Google for "jury nullification" if you want more info.
Never trust Google for legal advice.
While the concept of jury nullification is indeed a concept the US court system has inherited from English common law, a statement like "you create the law if you're on a jury" is utterly absurd. The US Constitution, which supercedes common law provisions, is quite clear on the issue of who creates the law: the legislature.
Please tell me I live in a sane world when I say even Dvorak or Cringley has better credentials.
Better credentials for WHAT?
Yes, I suppose if I were looking for someone to write a column about technology, one of those gentlemen would be the better choice. But if I were looking for someone to write a column about sex, you better believe John C. Dvorak would be at the very bottom of my list!
A better question is, under what possible set of circumstances would ANYONE market a product that would want to behave indepently from it's owners wishes?
if you're European your Freeloader will no longer work which means you still need your Gamecube for those imported games. AFAIK US gamers don't have that problem which leads me to believe NoE is a bunch of idiots again.
How DARE they not make sure that their new console is compatible with an unlicensed product used to circumvent the regional lockout system for their previous console!
what do you expect from a company that overcharges by 25-50%
I'm sure you have your reasons for believing that Nintendo products are overpriced, but the market seems to disagree with you, if an entire month of people camping out in front of stores overnight hoping to get a chance to buy their product is any indicator.
I think it's worth mentioning that they have not taken any risk here. They buy from a store at $x, post it on ebay with a reserve of $y such that $y - costs of ebay > $x and return it to the store for a full refund if it doesn't sell. It's not possible for them to lose money.
Depends on whether they could have been doing something more financially rewarding during the time they spent waiting in line to buy the item.
Also, beyond the financial risk, there's the risk of getting stabbed, shot, or trampled. It's not like flipping PS3's on eBay is a can't-lose proposition by any stretch.
Selling an item is a value added service, regardless of how many times it has been done.
What value does a scalper add? I find more value in being able to buy a high-demand product from a reputable and established retailer than from some faceless Joe Entrepreneur on eBay.
The inflated price was due to the insufficiency of the transactions due to the limited supply.
The "inflated" prices for the PS3 collapsed rapidly. They were no more "correct" prices for the product than the MSRP was.
Let's say there's 100 people in the US willing and able to pay $1200 for a PS3 during launch week. And then there's 200,000 people who wouldn't pay $1200, but would pay $600. Are you suggesting that Sony should have launched the PS3 with a $1200 price tag to get the maximum profit from a mere 100 people? How many of the 200,000 would have been turned off of the PS3 if they had done that?
all I need to do is $250 for the Wii, $? for the adapters, $? for near mint NES controllers, and $5 and I'll be playing Super Mario Bros. like it's 1985.
If all you want to do with the Wii is relive those 8-bit glory days, maybe you'd be better off getting a Generation NEX instead. Yes, there are a hundred Famiclones on the grey market to choose from, but this one has the advantages of being compatible with your original NES cartridges and controllers.
Plus it looks a lot cooler than a bright orange N64 controller casing or an off-grey PSone clone.
The bad news is that it's only 99.1% compatible. The good news is that most of the games that don't work are crap from Color Dreams and Koei. The other bad news is that one of the games that doesn't work is Castlevania III.
It's pretty poor IMO that a widespread standard such as CSS 2.0 still isn't implemented fully by any browser.
Maybe that's not only because browser developers have been lazy (IE) or preoccupied with rewriting the browser from the ground up (Netscape/Firefox) for the past 8.5 years, but also because CSS 2.0 is a convoluted, sloppily designed specification?
In PostgreSQL, when you do a SELECT across a table with IP addresses in it, you get them formatted and displayed as IP addresses
Formatting should be a task of the presentation tier, not the RDBMS.
That doesn't negate your point that having a native IP address datatype make actual application logic (like testing whether an address falls within a given range) much cleaner and easier to implement. The more native datatypes a database supports, the better; if I want to work with a boolean value, it's far better to have a bool datatype than to "fake" it with a char or int.
Foreign keys don't speed anything up, they just add an extra layer of checks on your database.
Correct. That extra layer of checks will probably actually slow things down a bit.
But foreign keys aren't about performance. They're about data integrity, which I would hope every database administrator or developer is more concerned with anyway. It doesn't matter how many requests/second your DBMS can handle if the data is fuxxored.
Your app should be checking itself anyway.
Yes, it should be catching "foreign key constraint violation" exceptions thrown by the DB interface and handling them appropriately. I hope that's what you meant.
the "vista" "road map" had been published clearly stating what major components would be part of Vista, on WinFS never made it while another, "Aero" has always been slated as part of the opertating system.
