Big company business plan 1. Profit! 2. Buyout a smaller company for their technology 3. Sell products based on new technology + big company brand name 4. Hopefully go back to 1.
Small company business plan 1. Develop cool new technology 2. Get pounded in the marketplace 'cause you don't have a brandname 3. Sell out to big company 4. Profit!
From the big company's perspective this is smart business. The big company is isolated from the risk of R&D. They only buy successes. Meanwhile the small companies vie to come up with the best ideas possible so they get the "Golden Ticket".
Linux, BSD and GNU are virtual Godsends to the poor
Show me one poor person running Linux, and I'll show you ten running a pirated copy of Windows. Only in America do the poor have $200 shoes, $100 sweatshirts and a broadband connection.
What happens to the people who aren't "tending to their own wants and needs" in the third world? They die. End of story.
What happens to people in America who don't tend to their own wants and needs? Somebody rolls out broadband to their subsidized housing project.
I used to be so poor that I didn't have enough to eat. Tell you what. I sure as hell didn't want fancy computer gear. All I wanted was a big meal and a chance to never feel that way again.
Surfin porn on the state's dime isn't going to lead these people to independant living. If anything it's going to continue the cycle of compassionate oppression. Many of the poor are trapped in a culture of dependance. Perpetuating that culture by providing luxuries instead of motivation is only going to make the problem worse.
What he needs to do is hook up with a car manufacturer. VW would be my first choice. Talk them into building a "Segway Edition" Passat or GTI. Then he'd have a distribution channel that let people test drive the Segway.
It's easier to bury five grand in a thirty thousand dollar price-tag than it is to sell it on it's own. Especially when financing becomes as easy as getting an auto loan. VW would probably get a ton of people coming to their dealerships to test it out. Since they seem to target the same demographic, it could be a win-win.
That's funny. I just cooked up a PHP script that reads a 24bit color BMP and converts it to HTML. Since the RGB color values in the BMP map directly to RGB color entites in the HTML it's mainly a matter of keeping track of the rows. I didn't bother with any of the cool tricks like selecting characters for asciialiasing curves and edges though.
Unfortunately, the technique I used for the HTML crashed Mozilla when I fed it bitmaps bigger than about 128x128. There must be something about rendering over a thousand span tags with different colored inline styles that makes the browser choke;) Also, the file size was larger than the original by a significant margin. Even plain ASCII is effectively 8 bits a 'pixel' so you probably wouldn't save much.
Nice idea about the 'anti slashdot' script, but I think I'd go with redirects instead. While the load is high dump everyone from the most popular referrer to a low bandwidth version of the page. Heh. Maybe send them to 127.0.0.1 instead?
Now that you mention it, I've got a couple hundred gigs of great public domain content right here. Just send me the hard drives and beer and I'll get started...
Write all of your assignments in COBOL. Even the ones for your VB class. No matter what it is, implement it in COBOL first.
Go party. Hard. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hard. Once your dorm room is full of bats start renaming variables and stripping out comments. If you can still remember what you wrote and why, you didn't party hard enough. Don't keep a backup copy of the original COBOL. That's cheating.
The night before a VB project is due, dust off the corresponding COBOL. Now all you have to do is port the heavily obfuscated and undocumented COBOL to VB. You can even get extra points for realism by getting the prof to change the project spec sometime midstream.
Once you've turned in your VB project, look back at the COBOL source. By now it should look like a bizzare cross between the tax code and naughty refrigerator poetry. The night before your COBOL project is due, start backporting it from the VB. Bonus points are awarded for targeting an ancient punchcard based architecture and then updating it to meet the project requirements.
Re:What's wrong with the Nintendo?
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
·
· Score: 1
could anybody who did both PC and console gaming during this time give an opinion on the matter?
I played both Nintendo and PC games around this time period (1991-1992), so I guess I'm qualified to answer. My first experience with Commander Keen came with the fourth episode (second shareware?), but I played Keen 1 at some point too.
