Strangely enough, that was my first question as well. If it comes down to saving a life or not, where will Jews & Muslims draw the line at the the uncleanliness of swine?
It's the only place where really interesting things are still happening on a regular basis. PDAs and wireless devices are today what PCs used to be in 1991 when the unwashed masses were just discovering that they could be entertaining and useful for everyone...
If the motion is that severaly limited, something simple would be a circuit that is completed by her putting a finger on top of two contacts -- maybe a millimeter away from where her finger is supposed to rest.
Or some lightweight convex surface with the contacts mounted underneath -- much lower resistance than a mechanical button or switch but less likely to go off accidentally. You could use the material from a small speaker dome and put conductive traces on the inside. Along with a cheap piezo buzzer and a 9V battery.
We almost died on a recent trip -- the value meals came with 300ml drinks. That's the size of cup you'd get for a small orange juice in the states. it definitely is an american thing -- none of us could even ration out the liquid to cover the whole meal and we wound up going back for second drinks.
Palms own version is... well, crap. It's just too limited when you compare it to Outlook.
Why in god's name would Palm want to compete on Microsoft's turf? Palm is not trying to make an all-singing, all-dancing desktop replacement that has 8 million features and nobody knows how to use them all. They are trying to make an APPLIANCE. You turn it on, and it works. You press a button and see your schedule. You click once and start a new to-do.
For those who WANT to get involved in advanced functions like linking contacts to to-dos and that sort of thing, the third market has Palm's blessing and support -- I'm a power user and make full use of DateBk5's extra features. But do I want to explain to my mom the difference between an untimed floating event and a to-do, or how to save views and use a split screen linking capability? No, I want to buy her an M500 and let her track her schedule & phone numbers with the occassional game of solitaire.
Palm is not trying to appeal to the MS Oulook users of the world -- they are selling to the Outlook Express users. Simple, one-task, gets it done.
Let Microsoft worry about producing PDAs that require 400 mhz processors, 32 megs of memory just for the OS, and last 4 hours on a battery charge. I'd rather trust my information to an appliance that is always ready to go and never dies in the middle of a meeting.
But isn't it limited by the dial-in? So you can't set up your Replay to record a show unless you do it a day ahead of time.
But with TiVoWeb you can literally hit the "recrd" button in your web browser and the TiVo 3,000 miles away will start recording because it is the server, not some intermediate system at Replay. or am I mixing up the way Replay works?
n most places in the U.S., if you are under 17, you can't get into R-rated movies without an adult.
That's not by law, though. Movie theaters are recommended by the ratings board not to allow minors into the movie, and most theaters comply because they are afraid of the liability if they were sued by angry parents.
The ratings board is more of a lawsuit protection policy than it is a legal standards board...
In other news, MegaGameCorp announced today that their planned Christmas 2002 release of "Child Porn: The First Person Shooter" will be delayed indefinitely...
You forget, the home computer WAS rapidly becoming ubiquitous, thanks to a little company in Cupertino, California. [apple.com] IBM laughed at the idea of a home computer in the late 70s, until Apple sold a few million units and Big Blue scurried around trying to get their sh!t together.
Well, it was becoming more popular. But without the price competition that the IBM clones brought to the market I don't think Apple and IBM would have ever made home PCs as affordable.
It would have happened eventually, but probably an extra decade would have intervened before the average family used a computer on a daily basis.
But yeah, it's all just speculation. Compaq's feat was amazing and certainly changed history -- whether another world would have featured a benevolent Steve Jobs ruling over the computer industry (and forcing us all to wear black) is anyone's guess...
Hey, what about presuming innocence until proving guilty? Surely Blizzard has to prove they copied code, not bnetd guys proving they didn't?
This isn't a criminal case, it is a civil lawsuit. There is no presumption on either side in a civil lawsuit, except that you better go in willing and able to prove your side better than the other guy.
Now copyright violations *can* be criminal, in which case the police would arrest someone (as they did with skylarov), and he is innocent until proven guilty.
As long as the bnetd guys can show they did a clean-room reverse-engineering feat, I doubt Blizzard can say much about it. I don't know how the bnetd guys would have gotten server code from Blizzard in the first place to pirate.
Imagine if 20 years ago, Compaq had not been allowed to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS. The worldwide economy would probably be a few trillion dollars poorer, and God only knows if we'd even have the WWW or ubiquitous home computers...
I wonder how (thinking of the market this is aimed at) they think they can get away with prices like that!
The market they're aimed at (research groups, expensive production facilities in corporations, potentially military and healthcare) are all used to paying this kind of money.
