The beautiful thing about Wikis is that they scale to any size.
And the ugly thing about Wikis is the user interface of every wiki site, ever. The bountifulness of raw information is great, but it doesn't do me any good if looking at the site makes my eyes bleed.
I can't believe you just cited "missing or disfunctional [sic] drivers for video cards and printers" as an argument for why Linux is better than Windows.
(about to get modded into oblivion for suggesting Linux isn't perfect...)
Why do I need to carry biometric data about my eyes and fingerprints with me, when I'm already taking my actual eyes and fingerprints?
Redundancy checking.
Just like how stores are supposed to check the signature on the back of your credit card against the one on the receipt to make sure they match, people using biometric cards as ID would have the stored data matched against fingerprints and/or retinal scans done right then and there.
There's an easy fix to the fast-forward complaint.
To change the FFW speed of a hard-disk based MP3 player, all that's needed is a firmware upgrade to tell the MP3 decoder to skip a greater number of frames. RCA's engineers could have one available for download tomorrow, and if they're smart they will.
So the Universal Media Disc is basically a refinement of Minidisc technology. Minidisc players generally got MUCH better (in the range of 4x) battery life than portable CD players in my experience, so even without Sony's bias towards in-house technologies it's a good choice for the product.
And for a gaming console, I really don't see the problem with having a proprietary media format. No one's complaining that the pinout of the Nintendo SP cartridges is going to be incompatible with other systems, after all.
But if they expect to use this same format to sell music and video content to PSP users, they've got another think coming. Nobody wants to buy the same movie or album in two formats, one for the home and one for the portable player.
"I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price."
And therein lies the reasoning behind DVD region encoding.
The scenario the MPAA and its friends are trying to avoid is one where the dealer in the UK, rather than dealing with the UK branch of the studio and selling their product, simply imports palletloads of product from the US and sells it at half the desired UK sales price.
The fact that an individual person can't play a typical US DVD on a typical UK DVD player is a mere side effect of their business plan for distribution and price-setting. It's collateral damage.
(All of this setting aside the NTSC/PAL conversion issues, of course)
But WHY isn't it the original intent of copyright that songwriters would be able to leave their songs to their children?
The answer to this probably lies in the fact that farmland is tangible and in finite supply, while songs are neither. The son of a songwriter can make more good songs with relative ease (Jakob Dylan and Julian Lennon excluded), but the son of a farmer has no way to create more land.
Additionally, running a farm takes continuous work and capital to be financially viable -- farming is a full-time, dawn-to-dusk job. Making a profit off popular songs your daddy wrote requires almost no effort in comparison.
The Archos AV300 and AV400 series have had the capability to display photos and album artwork on the device or via video-out for at least a year now. But perhaps they're not direct competitors, in the sense that they're higher-end products primarily for playing and recording video, not for music like the iPod.
Enter the Archos Gmini 400, a 20GB iPod-sized device that has practically all the features that this newly-announced iPod Photo has, and has been available since August. Plus, it has a CompactFlash card slot. Oh, and also it plays DivX video. And it costs barely $50 more than a non-photo G4 iPod of the same capacity.
Apple's products have more style, sure. But if you're looking for the best feature/price ratio, the common wisdom still holds -- consider non-Apple products.
There's plenty of computer navigation systems available on cars sold in the United States right now; maybe not pre-installed on GM cars, but there's non-GM vehicles, and then there's aftermarket products.
Personally, I don't see how you could have a useful navigation system without recurring fees anyway. Roadmaps change all the time; if your nav system is assuming the roads are the same as they were five years ago when you bought the system, you could be in for some unpleasant surprises.
Having been a member of Team OS/2 during that timeframe, I'd have to disagree with your version of events somewhat.
During all that time, Microsoft made so much hype for Windows 95 that OS/2 was almost completely ignored.
IBM was also guilty of almost completely ignoring OS/2, at least in the home market. Almost all of their promotion of 2.x was targeted at businesses, and it wasn't until the first buzz about Chicago started to circulate that they decided to market 3.0 as a consumer-ready alternative to Win/DOS.