The first time I played Commander Keen 4 "Goodbye Galaxy" I distinctly remember thinking "This is better than my Nintendo". It at least ranked with Super Mario Bros 3 in both graphics and gameplay. Keen had more style and humor though. The controls felt better than any PC 'platform' game that I'd played before. Before Keen I preferred consoles for 'thumb' games and computers for thinking games. Since playing Keen I haven't bought another console game. At least for me Keen killed the console star.
Nobody in the top 1% income bracket got there by actually producing anything of value anyway.
Care to support this assertion in some way?
Just out of curosity, do you know how much money you'd have to make to be in the top 1% income bracket? What about the top 5%, or even the top 10%? Are any of these numbers out of reach of a talented individual with the desire to attain them?
That's how the system was designed!
Again, can we see some proof? Your unsupported statements just twist in the wind.
How many homeless people in the USA? And what's the current defense budget? People in glass houses, etc...
How many homeless in the US? The most reliable numbers I've seen range from about half a million to one million homeless at any given time. This is based on extrapolations from HUD reports, shelter populations, and studies from the Urban Intsitute. We're talking about one third of one percent of the US population.
What's the current defense budget? The estimate I'm looking at (from FY 2001) gives a figure of about $300 billion dollars. Given recent events I'd call this a bit on the low side. However, you can compare this figure to spending on Social Security ($443 Billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($362 Billion), or Means Tested Entitlements ($119 Billion). Gee, it looks like we're spending more to take care of the poor and elderly than we are on defense.
You could literally enlist one million homeless people, pay them $50K a year, and still have the defense budget come out cheaper than Medicare+Medicaid. You could even do that for only half of the means tested entitlements budget. Lets phrase it a different way:
The US spends enough on programs for the poor that you could give every homeless person a six figure salary. What was this about glass houses?
Yeah, but you wouldn't know where your customers went. The bar might lose fifty cents when Fred pours an extra shot of Bourbon in my 'double'. What they gain in goodwill and repeat business is far more valuable. I'm not a heavy drinker, but if you make me feel like I'm getting stiffed, I'm leaving and never coming back.
Let's face it. I'm throwing down five bucks for a dollar's worth of alcohol. If a little conversation and someone who remembers my face is too much to ask I'll give my 500% markup to someone who cares.
Keep in mind, you don't even want exact inventory control in a bar. It maakes it harder to fudge the taxes.
These devices will cause SCSI drive manufacturers to produce cheaper drives.
Is there a technical reason you couldn't take a 200GB IDE drive and make it a native SCSI drive? Not really. The physical parts of the drive aren't dependant on the interface. Western Digital could just as easily make a 250GB SCSI drive as they can a 250GB IDE.
So why aren't SCSI manufacturers doing this? Until now they've been able to prop up the margins in the SCSI market by keeping it a 'high end' product. The SCSI drives you stick in your servers are often better peices of hardware than your cheapo IDE drives. I've got 18GB SCSI drives here that are built like bricks. They aren't cheap drives with SCSI controllers instead of IDE. Building cheap drives with SCSI would begin to erode their high end market. That's why they won't do it.
However, someone just did it for them. Now that the market has been opened, look for drive manufacturers to start releasing large SCSI drives. If they don't, they lose this midrange market segment AND the high end market still takes a hit.
Tech prediction for 2003: 200GB SCSI drives for $400 to $500 bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought you meant Steven *King*.
No, then you'd never get out of Maine.
I though that R&D was outsourced now...
Big company business plan
1. Profit!
2. Buyout a smaller company for their technology
3. Sell products based on new technology + big company brand name
4. Hopefully go back to 1.
Small company business plan
1. Develop cool new technology
2. Get pounded in the marketplace 'cause you don't have a brandname
3. Sell out to big company
4. Profit!
From the big company's perspective this is smart business. The big company is isolated from the risk of R&D. They only buy successes. Meanwhile the small companies vie to come up with the best ideas possible so they get the "Golden Ticket".
