I didn't even think anybody made an 80" HDTV, unless you're talking about a front projector on an 80" screen?
I might be incorrect by a few inches. The big HDTV that one of my friends has is a massive rear-projection set, and is signifigantly larger than the 65" sets that I've seen. The downside of that monolith is that you gotta sit in front of it to see the image, because if you are sitting off to the side you can't really see much, but that's true of most rear projectors. Besides, pretty much the whole living room is "in front" of that TV, because it's almost wall-to-wall wide.
No, they are HDTV. The handful of HDTV broadcasts in the Twin Cities come in correctly on them.
And 2 our of 3 is not something you'd qualify with 'only'. 2/3 is over half. 'Only' implies a much smaller amount.
"Only" implies a smaller amount than the listener is expecting. Example: If you order a beer, and the bartender "only" fills the pint glass 3/4 of the way up before serving it to you, but charges full price, you should kick his ass.
Since the parent of my post seemed to think that only the über-rich and ultra-1337 geeks would own HDTV's, his expectaion would be that all 3 of the HDTV owners I know are geeks, but only 2 of them are. Got it?
Unfortunately, for the next 3 years or so, most people won't actually know someone with an HDTV.
Actually, I would be willing to bet that most middle-class folks already know somebody with an HDTV. I am a fairly typical geek, and know three such people (only two of whom are geeks themselves). None of them are making six figures or have rich uncles or anything; they were just guys who were due to replace an old TV, and figured they might as well go HDTV for the set that they will use for the next 5-10 years.
By the way, DOA3 on the X-Box with an 80" HDTV is downright glorious. YMMV.
Personally, I want to squeeze another two or three years out of my 36" tube set, but if it were to somehow suddenly explode and be beyond repair, I would be shopping for an HDTV as well.
No, the Mac is a desktop Unix machine that, among many other things, just so happens to be good at manipulating digital content.
From the persective of UNIX geeks, that is correct.
However, a lot of people buy Macs for no other reason than that they are the very best consumer machines for manipulating digital multimedia. I never would have become a Mac user in the first place had it not been for my music studio. Now that I have a few Macs, I love all the chewey UNIX goodness under the Aqua candy shell, but it was not what brought me to the platform.
See, when I think of "well-known" female folk & rock singers of the 60's and early 70's, I think of Mama Cass, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, and Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary, for you youngsters following along). Then, of course there were the R&B stars of the time, like Aretha Franklin... and pop singers (back when "pop" meant Bacharach & David type stuff) like Dusty Springfield.
If Janis Ian was so huge, how is it that I can recite the lyrics to several songs from each of the women I just mentioned, yet I don't recall hearing any of her stuff anywhere?
I work with a lot of people in their 40's, so I just did an informal asking-around... none of them heard of her either. Either these people are out of touch with their generation, or your statement that "most of them have heard her" might not be entirely accurate.
Regarding your signature: I think Ruri's frequent use of the word "Baka" was a word that should have been left untranslated in both dubs and subs of the show. Instead of subbing "fool" or dubbing "idiot" (neither of which was completely accurate), leaving it alone would have allowed the viewer to get the meaning from the surrounding context. Totally unrelated to this thread, just an opinion of mine.
He must have done that as a joke to show the flaws in the patent system, because I'm sure there are thousands of super-8 home movies out there that demonstrate prior art. Just about every 3 year-old figures out how to swing sideways.
Gone forever are the days when hackers could roam through corporate systems, not really doing any damage, but just playing around.
One could take that to mean that early "white hat" hackers served their purpose successfully. By roaming through corporate systems, they managed to call attention to a lot of gaping security flaws that ended up getting fixed.
Also, roaming through corporate streams was a necessity for hard-core geeks in the days when Internet connectivity was prohibitively expensive. Much of what recreational hackers where "borrowing" other people's network resources for can now be done on a common consumer connection.
Just because you haven't heard of someone's name in your tiny little isolated corner of the universe you can presume judgement on someone's relative value, as if, because...
Here's a concept: a sense of humor.
Lighten up.
Oh, and yes, I do post too much here. I'm on a job with way too much down-time right now, and bored./. discussions passes for entertainment with me.
