Either you bought that MD player long ago or you're neglecting the optical inputs (in the same jack) that even the $100 NetMD players have had for quite a while. Granted, that way to go about it is slow, but you can make digital copies, perfect until mangled by ATRAC, with only a decent CD player.
If you have an old one, well, thinking about it, the $300 ones should have optical inputs. My friend's old MD player did and it was under $300 and before NetMD. For their time they were way better than one would get out of the later introduced 32MB flash players for $100+.
I'm hoping they grow up and make some decent software for the NetMD and HiMD now, instead of the crapfest they've been including previously. Those players will record at 32x or so, but the software to do so with is terrible.
When would you do this with a domestic company? There's your answer. Why is it really any different?
A better question might be if there's any sort of response apart from withholding payment and cutting ties. Is there a legal response that will make a difference to your bottom line? That'd be an interesting facet of outsourcing if you ask me.
I have nothing against the Mini, in fact I think the price point is rather in favor of the machine for what you get, especially compared to a comparable mini-itx system. I'm not sure all the facets of the Mini, size, power, components, can be effectively duplicated for less even.
However, while you speak of working extra time at a menial crap job, I'll speak of the enjoyment and experience one could get out of building a mini-itx machine that is comparable. I know, for me at least, that I enjoy fiddling with hardware, assembling a machine for personal use, and reaping the benefits of that effort. For me, it is at times how I choose to spend my free time. It doesn't matter if I could pay for the machine twice over if I'd get a crappy job instead. I don't enjoy making grease-logged food for others, and I do enjoy assembling the one off computer.
No, people who say they can build it for less are discounting their time to "all the joy I can wring out of it per hour". Nobody's speaking of doing this en masse, just as a one off thing for themselves, parents, maybe a clueless friend.
Autonomous machines making decisions will likely happen eventually, but pretty soon seems to be right out. The biggest reason for this is liability. Right now we have software making decisions for the music execs. What happens if the software is wrong? The execs are out a bit of cash. But since it at least seems to do a good enough job, it's worth the risk.
When decision making directly influences many lives, there's little chance of it being implemented in software without human oversight, unless it can be proven to always work. With music we just get manufactured crap, which doesn't bear the consequences many other decisions might. A hospital isn't going to want a machine with a chance of misdiagnosis, it exposes too much liability.
I'd say that some nerds may go so far as to do both. I'd even say that some do it because they find it personally amusing that so many do so and want to have more opportunity to make sometimes not so subtle digs by having the subject brought up to them.
You know, like: "Hey nice case Bob." "Thanks, the lights I put in there give it an extra 100 MHz!"
And you'll also have a hard time convincing me that car enthusiasts don't care about looks. Their cars are loved more than people. They get routine wash, wax, and cleaning for that special shine. Engine compartments kept immaculate.
I call shenanigans on looks being unimportant. Secondary maybe, ignored no.
Somebody really just should have told him he could flash the BIOS on his motherboard to work around whatever issues were imposed by said BIOSes. Most all board makers I know of have released updates to get the boards to work with whatever sized drives the user can throw at them.
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Engineers do love to show off, but many are also reserved, shy, quiet, or otherwise not forceful with their speaking. Many otherwise brilliant engineers may be so nervous during an interview that they don't pick up the subtle prompts that say jump in now, make a comment.
I've worked with brilliant people that could solve problems well, write clean code, and had difficulty following normal conversation. These people would certainly fail at trying to determine the intent of a story, but it's because of their social skill, not their technical acumen. Judging whether they create a conversation over technical solutions at a subtle prompt is about conversation. It'll trim both the people who don't have an answer and those that aren't aware, for whatever reason, that they're being indirectly asked a question and need to respond.
I'm not saying they've always been the easiest to work with. I'm saying if you're looking for a somebody to just solve problems, maybe the better approach is to be up front about having them solve problems, and not judge their problem solving ability on whether they offer up a solution without being directly instructed to.
