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But what if Google sells a "GMail appliance?"

I used to laugh every time I heard the word "appliance" used in a high-tech context. But no more. Now there's a washing machine with a back button.

--Rob

From the Need-to-make-headlines-and-haphazard-predictions Dept, in sponsorship with the Tiger-Sues-Apple Dept.

I have copied and pasted the article here, don't bring the ad revenue...

"Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the Apple business soon? Does anyone else think that it is overdue? It has happened before, and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $2500 or so for a Mac when the macs have hardly changed since the invention of the Ford Model T.

I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid designs.

I'm not the only one who thinks there's a problem. When Microsoft president Steve Ballmer spoke at this year's WinHEC Conference in Seattle, he discussed the lack of new keyboard ideas. He saw the same things that I see: There are four or five simple keyboard categories and nothing really new or different.

The categories are natural, natural multimedia, unnatural glow-in-the-dark, optical, and utopian http://store1.yimg.com/I/lovemacs_1841_247848. That's it. Most of today's hottest keyboards are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a logo added to keep the users from being bored stiff. When my kids show me a keyboard, I usually say that it's nothing but the same old clickety-click-click with a new background. They leave in a huff."

Interesting
Please say more.

Wow. You are very insightful. I never thought of it that way before.

Does *this* look positive to you?

I'd love to eat her out. I'd give her such mindblowing orgasms. But she ignores me and my letters, phone calls and any attempts to make contact. Bitch.

I'd love to eat her out. I'd give her such mindblowing orgasms. But she ignores me and my letters, phone calls and any attempts to make contact. Bitch.

I'd love to eat her out. I'd give her such mindblowing orgasms. But she ignores me and my letters, phone calls and any attempts to make contact. Bitch.

I'd love to eat her out. I'd give her such mindblowing orgasms. But she ignores me and my letters, phone calls and any attempts to make contact. Bitch.

Reminds me of this (de)motivational poster from despair.com.

April 29 is a good day for both Mac OS X fans and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans: both are being released on the same day.

But has anyone noticed the similarities between the Tiger Automator bot and the movie's Marvin robot?

1. Automator bot
2. Marvin bot

Okay, not identical, but they're not a million light years apart are they?

Either there is a fan in the marketing dept. of the Sirius Cybern^H^H^H^H^H Apple Computer company, or this is just one of the many consequences of living in the ZZ9 plural Z alpha region of the galaxy...

400,000 people.

I met one of the original Saturn V engineers in the giftshop at Kennedy Space center when I was there. He was aparently haggling with the poor woman who ran the giftshop about the display for the poster he designed. I overheard their conversation as I was perusing the poster right next to them and she (gladly) turned him over to me. His name was Bud Abbot. He was just happy to have a fan, someone who appreciated what they did way back then. I even bought his poster and got it autographed.

It took 400,000 people to get one Saturn V rocket into the air. A monumentous achievement, and there was significant outcry from all sorts of people that thought that they knew better how government should spend their money. This continued and grew in pitch throughout the 60's until the Moonlanding was broadcast on TV. History has forgotten that side of the story.

I think that there are dual points I'm trying to squeeze out:

1 - that "To Survive" means that space exploration is imminent. What if something happens here? Our ozone depletes all the way, some sort of viral pollution tears everything up. When I was a kid, it was just a matter of time until we had space stations like the one in 2001. There was a spirit of cooperation and wonder.
2 - We have to get our world in order here first. I can barely afford to drive anywhere with gas prices the way we are. We have to throw all these oil crooks in prison, start getting along with other countries, and just generally promote goodwill...

In Soviet Russia, old Koreans are GNOMEs.

They're basic horizontal graphic banner ads.

lol

Here's an example:

lol

[ ad image seen at top of mail.yahoo.com page ]

lol

Hey I think I've seen one of these thugs you speak of - here

Aside from the "wow" factor, how much does Raytracing really add?

This is one of their raytraced scenes, and this is a shot from the half-year-old Half-Life 2. Notice how while the shadows and lighting in HL2 are burned-in, they're still pretty convincing. This is a shot from a raytraced Quake 3. Notice how it's single-pass raytracing with no reflections and sharp edges... For the full benefit of raytracing you need multipass.

This is an early, leaked shot from Quake 4, a traditionally poly model engine. Traditional racing Games always have great lighting. This is a scene from GTA based on the Q3A raytracing engine, and this is a vaguely similar scene from the game.

With normal mapping coming into it's own and polygon edges mostly a thing of the past, what benefit does raytracing give us? Shadows? It costs us less than one character to draw a drop shadow. Dynamic lighting? There are tricks to doing pseudo dynamic lighting in many circumstances. Generally, though, you don't want too many moving lights in your scene anyway, as the effect is quite nauseating.

The only major benefit that I see with real time raytracing is that it would free up the artists and coders to drop some of the tricks they've been putting in place for the usual lighting stuff.

But for lighting effects, we've got a lot already going, and more coming in soon. I personally can't wait for relative light levels to make their way into more game engines. And normal mapping to become really normal. For many years I had wanted realtime raytracing, but now it seems so unnecessary.

It just seems like raytracing will always be so much more expensive, that the flat-polys-with-tricks models will always look better for the same hardware.

Of course, knowing this industry in 5 years we'll probably have chip boards that have one processor spit out a traditionally drawn 3d polygon scene and another which renders and layers upon that a 2d greyscale light map at a slightly lower resolution using a reduced parallel geometry set or some such. Instead of making things easier, they usually tend to make things harder. Oh well.

Can anyone here with more experience than I explain what raytracing gives you that you couldn't fake more cheaply?

As any PC this is likely to be running on wouldn't be "Apple-labeled" I'd guess that's probably a violation.

