Does this remind anyone of the Monty Python skit where they use mathematicians to create the world's funniest joke, and use it to get Nazis to die laughing?
Actually, it reminds me of some of Bradbury's more gloomy predictions of the sanitization of the culture that was happening then and is continuing to occur.
How long until books are written the same way, or at least evaluated by the same kind of tool? I suppose the news media will have it happen to them first: "Sorry, Dan, that story about political hanky-panky rated a 4.5 on our offensive-o-meter, way above the threshold of 3. Put some kittens in it and maybe we can get it to a 2.5."
Becuase we're told to. The fiasco that is Ashlee Simpson verifies this: she came from nowhere, is obviously bad to even the most undiscerning listener, but all of a sudden she's everywhere because she got signed up for the "Star Treatment Package", $19.95.
They push crap like this down our throats because they think they have a "product" and don't care enough to think about it too hard; then they blame poor sales on pirates. Thank God for internet radio. Those bastards are going to sell out to irrelevance if they aren't very careful.
The [solution] de-mystifies the high-tech world and gives you a competitive edge.
Really? What's meant, exactly, by "giving a competitive edge"? That's from Freedman's own site, promoting his own book.
Really, some hyperbole is to be expected. Yes, I get annoyed too, when I'm looking at a product manual that touts a "solution" but it doesn't mention the "problem"; but most company brochures shouldn't be a thesis, in, say, RAID theory or IPSec. For that, you need to read a manual or a spec, and that takes more than the 3 pages allocated to a brochure.
That, and that you can apparently win awards for being a barista. Who knew?
We can just hope that Apple doesn't take this product and roll it into their OS; lookit what happened to Sherlock and Konfabulator. I hope those guys have their patents squared away.
With Atlantis, they try to keep the SG-1 accoutrements, and then do a Voyager.
Yeah, and I think there's a gaping plot hole: wouldn't earth attempt to contact Atlantis in the event of not hearing from them for a certain amount of time? Or was that explained (one-use null generator, maybe) that I didn't catch?
Anyway, my Tivo hasn't picked up a new episode in awhile, so I fear the worst.
Gravity is accepted by probably about 99.9999999999% of the world. Evolution is accepted by a minority of the world.
Interesting point. It might interest you to realize that Christianity is not believed in by a majority of the world, either. I suppose we should put a warning label on churches.
The freedom of speech is not a freedom to be a shithead.Indeed it does protect that very thing.
Tell me: where in the 1st Amendement does it say "unless you are a shithead"? You can say anything you want; perhaps you can't say things that would cause harm to another, but it took the Supreme Court to determine that limitation, even. And when the Supremes went so far as to say that, notice that they didn't exclude "shithead statements" from the protection of the 1st Amendment, either.
As for why being a shithead is protected: that's a subjective judgement. If I think the things you say are disrespectful towards me, do you think I should be able to have you arrested?
I think that to work somewhere where you can post a blog entry about technical glitches at CES and not get fired is pretty cool.
I'm not impressed--this blog is pure spin, to excuse the issues that were encountered. I would be much more impressed if there were no issues on stage, but a blog entry that discussed how the performance was carried off by the skin of their teeth.
Maybe it's time to look at OS marketshare to see how the different strategies work out.
As an "Extreme Mac enthusiast" myself, I concede that Apple's strategy of "surprise releases" is problematic. It punishes enthusiasts. It discourages small developers, who unlike the bigger players (MS and Adobe) don't have as much advance notice that they'll be losing APIs that they depend on. It really discourages enterprise level spending, as those customers like to plan their purchasing strategy for a few years at a time, but Apple won't let them know their product roadmap for the same period.
OTOH, if Apple planned in the open, it would allow their much bigger competitors to race and likely beat them to market as they could bring more resources to bear. Being innovative is the key to Apple's strategy--so if they announce innovative features but consistenly release second, after their competitors have a chance to develop the feature themselves, they will lose their entire market.
