Microsoft would be put in a very strange position of NOT wanting to sell Surfaces. The more they sell, the more money they lose.
I think this happened with the Nokia N8x0 series. I tried buying one, and the guy tried so hard not to sell it to me that I literally had to tell him to shut up and take my money.
In Hollywood, "massive flop" means "made only imperial fucktons of money, not metric fucktons". Superman Returns set box-office records for Warner Bros., but it did not produce the turnout that the studio had hoped -- and budgeted -- for for a high-profile Superman release, so the general consensus is that it was a flop.
Also, all movies are flops for compensation purposes.
Re:They keep trying and failing
on
How DRM Won
·
· Score: 1
The cost to develop the copy protection in the original Atari ST Notator app -- the predecessor to Apple Logic -- was as much as the cost to develop the entire rest of the program. It is still uncracked today, despite there being intense cracker interest (Notator is still in use by pro and amateur musicians).
Enough people have purchased Notator who would otherwise have pirated it, to make that cost worthwhile.
Which may be available on Windows versions going as far back as 7. Card vendors don't play this "your OS must be this high to use this API" horseshit with OpenGL.
2. Snowden honestly misinterpreted a far more innocuous -- but still quite possibly overstepping of constitutional bounds -- intel-gathering operation as a panopticon
3. Snowden is lying for e-fame
The sad conclusion that I'm forced to make is that I don't have enough data to rule out any one of these possibilities, although my personal belief is that number two is closest by a hair to being correct. Snowden sounds exactly like the type of kid who might fabricate or embellish the truth in order to get the Reddit userbase to hoist him up on their shoulders and triumphantly dump Gatorade on his head. But that doesn't mean he *did* fabricate or embellish.
Meet the Australian White Ibis. Their natural habitat has been threatened, but these greedy, stinky, noisy birds have made themselves quite at home in municipal areas rummaging through people's garbage. Accordingly, the Australian Government isn't sure whether to consider them an endangered species or a pest.
The modern X11 protocol is more than capable of doing modern desktop graphics. The XRender extension can cache and composite pixmaps on the server side with full alpha blending. This can be used to, for instance, render antialiased fonts by caching one copy of each glyph to be drawn and then sending commands to composite the cached pixmap IDs.
The problem is nobody uses it, because attention-deficit linux kiddies think that they can do so much better than the infrastructure that's as old as their dads.
RDP is fast because it caches pixmaps. It can do this because it's basically a Windows GDI driver on the client side, and whenever there's a CreateBitmap or similar GDI call that creates a new HBITMAP, it can cache the bits on the server side, and further graphics calls on that HBITMAP do graphics operations on the server.
X11 works this way too; in fact, it was designed to work this way from the start. The problem is, in this era of kids throwing out and replacing critical bits of system functionality, the current toolkits don't actually use this functionality. They are written like a VGA game from the early 90s. They use their X11 window as a dumb frame buffer, allocate pixmaps within their own memory space, and then any time they want to draw they ship the entire goddamn pixmap over the network. Maybe as an optimization they'll ship a rectangular section of the pixmap.
NX gets around this problem by a form of aggressive optimization that actually looks at the pixmap data that's being drawn and caching the samey bits on the server side automatically. But if the l33t KDE and GNOME kiddies actually used the functionality that every Joe Blow Windows coder uses -- if they were aware of the issues -- a lot of X11's latency problems would go away.
And this is a big part of why I eschew "modern desktop environments".
What she made wasn't really a science experiment; it was a "bottle bomb" consisting of mixing tinfoil and Drano in a Coke bottle. These explosives are well-known among schoolyard pranksters and can cause serious injury (chemical burns, loss of fingers, etc.)
It's not politically correct to say, but if she was cooking one of these up on school property with her friends without teacher oversight, she should have been punished. As long as she didn't actually hurt anyone, though, it should have amounted into a few days' detention at worst.
That said, I'm happy she's going to space camp and that this sort of mischief might develop into a real interest in science.
