of our machines to a halt so well that you can watch the display being rendered, one raster line at a time.
We have a similar situation. On "Virus Wednesdays", our MacAfee scanners go hog-wild, and our. pee. cees. slow. to. a. crawl. A 40% drop in performance would be nothing. Twenty minutes? These scans usually take 18 hours or more. On our build machines, the virus scan takes upwards of four days (Wed, Thu, Fri, and often part of Saturday). A normal two hour build takes over a day.
More importantly, our core application - that which we are employed to build, sell, enhance, and support, in other words, the reason for our business' existence - cannot be run, because the serial and network connections all time out. We have about a 500ms window for comm traffic, and normally it's in the 100ms-200ms range. When the virus scanner runs, those packets can take 8-10 seconds each to process, so we have a timeout rate of 100%, with resultant application failure. It's like trying to test a new web browser when the network is disconnected. And this is in loopback mode, I might add.
Initially, developers were using task manager to lower the priority of the scanner so it didn't cripple the machine. IT discovered that their end of week reports were showing that the development machines weren't completing the scan by the expected time, so they locked the process such that developers couldn't change it. So, developers started rebooting their PCs to escape the process. The next step was to have the scan restart after every reboot so that it was inescapable.
Not a day goes past without my colleague cursing because his machine is doing the bidding of the IT department instead of compiling his code.
We have the same. Since my company is currently in one of those "efficiency initiative" drives where staff can suggest to management ways to improve the company, it was suggested that maybe these performance-sapping scans could be run, like, overnight rather than in core hours? Or on a weekend? Some in my department did the math, and showed that the performance hit was effectively the same as four full time developers in terms of hours being chewed up uselessly.
The IT director's response was "since the development department is showing that they are still able to make deadlines with the virus scan running, an alternative cost saving would be to move the virus scan to non-core hours, and terminate four positions from the development department". He put that in writing, in the "efficiency initiative" wiki.
Management is now scratching their heads, inquiring as to why suggestions have dried up, and no one seems to be submitting any new ideas for efficiency savings.
Of course, management is starting to take notice, because a major customer made an urgent request, and made the mistake of asking for it on a Tuesday. Of course, the "we must ship by Friday" edict ran head first into the "virus scan on the build machine means the build can't complete until Saturday" problem, which hopefully might escalate the problem to the point where it's taken seriously. But it's a shame that it had to negatively impact a customer deliverable before it's given serious attention.
I have a personal domain which has the same problem. My domain name is a four letter latin word (not wanting to slashdot my poor server, I won't mention the name). There's a Belgian rock band with the same name, a video game with a similar name, and at least one medical ward in a Boston hospital which uses a typographical variation.
I used to be inundated with (a) Flemish grunge fans who were indignant that I had "stolen" the name of "their" band's website (fans, not the band itself), (b) people asking/demanding help in the game, and (c) confidential reports from the hospital. And when I say inundated, I mean I was getting between 3,000 and 7,000 spam/misdirected email a day. Probably 50 of those a day were misdirected emails that weren't flagged as spam.
Ten years ago, I used to send back a boilerplate "this isn't the web site you're looking for" response to these guys (I set up a script in the Bat mailer I was using at the time). The results I got for this were:
a) the grungers demanded I give "back" my domain to their favourite band;
b) the gamers told me "I'll never buy another one of your effing games again"; and, for the win
c) the hospital types said "you have illegally intercepted confidential medical data, we're going to sue you into the ground"
To be fair, there were a number of "oops, sorry, thought you were the other guys" apologies (and one rambling email in Portuguese from a woman who wanted to know if she should marry her boyfriend whom she didn't love, and should wait for Mr. Right instead)
Nothing ever came from it, other than my deciding to say the hell with it. Most of it was nonsense, but it could easily become a time suck.
More recently, I've started getting "confirmations" from companies that my application has been pre-approved. This isn't spam, it's actually some bozo using my email address, despite giving different address/phone information when applying. The fact that he's getting these pre-approvals says something about the approval process, to be sure. I called the first few, thinking maybe my account had been hacked, but it's just someone else (it's always the same address he gives) who doesn't seem to know his own email address.
How do you "calibrate" a system that accommodates both the Steven Wrights of the world, and the Sam Kinisons, at the same time?
One of the problems reported in some airline crashes is that professional airline pilots can be too professional. In one case, a pilot was calling a mayday and was pretty much ignored because his voice was a monotone, as he'd been trained.
