Just a side comment: if you're planning on doing laundry in a sink, and air-drying your clothes, jeans generally aren't a good idea, because they take a long time to dry. Jeans may be rugged and comfortable, but they suck if you have to air-dry them (unless you're in a very hot and dry place).
Agreed (for home use), and ZFS's raidz is the easiest.;-)
Unfortunately, Solaris's IDE controller support sux.:-( If they only supported PCI-based IDE controllers, it would be soooo easy to create and maintain a RAID array using old hardware.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the iPhone's features require special provider services -- services that aren't provided by other carriers. One example of this is the visual voicemail feature. So, how many users will be willing to live with a "crippled" iPhone when you get service elsewhere... ? (Of course, if it's just one crippled feature, it may be acceptable, but, as no one really has one, we can't tell just yet.) It's a great lock-in strategy to have special services that can only be provided by Cingular.... (IANAL, but I assume that this is legal.) Think of special iTunes access only via Cingular, etc.,...
Also, it's possible that Cingular was able to put in contractual firmware limitations (e.g., "never put in VoIP, and we'll pay you $$$").
My wild guess is that Cingular will not offer any service discounts, but will require full Cingular service prices (read: $$$$$ for data access), as well as full iPhone pricing (as mandated by Apple, I believe, for reasons already mentioned by others). Why? Because there are lots and lots of drooling-at-the-mouth people who'll pay those prices. They might offer "early termination discounts", as that's a great incentive for the financially-challenged -- most of the comments I've seen have been people lamenting about their early termination fees, and not the high cost of the iPhone (which is probably more than their early termination fees)....
Anyway, this is all wild-a** speculation, and we'll just have to wait for the actual details.
True, but please read the specifications of whatever you buy. Some wattmeters are not accurate below 20W or so. For low-power devices, you have to do a "delta-power" measurement: measure the power used by a "100W" lamp (or anything else in the 40-150W range), and then measure the power used by the lamp + device. (Don't assume that a "100W" lamp or whatever is really 100W -- measure it.)
Unfortunately, drag-and-drop is a sucky method for music library maintenance. You still need an external application for this (for searching, ID3 tag editing, etc.).
Oh, and, just because you do not need a feature, does not mean that others do not.
Cowboy clothing on a space ship doesn't make sense to you? Here's how it works. The value of clothes is based off what people will pay for them, not so much the material: fashionable clothes will always cost more than functional clothes, even if they're made out of cheaper stuff.
That's not the argument though: the argument is that a particular piece of clothing, coupled with a particular, arguably "small-population" cultural style, can exist in such an unchanged fashion.
Cheap clothes? Yes. Cheap cowboy clothes? Unlikely, as the "cowboy culture" is fairly small compared to all of the other cultures on this planet, and the chances of it emerging, UNCHANGED, in the future, is laughably miniscule. We're just as likely to see cheap desert nomad clothing, or cheap African clothing.
And horses??? While that might be possible, it's much more likely that "powered vehicles" will exist if spaceships also exist. The reasoning is that, if there exists a (cheap) powerplant that can lift a massive spaceship off the surface of this planet, that powerplant can also be used to extract hydrogen for a hydrogen engine (this is just an example: there are other cheap, but not necessarily clean, powerplants for vehicles). If people can afford a cheap spaceship, they can certainly afford a cheap vehicle (if for no other reason that the scrap metal value of a spaceship is much more than the scrap metal value of a vehicle).
While the future might have cheap clothing and cheap spaceships, they won't have unchanged cowboy culture, complete with unchanged cowboy clothing and unchanged nasty cowboy drawl. Whatever it'll be, it'll probably be some mishmash of existing cultures. And, please note that Firefly people just threw together existing cultures, without mixing them: for example, there were 100% cowboys, and 100% "asian women" (geishas?). They didn't have a 40% cowgirl, wearing 55% asian clothing and a turban (this is a poor example, but you get the idea).
Anyway, even though it annoys the h*ll out of me, I still like Firefly.
It's not an MMORPG, because THAT term entails long boring grinds and "the player with the most toys wins."
Huh? You obviously haven't been playing the second (latest) chapter, "Guild Wars Factions". There are two elite missions that are accessible only to the two guilds with the most "faction", and the only way to get that is to grind, grind, grind. The vast majority of players will probably not have access to those missions, due to the massive faction farming/grinding that's going on.
