They list HNL as having a pay connection, but when I was there in February I found a free network at the Hawaiian Airlines gate. I don't know if it was run by the airport or the airline.
"The Palm Pilot was popular, influential and, quite frankly, a great product. The Netwon, which was far more innovative was expensive and had terrible handwriting recognition."
True, the Newton was expensive, but terrible handwriting recognition? Not after the first revision. My 110 has better handwriting recognition than my MS PocketPC PDA. The Newton's recognition continued to improve up to the end. Only the first Newton, the 100, had really poor handwriting recognition.
The Palm was heavily influenced by the Newt. The Newton should have been on this list, not the Palm.
"Seriously, how do you see around parked cars at a junction, or cars coming up behind either side of you on one of those things?"
How do you see around them when you're driving a car? I'm sitting at the same height on my recumbent as I am in my Honda. You just have to be a little more alert and cautious in those circumstances.
"The nose down and forward position is better for situational awareness"
Huh? Have you ever ridden a recumbent? Situational awareness is far better - you're not staring at your front wheel all the time. I can't count the number of times I've almost been mowed down by some roadie in an aero crouch who can't see more than five feet ahead of his wheel.
As to your other points - true about the recumbent being worse mechanically. Long frames and long chainlines decrease efficiency slightly. However, there are a few FWD recumbents that solve the chainline problem nicely, and improved materials are getting high-end recumbent weights down as low as 17 pounds.
As to a good pedalling stroke, I find it easier to spin properly on my recumbent than on my upright.
Please do not take any of this as being critical of upright bikes - I enjoy both types and think both have their advantages and disadvantages.
"Apple will void your warranty if you add memory..."
Where did you get that ridiculous idea? I have had two Macs serviced with third-party memory installed (one of them this year), and although Apple won't support the third-party memory, they will support the machine itself.
Your video store uses a disk cleaning machine? Unheard-of. The first thing I do when I rent a DVD is wipe all the fingerprints and smudges off so it won't start hanging and skipping halfway through the movie.
Freddy was associated with Easy Racers for years. He did some work with Calfee but ended that relationship a couple years ago. He has since returned to Easy Racers as one of the owners, having purchased the company, with a partner, after Gardner Martin passed.
His success in setting this record is a real triumph, and gives me, as another relative codger, hope.
I stopped participating in Seti@home a few months after they switched to BOINC. I found that BOINC kept hanging my Windoze box and had to turn it off. Since most of the other distributed projects are also using BOINC, they don't get my cycles, either.
Give me an interesting project and some software that doesn't crash my machine and I'll throw in a few cycles.
We refer to Pepco, our local power provider in the close-in Maryland suburbs, as a third-world power company. They've actually improved a little in the past few years, but in general, if it rains or snows, the power WILL go out.
After Hurricane Isabel we went 5 days without power. We've had three-day outages after a normal snowfall.
Yes, in downtown DC the power stays on, because the lines are buried. Outside that area, fugedaboutit.
Reminds me of the Knowledge Navigator video that Apple produced during the Scully era. The video showed a number of futuristic scenarios involving computers that you could talk to and they would understand you: avatars could carry on a conversation with you to determine what information you needed, then could go out on the internet and find it. It also featured various portable devices, and more.
At one point, the video shows a man sitting on a park bench reading the newspaper. He finds something he wants to keep, so he opens his laptop and holds the newspaper up to the screen - and the screen scans the newspaper. This bit got the most oohs and aahs of any scene in the video (I saw it at an Apple World Wide Developer Conference).
Looks like someone at Apple remembered Knowledge Navigator and decided to make part of it happen.
Neither format may make huge inroads. Why? Because resolution doesn't matter. Notice the popularity of the iPod - does it have higher fidelity than a portable CD player? Not hardly. MP3s and AACs are lower in sound quality than even FM radio, but people are willing to put up with the lower quality because of the convenience factor.
My wife and I haven't rented a DVD since we bought our TiVo last year. We record at basic quality, so there are lots of artifacts in the video. Do we care? No - we hardly notice the artifacts as we enjoy all the great old movies TiVo'ed from TCM.
