Won't the iPod disrupt the plane's flight electronics and CAUSE crashes, though? That's why the flight attendants always remind us that the use of portable electronic devices during takeoff and landing is forbidden, right?
I thought that the original Sound Blasters were just Adlib cards with joystick controllers thrown in.
Nope, the Adlib card just had the Yamaha FM Synthesizer chip. Sound Blaster added the joystick/MIDI port, but more importantly, it added a DAC for digital audio recording/playback.
I know of no corporation that is in a rush to drop prices.
Maybe not, but there's no shortage of companies that are willing to drop prices in order to get rid of unsold inventory.
If Sony is losing $200 on every PS3 they DO sell, then they lose $800 on every PS3 they've manufactured but DON'T sell. It's not outlandish to suggest that it might get to a point where Sony would drop the MSRP by $100, meaning they get away with a loss of only $300 per unit. Negative three is better than negative eight.
for roughly the same price: a PS3 without the full functionality of a standalone BluRay player -or- a full player with all of the features that a PS3 doesn't have
What features would a standalone BluRay player have that the PS3 does not?
Beekeeper 1: Well, sure is quiet in here today. Beekeeper 2: Yes, a little too quiet, if you know what I mean. Beekeeper 1: Hmm...I'm afraid I don't. Beekeeper 2: You see, bees usually make a lot of noise. No noise --
suggests no bees! Beekeeper 1: Oh, I understand now. Oh look, there goes one now. Beekeeper 2: To the Beemobile! Beekeeper 1: You mean your Chevy? Beekeeper 2: Yes.
everyone knows what a cellphone is, so they can look at the iPhone and just say, "That's like my phone, only better."
But how much better? If we assume that the average new phone handset costs the consumer $50-$200 (which is generous -- a lot of them end up being free or less with activation), then the iPhone would need to be 3-12 times better than their existing phone to be worth the switch. Is it?
Digital music players weren't new when the iPod came out, it was just the first of it's kind in terms of design and functionality.
They may not have been new, but they weren't anything approaching prevalent, either. Sure, there was a portion of the market who already had exposure to the Nomads and Diamond Rios that were available, but for a huge number of iPod buyers, the perceived competition was portable CD players.
Do you know who had the lowest "considering leaving" numbers and the highest "considering moving to" numbers? Verizon. Apparently the average Joes really like their crippled phones and their single-source philosophy.
Apparently Average Joes care more about having a strong cellular signal to talk over than the ability to install arbitrary Java applets.
Sure, Verizon's pricing and policies suck, but in my neighborhood it's the only carrier that offers more than 2 bars of signal strength indoors.
The court's opinion seems aimed at mailing lists and web boards
And describe how the comments section on a weblog differs in any substantial way from a "web board"?
If a reporter writes, "Bill Smith bonks goats" and the paper prints it (and doesn't retract it), how is that different from some goofball writing "Bill Smith bonks goats" and the website owner not taking it down when informed of the error? Granted, one is an employee
You answered your own question. A reporter is clearly and obviously working as an agent of the newspaper. One cannot and should not assume that the author of a blog has any relationship of authority to those that post comments on his or her blog. They could be friends. They could be strangers.
It's not like a reporter can get whatever they want to say recorded to ink and paper, either. Every word is vetted by at least one editor before being printed. Blogs don't, as an integral matter of design, have any editorial step between comment authoring and comment publication.
Another example: a streaker runs past a TV camera that's live. Guess what? The streaker gets arrested, but the TV station could be fined by the FCC; the FCC can't say "well, shucks, we can't really stop people from doing that sort of thing, it's live!"; the FCC turns around and says "We don't care, make sure it doesn't happen again"
That's an example of unreasonableness on the part of the FCC, not of the station's duty to censor unsolicited content.
Yeah, the first diesels in the US were smokey and loud and slow, but new ones are virtually indistinguishable from gas engines and use 50% less fuel or more. Yet, people still avoid them because they don't want a "noisy, smokey, slow diesel car."