OS/2 got built-in networking and Internet support and various other improvements.
It did, and the cost of those improvements was passed right on to the customers. OS/2 Warp was a great OS, but when I got to college and wanted to get on the network I had to shell out another $100 to upgrade to Warp Connect, for the uncommon privilege of getting a TCP/IP stack.
If OS/2 had understood the importance of the Internet back then in 1995, they wouldn't have lost the market (including yours truly) to Windows 95.
It didn't help any that the only browser that would run reliably under Warp was IBM's own Web Explorer -- it was a nice little browser, but Netscape 2.x was taking over. Trying to run the 16-bit Windows binary under OS/2 usually gave me system crashes, and the 32-bit binary couldn't even run.
I don't blame Microsoft for killing OS/2 (although the dissolution of the IBM/MS partnership in the late '80s really didn't help it any). No, IBM deserves most of the credit for taking a powerful product line like OS/2 and mis-marketing it to death.
Man, some of us can trace our online gaming lineage back to the original DOOM over a null modem cable.
And then there's those of us who can trace our online gaming lineage back to multi-line BBS'es with game doors...
And before THAT, there's those of us who played head-to-head on our Atari 2600 VCS's via the Gameline service (which later grew up to become AOL)... okay I'm lying. About part of that.
According to this site, the average income in Brazil's largest metropolitan areas is less than $300 a month!
I spent nearly a month's net pay on the last home computer I bought myself. Granted, it wasn't a low-cost trailing-edge special, but it wasn't a bleeding-edge riced-out xtreme gaming machine either; just a name-brand home PC model with a more-powerful-than-average configuration.
Expecting a third-world resident to expend a month's pay on an Internet-ready computer (that would more than likely become a resource for their entire community) doesn't seem TOO far-fetched to me.
I wonder if for $349, a hundred dollars more, they could produce a similar package for here in the US with a nic instead of a modem along with some sort of optical drive.
I can buy NIC cards off-the-shelf for $10 and DVD burners for $60. And that's not even bulk pricing.
There's no reason why they couldn't take your advice and still keep the MSRP under $300.
MIT is in Cambridge Mass, where there are lots of interesting things to do. RPI is in... Troy, NY. I'd spend all my time on the Internet too if I were there.
The Indymedia thing to me sounds like a case of an ISP doing everything it can not to get into trouble. Its been shown time after time and even tested, ISPs will remove/giveup anything if they told.
That basically seems to be what it boils down to.
Despite the claims that have been made on IndyMedia about IndyMedia (impartial observers, wot?), it appears that the decision to pull the plug the UK-hosted IndyMedia machines was unilaterally made by RackSpace, the hosting company.
Could RackSpace, a company that does business in both the US and the UK, have had its arm twisted by US law enforcement to pull the plug? Possible, but unlikely -- for one thing, we would have seen the fuzz go after IndyMedia resources located in the US as well. Claiming that US law enforcement was indeed involved in this action in the absence of any proof to that effect is speculation and irresponsible reporting.
Slashdot Mirror
...So why didn't you migrate from IIS to Apache 2.x? ;)
The beautiful thing about Wikis is that they scale to any size.
And the ugly thing about Wikis is the user interface of every wiki site, ever. The bountifulness of raw information is great, but it doesn't do me any good if looking at the site makes my eyes bleed.
I can't believe you just cited "missing or disfunctional [sic] drivers for video cards and printers" as an argument for why Linux is better than Windows.
(about to get modded into oblivion for suggesting Linux isn't perfect...)
Why do I need to carry biometric data about my eyes and fingerprints with me, when I'm already taking my actual eyes and fingerprints?
Redundancy checking.
Just like how stores are supposed to check the signature on the back of your credit card against the one on the receipt to make sure they match, people using biometric cards as ID would have the stored data matched against fingerprints and/or retinal scans done right then and there.
Transcript of the conversation can be found on Jeff Jarvis's Buzzmachine.
