He says that public APIs (COM-like interfaces for.NET, I would guess) are better than full OSS as you get the 'benefit' of many developers, and the developers get the 'benefit' of being able to keep the code private, as he believes in the proprietary software market over OSS.
Of course we can all disagree with him on that too, but misquoting him doesn't look professional!
PS: And please run your submissions through a spellchecker before publishing.
Seriously, having lived in two countries with free/80% subsidised health for all, this question really does seem to be an echo of that Python sketch
Channel 4 is not government owned!
on
The Pledge
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· Score: 1
You said:
Government owned television stations, such as Channel 4
Channel 4 and FilmFour, the film-making branch, are independant companies, although they might indirectly attract funding through the Arts Council for certain films.
Also, I'd hardly rate 4 Weddings as not designed to make money and counterculture...
In fact, many of the Japanese games, are non-zero sum. Karaoke, of course, where even tone-deaf people like me can have a great laugh, arcades with Dance Dance Revolution where a score is kept, but it's not really the point, to the newer versions based around Para-Para (think of John Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever!) which are just so much fun to do in groups.
Two of my colleagues flew from Scotland to whereever in the US on a horrendously expensive XP (eXcessively Priced?) training course and managed to lose a top of the range DVD portable in a taxi somewhere.
Surely I can't be the only Brit who thought of getting a sex toy delivered mail-order when seeing the phrase package fanny? Here, of course, a fanny is a girl's front bottom, as it were.
I could correct most of the factual errors above, but instead here's the web site that will tell you all http://www.bluematter.com/
I believe the underlying codec is AAC, as Universal prefer it to MP3.
My take, based on input so far
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
Asuuming it's not just a load of overblown hype...
It's most likely some kind of personal transport, given the background and the hints in the story. There's definitely a hint that it's some kind of free movement device, so it doesn't need an infrastructure, so no train track needed. It's got to be something stable, so some kind of motorised scooter or rollerblades are not going to sweep all before it as they would be difficult to keep balanced, especially with even just a little luggage.
Now, people seem to be keen on the flying machine part, but I have a few major reservations. First, safety: ignoring design issues about keeping the thing stable, what about issues like fuel tank protection, noise levels, pilot qualification (I suppose that comes under the "possibly illegal"clause), etc? Next, power itself: is there really any engines efficient enough to sustain flight compared to current personal transport like a scooter - 100mpg at 30mph? Finally, power source: batteries are too heavy, so perhaps IT would use biomass fuel?
Now, for a bit of sci-fi speculation. If it really used something like cold fusion, water engines, anti-grav, etc, why design a whole new mode of transport? Surely it would be better and more profitable to licence the design for retrofit into existing vehicles by existing manufacturers? Would there be at least some leaking of information of the viability of this technology?
My conclusion, given the pricepoint: some form of foldable/collapsable motorised (perhaps biomass?) one or two-person motorbike scooter-type thing with weather protection. However, BMW or Mercedes had something similar to this 10 years ago with conventional power and a rigid roll-bar and auto-deploying stabilisers, and of course 15 years ago Clive Sinclair lost his fortune and his credibility when he came out with the C5...
Before you all leap on this comment, I'll add "on this machine?"
AFAIK, the major benefit is optimising reboot time if the OS unexpectedly terminates, but surely a self-contained IA should not be expected to crash? And surely the average customer won't know what that is anyway, which probably explains why this feature is glossed over on their web site.
Perhaps it might be to recover from the user hitting the power switch at random, but again an applicance like this shouldn't have that much background processing to make the HD update at random times. I also notice there's no mention of HD space, but the press release does mention there's 10Mb of online space included too, which suggests to me there might be no directly accessible local storage at all for the user.
Also, with a Trinitron rather than a TFT, and no touchscreen, it's going to need a lot of space to use it. I don't think this is going to go anywhere - too simplistic for the expert user; for novice Windows/AOL market, just about all the automatic stuff can be emulated with Scheduler and a Power Management BIOS; and for people with no Internet connection, I think it's too expensive, and a proper computer is a better alternative.
A fuzzy expert system would be an easy way to build the base of an "intelligent" house controller, by establishing simple variables and rules (a la "if KITCHEN-LIGHT-LEVEL is LOW then KITCHEN-LIGHT is ON-FULL" etc). This is easy to establish initially, and gives you an "out of box" working system. Some sort of feedback technique (a la back-propagation, but modified to fit what you're trying to accomplish) can be used then with the "good/bad" remote mentioned above. Basically, you have two things you can tweak iteratively when "training" the system in this kind of a case. You could lower the weight that certain rules have, or you can modify fuzzy variable definitions (what exactly is a "LOW" LIGHT-LEVEL? maybe it's even specifically, what is a LOW KITCHEN-LIGHT-LEVEL?).