That might be one reason why American car buyers avoid diesels.
Other reasons might be that gas stations offering diesel fuel are not as common as those offering regular gasoline, and that only a couple of companies offer diesel passenger vehicles in the United States. If you don't want a Mercedes or VW and you don't live near a trucking route, a diesel car isn't going to be a very good option for you regardless of how clean or efficient the engine is.
You're doing the "Summon Kibo" incantation all wrong. He's not like Bloody Mary or the Candyman or Biggie Smalls, whose name you say into a mirror three times to make them appear.
I'd love to see the code without the "cool hack" because I'm intrigued as to how he uses an if statement to remove the higher bits.
I retrieved an earlier version from his source control:
if (val > 2147483647) {
val = val - 1073741824;
goto done;
if (val > 1073741824) {
val = val - 536870912;
goto done;
if (val > 536870912) { ...
}
} } done:
the software emulation will allow to scale the PS2-games to 720p high def resolution.
I'd rather that my PS2 titles work at 480i than NOT work at 720p.
It doesn't mention that Sony want's to bring the backward compatbility to an level almost as high as the hardware emulation in the US/Japan PS3 is too.
And Microsoft "wants" the 360 to emulate every Xbox title flawlessly, but it doesn't mean they've been able to make it happen. They're up to what now, 60% back-compatibility?
So from the past couple of Slashdotter comments, it would appear that Vista is tuned to give performance boosts to those with substantially lower or substantially higher system specs than the average.
What about the middle of the curve? You know, where the vast majority of users are?
Steve Jobs keeps making the stupid mistake of maximizing product quality over all else, when a smart business person understands that product quality is just one of many factors that must be balanced to maximize profits.
I love it when some random Slashdotter claims to have a better understanding of business than Steve Jobs.
AAPL isn't exactly hurting these days -- even with stagnant growth in the computer market, stock is selling near the highest prices it ever has.
Sure, they'd have a larger market share if they cut corners on quality and sold cheaper boxes -- but then they'd be in competition with the Dells, Gateways, and HPs of the world (or maybe the Motorolas, PowerComputings, and UMAXen), who'd possibly be able to out-corner-cut them.
No. Apple knows what they are doing when they build high-quality systems and sell them at a premium. It's working well for them.
Why would they ever make a bulletproof hard drive ? They'd go out of business!
That might be true if demand for greater performance and capacity weren't perpetual.
Sure, it'd be nice if a hard drive were guaranteed to work flawlessly for 20 years -- but what use would I have today for a 1987-vintage 60MB drive and its astonishing 1.5MB/s transfer rate? They give out bigger, faster devices for free at trade shows now.
You seem to be implying that hardware devices on x86 computers typically use memory-mapped I/O -- that you plug something into the device bus, and it "steals" away a range of memory addresses that otherwise would have been used to access physical RAM. As far as I know, this is generally not the case--though exceptions do exist (notably, integrated 3D accelerators that use system RAM as video RAM instead of having their own dedicated VRAM).
x86 CPUs use port-mapped I/O; a separate communications bus for device I/O than for memory access. Programs interact with the hardware by communicating with programs stored in RAM--device drivers--which then execute the necessary I/O instructions.
If you have 1GB worth of device drivers and install 4GB in your computer, you'll have 3GB free for applications. If you have 1GB of drivers and you install only 3GB, you'll have only 2GB free for apps.
Or at least that's my understanding of it; we only touched on x86 briefly in my Digital Systems coursework. If anyone has a better explanation, please jump in.
Last I checked OSX even wants 512MB and 1GB of RAM for acceptable performance [...] any *nix distribution with XWindows and a Windows Manager like KDE running, easly scale to where 512MB and 1GB are a sweet spot as well.
Since this is the year 2007, I don't see Vista being far out of the ballpark
Except for how Vista's memory sweet spot is FOUR TIMES that of any contemporary desktop OS. Do you really consider that being in the same ballpark?
