Micropayments are no way to do something professionally. I don't like the RIAA, my brother is an unsigned musician and I've spent alot of time researching record contracts for him. They suck ass. They make all the money and the musician(s) do all of theh ard work. If they are lucky enough to be the one in ten that makes it big then they actually start making some decent money.
The internet sucks for advertising. Why the fuck do you think so many dotcoms fucking failed man? No one pays fucking attention to advertisements. If I've looked for something on Amazon.com it is really really really rare I click the "if you like x try y" link. Look at MP3.com's statistics, they have thousands of unsigned bands yet they only sell one CD per month for ever two bands using the service. However everybody loves the free downloads. People want free downloads, not something asking them for a fucking handout. Besides that do you realize the technical implications of micropayments? On most merchant accounts it costs you 20 to 50 cents per transaction this gets billed to the customer, unless of course you're going to foot that part yourself. If you're doing some micropayment crap and asking a dollar for each song downloaded, up to 50% of your fucking money gets sucked up into overhead. Like any real business you raise prices to get more profit from each product sold but then people tell you to fuck off when you want 2$ a song just so you can grab that 1$ per song. Then you've got a bunch of people with 1$ billed to their credit cards. Some credit cards simply will not transact values this low and some merchant accounts won't let you transact values this low.
So take a site like MP3.com, 40k artists half of them actually sell a couple songs. One band makes 1000$ a week because they are really popular for whatever reason. The next guy over makes 10$ a week. Can you live on 10$ a week? Not in a first or second world country you can't. Asking a musician to make rad music and make less money than they could at McDonalds is ludicrous. The RIAA are a bunch of fucking criminals but you don't make a valid argument against them other than you found music that wasn't advertised on television. Good fucking work. I find new music by going to shows and paying ten bucks to see some band I recognize headlining and then getting introduced to people opening for them. The RIAA has nothing to do with that but I don't base an argument on it. Most of the bands I see are the starving artist types though many because they have talant have landed record contracts. They aren't selling out they're able to do what they really want for a living. Most of the music you've ever heard probably wouldn't exist if people could only do it part time whilst they were keeping real jobs. Micropayments are ridiculous because it is a toss up whether or not anyone is even going to get paid in any given month and the recording industry has people by the nuts because they formed a cartel to control music production and distribution. I say fuck them because they thought of it before I did (actually probably before most of us were born).
Free software ideologically works well in schools. It can be inexpensive to impliment and once you've got a good set-up going you're pretty much set unless you need to do like some major overhaul of something. Linux and FreeBSD are just a bit more robust than Windows and have enough software available for them to teach people the computer concepts they need. It's better to teach them concepts anyhow, the OS underneath doesn't matter much if you teach them the difference between ASCII and binary files, that it means when something is executable, and the basic tenents of word processing. They don't need high school to teach them highly technical skills, thats what they pay to go to college or trade school for. Trying to make the high school responsible for producing workplace ready people overextends their already meager funds.
However the bad thing about Free software is the lack of an educational infrastructure. Linux works well if you wanna use a computer to teach people about computers but what happens when you want to teach people about literature or history? Responses to that question including the word "internet" will be ignored. Why? When you're looking for something specific most of the internet is just complete cruft. Although there are some good sites you can use it sucks trying to them for educational purposes at times. It'd suck to have a page up on the projector and then have some x10 popup dominate the screen. It's far too distracting for trying to teach somebody something. Using the web as a info reference is tricky because if they don't know anything about what they're researching they'll grab a bunch of "facts" from Joe's House of History and turn it in not having learned anything. I think a free OS would be a good idea for schools if you could build a curriculum and not have the OS holding you up. Computers are information tools, not an end unto themselves. If you're going to deploy a free solution to your problem make sure it fills ALL of the requirements, not just be less expensive than Microsoft.
I actually suggested that to the landlord but they really weren't interested in providing broadband access to anybody in the complex. We were lucky to get somebody to come out and fix something let alone install a network infrastructure in the complex. Though now they would probably do it, they got bought out by somebody and increased rent by 25% (which is why I moved) because a new high income housing tract...I mean living community is being build next door so they are considered Luxery apartments now.
I had a really great fucking post but a stray keyclick nuked it. I don't feel like typing it all again so anyone interested please use ESP and I will send you a mind bullet. I'll also point to a handy website. Here is a really good page not because it contains much info but because it has two very good papers written about the recording industry and does a good job summing up what my mind bullets contain. It's good to see artists telling the RIAA to fuck off, the only problem I see is these artists have already made their money and have their fame, the recording companies could drop them like a bad habit and they could still make money on their own. There's thousands of bands that don't have that ability and probably never will. The recording industry likes it that way but then again, so do most people who really like listening to music (or just want to be cool for owning some new popular album). That blows.