How could you teach the system to tell the difference between, say, just popping down for an orange juice at 5am, so keep the lighting low, and waking at 5am for an early flight, etc, so get the lights on full, or getting up for that early flight but having a bugger of a hangover, so keep the lights low.
Gaming cheats like "Up, Up, Down, Down..." are techno-folklore,
Admittedly, I never owned a SNES, but I'd never heard of this universal cheat code until this series of articles.
Other generations told war stories or bragged about their sexual exploits
Umm, I don't think I'd like to go drinking with someone drooling over his/her latest console game. Give me sex any day!
A new report by PC Data says that 35% of Net users are going to buy console or PC console games this Christmas
I find nothing surprising in that figure. It's like 35% of car owners saying they're going to buy an air freshener.
"Solitaire," "Free Cell" and similiar bundled games are the most frequently played of all online and offline games. The top PC game categories are strategy real-time/turn-based, world building, and flight simulation.
This is now making no sense. I'm unaware of online Solitaire and Free Cell (or any other bundled PC game), and how does strategy real-time/turn-based become the top category when the previous sentence mentioned solo games?
Has JK been indulging in the Christmas spirits just a little too heavily before posting?
They're charging $49.95 for it (upgrade price I presume?) yet earlier today we had something about making BeOS (which is free to download) Open Source. It seems to be a contradiction to me: BeOS, let's make it more Free; yet for the AmigaOS we get a shopping list of what you can buy for it.
Why is it OK for Amiga to charge money for things when the usual cry here is for more free/Free stuff?
There are few studies of the effects of gaming, but some traits are increasingly obvious: gamers are often independent, strategic-thinkers and problem solvers.
To whom? The studies? What studies? Cite please!
Gaming has affected almost everyone who grew up with it -- which is to say, just about half of the country.
Ignoring the lack of grammar, half a century? How did games in the 1950s differ from games in, say the 1850s?
We know something about gamers. They're quick decision-makers, sometimes to the point of impulsiveness.
Again, cite please, otherwise it just seems you are pulling "facts" out of your arse. You earlier said they were problem solvers and strategic thinkers. Doesn't this contradict impulsiveness?
We know that gamers are the new prophets and story-tellers of society
How do we know that? Please enlighten us about what story an FPS deathmatch player is telling. Or did you mean a Sim player? Or an MMORPG? Or are you just randomly choosing anything that might back up your point, assuming you have a point.
So gamers are important. It seems clear that the future is in their hands.
Are they? Is it? Randomly collecting a few half-truths and out-of-context opinions, mixed up with some verbal diahorrea does not an argument make.
...from two perspectives. First, the tired old "get a life" one, get away from the computer screen and get out and live a bit more.
Second, and more importantly, why not cut back on rampant consumerism and just ask for small presents, donate money to charity, hell, tell your friends you want a receipt from their favourite charity as a prezzie. Most of the people here, I would imagine, could buy themselves most of the presents straight off (I just got a 17" TFT) so why not break away from spend, spend, spend, and instead win, win, win with it being better to give than to receive?
So this is nice timing, as I could have given you some insight into how it really looks.
However, they saw my name, and I got a "No gaijins due to NDA!" knockback, even though I'm a Japanese resident and a full employee of the Nintendo partner company.
I followed the ZD links at the bottom to this page and it waxes lyrical about the ability to pull every phone number off a web site. Replace phone number with email address, and it seems a bit worrying. Couple with that the SQL programmability, and we could be looking at something that can auto-harvest de-anti-SPAMmed addresses, perhaps?
*sigh* not even the mouse works?
on
Linux Sin Demo
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· Score: 1
I'd love to see more games for Linux (and of course more newer games) but it's really depressing that the comment about the mouse not working is the first thing everyone (especially the anti-Linux zealots) will see.
I could have understood if it had been a problem with an obscure or out of date graphics card driver, but the mouse seems such a fundamentally simple, integral part of the system that for it not to work seems crazy.
(I'd try SiN out myself, but it's a bit big to download over my modem)
As someone who doesn't really care about OSes or software manufacturers too much, just as long as the damn thing works, I feel pitching it as Linux Rules/M$ Sucks is not a good way to go. IMX, though, Outlook is a dreadfully overdesigned client, but Outlook Express is too simplistic (I only fire up OE at work when I want to use the Japanese IME), and then of course there's the scope for VB virii, and M$'s total disregard for nettiquette - top posting in replies, HTML to Usenet, inability to thread properly, etc, etc. The last two companies I've worked for had POP3 hosts (one NT, one Solaris) and we choose whatever we want to read mail - I'm a Forte Agent man myself.
