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About the only market segment who would find them useful are gamers, and gamers have no need for the slim, chic design that the eShades boast.

Let's get a few good laughs by reading their marketing BS:

eShades consume less than 1/4 of the power of a typical laptop display, so plugging eShades into your laptop and turning the laptop screen off can increase its battery-life by over 25%.

Because these glasses apparently make it difficult or impossible to read, write, or drink a beverage while using the computer (which I often do all at once while using a laptop), I really don't think a 25% power savings is worthwhile. Not to mention the fact that the only place I'd feel comfortable using such freaky glasses is in my home or office... where I have AC power anyway.

A large, colorful SVGA (800x600 pixels) display, featuring Inviso's unique OptiScape technology.

Holy shit, that must be some pretty hot tech to give me 800x600. I run 1024x768 on 15" monitors, for God's sake. On the "visual equivalent of a 19-inch desktop monitor", I expect a maximum resolution of no less than 1600x1200.

. . .their stylish, low-profile, ergonomic design make eShades look similar to popular sunglasses.

I guess I don't get out too much. I had no idea that today's popular sunglasses made people look like Geordi Laforge (sp?) with a hearing aid.

They'll probably sell a pair to this guy. And to a half dozen major corporations to make Powerpoint presentations "come alive". And they'll probably be bought in bulk by the Federal government for some obscure research project they want to waste taxpayer money on, and then pretty much fade away into LinuxOne-esque obscurity.

Timothy, that was a misleading story title. It sounds like the link has to do with 19" laptop screens, which would actually be useful.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Is it just me, or does he look like JeffK?

Including, for example, Jeff K.?

Hey, did anyone else see the idea at www.somethingawful.com for a really rich guy to play Irridium Command? That's probably the best idea I've heard yet.

It's the first article right now, and it's pretty damn amusing.

Check out Something Awful. They've got a suggestion of what can be done with the Iridium sats.

He was imitating Jeff K. Couldn't you tell that? :)

Each match was 2-3 minutes and there was at least 10 minutes of nothing between them. We didn't even get an idiot presenter, or music!

I really expected it to be better than SRL, but it wasn't. SRL's problem is a complete lack of pacing, and I thought that with the directed goal of a competition, that would give BattleBots the pacing that SRL so desperately needs. But they totally blew it by having so much dead air!

And how many times can you watch one triangular wedge bump into another triangular wedge? I was particularly impressed at how badly they pilotted their vehicles: you'd think they'd spend some time learning to drive RC vehicles first, wouldn't you? I guess they spent all their time building them and none driving them... It appeared that each match was won by accident, not by the skill involved in either driving or construction.

I'd watch it on TV, but I'm sure that whatever else is on at that time will be better.

SomethingAwful.com has a review of the TV version of a recent Robot Wars. It sounds differently awful, but very similarly awful in many ways.

I think you're talking about Smarty Man Game Designer Survivor. HTH.

At 32, I'm already something of an old fogie, relative to many of my peers in the PC game business. I've been a programmer ever since the day I first got my hands on an Apple ][+ at the age of 14. Even with the threat of encroaching senility on the horizon, I can still remember debating the merits of 8-bit home computers vis-a-vis the primitive game consoles of the day. Those debates sounded an awful lot like the debates we're having today. The ultimate answer back then was that most gamers were better off keeping both platforms handy. I think that's still true.

There were giants in the earth in those days. The "PC" platforms were the legendary 8-bit Apples, Ataris, and Commodores, while the "console" guys owned Colecovisions, Intellivisions, and Atari VCSs. The IBM PC platform hadn't made any significant inroads into consumer space by the early 80s, at least not in my neighborhood. Just as today, though, practically all of the people who had a home computer also owned a home videogame console. And just like today, you'd crank up your Atari if you wanted to play certain games (Missile Command, Space Invaders) and you'd boot your computer if you wanted to play others (Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein, MS Flight Simulator). I don't remember anyone complaining about not being able to play a decent game of Zork on their Colecovision or Kaboom! on their Apple. Games that required more than the 'twitch and dodge' level of user interaction were played on the home computer, while those that relied on bright, colorful animated sprites were a natural fit for the consoles of the time.

I was (and am) different, though -- I didn't own a console as a kid, and never felt the slightest stirrings of desire for one. Still don't. When I wasn't playing games on my Apple, I was either cracking their copy protection and disassembling them, or making lame-ass attempts at writing my own. I learned how the Bresenham line algorithm worked by poring over the entrails of Ultima II's DNGDRAW.OBJ, and Karateka taught me what good sound and animation code looked like. When my friends and I would discuss the relative merits of console versus PC gaming, it would always come down to that: my platform of choice was a genuine creativity tool, and the other was just a thing they hooked up to their TVs to play a bunch of games I sucked at. :)

I could not have become a professional programmer and game developer if my folks had bought me a Colecovision instead of an Apple for Christmas in 1982, and neither could Carmack, Romero, Garriott, or many of the other eminences grise currently duking it out on JeffK's SmartyMan Gaem Designar Survivor Island. We all got our start more or less the same way: by making the most of an open platform.