Asking toy or puzzle problems has two problems. One, it'll freeze a nervous person who can't think under pressure. Depending on the position it may be good or bad. Lots of researchy type positions have a nice relaxed atmosphere which may make the question poorly suited. The other problem is when idiot interviewers think they need the answer which they couldn't come up with themselves. They don't look for the thought process and instead come to conclusions about people based on the antithesis of the question's purpose. The questions certainly aren't perfect. However, for the purpose of finding out about somebody's thought process, they're as straight forward and as reasonable as I think an engineer could ask for.
I think maybe for a technical manager or similar position the discussion of a problem and implicitly jump in approach would be perfect. A manager needs to be a little more overt and capable of conversation while still maintaining a high level view of where to bring a project to solve it. That's a fairly different area though.
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
No argument about the top research companies doing it, and Bell Labs is a name that still carries weight from its accomplishments. What I'd be more concerned about is the companies that aren't quite the top research companies pulling copycat style interviews. It's well known that non-MS and non-Google companies love the brain teasers, even if they aren't big and don't have the best hiring people. I've known people who were passed up and they thought it might be because the hiring manager was looking only for answers to the puzzle question.
So sure, used by the right people it'd be fine. I'm not sure how it would discard fewer qualified people though. It'd still get rid of people who might be technical, quick thinking, but not good conversationalists. Perhaps the opposite set that puzzle questions would. Maybe a good diversification of questions would be best.
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Like I said, that assumes the interviewer is competent in both technical and conversational aspects. Too often it seems to be one or the other. A good conversationalist might invite many chances for questions that can't be answered properly or might confuse the interviewee with misleading details. Think marketing or management types. They've got a high level grasp that isn't so great with the details you'd want an interviewee to be probing. A good technologist may boast their proud triumph over the problem and not leave room for questions. Think about the proud engineer who knows the details because they solved the problem, but wants to retell the glory of it. They won't invite questions.
I'm sure there are quite a few people who can do both well, but for each of those I'm nearly certain there's another who's good at one and completely disfunctional with the other. I'd rather have a question posed which I know what I have to do with it. I'd rather not struggle with vague, uncertain details or having to forcefully interrupt when I don't even know that I'm supposed to as part of the "test".
When it works I'm sure it's a great method. It's a tad too multifaceted for me to believe it always works though. With creative engineer types, they can easily pose a tricky question and inspect the logic that results. Interviewees are clearly expected to demonstrate their logic. That's the system I'd rather go through, as there's less chance of the interviewer judging me on something they're doing wrong.
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
The technique is that you talk about a current or recent problem and walk through the solution trying to engage the candidate. You observe the candidate. If s/he just sits there and listens: rejection. If s/he asks interesting questions and offers up solutions before you do, you're got yourself a winner.
Works for different people. I'd much rather be put on the spot and try to come up with an answer, which is then judged on approach and thought process than be rejected out of hand because I've been taught it's polite not to interrupt.
You're assuming the interviewer is actually good enough at conversation to relate a difficult technical problem and prompt that they want interaction and interruption while doing so. My experience with people that will be competent enough to accurately relate a difficult technical problem is that they'll not pause or omit to invite interruption. They won't ask questions to prompt interaction. Instead solved problems are told as a story of triumph, where in polite conversation it'd be terribly rude to interrupt.
Add that onto the fact you don't know the person. I know with people I'm more comfortable and friendly with I'm more likely to interject comments. With the manners I grew up with I'd be more likely with a relative stranger to listen the whole time and then engage in "Did you try this?" "What happened when..." style questions at the end. If it's a tale of success over a problem all the guessing ahead opportunity is gone and you're left with a tale where the problem is solved and fewer questions.
With puzzle questions I'm smart enough to know that showing your work counts for more than coming up with an answer, and don't worry about the frazzled bit. I think everybody who is interviewing at a location where these problems are employed knows this, so what is there to be frazzled about? Isn't a search over a variety of problem solving techniques, looking for one that fits right enough for the puzzle problems? I've always been under that impression. And if you can't do that, you've no business solving problems.
Not going to argue with any of this really. The only thing worth mention is that terrorism has become the next red scare and people are now being labeled as terrorists instead of commies. Same old, same old.