It's interesting engineering and all, but I was kind of hoping that when someone finally built a helicopter that transformed into an airplane, it'd look cooler. This thing looks like a flying cigar with toothpicks coming out of it. As it is I think I'd rather fly in that autogiro made of crates, whose rotor was Pippi Longstocking spinning a pair of brooms, than this thing.
When developing a new technology, such as fuel cells with a high power yield, it's much more economical to start out in a small application like cellphones, to see how consumers would accept the idea and build the economies of scale it would take to crank out big-application (automotive, industrial) fuel cells cheaply.
This is probably because Q3 had to work on Voodoo cards, which had very limited texture sizes (256x256 I think? something dumb...) and so you couldn't atlas textures to the extent that you do on today's GPUs.
At the bottom of this article about how God-awful the interface is, I see an advertisement for Windows 8, the poster child for tablet-wannabe UI badness. "Develop for the Windows Store," it says, in white text against the same retina-searing shade of magenta I used to indicate transparency in all my game sprites because there's no way I could ever conceive of using that color. I thought to myself, how fitting that should appear on an article about top Linux distros following Windows into the abyss.
Man, I remember Northgate keyboards -- "with the F-keys on the left, where they belong!" That was the original layout of the 84-key XT keyboard, and F-keys-on-the-left gained proponents because of the muscle memory of Lotus 1-2-3 users.
Good keyboards. Good machines. Northgate's last hurrah was some sort of nerfed desktop/laptop aimed at teenagers called the Hip-e. After that flopped (who saw that coming?) they went out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft: "For you the day your servers all went down simultaneously was the most important day of your life, but for us it was Tuesday."
... to the UNSW researchers I say, good on you, mates.
I think this happened with the Nokia N8x0 series. I tried buying one, and the guy tried so hard not to sell it to me that I literally had to tell him to shut up and take my money.
In Hollywood, "massive flop" means "made only imperial fucktons of money, not metric fucktons". Superman Returns set box-office records for Warner Bros., but it did not produce the turnout that the studio had hoped -- and budgeted -- for for a high-profile Superman release, so the general consensus is that it was a flop.
Also, all movies are flops for compensation purposes.
The cost to develop the copy protection in the original Atari ST Notator app -- the predecessor to Apple Logic -- was as much as the cost to develop the entire rest of the program. It is still uncracked today, despite there being intense cracker interest (Notator is still in use by pro and amateur musicians).
Enough people have purchased Notator who would otherwise have pirated it, to make that cost worthwhile.
Which may be available on Windows versions going as far back as 7. Card vendors don't play this "your OS must be this high to use this API" horseshit with OpenGL.
There are three distinct possibilities:
1. Snowden is correct
2. Snowden honestly misinterpreted a far more innocuous -- but still quite possibly overstepping of constitutional bounds -- intel-gathering operation as a panopticon
3. Snowden is lying for e-fame
The sad conclusion that I'm forced to make is that I don't have enough data to rule out any one of these possibilities, although my personal belief is that number two is closest by a hair to being correct. Snowden sounds exactly like the type of kid who might fabricate or embellish the truth in order to get the Reddit userbase to hoist him up on their shoulders and triumphantly dump Gatorade on his head. But that doesn't mean he *did* fabricate or embellish.
I heard you like electronics stores so we put an electronics store in an electronics store so you can impulse-buy while you're impulse-buying.
I'm waiting for the Starbucks inside the Microsoft Store inside the Best Buy.
Meet the Australian White Ibis. Their natural habitat has been threatened, but these greedy, stinky, noisy birds have made themselves quite at home in municipal areas rummaging through people's garbage. Accordingly, the Australian Government isn't sure whether to consider them an endangered species or a pest.
The modern X11 protocol is more than capable of doing modern desktop graphics. The XRender extension can cache and composite pixmaps on the server side with full alpha blending. This can be used to, for instance, render antialiased fonts by caching one copy of each glyph to be drawn and then sending commands to composite the cached pixmap IDs.
