Well, aside from the fun aspects of playing god, I really don't get into the game that much after all this time. I don't see the point behind a particular tv show based on it unless it *was* part of someones particular patch or mod or scenario.
I supposed to could have your terrorist scenarios, inner city setups, complete with drive by shootings, etc. But after a while I find I am much more interested in world design where real people can have fun, and my interest in the sims drops off.
If I recall, it is possible to have independent patents on similar products using dissimilar technology.
For example a patent on a horsless carriage might not be enough. You could patent a specific steam powered technology, vs a separate patent for infernal combustion engines.
Thus it is possible for someone else to to develop an independant system separate from the first system, and accomplish the same goals.
A famous case had to do with the reverse enginnering of the IBM Bios, which led to the first 100% IBM compatible PCs. the engineers only had a spec of what the inputs and outputs were, with no other data, and designed a bit of hardware the duplicated the result exactly. IBM sued, and lost.
Given that, i somehow doubt that NCR would have much success vs someone with a similar idea, 14 years after the fact, and sitting on their hands all the while.
Personally, I look forward to having emulators with big bucks thrown into their development. It also allows for an expanded market for Sony.
My fantasy speculation is that now that Sony is going to get into the PC market, while MS is going into the game console market. Down the road this could lead to a Sony Gaming OS. I'm not taking the prospect seriously right now, but far stranger things have happened. And if the XBox turns out to be a dud, it could be fun to watch.
Many Oil Pockets have natural gas at the top. The Laser Drill will melt rock down to open the pocket. Ordinary drills use "drilling mud" to lubricate the bit and to help pull out the debris.
I don't know about you, but I see some danger of an explosion when you have a laser strong enough to melt rock opening up a pocket of natural gas.
Maybe I haven't had enough caffiene this morning, but it seems like a potential problem to me.
Just peruse back issues of popular computer magazines and you will see that most new Intel processors were pigeonholed as "server solutions" until they inevitably migrated to the business and consumer PC markets. If the actual SMT performance data matches or exceeds the simulated results, then an SMT processor may become an increasingly attractive option for many buyers. SMT could also be the "shot in the arm" microprocessor companies are looking for. There is a malaise in the current market, along with growing consumer resistance to ever-increasing processor clock speeds. If the hardware and software portions of SMT come together, then the question of "why do I need a 1.5 GHz processor?' may be answered in very short order.
Actually, while the first bit is true... let's face it, for most business applications we do not need faster machines until we have to deal with the bloat of the next road of software from the major vendors.
Businesses could probably do very well on a single standardized set of software for a decade or more for most common functions. Many have done so as a matter of fact. There are some businesses out the still running win 3.1 apps.
Still, he says, "It required a kid like Josh, who tries hard, likes to think and can perceive a whole complex of potential answers to find a new truth."
Looks like that school had not drummed the creativity out of the kid yet.
which is a damning comment on the quality of the education system.
Watch it be practical for something like warp drive design.
So the engineers are getting all concerned about human factors? I guess I wasn't aware that they had traded in their pocket protectors and slide rules.
I guess the point is that while it may take the intelligence of a rocket scientist to run some systems, the rocket scientists would rather be working on rocket science, not computer science.
That is an interesting attitude, because you only share with friends and communities you care about.
So this just adds to the apparent death spiral, since by implication friends and communities are for losers.
But strangely enough, that is probably the exact attitude of the marketroids who are abusing the community by ripping off the community effort by selling it.
This also fits in, in a weird way, to the whole Napster vs RIAA mess. Because there is a balance that needs to be reached as far as sharing vs respecting the rights of others. If I am required to share, then is that a fancy name for thievery? Are monopolies (in this case, of music) the means to achieve legalized rip offs?
The links for the original and related stories are here. The original story in the news report is here, and is much long than the Yahoo Article.
To a large degree, even though it is not named, well, for example there is this bit:
Targets of the critics' scorn included convoluted commands such as the common "Alt-Control-Delete" sequence used to close a program or perform an emergency shutdown. They also lambasted computer designers who refuse to distribute the machines' intelligence to smaller devices scattered throughout the home, instead insisting on packing a single box with maximum functionality.
Strangely, this sounds rather familiar. Certain large companies will not be named. They do not have to be. The marketroids have strangled the future.
A few years ago the chairman of the federal reserve muttered comments about "irrational exuburence".