Perhaps ANet will change this, but I wouldn't bet on it. They don't seem to do anything about the illegal bots, and so I don't see them doing anything about this, either (example: the majority of "players" in Elona Reach are bots, running the same pattern over and over, and it's been this way for a while).
That being said, if a 3D web is going to come out of anywhere, it will probably stem from the MMOGs. These virtual worlds have become so popular that in some cases they manage to displace the idea of meeting in real life.
Agreed. Just look at the recent (real) funeral/memorial (and unfortunate resulting rampage) that occurred in WoW.
And, as others have said, IM/irc is another use. One of the TV episodes of Ghost in the Shell had a "virtual chatroom", which gave you an idea of what a 3D IM/irc could be like (it was a bit on the unimaginative side, though).
If people really want this questionable functionality today, I suggest they try out the "Tab Mix Plus" extension. (Actually, I recommend that they install this extension anyway, because it provides so many other useful features, besides the questionable, "Close tab X" on each tab. Among other things, it provides session saving/remembering, and the ability to UNDO closed tabs. Good stuff, but keeping undo history around does suck up memory.)
The GIMP [gimp.org] satisfy virtually all "photoshop" needs (maybe not some small part in some graphics shops, but otherwise you're bitching without real knowledge).
You must not do any serious digital-camera photo tweaking.
Gimp's biggest problem is that it only supports 8-bit color depths. To do decent photo editing, using RAW camera data, you need depths of at least 12 bits (preferably more, to be future-proof). Among other things, you need this to bring out subtle shadow details.
To the unwashed slashdot masses, who may now be twitching because they think I've maligned their precious Gimp: note that I said editing, not viewing or printing. Yes, for viewing and printing, 8-bit color depths may be sufficient for most, but it sucks large-animal-reproductive-organs for editing.
And, before anyone says that only professionals need this, let me say that I'm a rank amateur at photography. I need to edit my photos because I'm not a good photographer. And, for the record, I don't use Gimp because Gimp doesn't meet my needs.
However that still doesn't change the apparent state of things, where OS/X appears to have something that may work with MTP devices, whereas linux doesn't.:-( I'd love to be wrong, though.
What's really hilarious is that XNJB (a Mac OS/X program for transferring MP3 files to Creative Labs MP3 players) has preliminary support for MTP: http://www.cg-tg.com/tutorials/mac/xnjb/.
You left out at least two more nasty issues facing iPod competitors: advertising and availability.
The advertising is really helping to fuel the iPod mythos. How many times, and in how many places, have you seen ads for iPods? Now, how many ads for iPod competitors? How many times have you seen competing MP3 players on TV? Few companies have the advertising budget of Apple.
It's real easy to buy an iPod (for non-technical people, who probably make up the majority of the market). Local Apple store out-of-stock? Try Best Buy, Comp USA, or a number of other places. Now, how easy is it to buy an iPod competitor? Sure, you can buy various and sundry MP3 players here and there, but they're not as easy to find.
It's a vicious problem: If no one knows about your product (insufficient advertising), how are you going to sell anything? If no one can find your product, how are you going to sell anything? If you produce too much product, and few people buy it, because they don't know about it, you've got big issues.
However, I do disagree with your comment about the PlaysForSure/MTP players -- they're not all that bad, as long as you're not looking for an iPod killer (but they may still be doomed, for all the reasons above). I have a Creative Labs Vision:M, and, as long as you ignore the DRM abilities, it's pretty good. The key, however, is to use third-party music management/synchronization software. As long as you don't use DRM'd media, you can use much better third-party software. Sure, it's not a nicely-packaged, all-in-one hardware/software solution like the iPod, but it's not bad. My only complaint is that (full, bi-directional) synchronization is slow (my guess is that the MTP protocol has some nasty inefficiencies).
In the same spirit, another alternative is to use OpenSolaris's ZFS/Raid-Z, which is a free, software-raid5-like implementation. Unlike other software RAID5 implementations, it's easy to set up and administer (you don't need a PhD in LVM/RAID management).
It's also wonderful in that it has automatic error-correction AND disk scrubbing. One of the Solaris developers is actually using it with flaky hardware (bad/insufficient power supply), and ZFS/Raid-Z automatically detects the error and corrects it. Note that this is different from the ECC done by the disk drive. Basically, the data on the platter is "correct" (passes ECC and doesn't get flagged as a bad sector), but the data on the platter is not what the OS originally wrote (the data probably got corrupted on the way to the platter due to the flaky hardware).
Now, other software raid implementions can do the same thing, but I don't know of any with the same seemingly mindless ease of setup and maintenance. You should check out the demo video, "100 mirrored filesystems in 5 minutes". Also check out the self healing demo video.