I was actually going to reply, but I can't imagine having a productive conversation with anyone who presupposes that other folks are "liars and idiots" rather than assuming they simply didn't understand what the other was saying...
I think its one of the coolest cities in the world. Not cheap, but you've got tons of free cultural activities every day, plus one of the largest museums on earth at your doorstep.
It's like NYC, you either love it or hate it. And I probably wouldn't want to raise kids there. But as a single person, how much fun is it to live in a major city?
A Dataplay disc is approximately 1 inch by 1 inch, while a minidisc is at least four times the area (approximately 2.75 inches by 2.5 inches), and you find the difference in physical area neglible?
they both fit in a pocket comfortably, so from a consumer standpoint they are of the same value -- pocketable. As opposed to a CD player which isn't. That's the only real contrast that a comnsumer cares about.
More specifically, I meant that the player with disc in it is likely to be pretty much the exact same size as a small minidisc player.
even MP3 players that use compactflash (a little bigger than dataplay) or smartmedia (which is smaller) are not noticably smaller than the smallest minidisc players. You still have to have space for the battery and stuff, so there is a physical limit to how small this total package can be. it's difficult to operate an eject button that is only four microns across.
And all of therse devices are, in the end, small enough to fit in the pocket and weight a few ounces, so in a consumer's eye, they are about the same portability.
is it cool that its a little smaller? Yes, but so is MP3 player media like smartmedia or compactflash that kids are familiar with and already have music for.
The important question is whether the size is going to sell it? no, because it's not smaller than other contemporary and established options, and size wasn't enough to drive the minidisc in the USA either.
there's a lot of inertia to overcome to get folks to switch music formats, MP3 has the inertia, dataplay doesn't. Neither of them is better than CD quality.
no better quality and no longer recording time? Let's see, the minidisc stores a maximum of 160Mb of data. The dataplay disc stores 500Mb.
Yes, dataplay has more storage than a MD, but so what? Data space doesn't necessarily equate better quality. Sony has been improving the ATRAC compression algorithms for a decade now. WMP sounds better at 100 kb/s than MP3 does at 200 kb/s because its simply better engineered.
Sony has 5-hour minidiscs/players available, which as far as far as I can tell will give you the same length as a dataplay (although I assume you'd hear the quality difference in that mode, but I don't have one of those).
And they let you record. People put up with CDs because they were SOOO much better than tapes and vinyl that they were willing to put up with lack of recording. But dataplay isn't offering any quality or cost advantage to offset the lack of recording, when plenty of small portable recordable formats are already available with similar quality and price.
I'm shocked that a troll account with such a low userid still hasn't been trollslapped or disabled.
I'm surprised that you can't handle someone disagreeing with you wihtout assuming they must be a troll. There's a whole wide world out there, my friend...
They're not any smaller than minidiscs, and they're a lot more fragile, a lot less flexible, a lot less powerful, more expensive, no better quality, and no longer recording time (oh, I meant to say NO recording time).
They are intended for digital cameras, PDA's and similar small, battery driven devices.
every 6-12 months you can buy a compactflash card with twice as much storage for the same price as before. Dataplay devices won't have 2 gig discs out in 18 months, but if you're using a compactflash camera/MP3 player, you'll probably be able to pick up a 2 gig CF card for $250.
as much as the general public likes convenience (which a fixed format offers), they're not going to be happy when their next-door neighbor has a 2 gig digital camera that shoots video and 5000x3000 pixel uncompressed stills, while their dataplay cameras are still stuck with low-res JPG because the format doesn't have any space.
yes, and all those actions would have been a lot less expensive if we had gone in with atomic weapons or carpet bombing. Instead, we used much more expensive precision weapons. That was the poster's point.
The money does not get rocketed into the sun, instead it sits in a billion different projects where it is no longer part of the economy./I.
How is it no longer a part of the economy? A billion different projects is a lot of jobs, a lot of desks, a lot of trucks, a lot of phone lines and all sorts of other goods and services that are provided by private corporations.
The money is spent like any other money, it goes onto corporate profit statements as surely as money from any private citizen does.
went back to the private sector... after how much the US has stolen in taxes over these many years, call it a one time tax cut... I would rather the money be in private hands than in public hands
Where do you think tax dollars usually go? Rocketed into the sun, never to be seen again?
The government always spends money on private goods and salaries, and then the private companies pay the salaries of employees, from which taxes are paid. Round and round it goes -- its not like government removes money from the cycle.
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Strangely enough, that was my first question as well. If it comes down to saving a life or not, where will Jews & Muslims draw the line at the the uncleanliness of swine?
It's the only place where really interesting things are still happening on a regular basis. PDAs and wireless devices are today what PCs used to be in 1991 when the unwashed masses were just discovering that they could be entertaining and useful for everyone...