It's worth pointing out that producers of documentaries probably aren't subsidizing 50 documentaries that fail for every one that makes money.
Right, because it's probably more like 5,000. Documentaries almost never make money. For every Ken Burns, there's an army of non-fiction film makers who are utterly ignored.
On a side note, it's too bad nobody modded up the question that I most wanted answered by Janis Ian: "Who the fuck are you?" I listen to lots of music from every decade of the 20th Century, in a wide variety of styles, and I never even heard that name before/. announced an interview with her.
Unfortunately for you, it's a safe bet that the cable company's business model (drafted before the dot-com bust) depends on them somehow wiring about 60% of the people on your block.
Since that's not happening, they will probably either jack up your price or else take down the network entirely within the next couple years.
No, because a publicly-shared network would be a "common carrier."
Without the legal concept of common carriers, the phone company could be sued for every pyramid scheme that used the phone network to telemarket, and railroads would be held responsible for every escaped fugitive that travelled by train. A publicly shared network is analogous to these situations, in spite of what paranoid corporate lawyers would like you to think.
You're not going to have 200 people sharing one cable line. The quality would be terrible and no one would be interested.
I think you are missing the point. The idea is not "200 people sharing one cable line". The idea is: 200,000,000 people connected peer-to-peer via wireless, with nobody plugged into any line anywhere.
Think about it: if everybody has a wireless presense, then what do we need the phone company for?
The long-term goal here is to build a wireless viral network so large that the land-line Internet becomes obsolete.
An intermediate step would be to have large groups of people (neighborhoods, apartment complexes, etc.) pitching in to share a T1 in their immediate physical area. Later, you could have entire cities using property taxes (or funds raised by the Chamber of Commerce) to pay for a couple of really fat shared pipes with broadcast nodes all over town. Eventually, these communities could use directional antennae to hook each other together, along with networks of bordering areas bleeding into each other by individual users' NAT hosting, and from there it baloons out until everything is on the wireless network. The only thing that needs to be worked out is a means of high-volume servers to handle the bandwidth load... probably with some vast system of mirroring. Yes, it would suck for a lot of media companies that think of their websites as a new form of television or magazine, but if we were to lose MSNBC and Salon in the process of going to nearly-free wireless I would not shed many tears.
It's a grand utopian scheme that might never happen, but it is kind of fun to dream about, isn't it?
As we saw with the warchalking article last week there is a good amount of room for someone to try and abuse your network. In the case of most war-chalkers its harmless but there are occasions when it would not be.
But if you are sharing the network on purpose for all parties, the warchalkers would be perfectly welcome. In fact, you might even choose to go out and chalk the streets in front of your house yourself... why be a Nice Guy and share a wireless NAT and not tell anybody?
Having your local city or county library provide a DS3 drop or two for all the "lillypads" in the city seems like a great way to get that done. I'm all for it.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any "emerging trend" that Negroponte has ever written about that actually ended up happening after he wrote about it. It's almost like the Sports Illustrated Cover Curse (for non-sports-fan geeks, it's kind of a murphy's law of sports... any athelete who gets his picture on the cover of SI will have a terrible week immediately afterwards).
Negroponte's columns are often the stuff of cyberpunk novels, not future reality. In this case, I hope he's right though. Connecting a laptop to the Internet from some non-wired coffee shop costs you a fortune right now, and it shouldn't.
The one potential problem I see with this is that if we all ababndon the wires, and cheap DSL goes away as a result, where the hell am I going to connect my static-ip web server? I'm one of those people who values the Internet as a means of distribution as much as a means of getting information.
Nearly all software creations fail this simple litmus test. It's about time that those of us in the industry lobby congress to establish that only copyright, not patents, should be the protection which software enjoys.
As long as you are not stealing code, there is nothing unethical about writing a program that does the same thing as somebody else's program. The only "invention" involved would be the versitile Finite State Machine ("the PC", for you patent lawyers), which allows these applications to work.
I can't take out a patent on a method of using my car to light my house. Likewise, I should not be allowed to patent a new application for my computer.