Pay a bit more for high-speed DSL. At our end of the DSL line, we have 6Mbps down, 600kbps up, and latency generally isn't an issue. We have a traffic-shaping firewall (m0n0wall), with rules to give TCP ACKs, small packets, etc., higher priority), which really helps to maintain household serenity (no one can hog the DSL line).
Sample ping times that I see: 1-2ms from my PC to our firewall, ~19ms to the box at the other end of the DSL line, and ~24ms to my ISP's shell server.
I don't get it. What would I use it for? Is it for people that can't afford laptops but want the web on the move?
Here's a kludgy one: uber remote control for PVRs like MythTV. Yeah, MythTV should have better functionality, but you can't watch (pause) live TV and schedule show recordings, the way you can with TiVo. Now, you've got a easy way to schedule recordings without losing live TV, without having to boot a laptop.
lol, that would have been a coup. Mind-numbing, inane, and utterly mindless, yet something that keeps you going back for more and more (and wanting more!).
It certainly would have been a great fit for the American daily comic format.
Re:FFS, what a fucking dreadful summary
on
Tier One ISPs Dying
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"Tier One ISPs dying" indeed. Worst. Story. EVER.
Come on, this is SlashDot.
It should be:
"Tier One ISPs dying" indeed. \/\/0rst. 570ry. EVAR.
Yes, there are cheaper alternatives in the US, like Skype or Gizmo, but those require access to a PC. The MCI card just needs POTS, and it also works internationally, although at higher rates. If you're traveling, it's a great way to call back to the US (unless you like getting reamed via hotel or nasty roaming charges).
I think that a cheap pocket database/organizer would be a better way to store password. Attaching a cable to get a dump of the database's flash memory is still a bit harder than using a hw/sw key logger. If the organizer encrypts everything with your master password, the situation is even better.
Yes, a PDA is the way to go (cheap or otherwise;-). It's much more portable than a desktop or laptop (which you need with a USB drive), and you have a much lower chance of encountering keyloggers and the like. USB drives can also get infected with viruses, etc..
Of course, storing the data in encrypted form on the PDA is an absolute must. Anyone who doesn't, gets what they deserve.;-)
No offense, but I think a lot of people here on/. use PDAs for this. It's just a matter of using decent (secure) software. I've got hundreds of passwords, login names, dates, notes, and other info stored in encrypted form on my palmpilot.
(I've also got incremental palmpilot backups being done to an SD card every night. I periodically manually backup the SD card to my PC and CDroms, and so my PDA could get lost/stolen without much harm, except to my pocketbook.;-)
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Just a side comment: if you're planning on doing laundry in a sink, and air-drying your clothes, jeans generally aren't a good idea, because they take a long time to dry. Jeans may be rugged and comfortable, but they suck if you have to air-dry them (unless you're in a very hot and dry place).
Agreed (for home use), and ZFS's raidz is the easiest. ;-)
Unfortunately, Solaris's IDE controller support sux. :-( If they only supported PCI-based IDE controllers, it would be soooo easy to create and maintain a RAID array using old hardware.
lol, games (and taxes :-( ) are the only reasons why I even have windows ....
That said, I'm not planning on getting vista any time soon. ("Never" would be good for me, but, some day, winxp64 won't be available to buy any more.)
Technically, you may be right.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the iPhone's features require special provider services -- services that aren't provided by other carriers. One example of this is the visual voicemail feature. So, how many users will be willing to live with a "crippled" iPhone when you get service elsewhere ... ? (Of course, if it's just one crippled feature, it may be acceptable, but, as no one really has one, we can't tell just yet.) It's a great lock-in strategy to have special services that can only be provided by Cingular .... (IANAL, but I assume that this is legal.) Think of special iTunes access only via Cingular, etc., ...
Also, it's possible that Cingular was able to put in contractual firmware limitations (e.g., "never put in VoIP, and we'll pay you $$$").
My wild guess is that Cingular will not offer any service discounts, but will require full Cingular service prices (read: $$$$$ for data access), as well as full iPhone pricing (as mandated by Apple, I believe, for reasons already mentioned by others). Why? Because there are lots and lots of drooling-at-the-mouth people who'll pay those prices. They might offer "early termination discounts", as that's a great incentive for the financially-challenged -- most of the comments I've seen have been people lamenting about their early termination fees, and not the high cost of the iPhone (which is probably more than their early termination fees) ....