My mom was an emergency room RN, and I found out early as a child that it's possible to be too dispassionate about things. On the one hand, when I was stabbed, it was really good to have a professional trauma nurse for a mom. On the other, it took a while to get the neighbours to react (phoning the hospital to know we were coming, getting a ride, clearing the streets, etc), because Mom wasn't running around screaming and attracting attention the way a normal civilian would, to get attention. Fortunately, my grandmother (whose dials started at 11, and worked up from there) was available to provide the necessary hysterics that got the neighbourhood going.
I never thought I'd see the day when Apple is considered an "evil empire", and Microsoft is kind of the underdog/good-guy.
Well, I never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft was considered an "evil empire", and IBM was kind of the underdog/good-guy. But it happened.
Corporations are not inherently virtuous or villainous; they work in their own best interests. When they are the top dog, they will want to maintain the status quo, and treat such changes as a potential (or real) threat. The further back in the pack the company is, the more it will try to change the status quo in their favour.
Unfortunately, a lot of people romanticize it, and tend to form emotional attachments to companies and their products. This results in a correspondingly wildly unrealistic viewpoint. You'll see people lambaste Microsoft as evil and monopolistic for their practices, yet absolve Sun or Apple for the exact same behaviour, if not worse.
The problem is that the company will inevitably do something you disagree with. If you think of it as a company, it makes sense. But if you're viewing it as a morality play of good versus evil, all of a sudden it's a betrayal, and the company is "turning its' back on people", etc.
I've seen this happen to IBM, to Sun, to AT&T, to Apple, to Microsoft, and it's now happening with both Google and Nokia. Eventually, the markets will shift, behaviours will adapt, new players will enter the market, and the cycle will restart, with Google as the scrappy competitor again.
Plus ca change, and all that.
Linux has been around since 1991. Windows did not really take off until 1995.
Conversely, Windows has been around since 1985, and Linux did not really take off until around 1998 or so. Both were either hobbyist projects (Linux) are in-house R&D efforts (Windows) that were really only suitable to hacker types. I'd say Windows "took off" around May 1990, when Windows 3.0 came out (and basically buried OS/2 v1), and Linux "took off" probably when Red Hat kicked out their 1.0 release in 1994.
I still recall hacking my phone to enable basic features like the ability to transfer files over USB instead of having to spent $0.75 a shot emailing *my own* pictures to myself or being able to upload custom ringtones instead of having to buy them from the telco's ringtone store.
That's one of the reasons I chose my Nokia 6585 in the first place. Never mind wanting $.075 to send pictures to yourself; they wanted me to spend money to put a calendar entry into my phone. And using my own MP3? Why would I want to do that? PC Suite was the major selling point for me. I could, and have, ditched one Nokia phone for another, and the syncing process was 15 minutes, and free. In the beginning, I had to crack the phone, just to be able to hook it up, because the carrier locked it down. To switch to a Samsung, or Motorola, or LG, my carrier wanted me to pay them to move my own data between my own devices. Sod that. Even moving between one Samsung to another (as a friend did) was a nightmare of lost data and manually re-entering stuff. You're right; if Steve Jobs did nothing else, he did that. Not because he was brilliant, but because he had enough weight behind him to get his way.
While the "trojan horse" idea may appeal to the conspiracy theorist and the anti-MS crowds, Occam's razor would lead me to believe the opposite.
Which is more likely? That Nokia brought an ex-Microsoft exec on board to run the company and are shocked, shocked to discover that he's partnering them with MS? Or that the Nokia board already considered an MS/Nokia deal as likely/possible/inevitable, and got someone previously with Microsoft onto their side in order to be able to better negotiate terms? Personally, I'd suspect the latter.
I'm not keen on a Nokia/Microsoft partnership, but given that their choices are either (a) go under, (b) go Android, or (c) go W7, I don't think it's the worst choice.
I would have loved for them to buy Palm last year and put WebOS on Nokia hardware, but that ship has sailed. And getting Meego out the door in time was sounding increasingly unlikely; and it has its' own set of problems, too.
Going with Android was the easy (and obvious) choice. But the problem there is that Nokia becomes just one more vendor swimming in the shark pool. With MS, they've negotiated preferential treatment over other W7 providers, so the will be able to differentiate themselves from the other W7 vendors.
I'm still irritated that this happened, but I'm not writing Nokia off yet. The irony is that living in Canada, I'm much more likely to see Nokia's in a year than I am now, simply because they are much more likely to be able to be carried by some of the major carriers.
it's a great pocket computer with phone capabilities
And therein lies the problem. It's a great phone for the /. crowd, but that's not what will make or break the company.
Nokia is getting stomped by the iPhone. Can anyone seriously say that iOS is superior to Symbian in terms of capabilities? No, the iPhone wins on services, ease of use, applications, etc. And that's what Nokia is looking to buy into with W7.