I guess you would need to pick up a
front panel then as well.

sdb

or does the guy in the picture look a lot like one of the creators of south park?

I nominate this picture.

They showed a picture of how this works with Firefox:

http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/yq/sp_f irefox.gif

Select text, pull up contextual menu, Query To... Y!Q.

In Mac OS X you can use services with ANY application, and one of the built in services is "Search with Google", which is Shift-Apple-L when you have any selected static text in any application. You can also control click selected text in Safari and there are two options: Copy and Google search.

This is already much better integration and ease of use than Y!Q with Firefox (don't know how well it works with IE).

This reminded me of a funny poster. Sorry couldn't resist.

Anyone else think this image of the new robot/soldier looks like Johnny 5?

In the movie Johnny 5 had Apple hardware... does this real one perhaps have a G5?

Is it running Darwin (insert darwinism joke here)?

It could broadcast what it's eyes/camera's see via a QuickTime Stream. It's voice can be done using text to speach. It can even sing (better than the movie) thanks to iTunes.

Oh boy. I bet I'm right!

Powell, who is a decent and devout Christian, probably objected heavily when both Jeanna and President Bush announced their allegiance to Satan during yesterday's ceremony.

one more

how large does a usb key have to be- could it be made to go within a camera?

(Just a satisfied customer here.)

That's not the impression I got when I looked CLOSELY at the building.

A good quarter of the building appears to be completely stationary, in addition to the room in the center. The stairs, plumbing, and possibly an elevator are all in the rectangular section off the corner.

Diagram of building on rotation control display.
Photo of building from the rectangle corner.

A good quarter of the building appears to be completely stationary, in addition to the room in the center. The stairs, plumbing, and possibly an elevator are all in the rectangular section off the corner.

Diagram of building on rotation control display.
Photo of building from the rectangle corner.

Better Picture.

from the picture it looks like the first floor is raised significantly off the ground.
I say this because the camera is raised, and at least 50 feet back, yet it catches the first floor. Also, in a town like Curtiba, with a population of almost 2 million, "held as a paragon of urban planning excellence ... [with] a notably efficient transportation system...," 300k is cheap. Look at condos in any US City.

Is Ridge Racer like Gran Turismo? Because Ridge Racer DS has been announced.

No, not at all. This is Ridge Racer DS. *This* is Gran Turismo.

Notice the enormous difference in image quality? The point is, the PSP may have lower battery life when playing graphically complex games, but the DS can't play such games anyway, so it's not a fair comparison. The games on the PSP that have the same level of quality as DS games won't tax the hardware as much, and should result in much better battery life.

like this?

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/200411 23/i/r2807937167.jpg

The funny thing is i have *NO* idea how the hell she won over the other finalist, who's page is here

All the shrek gags aside she's too young for this sort of responsibility to be thrust upon her, and besides she has a shithouse dress sense.

Reminds me of a classic Larson cartoon.

wtf ? just fo a normal google and the first hits are all her photos. some censorship.

But none of the results that google search are links to the pictures of her wearing this dress

Good Morning, Senator! So nice to hear from you!

Today's FoxTrot cartoon is especially appropriate for this topic... http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20041101 /lft041101.gif

It wasn't Timmy this time. It was Taco.

Once again, Apple offers a better alternative.

The big thing here is selling something which is easily reproduced. If your work is easily reproduced (or replaced by robots), you might very well be riding a wave of luck that someone has been willing to pay for your product.

However, in most cases, your work is not reproducable at a cost considerably less than the cost of the work, as it involves time which can not be copied. Music, ideas, patents, all can be copied at negligable cost, and will therefore go the way of all comodities, approaching the cost of production.

Please, more Clinton soccer moms drive SUV's than anyone else. They need it to take their kid and her friends to soccer..

If your cell phone is in your jacket pocket and you are pretending it is a gun while you hold up a liquer store because you lost your factory job, you are proably a democrat.

Thats just silly we all know democrats dont work thats why youre all for free drugs and welfare ;p

If you don't have a cell phone because you don't want to feed a huge greedy corporate oligopoly you are a Nader supporter.

I got nothin'

If your cell phone is inserted in your boyfriends ass, you are either a Barney Frank supporter, a log cabin republican, or possibly just a seriously disturbed individual.

or you could be This Guy trying to be something he is not...

Iraq is too far away. We've found a much more convenient place to store all of our anti-matter!

• It
• looks like Gore has been spending plenty of time at the OTHER White House.

1620 GMT -- Recovery forces begin cleanup.

Don't be, that one just looks like an empty tube rather than a real rocket.

I found a picture of the system here. You may have to zoom in a bit to see individual machines.

One thing about Synergy: it is a KM (Keyboard and Mouse only), not KVM (ie, no video -- you can use one mouse and keyboard, but you still have to have two monitors). The original question said that there are two monitors there already, so Synergy would work for him, but it is not a solution for multiple computers (unless your desk looks like Tank's).

The Synergy FAQ said that KVM functionality may be added in the future.

This would go great with the old-school Sun Type(3/4/5) optical mouse pads. Remember those? My brother was a lab monitor in some of the Sun computer labs at his university, and he mentioned that that was the #1 thing stolen from those labs. The rigid metal surface with the clear covering was just the pinnacle of vacuumpunk technology.

Could you please politely ask your wife to stop rocking the boat.

Thank you.

And this is not origami:

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20040818 /capt.bx10108182349.tiniest_preemie_bx101.jpg

volleyball hints:
#1 dont get hit in the nads
#2 save this for after the game
#3 watch out for that pervert camera man

volleyball hints:
#1 dont get hit in the nads
#2 save this for after the game
#3 watch out for that pervert camera man