Anyway, this is all wild-a** speculation, and we'll just have to wait for the actual details.
True, but please read the specifications of whatever you buy. Some wattmeters are not accurate below 20W or so. For low-power devices, you have to do a "delta-power" measurement: measure the power used by a "100W" lamp (or anything else in the 40-150W range), and then measure the power used by the lamp + device. (Don't assume that a "100W" lamp or whatever is really 100W -- measure it.)
Unfortunately, drag-and-drop is a sucky method for music library maintenance. You still need an external application for this (for searching, ID3 tag editing, etc.).
Oh, and, just because you do not need a feature, does not mean that others do not.
So get a couple of friends, and flip it upside down. Yeah, the roof isn't much smaller, but it might fit on your track. :-)
That's not the argument though: the argument is that a particular piece of clothing, coupled with a particular, arguably "small-population" cultural style, can exist in such an unchanged fashion.
Cheap clothes? Yes. Cheap cowboy clothes? Unlikely, as the "cowboy culture" is fairly small compared to all of the other cultures on this planet, and the chances of it emerging, UNCHANGED , in the future, is laughably miniscule. We're just as likely to see cheap desert nomad clothing, or cheap African clothing.
And horses??? While that might be possible, it's much more likely that "powered vehicles" will exist if spaceships also exist. The reasoning is that, if there exists a (cheap) powerplant that can lift a massive spaceship off the surface of this planet, that powerplant can also be used to extract hydrogen for a hydrogen engine (this is just an example: there are other cheap, but not necessarily clean, powerplants for vehicles). If people can afford a cheap spaceship, they can certainly afford a cheap vehicle (if for no other reason that the scrap metal value of a spaceship is much more than the scrap metal value of a vehicle).
While the future might have cheap clothing and cheap spaceships, they won't have unchanged cowboy culture, complete with unchanged cowboy clothing and unchanged nasty cowboy drawl. Whatever it'll be, it'll probably be some mishmash of existing cultures. And, please note that Firefly people just threw together existing cultures, without mixing them: for example, there were 100% cowboys, and 100% "asian women" (geishas?). They didn't have a 40% cowgirl, wearing 55% asian clothing and a turban (this is a poor example, but you get the idea).
Anyway, even though it annoys the h*ll out of me, I still like Firefly.
Yes, more rumored information here: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2800
Huh? You obviously haven't been playing the second (latest) chapter, "Guild Wars Factions". There are two elite missions that are accessible only to the two guilds with the most "faction", and the only way to get that is to grind, grind, grind. The vast majority of players will probably not have access to those missions, due to the massive faction farming/grinding that's going on.
Perhaps ANet will change this, but I wouldn't bet on it. They don't seem to do anything about the illegal bots, and so I don't see them doing anything about this, either (example: the majority of "players" in Elona Reach are bots, running the same pattern over and over, and it's been this way for a while).
Agreed. Just look at the recent (real) funeral/memorial (and unfortunate resulting rampage) that occurred in WoW.
And, as others have said, IM/irc is another use. One of the TV episodes of Ghost in the Shell had a "virtual chatroom", which gave you an idea of what a 3D IM/irc could be like (it was a bit on the unimaginative side, though).
Funny, the iBot wheelchair can climb (some) stairs, but it only needs one (1) controller.
This is bloat.
Whatever happened to extensions?
If people really want this questionable functionality today, I suggest they try out the "Tab Mix Plus" extension. (Actually, I recommend that they install this extension anyway, because it provides so many other useful features, besides the questionable, "Close tab X" on each tab. Among other things, it provides session saving/remembering, and the ability to UNDO closed tabs. Good stuff, but keeping undo history around does suck up memory.)
Gimp's biggest problem is that it only supports 8-bit color depths. To do decent photo editing, using RAW camera data, you need depths of at least 12 bits (preferably more, to be future-proof). Among other things, you need this to bring out subtle shadow details.
To the unwashed slashdot masses, who may now be twitching because they think I've maligned their precious Gimp: note that I said editing, not viewing or printing. Yes, for viewing and printing, 8-bit color depths may be sufficient for most, but it sucks large-animal-reproductive-organs for editing.
And, before anyone says that only professionals need this, let me say that I'm a rank amateur at photography. I need to edit my photos because I'm not a good photographer. And, for the record, I don't use Gimp because Gimp doesn't meet my needs.
However that still doesn't change the apparent state of things, where OS/X appears to have something that may work with MTP devices, whereas linux doesn't. :-( I'd love to be wrong, though.
