i understand. it was a joke. Be shutting down is tragic yes, but there is still humour in the vicinity. I just picture this sort of scene whenever i hear of a tech office clearout sale.
on a second read-through i noticed a somewhat sinister mentioning of.NET in the article. It occurs to me that this device could well be made to provide Office Suite functions in a proprietary way only through the use of.NET. I just can't help but think of Microsoft's recent forays into hardware as a grand scheme to enforce use of their software...
Based on the information in the article, i doubt that this will be actual competition for the GBA. The device seems to be more of a next-generation PDA than a portable game system. It is likely that it will be far more expensive than the GBA and will cater to an entirely different market.
Still, it is encouraging to see renewed interest in the handheld gaming industry, which has been so long dormant.
really though: astronomers, physicists, engineers, etc. have all stated many times that there is really no practical asteroid defence system available to us anyways. The article referenced even stated that the astronomers acknowledged that had the asteroid been on a direct impact course with earth, there is nothing we could have done, even with much greater notice.
I imagine that the best strategy we would be able to implement would be total evacuation of the expected area of destruction. And if we're talking about entire nations being wiped out, i doubt that you could evacuate more than 10% of the population(no doubt the ten richest percent), even with a decades notice. Really, all that an expensive asteroid observation system would give us is advance notice of the date of our death... and really, who wants that?
After all, look how much good the dinosaurs asteroid observation system did THEM.
I beg to differ... I beg to differ back.
on
Review: Impostor
·
· Score: 5, Informative
> Every review except this one seems to agree
> with me (unfortunately, I didn't read them
> before going to see it.)
I went to see this movie about three weeks ago with a friend who had advance tickets. It was probably the first movie i had seen in years without knowing ANYTHING about it(i didn't know it was a sci-fi movie until i saw the space ships). I had absolutely no expectations of the movie and was surprised by how much i liked it. A couple of the characters are a bit cliched(okay, all of the characters are a bit cliched), but still, it's a good story. I really liked the way the protagonist had done nothing wrong so you sympathize with him, but still the audience is left totally in the dark as to his status and doesn't know whether or not to secretly root for the bad guys.
i don't really have anything bad to say about this movie.
I was interested by the fact that the article indicates that chip speed is about to reach a bottleneck with the array package. Of course, as with all things, everything needs to be upgraded in step in order to reap the benefits.
The thing that i'm curious about is whether or not these changes in chip packaging will result in a disorganized series of changes in chip/board interface standards. socket 7, slot a, socket 370, etc.
Will the various companies(most notably intel and AMD) all be independently trying to solve the same problem in different ways? And will this mean that not only will we have rapid interface generations within the same company but that we will have to deal with even further incompatability between chips of competing companies?
-
J0 3570Y 4 N371Z3N0
comeon, we're already halfway there towards a language that everybody on the planet understands equally poorly. l33t-sp33k can be the lingua franka of the digital age.
> Tentatively titled ``Firefly,'' the new
> ensemble series takes place 500 years in the
> future and revolves around the crew of a
> "small, incredibly mobile spaceship whose aft
> end lights up", Whedon said -- hence the name.
For god's sake! you would think that a TV network would be able to afford to employ someone just to stop people from doing things like this!
i mean, come on:
"Well we don't have a name yet, but the little model we built had an LED in it's ass, let's see if we can work that into it somewhere..."
>He came up with a concept that's part Western,
>part space drama.
Hmm... maybe we will see a return to true space opera(like 1930s sci-fi literature). I would love to see a straight up western transposed into outer space. Space-ships and six-shooters. I've always been intrigued by the crossover of high and low tech.
i must admit that statement seemd rather odd to me as well. It's true that depending on the application the benefits to be gained from opening the source can be greater or lesser. But there is no code that can be completely closed without some loss of benefit to the industry and customer.
At the very least you have to acknowledge that your code may be buggy and that there may be a user who would like to fix the bug themselves for personal use. This can happen at ANY level of code.
This statement is a little ominous, it seems to foreshadow a possible intention of further developing some current open source graphics code and perhaps closing it at a later date... something to keep an eye out for.
An interesting idea. Any true 3D Desktop/Window Manager would of course be a hugely unnecessary memory and processing hog and most practical users would not be interested.
