These clowns are selling solar-powered flashlights.
I happen to have a solar powered flashlight and I love it. The designers had the brilliant idea to include some of those "battery" thingies. Works a treat.
I really don't know, but there are several monitors that can pivot. If you have a VESA monitor, you can remove the stand and put it on a VESA arm in a portrait manner.
Any monitor can do that as long as it has a VESA compliant attachment at the back. Then it's only a software issue.
What's nice is a monitor that can pivot on its own stand (typically in that case it can also twist and swivel, be raised and lowered). Although to lower costs a lot of makers only offer crappy stands on all but the very high end models these days. My Dell 24" can pivot on its stand (it can mess the numerous connectors a bit though).
It's less convenient if it's stuck in just one position. Although I don't pivot it all that often... 1200 vertical pixels is usually enough.
Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?
That's a french Minitel terminal (their videotex system, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). The telephone company gave people free terminals if they would forgo printed telephone books. Remeber, this was the early 80:s so there must have been enough people with less than stellar keyboard skills who'd rather peck away on a ABC-keyboard than hunt around on a AZERTY-keyboard if given the choice. But I'm pretty certain that most terminals had the french standard AZERTY keyboard (here's the Minitel 1 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Minitel_1.JPG )
I've seen pretty much every Minitel deployed including a number of those used in restricted releases prior to nationwide deployment and I don't remember ever seeing one with a non standard French keyboard.
Those things were rather kludgy with their using an X25 network at a snail's pace (1200/75) which was more or less sufficient for "enriched" text, although watching pages being drawn was still painful.
A number of people created BBS systems for them through the POTS, avoiding the (expensive) Minitel network altogether.
Oddly enough, there apparently are some people that still use them. The train ticketing, phone book, and a number of other services are still up and in use.
Alphabetical keyboards are evil. People who can't type will still hunt for keys, and people who can type no longer can. It's a stupid idea.
It has always been my understanding that the Supreme Court has determined that the border is where the powers of the executive to order searches has been at its zenith.
More precisely, warrants are not required at the border.
So, within that confluence of factors, the searches were probably quite legally acceptable.
Which : - doesn't make them any more reasonable - is starting to piss off people to the point they are reconsidering going to physically go to your crazy country for business - remains utterly stupid since the US were still connected to the Internet last tie I checked
So maybe it's "legally acceptable" in an international blank zone. But that's certainly not how people perceive it. In the end, it's both against the spirit of the law and utterly useless.
Woody Allen once wrote a short story on a man who was tasked by God to find the happiest couple on Earth. He actually finds them.
And they're dumb as a pair of sheep.
Laugh all you want, there is much truth in this.
There's a famous song by the Belgian/French songwriter/interpret Jacques Brel (La chanson de Jacky) that goes : Oh for one hour, Just one hour, One hour sometimes, To be dumb, Dumb and handsome, All at once.
(Paraphrasing to English from memory)
It's pretty hard not to agree with him:-/
On the topic of Brel, a lot of his songs deal with such themes since he has always been on the verge of depression.
We francophones consider him one of the two or three major writers of the 20th century. A few of his songs have been adapted to English with varying success.
Or, more likely, some people will rave about it, some people will rant about it, and the vast majority will just get some entertainment from it and never think twice.
And presumably, since this is merely a film, the whole planetary population won't give fuck one way or another since there are hundred others that come out each year, most of which (this one included) they will neither see nor care about. It's shocking.
That was my first impression as well. It doesn't do much to convince me that the movie will be legitimate science-fiction, rather than fluffy science-fantasy, when the aliens are bright anime-blue with giant cartoon doe-eyes.
And me thinking it was a furry kill fest. A chance to see those pests killed by the thousands by mechs and mowed down by machine guns while they moaned pitifully, waving their little bows and orangina bottles and fluttering those big eyelids before being crushed by gigantic robotic armored suits.
I too would have waited 10 or 15 years to get it just right. To get the fur to ripple just so as the metal squashes it into the mud.
And I was so eager to see it too... I'm so disappointed.
It also proves that Apple follows a wrong path selling hardware. It has some nice software in its hands, and it could become an alternative to Microsoft/Google if they wanted to.
Now, where to start with this...
