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The "Rambus vs. Infineon, Hynix, Micron Technologies, Siemens AG, Nvidia, anyone-else-who-has-a-memory-chip-in-their-hardware" lawsuit is another one which seems to be just going on and on...

They need to get burners to market in mass quantity as well as offer those licenses for free or very very small royalties.

Like pennies per unit. Plus they need to get the consumer on their side. The more hd-dvd players out there the more the industry has to listen. Unfortunately with the economy tanking this is hard. Right now I personally would put money making on the back burner and just look to break even. Make hd-dvd discs cheaper to buy then a normal dvd and make the players cheaper. At that point this whole thing can turn around , with consumer demand the studios have to listen. If smaller studios stick to the format then there really can be a price market , smaller studios usually make lower cost films and don't need to recoup so much back.

The reason I say they need burners in high volume asap, is that whether they like it or not piracy is often times a real boost to sales. It's been proven that it helps.( http://www.stargeek.com/item/41324.html ) ( http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=243454 )

The american and canadian dbs providers , even cable can thank piracy for large subscriber growth. They really should get those burners out in high volumes fast.

• Complementary Benefits - If the competition leaves something desirable out of their design, a developer can cater to that. Untold zillions of people (myself, included) have enjoyed a myriad of games in the first-person shooter genre. Many of these players would love to create their own levels and content, but lack the time or technical expertise to do this, even with the mod tools available. We want our offering to allow anyone adept enough to play our game to be able to create within it. I'm hoping that folks of all ages can play other FPSes, and still enjoy our game, for that reason.
• Consistency - From a marketing standpoint, the release of a small title is almost a non-event; rather, steady and consistent support causes awareness to gradually snowball. After all, most FPS fans know than Doom 3 will be released on 7/20/2004 (just kidding), but unless PGC and CWG suddenly do big pieces on indie developers, they won't be slapping us onto their covers. So, for us, it's a long-haul grassroots thing -- hopefully, this means that players will benefit from lots of fresh, new content over the next 12 months.
• Differentiation - This is where the consumer stands to win the most: developers can recognize saturation in a sub-genre and create products that evolve it. Or: to those who lament the current state of the myriad identical MMOGs, don't fret -- it's only a prelude to evolution! Our biggest example of this is the ability to create arenas. But we also apply it in small ways; whereas Doom 3 and Half Life 2 approach hyperrealism, we're trying for the oppsite effect. Aesthetics are not central to our game, but I hope players will consider it pretty enough -- and different enough -- to enjoy.

The republicans already have hacked some democrat computers.

. . . with the Open Source community. Just ask these guys.

Hmm, missed the link part...

You're right, it is the %01 bug. I was reading some security advisory site (not the link above) and they ddin't seem to think it was fixed. As I was using my Mac, I couldn't verify...

Bu the fact remains that WAS a valid bug. It's exactly things like that that lead me to use Mozilla at work (even if I didn't like it more). It's hardly FUD when similar suff happens all the time and you can neve be sure what patch level a computer is on. They may have released a patch shortlay after the exploit btu I have no idea when dsktop support at work actually aplied it (and I would guess never is the answer judging by a recent manual Windows Update run I just did for fun).

An earlier story covered discoveries that some commercial software already incorporated recognition of the Eurion constellation.

Once again, though, I disagree with yet another technical solution to a social problem. It's just like speed bumps in parking lots. Make life inconvenient and miserable for everyone because of the small percentage that abuse the system...

Oh, Boohoo! ;-(
Are you upset because Microsoft is using stuff
to much associated with Apple for you taste?

Rumor or not, I don't know. But apparently, this guy got fired over it.

I don't quite agree. $12M is nothing to them, and allows them to legally say they did nothing wrong. This has two nice things: saves litigation costs (and you can bet there will be an appeal no matter who wins); and reduces strategy requirements (no need to worry about the story/lie you're telling in one case coming back to bite you in another case). I wouldn't be surprised if MS paid their lawyers more than that in the federal case. This link notes that the lawyers in the California class-action suit want $258M. If you look at the rates given, most are probably 10x too high, but $25M is still twice what MS paid Opera to just go away. That's not admission, that's hedging your bets and cutting your losses for a guarantee.

That said, I think they were guilty, which certainly influenced them to just make it go away.

Amen to the banning of phones in lots of places but surely just because there is an _incredibly_ _slight_ chance of something bad happening is no reason to legislate against something or we'd all end up never doing anything at all. Does the chance of getting run down when crossing the street stop you from doing so? I can guarantee more people are injured/killed crossing the street than in mobile phone related gas station explosions but its not illegal to cross. How about flying? Lots of people fly (they say that statistically its the safest form of transport) and some die in horrible air crashes each year - again more than those who die in mobile phone/gas station disasters but lots of us still do it.