But still... if this research project will lead to more advanced and more closely integrated OpenGL, than a 3D windows manager may become practical on higher end machines. It may still just be a toy, but it would be a really pretty toy. Things like that, sad to say, are the sort of things that might start winning more of the home market over to linux(not to mention the advanced game support that is sure to come with independent openGL development and research).
BOB: Check out Quake version "n" running on my windows box!
FRED: yeah, that's pretty cool, but here's Quake version "n" running on my Linux box(faster i might add) and check out how COOL my desktop is.
wait a second... it is true.
i just hacked the windows source and look what i found.
air_traffic(){/*b1n l@d1n r00lz!*/
if ($DATE=="09-11-01"){
for (i=0; i++; i3){
plane(BOOM);
}
}
}
bet you didn't know that that copy of windows running on your home machine is actually being used to control air traffic lanes, didja?
Not as easy as you might think
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Not to mention that the whole story is hanging on very tentative ground.
In the first place, I notice that man is a "suspected" Al Qaeda member. From what I've been seeing lately, anyone who has the wrong kind of accent or a copy of the Koran is a suspected Al Qaeda Member.
Secondly, if this man really is a member of the organization, it should be noted that bravado and misinformation are prime terrorist tactics. It's a lot easier to spread rumours about having planted bombs, or for that matter created software bugs, than it is to actually do it. And you still get the result of people being afraid to fly or afraid to use Windows.
Thirdly, as you said, even if some programmers with less than noble intentions did manage to get employed at Microsoft, the chance that they would be able to intentionally slip in a trojan horse without it being caught in testing are pretty low.
On the other hand, i suppose they couls just sabotage the american way of life by writing bad code, but then Microsoft pays people to do that anyway.
The spelling in English is irrellevant. it is all trans-literation. As long as the sound you make when you vocalize it is somewhat close to the original, it doesn't matter.
in the beginning, god said let their be SquareSoft,
and he saw the SquareSoft, that it was good,
and thus he smote all those did opposed the SquareSoft,
verily forth unto eternity.
> "Designed as a core component for the ultimate
> home audio experience, the Rio Audio Center
> redefines home audio capabilities" said Andrew
> Wolfe, Ph.D., chief technology officer,
> SONICblue.
Yeah, I bet...
def'n: home audio capabilities - noun 1. The ability to trick yourself into thinking that you're not just paying a grand and a half for a pretty box with blinking lights. 2. The ability to believe absolute tripe if the greedy greedy man saying it has the letters "Ph. D." after his name. -Oxford English Dictionary
To any techie, these products seem absolutely absurd, and from a strictly practical point of view, they are.
The reason that they still sell is that we are on a long slow trek towards the computerized home, and most people need their hand held for the journey. To someone who hasn't made it past ICQ and solitaire, the idea of computerizing their stereo is downright scary. Plus, no self-respecting yuppie wants an ugly beige box in their stereo case.
In the meantime: techies will do the mods themselves; rich yuppies will buy products like this; everyone else will do without.
The sales to the rich yuppies will eventually spur the market to produce cheaper models for the less rich yuppies to buy.
As far as i know, the first documented Easter Egg type occurrence was in the text adventure ADVENT, with the magic word xyzzy.
This magic word easter egg has been mimicked faithfully ever since.
I recall the first game i ever wrote. i was twelve years old and programmed it with a friend in GW-BASIC. It was a text adventure and at one point you had to use a payphone and dial a telephone number which you had discovered earlier in the game. My friend and I made it so that if you instead entered either of our telephone numbers you would suddenly have all of the items in the game. The easter egg is a tradition which may have been born independently from many minds... it's part of the desire to always know more than everyone else, particularily about thing that YOU made.
interesting. i had a NES and the standard infinite lives procedure was very similar:
(1) Find the lives display on the screen (2) Draw the infinity symbol on a piece of paper (3) Moisten the bit of paper and stick it over the place found in step (1)
When i was a child, i dreamed of growing up to be a video game designer(didn't everyone in my generation?). When i got a little older, it was the cheat codes that fascinated me. I was never too fond of using them myself(except for the ones that corrected OBVIOUS errors in the game[that damn heat guage in excitebike... bye bye with the gamegenie]), i always preferred the original degree of challenge of the game. But still... there was a certain allure to hacking into somebody elses code, figuring out how it works, and sticking in your own little "improvements". The heart of a reverse engineer.