I always had the feeling that the bad security reputation with PHP had less to do with technical bugs and more to do with how easy it is to write insecure code
Or even more likely, how easy it is to download and run insecure code written by some other lousy programmer. It's not the people who are writing their own CMS systems that are getting haxor'd, it's the people who grabbed a copy of PHPNuke and threw it up there on the 'net.
how to get rid of Vista (the major OEMs no longer even give you a choice of XP).
What.
Wasn't the consumer launch date of Vista, like, 2 weeks ago? How can any OEM manufacturer be so confident in it that they're discontinuing the former product already?
At least with HTML, the tag names were kept short. But both standards use rather long element names, often in excess of eight characters, plus eight or more namespace characters beyond that. For some of the XML element names of each format, we're looking at over 16 characters overhead! When such tags are used repeatedly, especially in a large or heavily-formatted document, a lot of space ends up being wasted.
Not really, as even a trivial compression algorithm will reclaim most of that wasted space.
It's not accidental that both the Office Open XML and ODF file formats are basically zipfiles.
He says he wants an RPG that can be finished in 10-12 hours instead of the 40+ most of them are.. Dude, that's what makes an RPG an RPG. It's long very detailed story!
I doubt a 40-hour RPG has more than about 10-12 hours of actual story. The rest of the playing time is spent walking from place to place, talking to people who stand in the same place in the village all day every day, and slaughtering blue slimes over and over again because you need the experience points or coins or just because they're in the way.
If an RPG were a movie, a good editor would leave half of the film on the cutting room floor. It's filler.
It's a really good time to be Nintendo, with the only "affordable" (everyone has a different definition of that word, I'm looking at it from a casual persons concept of "what I'd pay for a video game console") system out there.
The Playstation 2 is still available for sale, costs about $130 brand new, and if titles like Guitar Hero II are any indication, the console is far from dead yet.
The problem Sony faces is how to prevent PS2 sales from cannibalizing potential PS3 sales. Well, that's one of the problems they face.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't the iPod disrupt the plane's flight electronics and CAUSE crashes, though? That's why the flight attendants always remind us that the use of portable electronic devices during takeoff and landing is forbidden, right?
I thought that the original Sound Blasters were just Adlib cards with joystick controllers thrown in.
Nope, the Adlib card just had the Yamaha FM Synthesizer chip. Sound Blaster added the joystick/MIDI port, but more importantly, it added a DAC for digital audio recording/playback.
I know of no corporation that is in a rush to drop prices.
Maybe not, but there's no shortage of companies that are willing to drop prices in order to get rid of unsold inventory.
If Sony is losing $200 on every PS3 they DO sell, then they lose $800 on every PS3 they've manufactured but DON'T sell. It's not outlandish to suggest that it might get to a point where Sony would drop the MSRP by $100, meaning they get away with a loss of only $300 per unit. Negative three is better than negative eight.
for roughly the same price: a PS3 without the full functionality of a standalone BluRay player -or- a full player with all of the features that a PS3 doesn't have
What features would a standalone BluRay player have that the PS3 does not?
Beekeeper 1: Well, sure is quiet in here today.
Beekeeper 2: Yes, a little too quiet, if you know what I mean.
Beekeeper 1: Hmm...I'm afraid I don't.
Beekeeper 2: You see, bees usually make a lot of noise. No noise --
suggests no bees!
Beekeeper 1: Oh, I understand now. Oh look, there goes one now.
Beekeeper 2: To the Beemobile!
Beekeeper 1: You mean your Chevy?
Beekeeper 2: Yes.
everyone knows what a cellphone is, so they can look at the iPhone and just say, "That's like my phone, only better."
But how much better? If we assume that the average new phone handset costs the consumer $50-$200 (which is generous -- a lot of them end up being free or less with activation), then the iPhone would need to be 3-12 times better than their existing phone to be worth the switch. Is it?
Digital music players weren't new when the iPod came out, it was just the first of it's kind in terms of design and functionality.