I know what you mean. Watching that damned show makes me think I need to run out and buy one of those big belt sanders that can do a whole door at once. Eventually, I come around to remember that it would be cheaper to hire somebody to sand my door by hand at $50/hour. Still, his show is fun to watch, and half of the pleasure comes from doing interesting woodwork vicariously through Norm.
Both the networky thing and the cutting thing are called "routers" because the make "routes". If people where you come from pronouce route as "root", then they should both be pronounced "rooter". If your dialect says route as "rowt" (as mine does), then they are both pronounced "rowter".
BTW: Do you say "pronounce" like "pronoonce", too?:P
The problem is, the story only works if the character begins as somebody who is taken seriously by most of Washington. In the case of Rush Limbaugh, only about half of the current Washington leadership (and a similar fraction of the general population) even agrees with his positions most of the time, and many of those who agree with him don't care for his schtick, so really only a small group of people take him seriously. In fact, the group that takes UFO crackpots seriously might be nearly as large.
George Will might be more analagous, but he's never really been given his own show either. He's smart and articulate, but perhaps a little too smart and articulate for mass consumption, so he tends to be used as the "token right-winger" in political round-table shows, now that people have caught on to the fact that David Gergen is not particularilly conservative.
"Little Green Men" is about a journalist who was considered ultra-credible by nearly everybody until he told the world he was abducted.
A story about a Rush Limbaugh type becoming a UFO believer would not be nearly as funny. Make Rush Limbaugh believe in UFO abductions, and all you end up with is Art Bell.
I've tried to figure out whether the protagonist is George Will or Rush Limbaugh or whether he's simply a mix of several pundits.
His Sunday talk show is almost exactly the same as "Meet The Press" on NBC, right down to stealing and slightly modifying the tag-line, "if it's Sunday, it's Meet The Press". He commands enough fear and respect in the early part of the book that it is doubtful that he is modelled on a pundit (who really only have a following among those with the same ideology as them... Rush Limbaugh has very few left-wing fans, and almost never does interviews of anybody on his show).
His job and status makes him seem closest to Tim Russert (the current "Meet the Press" host) or David Brinkley (of "This Week", another Sunday Morning put-leaders-in-the-hot-seat interview show). However, the character's background and style seems to resemble Buckley's father, William F. Buckley, and his PBS news interview-and-commentary show, "Firing Line".
For something slightly newer, check out "God Is My Broker", also by Buckley. It's a short novel formatted to spoof self-help books.
One of the things I found really amusing about "Little Green Men" is that the main character, while partly based in Tim Russert and David Brinkley, he was obviously also drawn heavilly from William F. Buckley, the author's father. The idea that he would subject his well-respected dad's fictional proxy to an alien anal probe, for the sake of a cheap laugh, somehow strikes me as even funnier because of this context.
Re:aren't they going to run out of characters?
on
Marvel Goes MMPORG
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· Score: 1
Oooo. Can I be the Comic Book Guy? That would be way cooler than playing the Hulk.
Now that is an idea I can get behind! What a great MMORPG a "Marvel Villians" game would be. Play a super-villian, and try to cause as much mayhem and distruction as you can before Spidey comes in to ruin your diabolical schemes. Curses! Foiled again!
Being a bad guy on a server with 1500 other bad guys, all trying to plunder the city, would be a blast.
It would certainly be more fun that being in a League of Heroes so big that you gotta carry union cards, which is what this announcement sounds like.
Slashdot Mirror
I might be incorrect by a few inches. The big HDTV that one of my friends has is a massive rear-projection set, and is signifigantly larger than the 65" sets that I've seen. The downside of that monolith is that you gotta sit in front of it to see the image, because if you are sitting off to the side you can't really see much, but that's true of most rear projectors. Besides, pretty much the whole living room is "in front" of that TV, because it's almost wall-to-wall wide.
No, they are HDTV. The handful of HDTV broadcasts in the Twin Cities come in correctly on them.
And 2 our of 3 is not something you'd qualify with 'only'. 2/3 is over half. 'Only' implies a much smaller amount.
"Only" implies a smaller amount than the listener is expecting. Example: If you order a beer, and the bartender "only" fills the pint glass 3/4 of the way up before serving it to you, but charges full price, you should kick his ass.
