If you think spending 40 quid on a good soundcard and another 40 quid for some "good speakers for my PC" is what fidelity is about then you need to have your hearing checked out.
And if you think "fidelity" is what music appreciation is about then you need to have your brain checked.
Play me a good song, and I won't care whether it's a 96kbps MP3 stream or pristine vinyl on a $2000 turntable -- I'm going to enjoy it. Likewise, play me a bad song and I'm NOT going to enjoy it, irregardless of "fidelity".
If returns policies are widely shaken up, it could be the end for easy customer returns, and the ability to legitimately return goods that do not fit your needs.
If it doesn't fit your needs, you probably should have done more research before you bought it.
Maybe stores should charge customers a premium for the ability to return items for reasons other than defectiveness? (This is essentially what "restocking fees" are.)
That way the costs of merchandise returns and of return fraud are borne by the people who actually engage in those practices, and not by those of us who actually caveat emptor.
"Once the young are old, and the old are dead, games will be regarded as just another medium..."
Shouldn't this have happened already, though?
Video games have been a part of mainstream culture since, let's say, 1980. A gamer who was 25 years old when the Pac-Man Fever epidemic took place would be 50 years old now--not "old" per se, but firmly in the middle of the generation that is currently most responsible for guiding our public policies.
So, my question to Microsoft fans is, what happened between 1990 and 2000 that turned Microsoft from hero to goat?
It was around 1990 that Microsoft decided to abandon its partnership with IBM in developing the powerful next-generation OS known as OS/2 and instead go solo with a lightweight GUI layer for DOS called Windows 3.0.
Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??
Part of it has to be because Roger Ebert is a seasoned journalist, who has been writing by the mantra "less is more" for decades, while most video game reviewers* lack such credentials. Bad writers love to see lots of their words in print, and assume everyone else will too.
I don't even understand why this is subject matter that is open to debate (well, I do: religious spokespeople are doing a better job of getting their voices heard than scientists by the media, but I digress).
Evolution and Intelligent Design cannot be compared. I say that not because one can be empirically supported or disproven, and the other cannot. I say it because they do not even address the same topic.
Change in species over time is well-documented. It is FACT. Whether the mechanism for change is evolution in the Darwinian model or some other mechanism, the Truth is that such change does happen. It is not disputable. An alternate theory to evolution, then, must address the issue of by what mechanism change in species occurs.
Intelligent Design does not propose any such alternate mechanism. It ignores the question completely and attempts to provide an origin story for life. That's all well and good, but there's nothing there capable of disproving Darwinian evolution. There's nothing worth bringing into a Science classroom.
The debate is comparing apples to baseballs. They're not even both fruits.
You are making the mistake of paying attention to what Bush SAYS, and not what he MEANS.
Now don't interpret this as a far-left "OMG BUSH LIES" screed, because there's a difference between Says and Means inherent in ANYTHING said by ANYONE. And a strictly literal interpretation of a statement is almost never the most appropriate one.
It's entirely reasonable to look at Bush's past and present statements regarding scientific education, and use them to inform one's understanding of his stance on Intelligent Design.
All Apple would need to do to prevent their OS from being run on generic hardware, would be to use a totally different addressing schema than that used by generic DOS/Windows/Linux PCs.
Which would drive hardware R&D and production prices up, pretty much negating the benefits of migrating to the x86 platform (not "CPU", "platform").
OS XI would not run on generic hardware because the memory map would be all wrong and the I/O devices would be in the wrong places.
I'm confused. Don't most contemporary computers use interrupt-based, rather than memory-mapped, I/O systems?
No, management isn't going to care if you and 2 coworkers meet up after your shifts to drink some beer and shoot the shit.
Yes, management IS going to care if you and 200 coworkers meet up after your shifts to plan a collective bargaining strategy.
This ruling says that they can now fire you with impunity for the latter. A blanche-er carte blanche to engage in union-busting practices couldn't have been given to Industry.
The box for [Genesis Strider] advertised that it had 8 megs of RAM!
Well, it was 8 megaBITS (1MB), and it was ROM not RAM, but whatever.
But that's not the point. The price of creative works like games, movies, music, etc. has never been primarily tied to the cost of producing the distribution media -- it's the cost of GENERATING the content the guides prices.
How can a newspaper setup an IT system that completely hides every trace (including emails, phone calls notes, logs and so forth) of an anonymous source's identity?"
Are you kidding me? Having worked in the IT department of a major newspaper company for years now, I have reached the conclusion that most newspapers are lucky if they can run their own PUBLIC email systems, nevermind anything involving security or anonymity. You'd be amazed if you saw the ancient modems that the "AP Newswire" actually physically connects to.
It is not an industry with an appreciation for technological innovations. I mean, if it was, we wouldn't even call it the "newspaper" industry anymore.
Call it "We all just lost our comfortable web design jobs to hungry young freelancers who are willing to put the client's requirements ahead of impractical idealism."