They may not have been new, but they weren't anything approaching prevalent, either. Sure, there was a portion of the market who already had exposure to the Nomads and Diamond Rios that were available, but for a huge number of iPod buyers, the perceived competition was portable CD players.
Do you know who had the lowest "considering leaving" numbers and the highest "considering moving to" numbers? Verizon. Apparently the average Joes really like their crippled phones and their single-source philosophy.
Apparently Average Joes care more about having a strong cellular signal to talk over than the ability to install arbitrary Java applets.
Sure, Verizon's pricing and policies suck, but in my neighborhood it's the only carrier that offers more than 2 bars of signal strength indoors.
The court's opinion seems aimed at mailing lists and web boards
And describe how the comments section on a weblog differs in any substantial way from a "web board"?
If a reporter writes, "Bill Smith bonks goats" and the paper prints it (and doesn't retract it), how is that different from some goofball writing "Bill Smith bonks goats" and the website owner not taking it down when informed of the error? Granted, one is an employee
You answered your own question. A reporter is clearly and obviously working as an agent of the newspaper. One cannot and should not assume that the author of a blog has any relationship of authority to those that post comments on his or her blog. They could be friends. They could be strangers.
It's not like a reporter can get whatever they want to say recorded to ink and paper, either. Every word is vetted by at least one editor before being printed. Blogs don't, as an integral matter of design, have any editorial step between comment authoring and comment publication.
Another example: a streaker runs past a TV camera that's live. Guess what? The streaker gets arrested, but the TV station could be fined by the FCC; the FCC can't say "well, shucks, we can't really stop people from doing that sort of thing, it's live!"; the FCC turns around and says "We don't care, make sure it doesn't happen again"
That's an example of unreasonableness on the part of the FCC, not of the station's duty to censor unsolicited content.
Yeah, the first diesels in the US were smokey and loud and slow, but new ones are virtually indistinguishable from gas engines and use 50% less fuel or more. Yet, people still avoid them because they don't want a "noisy, smokey, slow diesel car."
That might be one reason why American car buyers avoid diesels.
Other reasons might be that gas stations offering diesel fuel are not as common as those offering regular gasoline, and that only a couple of companies offer diesel passenger vehicles in the United States. If you don't want a Mercedes or VW and you don't live near a trucking route, a diesel car isn't going to be a very good option for you regardless of how clean or efficient the engine is.
Files on said disc which are lossless.
Tautologically so, even!
When we say an audio format is "lossless", we typically mean when compared to standard 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo Red Book Audio.
Parry Parry Parry
You're doing the "Summon Kibo" incantation all wrong. He's not like Bloody Mary or the Candyman or Biggie Smalls, whose name you say into a mirror three times to make them appear.
my view that 1984 should be made required reading in every form of education.
Because the best way to inoculate people against authoritarianism is to force them to read something?
I retrieved an earlier version from his source control:
the software emulation will allow to scale the PS2-games to 720p high def resolution.
I'd rather that my PS2 titles work at 480i than NOT work at 720p.
It doesn't mention that Sony want's to bring the backward compatbility to an level almost as high as the hardware emulation in the US/Japan PS3 is too.
And Microsoft "wants" the 360 to emulate every Xbox title flawlessly, but it doesn't mean they've been able to make it happen. They're up to what now, 60% back-compatibility?
So from the past couple of Slashdotter comments, it would appear that Vista is tuned to give performance boosts to those with substantially lower or substantially higher system specs than the average.
What about the middle of the curve? You know, where the vast majority of users are?
Steve Jobs keeps making the stupid mistake of maximizing product quality over all else, when a smart business person understands that product quality is just one of many factors that must be balanced to maximize profits.
I love it when some random Slashdotter claims to have a better understanding of business than Steve Jobs.
AAPL isn't exactly hurting these days -- even with stagnant growth in the computer market, stock is selling near the highest prices it ever has.
