No! No damn it no! I'm trying to think of the best way to formulate this response, but I can't so I'll just have to stick with this cheesy opening. Companies have been showing off useless junk like this since 1998. Why on god's earth would I want my computer to tell me whose calling me on my cell phone. I've got caller ID for that. But you say, "Sullust, that might not be usefull, but surely they can think of some really cool use for it." That's the problem though, they can't.
Bluetooth has been around for about 3 years now and nobody uses it. Why you may ask? Because it has no practical use. I recall a demo Bill Gates did many years ago just before Win2K was coming out where he selected a bunch of songs from Windows Media Player and it sent them to his car via 802.11 and then somebody got in the car, turned it on, and be damned if they weren't playing those songs. Wasn't that neat! Funny though, 2+ years latter and me using Windows XP, yet I still can't do that. Why? Because it's easier to just burn my mp3's onto a music cd, or (if i want lots of tunes) get a car mp3 player. You can buy these now, I know of no products that I can beam songs too and play (other than installing a PC in my car... no thanks).
Scott McNealy (or however you spell his name) from Sun does this kind of stuff all the time too, a mythical refrigerator with a computer in it and a barcode scanner (which I can't buy) will scan all the stuff in my fridge and put what I need on the shopping list of my Palm. WOW! That is so freakin' cool! But a year and a half later, I can do no such thing. Again, why? Because it's butt-loads cheaper and easier to... wait for it... open the damn door and look! How many bar code readers is it going to take to read ALL the UPC's in my fridge, or worse yet, am I going to have to point all the UPCs at one or five readers... thanks anyway, I'll just open the door.
The point of this now rantish response is to say that 0.1% of these gee whiz tech demos are going to turn into products. Just because Steve Jobs is on stage doesn't mean it isn't vapor ware. The point is to make you think "just how many streets ahead Apple are" and make you also think "This is all stuff that should exist under Windows, but doesn't." Guess what, it doesn't exist on a Mac either. Senior Jobs just got one of his engineers to make a BlueTooth cellphone that could talk with his address book thingy. I doubt Nokia is going to.
Until Jobs, Gates, or Nealy can get on stage and say "This is the Nokia 3425, Ford Tunester, and Kenmore Neat-n-Shit and you can go to the store and buy them right now." These demo's are just Marketing/PR to make all the geeks love them.
"This movie is going to suck, I know it's going to suck. I will not enjoy this movie. Huh? Oh yes, here is my $7 to see a movie that I know for a fact will suck."
The holders of battlebots.org are offering to sell the domain name to battlebots inc. for $5962 as compensation for the effort they've put into building the name of battlebots.org, potential loss of customers, etc...
Now battlebots inc. is going to sue them. It probably cost more than $6K just to get the restraining order. It seems as if Battlebots Inc. is trying to somehow defend the right of companies who own trademarks in one industry to enforce those trademarks in other completely unrelated industries. In other words, they're being silly.
Can they honestly believe that it makes sense to sue for a domain name when you could just buy the damn thing for $6000?
As an amateur China scholar (at the University level at least), I can at the least point you to a few good books. First I'll say that for the most part the urban Chinese are not unhappy. What they are is quiet. The ones who are unhappy are loud. Thats why it seems like everyone there hates communism. I would guess that the number of people there who dislike the Chinese government is approximately the same as the number of peole in America who hate the American government. The Chinese are quite nationalistic, and for the most part feel that certain sacrifices (like freedom of information) are necessary for the betterment of China. You need only look at the Great Leap Forward or especially the cultural revolution to see this. Now, as for the books, I would highly recommend (in order or worth)
The China Reader edited by Orville Schell and David Shambaugh. Its a collection of scholarly articals about various modern China subjects (its not right or left wing propoganda [for the most part]).
Governing China by Kenneth Lieberthal. Its part history, part discussion of culture as it relates to China from the Nationalist era (around 1920-1949) through the present.
The previous two were basically textbooks, the final one is an autobiography of the Cultural Revolution titeled Born Red by Gao Yuan. Its discussion of the Cultural Revolution gives great insight into both the urban chinese and the chinese peasantry and how easily they can be manipulated into following mass campaigns.
In order to understand modern China's culture (not necesserily their economy), you really have to understand Mao. I can't say that I do as Mao is a very confusing man whose motives are often difficult to discerne. However, that is certainly the place to start.