If only the US Government spent a tenth of the amount that they spend on Weapons of Mass Destruction (tm) on their space program, maybe in-flight repairs wouldn't be necessary.
And God knows, if there's one governmental organization in the US that knows how to spend money wisely, it's NASA...
It looks like IE developers though: "saving screen space == good usability". It's not.
It's better than the motto both Apple and Microsoft have been operating under for the past 10 years, vis. "vast expanses of empty gray (or better yet, a bitmap that looks like brushed metal) == good usability.
iTunes player, for instance. If I maximize the window on my 1600x1200 screen, there's ENORMOUS amounts of wasted space to the sides of the play controls. Why?
All URLs in the fake-bank-notices that are sent to me have the bare IP addresses of other site hosts, or even workstations, that have been compromised.
Within a week, those machines will probably have been cleaned, but will they stay on MS's phishing blacklist forever? How do you identify where the phishers are when they're constantly moving? Heisenberg had something to say about this...
Perhaps signing a loyalty clause in exchange for favored treatment as an employee (first review sooner, higher minimum yearly raise, etc.) will become a new incentive for prospective employees.
Why would companies do that, when they could just say "sign this loyalty clause or you can't work here at all" and offer the employee no consideration in return?
But people, the contract this guy signed was not signed in California.
But people, if the contract was covered under the laws of Washington state, it doesn't always follow that the terms of that contract can be enforced outside of Washington.
I agree that there MAY be a case here, and it is reasonable for the court to temporarily prevent him from working his new job until the case has been decided, but I don't think it's going to be a cut-and-dried easy victory for either side.
The thing about explosions is, they tend to turn the human body into carbon ash and scattered bits of meat. How is an embedded(?) RFID tag going to do anything to help identify the deceased, when the tag itself is likely to be destroyed by the blast?
Slashdot Mirror
Its a pity really, as Sony would earn so much respect by allowing programmers to sign their own code
Given the choice between earning respect and earning revenue, I'm pretty sure I know which one Sony would rather have.
If you think spending 40 quid on a good soundcard and another 40 quid for some "good speakers for my PC" is what fidelity is about then you need to have your hearing checked out.
And if you think "fidelity" is what music appreciation is about then you need to have your brain checked.
Play me a good song, and I won't care whether it's a 96kbps MP3 stream or pristine vinyl on a $2000 turntable -- I'm going to enjoy it. Likewise, play me a bad song and I'm NOT going to enjoy it, irregardless of "fidelity".
CDROMs laying around with .wmvs of said torture.
Gratuitous post about Windows Media being evil!!!
embedded serial numbers of various types
Can this be? A Slashdotter actually ADVOCATING the adoption of RFID-like technologies?
If returns policies are widely shaken up, it could be the end for easy customer returns, and the ability to legitimately return goods that do not fit your needs.
If it doesn't fit your needs, you probably should have done more research before you bought it.
Maybe stores should charge customers a premium for the ability to return items for reasons other than defectiveness? (This is essentially what "restocking fees" are.)
That way the costs of merchandise returns and of return fraud are borne by the people who actually engage in those practices, and not by those of us who actually caveat emptor.
"Once the young are old, and the old are dead, games will be regarded as just another medium..."
Shouldn't this have happened already, though?
Video games have been a part of mainstream culture since, let's say, 1980. A gamer who was 25 years old when the Pac-Man Fever epidemic took place would be 50 years old now--not "old" per se, but firmly in the middle of the generation that is currently most responsible for guiding our public policies.
So, my question to Microsoft fans is, what happened between 1990 and 2000 that turned Microsoft from hero to goat?
It was around 1990 that Microsoft decided to abandon its partnership with IBM in developing the powerful next-generation OS known as OS/2 and instead go solo with a lightweight GUI layer for DOS called Windows 3.0.
Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??
Part of it has to be because Roger Ebert is a seasoned journalist, who has been writing by the mantra "less is more" for decades, while most video game reviewers* lack such credentials. Bad writers love to see lots of their words in print, and assume everyone else will too.
* with the possible exceptions of Wil Wheaton.
I don't even understand why this is subject matter that is open to debate (well, I do: religious spokespeople are doing a better job of getting their voices heard than scientists by the media, but I digress).
Evolution and Intelligent Design cannot be compared. I say that not because one can be empirically supported or disproven, and the other cannot. I say it because they do not even address the same topic.
Change in species over time is well-documented. It is FACT. Whether the mechanism for change is evolution in the Darwinian model or some other mechanism, the Truth is that such change does happen. It is not disputable. An alternate theory to evolution, then, must address the issue of by what mechanism change in species occurs.
Intelligent Design does not propose any such alternate mechanism. It ignores the question completely and attempts to provide an origin story for life. That's all well and good, but there's nothing there capable of disproving Darwinian evolution. There's nothing worth bringing into a Science classroom.
The debate is comparing apples to baseballs. They're not even both fruits.
