The issue with SVG is that Adobe is in the process of merging with Macromedia, and it would be rather strange for the resulting organisation to support both Flash and SVG. I suspect that either Flash will get a long overdue de-crufting by switching to SVG, or SVG will be quietly dropped.
If I was running a crooked poker site, I wouldn't do anything as obvious as dealing the 'right' card to myself. Could your million hand database detect that a portion of the really bad players are being diverted to games where a fairly simple poker bot (or even a human on the payroll) is fleecing them? This sort of thing would be very hard to spot, or prove, and it would be easy to cover up such bot usage by, for example, sticking a scare story about poker bots in the media.
That's a very hasty conclusion to draw, many more people don't have an ipod than do!
The problem with jack of all trades devices is partly that there is always at least one important part missing (in the K750's case it's missing a usable web browser, the PSP misses out the phone, etc), but mostly that they botch many of the parts, as the rather scathing review of the K750 pasted above makes clear. Apple could make a killing with their user interface skills by making an all-in-one that actually works well.
I'm an Apple zealot, I'm typing this on a Mac Mini, and I'm going to be clicking submit with my one mouse button, but there is no way I'll be buying a flash-based iPod. My free upgrade phone is on order (a Sony Ericsson K750), it has a USB connector, plays mp3s and takes a Memory Stick Duo Pro card (currently maxing out at 2Gb, but 4Gb version promised soon).
By the time Apple gets to market, I'll have all it's functionality plus the ESSENTIAL feature of automatically stopping playing when my phone rings, just by adding a card to my phone - which also has the simple game play and video playback functionality that is missing from iPods (even if Sony forgot to add a usable fast forward/rewind or pause button).
I'd love have an Apple device in my pocket, because they get the user interface right in ways that Sony Ericsson can't be bothered to think about, but until they have a LOT more functionality, I can't justify buying one.
An interesting article, but it seems to make a fundamental mistake in comparing Rutan's task to building a Space Shuttle, when reaching orbit will merely require building something that can do the job of Vostok 1, which was early 60s Russian technology.
The shuttle is big, expensive and hugely complex, with a very compact engine, but that's because it's a 10-seater spaceshiip, and has a *huge* payload bay. If all you want to do is get a small crew up there, and not take a 60ft by 15 ft 28,800kg satellite along too, the task is a lot simpler.
The Famicom was released in Japan on July 15, 1983 and was launched in the US in June 1985. Since patents expire in 17-20 years, patents shouldn't be an issue. Any copyrighted ROM code might be more of a problem.
If it's true that "30 to 55% of users delete cookies" therefore current analytics products are out by "at least 30 percent, maybe more". then all they need to do is add 42.5% to their numbers then they'll be at most 12.5% out. Did I just shift a paradigm?
Why on earth is there an upper limit on contributions and no lower one? Wouldn't it be far easier and cheaper to administer this if only really big companies had to pay?
Why not just say that if your Linux related turnover exceeds $1bn a year you have to pay it all, and therfore let IBM pick up the tab (or better still simply ask them to use their legal team to defend the trademark)?
What's the value of Google if IE7 defaults to adblocking their text ads?
I wouldn't want to put my money into a company that Microsoft could so easily swat like an annoying fly. We already KNOW that Microsoft are prepared to take illegal action to kill competition, and this move wouldn't even be illegal.
If I go from 2 Mbps to 10 Mbps, what wonderful things happen?
Well, if that's full duplex, I drop television entirely and watch only tv programmes grabbed from bittorrent, because they are advert-free (as opposed to just grabbing things I missed or haven't been shown over my side of the atlantic yet as I now do).
Procedural textures can go a lot further than you think. Take a look at how far you can go with Artmatic Pro, a 'procedural graphics synthesiser' for the Mac, written by the original author of the Bryce landscape generator, and it's landscape-generating cousin Artmatic Voyager. This can generate entire procedural planets, with no detail loss if you zoom into look at a single inch-wide rock. This entire planet is decribed in a few k!