Anyway, hope you check out at least one of the books, the Lieberthal book is the only one thats a bit heady, the other two are pretty easy reads.
Wasn't there a law passed not long ago (it may have been the DMCA, I'm not sure), that said something about publishers having the right to force negative reviews of sites? Granted this is an "objective" benchmark (I know theres no such thing as an objective benchmark), but with a good enough lawyer, I would think MS would have a legitemate case.
At what point to you go to the effort of installing Linux and making sure it boots and all of that, and NOT test ethernet. Now, perhaps their special ethernet cards require specail modules, but that would seem to say that they DON'T work with Linux, at least yet. Just try each module, does one of them work, theres the compatability.
However, since they have overlooked this, I will be happy to test it for them, simply send me a G4 powerbook and I'll test every ethernet module in existince.
Okay, let me get this straight. You've managed to learn and use Linux (I assume), and yet you bemoan the "complexity" of two, sometimes even (got forbid) THREE mouse buttons. I mean really... next thing you know, keyboards will have two extra keys that will make menus pop up, sometimes you're even required to use these keys in combination with OTHER keys in order to perform some action. I mean, when will it stop.
I therefore propose this, computers which are far too complex as it is, should be reduced to a single unit with no buttons, no mouse, and no monitor. It will be absolutely functionless, but perfectly simple. I call this fabulous new creation "The Brick!" I already have a pattent on it in the works.
I realize the novelty and humor in all of this, but what are the real practical applications? I'm trying to think of one, and simply can't. This certainly doesn't seem like the best way to deliver a liquid in space.
Perhaps the device could be tweaked to only produce, say, a millileter of water. That *might* be a use for it, but I don't know if precise measuring of liquid is that much of an issue in space.
The article didn't really list any, so does anyone else have any ideas on practical uses for this three and a half years of scientific effort.
I'll go ahead and say that I'm in Mississippi which is not known for its addoption of new technology (they are just now making braodband ubiquitous in the state's capital), but none the less I can't help but notice that a good number of the arcades in Jackson (the captial) and some other places I've visited are either closing or haven't bought a new machine since Tekken 3. It seems hard to imagine how an arcade can compete with PC and console machines that can produce close to or better graphics and game play, and cost a WHOLE lot less. There is the atmosphere and all that, but at 50 cents a pop, it had better be some damn good atmosphere.
Now, I'd be interested to know how small to medium arcades are doing, I only have my one area to see, but the best I can tell is their dropping like flies.
The point of all this is to say that perhaps arcades aren't the best places to bet your brand new company on. Then again, perhaps this could mark a new beginning for arcades. The only real draw to an arcade in the first place was to play a game that looked better and was more fun than anything you could have at home. If they could get this massively muliplayer enough, in a way that PCs and regular dial=ups simply couldn't, perhaps that part of arcades could be regained. If its nothing more than 32 people in a room shooting at each other, then this is more likely something that I could just as easily do at home in my underwear, rather than going to the mall and spending $10 on a couple hours of game play.
Really? Whose your DSL providor? I'm shopping around and what you mentioned sounded pretty nice. As far as netdoor's over-all quality, the little that I used them I didn't have a problem. I never had their DSL, but I've got a good friend whose one of their techs and he related all of the delightfull stories of how bellsouth would "accidentally" disconnect netdoor from DSL access... WOOPS!
What I'm curious about, is why they did this so baltantly. They could have been much more subtle, for example: A local ISP (Netdoor) where I live leases bandwidth from BellSouth for DSL access. BellSouth also offers DSL access via the BellSouth ISP. Well, because they don't rape Netdoor, it's less profitable to have Netdoor provide access the DSL. So what does BellSouth do? They simply make DSL through Netdoor horrible. Periodic outages and (relative to BellSouth DSL) slow connections. Therefore Netdoor's DSL subscriber base is slowly switching to the more expensive BellSouth.
While it isn't extreemly subtle, most end users wouldn't notice, and its certainly not something that would get posted on Slashdot. So why would AOL/TimeWarner (who we assume have at least one or two smart people in their employment) opt for the heavy handed approach rather than the much more sneaky one.
After all, being sneaky is what US businesses are all about!
If this is legal in the first place, then why didn't they go ahead and require 99.9999% of all revenue, and the first born children of all ISP employees? It's not like requiring 75/25% of revenue is subtle, so why not just go all out?