I really like my 5800, but I'm under no illusions that it will convert over anyone but techies from an iPhone. Sure, I know a lot more about the insides of my Nokia 5800 than most of my friends with iPhones know about theirs, but their money is just as good as mine. So what if their criteria for choosing a phone is different than mine?
How did this get ignored for so long in iOS and Windows phone?
Because other than in a bullet chart, multitasking doesn't show up in marketing.
I have a Nokia 5800. I have several friends with iPhones (3 and 4), and they're constantly trying to prove that the iPhone is "better". Sure, Symbian multitasks like no one's business, but the iPhone has more apps and a better UI. So iPhone grabbed something like 70% of the Japanese smartphone market in 3 years, while Nokia has had to partner with Microsoft just for survival.
Another example was OS/2. OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking years before the Windows operating system(s) it was competing against, but it looked like crap, and users stayed away in droves. The same was true comparing Windows 95 to MacOS prior 1995; it wasn't until Apple went to a Unix based system in 1997-ish (my memory's fuzzy about the dates) that the Mac got features like pre-emptive multitasking and proper dynamic memory allocation.
Tech features may sell to slashdotters, but most of the population cares a lot more about the UI than what's under the hood.
Like most of my geek buddies, on Friday, I looked at Nokia's partnership with MS as one of the longer suicide notes in history. On Saturday, I was out with friends who aren't all techs, and I was surprised that many of them considered it a good thing, and were interested to see what a NokiaSoft phone would look like.
That's the insane part, since Microsoft is supposed to be outright draconian about the hardware spec. Under this deal, Nokia basically get to choose the colour of the device, AFAIK.
Actually, that was one of the issues Esop addressed, Nokia can modify W7, something that HTC cannot do. He said that they probably won't, though.
I think that Nokia is basically supposed to become the reference platform for W7. How well that will work out is another story.
My first (dumb)phone was a Nokia 6110
1999: Nokia 282
2000: Samsung 3530
2005: Nokia 6585
2007: Nokia 6275i
2009: Nokia 5130
2010: Nokia 5800, C3
My first PDA was a Palm Pilot 1000 in 1996 and my last, a Palm Tungsten T3 in 2005.
1997: USR Palm Pilot 1000
1998: 3Com Palm Pilot
2000: Handspring Visor
I ran with the Visor and the Samsung 3530 concurrently until I got the 6585, at which point, some of the Visor functionality (calendar, address book) moved to the phone. With the 5800, I can't see anything in the Visor that I can't do with the phone.
Too bad they didn't cooperate back then. Palm and Nokia: you will be remembered.
Oh, I so wanted Nokia to buy Palm. The Palm Pre phones get rave reviews for WebOS, but has no real presence; and all of Nokia's smartphone reviews read as "terrific hardware, horrible operating system". Nokia with WebOS would have been such a win, but it didn't happen.
I see this NokiaSoft alliance as being either really stupid or really smart. I'm not sure which, though. Nokia didn't want Android since they'd be nothing but a hardware vendor at that point. But there aren't a lot of phone OS options out there. WebOS would have been perfect, IMHO, but HP snapped that up, so what was left?
I hope they can pull it off. But it's a tall order. I'm not writing them off (as many/most slashdotters are), but they're going to have to release some impressive offerings reasonably soon. And I don't mean 18 months from now.
Implementation is something else. What so-called 'idea people' don't realize is that without implementation, ideas are worthless. And you know what? Implementation is hard.
Isaac Asimov was constantly approached by wannabe writers who always had the next Great Idea who proposed "I'll do the ideas, you do the writing, and we'll split it 50-50". Asimov always countered that ideas were easy, writing was hard. When the wannabe would handwave that aside, Asimov would counteroffer that he had lots of great ideas too, so why didn't they just use his idea, and let the other guy do the writing? All of a sudden the writing didn't look so trivial...
I used to work with such a wannabe. Back in the 1990s, every time a 25 year old became an internet-based millionaire, he would snark that "I could have done that easily". Yes, so could I. But we didn't. Everything's easy in hindsight.
People see the success of others and forget the hard work and risk taking that went into that success. If they recognize it at all, they write it off as simple luck.
I've been approached, as have probably most of the slashdot crowd, by any number of these "my idea, your code" types. Despite being certain that it will net fifty krillion dollars in the first year of operation, which I'd get 50% of, not one of them has been willing to buy out my 50% ahead of time for a mere $500,000. Funny, that.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner.
"Was right around the corner" isn't an option. It was a year off.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
It was inexpensive, but not compared to most PCs. And the killer for it was the serious lack of applications. The problem was that the company was good at games, but they were trying to release a business based PC without any compelling business software.