I think we'll find that DVD is more than good enough for most consumers. As long as DVD players and DVD movies are significantly cheaper than HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, DVD will continue to be the preferred format. The advantages of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray over DVD are not enough to justify the higher costs they will demand at the beginning, and if you don't have enough early adopters paying the initial premium, you'll never see the economies of scale that will let the prices come down. It'll be laser disks all over again.
This is an interesting idea - I have found my cheap noise-cancelling headphones to be a godsend on long airplane flights (too bad they broke).
The problem with doing this in the iPod is that, to be effective, the ambient noise must be sampled at the point where it would be entering the ear - the headphones. A set of noise-cancelling headphones has a tiny microphone in each earpiece. If you had a noise-cancelling iPod, you'd still need the mikes in the earpieces, with an extra wire to the iPod from each one.
The iPod would end up with a proprietary earphone jack. You'd be stuck with the earphones that Apple supplies until some third party comes up with replacements. The replacements would be more expensive than regular earphones, and everyone would carp on Slashdot about it.
You might as well put the noise-cancelation hardware in the phones or their cable, which puts us right where we are now - if you want noise-cancelling phones, just buy some. Lots of companies sell them at prices from around $30 to a couple hundred (Bose).
About 10 years ago I bought a Casio watch with altimeter, barometer, temp sensor, and compass built in. It's bulky enough to impress the geeks and repulse the snobs. It's built like a tank - it's a little beat up and I've replaced the watch band twice, but it still works great. I used to use the altimeter as a backup when I was flying my airplane, and I sometimes use it to check elevation changes as I'm riding my bike.
The Newton had some limited gesture recognition, such as "scratching out" text or graphic to erase it. This was one of the features that made the Newton so incredibly easy and fun to use. IMHO, neither Palm nor Microsoft has been able to top it (I have a PocketPC device and it is proof positive that MS just doesn't get it).
At the 2000 Interbike show in Las Vegas, the late lamented Vision recumbent bicyle company demonstrated a rocket-powered recumbent bike. It apparently made quite an impression.
I want one. A little rocket on the rear rack would make short work of the hills.
It's always taken me a couple of hours to really feel like I've woken up completely. When I first wake up I feel confused, tired, week, and stupid. Even riding my bike the short distance to work doesn't completely dispel this feeling. Coffee and/or a long bike ride will shorten the time it takes to feel human again.
I've sometimes worried that something was wrong with me that I felt so out of it after waking up. This research makes me feel a bit more normal.
" If you don't have to pay highway taxes, vehicle registration, licensing permits, emissions testing, or anything else, then stay off the highways."
I suppose this is just feeding the troll, but...
If you are spewing pollutants into the atmosphere and driving around in a two-ton heap of metal, endangering everyone around you by operating a death machine that you probably aren't skilled enough to handle properly in an emergency, instead of using a bicycle, your legs, or public transportation, stay off the highways.
Oh, and I do pay highway taxes, vehicle registration, and get emissions testing (my Honda just passed testing last month).
"Running over a pedestrian is the safest way to experience the thrill of murder."
No, the safest way is to run over a bicyclist. I've heard many stories of cyclists getting killed around the country, and the drivers are seldom charged, even if they were responsible for the collision. I've been hit twice by cars. Both times I had right of way, both times the driver failed to yield, and in neither case was the driver charged.
Many cyclists believe that police regard us as a nuisance and are glad to have us taken off the road, and that's why they don't bother charging the driver. True or not, it sometimes feels that way.
Also living in Montgomery County, MD, and being a frequent pedestrian, I concede that there are a lot of pedestrian hits on jaywalkers. But I can also tell you that drivers here seem to regard crosswalks as targeting zones. I'm looking right now at an intersection that I can see from my office window, and (waiting for it... There!) some driver just drove through the crosswalk while a pedestrian was in it, missing her by only a couple of feet.
I do see a lot of jaywalkers, but they usually (not always) seem to be aware of their environment. The drivers are not aware or are in too big a hurry to pay attention to ped safety.