I think it's truly a dilemma, and I don't know what the way out of it is for Apple. But, as you say, the marketshare is one example of the long-term failing of the secrecy strategy.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=249 37 [remove/. spaces]
I suppose you could stream out to a/lot/ of users, so long as you keep the bitrate down.
Thanks! I know what Apple says, but I was curious how that matched reality. I'd be interested to see how your stream goes tomorrow!
Re:A friend of mine...
on
Xbox 2 for $400?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
MS purchased a firm that specializes in emulating the x86 architecture on a powerPC platform
Specifically, MS purchased a firm that had lots of experience getting Virtual PC on a G4 CPU to work. Interestingly, Connectix sold itself just before it was revealed that getting VPC to work on a G5 CPU was going to be a lot more work and probably run slower when completed--you see, the G4 has a built-in endian code swticher, but the G5 does not. Now, VPC has been released for the G5--but it's not great. And although it was announced as a feature, it still doesn't use the native graphics CPU, but instead still emulates--which means it blows for games.
Honestly, I think MS was taken by Connectix. Could happen, if MS didn't do their due diliegence and were in a hurry to fill a need. Anyway, I wouldn't count on VPC being the tool that allows the Xbox2 to run Xbox1 games--might happen, but there's a lot of technical ifs. I think that's about as likely as Apple releasing a built-in Xbox environment on their G5 CPUs, actually.
Don't you think that there'd be more than 100 people interested in a pirate QT stream of a MacWorld keynote? From a PB no less? Guy didn't mention having an Xserve. That's my point entirely.
Seriously, though, how well did that scale? Was that video + sound over regular GigE? What kind of connection were your clients on? G4, G5, singular or dual CPU? How much RAM? I knew that this would work, but I have a hard time knowing how many streams you could push off a single Xserve before it crapped out...
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it. And is Apple making the right strategic move, here? One of the reasons that folks even contemplate moving from Windows to OS X, instead of, say, Linux, is that you can buy Microsoft Office for OS X.
If MS feels threatened by iWorks, they'll just kill Office for OS X. And then Apple has lost one of their best marketing reasons to go Mac instead of Linux.
Not that Keynote really caused any problems--but iWord is a different story. Maybe this is just so Apple can have a "professional grade" office suite to put on the their pro line, and if you need Office compatibility (like 95% of the world) you buy Office for the Mac? But it would save that other 5% $500.
I'm sure they could easily add a section entitled "Are you and Expert" and many experts would volunteer their time to look at specific sections.
That goes to the heart of the problem--who gets to decide who's an "expert"? The Wiki editors? On what basis? The contributors? What if one "expert" contributor disagrees with another "expert" contributor? And finally--how do you get an expert recognized as an expert to contribute their expert knowledge for free? Maybe you can get this contribution sometimes, but can you find such an expert in every field?
I just bought my first PC for work... played the hell out of it for the next 20 hours of so
I won't tell your boss that you only needed a 1Ghz Celeron, and "integrated" video memory, to run Outlook and Word...
As a long time Mac user myself, I feel your pain. I finally broke down and bought a remainder bin PC too, enough to upgrade and play games on. One thing Macs suck at is games--at least we have WoW, and CoD.
Since you're apparently a fish conoisseur, I'll follow this OT.
I did some looking around on the web to learn what it would take to make my own sushi, and learned the history of the food in the process. Turns out, E Asians used to catch a nice fish, bury it in the ground and let it rot for awhile. A month or so later, they would eat it.
How it didn't kill them outright I dunno. Isn't rotted meat, like, one of the most toxic things you can eat? How they bore the stench, I dunno. Who was the first guy to try it? I'm betting someone's little brother.
In any event, they stopped letting the fish meat ferment; but they still add vinegar to sushi rice to approximate the "tang" of the rotted fish (inasmuch as vinegar is essentially spoiled wine). Helps counterbalance the fattiness of the fish, and frankly, they have a point--sushi without the vinegar would be too rich.