So it's with some regret that I see PC game developers flocking to the PS2s and XBoxen of the world, cheerfully paying Microsoft and Sony ten bucks a box or more in hopes of deliverance from the PC's tech-support hassles and platform variability. The magic of the Apple ][ was that it was a general-purpose computing device that could do anything you wanted -- you could run the assemblers and editors you needed to build your game on the exact same piece of hardware that Nasir Gebelli, Richard Garriott, or Ken Williams had on their desks. There were no excuses -- you could do anything those guys could do, assuming you didn't suck.

Fortunately, that's still true of the PC world today. Even though our machines are close to five orders of magnitude faster than the old 1 MHz 8-bit home computers, any high-school kid with a PC still has access to an inexpensive, ubiquitous, open platform fit for nurturing new talent. (Microsoft bashers may object to my application of the term 'open platform' to a Wintel PC, but as far as I'm concerned, any machine I can write and sell code on without paying platform royalties is 'open' enough.)

My lengthy rant will have served its purpose if it inspires some of the die-hard console advocates out there to give a second thought to their own history. Few games more interesting than Super Mario Brothers really owe their origins to the proprietary arcade/console side of the business. Almost all the good stuff came from some bored, geeky kid fooling around on a home computer, or from college students with more access to general-purpose computer hardware than their professors knew what to do with.

I don't think PC gamers and console gamers are genuinely trapped in an us-versus-them situation, but if I'm wrong, and we really do have to draw battle lines in the sand, I know what side I'm on. :)

smarty man survivor is good

I don't know, I suppose it's good that CBS isn't nearly as stupid as they look, but I have to say that I prefer JeffK's FPS Smarty Man Gaem Surivoar Show MUCH better.

I mean, really, it's got JOHN ROMERO'S GHOST... IN A BONG.

I'd like to see CBS try THAT.
---

jeffk?

The quickies seem the best place for something like this. =)

SMARTY MAN GAEM DESIGNEAR "SURVIROR"
(be sure not to miss John Carmack's profile!)

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

I only trust the smartey reviewars.

These comics contain humor the likes of which the world has not yet seen. "I INSTALLED LUNIX AND FPROTTED THIER TARBALL!!!!!@#"

• There are a dozen game sites at least as good as this one. It's nothing new.
• How many articles focusing on "Games are violent" "I'm addicted to games" "I play games... and I'm a girl!" can you possibly stand?
• The writers are smug, but in the wrong way. Rather than obsessing on their own substance abuse or misspent youth, maybe they should talk about the games, point their hip cynical cleverness at the true topic at hand. For my money, a site like Something Awful does a much better job of expressing game "culture" by writing well about games themselves. And yes, some of the reviews are hilarious bitchslaps, but that's appropriate. SA's writers are contributing to gaming culture's smart-aleck, blunt, trash-talking nature, not writing article's spelling out these attributes.

Jeff K. has a positively hysterical comparison between Ghouls and Ghosts and Daikatana.

Jeff K. has a positively hysterical comparison between Ghouls and Ghosts and Daikatana.

Lowtax at Something Awful has an even funnier look at Daikatana and the release. it's utterly hilarious. you thought the sharky extreme review was mean, i don't know how Romero can look at his face in the morning after this review. ouch...but for some real comedy, read Lowtax's reviews of The War In Heaven or Thundra.

A perfect reflection of this would be JeffK. People really do think he's real. Gullible fools..

The claim of the internet as the information superhighway has pretty much stopped... that information superhighway needs to be fixed of it's pot holes before we widen the lanes..

Freedom? I dont think so. We cant even keep ourselves mature, much less try to make the internet a better place. This is only a dream for now..

Yeah, I find UF a bit (ahem) preachy as well. You'll probably get a good laugh then out of Loser Friendly over at SomethingAwful.

3DFX One-Ups nVidia: "Fuck Off and Die"

San Francisco, CA - In a formal press release read to major gaming sites, 3DFX has "one upped" the video card war by telling nVidia to "fuck off and die".

3DFX, known for its revolutionary line of "Voodoo" based video cards, has been under fire recently for losing its competitive edge to nVidia, who's GeForce 2 line of cards is speculated to be slightly faster than the upcoming Voodoo 5.

"Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of sidestepping the issues and trying to be 'Mister Nice Guy'. I hate nVidia and every fucking asshole that works there," quipped Brian Burke, 3DFX's PR spokesperson. "I hate their engineers, distributors, advertisers, executives, and janitors. I especially despise Derek Perez, who I formally challenge to a knife fight in the parking lot after this meeting..."