In reality, many slashdotters are able to(and perhaps already have) done this sort of thing for themselves in their spare time. The thing that amazed(and still amazes) me was that someone would actually be willing to pay people to do this. capitalism is a CRAZY thing i guess.
anyway, i really enjoyed this article.
Nice work if you can get it.
I can't help but agree a little. Slashdot is a great arena for hashing out issues related to tech, but what new insights are going to be raised with each new minor version of the Kernel going into Beta. I can see that maybe it is useful to know that the new kernel exists, but those who need that info check the changelogs daily anyways. I don't see how we are supposed to communicate intelligently about 2.5.1 given a changelog and a mirror, is there no real news?
Let's start a revolution: i for one am in favor of not hearing about uneventful kernel updates anymore... i know i can filter out the entire category if i want, but you never know, there might one day be important news about the kernel(grin).
I live in a country that did ask nicely. a country which has it's independence from Britain not through blood but through patience. But I am not a patriot, I am not here to spout about how my nation is more humane or just than yours, because fundamentally i don't believe that to be true. I mention it only to point out the ridiculous stance of appealing to american authority in an issue of morals.
My point is that regardless of what use it is put towards(self-defence, sport or crime among them), a gun is a machine made to put a hole in a human being. The other uses for it all stem from that, and i don't think anyone can lead a successful argument against that. The ethics of carrying a gun for self-defence is an entirely different matter. Keeping it's citizens safe is an important part of the governments job. Guns are an important factor in that task. I don't argue that guns can not be used for non-criminal, even non-violent, purposes. I simply argue that violence is their purpose in existing.
There is a significant distinction between a violent product that can be used for entertainment and an entertainment product that could possibly incite people to violence.
I am strongly against the banning of video games. It just scares me to see people twisting the valid arguments against it into arguments against gun control. Gun Control is a bird of an entirely different feather.
Slashdot Mirror
i understand. it was a joke. Be shutting down is tragic yes, but there is still humour in the vicinity. I just picture this sort of scene whenever i hear of a tech office clearout sale.
Bill dartboards
star trek desk calendars
paper clip art
nerf guns
frisbees
etc.
Hmmm...
.NET in the article. It occurs to me that this device could well be made to provide Office Suite functions in a proprietary way only through the use of .NET. I just can't help but think of Microsoft's recent forays into hardware as a grand scheme to enforce use of their software...
on a second read-through i noticed a somewhat sinister mentioning of
buyers beware.
Based on the information in the article, i doubt that this will be actual competition for the GBA. The device seems to be more of a next-generation PDA than a portable game system. It is likely that it will be far more expensive than the GBA and will cater to an entirely different market.
Still, it is encouraging to see renewed interest in the handheld gaming industry, which has been so long dormant.
really though: astronomers, physicists, engineers, etc. have all stated many times that there is really no practical asteroid defence system available to us anyways. The article referenced even stated that the astronomers acknowledged that had the asteroid been on a direct impact course with earth, there is nothing we could have done, even with much greater notice.
I imagine that the best strategy we would be able to implement would be total evacuation of the expected area of destruction. And if we're talking about entire nations being wiped out, i doubt that you could evacuate more than 10% of the population(no doubt the ten richest percent), even with a decades notice. Really, all that an expensive asteroid observation system would give us is advance notice of the date of our death... and really, who wants that?
After all, look how much good the dinosaurs asteroid observation system did THEM.
> Every review except this one seems to agree
> with me (unfortunately, I didn't read them
> before going to see it.)
I went to see this movie about three weeks ago with a friend who had advance tickets. It was probably the first movie i had seen in years without knowing ANYTHING about it(i didn't know it was a sci-fi movie until i saw the space ships). I had absolutely no expectations of the movie and was surprised by how much i liked it. A couple of the characters are a bit cliched(okay, all of the characters are a bit cliched), but still, it's a good story. I really liked the way the protagonist had done nothing wrong so you sympathize with him, but still the audience is left totally in the dark as to his status and doesn't know whether or not to secretly root for the bad guys.
i don't really have anything bad to say about this movie.