Slashdotters bitch about a lack of last mile broadband and then when someone rolls out yet another broadband scheme and people still bitch. I spent a year in an apartment with shitty phone lines which got me a whole 24kbit dial-up connection. Now I've moved back into an area covered by Charter which means I once again have a cable modem. I haven't had any complaints about it yet. Fixed wireless I don't think will replace DSL or cable but it will definitely augment it. Even in a decent sized city it can be tough to have everywhere covered by either DSL or cable. My apartment for instance didn't have cable and PacBell fucked up DSL here so bad it is ridiculous. There's plenty of places here in town that either don't have coax to splice onto and are too far from a CO or DSLAM to get DSL service. Most parts of town probably have a direct line of sight to at least one radio tower (well when the smog isn't so thick that your visibility is cut to about four feet).
The way the article was titled it was made to sound like the PS2 outsold the XBox and GC combined. Leave it to the LA Times to use a really shitty source for one of their stories. First NPDFunworld began their counting console sales before the XBox and GC were even released and they do not count WalMart sales. My GC was the last one left at a WalMart in Jonesboro Louisiana and I got it on the 18th. I haven't seen GC's anywhere in any decent quantity since they've come out. WalMart seems to have a number of XBoxes lying around though. If you read the article you start to figure something is fishy then they say Nintendo's only sold ~600k units when everywhere else is reporting they've sold upwards of 800k units. They fucking mention that number in the LA Times story for fuck sake. That's just bad journalism. I also think there's some kind of misconception that only two consoles can exist in the market. In the past offerings from smaller competitors to Sega and Nintendo were dismal failures. This is usually due to the failures of the company's marketing and deployment strategy. You can't offer a console with no games. It just will not sell. Just like you don't sell and OS with no software.
When it came to 3rd generation consoles (for Sega and Nintendo at least) Sega dropped the ball when it ran headlong into the Playstation. The PSX was just a better design than the Saturn. Sega stuck two SH3s in the Saturn (not learning from the Jaguar's failure to lure developers with two processors) which nobody really learned how to use properly. Most of the first series of Saturn and PSX games were arcade adaptations. When the reviews came out saying the PSX mimiced the arcade systems almost perfectly and the Saturn met with some serious slowdown in heavily sprite laden scenes the winner was pretty evident. The market fell out from under the Saturn and thus Sega because they didn't produce something that could keep up as well as Sony had. Sony also didn't bother with their own line of arcade games like Sega did, they just jammed third party games onto the PSX. Nintendo learned the same lesson, arcades are too fickle to stick games with any substance in so leave it to somebody else. If the XBox and GC both maintain a steady list of third party developers I think there might be plenty of room in the market for them both. Alot of people own several consoles and a handful of games for each one. As long as enough games get sold to make the companies mula there can be plenty of consoles in the market.
The assumption that only two game consoles can exist in the market is statistical nonsense. In the case of the SNES and Genesis beating out the TurboGrafx and 3DO. The TurboGrafx simply had nothing behind it. It had little first party development, let alone third party development. The 3DO was simply too expensive. You'd end up shelling 500$ for a fucking game console, one that didn't specifically offer anything anybody wanted other than Dragon's Layer, Space Ace, and a Monty Python looking Zelda game. Because only Sega and Nintendo managed to get it right with a console doesn't mean only two consoles can exist necessarily. The Dreamcast sold well because it was released between Nintendo and Sony's generations of consoles.
The concept of galactic habital zones has to do with a star's distance from the core and distance from star forming density waves (according to particular theories). In near the core stars form very close together and in a group of stars there's probably going to be an O class star or two forming. These stars are such badasses they end up blowing planetary nebula material away from surrounding stars as well as themselves. It is theorized planets are rare in the core of the galaxy and if they did happen to form there life wouldn't develop because all of the badass O class stars would be bombarding them with high energy ultra violet radiation blasting the shit out of organic molecules. Besides every handful of millions of years one of these O classes is going to go super nova. As for the density wave it is theorized the spiral arm formations in galaxies are formed by density waves condensing interstellar molecular clouds and causing stars to form. In regions with lots of O and B stars forming you're going to have the same problems as stars in the core. Galactic habitable zones are theorized to exist behind (relatively) these star forming density waves and outside of the core and before you get to the outer edge as thpse stars are far to cool to even have liquid water forming and are so small they probably won't pull in enough interstellar mass to form big enough planets to hold atmospheres. To explain a little better.
I think this sucker comes close to being a real winner in the wireless connectivity pad with extra features market. For the most part Palms and PocketPC devices are glorified datebooks. Now of course they're jammed with features like video playback and web browsing. Laptops are portable but awkward to use when on the move or not sitting down because you interface with them exactly like a regular desktop machine. I've been waiting for a really good tablet system since I first saw ST:TNG.
I think in many cases tablet systems offer a more intuitive interface than laptops and definitely give you more real estate than a handheld device. With a web enabled device you want to have something that can view a web page with reasonable clarity and functionality. Most of the web simply does not mesh well with handheld devices. Then on the other hand laptops don't work well when you're really on the go. Tablets fall inbetween both of these catagories (which is a boon and a problem). On the one hand you can have a highly portable system with most of the functionality of a full fledged PC. With a well thought out GUI you won't miss a keyboard for any task other than typing which is when you whip out an attachable keyboard or a soft keyboard on the screen. On the downside you're limited in function by how portable the system is. In order to be viable a tablet needs a long battery life but enough power to do what you need it to. A tablet also runs into trouble when running anything not specifically designed for it. A tablet PC running Windows or Linux could run all sorts of programs but would you really want to run some stuff where a mouse was really intended to be used?