Anybody who thinks the 3dfx vs. nVidia wars are getting increasingly ridiculous should go read the rest of this article, at SomethingAwful.

3DFX One-Ups nVidia: "Fuck Off and Die"

San Francisco, CA - In a formal press release read to major gaming sites, 3DFX has "one upped" the video card war by telling nVidia to "fuck off and die".

3DFX, known for its revolutionary line of "Voodoo" based video cards, has been under fire recently for losing its competitive edge to nVidia, who's GeForce 2 line of cards is speculated to be slightly faster than the upcoming Voodoo 5.

"Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of sidestepping the issues and trying to be 'Mister Nice Guy'. I hate nVidia and every fucking asshole that works there," quipped Brian Burke, 3DFX's PR spokesperson. "I hate their engineers, distributors, advertisers, executives, and janitors. I especially despise Derek Perez, who I formally challenge to a knife fight in the parking lot after this meeting..."

Anybody who thinks the 3dfx vs. nVidia wars are getting increasingly ridiculous should go read the rest of this article, at SomethingAwful.

Only in a Quickies topic would a link to JeffK's "Wacky Fun Computar Comic Jokes" be ALMOST on-topic. =)

Wacky Fun Computar Comic Jokes

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

"Oh, at work we are trying to get our coffee machine to make coffee quicker and I came up with the idea of using a beowulf cluster on linux, how would that work?"

Hi, I couldnt help noticing the particular bind you are in, and im gonna stop work on emacs, and some other things i do in between picking lint from my toes, and write GNU/Pen for you - Love RMS

WOW! IM SO IMPRESSED. My name is Tina and im 17 and I *REALLY* like hackers who do Tae Bo - I do Naked Tae Bo, and then sit and write Perl for hours.. Would you like to join me -- Im So Alone without you.. Im sure you will complete my life.. because Im always so busy with my naked Tae Bo, and coding Perl, I will only have time to bonk you!~!!!!

• rtfm
• freshmeat
• oh you are so smart, is there room in your heart for me to love you too?
• Linux can do it!

This is JEFFK! I know it is. If anyone else wants to know what I'm talking about, check out:

Jeff K's website

I am virtually certain that this is the same guy.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless

you'll have to pardon my wording. not all of us can be as *precise* as yourself. Pardon me - *human* life began in Africa. (read: Lucy, Austrelopithicus, Homo erectus, etc.)

actually, no. Life began about 3.5-4 billion years ago.

ummm - so you actually know when life began in the Universe? holy shit! have you been on Charlie Rose??? let's not get into semantics here, pud! - you're Jeff K. aren't you??


FluX

...can be found in this article.

We all know that the bestest AMD vs Intel review is JeffK's.

Gives you all the information you really want and none of that technical mumbo-jumbo.

My earlier post..I noticed my link was broken...
oops.

Anyhow, jeffk at somethingawful.com has a full
review on amd vs. intel as well. Although not
as informative as most reviews...he definately
approaches the situation from a different angle.
That angle being one in a completely different dimension.

Judge for yourself...should jeffk be instituted?

Just visit jeffk's site and see what he has to say about amd vs intel.
www.somethingawful.com/jeffk

Ok now we all now know that both Hemos and Cmdtaco must have lost their minds. It started with the slashdoting of an innocent Atari. Now they have decided to start using a "writing syle" the would make Jeff K uneasy.

Now we may only pray for the saftey of Cowboy neil.

That sounds like that guy Jeffk

http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/

Check it

Yah, I read that too. It smacked of fanboy, "my system is better than yours", crap. It sounded like it was written by Jeff K..

Jarod

BakaNet? This is where all of the idiots who really shouldn't be using the internet belong (and there are way too many of them). Many AOLers fit in here, as well as script kiddies who think they're l33t h4x0rs, anyone who's ever begged for a ROM on an emulation message board, spammers, trolling AC's (/me uses item "Soft" on Natalie Portman and ends the madness!) and Jeff K.

I think you should go to Jeff K.'s site. You'll find him cool, I'm sure.

10) Install Windows 2000

9) Surf the Gay Jedi fanfic page.

8) Call up the MPAA and rat on people who link to DeCSS

7) Make Natalie Portman posts on /.

6) Try to make money by getting my friends to read my epinions (you too can be a spammer).

5) Run Ultima 9 on a non VooDoo 3 card.

4) Start a Daiktana fan page

3) Meet Jeff K on IRC for hacking tips. (FrEE KEVIN NITMACK!)

2) Code a DOS Emulator for Linux so I can play badass games designed for 486s

1) Order DVDs from MPAA aligned studios on Amazon.