I don't really use either Apple or Microsoft (my iBook gathers dust and my Windows partition is there for games) but I don't really hate either even though it seems to be fashionable, especially with Ms).
Microsoft and Google really can't be lumped together. The Venn diagrams for their areas of operation don't intersect that much. They do compete for mindshare though.
Microsoft makes :
operating systems
corporate software
home software
"communication" software (including corporate groupware, but also personal "sharing stuff", and "chatting online" apps")
online presence apps
a search engine with maps
development frameworks
computer peripherals (made by others of course)
fud
Google makes :
a search engine, search and indexing tools with maps
large scale online presence and community web sites that are free or low cost
dubious deals
Apple makes :
marketing
design (designed in California !)
hardware (that's apparently quite good past 1.0)
software (completely closed apart from the bottom-most layer)
Granted, Apple *could* just sell its system openly for any intel system (meaning anything that has an x86 instruction set or x86_64). And then what ?
Then Apple would end up where Linux or BSD is. With way less people to fix it. Currently, you certainly can run Mac OS on pretty much any x86 system. You'll probably have lots of fun finding drivers for your stuff if my experience with my Mac is anything to go by but I'm sure that for the most part it'll run.
And then what ? Do you think there's money in selling CDs with 0s and 1s on them ?
Apple makes money moving boxes (mostly small boxes with little music players in them at the moment). Selling operating systems is the best way to kill a company. Ask Be Inc. At the time they were so far ahead of Apple (or of Microsoft for that matter) technologically (ok, Apple was 5 or 10 years behind at the time so it was quite easy) that it wasn't even funny. Of course nobody cared. Or look at NeXT when it tried to gulp a few lungfuls of air before going under when it was selling its system for generic PCs. That was under the direction of Jesus^H^H^H^H^HSteve Jobs BTW.
You may be fond of Apple products, which is something you'll have to deal with on your own, and isn't a serious condition anyway, but it doesn't mean they are fit to take over the computing world. I'm glad it works for you and if it's important to you you'll probably be able to switch over a number of casual users.
However, remember that if the best product at a given time took over the market, we'd have all run Amiga computers for quite a while. In any market, quality doesn't have a lot (if anything) to do with its success on the marketplace. There are *a lot* of factors in play. And currently, while the play field isn't as varied as it was in the 8 bit days, we're still lucky to have 3 fairly active players, none of which can ignore the others. This is a good thing for all involved. It probably would be beneficial to lower a bit the influence of the major player, but to remove any of them certainly would hurt the whole ecosystem.
Actually the original announcement was much worse...
Nokia unveils its largest phone ever !
Are you afraid your friends will fail to spot your measly iPhone(1) ?
With the Nokia Meg-A-Phone, everybody will see you using the worlds largest and most connected cyber-e-web-chat-wifiphone(2) !
The Meg-A-Phone also doubles as an emergency shelter, a radiation shield, a flotation device(3) and a room heater(4).
(1) i and possibly other vowels are a trademark of the fruit company (2) in select locations, may be subject to restrictions depending on phases of the moon (3) not to be used outside of parental supervision (4) this function not to be used in aircrafts or within sight of law enforcement
It also reminds me that until very recently, human babies weren't thought to feel pain either and therefore weren't subjected to anaesthesia (not even a hearty swig of rum) before surgery. Granted children have a fairly incomplete nervous system for their first 8 years at least but pain is very very basic. Oddly enough, it has since been established (presumably with cigarette butts and cattle prods) that infants feel pain very well (oops).
If there's only 30 million linux computers, and we assume only 3 million of these are desktops, that means there's only roughly 100 million servers in the entire world
And there are some Loki games around the house somewhere...
So not "never". Not recently, as most games after CIV II don't appeal to this grumpy old geezer
Same here (Myth II) as well as a couple commercial products : a RAW photo processor and a grammar/dictionary engine.
I'd probably buy a commercial product every now and then if it was worth it (no lock-in, right price, no superior or equivalent open alternative, etc.) and of course if it *at least* existed.
I'm certainly not alone in this case. No product = no sale.
But the video itself is 1080p. That means the hardware has to deal with the 1080p video and then resize it to whatever the display resolution is. And guess what? Hardware is better at doing that kind of transform than software.