The problem is nobody uses it, because attention-deficit linux kiddies think that they can do so much better than the infrastructure that's as old as their dads.
RDP is fast because it caches pixmaps. It can do this because it's basically a Windows GDI driver on the client side, and whenever there's a CreateBitmap or similar GDI call that creates a new HBITMAP, it can cache the bits on the server side, and further graphics calls on that HBITMAP do graphics operations on the server.
X11 works this way too; in fact, it was designed to work this way from the start. The problem is, in this era of kids throwing out and replacing critical bits of system functionality, the current toolkits don't actually use this functionality. They are written like a VGA game from the early 90s. They use their X11 window as a dumb frame buffer, allocate pixmaps within their own memory space, and then any time they want to draw they ship the entire goddamn pixmap over the network. Maybe as an optimization they'll ship a rectangular section of the pixmap.
NX gets around this problem by a form of aggressive optimization that actually looks at the pixmap data that's being drawn and caching the samey bits on the server side automatically. But if the l33t KDE and GNOME kiddies actually used the functionality that every Joe Blow Windows coder uses -- if they were aware of the issues -- a lot of X11's latency problems would go away.
And this is a big part of why I eschew "modern desktop environments".
What she made wasn't really a science experiment; it was a "bottle bomb" consisting of mixing tinfoil and Drano in a Coke bottle. These explosives are well-known among schoolyard pranksters and can cause serious injury (chemical burns, loss of fingers, etc.)
It's not politically correct to say, but if she was cooking one of these up on school property with her friends without teacher oversight, she should have been punished. As long as she didn't actually hurt anyone, though, it should have amounted into a few days' detention at worst.
That said, I'm happy she's going to space camp and that this sort of mischief might develop into a real interest in science.
It's interesting engineering and all, but I was kind of hoping that when someone finally built a helicopter that transformed into an airplane, it'd look cooler. This thing looks like a flying cigar with toothpicks coming out of it. As it is I think I'd rather fly in that autogiro made of crates, whose rotor was Pippi Longstocking spinning a pair of brooms, than this thing.
http://xkcd.com/375/
... and this is my favorite in-app purchase on the Citadel.
That's because they all just bought Photoshop and got their work done.
When developing a new technology, such as fuel cells with a high power yield, it's much more economical to start out in a small application like cellphones, to see how consumers would accept the idea and build the economies of scale it would take to crank out big-application (automotive, industrial) fuel cells cheaply.
Now all we need is for Chef Boyardee to start selling Sketti.
That's pretty much grounds for trademark and patent litigation right there.
This is probably because Q3 had to work on Voodoo cards, which had very limited texture sizes (256x256 I think? something dumb...) and so you couldn't atlas textures to the extent that you do on today's GPUs.
At the bottom of this article about how God-awful the interface is, I see an advertisement for Windows 8, the poster child for tablet-wannabe UI badness. "Develop for the Windows Store," it says, in white text against the same retina-searing shade of magenta I used to indicate transparency in all my game sprites because there's no way I could ever conceive of using that color. I thought to myself, how fitting that should appear on an article about top Linux distros following Windows into the abyss.
"Government regulations are nearly always outdated and too cautious."
Next up on Slashdot: "Polar ice caps melting slightly faster than expected! Quickly, to the Regulatron!"
Which is it guys?
Man, I remember Northgate keyboards -- "with the F-keys on the left, where they belong!" That was the original layout of the 84-key XT keyboard, and F-keys-on-the-left gained proponents because of the muscle memory of Lotus 1-2-3 users.
Good keyboards. Good machines. Northgate's last hurrah was some sort of nerfed desktop/laptop aimed at teenagers called the Hip-e. After that flopped (who saw that coming?) they went out of business.
I think I smell an IgNobel Prize in the offing...
Is this a troll? Not even Lisp implements bignums this way...