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ViewSonic AirPanel v150 Review at Ars Technica
Haxby writes "Ars Technica has a pretty thorough review of the ViewSonic AirPanel (15 inch model). You might recall that this device/design won 'Best of Comdex' in 2002, but as the review clearly shows, it's not really all that great, and it's way overpriced. The biggest problem is video performance: it sucks. Poor resolution and hideous rendering times (partly Microsoft's RDC's fault) make it next to useless. Is more bandwidth the key to making these things more palatable?"
i like it wet
Spirit of America has come loose from its mooring
Gone limp -- deflated
Nosedived into a pile of crap
I won't give away anything here that can single me out.
When I started at SCO in the late 90s it was a fun, vibrant place to work. The coffee was free as was lunch most Fridays. It was replete with friendly competition to write the best code we could while finding problems and fixing the code of others. It was sheer joy.
Then, in late 2001, several of the core systems people were told we had to attend a meeting (we later started calling that meeting "Salem Tuesday" after the witch hunts) in which we were told that effective immediately our job functions were to change.
One man, who I'd just seen around the office recently, announced himself as an intellectual property attorney from Washington. He said that Linux, which we all knew about of course, was infringing on SCO's IP. We couldn't ask questions during this meeting, it was strictly a one-way conversation. We were told of how the GPL was bad for business and bad for America (remember that this was just after Sept. 11 and patriotism was still on a high). Free software, we were told, was killing the 150 billion dollar software industry. In effect, by supporting Linux we were cutting our own throats.
None of use believed that, we had some great sales lined up for our server software and support contracts were bringing in loads of cash. The lawyer continued on about how Free wasn't and how we would be unemployed if we continued to give away Linux.
He sat down (interestingly, I never saw this man again), and another lawyer stood up and gave us our plans: from that moment forth we were to dissect the Linux kernel source and compare it with our own internal code. If things looked close we were to try getting our code into the Linux tree through our contacts at IBM and SGI. The funny thing is that much code that did the same stuff was replicated but with out unique comments in there it was obvious that our internal source had to be the initial source for the code.
The rest is history.
Here we are, 10 months after the rocks started flying: IBM didn't bite and buy us out, SGI is fighting back, Sun and MS bought licenses. That wasn't how it was supposed to go I guess. The atmosphere here is thick with paranoia. We're no longer systems coders in a software company, we're inventing evidence in a litigation firm.
Oh, for the record: SCO monitors outgoing connections to sites such as Groklaw and Slashdot. We've had a handful of job terminations for people saying things that may hurt SCO on various forums. A single AC posting on
I'm ssh'd out through another machine I have access too. Keep the fight going. Hopefully the board will turf the pirates that took over and let us get back to what we love: programming.
An Anonymous Coward at SCO.
doesn't add anything to the quote, and check out his/her/its post history, it's filled with offtopic, flamebait, and troll posts.
toaster,toaster toaser, do you have toast in you yet i think
so!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Im not a toaster!!!!!!!!!!And one more
thing........YOUR A TOASER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND A COOKIE WITH MILK SOAGE
MILK!!!!!!!!!!AND A BUTT WITH POOP IN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CHESAPEAKE, Va. - Consumed with righting racial inequality and injustice, sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo became yesterday the latest young defendant to use the film The Matrix as part of an insanity defense to explain killings that seem to have no clear explanation.
The 1999 film has been used, with some success, in at least three other murder cases in which young defendants attempted to justify their crimes with allusions to the movie's philosophy that the world people live in is only a dream sequence controlled by a computer. Violence is condoned as a way to get out of the fake, oppressive world of The Matrix.
More than a hundred drawings and notes found in Malvo's jail cell, as well as the testimony yesterday of a social worker who met with the teen-age sniper suspect, indicate that the youth had an obsession with The Matrix. He told detectives and the social worker to watch the film to understand the motive behind the sniper shootings.
"Mr. Malvo wanted me to know how unjust this society was and how important it was for them to build a new and just society," said court-appointed forensic social worker Carmeta Albarus, who spent 70 hours with Malvo this year. "I recognized something was amiss with this Jamaican boy who had not been in this country three years and is speaking as if he had lived here his whole life and suffered years of social injustice."
Albarus' testimony dovetailed with the drawings introduced into evidence Wednesday. In those ink sketches on blue-lined notebook paper, Malvo creates a heroic portrait of Neo, the central character in The Matrix, and makes numerous references to the film's slogans of freeing one's mind.
"The outside force has arrived, free yourself of the Matrix 'control,'" Malvo wrote on one drawing that depicted him handcuffed with the word Bondage on his chest. "Free first your mind. Trust me!! The body will follow."
The 'Matrix' defense
This is not the first time a disenfranchised teen-ager has used the film as an explanation for violent acts.
Two notable Matrix defenses, in San Francisco and Ohio, saw judges accept insanity pleas based on a defendant's infatuation with the movie.
In the San Francisco case, a 27-year-old Swiss exchange student said he dismembered his landlady in May 2000 because she was emitting "evil vibes" and he was afraid of being "sucked into the Matrix," according to news reports. The case did not go to trial after the judge accepted the insanity plea.
Last year in Hamilton, Ohio, a 36-year-old bartender shot her landlady three times with a pistol. She said her landlady had been controlling her mind and justified the killing by telling the court: "They commit a lot of crimes in The Matrix." Her insanity plea was accepted.
Robert F. Horan Jr., lead prosecutor in the Malvo trial, faced The Matrix defense in another case he prosecuted this year - that of Joshua Cooke, a 19-year-old Oakton, Va., resident who killed his parents with a 12-gauge shotgun and blamed the movie.
Cooke's attorney said his client believed he was living in the virtual reality world of The Matrix when he shot his parents. Horan argued that the defense was nonsense, and the judge later sentenced Cooke to 40 years in prison.
"How many million people have seen this movie and how many have committed murder?" asked Horan rhetorically during a Boston Globe interview.
'A common theme'
Some legal experts say the film may be no more than a convenient framework to explain crimes committed by people who do not exhibit typical forms of insanity.
"If you cast aside the notion that the laws of the land matter, it allows us to behave in a very different way. It gives us license," said John Kennedy, director of the University of Cincinnati's Institute of Psychiatry and Law. "There's a common theme of oppression and unfairness that requires abandoning the status quo and turning to a new way, and it just so happens that this behavior and the movie express that same theme."
It
... mod the article into /dev/null. In fact, mod this comment there, too.
Yawn.
sigs, as if you care.
The very next time a fundie comes up to you and asks, "are you saved?" share with them this information: Take a letter, one by one from the word Evangelists and it forms two words: Evil's Agents.
Lucky for us we have a God who we can actually SEE. His name is Lord Captain Kirk.
The Captain Kirk Bible comes with remote controlled twitching rubber Spock ears to wear during worship. Lord Captain Kirk defeated or outwitted many Klingons and Romulans. In celebration of Lord Kirk's Godly wonder I offer the following prayer:
"Lord Captain Kirk you gave us your holy prophet Picard to introduce your sacrament of tea earl grey hot. BEHOLD! Before me I have prepared a cup of this tea become present to me in the holy sacrament of the tea earl grey hot - this I command! I do summon, invoke, and command thee O mighty Lord Captain Kirk! Amen Amen."
You know, the alternative is to just not read slashdot. :)
Pretty Pictures!