Re:LP's ??? You must be kidding..
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have a lot of nostalgia for vinyl - partly because you did have to care for the discs, which meant the pop stars you worshiped as a teenager had their own little audio shrine in your house, but mostly because you got at least 2 square feet of artwork on the sleeves. A band can't fit much of an 'image' on a CD inlay, so image-building has to be done by video, which places too much emphasis on the looks of the perfomers. Ulgy musicians can't be effortlessly cool anymore.
1) Audiogalaxy. Wonderful as BitTorrent is, it's simply not as good for finding incredibly obscure music that only 3 people in the world are interested in.
2) Games written in Basic. Oh for the glory days when any schoolkid could write from scratch something that his mates would be interested in playing.
3) The 12" single. For the sleeves - CD singles are great, but I really miss getting a square foot of artwork thrown in for free.
4) Booting from ROM. The Amiga started the rot, back in the old days you could turn a PC on and start to use it in seconds. Hard OSes were practically immune to piracy, and the 'it has to be right, we can't patch it' OS coding ethos has a lot going for it too!
5) Trackballs. The mouse you don't need a pad for, perfect for laptops too, but we ended up smearing our fingers over horrible 'trackpads' instead - how did that happen?
6) Analogue TV. Still hobbling on but it's days are numbered. My 30 years of compression-artefact-free viewing are already over.
To nominate a book for a Hugo award, you need to be a member of this year's World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). This year's Worldcon is in Britain. You do the math.
It's not necessary to bankrupt Microsoft, all that's needed is to get them to realise that it's no longer worth throwing good money after bad. At any point, Microsoft could deciude get out of games and carry on with their core business, Sega couldn't do that.
I'm not surprised that this is PC compatible, I expect Apple to be pushing this little beast in the same way they do iPods - a really well designed and 'cool' piece of kit that has the potential to hook PC users into the Apple fold. If it's good (and let's face it, Apple excel at product design so it really ought to be) then it's another 'gateway drug' to Appleness.
What I do find strange is that it's not wireless, maybe this is because PCs can't be guaranteed to have the same sort of uniform way of talking bluetooth that Macs have?
Before you 'guarantee'that networking isn't a viable way of increasing processing speed, I suggest you take a look at Apple's Distributed Audio Processing in Logic Audio, which does exactly this with nothing cleverer than 2 Macs and an Ethernet cable.
Apple has also shipped plenty of single processor Macs with slots for a 2nd CPU, and many servers are similarly upgradeable. Consoles have had mysterious expansion connectors with the system bus exposed on them for generations, just look underneath an N64 for proof. The machines don't even have to be upgradeable, Sony could simply launch faster/more core versions during the machine's life and hope gamers trade up.
As for the AMD64, how is that remotely relevant to Games Consoles? In case you hadn't noticed, all 3 of the next gen consoles went with IBM's Power architecture, Microsoft have 3 cores, and Sony 8. If you want to back single cores for console gaming, I think you'll find a wide choice of the Phoenix or the Phoenix.
The hype for the Cell said that if the Cell in your TV, or toaster wasn't being used to it's limits by that device then it would be added to the power of anything that needed it on your network, which sounds like complete rubbish, but it hints that 1+7 cores at 3.2 Ghz might not be the end of the PS3 line - as Cells become ubiquitous, Sony could simply throw more cores in the box, or sell more horsepower in a box as an add-on.
Maybe we should be looking at this claim of the PS3 having a 10 year life in the same way that IBM's XT has so far had a 20 year life?
Slashdot Mirror
The issue with SVG is that Adobe is in the process of merging with Macromedia, and it would be rather strange for the resulting organisation to support both Flash and SVG. I suspect that either Flash will get a long overdue de-crufting by switching to SVG, or SVG will be quietly dropped.