An awful lot of the economy is in fact based on the attitudes of the public at large. Are they confident in the future, or are they victimised by FUD?
An awfull lot of what has happened over the past 6 months in terms of layoffs is part of the internet bubble shakeout. BUT a lot of it is not.
Alot of it is based on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Certain national politicians have muttered phrases generating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They have down this to cover themselves in case they mess up, and to sell their own agendas.
But what this has led to is a self fulfilling prophecy. Because part of what leads to a downturn is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, especially when there are not other factors changing the market, such as a new technology, etc.
You can call it an irrational pessimism, which is what I have seen in some posts here. I swear, you would think that people would have learned to recognize FUD when they see it.
A good example is that a Pentium 2 333 was not ten times faster in real life then a 486/33, excel to 2 seconds instead of 7 to load up, but during the actual work not much different.
The fairest way to measure that is to get the old harddrive from the 486, load it into the P2/333, and then do a crunvhing calculation that took a couple of minutes on the 486.
Most of the fill time is the User Interface bloat.
This fluid, leaderless revolutionary movement has driven Congress, academics, journalists and parents nearly mad. They are rattled by the hordes of the digital unwashed; they are particularly rattled by the revolution's unpredictability and enthusiasm. But do they have to worry about that much longer? Is the revolution stalled?
An off the wall take on this:
All too often, a revolution will present an opportunity for someone to come in an take control. Sometimes there are some higher principles involved, but do not hold your breath.
Examples of this are Napoleon in the French Revolution, and Lenin in the Russian. But in a certain sense these were provincial affairs, and the momentum of the moment allows for a certain type of politics that is not yet possible today. We do not have a Napoleon or Lenin or Washington of the Internet revolution. It is far to anarchistic and wide spread for that.
And yet even someone like Napoleon took control to "preserve the gains of the revolution". The French Revolution terrified the crowned heads of Europe. It is not without some reason, that in their fear, they called Napoleon the Anti-Christ.
Who cannot doubt, that certain factions, already frightened by the Internet with its' pornography and unfettered access to the rest of the world, would look in horror at any consolidation of the the gains of the Internet revolution? Many interests are frightened by the prospects of what the Internet promises. They are frightened of freedom.
And yet we have the balance of freedom and rules and laws. The freedom to drive cars requires some obedience to basic traffic laws. But we do not check points at every intersection either.
What we should really do is investigate and expose all of the personal information of Mr. Scott McNealy.
After all, he has said there is no such thing as privacy, and we should get over it. Well, we should give him a taste of what that really means.
Now this is just a fantasy, a wild opinion, but it is interesting as an educational exercise. It might be a very effective way to handle a lot of these jokers who want to pry into every one else's lives, but who would be very protective of their own privacy.
After all, effective privacy would ruin their economic model for cheap and easy money selling out their friends and neighbors.
feh
People moan about morality being outdated, and then they run into something like this, an utter disrespect for the rights of others.
There is not that much distance between this and outright thievery, looting, and pillaging, and plundering. All it takes is a little less respect for others. That's all.
Technical specs include 33mhz processor, and 8 megs of ram.
The flashback for me is that this compares to the 486 desktops when they were shipping consumer desktop models some years ago.
One has got to ask what will they be like when they get to have the power of todays' low end desktops in 5 to ten years?
Let's face it, when the 486/33 was king, if you told people that gigahertz machines with dozens of gigabytes of storage would be commonplace, who would have beleived you? or imagined that it would be like it ?
So my flight of fancy for today is to imagine what one of these would be like when they have todays desktop PCs.
It has been said that Government is the repository for all of those things that we as individuals do not want to take responsibility for. There is some truth in this.
Personally, I cannot be responsible for plowing out my street. So I am willing to pay someone to do this for me.
But you can take this too far. You can choose to not take personal responsibility for your kids. Maybe you cannot take care of your kids 24/7, so you hire baby sitters and nannies and arrange daycare for them.
Odds say that a significant amount of the people in any field are below average. A significant number of people are below average as parents. I suspect that this has not much to do with income level. Same goes for the hired help.
But in any case, we have a situation where some folks pawn off their responsibilities to the government. "Protect my children" they say.
But the easiest and most profitable way for government is not the one on one supervision that a parent can supply. It is something else.
With the electric cars, one of the things that is really needed is a high speed recharge setup. Let's face it, your drive to a gas station in a regular car, and fuel up in minutes, and are good for a week or so. With the electric, it's recharging overnight.