Personally I'd like something the size of a note pad that I could run lots of different software on and interface with all kinds of network services. I don't think the Aquapad is quite there yet, in fact I think we're still a couple of generations away from what I'd (not to mention lots of other people) spend money on.
The typical wristwatch is both reflective and backlit. IIRC Casio's older WinCE (the ones with black and white screens) had reflective/backlit screens as well. I think the main problem with them is the reflective components cost more because they have to be partially transparent so when you fire up the backlight you can actually see it. Oh yeah before some jackass flames me I realize Indiglo watches are the most popular variety of wristwatch backlights, that's the model I meant. Most watches have only a reflective backing and the light is houses above the reflective layer.
Do you honestly believe that at some point you were getting more value than you are right now? What in the fuck are you thinking? Movies and music have always sucked with a handful of exceptions every couple of years. The whole entertainment industry is based on paying alot of money for something someone may or may not think is worth spending money on. You're a dumbfuck and I can't believe some son of a bitch modded you up. You're saying that everyone ought to quit everything just because someone is rich and they aren't? Not buying shit advertised in magaziens and on television means magazines go out of print and television shows go off their air. If no one buys books first hand they won't be fucking available second hand you jackass.
I have friends in the CE program at Cal State Pomona and that's pretty much exactly what they do. All of the programming workstations are Ultra5s and use GNU tools for compiling and debugging. A good number of students develop on Linux and just port their stuff to Solaris which doesn't take very long in most cases. The school's also a big promoter of Java (which they have been for a number of years in the CE programs) so Sun was a natural choice for development systems since Linux namely had shit Java support in the past. If people don't have a Linux partition somewhere on their systems they've learned to log into the Ultra5s via puTTY or a Windows X server to do their work outside of lab hours.
SpaceImaging charges 55$ per sqkm with a minimum of 100 sqkm. So for those highly optimistic useful 50 images a day they're making 5500$ each. That's half the figure you came up with. Now for the kicker. Many organizations are buying many hundreds of sqkm all the time from arial recon companies. Why? Farmers can use the data to figure out how well their crops are doing, knowing where water collected after a rainfall tells you where you may or may not need to water the next week which saves you lots of money in both equipment and man hours. If you can save a 100,000$ worth of crop for spending 20,000 you just saved yourself 80% of what your loses would have been. State governments can spend a couple grand every year to inventory public roads. Not all uses for arial photography require a single precise image taken every five minutes. SpaceImaging is just complimenting a business that lots of organizations already use.
But by the same argument you can say USGS info or some Rand McNally map could be used for evil purposes. The problem (governments know this) with banning stuff is you only drive up the desire to have it by those who want it for something nefarious. If say some government said you couldn't have high res satillite photos the demand would skyrocket for them and people would get them anyways. Stuff being illegal doesn't mean it disappears. Of course this is theoretical. Somebody could come along and say Digital Globe and Space Imaging couldn't conduct business anymore and block them from rental time in control facilities. It would prevent you from getting an accurate picture of a building in a time period of 24 hours. You could just as easily get somebody with a GPS receiver and a camera to gather intel on something. Most bans on anything are politically motivated rather than truely safety motivated.
I used to watch and record TV and do sound and video editing on my P200 Sony VAIO back a while ago. It took a while sometimes but it got the job done when it needed to. When I got my VAIO the same people said the same thing about their 386SX systems but at least in that case it was true.
Something I don't get is what is people's facination with compiling shit. Do you change software so damn often that compilation times REALLY matter at all. How often do you have to compile a kernel or actually build something from source? Are updates so frequent and absolutely important that you can't run without them? The two things my VAIO didn't do well as it got older was play new 3D games and DVDs. Of course it doesn't even have a DVD-ROM and the video was onboard so there were no upgrade options. You post is pure jackassery. So a P200 will get it done slower, it still gets done. Saying that it simply cannot do certain tasks is ridiculous.
Uh how exactly do you propose getting live video from an orbiting satillite? In a sun sync orbit a sat would pass over everything far too quickly to even take a handful of concurrent frames of video let alone something with apparent motion you could call "video". There isn't much need to speculate about true video like from a hack movie.
Two of the best Liux books I've read are Running Linux and Learning GNU/Debian Linux both published by O'Reilly. Running Linux has tons of info for new Linux users, most of it is day to day stuff but is really great for somebody who isn't going to have access to alot of online resources. Learning GDL, has alot of info about installing and administering Linux (specifically Debian of course) and is the book that would be included with Debian if it included a book. Your distribution of choice isn't really so important as they offer so many of the same things. People will argue until they're blue in the face about it but thats true. I might suggest FreeBSD but the documentation that's easy to pack with you on a trip can be hard to come by and I don't know many books written about it for novice users. I suggest hitting up somewhere like Cheapbytes of LSL and getting several CDs. Learning GDL comes with a Debian 2.1 (x86) CD (the edition I have has 2.1 at least) You might even want to pick up CDs for different architectures because you never know when someone's going to find some old 68k Mac or something lying around.