If the motion is that severaly limited, something simple would be a circuit that is completed by her putting a finger on top of two contacts -- maybe a millimeter away from where her finger is supposed to rest.
Or some lightweight convex surface with the contacts mounted underneath -- much lower resistance than a mechanical button or switch but less likely to go off accidentally. You could use the material from a small speaker dome and put conductive traces on the inside. Along with a cheap piezo buzzer and a 9V battery.
We almost died on a recent trip -- the value meals came with 300ml drinks. That's the size of cup you'd get for a small orange juice in the states. it definitely is an american thing -- none of us could even ration out the liquid to cover the whole meal and we wound up going back for second drinks.
will be great fun once the packet-sniffers are available...
Palms own version is ... well, crap. It's just too limited when you compare it to Outlook.
Why in god's name would Palm want to compete on Microsoft's turf? Palm is not trying to make an all-singing, all-dancing desktop replacement that has 8 million features and nobody knows how to use them all. They are trying to make an APPLIANCE. You turn it on, and it works. You press a button and see your schedule. You click once and start a new to-do.
For those who WANT to get involved in advanced functions like linking contacts to to-dos and that sort of thing, the third market has Palm's blessing and support -- I'm a power user and make full use of DateBk5's extra features. But do I want to explain to my mom the difference between an untimed floating event and a to-do, or how to save views and use a split screen linking capability? No, I want to buy her an M500 and let her track her schedule & phone numbers with the occassional game of solitaire.
Palm is not trying to appeal to the MS Oulook users of the world -- they are selling to the Outlook Express users. Simple, one-task, gets it done.
Let Microsoft worry about producing PDAs that require 400 mhz processors, 32 megs of memory just for the OS, and last 4 hours on a battery charge. I'd rather trust my information to an appliance that is always ready to go and never dies in the middle of a meeting.
I just don't get it I guess, it just seems like there are already so many standards.
That's the great thing about standards -- there's so many to choose from!
...and the computer said "Let there be light", and there was light...
But isn't it limited by the dial-in? So you can't set up your Replay to record a show unless you do it a day ahead of time.
But with TiVoWeb you can literally hit the "recrd" button in your web browser and the TiVo 3,000 miles away will start recording because it is the server, not some intermediate system at Replay. or am I mixing up the way Replay works?
n most places in the U.S., if you are under 17, you can't get into R-rated movies without an adult.
That's not by law, though. Movie theaters are recommended by the ratings board not to allow minors into the movie, and most theaters comply because they are afraid of the liability if they were sued by angry parents.
The ratings board is more of a lawsuit protection policy than it is a legal standards board...
In other news, MegaGameCorp announced today that their planned Christmas 2002 release of "Child Porn: The First Person Shooter" will be delayed indefinitely...
You forget, the home computer WAS rapidly becoming ubiquitous, thanks to a little company in Cupertino, California. [apple.com] IBM laughed at the idea of a home computer in the late 70s, until Apple sold a few million units and Big Blue scurried around trying to get their sh!t together.
Well, it was becoming more popular. But without the price competition that the IBM clones brought to the market I don't think Apple and IBM would have ever made home PCs as affordable.
It would have happened eventually, but probably an extra decade would have intervened before the average family used a computer on a daily basis.
But yeah, it's all just speculation. Compaq's feat was amazing and certainly changed history -- whether another world would have featured a benevolent Steve Jobs ruling over the computer industry (and forcing us all to wear black) is anyone's guess...
Hey, what about presuming innocence until proving guilty? Surely Blizzard has to prove they copied code, not bnetd guys proving they didn't?
This isn't a criminal case, it is a civil lawsuit. There is no presumption on either side in a civil lawsuit, except that you better go in willing and able to prove your side better than the other guy.
Now copyright violations *can* be criminal, in which case the police would arrest someone (as they did with skylarov), and he is innocent until proven guilty.
As long as the bnetd guys can show they did a clean-room reverse-engineering feat, I doubt Blizzard can say much about it. I don't know how the bnetd guys would have gotten server code from Blizzard in the first place to pirate.
Imagine if 20 years ago, Compaq had not been allowed to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS. The worldwide economy would probably be a few trillion dollars poorer, and God only knows if we'd even have the WWW or ubiquitous home computers...
I wonder how (thinking of the market this is aimed at) they think they can get away with prices like that!
The market they're aimed at (research groups, expensive production facilities in corporations, potentially military and healthcare) are all used to paying this kind of money.
LOL :)
Why should _we_ be paying a recycle fee if the machines are not going to be recycled?