If I was running a crooked poker site, I wouldn't do anything as obvious as dealing the 'right' card to myself. Could your million hand database detect that a portion of the really bad players are being diverted to games where a fairly simple poker bot (or even a human on the payroll) is fleecing them? This sort of thing would be very hard to spot, or prove, and it would be easy to cover up such bot usage by, for example, sticking a scare story about poker bots in the media.
If you live in Britain, iTunes songs cost 79p, or just over $1.42 at today's exchange rate.
That's a very hasty conclusion to draw, many more people don't have an ipod than do!
The problem with jack of all trades devices is partly that there is always at least one important part missing (in the K750's case it's missing a usable web browser, the PSP misses out the phone, etc), but mostly that they botch many of the parts, as the rather scathing review of the K750 pasted above makes clear. Apple could make a killing with their user interface skills by making an all-in-one that actually works well.
I'm an Apple zealot, I'm typing this on a Mac Mini, and I'm going to be clicking submit with my one mouse button, but there is no way I'll be buying a flash-based iPod. My free upgrade phone is on order (a Sony Ericsson K750), it has a USB connector, plays mp3s and takes a Memory Stick Duo Pro card (currently maxing out at 2Gb, but 4Gb version promised soon).
By the time Apple gets to market, I'll have all it's functionality plus the ESSENTIAL feature of automatically stopping playing when my phone rings, just by adding a card to my phone - which also has the simple game play and video playback functionality that is missing from iPods (even if Sony forgot to add a usable fast forward/rewind or pause button).
I'd love have an Apple device in my pocket, because they get the user interface right in ways that Sony Ericsson can't be bothered to think about, but until they have a LOT more functionality, I can't justify buying one.
An interesting article, but it seems to make a fundamental mistake in comparing Rutan's task to building a Space Shuttle, when reaching orbit will merely require building something that can do the job of Vostok 1, which was early 60s Russian technology.
The shuttle is big, expensive and hugely complex, with a very compact engine, but that's because it's a 10-seater spaceshiip, and has a *huge* payload bay. If all you want to do is get a small crew up there, and not take a 60ft by 15 ft 28,800kg satellite along too, the task is a lot simpler.
What on earth is a 'skus'?
The Famicom was released in Japan on July 15, 1983 and was launched in the US in June 1985. Since patents expire in 17-20 years, patents shouldn't be an issue. Any copyrighted ROM code might be more of a problem.
If it's true that "30 to 55% of users delete cookies" therefore current analytics products are out by "at least 30 percent, maybe more". then all they need to do is add 42.5% to their numbers then they'll be at most 12.5% out. Did I just shift a paradigm?
Why on earth is there an upper limit on contributions and no lower one? Wouldn't it be far easier and cheaper to administer this if only really big companies had to pay?
Why not just say that if your Linux related turnover exceeds $1bn a year you have to pay it all, and therfore let IBM pick up the tab (or better still simply ask them to use their legal team to defend the trademark)?
"We are only asking that people help us..."
The seem to have misspelled the word 'demanding'.
He should have his own designated bit of highway, so the rest of us know where to throw out our junkmailed AOL cds.
What's the value of Google if IE7 defaults to adblocking their text ads?
I wouldn't want to put my money into a company that Microsoft could so easily swat like an annoying fly. We already KNOW that Microsoft are prepared to take illegal action to kill competition, and this move wouldn't even be illegal.
If I go from 2 Mbps to 10 Mbps, what wonderful things happen?
Well, if that's full duplex, I drop television entirely and watch only tv programmes grabbed from bittorrent, because they are advert-free (as opposed to just grabbing things I missed or haven't been shown over my side of the atlantic yet as I now do).
Your post makes a lot of sense if you prefix it with "Tell Microsoft to shut the hell up about $10 per iPod or we'll..."
"The scientists hope to collect enough crocodile blood..."
Conversely, the crocodiles hope to collect large quantities of scientist blood...