I think what the parent is trying to say is that, in the Firestone/Ford Explorer debacle, the wrong company got burned. Firestone got most of the bad press for having sold faulty tires, but the real culprit was Ford. There's no excuse for selling a vehicle that will roll over when you have a flat tire, no matter how catastrophic the tire failure.
But Ford suffered virtually no ill effects from this, in spite of all the deaths they caused. So if this current scandal is Merck's Firestone, I guess some other company is going to get the shaft, not Merck...
Yes, I'm a young and arrogant bastard - but it seems all the folks I know with 'carpal', low-back problems, stress disorders, etc. complaints are either:
a bunch of whiners who exagerate the smallest of aches and pains for pity/attention/etc.
a bunch of phoneys trying to milk the system
No, you're not a young and arrogant bastard, you're a heartless, ignorant asshole. I say this as a cancer survivor with a broken back who has gotten used to pain (and, no, I don't have a handicapped permit). I have friends and relatives whose problems make mine look trivial. For the most part, they continue to work hard (until they are too disabled to work at all), but they often need a little help to get through life - a handicapped permit so they can hobble (sans wheelchair) to the store without collapsing in the parking lot, some pain killers, an ergo chair that doesn't kill their back, etc.
Let me know when your body starts going bad so I can come laugh at the justice of it all.
Re:Microsoft Innovates like Enron did - with BS.
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 1
TrueType was created by Apple. If my memory serves, Apple traded rights to TrueType to Microsoft in exchange for some PostScript emulation technology. This was all an effort to gain some leverage against Adobe.
A little OT, but this reminds of something that happened when I was in grad school. As part of a class project, one of my classmates, who was an avid Civil War reenactor, compiled a directory of local units and individuals involved in reenactments. Word must have gotten out that he was working on it, because he eventually heard from the NRA (National Rifle Assn.) asking him for a copy.
He may have liked running around in a Civil War uniform with a musket, but he was lefty enough to despise the NRA - he told them to fsck off and do their own recruitment.
Slashdot Mirror
They list HNL as having a pay connection, but when I was there in February I found a free network at the Hawaiian Airlines gate. I don't know if it was run by the airport or the airline.
"The Palm Pilot was popular, influential and, quite frankly, a great product. The Netwon, which was far more innovative was expensive and had terrible handwriting recognition."
True, the Newton was expensive, but terrible handwriting recognition? Not after the first revision. My 110 has better handwriting recognition than my MS PocketPC PDA. The Newton's recognition continued to improve up to the end. Only the first Newton, the 100, had really poor handwriting recognition.
The Palm was heavily influenced by the Newt. The Newton should have been on this list, not the Palm.
"Seriously, how do you see around parked cars at a junction, or cars coming up behind either side of you on one of those things?"
How do you see around them when you're driving a car? I'm sitting at the same height on my recumbent as I am in my Honda. You just have to be a little more alert and cautious in those circumstances.
"The nose down and forward position is better for situational awareness"
Huh? Have you ever ridden a recumbent? Situational awareness is far better - you're not staring at your front wheel all the time. I can't count the number of times I've almost been mowed down by some roadie in an aero crouch who can't see more than five feet ahead of his wheel.
As to your other points - true about the recumbent being worse mechanically. Long frames and long chainlines decrease efficiency slightly. However, there are a few FWD recumbents that solve the chainline problem nicely, and improved materials are getting high-end recumbent weights down as low as 17 pounds.
As to a good pedalling stroke, I find it easier to spin properly on my recumbent than on my upright.
Please do not take any of this as being critical of upright bikes - I enjoy both types and think both have their advantages and disadvantages.
"Apple will void your warranty if you add memory..."
Where did you get that ridiculous idea? I have had two Macs serviced with third-party memory installed (one of them this year), and although Apple won't support the third-party memory, they will support the machine itself.
Your video store uses a disk cleaning machine? Unheard-of. The first thing I do when I rent a DVD is wipe all the fingerprints and smudges off so it won't start hanging and skipping halfway through the movie.