Linux, BSD and GNU are virtual Godsends to the poor
Show me one poor person running Linux, and I'll show you ten running a pirated copy of Windows. Only in America do the poor have $200 shoes, $100 sweatshirts and a broadband connection.
What happens to the people who aren't "tending to their own wants and needs" in the third world? They die. End of story.
What happens to people in America who don't tend to their own wants and needs? Somebody rolls out broadband to their subsidized housing project.
I used to be so poor that I didn't have enough to eat. Tell you what. I sure as hell didn't want fancy computer gear. All I wanted was a big meal and a chance to never feel that way again.
Surfin porn on the state's dime isn't going to lead these people to independant living. If anything it's going to continue the cycle of compassionate oppression. Many of the poor are trapped in a culture of dependance. Perpetuating that culture by providing luxuries instead of motivation is only going to make the problem worse.
Perhaps the obfusicated coding contest is a bad example
No, that's just a Jackson Pollock style counterpoint to Mondrian inspired structured programming.
What he needs to do is hook up with a car manufacturer. VW would be my first choice. Talk them into building a "Segway Edition" Passat or GTI. Then he'd have a distribution channel that let people test drive the Segway.
It's easier to bury five grand in a thirty thousand dollar price-tag than it is to sell it on it's own. Especially when financing becomes as easy as getting an auto loan. VW would probably get a ton of people coming to their dealerships to test it out. Since they seem to target the same demographic, it could be a win-win.
Hotslut13
Hey, you know Bill too? Of course we call him "Special Agent Johnson" around here...
That might be better than "You're the one for me fatty"...
Of course my girlfriend's in a coma so I don't have any plans.
That's funny. I just cooked up a PHP script that reads a 24bit color BMP and converts it to HTML. Since the RGB color values in the BMP map directly to RGB color entites in the HTML it's mainly a matter of keeping track of the rows. I didn't bother with any of the cool tricks like selecting characters for asciialiasing curves and edges though.
;) Also, the file size was larger than the original by a significant margin. Even plain ASCII is effectively 8 bits a 'pixel' so you probably wouldn't save much.
Unfortunately, the technique I used for the HTML crashed Mozilla when I fed it bitmaps bigger than about 128x128. There must be something about rendering over a thousand span tags with different colored inline styles that makes the browser choke
Nice idea about the 'anti slashdot' script, but I think I'd go with redirects instead. While the load is high dump everyone from the most popular referrer to a low bandwidth version of the page. Heh. Maybe send them to 127.0.0.1 instead?
Now that you mention it, I've got a couple hundred gigs of great public domain content right here. Just send me the hard drives and beer and I'll get started...
3.5 cheer when "Uncle George" decides to protect "US Interests Abroad" and turns the /indian/russian/chinese programmer into a smoking hole.
Write all of your assignments in COBOL. Even the ones for your VB class. No matter what it is, implement it in COBOL first.
Go party. Hard. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hard. Once your dorm room is full of bats start renaming variables and stripping out comments. If you can still remember what you wrote and why, you didn't party hard enough. Don't keep a backup copy of the original COBOL. That's cheating.
The night before a VB project is due, dust off the corresponding COBOL. Now all you have to do is port the heavily obfuscated and undocumented COBOL to VB. You can even get extra points for realism by getting the prof to change the project spec sometime midstream.
Once you've turned in your VB project, look back at the COBOL source. By now it should look like a bizzare cross between the tax code and naughty refrigerator poetry. The night before your COBOL project is due, start backporting it from the VB. Bonus points are awarded for targeting an ancient punchcard based architecture and then updating it to meet the project requirements.
could anybody who did both PC and console gaming during this time give an opinion on the matter?
I played both Nintendo and PC games around this time period (1991-1992), so I guess I'm qualified to answer. My first experience with Commander Keen came with the fourth episode (second shareware?), but I played Keen 1 at some point too.