Why should I want communications monitored? I don't. I'm just pointing out that if people want communications monitored they can be. The real effect is that the government protects itself rather than its constituents. The threat to the government from terrorism is minimal. They might lose a building and have to spend more tax money, but terrorism really helps keep the populous afraid. At the same time, the government can strengthen itself against other things, like outside ideas, by clamping down on people who want political change.
That isn't to say that monitoring communications won't have the effect of effectively tracking down people who the government might not want roaming around. It just may mean that those people aren't really a threat to the citizens. But that discussion is only tangental to whether or not you should assume your MUD discussions are safely shielded from various agencies.
What's your point? You can do the same out in the open in front of the White House and unless somebody knows the code it isn't going to do a bit of good. You can do it over email, same thing.
More to the point is that if TerroristMage1 is a known lead, you can tap all the communications of said person on the MUD, figure out whom they are talking to, and get IPs there, which might lead to more information. If TerroristMage2 were unknown to your choice of TLA, this would be a big find, and they could be monitored as well.
Who is likely to be every bit as important as what, so long as what hasn't yet occured. And if the communication is constantly between several blocks of IPs, it narrows location.
Personally, I think it's a lost cause to try to filter through everything right now, and it'd be better to try concentrating on deciphering known communications than finding a whole lot more of the uncomprehensible ones. At some point there's likely to be enough compute power to process an awful lot of communication for red flags though. As a sunk cost, it provides something, where having personnel for border control and the like is a large continual cost. Not saying the latter isn't an important aspect, just that some things can be automated more than others.
It's a terrible example though. Obscurity does very little for the cause. If it's a known lead, it would be plenty easy to get a tap into the MUD and get all communication, track down connected IPs, and start trying to figure out who's up to something while breaking the code for the what. Believe it or not, the sort of terrorism we're supposedly fighting is the sort that's organized and actually plans for things. There's some time to break codes. All it takes is sniffing out where the known lead is connecting to.
If the point is that it's an unknown location for unknown leads, it simply means discovery of the lead won't show up through normal snooping, if this lead doesn't post anywhere known or otherwise communicate with a known lead. It seems far more likely this type of person will be picked up by making mundane and unimportant contact with a known lead, rather than being picked up because of any message content.
I'd be much more worried about people posing as old college friends, sending grainy "family" pictures back and forth with encrypted messages hidden within. There'd be no reason to suspect any of them until somebody made a wrong move by contacting a known suspect. That plan would probably raise fewer flags just tracing through packets than would somebody who constantly sends encrypted messages on odd ports. Who looks like the normal user?
Most of the MUD codebases I have looked into have all had this nifty feature to log what players do, should the admins start suspecting foul play. It'll keep track of where the players go, what they say, emote, do, pretty much everything. Simply talking to an admin and letting them know that you're with some national TLA and would like cooperation in logging a characters conversation would probably be enough to get the job done.
Or, consider most MUDs are transmitted in plaintext, and a simple sniff on your connection would be more than sufficient.
No, the real tricks should be information hiding, all messages stongly encrypted, sensitive or otherwise, and simple knowledge of where not to communicate. Wonder if crypto hidden in the least significant bits of a scan of a point and shoot 35mm picture of some random "family" photo would ever go noticed. I hope you don't think your chatting in the open in an "obscure" MUD location really helps you any.
Yeah, yeah, architecture hardly matters anymore. I seem to remember this Virtual PC thing that gives Macs the ability to run operating systems intended for an x86 instruction set. That'd give the Mac IBM compatability, wouldn't it? If the whole of your argument is compatability with the IBM PC of old, the Mac is a PC. Isn't emulation grand?
And before you point out that the Mac isn't designed specifically for x86, neither are Transmeta processors, yet they go into PC laptops. Their emulation is just at a different stage. Even today's Intel PCs have completely different architecture that has x86 translated into the internal instructions. Also note that today's Macs don't natively support the original 68k based Mac software. Does that mean it's been misnamed as a Mac?
The point is the whole line is being blurred. There's hardly a thing you can do on one home computer platform that you can't on another. Almost certainly nothing you'd do on an eMac.