You are making the mistake of paying attention to what Bush SAYS, and not what he MEANS.
Now don't interpret this as a far-left "OMG BUSH LIES" screed, because there's a difference between Says and Means inherent in ANYTHING said by ANYONE. And a strictly literal interpretation of a statement is almost never the most appropriate one.
It's entirely reasonable to look at Bush's past and present statements regarding scientific education, and use them to inform one's understanding of his stance on Intelligent Design.
All Apple would need to do to prevent their OS from being run on generic hardware, would be to use a totally different addressing schema than that used by generic DOS/Windows/Linux PCs.
Which would drive hardware R&D and production prices up, pretty much negating the benefits of migrating to the x86 platform (not "CPU", "platform").
OS XI would not run on generic hardware because the memory map would be all wrong and the I/O devices would be in the wrong places.
I'm confused. Don't most contemporary computers use interrupt-based, rather than memory-mapped, I/O systems?
No, management isn't going to care if you and 2 coworkers meet up after your shifts to drink some beer and shoot the shit.
Yes, management IS going to care if you and 200 coworkers meet up after your shifts to plan a collective bargaining strategy.
This ruling says that they can now fire you with impunity for the latter. A blanche-er carte blanche to engage in union-busting practices couldn't have been given to Industry.
It makes me a little bit sick.
The box for [Genesis Strider] advertised that it had 8 megs of RAM!
Well, it was 8 megaBITS (1MB), and it was ROM not RAM, but whatever.
But that's not the point. The price of creative works like games, movies, music, etc. has never been primarily tied to the cost of producing the distribution media -- it's the cost of GENERATING the content the guides prices.
The only thing that people hated about it was its price: it cost too much for what it did.
As someone who has had to deal with Blowtus Goats, let me assure you that the priece was NOT the only thing that people hated about it.
Well, if we're interpreting "done" to mean "finished; irrelevant; obsolete", then an altered form of the myth
DR-DOS ain't 'done' until Windows won't run
turns out to be true, after all.
How can a newspaper setup an IT system that completely hides every trace (including emails, phone calls notes, logs and so forth) of an anonymous source's identity?"
Are you kidding me? Having worked in the IT department of a major newspaper company for years now, I have reached the conclusion that most newspapers are lucky if they can run their own PUBLIC email systems, nevermind anything involving security or anonymity. You'd be amazed if you saw the ancient modems that the "AP Newswire" actually physically connects to.
It is not an industry with an appreciation for technological innovations. I mean, if it was, we wouldn't even call it the "newspaper" industry anymore.
Call it idealism, call it collective action...
Call it "We all just lost our comfortable web design jobs to hungry young freelancers who are willing to put the client's requirements ahead of impractical idealism."
I just visited the Acid2 test page in the Internet Explorer 7 beta, and it looks exactly the same as it does in FireFox. Am I doing something wrong?
Only as far as launching IE 7 in the first place is wrong.
Microsoft has confirmed already that the release version of IE 7 will not be Acid-compliant.
If only the US Government spent a tenth of the amount that they spend on Weapons of Mass Destruction (tm) on their space program, maybe in-flight repairs wouldn't be necessary.
And God knows, if there's one governmental organization in the US that knows how to spend money wisely, it's NASA...
It looks like IE developers though: "saving screen space == good usability". It's not.
It's better than the motto both Apple and Microsoft have been operating under for the past 10 years, vis. "vast expanses of empty gray (or better yet, a bitmap that looks like brushed metal) == good usability.
iTunes player, for instance. If I maximize the window on my 1600x1200 screen, there's ENORMOUS amounts of wasted space to the sides of the play controls. Why?
Since when do phishers set up dedicated domains?
All URLs in the fake-bank-notices that are sent to me have the bare IP addresses of other site hosts, or even workstations, that have been compromised.
Within a week, those machines will probably have been cleaned, but will they stay on MS's phishing blacklist forever? How do you identify where the phishers are when they're constantly moving? Heisenberg had something to say about this...
Perhaps signing a loyalty clause in exchange for favored treatment as an employee (first review sooner, higher minimum yearly raise, etc.) will become a new incentive for prospective employees.
Why would companies do that, when they could just say "sign this loyalty clause or you can't work here at all" and offer the employee no consideration in return?
But people, the contract this guy signed was not signed in California.
But people, if the contract was covered under the laws of Washington state, it doesn't always follow that the terms of that contract can be enforced outside of Washington.
I agree that there MAY be a case here, and it is reasonable for the court to temporarily prevent him from working his new job until the case has been decided, but I don't think it's going to be a cut-and-dried easy victory for either side.
Just run GTK installer and then Gimp installer. How could it be easier?
It could be easier if you didn't have to say "Just run GTK installer and then..."
The thing about explosions is, they tend to turn the human body into carbon ash and scattered bits of meat. How is an embedded(?) RFID tag going to do anything to help identify the deceased, when the tag itself is likely to be destroyed by the blast?