Fuck man, get a clue. Do you REALLY fucking think people live in shit infested villages because they lack technology or medicine? It's the fault of their corrupt leadership which spends loan money on their ragtag military force to defend their coup government. Food doesn't need to be delivered by high tech means, humans collectively have been doing the agriculture thing before the wheel was fucking invented. Corrupt governments have the military power to keep down normal citizens and are often only resisted by even more ragtag resistance forces. The groups spend all their time fighting and looking for more money. People uninterested for fighting on either side of the conflict end up screwed because both groups take their food and blow the fuck out of their land which leads to the starving masses Sally Struthers whines about on TV. Scientists and engineers coming up with more technical ways of getting stuff done just makes the problem worse because those technical things need technical infrastructures. Why suggest using a fusion powered hover craft when a horse and a decent wooden carrige would work fine?
That sounds alot like OpenFirmware used by both Sun and Apple on their systems. Sun systems can be controlled from a serial or network interface from firmware load to OS load. Your standard Mac can boot off just about anything you can attach to the thing. With portable systems you can also use components in dumb mode. Like being able ot mount a laptop as an external SCSI (in the case of PB models predating the Pismo) or FireWire drive.
Before you wet yourself look up information on running an x86 is realtime protected mode. IIRC PCs would make shitty RT computing devices by and large. If you want a cheapo little sensor system with digital and analog inputs you'd be better off using real microcontrollers than trying to adapt a vanilla PC system for the task.
Molecular hydrogen is rare on small planets close to the Sun, not necessarily rocky ones. Hydrogen is so light that the slightest application of heat blows it off into space. Nothing this side of Jupiter is big enough to hold onto Hydrogen in its molecular form. Though you probably know that I was just being anal about it:)
Yeah but this is slashdot. When has anything been reported only after all the facts had been collected. It's a good thing slashdot doesn't have a space agency. There'd already be a team sent up in a rocket headed for Mars. It'd suck for them to find that all they had to drink was methane ice.
"Geek Control, this is Torvalds 1, we tried heating the ice to get water but it caught on fire. Please advise. Torvalds 1 out."
What side am I on? What a joke. Apple is based in part on specifically NOT going with sunset clauses of any sort and doing the "right hting" when it comes out obsolete OSes. Reason being is their hardware lasts a long time. You can go and download OS 7.5 if you need something that works fine with your really old 68k based Mac. Apple isn't big on the OS software game and thus doesn't have a whole lot of incentive to go around screwing their customers over with retarded licensing.
If you're deciding to upgrade your software you simply should make sure everything is going to work for it. No matter which OS you're using. Should an OS developer support every conceivable piece of old software available for previous versions of their OS? That's ridiculous. WinNT dropped all of the 16-bit support that was bitchslapping the OS because all 16-bit code was stuck in the same virtual machine. When it crashed and locked up it rarely allowed the system to recover. WinNT dropped the cruft and moved forward. Apple dropped 68k support with System 8.5. Besides moving forward with technology, most of the time the OS developer has little to do with third party software crapping out. The guy I responded to is comparing his lack of forsight with a new OS to a sunset clause in software. I don't think Adaptec was sitting in their meeting saying "Oh hey, version 4 is going to come out well ahead of Windows XP which is currently still in an alpha relase stage, we better make sure that ECDC 4 doesn't work with Windows XP so we can take over the world!" He's also bitching over the fact a boxed copy of the software doesn't work with an OS that'd been officially released for a very short period of time. The box was packaged in bulk somewhere way before Windows XP was released, the code on the CD in the box was probably last revised nearly a year ago. Boohoo he has to download an update for it to work. The two of you are misconstruing that which is a true sunset clause and that which is just annoying.
Hello? Phone companies have been charging corporate customers almost double for phone service for a very long time. Why? First business customers usually get better QOS than residential customers as well as access to real technical support, not the dumbass farms everyone else gets the number to. If they don't get this for their business class service their provider is just being shitty. Second telecommunications equipment IS FUCKING EXPENSIVE. Do you really think your 40$ per month for a cable modem even remotely covers the actual cost to your provider for you to have the damn thing? It's not dishonest to have a pricing scheme which aims to cover costs by charging those using their connection for business transactions. If the guy's company won't shell out a little cash for him to use business service then they're yanking him around. Everyone bitches about telephone and cable companies like they've got some fucking right to the coaxial and twisted pair wire strung through their city. Unless your municipality was the one fotting the bill out of your tax dollars you don't own it. Being you're using somebody else's network you should stop thinking you're so special and that they owe you somehow. It's a slashdot syndrom where people seem to think T1s ought to be free and that everyone should be able to install Linux on an old computer and have a server in their garage without paying so much as a subscription fee.
Uh where does it say anywhere the internet is supposed to be free for anyone to use? Considering most of the internet's traffic exists of data lines owned by businesses I don't see where you get this idea from.