Okay, mabey you folks can give me some help here. I'm running a Celeron 400 w/ 128 megs of ram and a TNT vid card. Granted thats not exactly a smokin' rig, but I can get 30 fps in Q3 in medium detail and 40 fps in UT on high detail. I was getting (litteraly).5 fps on the MENU in Daikatana. I got something like.3 in the actual game. This just doesn't seem right. Any suggestions? I didn't see an option anywhere in there to turn OpenGL on or off. I was running it at 640x480 with every detail at its lowest.
Re:Is this a good idea?
on
Laptop Exams?
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· Score: 1
To give another spin on that, most of these folks who complain about having to memorize "useless stuff" are "geeks." Well suppose some prof comes along and says "You can use the net to for you C++ test." This is going to create a class which is very adept at searching the net for code, but who don't have it memorized. In effect, some very slow coders. There are simply some things which HAVE to be memorized.
Lucas Arts has always managed to take a good idea and improve it. Dark Forces may have been a Doom clone, but it was the first decent game I ever played that allowed you to jump and look around. Then of course you've got they're GREAT flight sims (well, sort of flight sims...). This sounds like classic Lucas: take an idea which works, and (hopefully) improve it. I personally think they should ditch the Star Wars thing though, I want my Sam & Max persistant world RPG!!!
I'll trust your numbers on that (actually I forgott about ISDN being intended to carry voice). I was basing that on the face that I never get less than 300 Kbps off my shared T1 and when I use Dailpad.com it STILL sounds cruddy...
I think a bigger concern is what is this going to do to the existing internet infrastructure. If we all start abandoning the existing phone lines and start using up our big fat DSL bandwidth to make phone calls, I don't think the net could handle that. I'll admit I don't know the numbers but lets say an internet phone call uses 500Kbps and every person in America averages 2 phone calls a day, thats 350,000 gigabits of necessary bandwidth just to handle the phone calls (and thats assuming they're polite enough to spread those phone calls out evenly!), not to mention the movies and music on demand we'll all be having. I realize that all of that is a long way off, but its not that long.
Slashdot Mirror
No! No damn it no! I'm trying to think of the best way to formulate this response, but I can't so I'll just have to stick with this cheesy opening. Companies have been showing off useless junk like this since 1998. Why on god's earth would I want my computer to tell me whose calling me on my cell phone. I've got caller ID for that. But you say, "Sullust, that might not be usefull, but surely they can think of some really cool use for it." That's the problem though, they can't.
Bluetooth has been around for about 3 years now and nobody uses it. Why you may ask? Because it has no practical use. I recall a demo Bill Gates did many years ago just before Win2K was coming out where he selected a bunch of songs from Windows Media Player and it sent them to his car via 802.11 and then somebody got in the car, turned it on, and be damned if they weren't playing those songs. Wasn't that neat! Funny though, 2+ years latter and me using Windows XP, yet I still can't do that. Why? Because it's easier to just burn my mp3's onto a music cd, or (if i want lots of tunes) get a car mp3 player. You can buy these now, I know of no products that I can beam songs too and play (other than installing a PC in my car... no thanks).
Scott McNealy (or however you spell his name) from Sun does this kind of stuff all the time too, a mythical refrigerator with a computer in it and a barcode scanner (which I can't buy) will scan all the stuff in my fridge and put what I need on the shopping list of my Palm. WOW! That is so freakin' cool! But a year and a half later, I can do no such thing. Again, why? Because it's butt-loads cheaper and easier to... wait for it... open the damn door and look! How many bar code readers is it going to take to read ALL the UPC's in my fridge, or worse yet, am I going to have to point all the UPCs at one or five readers... thanks anyway, I'll just open the door.
The point of this now rantish response is to say that 0.1% of these gee whiz tech demos are going to turn into products. Just because Steve Jobs is on stage doesn't mean it isn't vapor ware. The point is to make you think "just how many streets ahead Apple are" and make you also think "This is all stuff that should exist under Windows, but doesn't." Guess what, it doesn't exist on a Mac either. Senior Jobs just got one of his engineers to make a BlueTooth cellphone that could talk with his address book thingy. I doubt Nokia is going to.