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then.
Actually, it was pretty much true. PC vendors also published the pinouts and entry points (some vendors, like Heathkit, published the source code of their BIOS), and some didn't.
The problem with the Apple, Amiga and the Atari ST was that they were single sourced. The PCs were competing not only with Apple/Atari/Commodore but with each other. So no matter what level of technical specs you wanted, there was always at least one vendor who'd run with it.
Windows 1.0 was clearly a proof of concept rather than a platform that was intended for serious use. The main reason to get it out the door was to show how it stacked up against the other PC-based DOS alternatives of the day: GEM, DesQ (later DesqView), and TopView. I believe that the idea was to just get it out the door so it was no longer vapourware, so people could see it head to head with the others.
For the most part, people fired it up, played with it for about 20 minutes, then shut it down and went back to work. I remember that every Windows application that was for sale at the time included a run-time version of Windows, so that you could run it whether you had a full copy of Windows or not.
I do remember you couldn't have overlapping windows. That's why many referred to it as "Microsoft Window". Also, it was so slow that the little corner thing was there to referred to as the vent, because of all the heat generated by the speed :-)
The name of the film was actually even Revenge of the Jedi
Heh. I still have my "Revenge of the Jedi" shirt from some 1982 convention or giveway. A little small, 30 years later, but I still pull it out to prove that yes, it was called Revenge originally.
As I recall, it was changed because Star Trek 2: The Revenge of Khan was due to come out, and Paramount was threatening Lucas about stealing "their" title. And as someone pointed out, Jedis aren't supposed to believe in revenge anyway, so they changed it to "Return". Of course, Star Trek also then changed their title to "Wrath", making the whole thing moot.
not that I expect you to believe me fully, I'm also a developer, and myself I don't believe what I can't verify
Why wouldn't I believe you? I'm a developer too (not in the cell phone or GPS arena, though). I thought you were over generalizing from a single data point, but I don't doubt what you were reporting. I just thought your blanket criticisms of all Nokias as unacceptable deserved a counterpoint.
As I said, I've got a 5800, you've got an E71, and we both know how much the "but they're exactly the same" argument means. Hell, I wouldn't be doubt you if 98% of the E71 users had opposite experiences; unless you know everybody's firmware revision, install applications, and configuration settings, everything's possible.
Free offline navigation is one of its key differentiators
Agreed. I replaced my old phone (a 5130) because with my poor eyesight, I wanted a larger display and higher resolution. At the time, I was also considering getting a GPS for my car, so when I checked out phones, I figured I'd see if the 5800's internal GPS was good enough. It was and is.
It's really a shame; Nokia (like Palm) has some really nice hardware, but doesn't leverage it properly. For all the buzz around Android and the iPhone, most people (in North America, at least) aren't even aware that Nokia's in the smart phone business.
Disagree.
I bought a (used) Nokia 5800 several months back. I use it primarily as a GPS/MP3 player/PDA/Calculator (also as a flashlight). It's pretty much just an emergency phone. I'm only spending $25 a year for air time (at 25 cents a minute), and I certainly don't have any data plan.
The Nokia 5800 GPS doesn't require a data connection. By default, it will use A-GPS, but that's just a configuration setting. Set it to standard GPS mode (Settings->Location->Positioning->Positioning Methods->Integrated GPS), and you're done. Your post goes into great detail about the problem with your E71, but you didn't mention if you'd changed the default from Assisted GPS. If you're still using that setting, the phone will look for cell towers first, and only use the internal GPS when all the cell connections fail. That might explain some of the problems you're reporting. Or, the E71 is different than the 5800.
Either that, or your unit is just a lemon.
For maps, as you mentioned. you can download them on a Mac/PC, and then use either the Nokia OVI Suite software or the Nokia Map Loader software (both free) to download maps from OVI into your phone.
As for battery life, the major drain isn't the GPS, but the display. If you've got a car charger, set the GPS backlight to "always on"; otherwise use the "Optimized" setting.
Of course, without a data plan, the GPS in the phone won't work inside buildings (where it depends on the A-GPS), you won't get traffic reports, and maps will only be as current as the last download you made. There will be to Google Maps support or the like.
A co-worker with and I often compare what the A-GPS in his $50/month iPhone 3G can do versus my four-month-old downloaded maps. Surprisingly, I've been able to do some things he can't; when in areas with poor reception, the "Search Offline" in the Nokia is extremely useful. Of course, he gets live traffic updates, Google street view, live restaurant reviews, and the like that I don't. My Turn-By-Turn display is also better than what he's been able to do (not saying it's not in the iPhone, but he hasn't found it). I also downloaded the (free) "surfer dude" voice, for amusement.