What an apt summary of what's wrong with Microsoft's approach to OS development.
The shiny 3D eyecandy was considered launch-critical and made it into final release, while the powerful filesystem improvements were abandoned fairly early in the product cycle.
It's awesome they're recognizing the trend towards internet communities of individuals working together for the common good
It's odd, though, that they don't seem to consider themselves part of those communities.
Instead of "You", why not "Us"? What is gained from the media industry retaining the foolish pretense that they are not an integral part of our culture, but merely an observer of it?
And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s.
But those had been designed to be multi-user systems. It took a decade or two for single-user computer use patterns to reach a point where cooperative multitasking wasn't good enough anymore. For that matter, it took a while for desktop computers to become powerful enough that multiple jobs could run simultaneously without decimating responsiveness.
The Borg Cube bearing the Microsoft logo, destroying Earth, with flames reaching up from off-frame image just screams professionalism. I will take anything this site says very seriously.
Yes, avoid all sites with graphics that suggest some sort of relationship between Microsoft and the Borg.
Hey Mike - arrow key until the file you want to rename is hilighted - and push enter. Wooooooo, scary hard.
That's a design WTF in itself.
Enter is a primary action key, has been since people were using VT100 terminals. When you press Enter in the context of some interface resource, it should perform the primary action associated with that resource: navigate into a folder. Open a document. Launch a program.
Instead it allows the user to modify the resource name? That's not a primary action!
Honestly, I can't blame Mike for not knowing about this. It's not like the "Rename" item in Finder's menus mentions that Enter is a hotkey for that action. Actually, it's not like the Finder menus even have a "Rename" item.
No one seems to be complaining that "My wiimote flew off the strap and broke that nasty ornament over the fireplace I've always hated since the day my Aunt gave it to me".
Video games are traditionally played facing a television set, not facing a fireplace.
(With the obvious exceptions of "Nasty Ornament Shooting Gallery" and "Super Nasty Ornament Shooting Gallery".)
For what its worth I believe that Nintendo will sell you a Dev Kit, for like $2K.
Sorry, hobbyists, Nintendo only sells devkits to legitimate, established software houses. Ones that have secure offices where Nintendo can be assured that their proprietary resources won't be stolen from and put up for sale to the least scrupulous bidder.
If you want to develop for their handheld platforms, though, the homebrew community has pretty much reverse-engineered every aspect of the GBA and DS, and there are even a few decent IDEs available for them.
You know, in the real world, the purpose of an OS is to talk to the hardware. It's mildly ironic that MS includes all sorts of junk in an OS that doesn't belong there, but doesn't bother writing actual hardware drivers, which, you know, is something like half of the actual 'OS', with managing access to devices being the other half.
Elegant and invisible systems for managing software access to hardware devices doesn't make a good selling point for a consumer product. Fancier web browsers and shinier UI buttons do.
Makes me wonder why Microsoft even bothers working on the difficult and unrewarding parts of OS design at all anymore; it's not what they're selling anymore. Do you think there will come a day where MS adopts some Linux or BSD variant for the low-level OS stuff, and "Windows" becomes (again) a graphical shell with bundled applets that runs on top of it?
3D graphics had serious limitations in the past and for some time required quite a large sum of money and time to render moderately complex models.
Yes, in the past they did, and that's why games like DKC didn't do real-time 3D rendering, choosing instead to leave that work to a cluster of SGIs back in Rare's server room before you even bought the game, and taking as long as was needed to render each frame of animation.
The consoles of today are capable of doing complex, if not quite "Toy Story" quality 3D renders in real time. But it doesn't mean they HAVE to.
the problem is that Capcom doesn't seem to know what the hell they are doing. Most of the changes they are making are FUNDAMENTAL things US game makers figured out years ago.
But then on the other hand, US game makers STILL haven't figured out how to make a side-scrolling action game as elegant, fun, challenging, or timeless as Mega Man. (Games like Viewtiful Joe show that Capcom still remembers how to do those, too.)
Myself, I welcome the variety of game styles, strengths and shortcomings that come from developers of different geographical regions and cultures.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, what good is having a 360 HD drive when you're only going to be watching the stuff at 720p or 1080i anyhow?
Anyone?
Um, because it will still look an order of magnitude better than 480i?
Google for "jury nullification" if you want more info.
Never trust Google for legal advice.
While the concept of jury nullification is indeed a concept the US court system has inherited from English common law, a statement like "you create the law if you're on a jury" is utterly absurd. The US Constitution, which supercedes common law provisions, is quite clear on the issue of who creates the law: the legislature.