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Micropayments are no way to do something professionally. I don't like the RIAA, my brother is an unsigned musician and I've spent alot of time researching record contracts for him. They suck ass. They make all the money and the musician(s) do all of theh ard work. If they are lucky enough to be the one in ten that makes it big then they actually start making some decent money.
The internet sucks for advertising. Why the fuck do you think so many dotcoms fucking failed man? No one pays fucking attention to advertisements. If I've looked for something on Amazon.com it is really really really rare I click the "if you like x try y" link. Look at MP3.com's statistics, they have thousands of unsigned bands yet they only sell one CD per month for ever two bands using the service. However everybody loves the free downloads. People want free downloads, not something asking them for a fucking handout. Besides that do you realize the technical implications of micropayments? On most merchant accounts it costs you 20 to 50 cents per transaction this gets billed to the customer, unless of course you're going to foot that part yourself. If you're doing some micropayment crap and asking a dollar for each song downloaded, up to 50% of your fucking money gets sucked up into overhead. Like any real business you raise prices to get more profit from each product sold but then people tell you to fuck off when you want 2$ a song just so you can grab that 1$ per song. Then you've got a bunch of people with 1$ billed to their credit cards. Some credit cards simply will not transact values this low and some merchant accounts won't let you transact values this low.
So take a site like MP3.com, 40k artists half of them actually sell a couple songs. One band makes 1000$ a week because they are really popular for whatever reason. The next guy over makes 10$ a week. Can you live on 10$ a week? Not in a first or second world country you can't. Asking a musician to make rad music and make less money than they could at McDonalds is ludicrous. The RIAA are a bunch of fucking criminals but you don't make a valid argument against them other than you found music that wasn't advertised on television. Good fucking work. I find new music by going to shows and paying ten bucks to see some band I recognize headlining and then getting introduced to people opening for them. The RIAA has nothing to do with that but I don't base an argument on it. Most of the bands I see are the starving artist types though many because they have talant have landed record contracts. They aren't selling out they're able to do what they really want for a living. Most of the music you've ever heard probably wouldn't exist if people could only do it part time whilst they were keeping real jobs. Micropayments are ridiculous because it is a toss up whether or not anyone is even going to get paid in any given month and the recording industry has people by the nuts because they formed a cartel to control music production and distribution. I say fuck them because they thought of it before I did (actually probably before most of us were born).
Free software ideologically works well in schools. It can be inexpensive to impliment and once you've got a good set-up going you're pretty much set unless you need to do like some major overhaul of something. Linux and FreeBSD are just a bit more robust than Windows and have enough software available for them to teach people the computer concepts they need. It's better to teach them concepts anyhow, the OS underneath doesn't matter much if you teach them the difference between ASCII and binary files, that it means when something is executable, and the basic tenents of word processing. They don't need high school to teach them highly technical skills, thats what they pay to go to college or trade school for. Trying to make the high school responsible for producing workplace ready people overextends their already meager funds.
However the bad thing about Free software is the lack of an educational infrastructure. Linux works well if you wanna use a computer to teach people about computers but what happens when you want to teach people about literature or history? Responses to that question including the word "internet" will be ignored. Why? When you're looking for something specific most of the internet is just complete cruft. Although there are some good sites you can use it sucks trying to them for educational purposes at times. It'd suck to have a page up on the projector and then have some x10 popup dominate the screen. It's far too distracting for trying to teach somebody something. Using the web as a info reference is tricky because if they don't know anything about what they're researching they'll grab a bunch of "facts" from Joe's House of History and turn it in not having learned anything. I think a free OS would be a good idea for schools if you could build a curriculum and not have the OS holding you up. Computers are information tools, not an end unto themselves. If you're going to deploy a free solution to your problem make sure it fills ALL of the requirements, not just be less expensive than Microsoft.
I actually suggested that to the landlord but they really weren't interested in providing broadband access to anybody in the complex. We were lucky to get somebody to come out and fix something let alone install a network infrastructure in the complex. Though now they would probably do it, they got bought out by somebody and increased rent by 25% (which is why I moved) because a new high income housing tract...I mean living community is being build next door so they are considered Luxery apartments now.
I had a really great fucking post but a stray keyclick nuked it. I don't feel like typing it all again so anyone interested please use ESP and I will send you a mind bullet. I'll also point to a handy website. Here is a really good page not because it contains much info but because it has two very good papers written about the recording industry and does a good job summing up what my mind bullets contain. It's good to see artists telling the RIAA to fuck off, the only problem I see is these artists have already made their money and have their fame, the recording companies could drop them like a bad habit and they could still make money on their own. There's thousands of bands that don't have that ability and probably never will. The recording industry likes it that way but then again, so do most people who really like listening to music (or just want to be cool for owning some new popular album). That blows.