Until Jobs, Gates, or Nealy can get on stage and say "This is the Nokia 3425, Ford Tunester, and Kenmore Neat-n-Shit and you can go to the store and buy them right now." These demo's are just Marketing/PR to make all the geeks love them.
It works too...
Only a star wars fan would say to themselves:
"This movie is going to suck, I know it's going to suck. I will not enjoy this movie. Huh? Oh yes, here is my $7 to see a movie that I know for a fact will suck."
Since the link to the bill is dead, here are some links to pdf copies of it:
Digimedia.org pdf
house.gov pdf
A summary of the bill here at house.gov
And the google cached version here
There if you can Slashdot all of those, we deserve a collective cookie.
The holders of battlebots.org are offering to sell the domain name to battlebots inc. for $5962 as compensation for the effort they've put into building the name of battlebots.org, potential loss of customers, etc...
Now battlebots inc. is going to sue them. It probably cost more than $6K just to get the restraining order. It seems as if Battlebots Inc. is trying to somehow defend the right of companies who own trademarks in one industry to enforce those trademarks in other completely unrelated industries. In other words, they're being silly.
Can they honestly believe that it makes sense to sue for a domain name when you could just buy the damn thing for $6000?
Now, as for the books, I would highly recommend (in order or worth)
The China Reader edited by Orville Schell and David Shambaugh. Its a collection of scholarly articals about various modern China subjects (its not right or left wing propoganda [for the most part]).
Governing China by Kenneth Lieberthal. Its part history, part discussion of culture as it relates to China from the Nationalist era (around 1920-1949) through the present.
The previous two were basically textbooks, the final one is an autobiography of the Cultural Revolution titeled Born Red by Gao Yuan. Its discussion of the Cultural Revolution gives great insight into both the urban chinese and the chinese peasantry and how easily they can be manipulated into following mass campaigns.
In order to understand modern China's culture (not necesserily their economy), you really have to understand Mao. I can't say that I do as Mao is a very confusing man whose motives are often difficult to discerne. However, that is certainly the place to start.
Anyway, hope you check out at least one of the books, the Lieberthal book is the only one thats a bit heady, the other two are pretty easy reads.
Wasn't there a law passed not long ago (it may have been the DMCA, I'm not sure), that said something about publishers having the right to force negative reviews of sites? Granted this is an "objective" benchmark (I know theres no such thing as an objective benchmark), but with a good enough lawyer, I would think MS would have a legitemate case.
It should be noted that for whatever reason, be it MS backing down or the company discovering they could publish it legally, the results ARE online.
In other words, MS didn't win that particular round.
At what point to you go to the effort of installing Linux and making sure it boots and all of that, and NOT test ethernet. Now, perhaps their special ethernet cards require specail modules, but that would seem to say that they DON'T work with Linux, at least yet. Just try each module, does one of them work, theres the compatability.
However, since they have overlooked this, I will be happy to test it for them, simply send me a G4 powerbook and I'll test every ethernet module in existince.
Okay, let me get this straight. You've managed to learn and use Linux (I assume), and yet you bemoan the "complexity" of two, sometimes even (got forbid) THREE mouse buttons. I mean really... next thing you know, keyboards will have two extra keys that will make menus pop up, sometimes you're even required to use these keys in combination with OTHER keys in order to perform some action. I mean, when will it stop.
I therefore propose this, computers which are far too complex as it is, should be reduced to a single unit with no buttons, no mouse, and no monitor. It will be absolutely functionless, but perfectly simple. I call this fabulous new creation "The Brick!" I already have a pattent on it in the works.
I realize the novelty and humor in all of this, but what are the real practical applications? I'm trying to think of one, and simply can't. This certainly doesn't seem like the best way to deliver a liquid in space.
Perhaps the device could be tweaked to only produce, say, a millileter of water. That *might* be a use for it, but I don't know if precise measuring of liquid is that much of an issue in space.
The article didn't really list any, so does anyone else have any ideas on practical uses for this three and a half years of scientific effort.
We're one step closer to having that oh-so-nasty monofilament gun one of the Harelquins had in Warhammer 40K.
It shot out a spinning web of monofilament fibers that would turn its target into, as the book put in, something the approximate consistency of soup.