(Sorry Jeff)
There's an easy fix to the fast-forward complaint.
To change the FFW speed of a hard-disk based MP3 player, all that's needed is a firmware upgrade to tell the MP3 decoder to skip a greater number of frames. RCA's engineers could have one available for download tomorrow, and if they're smart they will.
From what I understand, :: CD : DVD
MD : UMD
So the Universal Media Disc is basically a refinement of Minidisc technology. Minidisc players generally got MUCH better (in the range of 4x) battery life than portable CD players in my experience, so even without Sony's bias towards in-house technologies it's a good choice for the product.
And for a gaming console, I really don't see the problem with having a proprietary media format. No one's complaining that the pinout of the Nintendo SP cartridges is going to be incompatible with other systems, after all.
But if they expect to use this same format to sell music and video content to PSP users, they've got another think coming. Nobody wants to buy the same movie or album in two formats, one for the home and one for the portable player.
France & Germany have sued Yahoo US over Nazi stuff.
Would people PLEASE stop thinking that when someone means "the rest of the world", they're specifically referring to "France and Germany"?
Please don't reply to this comment, as it's bound to lead to an off-topic flamewar if you do.
"I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price."
And therein lies the reasoning behind DVD region encoding.
The scenario the MPAA and its friends are trying to avoid is one where the dealer in the UK, rather than dealing with the UK branch of the studio and selling their product, simply imports palletloads of product from the US and sells it at half the desired UK sales price.
The fact that an individual person can't play a typical US DVD on a typical UK DVD player is a mere side effect of their business plan for distribution and price-setting. It's collateral damage.
(All of this setting aside the NTSC/PAL conversion issues, of course)
But WHY isn't it the original intent of copyright that songwriters would be able to leave their songs to their children?
The answer to this probably lies in the fact that farmland is tangible and in finite supply, while songs are neither. The son of a songwriter can make more good songs with relative ease (Jakob Dylan and Julian Lennon excluded), but the son of a farmer has no way to create more land.
Additionally, running a farm takes continuous work and capital to be financially viable -- farming is a full-time, dawn-to-dusk job. Making a profit off popular songs your daddy wrote requires almost no effort in comparison.
The Archos AV300 and AV400 series have had the capability to display photos and album artwork on the device or via video-out for at least a year now. But perhaps they're not direct competitors, in the sense that they're higher-end products primarily for playing and recording video, not for music like the iPod.
Enter the Archos Gmini 400, a 20GB iPod-sized device that has practically all the features that this newly-announced iPod Photo has, and has been available since August. Plus, it has a CompactFlash card slot. Oh, and also it plays DivX video. And it costs barely $50 more than a non-photo G4 iPod of the same capacity.
Apple's products have more style, sure. But if you're looking for the best feature/price ratio, the common wisdom still holds -- consider non-Apple products.
There's plenty of computer navigation systems available on cars sold in the United States right now; maybe not pre-installed on GM cars, but there's non-GM vehicles, and then there's aftermarket products.
Personally, I don't see how you could have a useful navigation system without recurring fees anyway. Roadmaps change all the time; if your nav system is assuming the roads are the same as they were five years ago when you bought the system, you could be in for some unpleasant surprises.
You shouldn't compare new products to enhanced old ones.
What if I argued that the DS is just an enhanced version of the GB Advance? It does play GBA software...
I just checked on seti@home, climate prediction and predictor@home via boinc, I don't see any Apple IIs on top of any lists.
Why do you assume that distributed computing projects are ideal candidates for measuring programming efficiency?
words and phrases such as "modern"
A meaningless term when applied to operating systems.
"virtual memory"
Irrelevant to user interface
"true multitasking"
Irrelevant to user interface
"protected memory"
Irrelevant to user interface
and "brushed metal".
Eye candy with no performance benefit -- rendering vector or bitmap graphics in the window painter will never be as efficient as a simple color fill.
Having been a member of Team OS/2 during that timeframe, I'd have to disagree with your version of events somewhat.
During all that time, Microsoft made so much hype for Windows 95 that OS/2 was almost completely ignored.