Never mind local hooligans and misdeed doers swinging by in the middle of the night and cutting the cable. [No charged car in the morning.] Or the neighbor who borrows your charge plug when you are not around, running up *your* bill.
Right now it is only really secure and practical in a private home with a private garage.
Here are the economics of it, from deeper in the article:
The problem is that five years of experience shows very limited value for the sort of ad that Yahoo and other sites sell most -- the ubiquitous rectangular banner. Those banners, it seems, are not as entertaining as TV, not as informative as print and not as personal as direct mail.
"A banner is nothing more than a highway billboard, a reminder message," said R. V. Hopple, CEO of Unicast, an advertising technology firm. "We know what outdoor is worth -- $2 per thousand." By contrast, prime-time television advertising sells for $17 per thousand audience members, according to The Myers Report. Yahoo recently dropped its list price for general banner ads from $16 to $8 per thousand impressions, although ads in certain high-demand places can go for as much as $80 a thousand.
The problem is that, when Banner ads were novelties, they had more value. Now they are common place, and their value is dropping. It will probably level out at the bill board level or slightly higher.
The real fix, of course, is to find operating systems vendors liable for selling systems which allow attackers to use OS vulnerabilities to take over a system and use it to attack a third party. Note that disclamers in EULAs don't matter in such cases, because the victim isn't the customer of the OS maker, but an unrelated third party. Someone needs to sue Microsoft for gross negligence over this, for selling mass-market operating systems with vulnerabilities years after the problem was identified.
Now if this software was a Microsoft solution, how many people would spook out at it totally? Or imagine the magnitude of behind the scenes conspiracy?
This is going to require enforced wide spread adoption, but I can see the RIAA, etc drooling over this. But I can also see the consumers for this avoiding it as the word gets out.
Depending on the media, the work around may be as easy as a patch cord. or knowing how to boot to safe mode.
Some info from the article:
InTether's most intriguing features are those intended to rebuff hackers. To begin with, Friedman says, the system incorporates 11 layers of security defenses. ''All have to be successfully navigated'' in order to hack the
system. ''But one piece does nothing but check continually the integrity of the other pieces,'' he says. ''If you could disable a certain piece, within milliseconds our system would know.''
At that point -- probably before, he says -- InTether begins taking counter measures. One relatively mild step is to force you to reboot your computer. But if the hacker persists, and continues making ''aggressive'' attempts to disable InTether's defenses or pierce its vault, he'll get what Friedman calls ''the white screen of death.'' His InTether receiver, together with all the InTethered files stored inside it, will be destroyed. Attacks ''would have to be pretty aggressive and multiple'' in order to trigger
the white screen of death, Friedman says, not so reassuringly.
As a side Note: It turns out that when an InTethered file is open -- say, a Word document -- the user cannot copy, cut, paste, or print any other Word document on his computer, including those that have not been InTethered. That's because, Friedman later explained, InTether imposes restrictions at the application level. But once the InTethered file was closed, the spell was lifted, and all normal operations resumed.
With the system, known as DNA-S, game CDs and DVDs will be imprinted with a unique ID. When a user puts the disc into the PlayStation2, the software ID and equipment ID will be verified over a network through an authentication server. Games that are not authenticated will not work.
The way I read this, a network connection will be mandatory. YOU must have DSL, or something.
While network connections, etc are common these days, I do not want to be **required** to connect my playstation to a network.
I wonder what kind of a marketing flap this will create?
Slashdot Mirror
I supposed to could have your terrorist scenarios, inner city setups, complete with drive by shootings, etc. But after a while I find I am much more interested in world design where real people can have fun, and my interest in the sims drops off.
In other words, I like a bigger game.
It's up there, but in PDF and word2000(?) format.
Some of it is interesting, with some real world type problems. Although I could see some purists griping.
wrong topic area, too many windows
For example a patent on a horsless carriage might not be enough. You could patent a specific steam powered technology, vs a separate patent for infernal combustion engines.
Thus it is possible for someone else to to develop an independant system separate from the first system, and accomplish the same goals.
A famous case had to do with the reverse enginnering of the IBM Bios, which led to the first 100% IBM compatible PCs. the engineers only had a spec of what the inputs and outputs were, with no other data, and designed a bit of hardware the duplicated the result exactly. IBM sued, and lost.