I'll go ahead and say that I'm in Mississippi which is not known for its addoption of new technology (they are just now making braodband ubiquitous in the state's capital), but none the less I can't help but notice that a good number of the arcades in Jackson (the captial) and some other places I've visited are either closing or haven't bought a new machine since Tekken 3. It seems hard to imagine how an arcade can compete with PC and console machines that can produce close to or better graphics and game play, and cost a WHOLE lot less. There is the atmosphere and all that, but at 50 cents a pop, it had better be some damn good atmosphere. Now, I'd be interested to know how small to medium arcades are doing, I only have my one area to see, but the best I can tell is their dropping like flies. The point of all this is to say that perhaps arcades aren't the best places to bet your brand new company on. Then again, perhaps this could mark a new beginning for arcades. The only real draw to an arcade in the first place was to play a game that looked better and was more fun than anything you could have at home. If they could get this massively muliplayer enough, in a way that PCs and regular dial=ups simply couldn't, perhaps that part of arcades could be regained. If its nothing more than 32 people in a room shooting at each other, then this is more likely something that I could just as easily do at home in my underwear, rather than going to the mall and spending $10 on a couple hours of game play.
Really? Whose your DSL providor? I'm shopping around and what you mentioned sounded pretty nice. As far as netdoor's over-all quality, the little that I used them I didn't have a problem. I never had their DSL, but I've got a good friend whose one of their techs and he related all of the delightfull stories of how bellsouth would "accidentally" disconnect netdoor from DSL access... WOOPS!
What I'm curious about, is why they did this so baltantly. They could have been much more subtle, for example: A local ISP (Netdoor) where I live leases bandwidth from BellSouth for DSL access. BellSouth also offers DSL access via the BellSouth ISP. Well, because they don't rape Netdoor, it's less profitable to have Netdoor provide access the DSL. So what does BellSouth do? They simply make DSL through Netdoor horrible. Periodic outages and (relative to BellSouth DSL) slow connections. Therefore Netdoor's DSL subscriber base is slowly switching to the more expensive BellSouth.
While it isn't extreemly subtle, most end users wouldn't notice, and its certainly not something that would get posted on Slashdot. So why would AOL/TimeWarner (who we assume have at least one or two smart people in their employment) opt for the heavy handed approach rather than the much more sneaky one.
After all, being sneaky is what US businesses are all about!
If this is legal in the first place, then why didn't they go ahead and require 99.9999% of all revenue, and the first born children of all ISP employees? It's not like requiring 75/25% of revenue is subtle, so why not just go all out?
Okay, mabey you folks can give me some help here. I'm running a Celeron 400 w/ 128 megs of ram and a TNT vid card. Granted thats not exactly a smokin' rig, but I can get 30 fps in Q3 in medium detail and 40 fps in UT on high detail. I was getting (litteraly) .5 fps on the MENU in Daikatana. I got something like .3 in the actual game. This just doesn't seem right. Any suggestions? I didn't see an option anywhere in there to turn OpenGL on or off. I was running it at 640x480 with every detail at its lowest.
To give another spin on that, most of these folks who complain about having to memorize "useless stuff" are "geeks." Well suppose some prof comes along and says "You can use the net to for you C++ test." This is going to create a class which is very adept at searching the net for code, but who don't have it memorized. In effect, some very slow coders. There are simply some things which HAVE to be memorized.
Lucas Arts has always managed to take a good idea and improve it. Dark Forces may have been a Doom clone, but it was the first decent game I ever played that allowed you to jump and look around. Then of course you've got they're GREAT flight sims (well, sort of flight sims...). This sounds like classic Lucas: take an idea which works, and (hopefully) improve it. I personally think they should ditch the Star Wars thing though, I want my Sam & Max persistant world RPG!!!
I'll trust your numbers on that (actually I forgott about ISDN being intended to carry voice). I was basing that on the face that I never get less than 300 Kbps off my shared T1 and when I use Dailpad.com it STILL sounds cruddy...
I think a bigger concern is what is this going to do to the existing internet infrastructure. If we all start abandoning the existing phone lines and start using up our big fat DSL bandwidth to make phone calls, I don't think the net could handle that. I'll admit I don't know the numbers but lets say an internet phone call uses 500Kbps and every person in America averages 2 phone calls a day, thats 350,000 gigabits of necessary bandwidth just to handle the phone calls (and thats assuming they're polite enough to spread those phone calls out evenly!), not to mention the movies and music on demand we'll all be having. I realize that all of that is a long way off, but its not that long.