I doubt any user of small portable multimedia devices does this. Few such devices have the processing power to resize video in real time (and therefore require that you do so yourself before storing the file on the gadget) and few users would want to waste the little available memory on a huge file that wouldn't be used anyway.
My Cowon D2 has a QVGA display (roughly equivalent to VHS) so I use iriverter to massage video files before getting them onboard, although Cowon provides some software that might (or not, it runs in Windows so I haven't tried it) be good at it. I have 4 Megs + up to 32 on that device. Why would I waste it on high definition video ? It can be connected to (composite) external displays but I've never used it that way and I doubt many people would consider it.
Yeah, and who the hell is going to use Phoenix? I mean, Firebird. Oh, I guess it started getting popular. I mean, Firefox. Gee, I guess... things change.
Nah, I don't really think that new "web" thing is going to displace Gopher, even if Wired calls it "surfing" (which is so ridiculous it will never catch on). Besides there are plans to add GIF images to Gopher pages. So that web gadget has nothing on it. It's just a short lived fad.
As an aside, and as the "proud" owner of Theora playing devices for the past few years, a regular follower of things digital, and someone who (apparently mistakenly) thought he was pretty much up to date on those matters, I'm glad to learn that there's a Play Ogg! campaign. Apparently it has been pretty successful (*ahem*)
I remember reading somewhere that people who can't feel pain, generally don't live past their 20's. Something almost always ends up killing them without them knowing.
Which, as an aside, is why I've always been puzzled by the various claims that "fish (or insert your critter here) don't feel pain" (usually claimed by anglers so they can stick various pointy things through the animal's jaws) since it's such an essential evolutionary trait. It's more than likely that pretty much anything that has a reasonably complex nervous system can feel pain, including insects.
I have a broken heart because everyone close to me seems to hate me. Oh well right. Right now I have a petty handgun that I bought from a crackhead and I am going to just drop a bullet into my brain.
No no, your *heart*. The theme here is broken *heart*, not brain. Even if the gun was from a crack-head doesn't mean it cannot be applied to other parts of the body. Stay on focus. We're talking about the heart here. No wonder everybody hates you.
Even supporting IE at all means withholding features. That can make sense for supporting IE 7/8, which hold about 40% of the browser market.
IE6 only holds about 15% of the browser market, and requires extreme measures to support. If Google, a 150 billion dollar corporation, can't be bothered to support it in something as simple as a webmail client or video portal, why should the little guy struggle to support it in a complex web app?
While a number of companies retain IE6, in my case I just make sure it more or less works (i.e. no major loss of functionality) on the sites I build. If it doesn't display "just so", well tough. I don't check them for Mosaic users either. (I never even build any Gopher compatibility in for traditionalists).
I understand that companies have to protect their investment in crappy software (duh), but *some* pressure has to be applied *somewhere*. Or in 15 years we'll still be stuck with that damn thing.
OTOH of curse, it might end up with :
IT guy : Our users complain that they cannot display web sites, nothing works on IE6 any more PHB : Good, productivity will increase ! IT guy : But a lot of them need the web to work PHB : Tell them to order paper catalogues IT guy : Uh, they're ordered through a web interface...
How come I don't learn English in school even though it's my country's official language ?
No wonder parents are baffled. They can't understand WTF their children are talking about.
"Honey ? Timmy asked me about those "babby" things again this morning" "You too ? I tried looking it up but I couldn't find anything." "It's probably part of this advanced science curriculum they have nowadays, we'll never be able to help our kids with such exotic topics being taught in schools, what were they thinking of !" "Couldn't they do simple things like human reproduction, particle spin, muons, halting states and how to meet girls ?" "We're so out of our league... we have to face it, we're old."
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These clowns are selling solar-powered flashlights.
I happen to have a solar powered flashlight and I love it. The designers had the brilliant idea to include some of those "battery" thingies. Works a treat.
Since Sun made Sparc cpus, and used Solaris for their OS, will they sell Solaris to HP to match their hardware?
No, apparently they'll have to run Oracloris.
No, more likely they don't want kids learning combat tactics and techniques from video games, so they won't be effective in the coming revolution.
Yes, I heard that there's a Leeroy Jenkins School of Tactical Assault that is becoming very popular. It's amazing what you can learn in video games.