Interesting that both the E. Asians and the N. Europeans would rot their fish on purpose. I guess there's a survival strategy there. If you can't preserve it, learn to like the taste of spoiled food?
Better video cards. Really, the speed at which the onboard video card becomes obsolescent makes the entire unit age quicker than it should. If you could just upgrade the video card, and, less importantly, RAM and maybe HD, you get a lot more life out of the machine.
The CPU is artificially aged by the speed at which the video card becomes obsolescent.
After the heat shield, what will Opportunity look at? There's really not a whole lot--not even very many rocks--on that plain.
Are there scientific targets identified, or are they maybe going to try to "sprint" Opportunity and see how far it can get in the shortest amount of time? Maybe there's other potential sites of interest some distance away.
The Torino scale for this impact is now rated as a "4"--about 1% chance of hitting us, an upgrade from previous estimations. Still not likely, but now more likely.
I taught in High School after Columbine, and folks were pretty tense about anything that resembled violence on the school property--after hours or not. If you have to rule out FPS, I can't imagine you'll get many folks interested--and if things haven't loosened up in the last few years, I think getting FPS approved would be tough. Worse, they'll say "okay", but then shut you down once you start playing and they can see what is meant by FPS.
So before you go much further, I would demo the games that you want to play to the approving authority; if they blanch you'll have to rethink. And the type of game will impact the network needs too, so I think what gets approved will help determine the rest of your needs.
Sure--if you also correct the ratio by the production cost. Tell me--do you think that Halo2 cost $200 Million to make and promote? That's the going rate for a movie--so if you can make more with a game than a movie, you come out ahead. Thus the shift of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this remind anyone of the Monty Python skit where they use mathematicians to create the world's funniest joke, and use it to get Nazis to die laughing?
Actually, it reminds me of some of Bradbury's more gloomy predictions of the sanitization of the culture that was happening then and is continuing to occur.
How long until books are written the same way, or at least evaluated by the same kind of tool? I suppose the news media will have it happen to them first: "Sorry, Dan, that story about political hanky-panky rated a 4.5 on our offensive-o-meter, way above the threshold of 3. Put some kittens in it and maybe we can get it to a 2.5."
But why do we really like the music that we like?
Becuase we're told to. The fiasco that is Ashlee Simpson verifies this: she came from nowhere, is obviously bad to even the most undiscerning listener, but all of a sudden she's everywhere because she got signed up for the "Star Treatment Package", $19.95.
They push crap like this down our throats because they think they have a "product" and don't care enough to think about it too hard; then they blame poor sales on pirates. Thank God for internet radio. Those bastards are going to sell out to irrelevance if they aren't very careful.
What does this product describe?
The [solution] de-mystifies the high-tech world and gives you a competitive edge.
Really? What's meant, exactly, by "giving a competitive edge"? That's from Freedman's own site, promoting his own book.
Really, some hyperbole is to be expected. Yes, I get annoyed too, when I'm looking at a product manual that touts a "solution" but it doesn't mention the "problem"; but most company brochures shouldn't be a thesis, in, say, RAID theory or IPSec. For that, you need to read a manual or a spec, and that takes more than the 3 pages allocated to a brochure.
That, and that you can apparently win awards for being a barista. Who knew?
We can just hope that Apple doesn't take this product and roll it into their OS; lookit what happened to Sherlock and Konfabulator. I hope those guys have their patents squared away.
Yes, you should. Your TiVo is busted.
Ah! Ahhhh! Ah. Don't say that. Not funny. At least, not until the miniMac has been proven as a capable MythTV unit.
With Atlantis, they try to keep the SG-1 accoutrements, and then do a Voyager.
Yeah, and I think there's a gaping plot hole: wouldn't earth attempt to contact Atlantis in the event of not hearing from them for a certain amount of time? Or was that explained (one-use null generator, maybe) that I didn't catch?