After all, if YOU LOOSE, you have to pay the government court costs.
It's LOSE, dammit! L-O-S-E.
And no, in the United States, criminal trials do not use a loser-pays system.
Please tell me I live in a sane world when I say even Dvorak or Cringley has better credentials.
Better credentials for WHAT?
Yes, I suppose if I were looking for someone to write a column about technology, one of those gentlemen would be the better choice. But if I were looking for someone to write a column about sex, you better believe John C. Dvorak would be at the very bottom of my list!
A better question is, under what possible set of circumstances would ANYONE market a product that would want to behave indepently from it's owners wishes?
I take it you've never had children.
if you're European your Freeloader will no longer work which means you still need your Gamecube for those imported games. AFAIK US gamers don't have that problem which leads me to believe NoE is a bunch of idiots again.
How DARE they not make sure that their new console is compatible with an unlicensed product used to circumvent the regional lockout system for their previous console!
what do you expect from a company that overcharges by 25-50%
I'm sure you have your reasons for believing that Nintendo products are overpriced, but the market seems to disagree with you, if an entire month of people camping out in front of stores overnight hoping to get a chance to buy their product is any indicator.
If the people selling were happy to sell, and you were happy to buy, that's the free market right there.
I don't think the Kenny G fan would be "happy to buy" a ticket for $120 when, five minutes prior, the market value of the ticket was appraised at $20.
I think it's worth mentioning that they have not taken any risk here. They buy from a store at $x, post it on ebay with a reserve of $y such that $y - costs of ebay > $x and return it to the store for a full refund if it doesn't sell. It's not possible for them to lose money.
Depends on whether they could have been doing something more financially rewarding during the time they spent waiting in line to buy the item.
Also, beyond the financial risk, there's the risk of getting stabbed, shot, or trampled. It's not like flipping PS3's on eBay is a can't-lose proposition by any stretch.
Selling an item is a value added service, regardless of how many times it has been done.
What value does a scalper add? I find more value in being able to buy a high-demand product from a reputable and established retailer than from some faceless Joe Entrepreneur on eBay.
The inflated price was due to the insufficiency of the transactions due to the limited supply.
The "inflated" prices for the PS3 collapsed rapidly. They were no more "correct" prices for the product than the MSRP was.
Let's say there's 100 people in the US willing and able to pay $1200 for a PS3 during launch week. And then there's 200,000 people who wouldn't pay $1200, but would pay $600. Are you suggesting that Sony should have launched the PS3 with a $1200 price tag to get the maximum profit from a mere 100 people? How many of the 200,000 would have been turned off of the PS3 if they had done that?
all I need to do is $250 for the Wii, $? for the adapters, $? for near mint NES controllers, and $5 and I'll be playing Super Mario Bros. like it's 1985.
If all you want to do with the Wii is relive those 8-bit glory days, maybe you'd be better off getting a Generation NEX instead. Yes, there are a hundred Famiclones on the grey market to choose from, but this one has the advantages of being compatible with your original NES cartridges and controllers.
Plus it looks a lot cooler than a bright orange N64 controller casing or an off-grey PSone clone.
The bad news is that it's only 99.1% compatible. The good news is that most of the games that don't work are crap from Color Dreams and Koei. The other bad news is that one of the games that doesn't work is Castlevania III.
It's pretty poor IMO that a widespread standard such as CSS 2.0 still isn't implemented fully by any browser.
Maybe that's not only because browser developers have been lazy (IE) or preoccupied with rewriting the browser from the ground up (Netscape/Firefox) for the past 8.5 years, but also because CSS 2.0 is a convoluted, sloppily designed specification?
In PostgreSQL, when you do a SELECT across a table with IP addresses in it, you get them formatted and displayed as IP addresses
Formatting should be a task of the presentation tier, not the RDBMS.
That doesn't negate your point that having a native IP address datatype make actual application logic (like testing whether an address falls within a given range) much cleaner and easier to implement. The more native datatypes a database supports, the better; if I want to work with a boolean value, it's far better to have a bool datatype than to "fake" it with a char or int.
Foreign keys don't speed anything up, they just add an extra layer of checks on your database.
Correct. That extra layer of checks will probably actually slow things down a bit.
But foreign keys aren't about performance. They're about data integrity, which I would hope every database administrator or developer is more concerned with anyway. It doesn't matter how many requests/second your DBMS can handle if the data is fuxxored.
Your app should be checking itself anyway.
Yes, it should be catching "foreign key constraint violation" exceptions thrown by the DB interface and handling them appropriately. I hope that's what you meant.
the "vista" "road map" had been published clearly stating what major components would be part of Vista, on WinFS never made it while another, "Aero" has always been slated as part of the opertating system.