Much better than any proprietary system, and as for the calendar/scheduling systems everyone is talking about here, do people *really* use them?
I filled my buzzword bingo card by the end of the first paragraph.
Can anyone please tell me what this article is about? It seemed like yet another incoherent babble about vague things that seem to contradict earlier articles by JK on the same subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course we can all disagree with him on that too, but misquoting him doesn't look professional!
PS: And please run your submissions through a spellchecker before publishing.
Seriously, having lived in two countries with free/80% subsidised health for all, this question really does seem to be an echo of that Python sketch
Government owned television stations, such as Channel 4
Channel 4 and FilmFour, the film-making branch, are independant companies, although they might indirectly attract funding through the Arts Council for certain films.
Also, I'd hardly rate 4 Weddings as not designed to make money and counterculture...
In fact, many of the Japanese games, are non-zero sum. Karaoke, of course, where even tone-deaf people like me can have a great laugh, arcades with Dance Dance Revolution where a score is kept, but it's not really the point, to the newer versions based around Para-Para (think of John Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever!) which are just so much fun to do in groups.
So, in my opinion, XP is a waste of money ;-)
Here's my next phone complete with Konami's Golf, and my ex-boss has joined Digital Bridges to design the games for these (and other) phones.
Surely I can't be the only Brit who thought of getting a sex toy delivered mail-order when seeing the phrase package fanny? Here, of course, a fanny is a girl's front bottom, as it were.
He is charged with misuse of computer system information, a felony.
As IANAL, I won't comment on whether or not the charge will stick.
Imagining just one of them is bad enough. 'Scuse me whilst I go wash out my brain with soap and water.
I believe the underlying codec is AAC, as Universal prefer it to MP3.
Asuuming it's not just a load of overblown hype...
It's most likely some kind of personal transport, given the background and the hints in the story. There's definitely a hint that it's some kind of free movement device, so it doesn't need an infrastructure, so no train track needed. It's got to be something stable, so some kind of motorised scooter or rollerblades are not going to sweep all before it as they would be difficult to keep balanced, especially with even just a little luggage.
Now, people seem to be keen on the flying machine part, but I have a few major reservations. First, safety: ignoring design issues about keeping the thing stable, what about issues like fuel tank protection, noise levels, pilot qualification (I suppose that comes under the "possibly illegal"clause), etc? Next, power itself: is there really any engines efficient enough to sustain flight compared to current personal transport like a scooter - 100mpg at 30mph? Finally, power source: batteries are too heavy, so perhaps IT would use biomass fuel?
Now, for a bit of sci-fi speculation. If it really used something like cold fusion, water engines, anti-grav, etc, why design a whole new mode of transport? Surely it would be better and more profitable to licence the design for retrofit into existing vehicles by existing manufacturers? Would there be at least some leaking of information of the viability of this technology?
My conclusion, given the pricepoint: some form of foldable/collapsable motorised (perhaps biomass?) one or two-person motorbike scooter-type thing with weather protection. However, BMW or Mercedes had something similar to this 10 years ago with conventional power and a rigid roll-bar and auto-deploying stabilisers, and of course 15 years ago Clive Sinclair lost his fortune and his credibility when he came out with the C5...
AFAIK, the major benefit is optimising reboot time if the OS unexpectedly terminates, but surely a self-contained IA should not be expected to crash? And surely the average customer won't know what that is anyway, which probably explains why this feature is glossed over on their web site.
Perhaps it might be to recover from the user hitting the power switch at random, but again an applicance like this shouldn't have that much background processing to make the HD update at random times. I also notice there's no mention of HD space, but the press release does mention there's 10Mb of online space included too, which suggests to me there might be no directly accessible local storage at all for the user.
Also, with a Trinitron rather than a TFT, and no touchscreen, it's going to need a lot of space to use it. I don't think this is going to go anywhere - too simplistic for the expert user; for novice Windows/AOL market, just about all the automatic stuff can be emulated with Scheduler and a Power Management BIOS; and for people with no Internet connection, I think it's too expensive, and a proper computer is a better alternative.
Well, it gave me a bit of a giggle anyway.