Most "accidents" can be prevented by a nanny state through the judicious use of legislation - hey, lets ban everything that has even a slight chance of being dangerous - but I thank god (figuratively at least) that I don't live in one, at least not yet!

Just how statistically probable does something need to be in order for you to want it banned? Lets look at the probability of a mobile phone/gas station disaster... I'll take your figure of 100 accidents and say that you mean per year (you didn't specify) - this seems a little high but we'll take this figure to start. Next, we'll estimate how many people in the world own or drive both cars and mobile phones - This article suggests that worldwide, the number of cars in use are somewhere between 580 (1990) and 816 (2010 est.) million - lets be conservative and say it has not increased at all since 1990. Finally we need to know how frequently they are refuelled. Lets estimate that, on average, a car uses one tank of gas per fortnight (lets in fact round down to two tanks per month). That makes 24 visits to the gas station per vehicle per month.

Now we'll estimate the number of car owner/drivers who also own mobile phones. A quick google leads to this article which in turn references several other sources. It would appear that both Europe and North America (the majority car owning nations) are reaching the stage where everyone who wants a mobile phone has one - lets call this around 70% of both car owners and mobile phone owners. so:

(580 million car/owners x 70%) x 24 fill-ups = 9.7 BILLION visits to the gas station annually.

So if there are 100 incidents, the probability is 1 in 97,000,000. Lets put that in perspective - the chance of winning the Canadian lottery is 1 in 13,983,816 and the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11,000,000 and the chance of dying in a car accident is (from the same source) 1 in 5,000.

So, statistically, its far safer to talk on your mobile phone whilst filling up than it was to drive to the gas station in the first place - by a huge margin!

Maybe we don't need to ban mobile phones at forecourts, maybe we need to ban cars :)

Actually, there are no polar bears in the Antarctica. Penguins yes, bears no.

Polar bears live in the Arctic, being neighbours to the good ol' Santa Claus, who is going bankrupt...

That's a lot better than Starband and Direcway in my experience.

Microsoft have, um, a bit of a reputation problem as it is :-) and I can't imagine it'd get any better if it became public knowledge that their security updates sometimes deleted the operating system.

Yeah, like that hasn't happened several times already.

p

Don't forget re-use... a lot of people like turning old macs in to aquariums

I'd Like to see my old 17-inch monitor that is Officially Dead swimming with a few goldfish. The next time family comes to visit: "Wow, that screensaver keeps getting better and better!"

Just Don't Store Your Important Source Code On It.... :))))))))))))

Actually MSN has posted a profit.

...and then immediately resigns to "write his memoirs."

Google Catalog Search
... Food & Gourmet Harry and David, Starbucks Coffee, ... Toys & Hobbies HearthSong,
Lego, ... Business to Business Alfa Aesar, OfficeMax, ... ...
Description: Applies Googles search technology to catalogs.
Category: Shopping>Publications>Catalogs
catalogs.google.com/ - 8k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

.: Welcome to MSBetas.net v2.0 :.
... Google's New toys - Wednesday, December 11, 2002 at 01:10, Posted by
csabo2. Google Two new toys from Google's technology playground ...
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.: Welcome to MSBetas.net v2.0 :.
Google's New toys - Wednesday, December 11, 2002 at 01:10, Posted by
csabo2. Google Two new toys from Google's technology playground ...
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Google News by CodingTheWeb.com
... By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's
search technology to a very specific task: locating ... New Google Lab toys. ...
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Small Values of Cool: May 22, 2002 Archives
... Question of the Day at HowStuffWorks. Posted by Simon Brunning at 01:23 PM Google
Labs. Check out some of Google's new toys. Pretty cool, most of them. ...
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Small Values of Cool: Google Labs
... More unmissable daily reading... ?? May 22, 2002 Google Labs Check out some of Google's
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[ More results from www.brunningonline.net ]

Google Press Center: 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist
... Top Destinations 2002, 1. paris. 2. canada. 3. new york. 4. india. 5. las vegas.
6. australia. ... 5. sears. 6. circuit city. 7. costco. 8. toys r us. 9. staples.
10. ...
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news items
... in a toy store, it's the first crack at toys that we ... Froogle is a new service from ... on
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marginalia.org: June 2001 Archives
... Google's new images search is good. ... I don't know what's worse, plush toys, new novels,
or emphatic assurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the ...
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