OS/X has it, but not linux. :-)
The advertising is really helping to fuel the iPod mythos. How many times, and in how many places, have you seen ads for iPods? Now, how many ads for iPod competitors? How many times have you seen competing MP3 players on TV? Few companies have the advertising budget of Apple.
It's real easy to buy an iPod (for non-technical people, who probably make up the majority of the market). Local Apple store out-of-stock? Try Best Buy, Comp USA, or a number of other places. Now, how easy is it to buy an iPod competitor? Sure, you can buy various and sundry MP3 players here and there, but they're not as easy to find.
It's a vicious problem: If no one knows about your product (insufficient advertising), how are you going to sell anything? If no one can find your product, how are you going to sell anything? If you produce too much product, and few people buy it, because they don't know about it, you've got big issues.
However, I do disagree with your comment about the PlaysForSure/MTP players -- they're not all that bad, as long as you're not looking for an iPod killer (but they may still be doomed, for all the reasons above). I have a Creative Labs Vision:M, and, as long as you ignore the DRM abilities, it's pretty good. The key, however, is to use third-party music management/synchronization software. As long as you don't use DRM'd media, you can use much better third-party software. Sure, it's not a nicely-packaged, all-in-one hardware/software solution like the iPod, but it's not bad. My only complaint is that (full, bi-directional) synchronization is slow (my guess is that the MTP protocol has some nasty inefficiencies).
In the same spirit, another alternative is to use OpenSolaris's ZFS/Raid-Z, which is a free, software-raid5-like implementation. Unlike other software RAID5 implementations, it's easy to set up and administer (you don't need a PhD in LVM/RAID management).
It's also wonderful in that it has automatic error-correction AND disk scrubbing. One of the Solaris developers is actually using it with flaky hardware (bad/insufficient power supply), and ZFS/Raid-Z automatically detects the error and corrects it. Note that this is different from the ECC done by the disk drive. Basically, the data on the platter is "correct" (passes ECC and doesn't get flagged as a bad sector), but the data on the platter is not what the OS originally wrote (the data probably got corrupted on the way to the platter due to the flaky hardware).
Now, other software raid implementions can do the same thing, but I don't know of any with the same seemingly mindless ease of setup and maintenance. You should check out the demo video, "100 mirrored filesystems in 5 minutes". Also check out the self healing demo video.
You get what you pay for.
Pay a bit more for high-speed DSL. At our end of the DSL line, we have 6Mbps down, 600kbps up, and latency generally isn't an issue. We have a traffic-shaping firewall (m0n0wall), with rules to give TCP ACKs, small packets, etc., higher priority), which really helps to maintain household serenity (no one can hog the DSL line).
Sample ping times that I see: 1-2ms from my PC to our firewall, ~19ms to the box at the other end of the DSL line, and ~24ms to my ISP's shell server.
Here's a kludgy one: uber remote control for PVRs like MythTV. Yeah, MythTV should have better functionality, but you can't watch (pause) live TV and schedule show recordings, the way you can with TiVo. Now, you've got a easy way to schedule recordings without losing live TV, without having to boot a laptop.
lol, that would have been a coup. Mind-numbing, inane, and utterly mindless, yet something that keeps you going back for more and more (and wanting more!).
It certainly would have been a great fit for the American daily comic format.
Come on, this is SlashDot.
It should be:
I'll second this (mods, please bump it up!).
Yes, there are cheaper alternatives in the US, like Skype or Gizmo, but those require access to a PC. The MCI card just needs POTS, and it also works internationally, although at higher rates. If you're traveling, it's a great way to call back to the US (unless you like getting reamed via hotel or nasty roaming charges).
(This applies to people in the US, of course.)
Yes, a PDA is the way to go (cheap or otherwise ;-). It's much more portable than a desktop or laptop (which you need with a USB drive), and you have a much lower chance of encountering keyloggers and the like. USB drives can also get infected with viruses, etc..
Of course, storing the data in encrypted form on the PDA is an absolute must. Anyone who doesn't, gets what they deserve. ;-)
No offense, but I think a lot of people here on /. use PDAs for this. It's just a matter of using decent (secure) software. I've got hundreds of passwords, login names, dates, notes, and other info stored in encrypted form on my palmpilot.
(I've also got incremental palmpilot backups being done to an SD card every night. I periodically manually backup the SD card to my PC and CDroms, and so my PDA could get lost/stolen without much harm, except to my pocketbook. ;-)