Anyway, my Tivo hasn't picked up a new episode in awhile, so I fear the worst.
DVD player may be required, however.
Gravity is accepted by probably about 99.9999999999% of the world. Evolution is accepted by a minority of the world.
Interesting point. It might interest you to realize that Christianity is not believed in by a majority of the world, either. I suppose we should put a warning label on churches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_world_religion
Christians are the largest single segment, but still represent a minority at about 30%.
The freedom of speech is not a freedom to be a shithead.Indeed it does protect that very thing.
Tell me: where in the 1st Amendement does it say "unless you are a shithead"? You can say anything you want; perhaps you can't say things that would cause harm to another, but it took the Supreme Court to determine that limitation, even. And when the Supremes went so far as to say that, notice that they didn't exclude "shithead statements" from the protection of the 1st Amendment, either.
As for why being a shithead is protected: that's a subjective judgement. If I think the things you say are disrespectful towards me, do you think I should be able to have you arrested?
I think that to work somewhere where you can post a blog entry about technical glitches at CES and not get fired is pretty cool.
I'm not impressed--this blog is pure spin, to excuse the issues that were encountered. I would be much more impressed if there were no issues on stage, but a blog entry that discussed how the performance was carried off by the skin of their teeth.
Maybe it's time to look at OS marketshare to see how the different strategies work out.
As an "Extreme Mac enthusiast" myself, I concede that Apple's strategy of "surprise releases" is problematic. It punishes enthusiasts. It discourages small developers, who unlike the bigger players (MS and Adobe) don't have as much advance notice that they'll be losing APIs that they depend on. It really discourages enterprise level spending, as those customers like to plan their purchasing strategy for a few years at a time, but Apple won't let them know their product roadmap for the same period.
OTOH, if Apple planned in the open, it would allow their much bigger competitors to race and likely beat them to market as they could bring more resources to bear. Being innovative is the key to Apple's strategy--so if they announce innovative features but consistenly release second, after their competitors have a chance to develop the feature themselves, they will lose their entire market.
I think it's truly a dilemma, and I don't know what the way out of it is for Apple. But, as you say, the marketshare is one example of the long-term failing of the secrecy strategy.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24
Thanks! I know what Apple says, but I was curious how that matched reality. I'd be interested to see how your stream goes tomorrow!
MS purchased a firm that specializes in emulating the x86 architecture on a powerPC platform
Specifically, MS purchased a firm that had lots of experience getting Virtual PC on a G4 CPU to work. Interestingly, Connectix sold itself just before it was revealed that getting VPC to work on a G5 CPU was going to be a lot more work and probably run slower when completed--you see, the G4 has a built-in endian code swticher, but the G5 does not. Now, VPC has been released for the G5--but it's not great. And although it was announced as a feature, it still doesn't use the native graphics CPU, but instead still emulates--which means it blows for games.
Honestly, I think MS was taken by Connectix. Could happen, if MS didn't do their due diliegence and were in a hurry to fill a need. Anyway, I wouldn't count on VPC being the tool that allows the Xbox2 to run Xbox1 games--might happen, but there's a lot of technical ifs. I think that's about as likely as Apple releasing a built-in Xbox environment on their G5 CPUs, actually.
Don't you think that there'd be more than 100 people interested in a pirate QT stream of a MacWorld keynote? From a PB no less? Guy didn't mention having an Xserve. That's my point entirely.
Seriously, though, how well did that scale? Was that video + sound over regular GigE? What kind of connection were your clients on? G4, G5, singular or dual CPU? How much RAM? I knew that this would work, but I have a hard time knowing how many streams you could push off a single Xserve before it crapped out...
I mean, shit, this is pratically begging for someone to use their Powerbook and iSight to do this.
Your PowerBook can serve a million streams? I think the bandwidth would kill you.
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it. And is Apple making the right strategic move, here? One of the reasons that folks even contemplate moving from Windows to OS X, instead of, say, Linux, is that you can buy Microsoft Office for OS X.