It's traditional for computers traced back to IBM PC compatability to be called PCs and Apples to be called Macs for ease of differentiation in selling platform specific software or in some now rare cases hardware. Also note that Apple claimed to offer the "world's first 64-bit processor for personal computers".
Using the term PC to refer just to x86 machines should meet its end. PC Magazine's already doing it. The end of PC being platform specific happening. The terminology we use is alive. It's now turning into what the acronym expands to and nothing more. PCs are becoming nothing but personal computers. Sorry if that takes away some feeling of superiority from using one type of personal computer over another.
Odd, the eMac was a Personal Computer the last time I checked. It's no server, minicomputer, mainframe, thin client, or anything else to the best of my knowledge. Perhaps you mean it isn't a Windows PC or an x86 PC as is typically implied, given market share.
Nooo, it's a Mac, it's more than just a personal computer, right? Whatever.
Still, from the article, impossible to get information off of it because of a lack of a DVD burner? What's the author smoking? What did we all do with our 40+GB drives before DVD burners came along? Give me a break. I'd bet he wouldn't dream of trying to back up a 250GB drive with a DVD burner since that'd be over 50 DVDs. Why, backing up a 40GB drive with 700MB CDs yields just under 60 CDs. There's hardly a difference at all.
MN's page about the new license says it uses a Digimarc technology for the watermark. A quick scan of Digimarc's page shows plenty of optical image data hiding and nothing about RFID. I think they mean digital watermark in the traditional sense, which makes it a security feature and not a potential problem, since if you can read the hidden data you can read what's on the card's face anyway.
Re:As long as you have the space
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
Yes I will. I backup regularly. I have some clutter online and offline. I intend to start doing a mutual offsite backup every couple months or so with my brother who lives a state away. Except for tragic catastrophy, my data isn't going anywhere. It's safer than some journal memoirs that are often unearthed from famous dead people.
Most little clutter I generate is in some open plaintext format. That clutter I have that isn't I have installers for the applications to view it with. I try to keep most of it in an openly readable format as well. I have backups of my OS installation media. Virtual Machines to emulate x86 computers are plentiful now, and should the instruction set start going away, I am capable of either migrating the minimal specifically formated data I have or if necessary writing software to read the open formats I have. Not that other people are likely to let the formats I use up and die.
Don't be so assuming.
Re:As long as you have the space
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
Precisely. As long as there's some rhyme or reason to the storage, if there isn't a need to clear up space then why bother? The biggest clutter to disks seems to be long media files anyway. Without such I'm generally hard pressed to approach the limits of my disk space. Manage those well, typically burning the files to DVD, and there's no way I can run out of room for cluttered old files.
What's the chances you'll need that old college paper about some random societal issue of the time? Not very likely, but if it's a few kilobytes on todays massive drives it doesn't hurt on the off chance you need it. What may be interesting is the potential it will yield for discovering things about people. If in 50 years I decide to write down my memories or stories or just about how I lived my life, I'll have a mountain of easily referenced information to aid me. I'll have specific examples of things I've written or enjoyed in the past.
There were no posts that I saw in my quick scan informing me of what the store was actually selling, so I simply said not to assume anything. Yeesh. The story didn't come flat out and say the manner with which these things were being sold. Your quoted statement could have meant they would rip any games the customer bought with the Xbox for them, and show them how to do it at home so they didn't have to swap discs for each game. I read the article.
Looking at what's been said in that direction, I wonder how the heck anybody could think they were going to get away with that.
Chalk one up to stupidity then I guess. Yeesh, why'd they think they could get away with that? Why would anybody purchase one of these and leave a paper trail if you can do it yourself?
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that. They had displays with 15 games, so what? It sure beats having the customers switch games discs on their own. It doesn't say they sold any modded boxes with games on them, that part is strangely missing from the article.
There's an interesting clue though. They've been charged with "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" and not copyright infringement. You'd think that if they were openly selling consoles with pirated games on them they'd have been hit with, I don't know, actual copyright infringement and not just conspiracy to commit it.
The article doesn't say anything about whether they did or not, but I'm guessing by the charges including "conspiracy to" in the title that they've no evidence that they were sold with pirated games. That means it was likely either a hideously expensive modded console or they were paying for some games with that.