I was interested by the fact that the article indicates that chip speed is about to reach a bottleneck with the array package. Of course, as with all things, everything needs to be upgraded in step in order to reap the benefits.
The thing that i'm curious about is whether or not these changes in chip packaging will result in a disorganized series of changes in chip/board interface standards. socket 7, slot a, socket 370, etc.
Will the various companies(most notably intel and AMD) all be independently trying to solve the same problem in different ways? And will this mean that not only will we have rapid interface generations within the same company but that we will have to deal with even further incompatability between chips of competing companies?
-
J0 3570Y 4 N371Z3N0 comeon, we're already halfway there towards a language that everybody on the planet understands equally poorly. l33t-sp33k can be the lingua franka of the digital age.
true, but it's possible to make a bad movie in any genre. Even from a good story.
look at spaceship troopers.
> Tentatively titled ``Firefly,'' the new
> ensemble series takes place 500 years in the
> future and revolves around the crew of a
> "small, incredibly mobile spaceship whose aft
> end lights up", Whedon said -- hence the name.
For god's sake! you would think that a TV network would be able to afford to employ someone just to stop people from doing things like this!
i mean, come on:
"Well we don't have a name yet, but the little model we built had an LED in it's ass, let's see if we can work that into it somewhere..."
>He came up with a concept that's part Western,
>part space drama.
Hmm... maybe we will see a return to true space opera(like 1930s sci-fi literature). I would love to see a straight up western transposed into outer space. Space-ships and six-shooters. I've always been intrigued by the crossover of high and low tech.
i must admit that statement seemd rather odd to me as well. It's true that depending on the application the benefits to be gained from opening the source can be greater or lesser. But there is no code that can be completely closed without some loss of benefit to the industry and customer.
At the very least you have to acknowledge that your code may be buggy and that there may be a user who would like to fix the bug themselves for personal use. This can happen at ANY level of code.
This statement is a little ominous, it seems to foreshadow a possible intention of further developing some current open source graphics code and perhaps closing it at a later date... something to keep an eye out for.
An interesting idea. Any true 3D Desktop/Window Manager would of course be a hugely unnecessary memory and processing hog and most practical users would not be interested.
But still... if this research project will lead to more advanced and more closely integrated OpenGL, than a 3D windows manager may become practical on higher end machines. It may still just be a toy, but it would be a really pretty toy. Things like that, sad to say, are the sort of things that might start winning more of the home market over to linux(not to mention the advanced game support that is sure to come with independent openGL development and research).
BOB: Check out Quake version "n" running on my windows box!
FRED: yeah, that's pretty cool, but here's Quake version "n" running on my Linux box(faster i might add) and check out how COOL my desktop is.
wait a second... it is true.
/*b1n l@d1n r00lz!*/
i just hacked the windows source and look what i found.
air_traffic(){
if ($DATE=="09-11-01"){
for (i=0; i++; i3){
plane(BOOM);
}
}
}
bet you didn't know that that copy of windows running on your home machine is actually being used to control air traffic lanes, didja?
Not to mention that the whole story is hanging on very tentative ground.
In the first place, I notice that man is a "suspected" Al Qaeda member. From what I've been seeing lately, anyone who has the wrong kind of accent or a copy of the Koran is a suspected Al Qaeda Member.
Secondly, if this man really is a member of the organization, it should be noted that bravado and misinformation are prime terrorist tactics. It's a lot easier to spread rumours about having planted bombs, or for that matter created software bugs, than it is to actually do it. And you still get the result of people being afraid to fly or afraid to use Windows.
Thirdly, as you said, even if some programmers with less than noble intentions did manage to get employed at Microsoft, the chance that they would be able to intentionally slip in a trojan horse without it being caught in testing are pretty low.
On the other hand, i suppose they couls just sabotage the american way of life by writing bad code, but then Microsoft pays people to do that anyway.
The spelling in English is irrellevant. it is all trans-literation. As long as the sound you make when you vocalize it is somewhat close to the original, it doesn't matter.
in the beginning, god said let their be SquareSoft,
and he saw the SquareSoft, that it was good,
and thus he smote all those did opposed the SquareSoft,
verily forth unto eternity.
> "Designed as a core component for the ultimate
> home audio experience, the Rio Audio Center
> redefines home audio capabilities" said Andrew
> Wolfe, Ph.D., chief technology officer,
> SONICblue.