Slashdotters bitch about a lack of last mile broadband and then when someone rolls out yet another broadband scheme and people still bitch. I spent a year in an apartment with shitty phone lines which got me a whole 24kbit dial-up connection. Now I've moved back into an area covered by Charter which means I once again have a cable modem. I haven't had any complaints about it yet. Fixed wireless I don't think will replace DSL or cable but it will definitely augment it. Even in a decent sized city it can be tough to have everywhere covered by either DSL or cable. My apartment for instance didn't have cable and PacBell fucked up DSL here so bad it is ridiculous. There's plenty of places here in town that either don't have coax to splice onto and are too far from a CO or DSLAM to get DSL service. Most parts of town probably have a direct line of sight to at least one radio tower (well when the smog isn't so thick that your visibility is cut to about four feet).
The way the article was titled it was made to sound like the PS2 outsold the XBox and GC combined. Leave it to the LA Times to use a really shitty source for one of their stories. First NPDFunworld began their counting console sales before the XBox and GC were even released and they do not count WalMart sales. My GC was the last one left at a WalMart in Jonesboro Louisiana and I got it on the 18th. I haven't seen GC's anywhere in any decent quantity since they've come out. WalMart seems to have a number of XBoxes lying around though. If you read the article you start to figure something is fishy then they say Nintendo's only sold ~600k units when everywhere else is reporting they've sold upwards of 800k units. They fucking mention that number in the LA Times story for fuck sake. That's just bad journalism. I also think there's some kind of misconception that only two consoles can exist in the market. In the past offerings from smaller competitors to Sega and Nintendo were dismal failures. This is usually due to the failures of the company's marketing and deployment strategy. You can't offer a console with no games. It just will not sell. Just like you don't sell and OS with no software.
When it came to 3rd generation consoles (for Sega and Nintendo at least) Sega dropped the ball when it ran headlong into the Playstation. The PSX was just a better design than the Saturn. Sega stuck two SH3s in the Saturn (not learning from the Jaguar's failure to lure developers with two processors) which nobody really learned how to use properly. Most of the first series of Saturn and PSX games were arcade adaptations. When the reviews came out saying the PSX mimiced the arcade systems almost perfectly and the Saturn met with some serious slowdown in heavily sprite laden scenes the winner was pretty evident. The market fell out from under the Saturn and thus Sega because they didn't produce something that could keep up as well as Sony had. Sony also didn't bother with their own line of arcade games like Sega did, they just jammed third party games onto the PSX. Nintendo learned the same lesson, arcades are too fickle to stick games with any substance in so leave it to somebody else. If the XBox and GC both maintain a steady list of third party developers I think there might be plenty of room in the market for them both. Alot of people own several consoles and a handful of games for each one. As long as enough games get sold to make the companies mula there can be plenty of consoles in the market.
The assumption that only two game consoles can exist in the market is statistical nonsense. In the case of the SNES and Genesis beating out the TurboGrafx and 3DO. The TurboGrafx simply had nothing behind it. It had little first party development, let alone third party development. The 3DO was simply too expensive. You'd end up shelling 500$ for a fucking game console, one that didn't specifically offer anything anybody wanted other than Dragon's Layer, Space Ace, and a Monty Python looking Zelda game. Because only Sega and Nintendo managed to get it right with a console doesn't mean only two consoles can exist necessarily. The Dreamcast sold well because it was released between Nintendo and Sony's generations of consoles.
The concept of galactic habital zones has to do with a star's distance from the core and distance from star forming density waves (according to particular theories). In near the core stars form very close together and in a group of stars there's probably going to be an O class star or two forming. These stars are such badasses they end up blowing planetary nebula material away from surrounding stars as well as themselves. It is theorized planets are rare in the core of the galaxy and if they did happen to form there life wouldn't develop because all of the badass O class stars would be bombarding them with high energy ultra violet radiation blasting the shit out of organic molecules. Besides every handful of millions of years one of these O classes is going to go super nova. As for the density wave it is theorized the spiral arm formations in galaxies are formed by density waves condensing interstellar molecular clouds and causing stars to form. In regions with lots of O and B stars forming you're going to have the same problems as stars in the core. Galactic habitable zones are theorized to exist behind (relatively) these star forming density waves and outside of the core and before you get to the outer edge as thpse stars are far to cool to even have liquid water forming and are so small they probably won't pull in enough interstellar mass to form big enough planets to hold atmospheres. To explain a little better.
I think this sucker comes close to being a real winner in the wireless connectivity pad with extra features market. For the most part Palms and PocketPC devices are glorified datebooks. Now of course they're jammed with features like video playback and web browsing. Laptops are portable but awkward to use when on the move or not sitting down because you interface with them exactly like a regular desktop machine. I've been waiting for a really good tablet system since I first saw ST:TNG.
I think in many cases tablet systems offer a more intuitive interface than laptops and definitely give you more real estate than a handheld device. With a web enabled device you want to have something that can view a web page with reasonable clarity and functionality. Most of the web simply does not mesh well with handheld devices. Then on the other hand laptops don't work well when you're really on the go. Tablets fall inbetween both of these catagories (which is a boon and a problem). On the one hand you can have a highly portable system with most of the functionality of a full fledged PC. With a well thought out GUI you won't miss a keyboard for any task other than typing which is when you whip out an attachable keyboard or a soft keyboard on the screen. On the downside you're limited in function by how portable the system is. In order to be viable a tablet needs a long battery life but enough power to do what you need it to. A tablet also runs into trouble when running anything not specifically designed for it. A tablet PC running Windows or Linux could run all sorts of programs but would you really want to run some stuff where a mouse was really intended to be used?