The store probably was out for a quick buck from those who were going to do so anyway, even if it meant paying a knowledgable friend to do it for them. $500 probably means a good 50% profit on top of whatever profit they get from the normal sale, especially if they sell it bare with no games. How much life does the Xbox have left too? Probably a good bit, but maybe these people will come back to the store occasionally, say when the next console is out. And if so, maybe they'll buy one then too.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have an old one, well, thinking about it, the $300 ones should have optical inputs. My friend's old MD player did and it was under $300 and before NetMD. For their time they were way better than one would get out of the later introduced 32MB flash players for $100+.
I'm hoping they grow up and make some decent software for the NetMD and HiMD now, instead of the crapfest they've been including previously. Those players will record at 32x or so, but the software to do so with is terrible.
A better question might be if there's any sort of response apart from withholding payment and cutting ties. Is there a legal response that will make a difference to your bottom line? That'd be an interesting facet of outsourcing if you ask me.
However, while you speak of working extra time at a menial crap job, I'll speak of the enjoyment and experience one could get out of building a mini-itx machine that is comparable. I know, for me at least, that I enjoy fiddling with hardware, assembling a machine for personal use, and reaping the benefits of that effort. For me, it is at times how I choose to spend my free time. It doesn't matter if I could pay for the machine twice over if I'd get a crappy job instead. I don't enjoy making grease-logged food for others, and I do enjoy assembling the one off computer.
No, people who say they can build it for less are discounting their time to "all the joy I can wring out of it per hour". Nobody's speaking of doing this en masse, just as a one off thing for themselves, parents, maybe a clueless friend.
When decision making directly influences many lives, there's little chance of it being implemented in software without human oversight, unless it can be proven to always work. With music we just get manufactured crap, which doesn't bear the consequences many other decisions might. A hospital isn't going to want a machine with a chance of misdiagnosis, it exposes too much liability.
Yeah, similar reaction here. It's like a paradigm shifting without a clutch. 1.25 GHz G4 will rock the heck out of Via's C3 and Eden processors too.
You know, like:
"Hey nice case Bob."
"Thanks, the lights I put in there give it an extra 100 MHz!"
And you'll also have a hard time convincing me that car enthusiasts don't care about looks. Their cars are loved more than people. They get routine wash, wax, and cleaning for that special shine. Engine compartments kept immaculate.
I call shenanigans on looks being unimportant. Secondary maybe, ignored no.
Somebody really just should have told him he could flash the BIOS on his motherboard to work around whatever issues were imposed by said BIOSes. Most all board makers I know of have released updates to get the boards to work with whatever sized drives the user can throw at them.
I've worked with brilliant people that could solve problems well, write clean code, and had difficulty following normal conversation. These people would certainly fail at trying to determine the intent of a story, but it's because of their social skill, not their technical acumen. Judging whether they create a conversation over technical solutions at a subtle prompt is about conversation. It'll trim both the people who don't have an answer and those that aren't aware, for whatever reason, that they're being indirectly asked a question and need to respond.
I'm not saying they've always been the easiest to work with. I'm saying if you're looking for a somebody to just solve problems, maybe the better approach is to be up front about having them solve problems, and not judge their problem solving ability on whether they offer up a solution without being directly instructed to.
Asking toy or puzzle problems has two problems. One, it'll freeze a nervous person who can't think under pressure. Depending on the position it may be good or bad. Lots of researchy type positions have a nice relaxed atmosphere which may make the question poorly suited. The other problem is when idiot interviewers think they need the answer which they couldn't come up with themselves. They don't look for the thought process and instead come to conclusions about people based on the antithesis of the question's purpose. The questions certainly aren't perfect. However, for the purpose of finding out about somebody's thought process, they're as straight forward and as reasonable as I think an engineer could ask for.
I think maybe for a technical manager or similar position the discussion of a problem and implicitly jump in approach would be perfect. A manager needs to be a little more overt and capable of conversation while still maintaining a high level view of where to bring a project to solve it. That's a fairly different area though.