Since the parent of my post seemed to think that only the über-rich and ultra-1337 geeks would own HDTV's, his expectaion would be that all 3 of the HDTV owners I know are geeks, but only 2 of them are. Got it?
Actually, I would be willing to bet that most middle-class folks already know somebody with an HDTV. I am a fairly typical geek, and know three such people (only two of whom are geeks themselves). None of them are making six figures or have rich uncles or anything; they were just guys who were due to replace an old TV, and figured they might as well go HDTV for the set that they will use for the next 5-10 years.
By the way, DOA3 on the X-Box with an 80" HDTV is downright glorious. YMMV.
Personally, I want to squeeze another two or three years out of my 36" tube set, but if it were to somehow suddenly explode and be beyond repair, I would be shopping for an HDTV as well.
From the persective of UNIX geeks, that is correct.
However, a lot of people buy Macs for no other reason than that they are the very best consumer machines for manipulating digital multimedia. I never would have become a Mac user in the first place had it not been for my music studio. Now that I have a few Macs, I love all the chewey UNIX goodness under the Aqua candy shell, but it was not what brought me to the platform.
If Janis Ian was so huge, how is it that I can recite the lyrics to several songs from each of the women I just mentioned, yet I don't recall hearing any of her stuff anywhere?
Regarding your signature: I think Ruri's frequent use of the word "Baka" was a word that should have been left untranslated in both dubs and subs of the show. Instead of subbing "fool" or dubbing "idiot" (neither of which was completely accurate), leaving it alone would have allowed the viewer to get the meaning from the surrounding context. Totally unrelated to this thread, just an opinion of mine.
You are correct, although that does not negate my point. Documentary film producers do, in fact, subsidize a lot of money-losers.
He must have done that as a joke to show the flaws in the patent system, because I'm sure there are thousands of super-8 home movies out there that demonstrate prior art. Just about every 3 year-old figures out how to swing sideways.
One could take that to mean that early "white hat" hackers served their purpose successfully. By roaming through corporate systems, they managed to call attention to a lot of gaping security flaws that ended up getting fixed.
Also, roaming through corporate streams was a necessity for hard-core geeks in the days when Internet connectivity was prohibitively expensive. Much of what recreational hackers where "borrowing" other people's network resources for can now be done on a common consumer connection.
Here's a concept: a sense of humor.
Lighten up.
Oh, and yes, I do post too much here. I'm on a job with way too much down-time right now, and bored. /. discussions passes for entertainment with me.
Right, because it's probably more like 5,000. Documentaries almost never make money. For every Ken Burns, there's an army of non-fiction film makers who are utterly ignored.
On a side note, it's too bad nobody modded up the question that I most wanted answered by Janis Ian: "Who the fuck are you?" I listen to lots of music from every decade of the 20th Century, in a wide variety of styles, and I never even heard that name before /. announced an interview with her.
Since that's not happening, they will probably either jack up your price or else take down the network entirely within the next couple years.
Without the legal concept of common carriers, the phone company could be sued for every pyramid scheme that used the phone network to telemarket, and railroads would be held responsible for every escaped fugitive that travelled by train. A publicly shared network is analogous to these situations, in spite of what paranoid corporate lawyers would like you to think.
I think you are missing the point. The idea is not "200 people sharing one cable line". The idea is: 200,000,000 people connected peer-to-peer via wireless, with nobody plugged into any line anywhere.
Think about it: if everybody has a wireless presense, then what do we need the phone company for?
The long-term goal here is to build a wireless viral network so large that the land-line Internet becomes obsolete.
An intermediate step would be to have large groups of people (neighborhoods, apartment complexes, etc.) pitching in to share a T1 in their immediate physical area. Later, you could have entire cities using property taxes (or funds raised by the Chamber of Commerce) to pay for a couple of really fat shared pipes with broadcast nodes all over town. Eventually, these communities could use directional antennae to hook each other together, along with networks of bordering areas bleeding into each other by individual users' NAT hosting, and from there it baloons out until everything is on the wireless network. The only thing that needs to be worked out is a means of high-volume servers to handle the bandwidth load... probably with some vast system of mirroring. Yes, it would suck for a lot of media companies that think of their websites as a new form of television or magazine, but if we were to lose MSNBC and Salon in the process of going to nearly-free wireless I would not shed many tears.