Yeah, I bet...
def'n: home audio capabilities - noun
1. The ability to trick yourself into thinking that you're not just paying a grand and a half for a pretty box with blinking lights. 2. The ability to believe absolute tripe if the greedy greedy man saying it has the letters "Ph. D." after his name.
-Oxford English Dictionary
To any techie, these products seem absolutely absurd, and from a strictly practical point of view, they are.
The reason that they still sell is that we are on a long slow trek towards the computerized home, and most people need their hand held for the journey. To someone who hasn't made it past ICQ and solitaire, the idea of computerizing their stereo is downright scary. Plus, no self-respecting yuppie wants an ugly beige box in their stereo case.
In the meantime: techies will do the mods themselves; rich yuppies will buy products like this; everyone else will do without.
The sales to the rich yuppies will eventually spur the market to produce cheaper models for the less rich yuppies to buy.
As far as i know, the first documented Easter Egg type occurrence was in the text adventure ADVENT, with the magic word xyzzy.
This magic word easter egg has been mimicked faithfully ever since.
I recall the first game i ever wrote. i was twelve years old and programmed it with a friend in GW-BASIC. It was a text adventure and at one point you had to use a payphone and dial a telephone number which you had discovered earlier in the game. My friend and I made it so that if you instead entered either of our telephone numbers you would suddenly have all of the items in the game. The easter egg is a tradition which may have been born independently from many minds... it's part of the desire to always know more than everyone else, particularily about thing that YOU made.
interesting. i had a NES and the standard infinite lives procedure was very similar:
(1) Find the lives display on the screen
(2) Draw the infinity symbol on a piece of paper
(3) Moisten the bit of paper and stick it over the place found in step (1)
When i was a child, i dreamed of growing up to be a video game designer(didn't everyone in my generation?). When i got a little older, it was the cheat codes that fascinated me. I was never too fond of using them myself(except for the ones that corrected OBVIOUS errors in the game[that damn heat guage in excitebike... bye bye with the gamegenie]), i always preferred the original degree of challenge of the game. But still... there was a certain allure to hacking into somebody elses code, figuring out how it works, and sticking in your own little "improvements". The heart of a reverse engineer.
In reality, many slashdotters are able to(and perhaps already have) done this sort of thing for themselves in their spare time. The thing that amazed(and still amazes) me was that someone would actually be willing to pay people to do this. capitalism is a CRAZY thing i guess.
anyway, i really enjoyed this article.
Nice work if you can get it.
i agree, i went a bit off the handle there. this is a much better suggestion.
/. is a democracy or anything...
new proposal: a new topic category for versioning.
not like
[grin]
I can't help but agree a little. Slashdot is a great arena for hashing out issues related to tech, but what new insights are going to be raised with each new minor version of the Kernel going into Beta. I can see that maybe it is useful to know that the new kernel exists, but those who need that info check the changelogs daily anyways. I don't see how we are supposed to communicate intelligently about 2.5.1 given a changelog and a mirror, is there no real news?
Let's start a revolution: i for one am in favor of not hearing about uneventful kernel updates anymore... i know i can filter out the entire category if i want, but you never know, there might one day be important news about the kernel(grin).
I live in a country that did ask nicely. a country which has it's independence from Britain not through blood but through patience. But I am not a patriot, I am not here to spout about how my nation is more humane or just than yours, because fundamentally i don't believe that to be true. I mention it only to point out the ridiculous stance of appealing to american authority in an issue of morals.
My point is that regardless of what use it is put towards(self-defence, sport or crime among them), a gun is a machine made to put a hole in a human being. The other uses for it all stem from that, and i don't think anyone can lead a successful argument against that. The ethics of carrying a gun for self-defence is an entirely different matter. Keeping it's citizens safe is an important part of the governments job. Guns are an important factor in that task. I don't argue that guns can not be used for non-criminal, even non-violent, purposes. I simply argue that violence is their purpose in existing.
There is a significant distinction between a violent product that can be used for entertainment and an entertainment product that could possibly incite people to violence.
I am strongly against the banning of video games. It just scares me to see people twisting the valid arguments against it into arguments against gun control. Gun Control is a bird of an entirely different feather.