I really don't know, but there are several monitors that can pivot. If you have a VESA monitor, you can remove the stand and put it on a VESA arm in a portrait manner.
Any monitor can do that as long as it has a VESA compliant attachment at the back. Then it's only a software issue.
What's nice is a monitor that can pivot on its own stand (typically in that case it can also twist and swivel, be raised and lowered). Although to lower costs a lot of makers only offer crappy stands on all but the very high end models these days. My Dell 24" can pivot on its stand (it can mess the numerous connectors a bit though).
It's less convenient if it's stuck in just one position. Although I don't pivot it all that often... 1200 vertical pixels is usually enough.
Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?
That's a french Minitel terminal (their videotex system, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). The telephone company gave people free terminals if they would forgo printed telephone books. Remeber, this was the early 80:s so there must have been enough people with less than stellar keyboard skills who'd rather peck away on a ABC-keyboard than hunt around on a AZERTY-keyboard if given the choice. But I'm pretty certain that most terminals had the french standard AZERTY keyboard (here's the Minitel 1 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Minitel_1.JPG )
I've seen pretty much every Minitel deployed including a number of those used in restricted releases prior to nationwide deployment and I don't remember ever seeing one with a non standard French keyboard.
Those things were rather kludgy with their using an X25 network at a snail's pace (1200/75) which was more or less sufficient for "enriched" text, although watching pages being drawn was still painful.
A number of people created BBS systems for them through the POTS, avoiding the (expensive) Minitel network altogether.
Oddly enough, there apparently are some people that still use them. The train ticketing, phone book, and a number of other services are still up and in use.
Alphabetical keyboards are evil. People who can't type will still hunt for keys, and people who can type no longer can. It's a stupid idea.
It has always been my understanding that the Supreme Court has determined that the border is where the powers of the executive to order searches has been at its zenith.
More precisely, warrants are not required at the border.
So, within that confluence of factors, the searches were probably quite legally acceptable.
Which :
- doesn't make them any more reasonable
- is starting to piss off people to the point they are reconsidering going to physically go to your crazy country for business
- remains utterly stupid since the US were still connected to the Internet last tie I checked
So maybe it's "legally acceptable" in an international blank zone. But that's certainly not how people perceive it. In the end, it's both against the spirit of the law and utterly useless.
Woody Allen once wrote a short story on a man who was tasked by God to find the happiest couple on Earth. He actually finds them.
And they're dumb as a pair of sheep.
Laugh all you want, there is much truth in this.
There's a famous song by the Belgian/French songwriter/interpret Jacques Brel (La chanson de Jacky) that goes :
Oh for one hour,
Just one hour,
One hour sometimes,
To be dumb,
Dumb and handsome,
All at once.
(Paraphrasing to English from memory)
It's pretty hard not to agree with him :-/
On the topic of Brel, a lot of his songs deal with such themes since he has always been on the verge of depression.
We francophones consider him one of the two or three major writers of the 20th century. A few of his songs have been adapted to English with varying success.
I'm going to have to think about this...
I already have. Analytically even. The results are depressing.
Of course, you could use paper ... but then you take the risk that people will still be able to read 17 years into the future!
I was about to suggest the same thing with flip books and printed scores but your point is very valid.
Maybe with an English to SMS-lingo (what is it called in the US, texting lingo ?) converter ?
Or you could include a language method with ideograms ?
{EYE} {BIG DOT}
{EYE} {BIG DOT} {MOVING LEGS}
On second thought maybe not.
The only place where you can really expect privacy is inside your home. That's always been true.
But what if there's a crime committed in your house ? If someone attacks you there, there will be no camera to act as a deterrent.
I'm not sure it's reasonable to ban police CCTV from private houses those days.
Or, more likely, some people will rave about it, some people will rant about it, and the vast majority will just get some entertainment from it and never think twice.
And presumably, since this is merely a film, the whole planetary population won't give fuck one way or another since there are hundred others that come out each year, most of which (this one included) they will neither see nor care about. It's shocking.
That was my first impression as well. It doesn't do much to convince me that the movie will be legitimate science-fiction, rather than fluffy science-fantasy, when the aliens are bright anime-blue with giant cartoon doe-eyes.