It's a grand utopian scheme that might never happen, but it is kind of fun to dream about, isn't it?
But if you are sharing the network on purpose for all parties, the warchalkers would be perfectly welcome. In fact, you might even choose to go out and chalk the streets in front of your house yourself... why be a Nice Guy and share a wireless NAT and not tell anybody?
Unfortunately, I can't think of any "emerging trend" that Negroponte has ever written about that actually ended up happening after he wrote about it. It's almost like the Sports Illustrated Cover Curse (for non-sports-fan geeks, it's kind of a murphy's law of sports... any athelete who gets his picture on the cover of SI will have a terrible week immediately afterwards).
Negroponte's columns are often the stuff of cyberpunk novels, not future reality. In this case, I hope he's right though. Connecting a laptop to the Internet from some non-wired coffee shop costs you a fortune right now, and it shouldn't.
The one potential problem I see with this is that if we all ababndon the wires, and cheap DSL goes away as a result, where the hell am I going to connect my static-ip web server? I'm one of those people who values the Internet as a means of distribution as much as a means of getting information.
As long as you are not stealing code, there is nothing unethical about writing a program that does the same thing as somebody else's program. The only "invention" involved would be the versitile Finite State Machine ("the PC", for you patent lawyers), which allows these applications to work.
I can't take out a patent on a method of using my car to light my house. Likewise, I should not be allowed to patent a new application for my computer.
IANAL, blah blah blah
I know what you mean. Watching that damned show makes me think I need to run out and buy one of those big belt sanders that can do a whole door at once. Eventually, I come around to remember that it would be cheaper to hire somebody to sand my door by hand at $50/hour. Still, his show is fun to watch, and half of the pleasure comes from doing interesting woodwork vicariously through Norm.
BTW: Do you say "pronounce" like "pronoonce", too? :P
That's what the "/ignore" command is for. I wouldn't consider playing a MMORPG without it.
George Will might be more analagous, but he's never really been given his own show either. He's smart and articulate, but perhaps a little too smart and articulate for mass consumption, so he tends to be used as the "token right-winger" in political round-table shows, now that people have caught on to the fact that David Gergen is not particularilly conservative.
"Little Green Men" is about a journalist who was considered ultra-credible by nearly everybody until he told the world he was abducted.
A story about a Rush Limbaugh type becoming a UFO believer would not be nearly as funny. Make Rush Limbaugh believe in UFO abductions, and all you end up with is Art Bell.
His Sunday talk show is almost exactly the same as "Meet The Press" on NBC, right down to stealing and slightly modifying the tag-line, "if it's Sunday, it's Meet The Press". He commands enough fear and respect in the early part of the book that it is doubtful that he is modelled on a pundit (who really only have a following among those with the same ideology as them... Rush Limbaugh has very few left-wing fans, and almost never does interviews of anybody on his show).
His job and status makes him seem closest to Tim Russert (the current "Meet the Press" host) or David Brinkley (of "This Week", another Sunday Morning put-leaders-in-the-hot-seat interview show). However, the character's background and style seems to resemble Buckley's father, William F. Buckley, and his PBS news interview-and-commentary show, "Firing Line".
For something slightly newer, check out "God Is My Broker", also by Buckley. It's a short novel formatted to spoof self-help books.
One of the things I found really amusing about "Little Green Men" is that the main character, while partly based in Tim Russert and David Brinkley, he was obviously also drawn heavilly from William F. Buckley, the author's father. The idea that he would subject his well-respected dad's fictional proxy to an alien anal probe, for the sake of a cheap laugh, somehow strikes me as even funnier because of this context.
Oooo. Can I be the Comic Book Guy? That would be way cooler than playing the Hulk.
Now that is an idea I can get behind! What a great MMORPG a "Marvel Villians" game would be. Play a super-villian, and try to cause as much mayhem and distruction as you can before Spidey comes in to ruin your diabolical schemes. Curses! Foiled again!
Being a bad guy on a server with 1500 other bad guys, all trying to plunder the city, would be a blast.
It would certainly be more fun that being in a League of Heroes so big that you gotta carry union cards, which is what this announcement sounds like.