:)
Well, sooner or later it will be. those computer components will just take a lot longer to break down than you or I will
I was actually going to reply, but I can't imagine having a productive conversation with anyone who presupposes that other folks are "liars and idiots" rather than assuming they simply didn't understand what the other was saying...
I think its one of the coolest cities in the world. Not cheap, but you've got tons of free cultural activities every day, plus one of the largest museums on earth at your doorstep.
It's like NYC, you either love it or hate it. And I probably wouldn't want to raise kids there. But as a single person, how much fun is it to live in a major city?
A Dataplay disc is approximately 1 inch by 1 inch, while a minidisc is at least four times the area (approximately 2.75 inches by 2.5 inches), and you find the difference in physical area neglible?
they both fit in a pocket comfortably, so from a consumer standpoint they are of the same value -- pocketable. As opposed to a CD player which isn't. That's the only real contrast that a comnsumer cares about.
More specifically, I meant that the player with disc in it is likely to be pretty much the exact same size as a small minidisc player.
even MP3 players that use compactflash (a little bigger than dataplay) or smartmedia (which is smaller) are not noticably smaller than the smallest minidisc players. You still have to have space for the battery and stuff, so there is a physical limit to how small this total package can be. it's difficult to operate an eject button that is only four microns across.
And all of therse devices are, in the end, small enough to fit in the pocket and weight a few ounces, so in a consumer's eye, they are about the same portability.
is it cool that its a little smaller? Yes, but so is MP3 player media like smartmedia or compactflash that kids are familiar with and already have music for.
The important question is whether the size is going to sell it? no, because it's not smaller than other contemporary and established options, and size wasn't enough to drive the minidisc in the USA either.
there's a lot of inertia to overcome to get folks to switch music formats, MP3 has the inertia, dataplay doesn't. Neither of them is better than CD quality.
no better quality and no longer recording time? Let's see, the minidisc stores a maximum of 160Mb of data. The dataplay disc stores 500Mb.
Yes, dataplay has more storage than a MD, but so what? Data space doesn't necessarily equate better quality. Sony has been improving the ATRAC compression algorithms for a decade now. WMP sounds better at 100 kb/s than MP3 does at 200 kb/s because its simply better engineered.
Sony has 5-hour minidiscs/players available, which as far as far as I can tell will give you the same length as a dataplay (although I assume you'd hear the quality difference in that mode, but I don't have one of those).
And they let you record. People put up with CDs because they were SOOO much better than tapes and vinyl that they were willing to put up with lack of recording. But dataplay isn't offering any quality or cost advantage to offset the lack of recording, when plenty of small portable recordable formats are already available with similar quality and price.
I'm shocked that a troll account with such a low userid still hasn't been trollslapped or disabled.
I'm surprised that you can't handle someone disagreeing with you wihtout assuming they must be a troll. There's a whole wide world out there, my friend...
scenes like that are a large part of the reason we use $100k missiles instead of $5000 bombs post-vietnam, yes.
Dataplay discs are VERY small.
They're not any smaller than minidiscs, and they're a lot more fragile, a lot less flexible, a lot less powerful, more expensive, no better quality, and no longer recording time (oh, I meant to say NO recording time).
They are intended for digital cameras, PDA's and similar small, battery driven devices.
every 6-12 months you can buy a compactflash card with twice as much storage for the same price as before. Dataplay devices won't have 2 gig discs out in 18 months, but if you're using a compactflash camera/MP3 player, you'll probably be able to pick up a 2 gig CF card for $250.
as much as the general public likes convenience (which a fixed format offers), they're not going to be happy when their next-door neighbor has a 2 gig digital camera that shoots video and 5000x3000 pixel uncompressed stills, while their dataplay cameras are still stuck with low-res JPG because the format doesn't have any space.
yes, and all those actions would have been a lot less expensive if we had gone in with atomic weapons or carpet bombing. Instead, we used much more expensive precision weapons. That was the poster's point.
The money does not get rocketed into the sun, instead it sits in a billion different projects where it is no longer part of the economy. /I.
How is it no longer a part of the economy? A billion different projects is a lot of jobs, a lot of desks, a lot of trucks, a lot of phone lines and all sorts of other goods and services that are provided by private corporations.
The money is spent like any other money, it goes onto corporate profit statements as surely as money from any private citizen does.
went back to the private sector... after how much the US has stolen in taxes over these many years, call it a one time tax cut... I would rather the money be in private hands than in public hands
Where do you think tax dollars usually go? Rocketed into the sun, never to be seen again?
The government always spends money on private goods and salaries, and then the private companies pay the salaries of employees, from which taxes are paid. Round and round it goes -- its not like government removes money from the cycle.