These may sound evil - but they're probably more productive for your own karma in the long run.

wellllllllllll,
i think slashdot may be slightly biased against MS. but definitely less so than any other news source out there. I've only been reading slashdot religiously for about 3 months now, but i definitely think it's the best news source on the net

btw, for something funny click me

I wonder if this is how they tracked down Jeff K.

--

I read and post to slashdot because its entire perview is anything but narrow or hostile. Options are present for me to filter out the information I regard as useless. Sometimes I post and get high karma. Sometimes I don't. It happens.

Time and time again I read about an issue on slashdot and find the User Comments more valuable than the post. An item on wearable computing might lead to a post by someone who actually makes them, and links to more information. My interest in technology and culture finds this site the perfect compliment to these curiosities, despite some people insisting that slashdot's focus should be more narrow.

However, I cannot help but feel Mr. Katz' recent articles are written only in reaction to the amount of negative posts he generates here. I do not understand this three part series' point whatsoever - the main criticism I find levelled at Katz by my friends who are literate, polite, non flaming linux users is that being a cultural person he is more interested in buzzwords than content - driving an issue based on its importance rather than providing any real insight - something I do not agree with completely but understand, and wish them to be able to express that opinion. I do not sit here flaming anonymously, but as myself.

I am a minority. I am non white. My mother was an immigrant from a low tech country to the U.S. I am not a coder. My expertise is in an analog tech format (filmmaking). I am everything that katz has suggested online communities are - but I am not a dangerous, hostile adolescent who uses the Net for juvenile vitriol.

I've found this community and many others on the net all the same - there are minorities and, yes, women present - as computing becomes more ubiquitious it will become even more diverse. There are flamers, and there are intelligent posters, and trolls. There is highly valuable news and some which is worthless to myself or others. At the end of the day, as the reader, I make slashdot to be my own - taking what I need and is important from it.

I don't see why this model is so deprecative to society, as Mr. Katz would have it. Anybody else feel like me despite the lunacy and annoyance that every Jeff K on the net generates, there is something more profound, just waiting for you to find it, instead of a hierarchy deciding it for us.

And just to keep it in one comment, I'd like to know what Mr. Katz would like to say to us slashdotters about the fact that he has sold his book to a company that will soon be owned (more than likely) by AOL - (Fine Line pictures is owned by Time Warner). Within his dealings of a traditional media hierarchy, does he not expect any influence from corporate control - as opposed to the freedom afforded us in this forum?

It's odd how people forget that gopher was the web without graphics. Gopher never took off nearly to the extent that the web did, and gohperspace a pretty much ignored subset of webspace now. Yeah, it might because http understans MIME, but IMO it's because of the graphical nature of the web that it's doing so much better.

BTW, I think you meant to link here, and I agree: aweful.

This is the kind of crap that I hate seeing. People say, "The web was only meant for text," and "Graphics suck, they make the web slow." You know, when the first books came out, they had only words in them, no pictures (unless you count the letters as pictures). But then discovered that you could put images in books as well, too, and even though it cost more and took more time to print, the did it. Why did they do it? Because graphically it was more enticing. Sometimes it does absolutely nothing to enhance the story, but sometimes, they're very beneficial.

Slashdot readers talk, on one hand, about e-commerce and how it's revolutionizing our lives and how it'll be great when we have this perfect 'Netcentric society. On the other hand, they, they say, "Woe is me, the 'Net's changed so much since I was using back in the day!" Why do companies put graphics on their web page? Because it helps to make the web site more appealing graphically. Most Companies are defined by their corporate image. That's a visual representation. Microsoft in text and Microsoft in logo are two very different things. I would hate to go to a web site of a company that I use and not see their logo, because as a consumer, it's comforting to know that I have the right site, and that image confirms that. I'd hate to go to a friend's web site and read about how great his trip to Spain was and not be able to immediately pull up the images he's talking about. I can do that because of the power of graphics. I miss out on something when I use w3m or similar text-based graphics. A picture is worth a 1000 words, and who knows how many a moving picture can be.

If a Shockwave plugin means I get a presentation explaining a something to me in less bits than a similar animated GIF, great. If an animation shows me what the product looks like more clearly, that's great, too. If someone decides to simply scan their brochue and upload it, then yes, that sucks. But do not look down on Shockwave and GIFs and similar changes in the way that the Web is used. It's revolutionizing the world, and I for one am glad that people are making it at least a little nicer to look at.

Except for this guy. That's just awful, both in terms of images and in terms of text.

The fact is that message is very redundant, and not really worth the clicking of any knowledgeable computer user. Everyone knows warez is illegal and bad, so whats the point of telling people the same fact over na dover (except for, of course, warez d00dz) Parody of a warez person: Something Awful