How could you teach the system to tell the difference between, say, just popping down for an orange juice at 5am, so keep the lighting low, and waking at 5am for an early flight, etc, so get the lights on full, or getting up for that early flight but having a bugger of a hangover, so keep the lights low.
NNs are a solution looking for a problem here.
Admittedly, I never owned a SNES, but I'd never heard of this universal cheat code until this series of articles.
Other generations told war stories or bragged about their sexual exploits
Umm, I don't think I'd like to go drinking with someone drooling over his/her latest console game. Give me sex any day!
A new report by PC Data says that 35% of Net users are going to buy console or PC console games this Christmas
I find nothing surprising in that figure. It's like 35% of car owners saying they're going to buy an air freshener.
"Solitaire," "Free Cell" and similiar bundled games are the most frequently played of all online and offline games. The top PC game categories are strategy real-time/turn-based, world building, and flight simulation.
This is now making no sense. I'm unaware of online Solitaire and Free Cell (or any other bundled PC game), and how does strategy real-time/turn-based become the top category when the previous sentence mentioned solo games?
Has JK been indulging in the Christmas spirits just a little too heavily before posting?
Why is it OK for Amiga to charge money for things when the usual cry here is for more free/Free stuff?
There are few studies of the effects of gaming, but some traits are increasingly obvious: gamers are often independent, strategic-thinkers and problem solvers.
To whom? The studies? What studies? Cite please!
Gaming has affected almost everyone who grew up with it -- which is to say, just about half of the country.
Ignoring the lack of grammar, half a century? How did games in the 1950s differ from games in, say the 1850s?
We know something about gamers. They're quick decision-makers, sometimes to the point of impulsiveness.
Again, cite please, otherwise it just seems you are pulling "facts" out of your arse. You earlier said they were problem solvers and strategic thinkers. Doesn't this contradict impulsiveness?
We know that gamers are the new prophets and story-tellers of society
How do we know that? Please enlighten us about what story an FPS deathmatch player is telling. Or did you mean a Sim player? Or an MMORPG? Or are you just randomly choosing anything that might back up your point, assuming you have a point.
So gamers are important. It seems clear that the future is in their hands.
Are they? Is it? Randomly collecting a few half-truths and out-of-context opinions, mixed up with some verbal diahorrea does not an argument make.
...from two perspectives. First, the tired old "get a life" one, get away from the computer screen and get out and live a bit more.
Second, and more importantly, why not cut back on rampant consumerism and just ask for small presents, donate money to charity, hell, tell your friends you want a receipt from their favourite charity as a prezzie. Most of the people here, I would imagine, could buy themselves most of the presents straight off (I just got a 17" TFT) so why not break away from spend, spend, spend, and instead win, win, win with it being better to give than to receive?
However, they saw my name, and I got a "No gaijins due to NDA!" knockback, even though I'm a Japanese resident and a full employee of the Nintendo partner company.
Arse
I followed the ZD links at the bottom to this page and it waxes lyrical about the ability to pull every phone number off a web site. Replace phone number with email address, and it seems a bit worrying. Couple with that the SQL programmability, and we could be looking at something that can auto-harvest de-anti-SPAMmed addresses, perhaps?
I'd love to see more games for Linux (and of course more newer games) but it's really depressing that the comment about the mouse not working is the first thing everyone (especially the anti-Linux zealots) will see.
I could have understood if it had been a problem with an obscure or out of date graphics card driver, but the mouse seems such a fundamentally simple, integral part of the system that for it not to work seems crazy.
(I'd try SiN out myself, but it's a bit big to download over my modem)
The Slashdot article tells us the machine is "priceless". The Sunday Times says it is valued at UKP100,000.
*insert funny MasterCard parody here*
As someone who doesn't really care about OSes or software manufacturers too much, just as long as the damn thing works, I feel pitching it as Linux Rules/M$ Sucks is not a good way to go. IMX, though, Outlook is a dreadfully overdesigned client, but Outlook Express is too simplistic (I only fire up OE at work when I want to use the Japanese IME), and then of course there's the scope for VB virii, and M$'s total disregard for nettiquette - top posting in replies, HTML to Usenet, inability to thread properly, etc, etc. The last two companies I've worked for had POP3 hosts (one NT, one Solaris) and we choose whatever we want to read mail - I'm a Forte Agent man myself.
Much better than any proprietary system, and as for the calendar/scheduling systems everyone is talking about here, do people *really* use them?
...will someone set up http://www.koalase.cx as a new link for the slashdot trolls?
Can anyone please tell me what this article is about? It seemed like yet another incoherent babble about vague things that seem to contradict earlier articles by JK on the same subject.