IBM was also guilty of almost completely ignoring OS/2, at least in the home market. Almost all of their promotion of 2.x was targeted at businesses, and it wasn't until the first buzz about Chicago started to circulate that they decided to market 3.0 as a consumer-ready alternative to Win/DOS.
OS/2 got built-in networking and Internet support and various other improvements.
It did, and the cost of those improvements was passed right on to the customers. OS/2 Warp was a great OS, but when I got to college and wanted to get on the network I had to shell out another $100 to upgrade to Warp Connect, for the uncommon privilege of getting a TCP/IP stack.
If OS/2 had understood the importance of the Internet back then in 1995, they wouldn't have lost the market (including yours truly) to Windows 95.
It didn't help any that the only browser that would run reliably under Warp was IBM's own Web Explorer -- it was a nice little browser, but Netscape 2.x was taking over. Trying to run the 16-bit Windows binary under OS/2 usually gave me system crashes, and the 32-bit binary couldn't even run.
I don't blame Microsoft for killing OS/2 (although the dissolution of the IBM/MS partnership in the late '80s really didn't help it any). No, IBM deserves most of the credit for taking a powerful product line like OS/2 and mis-marketing it to death.
Man, some of us can trace our online gaming lineage back to the original DOOM over a null modem cable.
And then there's those of us who can trace our online gaming lineage back to multi-line BBS'es with game doors...
And before THAT, there's those of us who played head-to-head on our Atari 2600 VCS's via the Gameline service (which later grew up to become AOL)... okay I'm lying. About part of that.
This is a computer being sold in the third world. It is NOT, as the article claims, a low-cost solution.
I'd like to see you try to build a computer, using only new components, capable of running modern software, for any less than this device.
Okay, you've tossed Windows and installed a Linux distro, and it saved you maybe $20. What next?
According to this site, the average income in Brazil's largest metropolitan areas is less than $300 a month!
I spent nearly a month's net pay on the last home computer I bought myself. Granted, it wasn't a low-cost trailing-edge special, but it wasn't a bleeding-edge riced-out xtreme gaming machine either; just a name-brand home PC model with a more-powerful-than-average configuration.
Expecting a third-world resident to expend a month's pay on an Internet-ready computer (that would more than likely become a resource for their entire community) doesn't seem TOO far-fetched to me.
I wonder if for $349, a hundred dollars more, they could produce a similar package for here in the US with a nic instead of a modem along with some sort of optical drive.
I can buy NIC cards off-the-shelf for $10 and DVD burners for $60. And that's not even bulk pricing.
There's no reason why they couldn't take your advice and still keep the MSRP under $300.
Let's be clear, RPG stands for Roll Playing Game.
In that case, SimDinner is my favorite RPG.
I'm wondering why, if you're not a fan of biased, editorializing analyses, would you be a fan of Gizmodo or any of the Gawker Media sites...
I'm not surprised to see that Rutgers isn't even listed in the rankings. That school always was cheap when it came to technology spending.
I don't know about ALWAYS... wasn't it the site of one of the first handful of ARPAnet nodes?
MIT is in Cambridge Mass, where there are lots of interesting things to do. RPI is in... Troy, NY. I'd spend all my time on the Internet too if I were there.
The Indymedia thing to me sounds like a case of an ISP doing everything it can not to get into trouble. Its been shown time after time and even tested, ISPs will remove/giveup anything if they told.
That basically seems to be what it boils down to.
Despite the claims that have been made on IndyMedia about IndyMedia (impartial observers, wot?), it appears that the decision to pull the plug the UK-hosted IndyMedia machines was unilaterally made by RackSpace, the hosting company.
Could RackSpace, a company that does business in both the US and the UK, have had its arm twisted by US law enforcement to pull the plug? Possible, but unlikely -- for one thing, we would have seen the fuzz go after IndyMedia resources located in the US as well. Claiming that US law enforcement was indeed involved in this action in the absence of any proof to that effect is speculation and irresponsible reporting.