As for using the phone as a GPS versus a dedicated GPS: it's fine for me, but there are some good reasons to prefer a dedicated GPS. For one thing, their maps tend to be a lot more details. My Nokia maps for all of Ontario, Canada, were about 63MB. In contrast, my friend's Garmin was something like 2.5GB for the same area. That's forty times the amount of detail. His GPS also does proper building addresses, where the Nokia maps only estimate street addresses based on the position within the street. That won't matter so much if you're camping or fishing, though.
My 5800 usually gets a lock within 90 seconds of going outdoors when in a car. It has taken up to six minutes on a very cloudy day. Walking, it seems to take longer, but that's more problematic. It won't get a fix if it's in a covered case/pocket/backpack, so you have to be holding the damn thing in your hand for it to work, and I'm rarely interested in holding it in my hand for six minutes while walking for it to get position. It does work, though, when I've stopped to sit down for a few minutes, and let it acquire a signal.
One major weakness for walking, though, is that sunlight readability of the 5800 at least (I don't know about other Nokias) is pathetic, practically nonexistent. Not really a recommendation for a unit when fishing/hiking/hunting. I don't know how other GPSes compare though.
So, to summarize:
- you can use a Nokia phone as a GPS
- you don't need a data plan
- it will have the benefit of being an emergency 911 phone, even without a data or voice plan
- battery life will be inferior to a dedicated GPS
- it's not as accurate as a dedicated GPS
- sunlight readability is a concern
So really, it's a judgment call as to whether it's a suitable replacement for a standalone GPS. For me, it is. For others, it won't be.
This is the exact reason why, when Babylon 5 started up, the actors were all signed on for five year contracts (the industry standard is seven, I believe). That was specifically so that when the story had been told, it would be too difficult/expensive to sign up the entire cast again to continue for a sixth season. jms wanted the series to end after five years, by design. And he knew that the networks would try to milk it if it were a money maker, so he sabotaged it from the start.
I've seen a number of actors from the B5 series express interest in doing a sixth season because "there was more we could do". True, but there was also things that could be done with Lord of the Rings after Sauron was defeated, but that's not the point. As someone on B5 (maybe Zathras) said, "This is the end of the story, there is no more to tell. But there will be other stories".
Some shows, like Firefly, straddle the line between having a story arc (Buffy, B5, Lost, BSG), and being standalone. Firefly had the mystery of the Reavers (even if you didn't know it was a mystery at the time), but the episodes weren't dependent on it.
I remember watching B5 when it originally aired, and then seeing something like TNG afterwards, and wondering why the Federation was stumbling around scratching their heads trying to solve a crisis that could have been resolved in five minutes with the tech that they'd discovered or invented about three episodes earlier.
The simple fact is that nothing really had consequences in TNG, or most shows. What should be universe changing tech (or religion, or social, or whatever) discoveries happened in an episode and were then promptly forgotten. In B5, what looks like a throwaway piece of tech in season one ends up being the resolution to Ivanova's situation in the finale of season four.
jms said that he saw the ending of the B5 storyline first, and then worked his way back. There were bumps along the way (actors leave, studios screw with you), but as he said, if you're telling the story of a Marine Corps unit in WWII, you still know that the Allies are going to win in the end, it's how you get there.
With stories like Lost (which I only saw the first season of) and BSG (which I watched with one eye open), it's obvious that the writers are just making up crap as they go along. In the BSG commentaries, Ronald Moore admitted that the writers were deciding the resolutions to mysteries only *after* the mystery had been aired. In other words, there was no logic to who the "final five" were; there was no point for the watchers to try to figure it out, because the writers had not figured it out yet themselves.
I watched the first season of Lost because everyone was raving about it. There were some good episodes, but overall, it suffered from the Chris Carter effect. There's a difference between having a complex story, and simply throwing unresolved mystery after unresolved mystery on the screen, hoping that something will stick, and then standing back and calling it "brilliant". B5 had just as many mysteries and subplots, and it managed to resolve them *all*.
If you're scratching your head after a planned series finale, the series is a dud, as far as I'm concerned.
the real difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 is *you*, not the films.
The real difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 is the difference between the 1970s and the 2000s.
Star Wars existed in a vacuum. Episodes 1-3 were planted in a forest.
People forget, or don't know, what the movie landscape was like in the mid to late 1970s. If you ever check out movie listings in 1970s newspapers, you'll get an eye full. In post-Watergate America, movies were depressing. Occult movies were all the rage, as were cops-on-the-take pieces. Movies almost uniformly presented a dismal view of the world. Everything was corrupt, evil, or pointless. The number of kid- and family-friendly movies was almost exclusively limited to Disney flicks.