Given that, i somehow doubt that NCR would have much success vs someone with a similar idea, 14 years after the fact, and sitting on their hands all the while.
It isn't like it was a secret.
BTW, IANAL, etc.
My fantasy speculation is that now that Sony is going to get into the PC market, while MS is going into the game console market. Down the road this could lead to a Sony Gaming OS. I'm not taking the prospect seriously right now, but far stranger things have happened. And if the XBox turns out to be a dud, it could be fun to watch.
I don't know about you, but I see some danger of an explosion when you have a laser strong enough to melt rock opening up a pocket of natural gas.
Maybe I haven't had enough caffiene this morning, but it seems like a potential problem to me.
Actually, while the first bit is true... let's face it, for most business applications we do not need faster machines until we have to deal with the bloat of the next road of software from the major vendors.
Businesses could probably do very well on a single standardized set of software for a decade or more for most common functions. Many have done so as a matter of fact. There are some businesses out the still running win 3.1 apps.
Looks like that school had not drummed the creativity out of the kid yet.
which is a damning comment on the quality of the education system.
Watch it be practical for something like warp drive design.
I guess the point is that while it may take the intelligence of a rocket scientist to run some systems, the rocket scientists would rather be working on rocket science, not computer science.
;-)
So this just adds to the apparent death spiral, since by implication friends and communities are for losers.
But strangely enough, that is probably the exact attitude of the marketroids who are abusing the community by ripping off the community effort by selling it.
This also fits in, in a weird way, to the whole Napster vs RIAA mess. Because there is a balance that needs to be reached as far as sharing vs respecting the rights of others. If I am required to share, then is that a fancy name for thievery? Are monopolies (in this case, of music) the means to achieve legalized rip offs?
To a large degree, even though it is not named, well, for example there is this bit:
Targets of the critics' scorn included convoluted commands such as the common "Alt-Control-Delete" sequence used to close a program or perform an emergency shutdown. They also lambasted computer designers who refuse to distribute the machines' intelligence to smaller devices scattered throughout the home, instead insisting on packing a single box with maximum functionality.
Strangely, this sounds rather familiar. Certain large companies will not be named. They do not have to be. The marketroids have strangled the future.
An awful lot of the economy is in fact based on the attitudes of the public at large. Are they confident in the future, or are they victimised by FUD?
An awfull lot of what has happened over the past 6 months in terms of layoffs is part of the internet bubble shakeout. BUT a lot of it is not.
Alot of it is based on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Certain national politicians have muttered phrases generating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They have down this to cover themselves in case they mess up, and to sell their own agendas.
But what this has led to is a self fulfilling prophecy. Because part of what leads to a downturn is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, especially when there are not other factors changing the market, such as a new technology, etc.
You can call it an irrational pessimism, which is what I have seen in some posts here. I swear, you would think that people would have learned to recognize FUD when they see it.
The fairest way to measure that is to get the old harddrive from the 486, load it into the P2/333, and then do a crunvhing calculation that took a couple of minutes on the 486.
Most of the fill time is the User Interface bloat.
An off the wall take on this:
All too often, a revolution will present an opportunity for someone to come in an take control. Sometimes there are some higher principles involved, but do not hold your breath.
Examples of this are Napoleon in the French Revolution, and Lenin in the Russian. But in a certain sense these were provincial affairs, and the momentum of the moment allows for a certain type of politics that is not yet possible today. We do not have a Napoleon or Lenin or Washington of the Internet revolution. It is far to anarchistic and wide spread for that.
And yet even someone like Napoleon took control to "preserve the gains of the revolution". The French Revolution terrified the crowned heads of Europe. It is not without some reason, that in their fear, they called Napoleon the Anti-Christ.
Who cannot doubt, that certain factions, already frightened by the Internet with its' pornography and unfettered access to the rest of the world, would look in horror at any consolidation of the the gains of the Internet revolution? Many interests are frightened by the prospects of what the Internet promises. They are frightened of freedom.
And yet we have the balance of freedom and rules and laws. The freedom to drive cars requires some obedience to basic traffic laws. But we do not check points at every intersection either.
After all, he has said there is no such thing as privacy, and we should get over it. Well, we should give him a taste of what that really means.