So sure, used by the right people it'd be fine. I'm not sure how it would discard fewer qualified people though. It'd still get rid of people who might be technical, quick thinking, but not good conversationalists. Perhaps the opposite set that puzzle questions would. Maybe a good diversification of questions would be best.
I'm sure there are quite a few people who can do both well, but for each of those I'm nearly certain there's another who's good at one and completely disfunctional with the other. I'd rather have a question posed which I know what I have to do with it. I'd rather not struggle with vague, uncertain details or having to forcefully interrupt when I don't even know that I'm supposed to as part of the "test".
When it works I'm sure it's a great method. It's a tad too multifaceted for me to believe it always works though. With creative engineer types, they can easily pose a tricky question and inspect the logic that results. Interviewees are clearly expected to demonstrate their logic. That's the system I'd rather go through, as there's less chance of the interviewer judging me on something they're doing wrong.
Works for different people. I'd much rather be put on the spot and try to come up with an answer, which is then judged on approach and thought process than be rejected out of hand because I've been taught it's polite not to interrupt.
You're assuming the interviewer is actually good enough at conversation to relate a difficult technical problem and prompt that they want interaction and interruption while doing so. My experience with people that will be competent enough to accurately relate a difficult technical problem is that they'll not pause or omit to invite interruption. They won't ask questions to prompt interaction. Instead solved problems are told as a story of triumph, where in polite conversation it'd be terribly rude to interrupt.
Add that onto the fact you don't know the person. I know with people I'm more comfortable and friendly with I'm more likely to interject comments. With the manners I grew up with I'd be more likely with a relative stranger to listen the whole time and then engage in "Did you try this?" "What happened when..." style questions at the end. If it's a tale of success over a problem all the guessing ahead opportunity is gone and you're left with a tale where the problem is solved and fewer questions.
With puzzle questions I'm smart enough to know that showing your work counts for more than coming up with an answer, and don't worry about the frazzled bit. I think everybody who is interviewing at a location where these problems are employed knows this, so what is there to be frazzled about? Isn't a search over a variety of problem solving techniques, looking for one that fits right enough for the puzzle problems? I've always been under that impression. And if you can't do that, you've no business solving problems.
Why should I want communications monitored? I don't. I'm just pointing out that if people want communications monitored they can be. The real effect is that the government protects itself rather than its constituents. The threat to the government from terrorism is minimal. They might lose a building and have to spend more tax money, but terrorism really helps keep the populous afraid. At the same time, the government can strengthen itself against other things, like outside ideas, by clamping down on people who want political change.
That isn't to say that monitoring communications won't have the effect of effectively tracking down people who the government might not want roaming around. It just may mean that those people aren't really a threat to the citizens. But that discussion is only tangental to whether or not you should assume your MUD discussions are safely shielded from various agencies.
More to the point is that if TerroristMage1 is a known lead, you can tap all the communications of said person on the MUD, figure out whom they are talking to, and get IPs there, which might lead to more information. If TerroristMage2 were unknown to your choice of TLA, this would be a big find, and they could be monitored as well.
Who is likely to be every bit as important as what, so long as what hasn't yet occured. And if the communication is constantly between several blocks of IPs, it narrows location.
Personally, I think it's a lost cause to try to filter through everything right now, and it'd be better to try concentrating on deciphering known communications than finding a whole lot more of the uncomprehensible ones. At some point there's likely to be enough compute power to process an awful lot of communication for red flags though. As a sunk cost, it provides something, where having personnel for border control and the like is a large continual cost. Not saying the latter isn't an important aspect, just that some things can be automated more than others.
If the point is that it's an unknown location for unknown leads, it simply means discovery of the lead won't show up through normal snooping, if this lead doesn't post anywhere known or otherwise communicate with a known lead. It seems far more likely this type of person will be picked up by making mundane and unimportant contact with a known lead, rather than being picked up because of any message content.
I'd be much more worried about people posing as old college friends, sending grainy "family" pictures back and forth with encrypted messages hidden within. There'd be no reason to suspect any of them until somebody made a wrong move by contacting a known suspect. That plan would probably raise fewer flags just tracing through packets than would somebody who constantly sends encrypted messages on odd ports. Who looks like the normal user?