Procedural textures can go a lot further than you think. Take a look at how far you can go with Artmatic Pro, a 'procedural graphics synthesiser' for the Mac, written by the original author of the Bryce landscape generator, and it's landscape-generating cousin Artmatic Voyager. This can generate entire procedural planets, with no detail loss if you zoom into look at a single inch-wide rock. This entire planet is decribed in a few k!
I have a lot of nostalgia for vinyl - partly because you did have to care for the discs, which meant the pop stars you worshiped as a teenager had their own little audio shrine in your house, but mostly because you got at least 2 square feet of artwork on the sleeves. A band can't fit much of an 'image' on a CD inlay, so image-building has to be done by video, which places too much emphasis on the looks of the perfomers. Ulgy musicians can't be effortlessly cool anymore.
1) Audiogalaxy. Wonderful as BitTorrent is, it's simply not as good for finding incredibly obscure music that only 3 people in the world are interested in.
2) Games written in Basic. Oh for the glory days when any schoolkid could write from scratch something that his mates would be interested in playing.
3) The 12" single. For the sleeves - CD singles are great, but I really miss getting a square foot of artwork thrown in for free.
4) Booting from ROM. The Amiga started the rot, back in the old days you could turn a PC on and start to use it in seconds. Hard OSes were practically immune to piracy, and the 'it has to be right, we can't patch it' OS coding ethos has a lot going for it too!
5) Trackballs. The mouse you don't need a pad for, perfect for laptops too, but we ended up smearing our fingers over horrible 'trackpads' instead - how did that happen?
6) Analogue TV. Still hobbling on but it's days are numbered. My 30 years of compression-artefact-free viewing are already over.
To nominate a book for a Hugo award, you need to be a member of this year's World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). This year's Worldcon is in Britain. You do the math.
SMOF = Secret Master of Fandom
ie the sort of person who organises SF conventions.
It's not necessary to bankrupt Microsoft, all that's needed is to get them to realise that it's no longer worth throwing good money after bad. At any point, Microsoft could deciude get out of games and carry on with their core business, Sega couldn't do that.
I'm not surprised that this is PC compatible, I expect Apple to be pushing this little beast in the same way they do iPods - a really well designed and 'cool' piece of kit that has the potential to hook PC users into the Apple fold. If it's good (and let's face it, Apple excel at product design so it really ought to be) then it's another 'gateway drug' to Appleness.
What I do find strange is that it's not wireless, maybe this is because PCs can't be guaranteed to have the same sort of uniform way of talking bluetooth that Macs have?
Before you 'guarantee'that networking isn't a viable way of increasing processing speed, I suggest you take a look at Apple's Distributed Audio Processing in Logic Audio, which does exactly this with nothing cleverer than 2 Macs and an Ethernet cable.
Apple has also shipped plenty of single processor Macs with slots for a 2nd CPU, and many servers are similarly upgradeable. Consoles have had mysterious expansion connectors with the system bus exposed on them for generations, just look underneath an N64 for proof. The machines don't even have to be upgradeable, Sony could simply launch faster/more core versions during the machine's life and hope gamers trade up.
As for the AMD64, how is that remotely relevant to Games Consoles? In case you hadn't noticed, all 3 of the next gen consoles went with IBM's Power architecture, Microsoft have 3 cores, and Sony 8. If you want to back single cores for console gaming, I think you'll find a wide choice of the Phoenix or the Phoenix.
The hype for the Cell said that if the Cell in your TV, or toaster wasn't being used to it's limits by that device then it would be added to the power of anything that needed it on your network, which sounds like complete rubbish, but it hints that 1+7 cores at 3.2 Ghz might not be the end of the PS3 line - as Cells become ubiquitous, Sony could simply throw more cores in the box, or sell more horsepower in a box as an add-on.
Maybe we should be looking at this claim of the PS3 having a 10 year life in the same way that IBM's XT has so far had a 20 year life?