What an apt summary of what's wrong with Microsoft's approach to OS development.
The shiny 3D eyecandy was considered launch-critical and made it into final release, while the powerful filesystem improvements were abandoned fairly early in the product cycle.
Does memorizing the names and stats of baseball players make your brain grow?
What about people who memorize every little detail of Star Trek?
What about people who run and participate in Star Trek-themed "Federation Rotisserie Baseball" leagues?
It's awesome they're recognizing the trend towards internet communities of individuals working together for the common good
It's odd, though, that they don't seem to consider themselves part of those communities.
Instead of "You", why not "Us"? What is gained from the media industry retaining the foolish pretense that they are not an integral part of our culture, but merely an observer of it?
And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s.
But those had been designed to be multi-user systems. It took a decade or two for single-user computer use patterns to reach a point where cooperative multitasking wasn't good enough anymore. For that matter, it took a while for desktop computers to become powerful enough that multiple jobs could run simultaneously without decimating responsiveness.
The Borg Cube bearing the Microsoft logo, destroying Earth, with flames reaching up from off-frame image just screams professionalism. I will take anything this site says very seriously.
Yes, avoid all sites with graphics that suggest some sort of relationship between Microsoft and the Borg.
Hey Mike - arrow key until the file you want to rename is hilighted - and push enter. Wooooooo, scary hard.
That's a design WTF in itself.
Enter is a primary action key, has been since people were using VT100 terminals. When you press Enter in the context of some interface resource, it should perform the primary action associated with that resource: navigate into a folder. Open a document. Launch a program.
Instead it allows the user to modify the resource name? That's not a primary action!
Honestly, I can't blame Mike for not knowing about this. It's not like the "Rename" item in Finder's menus mentions that Enter is a hotkey for that action. Actually, it's not like the Finder menus even have a "Rename" item.
No one seems to be complaining that "My wiimote flew off the strap and broke that nasty ornament over the fireplace I've always hated since the day my Aunt gave it to me".
Video games are traditionally played facing a television set, not facing a fireplace.
(With the obvious exceptions of "Nasty Ornament Shooting Gallery" and "Super Nasty Ornament Shooting Gallery".)
For what its worth I believe that Nintendo will sell you a Dev Kit, for like $2K.
Sorry, hobbyists, Nintendo only sells devkits to legitimate, established software houses. Ones that have secure offices where Nintendo can be assured that their proprietary resources won't be stolen from and put up for sale to the least scrupulous bidder.
If you want to develop for their handheld platforms, though, the homebrew community has pretty much reverse-engineered every aspect of the GBA and DS, and there are even a few decent IDEs available for them.
You know, in the real world, the purpose of an OS is to talk to the hardware. It's mildly ironic that MS includes all sorts of junk in an OS that doesn't belong there, but doesn't bother writing actual hardware drivers, which, you know, is something like half of the actual 'OS', with managing access to devices being the other half.
Elegant and invisible systems for managing software access to hardware devices doesn't make a good selling point for a consumer product. Fancier web browsers and shinier UI buttons do.
Makes me wonder why Microsoft even bothers working on the difficult and unrewarding parts of OS design at all anymore; it's not what they're selling anymore. Do you think there will come a day where MS adopts some Linux or BSD variant for the low-level OS stuff, and "Windows" becomes (again) a graphical shell with bundled applets that runs on top of it?
3D graphics had serious limitations in the past and for some time required quite a large sum of money and time to render moderately complex models.
Yes, in the past they did, and that's why games like DKC didn't do real-time 3D rendering, choosing instead to leave that work to a cluster of SGIs back in Rare's server room before you even bought the game, and taking as long as was needed to render each frame of animation.
The consoles of today are capable of doing complex, if not quite "Toy Story" quality 3D renders in real time. But it doesn't mean they HAVE to.
How can they legally stop you from sending a ton of pennies to china if someone there is willing to pay for them?
Heard of tariffs? Embargoes?
It's been well established that the federal government can assert control over what is shipped in and out of the country.
the problem is that Capcom doesn't seem to know what the hell they are doing. Most of the changes they are making are FUNDAMENTAL things US game makers figured out years ago.
But then on the other hand, US game makers STILL haven't figured out how to make a side-scrolling action game as elegant, fun, challenging, or timeless as Mega Man. (Games like Viewtiful Joe show that Capcom still remembers how to do those, too.)
Myself, I welcome the variety of game styles, strengths and shortcomings that come from developers of different geographical regions and cultures.