And me thinking it was a furry kill fest. A chance to see those pests killed by the thousands by mechs and mowed down by machine guns while they moaned pitifully, waving their little bows and orangina bottles and fluttering those big eyelids before being crushed by gigantic robotic armored suits.
I too would have waited 10 or 15 years to get it just right. To get the fur to ripple just so as the metal squashes it into the mud.
And I was so eager to see it too... I'm so disappointed.
How fat or lazy do you have to be, where 15 minutes of walking is neck and neck with genocide on your list?
Come on.. US people ? Walking ? Hello ? Don't you see a major problem coming ?
Remember, you are unique. Just like everybody else.
I'm not.
It also proves that Apple follows a wrong path selling hardware. It has some nice software in its hands, and it could become an alternative to Microsoft/Google if they wanted to.
Now, where to start with this...
I don't really use either Apple or Microsoft (my iBook gathers dust and my Windows partition is there for games) but I don't really hate either even though it seems to be fashionable, especially with Ms).
Microsoft and Google really can't be lumped together. The Venn diagrams for their areas of operation don't intersect that much. They do compete for mindshare though.
Microsoft makes :
Google makes :
Apple makes :
Granted, Apple *could* just sell its system openly for any intel system (meaning anything that has an x86 instruction set or x86_64). And then what ?
Then Apple would end up where Linux or BSD is. With way less people to fix it. Currently, you certainly can run Mac OS on pretty much any x86 system. You'll probably have lots of fun finding drivers for your stuff if my experience with my Mac is anything to go by but I'm sure that for the most part it'll run.
And then what ? Do you think there's money in selling CDs with 0s and 1s on them ?
Apple makes money moving boxes (mostly small boxes with little music players in them at the moment). Selling operating systems is the best way to kill a company. Ask Be Inc. At the time they were so far ahead of Apple (or of Microsoft for that matter) technologically (ok, Apple was 5 or 10 years behind at the time so it was quite easy) that it wasn't even funny. Of course nobody cared.
Or look at NeXT when it tried to gulp a few lungfuls of air before going under when it was selling its system for generic PCs. That was under the direction of Jesus^H^H^H^H^HSteve Jobs BTW.
You may be fond of Apple products, which is something you'll have to deal with on your own, and isn't a serious condition anyway, but it doesn't mean they are fit to take over the computing world. I'm glad it works for you and if it's important to you you'll probably be able to switch over a number of casual users.
However, remember that if the best product at a given time took over the market, we'd have all run Amiga computers for quite a while. In any market, quality doesn't have a lot (if anything) to do with its success on the marketplace. There are *a lot* of factors in play. And currently, while the play field isn't as varied as it was in the 8 bit days, we're still lucky to have 3 fairly active players, none of which can ignore the others. This is a good thing for all involved. It probably would be beneficial to lower a bit the influence of the major player, but to remove any of them certainly would hurt the whole ecosystem.
Actually the original announcement was much worse...
Nokia unveils its largest phone ever !
Are you afraid your friends will fail to spot your measly iPhone(1) ?
With the Nokia Meg-A-Phone, everybody will see you using the worlds largest and most connected cyber-e-web-chat-wifiphone(2) !
The Meg-A-Phone also doubles as an emergency shelter, a radiation shield, a flotation device(3) and a room heater(4).
(1) i and possibly other vowels are a trademark of the fruit company
(2) in select locations, may be subject to restrictions depending on phases of the moon
(3) not to be used outside of parental supervision
(4) this function not to be used in aircrafts or within sight of law enforcement
It also reminds me that until very recently, human babies weren't thought to feel pain either and therefore weren't subjected to anaesthesia (not even a hearty swig of rum) before surgery. Granted children have a fairly incomplete nervous system for their first 8 years at least but pain is very very basic.
Oddly enough, it has since been established (presumably with cigarette butts and cattle prods) that infants feel pain very well (oops).
If there's only 30 million linux computers, and we assume only 3 million of these are desktops, that means there's only roughly 100 million servers in the entire world
I find your lack of math disturbing.
And there are some Loki games around the house somewhere...
So not "never". Not recently, as most games after CIV II don't appeal to this grumpy old geezer
Same here (Myth II) as well as a couple commercial products : a RAW photo processor and a grammar/dictionary engine.