There were movies for 5-10 year olds, mature movies for 18+ year olds. And porn. Teens had a choice between sneaking into R-rated flicks, or seeing "family fare" aimed at six year olds. I remember one weekend checking the movie listings, and out of something like 25 movies, 20 were R-rated, 4 were kid flicks, and one was a documentary.
Keep in mind that these were the days before the internet, before cell phones, and before personal computers. Television had three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. There were five for us Canadians, we got CBC and CTV too, but mostly they just showed American shows, so it wasn't all that different.
In other words, Star Wars didn't have a whole lot in the way of competition for people's attention, compared to today.
Star Wars was the first movie in years which a family could see together without boring the teenagers out of their minds, and without traumatizing the pre-teen set. It was the first movie in something like five years where parents didn't have to cringe going into the theater, and weren't afraid to take their kids to.
Star Wars was also a throwback to the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials that many of those parents had back in their own teenage years.
I think the original Star Wars trilogy was a good, fun, series. I don't think that it deserved the adulation it received. It was a decent film that happened to appear at exactly the perfect time for it to become a phenomenon.
Star Wars made theatrical movies fun again. It made it okay to make family friendly movies, something that even a year earlier would have been sneered at as unsophisticated.
So, basically, Star Wars got an unearned reputation as being the second coming of science fiction. People had low expectations, so they were pleasantly surprised by a fun film which, in all honesty, doesn't really stand up to deep inspection.
Episodes 1-3 were exactly the opposite. People had sky high expectations, and both TV and movie offerings of science fiction had blossomed since the 1970s.
That having been said, episodes 1-3 also sucked like a Hoover because they failed at storytelling. The original series fails the logic test, too. But it's interesting enough that it distracts most people from noticing that fact until after they leave the theatre. Episodes 1-3 had people physically rolling their eyes and groaning in the theatre.
This is essentially what I do. As always, security is a process, not a product.
For the really secure stuff, that's only done at home, on a separate browser instance that uses strong passwords. That browser is only used for banking and etc., has no plugins other than AdBlock and NoScript, and no bookmarks other the the financial/secure sites (no, not porn :-). Those passwords never leave the house, for any reason. They're kept in a KeepPass database on the PC.
For normal browsing, ie. web based passwords, I use XMarks to keep my work and home passwords in sync. My work version of Firefox is password protected, and I use a keyboard macro program to give the 32 character password (or at least 30 of the characters; I enter the last 2 manually), so I'm reasonably sure that's safe. Even if it isn't, the exposure is limited. I always generate large (20+ character) passwords, which aren't human readable, so I find that's the most effective guarantee to ensure I don't get lazy and enter an easily remembered/compromised password.
I keep a separate KeepPass database for those passwords that can travel. That database, and a copy of portable KeepPass (for various OSes), are on my USB thumb drive. My USB drive is on my key chain, which has my home and car keys, so I have to make a conscious effort to pull out my car keys to use it. That makes it pretty much impossible to forget somewhere, unlike numerous friends who use lanyards and free floating USB drives. Sadly, that's why I got rid of my otherwise fantastic Rally OZ drive: the plastic keyring attachment snapped off. The Diesel's not as fast, but it's still securely on the key chain.
On PCs that I frequent (such as at work), I have KeepPass installed, and I set up a shortcut to link only to the file on the USB drive. I replicate my USB drive to a directory on my home PC, and I have a script to reconcile if the home PC's version of the database is newer than the USB drive version, so I can add new passwords to either the home PC or the USB key when on the road.
As for the the password for the KeepPass database, I build passwords using a standard formula:
- special character #1 (ie. @)
- special character #2 (ie. _)
- friend's student ID
- first letter of first sentence of saying/song/poem I associate with friend
- original phone number of friend when I met him/her
So if my friend David's student ID was 9801938, his favourite saying was "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party", and his phone number was 555-1234, then the password is "@_9801938Nittfagmtcttaotp5551234". When I change the password, I update a hint file (not called hint) in an unencrypted file on the USB drive. In the example above, the hint is simply "David".
What does this all mean? Well, obviously I'm a raving paranoid, but it works well for me. If someone were to steal and crack my work desktop PC, nothing critical (ie. my banking) is there. And if it were stolen, I'd have my XMarks password changed in a minute, long before they cracked the TrueCrypt volume that Firefox is on, anyway. And if my USB drive was stolen, well, good luck cracking that password.
The root password is pretty complex, but after using that scheme for several years, it's not onerous at all.