If MS feels threatened by iWorks, they'll just kill Office for OS X. And then Apple has lost one of their best marketing reasons to go Mac instead of Linux.
Not that Keynote really caused any problems--but iWord is a different story. Maybe this is just so Apple can have a "professional grade" office suite to put on the their pro line, and if you need Office compatibility (like 95% of the world) you buy Office for the Mac? But it would save that other 5% $500.
I guess I don't see the wisdom of this.
I'm sure they could easily add a section entitled "Are you and Expert" and many experts would volunteer their time to look at specific sections.
That goes to the heart of the problem--who gets to decide who's an "expert"? The Wiki editors? On what basis? The contributors? What if one "expert" contributor disagrees with another "expert" contributor? And finally--how do you get an expert recognized as an expert to contribute their expert knowledge for free? Maybe you can get this contribution sometimes, but can you find such an expert in every field?
I just bought my first PC for work... played the hell out of it for the next 20 hours of so
I won't tell your boss that you only needed a 1Ghz Celeron, and "integrated" video memory, to run Outlook and Word...
As a long time Mac user myself, I feel your pain. I finally broke down and bought a remainder bin PC too, enough to upgrade and play games on. One thing Macs suck at is games--at least we have WoW, and CoD.
Since you're apparently a fish conoisseur, I'll follow this OT.
I did some looking around on the web to learn what it would take to make my own sushi, and learned the history of the food in the process. Turns out, E Asians used to catch a nice fish, bury it in the ground and let it rot for awhile. A month or so later, they would eat it.
How it didn't kill them outright I dunno. Isn't rotted meat, like, one of the most toxic things you can eat? How they bore the stench, I dunno. Who was the first guy to try it? I'm betting someone's little brother.
In any event, they stopped letting the fish meat ferment; but they still add vinegar to sushi rice to approximate the "tang" of the rotted fish (inasmuch as vinegar is essentially spoiled wine). Helps counterbalance the fattiness of the fish, and frankly, they have a point--sushi without the vinegar would be too rich.
Interesting that both the E. Asians and the N. Europeans would rot their fish on purpose. I guess there's a survival strategy there. If you can't preserve it, learn to like the taste of spoiled food?
Better video cards. Really, the speed at which the onboard video card becomes obsolescent makes the entire unit age quicker than it should. If you could just upgrade the video card, and, less importantly, RAM and maybe HD, you get a lot more life out of the machine.
The CPU is artificially aged by the speed at which the video card becomes obsolescent.
After the heat shield, what will Opportunity look at? There's really not a whole lot--not even very many rocks--on that plain.
Are there scientific targets identified, or are they maybe going to try to "sprint" Opportunity and see how far it can get in the shortest amount of time? Maybe there's other potential sites of interest some distance away.
The Torino scale for this impact is now rated as a "4"--about 1% chance of hitting us, an upgrade from previous estimations. Still not likely, but now more likely.
I do disagree with the slow creep of the word to include people who have different opinions then the government.
Then you'll enjoy learning of Ann Coulter's book: Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. No, I haven't read it. I don't plan to.
I taught in High School after Columbine, and folks were pretty tense about anything that resembled violence on the school property--after hours or not. If you have to rule out FPS, I can't imagine you'll get many folks interested--and if things haven't loosened up in the last few years, I think getting FPS approved would be tough. Worse, they'll say "okay", but then shut you down once you start playing and they can see what is meant by FPS.
So before you go much further, I would demo the games that you want to play to the approving authority; if they blanch you'll have to rethink. And the type of game will impact the network needs too, so I think what gets approved will help determine the rest of your needs.
Let's divide your numbers by five and then talk.
Sure--if you also correct the ratio by the production cost. Tell me--do you think that Halo2 cost $200 Million to make and promote? That's the going rate for a movie--so if you can make more with a game than a movie, you come out ahead. Thus the shift of interest.