Freddy was associated with Easy Racers for years. He did some work with Calfee but ended that relationship a couple years ago. He has since returned to Easy Racers as one of the owners, having purchased the company, with a partner, after Gardner Martin passed.
His success in setting this record is a real triumph, and gives me, as another relative codger, hope.
I stopped participating in Seti@home a few months after they switched to BOINC. I found that BOINC kept hanging my Windoze box and had to turn it off. Since most of the other distributed projects are also using BOINC, they don't get my cycles, either.
Give me an interesting project and some software that doesn't crash my machine and I'll throw in a few cycles.
We refer to Pepco, our local power provider in the close-in Maryland suburbs, as a third-world power company. They've actually improved a little in the past few years, but in general, if it rains or snows, the power WILL go out.
After Hurricane Isabel we went 5 days without power. We've had three-day outages after a normal snowfall.
Yes, in downtown DC the power stays on, because the lines are buried. Outside that area, fugedaboutit.
Reminds me of the Knowledge Navigator video that Apple produced during the Scully era. The video showed a number of futuristic scenarios involving computers that you could talk to and they would understand you: avatars could carry on a conversation with you to determine what information you needed, then could go out on the internet and find it. It also featured various portable devices, and more.
At one point, the video shows a man sitting on a park bench reading the newspaper. He finds something he wants to keep, so he opens his laptop and holds the newspaper up to the screen - and the screen scans the newspaper. This bit got the most oohs and aahs of any scene in the video (I saw it at an Apple World Wide Developer Conference).
Looks like someone at Apple remembered Knowledge Navigator and decided to make part of it happen.
Neither format may make huge inroads. Why? Because resolution doesn't matter. Notice the popularity of the iPod - does it have higher fidelity than a portable CD player? Not hardly. MP3s and AACs are lower in sound quality than even FM radio, but people are willing to put up with the lower quality because of the convenience factor.
My wife and I haven't rented a DVD since we bought our TiVo last year. We record at basic quality, so there are lots of artifacts in the video. Do we care? No - we hardly notice the artifacts as we enjoy all the great old movies TiVo'ed from TCM.
I think we'll find that DVD is more than good enough for most consumers. As long as DVD players and DVD movies are significantly cheaper than HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, DVD will continue to be the preferred format. The advantages of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray over DVD are not enough to justify the higher costs they will demand at the beginning, and if you don't have enough early adopters paying the initial premium, you'll never see the economies of scale that will let the prices come down. It'll be laser disks all over again.
This is an interesting idea - I have found my cheap noise-cancelling headphones to be a godsend on long airplane flights (too bad they broke).
The problem with doing this in the iPod is that, to be effective, the ambient noise must be sampled at the point where it would be entering the ear - the headphones. A set of noise-cancelling headphones has a tiny microphone in each earpiece. If you had a noise-cancelling iPod, you'd still need the mikes in the earpieces, with an extra wire to the iPod from each one.
The iPod would end up with a proprietary earphone jack. You'd be stuck with the earphones that Apple supplies until some third party comes up with replacements. The replacements would be more expensive than regular earphones, and everyone would carp on Slashdot about it.
You might as well put the noise-cancelation hardware in the phones or their cable, which puts us right where we are now - if you want noise-cancelling phones, just buy some. Lots of companies sell them at prices from around $30 to a couple hundred (Bose).
About 10 years ago I bought a Casio watch with altimeter, barometer, temp sensor, and compass built in. It's bulky enough to impress the geeks and repulse the snobs. It's built like a tank - it's a little beat up and I've replaced the watch band twice, but it still works great. I used to use the altimeter as a backup when I was flying my airplane, and I sometimes use it to check elevation changes as I'm riding my bike.
And it keeps time.
The Newton had some limited gesture recognition, such as "scratching out" text or graphic to erase it. This was one of the features that made the Newton so incredibly easy and fun to use. IMHO, neither Palm nor Microsoft has been able to top it (I have a PocketPC device and it is proof positive that MS just doesn't get it).