Like the OP, I wanted something that was application, browser, and computer independant, was easily carried, and I'm not about to freak out if I lose it.
IIRC, when jms started the show, he ran everything he could past the JPL (who were big fans) to get their take on things. Outside of the jump gates, which were a necessary plot point, everything had at least *some* grounding in real world science, however tenuous. The jump gates had some gag line about being "(C) Minbari/Centauri Consortium", and they deliberately didn't explain how they worked, so as to prevent humans from making cheap knockoffs.
B5 itself actually looked like some of the proposed space stations, using centripetal force for gravity, etc. The handheld weapons were PPGs rather than slug throwers, because handguns in space have all sorts of problems.
There was obviously a lot of "this is beyond you" technology (Minbari, Vorlon, Shadow, and Centauri), but the story was never about the tech. It was about the politics that used the tech.
In contrast, Star Trek just made up tech as required, and promptly forgot about it at episode's end. Need to transport Picard to another galaxy? Just sprinkle some plot dust over the transporter, and hey, he can transport 57.2 light years safely. It's not like the Federation would ever bother to research that for future use or anything. In one episode, Barcley became super smart and actually dragged the Enterprise (at something like warp 56) to a planet that had given him the brainpower to upgrade the Enterprise to the point that they'd come visit. Why aren't all starships doing warp 56 afterwards? No technical or military use?
In the first season of B5, they came up with an alien medical device that could be used to cure or kill. Surprisingly, in the second season, they actually remembered it, and used it to restore a character (at cost to two other characters). It was deemed too dangerous to use. Lo and behold, in season four, it showed up again, and this time it did kill someone. Can anyone honestly see that happening in Trek?
My problem with Trek was that the tech was nothing but a plot crutch. Engineers could research, develop, and implement a generation's worth of technology, in a day, on board ship, in order to solve a crisis. And it would promptly be forgotten. How many episodes would be resolved if they just used the magic wand they created six episodes back? Too many. So, they'd handwave it away.
In practice this obviously means (just 2 examples) :
-> teaching data denying global warming
-> teaching data agreeing with global warming
-> teaching against evolution
-> teaching for evolution
AND tolerating, without ridicule ANY conclusion any individual kid comes to.
Back in the day, in my grade 11 English class, we were required to debate. This was rules-based debating, awarding points based on rebuttals, etc. However, we had a touchy-feely teacher who objected to the concept, because often the "wrong side" would win. "Wrong" of course being defined as anything the teacher disagreed with.
Due to a quirk of scheduling, I managed to get two debates on consecutive weeks. The first was debating capital punishment, and my team drew the affirmative. The second was also debating capital punishment, and I was added to the negative team, who were short a debater.
In both cases, my team won the debate, by large margins.
The teacher promptly ordered the result of the second debate overturned, and gave me a poor grade, because "obviously" I must have cheated. I escalated it all the way up to the Board of Education. In one of the more memorable memories I had of high school, I witnessed the Board members drop their jaws to the floor listening to the teacher's justification for her grading. First off, she said I was being "intellectually dishonest" by arguing both sides of the same proposition. Ignoring the fact that I didn't *choose* what debates to be part of (they were assigned to us), whether you agree with your debate topic or not is irrelevant. In fact, it's quite beneficial to argue the merits of something you personally disagree with; it helps you judge the validity of your own position from a different view. That a teacher didn't realize (or accept) this was quite a shock to the Board.
But even more damning was the teacher's second argument for my grade. She gave an impassioned speech explaining how capital punishment was immoral, with numerous (irrelevant) emotional examples of why it was bad. Again, the Board pointed out that whether capital punishment was moral or not wasn't the issue, the issue was the debate.
At this point, she basically flipped her lid, and was practically yelling at the Board members. "Don't you understand? Capital punishment is *murder*! It's *wrong*! How can I give a passing grade to a student that advocates *killing*? You're asking me to reward immoral behaviour, and I won't do it!"
She didn't have to, as the Board directly upgraded my mark, and that teacher found herself removed from the debate process the next year. However, she was still in the system, evaluating her students using her moral criteria.
Sure, I won. But only because I wouldn't back down. The teacher wouldn't budge. The vice principal wouldn't do anything. The principal wouldn't do anything. It took me (and my mother) months to escalate this up to the Board, during which time, this teacher was teaching students that debate was a popularity contest and a way to show your moral superiority.
Sadly, they don't teach formal debate any more, and I see the effects of that in many places. Students are not taught to not become emotionally involved in a debate; over the years I've seen more and more that people are trying to shout each other down rather than debate.