I'd probably buy a commercial product every now and then if it was worth it (no lock-in, right price, no superior or equivalent open alternative, etc.) and of course if it *at least* existed.
I'm certainly not alone in this case. No product = no sale.
But the video itself is 1080p. That means the hardware has to deal with the 1080p video and then resize it to whatever the display resolution is. And guess what? Hardware is better at doing that kind of transform than software.
I doubt any user of small portable multimedia devices does this. Few such devices have the processing power to resize video in real time (and therefore require that you do so yourself before storing the file on the gadget) and few users would want to waste the little available memory on a huge file that wouldn't be used anyway.
My Cowon D2 has a QVGA display (roughly equivalent to VHS) so I use iriverter to massage video files before getting them onboard, although Cowon provides some software that might (or not, it runs in Windows so I haven't tried it) be good at it. I have 4 Megs + up to 32 on that device. Why would I waste it on high definition video ? It can be connected to (composite) external displays but I've never used it that way and I doubt many people would consider it.
Yeah, and who the hell is going to use Phoenix? I mean, Firebird. Oh, I guess it started getting popular. I mean, Firefox. Gee, I guess... things change.
Nah, I don't really think that new "web" thing is going to displace Gopher, even if Wired calls it "surfing" (which is so ridiculous it will never catch on). Besides there are plans to add GIF images to Gopher pages. So that web gadget has nothing on it. It's just a short lived fad.
As an aside, and as the "proud" owner of Theora playing devices for the past few years, a regular follower of things digital, and someone who (apparently mistakenly) thought he was pretty much up to date on those matters, I'm glad to learn that there's a Play Ogg! campaign. Apparently it has been pretty successful (*ahem*)
I remember reading somewhere that people who can't feel pain, generally don't live past their 20's. Something almost always ends up killing them without them knowing.
Which, as an aside, is why I've always been puzzled by the various claims that "fish (or insert your critter here) don't feel pain" (usually claimed by anglers so they can stick various pointy things through the animal's jaws) since it's such an essential evolutionary trait. It's more than likely that pretty much anything that has a reasonably complex nervous system can feel pain, including insects.
I have a broken heart because everyone close to me seems to hate me. Oh well right. Right now I have a petty handgun that I bought from a crackhead and I am going to just drop a bullet into my brain.
No no, your *heart*. The theme here is broken *heart*, not brain. Even if the gun was from a crack-head doesn't mean it cannot be applied to other parts of the body. Stay on focus. We're talking about the heart here.
No wonder everybody hates you.
Even supporting IE at all means withholding features. That can make sense for supporting IE 7/8, which hold about 40% of the browser market.
IE6 only holds about 15% of the browser market, and requires extreme measures to support. If Google, a 150 billion dollar corporation, can't be bothered to support it in something as simple as a webmail client or video portal, why should the little guy struggle to support it in a complex web app?
While a number of companies retain IE6, in my case I just make sure it more or less works (i.e. no major loss of functionality) on the sites I build. If it doesn't display "just so", well tough. I don't check them for Mosaic users either. (I never even build any Gopher compatibility in for traditionalists).
I understand that companies have to protect their investment in crappy software (duh), but *some* pressure has to be applied *somewhere*. Or in 15 years we'll still be stuck with that damn thing.
OTOH of curse, it might end up with :
IT guy : Our users complain that they cannot display web sites, nothing works on IE6 any more
PHB : Good, productivity will increase !
IT guy : But a lot of them need the web to work
PHB : Tell them to order paper catalogues
IT guy : Uh, they're ordered through a web interface...
how is babby formed?
how girl get pragnent?
How come I don't learn English in school even though it's my country's official language ?
No wonder parents are baffled. They can't understand WTF their children are talking about.
"Honey ? Timmy asked me about those "babby" things again this morning"
"You too ? I tried looking it up but I couldn't find anything."
"It's probably part of this advanced science curriculum they have nowadays, we'll never be able to help our kids with such exotic topics being taught in schools, what were they thinking of !"
"Couldn't they do simple things like human reproduction, particle spin, muons, halting states and how to meet girls ?"
"We're so out of our league... we have to face it, we're old."