Personally I'd like something the size of a note pad that I could run lots of different software on and interface with all kinds of network services. I don't think the Aquapad is quite there yet, in fact I think we're still a couple of generations away from what I'd (not to mention lots of other people) spend money on.
The typical wristwatch is both reflective and backlit. IIRC Casio's older WinCE (the ones with black and white screens) had reflective/backlit screens as well. I think the main problem with them is the reflective components cost more because they have to be partially transparent so when you fire up the backlight you can actually see it. Oh yeah before some jackass flames me I realize Indiglo watches are the most popular variety of wristwatch backlights, that's the model I meant. Most watches have only a reflective backing and the light is houses above the reflective layer.
Do you honestly believe that at some point you were getting more value than you are right now? What in the fuck are you thinking? Movies and music have always sucked with a handful of exceptions every couple of years. The whole entertainment industry is based on paying alot of money for something someone may or may not think is worth spending money on. You're a dumbfuck and I can't believe some son of a bitch modded you up. You're saying that everyone ought to quit everything just because someone is rich and they aren't? Not buying shit advertised in magaziens and on television means magazines go out of print and television shows go off their air. If no one buys books first hand they won't be fucking available second hand you jackass.
I have friends in the CE program at Cal State Pomona and that's pretty much exactly what they do. All of the programming workstations are Ultra5s and use GNU tools for compiling and debugging. A good number of students develop on Linux and just port their stuff to Solaris which doesn't take very long in most cases. The school's also a big promoter of Java (which they have been for a number of years in the CE programs) so Sun was a natural choice for development systems since Linux namely had shit Java support in the past. If people don't have a Linux partition somewhere on their systems they've learned to log into the Ultra5s via puTTY or a Windows X server to do their work outside of lab hours.
SpaceImaging charges 55$ per sqkm with a minimum of 100 sqkm. So for those highly optimistic useful 50 images a day they're making 5500$ each. That's half the figure you came up with. Now for the kicker. Many organizations are buying many hundreds of sqkm all the time from arial recon companies. Why? Farmers can use the data to figure out how well their crops are doing, knowing where water collected after a rainfall tells you where you may or may not need to water the next week which saves you lots of money in both equipment and man hours. If you can save a 100,000$ worth of crop for spending 20,000 you just saved yourself 80% of what your loses would have been. State governments can spend a couple grand every year to inventory public roads. Not all uses for arial photography require a single precise image taken every five minutes. SpaceImaging is just complimenting a business that lots of organizations already use.
But by the same argument you can say USGS info or some Rand McNally map could be used for evil purposes. The problem (governments know this) with banning stuff is you only drive up the desire to have it by those who want it for something nefarious. If say some government said you couldn't have high res satillite photos the demand would skyrocket for them and people would get them anyways. Stuff being illegal doesn't mean it disappears. Of course this is theoretical. Somebody could come along and say Digital Globe and Space Imaging couldn't conduct business anymore and block them from rental time in control facilities. It would prevent you from getting an accurate picture of a building in a time period of 24 hours. You could just as easily get somebody with a GPS receiver and a camera to gather intel on something. Most bans on anything are politically motivated rather than truely safety motivated.
I used to watch and record TV and do sound and video editing on my P200 Sony VAIO back a while ago. It took a while sometimes but it got the job done when it needed to. When I got my VAIO the same people said the same thing about their 386SX systems but at least in that case it was true.
Something I don't get is what is people's facination with compiling shit. Do you change software so damn often that compilation times REALLY matter at all. How often do you have to compile a kernel or actually build something from source? Are updates so frequent and absolutely important that you can't run without them? The two things my VAIO didn't do well as it got older was play new 3D games and DVDs. Of course it doesn't even have a DVD-ROM and the video was onboard so there were no upgrade options. You post is pure jackassery. So a P200 will get it done slower, it still gets done. Saying that it simply cannot do certain tasks is ridiculous.
Uh how exactly do you propose getting live video from an orbiting satillite? In a sun sync orbit a sat would pass over everything far too quickly to even take a handful of concurrent frames of video let alone something with apparent motion you could call "video". There isn't much need to speculate about true video like from a hack movie.
Two of the best Liux books I've read are Running Linux and Learning GNU/Debian Linux both published by O'Reilly. Running Linux has tons of info for new Linux users, most of it is day to day stuff but is really great for somebody who isn't going to have access to alot of online resources. Learning GDL, has alot of info about installing and administering Linux (specifically Debian of course) and is the book that would be included with Debian if it included a book. Your distribution of choice isn't really so important as they offer so many of the same things. People will argue until they're blue in the face about it but thats true. I might suggest FreeBSD but the documentation that's easy to pack with you on a trip can be hard to come by and I don't know many books written about it for novice users. I suggest hitting up somewhere like Cheapbytes of LSL and getting several CDs. Learning GDL comes with a Debian 2.1 (x86) CD (the edition I have has 2.1 at least) You might even want to pick up CDs for different architectures because you never know when someone's going to find some old 68k Mac or something lying around.