I'm pro-evolution and a global warming "denier", and I'm more than happy to debate those topics with people. However, I find that many of my ideological opponents tend to (a) confuse an appeal to emotion with a logical argument, and (b) become hysterical when they feel they're losing.
I've won more debates than I've lost, but I've certainly lost a few in my time. And I've learned more from those debates than from the ones I won. Winning doesn't make you challenge your assumptions.
In 1985, I'd spent about a year and a half doing contract PC work with various versions of Lattice C (2.0 bad, 2.01 better, 2.10 really bad, 2.11 bad, 2.12 good) and was looking for a new contract.
Two local shops were advertising for "DOS based C programmers" at the time, so I applied.
The first one rejected me because they were an Microsoft C shop, and all my experience was with Lattice. The fact that Microsoft was simply reselling Lattice C under their own name seemed to be a revelation to them.
The second shop was even more amusing. Despite being impressed with my credentials, all my experience was unfortunately on PC based, and, as the interviewer patiently explained to me as if he was speaking to a child, their shop in question had no PCs, they had (drum roll) the new IBM XT computers.
The frightening thing is that in those days HR (or Personel, as it was known back in the day) didn't interview tech positions, because they knew they didn't understand it. So the tech manager did the interviewing. So it was the management types, the people who would have been my immediate superiors, than didn't know the difference between a PC and an XT. For you youngun's: the XT has a hard drive, 7 bus slots instead of 5, and a 120 watt power supply rather than 63.5 watts. None of which really makes a difference to a C coder, but there you go.
I didn't get an offer from either shop. Of course, I didn't really want one. Working at places where I'd report to managers like that really wasn't a big draw.
deus ex machina: literally translated, means god from the machine. The expression is used to denote an unlikely agent which arrives to resolve an apparently hopeless situation; or, a contrived and inartistic solution of a difficulty in plot.
It's on my website :-)
SPOILERS HO
I expected the ending of BSG to be a tragedy. I didn't expect it literally, however. It was a tragedy not only in the modern sense, but in the historical "Greek tragedy" sense as well.
There were a lot of things to like about the new BSG. But there was a lot of silliness, too. The original idea, that humans were on the run from a relentless force that had a plan was intriguing, right up until the point where the plan was revealed.
The idea that the Cylons were hunting the humans in order to breed with them made zero sense. Occam's razor would dictate that if they wanted Cylon/Human hybrids, it would be a hell of a lot easier to do so when there were 12 planets teeming with humankind than it would be to wipe out 99.9999% of the human race, then hunt down the surviving 0.0001% and mate with them. Are we supposed to believe that they deliberately let the Galactica survive? Or did they only start working on this plan after they destroyed the colonies?
And boy, it was a lucky thing that the final Cylons just *happened* to all get together on that one ship, eh?
The running gag was that the Cylons had a plan, we just with that they'd let the writers in on it. Add to that the nonsense of "the final five", where in an interview, Ron Moore admitted that the writers had no idea who they were, and it's obvious that they were making the show up as they went along. It's kind of difficult to get involved with a complex plot when the writers are just throwing darts to create plot resolutions.
In the end, the finale was not the resolution of a multiyear story arc that culminated in a logical conclusion (see: Babylon 5). It was the writers looking at the wall, seeing the clock was running down, and realizing that they had 30 minutes to wrap up 4 years of plotlines.
Look at that last half hour.
- Starbuck punches in random co-ordinates into the FTL drive (based on a song in her head)
- said jump trashes the Galactica so it can never jump again (forcing an end to the series)
- hey look! the fleet just happened to jump next to a perfectly suitable planet!
- the planet has human life, just like the Colonials (odds against? "Astronomical")
- the Colonials decide to destroy all their tech and go camping for 150,000 years
(with "surprisingly little dissent")
- they destroy the entire fleet by driving it into the sun
- what the hell, we wanted Earth, let's call this place Earth
- 150,000 years later, it's Live From New York!
Wait a second. Wouldn't we have found evidence of a superior civilization that predates us by 150,000 years (see: Inherit the Stars)? No, they conveniently decided to chuck all that for no reason. What about the Battlestar and other vessels? Nope, trashed them too. What about a settlement? No, they spread out.
You're the last 35,000 members of your species. You've just landed on an unknown, unfamiliar, but inhabited planet. You don't know the wildlife, the flora, or the natives. You're led by professional soldiers. So what do you do? Throw away all your technology, and split up.
The only reason a hardened military unit that just came out of a running war would do something that stupid is that the writers decreed they had to. Because if they didn't, if they acted like their training and experience had conditioned them too, then there would be physical evidence of their existence, and that would blow the finale.
This was a copout on an epic scale.