Or, consider most MUDs are transmitted in plaintext, and a simple sniff on your connection would be more than sufficient.
No, the real tricks should be information hiding, all messages stongly encrypted, sensitive or otherwise, and simple knowledge of where not to communicate. Wonder if crypto hidden in the least significant bits of a scan of a point and shoot 35mm picture of some random "family" photo would ever go noticed. I hope you don't think your chatting in the open in an "obscure" MUD location really helps you any.
And before you point out that the Mac isn't designed specifically for x86, neither are Transmeta processors, yet they go into PC laptops. Their emulation is just at a different stage. Even today's Intel PCs have completely different architecture that has x86 translated into the internal instructions. Also note that today's Macs don't natively support the original 68k based Mac software. Does that mean it's been misnamed as a Mac?
The point is the whole line is being blurred. There's hardly a thing you can do on one home computer platform that you can't on another. Almost certainly nothing you'd do on an eMac.
It's traditional for computers traced back to IBM PC compatability to be called PCs and Apples to be called Macs for ease of differentiation in selling platform specific software or in some now rare cases hardware. Also note that Apple claimed to offer the "world's first 64-bit processor for personal computers".
Using the term PC to refer just to x86 machines should meet its end. PC Magazine's already doing it. The end of PC being platform specific happening. The terminology we use is alive. It's now turning into what the acronym expands to and nothing more. PCs are becoming nothing but personal computers. Sorry if that takes away some feeling of superiority from using one type of personal computer over another.
Nooo, it's a Mac, it's more than just a personal computer, right? Whatever.
Still, from the article, impossible to get information off of it because of a lack of a DVD burner? What's the author smoking? What did we all do with our 40+GB drives before DVD burners came along? Give me a break. I'd bet he wouldn't dream of trying to back up a 250GB drive with a DVD burner since that'd be over 50 DVDs. Why, backing up a 40GB drive with 700MB CDs yields just under 60 CDs. There's hardly a difference at all.
You nearly described the Sega Game Gear, except it had color, 6 AA batteries, and a 30 minute life.
MN's page about the new license says it uses a Digimarc technology for the watermark. A quick scan of Digimarc's page shows plenty of optical image data hiding and nothing about RFID. I think they mean digital watermark in the traditional sense, which makes it a security feature and not a potential problem, since if you can read the hidden data you can read what's on the card's face anyway.
Most little clutter I generate is in some open plaintext format. That clutter I have that isn't I have installers for the applications to view it with. I try to keep most of it in an openly readable format as well. I have backups of my OS installation media. Virtual Machines to emulate x86 computers are plentiful now, and should the instruction set start going away, I am capable of either migrating the minimal specifically formated data I have or if necessary writing software to read the open formats I have. Not that other people are likely to let the formats I use up and die.
Don't be so assuming.
What's the chances you'll need that old college paper about some random societal issue of the time? Not very likely, but if it's a few kilobytes on todays massive drives it doesn't hurt on the off chance you need it. What may be interesting is the potential it will yield for discovering things about people. If in 50 years I decide to write down my memories or stories or just about how I lived my life, I'll have a mountain of easily referenced information to aid me. I'll have specific examples of things I've written or enjoyed in the past.
Looking at what's been said in that direction, I wonder how the heck anybody could think they were going to get away with that.
Chalk one up to stupidity then I guess. Yeesh, why'd they think they could get away with that? Why would anybody purchase one of these and leave a paper trail if you can do it yourself?
There's an interesting clue though. They've been charged with "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" and not copyright infringement. You'd think that if they were openly selling consoles with pirated games on them they'd have been hit with, I don't know, actual copyright infringement and not just conspiracy to commit it.
The store probably was out for a quick buck from those who were going to do so anyway, even if it meant paying a knowledgable friend to do it for them. $500 probably means a good 50% profit on top of whatever profit they get from the normal sale, especially if they sell it bare with no games. How much life does the Xbox have left too? Probably a good bit, but maybe these people will come back to the store occasionally, say when the next console is out. And if so, maybe they'll buy one then too.