The first time I played Commander Keen 4 "Goodbye Galaxy" I distinctly remember thinking "This is better than my Nintendo". It at least ranked with Super Mario Bros 3 in both graphics and gameplay. Keen had more style and humor though. The controls felt better than any PC 'platform' game that I'd played before. Before Keen I preferred consoles for 'thumb' games and computers for thinking games. Since playing Keen I haven't bought another console game. At least for me Keen killed the console star.
So the ancient greeks are riding around in time machines and flattening the crops of the future? Man, and I thought aliens were far fetched...
Nobody in the top 1% income bracket got there by actually producing anything of value anyway.
Care to support this assertion in some way?
Just out of curosity, do you know how much money you'd have to make to be in the top 1% income bracket? What about the top 5%, or even the top 10%? Are any of these numbers out of reach of a talented individual with the desire to attain them?
That's how the system was designed!
Again, can we see some proof? Your unsupported statements just twist in the wind.
The especially amusing part about your rant is describing the top 1% as being productive.
Let me ask a couple of simple questions:
Why aren't the wealthiest individuals being productive?
What do you consider productivity?
I'm honestly curious what you're answers are.
Creed marathons.
They have more than one song?
Yeah, but everyone needs to have food. Porn on the other hand...
How many homeless people in the USA? And what's the current defense budget? People in glass houses, etc...
How many homeless in the US? The most reliable numbers I've seen range from about half a million to one million homeless at any given time. This is based on extrapolations from HUD reports, shelter populations, and studies from the Urban Intsitute. We're talking about one third of one percent of the US population.
What's the current defense budget? The estimate I'm looking at (from FY 2001) gives a figure of about $300 billion dollars. Given recent events I'd call this a bit on the low side. However, you can compare this figure to spending on Social Security ($443 Billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($362 Billion), or Means Tested Entitlements ($119 Billion). Gee, it looks like we're spending more to take care of the poor and elderly than we are on defense.
You could literally enlist one million homeless people, pay them $50K a year, and still have the defense budget come out cheaper than Medicare+Medicaid. You could even do that for only half of the means tested entitlements budget. Lets phrase it a different way:
The US spends enough on programs for the poor that you could give every homeless person a six figure salary. What was this about glass houses?
Yeah, but you wouldn't know where your customers went. The bar might lose fifty cents when Fred pours an extra shot of Bourbon in my 'double'. What they gain in goodwill and repeat business is far more valuable. I'm not a heavy drinker, but if you make me feel like I'm getting stiffed, I'm leaving and never coming back.
Let's face it. I'm throwing down five bucks for a dollar's worth of alcohol. If a little conversation and someone who remembers my face is too much to ask I'll give my 500% markup to someone who cares.
Keep in mind, you don't even want exact inventory control in a bar. It maakes it harder to fudge the taxes.
No, but it's connected to a NetBEUI...
You write for The Onion, don't you?
Christmas, Twin Falls, Idaho...
Could it have been Demon Stalkers?? I was mostly using PC's by the time this game came out, but I vaguely remember it.
These devices will cause SCSI drive manufacturers to produce cheaper drives.
Is there a technical reason you couldn't take a 200GB IDE drive and make it a native SCSI drive? Not really. The physical parts of the drive aren't dependant on the interface. Western Digital could just as easily make a 250GB SCSI drive as they can a 250GB IDE.
So why aren't SCSI manufacturers doing this? Until now they've been able to prop up the margins in the SCSI market by keeping it a 'high end' product. The SCSI drives you stick in your servers are often better peices of hardware than your cheapo IDE drives. I've got 18GB SCSI drives here that are built like bricks. They aren't cheap drives with SCSI controllers instead of IDE. Building cheap drives with SCSI would begin to erode their high end market. That's why they won't do it.
However, someone just did it for them. Now that the market has been opened, look for drive manufacturers to start releasing large SCSI drives. If they don't, they lose this midrange market segment AND the high end market still takes a hit.
Tech prediction for 2003: 200GB SCSI drives for $400 to $500 bucks.
I guess those who can't really do teach...