At the 2000 Interbike show in Las Vegas, the late lamented Vision recumbent bicyle company demonstrated a rocket-powered recumbent bike. It apparently made quite an impression.
I want one. A little rocket on the rear rack would make short work of the hills.
It's always taken me a couple of hours to really feel like I've woken up completely. When I first wake up I feel confused, tired, week, and stupid. Even riding my bike the short distance to work doesn't completely dispel this feeling. Coffee and/or a long bike ride will shorten the time it takes to feel human again.
I've sometimes worried that something was wrong with me that I felt so out of it after waking up. This research makes me feel a bit more normal.
" If you don't have to pay highway taxes, vehicle registration, licensing permits, emissions testing, or anything else, then stay off the highways."
I suppose this is just feeding the troll, but...
If you are spewing pollutants into the atmosphere and driving around in a two-ton heap of metal, endangering everyone around you by operating a death machine that you probably aren't skilled enough to handle properly in an emergency, instead of using a bicycle, your legs, or public transportation, stay off the highways.
Oh, and I do pay highway taxes, vehicle registration, and get emissions testing (my Honda just passed testing last month).
"Running over a pedestrian is the safest way to experience the thrill of murder."
No, the safest way is to run over a bicyclist. I've heard many stories of cyclists getting killed around the country, and the drivers are seldom charged, even if they were responsible for the collision. I've been hit twice by cars. Both times I had right of way, both times the driver failed to yield, and in neither case was the driver charged.
Many cyclists believe that police regard us as a nuisance and are glad to have us taken off the road, and that's why they don't bother charging the driver. True or not, it sometimes feels that way.
Also living in Montgomery County, MD, and being a frequent pedestrian, I concede that there are a lot of pedestrian hits on jaywalkers. But I can also tell you that drivers here seem to regard crosswalks as targeting zones. I'm looking right now at an intersection that I can see from my office window, and (waiting for it ... There!) some driver just drove through the crosswalk while a pedestrian was in it, missing her by only a couple of feet.
I do see a lot of jaywalkers, but they usually (not always) seem to be aware of their environment. The drivers are not aware or are in too big a hurry to pay attention to ped safety.
I think what the parent is trying to say is that, in the Firestone/Ford Explorer debacle, the wrong company got burned. Firestone got most of the bad press for having sold faulty tires, but the real culprit was Ford. There's no excuse for selling a vehicle that will roll over when you have a flat tire, no matter how catastrophic the tire failure.
But Ford suffered virtually no ill effects from this, in spite of all the deaths they caused. So if this current scandal is Merck's Firestone, I guess some other company is going to get the shaft, not Merck...
a bunch of whiners who exagerate the smallest of aches and pains for pity/attention/etc.
a bunch of phoneys trying to milk the system
No, you're not a young and arrogant bastard, you're a heartless, ignorant asshole. I say this as a cancer survivor with a broken back who has gotten used to pain (and, no, I don't have a handicapped permit). I have friends and relatives whose problems make mine look trivial. For the most part, they continue to work hard (until they are too disabled to work at all), but they often need a little help to get through life - a handicapped permit so they can hobble (sans wheelchair) to the store without collapsing in the parking lot, some pain killers, an ergo chair that doesn't kill their back, etc.
Let me know when your body starts going bad so I can come laugh at the justice of it all.
TrueType was created by Apple. If my memory serves, Apple traded rights to TrueType to Microsoft in exchange for some PostScript emulation technology. This was all an effort to gain some leverage against Adobe.
I just have to say that this is the best post I have ever read on Slashdot. I was moved.
A little OT, but this reminds of something that happened when I was in grad school. As part of a class project, one of my classmates, who was an avid Civil War reenactor, compiled a directory of local units and individuals involved in reenactments. Word must have gotten out that he was working on it, because he eventually heard from the NRA (National Rifle Assn.) asking him for a copy.
He may have liked running around in a Civil War uniform with a musket, but he was lefty enough to despise the NRA - he told them to fsck off and do their own recruitment.
...that this record will never be broken. At least not on Earth (let's see them try it on Olympus Mons).