Sure, they'd have a larger market share if they cut corners on quality and sold cheaper boxes -- but then they'd be in competition with the Dells, Gateways, and HPs of the world (or maybe the Motorolas, PowerComputings, and UMAXen), who'd possibly be able to out-corner-cut them.
No. Apple knows what they are doing when they build high-quality systems and sell them at a premium. It's working well for them.
Why would they ever make a bulletproof hard drive ? They'd go out of business!
That might be true if demand for greater performance and capacity weren't perpetual.
Sure, it'd be nice if a hard drive were guaranteed to work flawlessly for 20 years -- but what use would I have today for a 1987-vintage 60MB drive and its astonishing 1.5MB/s transfer rate? They give out bigger, faster devices for free at trade shows now.
You seem to be implying that hardware devices on x86 computers typically use memory-mapped I/O -- that you plug something into the device bus, and it "steals" away a range of memory addresses that otherwise would have been used to access physical RAM. As far as I know, this is generally not the case--though exceptions do exist (notably, integrated 3D accelerators that use system RAM as video RAM instead of having their own dedicated VRAM).
x86 CPUs use port-mapped I/O; a separate communications bus for device I/O than for memory access. Programs interact with the hardware by communicating with programs stored in RAM--device drivers--which then execute the necessary I/O instructions.
If you have 1GB worth of device drivers and install 4GB in your computer, you'll have 3GB free for applications. If you have 1GB of drivers and you install only 3GB, you'll have only 2GB free for apps.
Or at least that's my understanding of it; we only touched on x86 briefly in my Digital Systems coursework. If anyone has a better explanation, please jump in.
Last I checked OSX even wants 512MB and 1GB of RAM for acceptable performance [...] any *nix distribution with XWindows and a Windows Manager like KDE running, easly scale to where 512MB and 1GB are a sweet spot as well.
Since this is the year 2007, I don't see Vista being far out of the ballpark
Except for how Vista's memory sweet spot is FOUR TIMES that of any contemporary desktop OS. Do you really consider that being in the same ballpark?
I always had the feeling that the bad security reputation with PHP had less to do with technical bugs and more to do with how easy it is to write insecure code
Or even more likely, how easy it is to download and run insecure code written by some other lousy programmer. It's not the people who are writing their own CMS systems that are getting haxor'd, it's the people who grabbed a copy of PHPNuke and threw it up there on the 'net.
how to get rid of Vista (the major OEMs no longer even give you a choice of XP).
What.
Wasn't the consumer launch date of Vista, like, 2 weeks ago? How can any OEM manufacturer be so confident in it that they're discontinuing the former product already?
At least with HTML, the tag names were kept short. But both standards use rather long element names, often in excess of eight characters, plus eight or more namespace characters beyond that. For some of the XML element names of each format, we're looking at over 16 characters overhead! When such tags are used repeatedly, especially in a large or heavily-formatted document, a lot of space ends up being wasted.
Not really, as even a trivial compression algorithm will reclaim most of that wasted space.
It's not accidental that both the Office Open XML and ODF file formats are basically zipfiles.
"case dismissed" != "not guilty".
He says he wants an RPG that can be finished in 10-12 hours instead of the 40+ most of them are.. Dude, that's what makes an RPG an RPG. It's long very detailed story!
I doubt a 40-hour RPG has more than about 10-12 hours of actual story. The rest of the playing time is spent walking from place to place, talking to people who stand in the same place in the village all day every day, and slaughtering blue slimes over and over again because you need the experience points or coins or just because they're in the way.
If an RPG were a movie, a good editor would leave half of the film on the cutting room floor. It's filler.
It's a really good time to be Nintendo, with the only "affordable" (everyone has a different definition of that word, I'm looking at it from a casual persons concept of "what I'd pay for a video game console") system out there.
The Playstation 2 is still available for sale, costs about $130 brand new, and if titles like Guitar Hero II are any indication, the console is far from dead yet.
The problem Sony faces is how to prevent PS2 sales from cannibalizing potential PS3 sales. Well, that's one of the problems they face.