Fuck man, get a clue. Do you REALLY fucking think people live in shit infested villages because they lack technology or medicine? It's the fault of their corrupt leadership which spends loan money on their ragtag military force to defend their coup government. Food doesn't need to be delivered by high tech means, humans collectively have been doing the agriculture thing before the wheel was fucking invented. Corrupt governments have the military power to keep down normal citizens and are often only resisted by even more ragtag resistance forces. The groups spend all their time fighting and looking for more money. People uninterested for fighting on either side of the conflict end up screwed because both groups take their food and blow the fuck out of their land which leads to the starving masses Sally Struthers whines about on TV. Scientists and engineers coming up with more technical ways of getting stuff done just makes the problem worse because those technical things need technical infrastructures. Why suggest using a fusion powered hover craft when a horse and a decent wooden carrige would work fine?
That sounds alot like OpenFirmware used by both Sun and Apple on their systems. Sun systems can be controlled from a serial or network interface from firmware load to OS load. Your standard Mac can boot off just about anything you can attach to the thing. With portable systems you can also use components in dumb mode. Like being able ot mount a laptop as an external SCSI (in the case of PB models predating the Pismo) or FireWire drive.
Before you wet yourself look up information on running an x86 is realtime protected mode. IIRC PCs would make shitty RT computing devices by and large. If you want a cheapo little sensor system with digital and analog inputs you'd be better off using real microcontrollers than trying to adapt a vanilla PC system for the task.
Molecular hydrogen is rare on small planets close to the Sun, not necessarily rocky ones. Hydrogen is so light that the slightest application of heat blows it off into space. Nothing this side of Jupiter is big enough to hold onto Hydrogen in its molecular form. Though you probably know that I was just being anal about it :)
Yeah but this is slashdot. When has anything been reported only after all the facts had been collected. It's a good thing slashdot doesn't have a space agency. There'd already be a team sent up in a rocket headed for Mars. It'd suck for them to find that all they had to drink was methane ice.
"Geek Control, this is Torvalds 1, we tried heating the ice to get water but it caught on fire. Please advise. Torvalds 1 out."
What side am I on? What a joke. Apple is based in part on specifically NOT going with sunset clauses of any sort and doing the "right hting" when it comes out obsolete OSes. Reason being is their hardware lasts a long time. You can go and download OS 7.5 if you need something that works fine with your really old 68k based Mac. Apple isn't big on the OS software game and thus doesn't have a whole lot of incentive to go around screwing their customers over with retarded licensing.
If you're deciding to upgrade your software you simply should make sure everything is going to work for it. No matter which OS you're using. Should an OS developer support every conceivable piece of old software available for previous versions of their OS? That's ridiculous. WinNT dropped all of the 16-bit support that was bitchslapping the OS because all 16-bit code was stuck in the same virtual machine. When it crashed and locked up it rarely allowed the system to recover. WinNT dropped the cruft and moved forward. Apple dropped 68k support with System 8.5. Besides moving forward with technology, most of the time the OS developer has little to do with third party software crapping out. The guy I responded to is comparing his lack of forsight with a new OS to a sunset clause in software. I don't think Adaptec was sitting in their meeting saying "Oh hey, version 4 is going to come out well ahead of Windows XP which is currently still in an alpha relase stage, we better make sure that ECDC 4 doesn't work with Windows XP so we can take over the world!" He's also bitching over the fact a boxed copy of the software doesn't work with an OS that'd been officially released for a very short period of time. The box was packaged in bulk somewhere way before Windows XP was released, the code on the CD in the box was probably last revised nearly a year ago. Boohoo he has to download an update for it to work. The two of you are misconstruing that which is a true sunset clause and that which is just annoying.
Hello? Phone companies have been charging corporate customers almost double for phone service for a very long time. Why? First business customers usually get better QOS than residential customers as well as access to real technical support, not the dumbass farms everyone else gets the number to. If they don't get this for their business class service their provider is just being shitty. Second telecommunications equipment IS FUCKING EXPENSIVE. Do you really think your 40$ per month for a cable modem even remotely covers the actual cost to your provider for you to have the damn thing? It's not dishonest to have a pricing scheme which aims to cover costs by charging those using their connection for business transactions. If the guy's company won't shell out a little cash for him to use business service then they're yanking him around. Everyone bitches about telephone and cable companies like they've got some fucking right to the coaxial and twisted pair wire strung through their city. Unless your municipality was the one fotting the bill out of your tax dollars you don't own it. Being you're using somebody else's network you should stop thinking you're so special and that they owe you somehow. It's a slashdot syndrom where people seem to think T1s ought to be free and that everyone should be able to install Linux on an old computer and have a server in their garage without paying so much as a subscription fee.
Uh where does it say anywhere the internet is supposed to be free for anyone to use? Considering most of the internet's traffic exists of data lines owned by businesses I don't see where you get this idea from.