Now this is just a fantasy, a wild opinion, but it is interesting as an educational exercise. It might be a very effective way to handle a lot of these jokers who want to pry into every one else's lives, but who would be very protective of their own privacy.
feh
People moan about morality being outdated, and then they run into something like this, an utter disrespect for the rights of others.
There is not that much distance between this and outright thievery, looting, and pillaging, and plundering. All it takes is a little less respect for others. That's all.
The flashback for me is that this compares to the 486 desktops when they were shipping consumer desktop models some years ago.
One has got to ask what will they be like when they get to have the power of todays' low end desktops in 5 to ten years?
Let's face it, when the 486/33 was king, if you told people that gigahertz machines with dozens of gigabytes of storage would be commonplace, who would have beleived you? or imagined that it would be like it ?
So my flight of fancy for today is to imagine what one of these would be like when they have todays desktop PCs.
Wooo - head rush!
Personally, I cannot be responsible for plowing out my street. So I am willing to pay someone to do this for me.
But you can take this too far. You can choose to not take personal responsibility for your kids. Maybe you cannot take care of your kids 24/7, so you hire baby sitters and nannies and arrange daycare for them.
Odds say that a significant amount of the people in any field are below average. A significant number of people are below average as parents. I suspect that this has not much to do with income level. Same goes for the hired help.
But in any case, we have a situation where some folks pawn off their responsibilities to the government. "Protect my children" they say.
But the easiest and most profitable way for government is not the one on one supervision that a parent can supply. It is something else.
Never mind local hooligans and misdeed doers swinging by in the middle of the night and cutting the cable. [No charged car in the morning.] Or the neighbor who borrows your charge plug when you are not around, running up *your* bill.
Right now it is only really secure and practical in a private home with a private garage.
The problem is that five years of experience shows very limited value for the sort of ad that Yahoo and other sites sell most -- the ubiquitous rectangular banner. Those banners, it seems, are not as entertaining as TV, not as informative as print and not as personal as direct mail.
"A banner is nothing more than a highway billboard, a reminder message," said R. V. Hopple, CEO of Unicast, an advertising technology firm. "We know what outdoor is worth -- $2 per thousand." By contrast, prime-time television advertising sells for $17 per thousand audience members, according to The Myers Report. Yahoo recently dropped its list price for general banner ads from $16 to $8 per thousand impressions, although ads in certain high-demand places can go for as much as $80 a thousand.
The problem is that, when Banner ads were novelties, they had more value. Now they are common place, and their value is dropping. It will probably level out at the bill board level or slightly higher.
Now if this software was a Microsoft solution, how many people would spook out at it totally? Or imagine the magnitude of behind the scenes conspiracy?
Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.
Depending on the media, the work around may be as easy as a patch cord. or knowing how to boot to safe mode.
Some info from the article:
InTether's most intriguing features are those intended to rebuff hackers. To begin with, Friedman says, the system incorporates 11 layers of security defenses. ''All have to be successfully navigated'' in order to hack the system. ''But one piece does nothing but check continually the integrity of the other pieces,'' he says. ''If you could disable a certain piece, within milliseconds our system would know.''
At that point -- probably before, he says -- InTether begins taking counter measures. One relatively mild step is to force you to reboot your computer. But if the hacker persists, and continues making ''aggressive'' attempts to disable InTether's defenses or pierce its vault, he'll get what Friedman calls ''the white screen of death.'' His InTether receiver, together with all the InTethered files stored inside it, will be destroyed. Attacks ''would have to be pretty aggressive and multiple'' in order to trigger the white screen of death, Friedman says, not so reassuringly.
As a side Note: It turns out that when an InTethered file is open -- say, a Word document -- the user cannot copy, cut, paste, or print any other Word document on his computer, including those that have not been InTethered. That's because, Friedman later explained, InTether imposes restrictions at the application level. But once the InTethered file was closed, the spell was lifted, and all normal operations resumed.
The way I read this, a network connection will be mandatory. YOU must have DSL, or something.
While network connections, etc are common these days, I do not want to be **required** to connect my playstation to a network.
I wonder what kind of a marketing flap this will create?
Although I can see someone using this to torture their kid brother or sister, or a niece or nephew.
"Bobby, you don't understand, Uncle Sluggo is going to make you toy *better*"
(insert evil laff here)
Or a college fraternity initiation ritual.
"You must ride this for at least one hour, while guzzling down the infamous Slammo Cocktail"
damn the graphics are good Source can be a pain, though.