"What was wrong was that I made the decision to go public on it at the Consumer Electronics Show," he said in a recent interview in Intel's Santa Clara headquarters. "Error of judgment. Mea culpa. I learned a lesson."
I like this statement. And I think it's consistent with what I've known of Intel first hand. A corporation this large and leading-edge, needs to dabble and branch off in "researchy" ways to test out areas of new market potential.
I was involved in a company whose seed money came from a sizeable (to us) contract from Intel, to license our technology in the digital imaging space. They were a great company to work with, talented people, good executives, and they got their demonstration technology, based upon our code, up and life in a respectable time.
The site was never marketed and never took off, but I believe it served their purposes in exploring this potential area of technology. It's a good thing to see a company like Intel taking part in this type of thing.
The only story here, as in the quote above, is that they made a bit of a visible statement about where they were headed, before knowing for sure. Minor mis-step, if mis-step at all.
Ummmm, after wading through the expected slashdot backlash (yawn), this really just strikes me as a an optimization of the traditional "role call"? If it can save time for all teachers, by knowing who's there and who's not, without the lengthy morning role call, what the heck.
There is the aspect that it's *easier* to spoof by having your buddy bring in your tag when you're not really there; that strikes me as *less* of an invasion of your personal status, than calling your name and visually verifying you're there.:)
While I have witnesses Microsoft's anti-competitive tactics first hand (undocumented API's that they used to their advantage), and believe that they play dirty, and aren't beyond corporate espionage, this post seems a bit suspect.
The username illumin8 of the posted kind of smells a bit of a conspiracy theorist (the illuminati are running things!) Also, getting code snippets off a whiteboard could hardly be a useful approach; the amount of code held by a whiteboard, and the effort involved, would be greater than simply writing the code. (Now, marketing plans, announcements, etc., maybe.)
Anyhow, I know MS plays dirty, and the government (the US govt at least) will never call them on it; but this post just seems a bit unbelievable to me.
I recommend the Panasonic SV-AV100. Tapeless, 512M SD Card, 20min per tape (on good quality, there is a 10min/tape setting, but I find it's overkill). Very small, great battery life, nice unit all around (and Pansonic is the one brand, with which I've never had *any* disappointment; definitely an underrated brand).
I remember reading somewhere that some replacement smartcards for hacking satellite TV, can emit signals on distress frequencies.
Pure speculation, but I could just picture this causing the problem, and when the authorities show up, buddy ditching the smart card, then saying "ummm, errr, it must be the TV, yeah, that's it!"
If you can afford Office, you can afford CrossOver office (which would be way cheaper than XP itself), which runs Office exceedingly well on Linux, in my experience so far (about a month of moderate use); also runs IE, and other goodies.
Worth checking out, if Office availability is your only reason not to be moving people to Linux.
I tried a similar product, X1 (http://www.x1.com) a year or so ago, and loved it so much, I actually paid money for the full version (yes, it's true, it's true). It indexed the drive quickly, and searching was blindingly fast (updated query results *as* you typed the letters in the query). Did email, xls, doc, etc, as well.
I'm looking forward to comparing Google's offering, and seeing how it stacks up; if it's even close, I'm sure it will take over on brand name alone.
Products like this definitely does change the way one uses their PC, not having to worry about finding things.
It's always been a thorn in my side, that (here in Canada, and no doubt elswhere) tax money pays for government agencies to collect map and aerial photography data (and land records), and do not make it properly accessible to the public.
Prior to the internet, you could buy the maps and aerial photographs for a fee, which was a bit high, I always thought, but reasonable considering the trouble and costs associated with the physical reproduction of the media.
Now in this age of the Internet and blank DVD's priced well under $1 (even our lame Cdn $), providing that "public data" far more cheaply (and allowing copying) should be allowed.
Instead the fees for getting large sets of map data are exorbitant. I just hope that more competitive privatized satellite photography concerns can provide a lot of this, far more economically.
This is especially annoying, since here in Canada, we are taxed quite heavily; if you make more than $50K Cdn [30K+-ish US], your incremental tax rate is something like 50c on the dollar. Plus in some provinces, you pay 15% GST on everything you purchase; booze and gas have taxes that are astronomical (more than 100%, I believe). (Not that we Canadians drink a lot, *cough* *cough*.)
In many cases, those tax dollars are put to great use, incredible and accessible health care (as much as we like to bitch about it, it's great), generally excellent and free highways (toll roads are fairly rare in Canada), and so forth. Granted, those are more critical than map data, but I still hope we come around on the mapping issue some day.
I believe that here in Canada, there's a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits, since it's far easier to get losing sides to pay defendant's costs. I think it's a great system; you go around suing people frivolously, trying to be a bully, you primarily end up paying their court costs in battles you lose. The US should really consider moving towards this approach.
D'oh... By "Service contract" I now assume this isn't a warrantee, but the Tivo listing/etc. service. Oh well, I tried... Please disregard above post:$
So just for comparison, a low end brand new TiVo is $99 after rebates. A lifetime service contract is $299. The total is there for about $400. That's still about $250 under what the box in the article is. For that extra money you could get a 140 hour TiVo and still have $50 to spend on something else.
Extended warranty?!?! How can I lose!?!?!?
[Quoted from the final phase of Homer's redumbening. Wait, is redumbening a word?]
Do people on here actually buy those? I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that these things are just gravy for the companies, and extra commissions for sales clerks. Especially these days, when something new and better will be available at 1/4 the price in a year or two.
There are differences between Hauppage cards, too. The PVR-250/350 line have hardware encoding, very high quality. There are two different versions of their USB product, one spits out direct MPEG, and I suspect is better than the one that doesn't (I had the latter, and it was disappointing.)
After being a MythTV user for a year or so, I'm amazed this type of thing isn't pretty much ubiquitous among Linux geeks such as muchself.
Unfortunately, the black box will not detect some of the more dangerous forms of driving, such as weaving and my biggest peeve, tail gating. (People just don't seem to clue in, that if you don't leave enough space between you and the car in front of you, any accident with them is going to be your fault.)
You need more shortcut buttons on Linux/X; one for copy-by-Ctrl-C-method, one for cut-by-click-method, one for paste-by-Ctrl-V-method, one for paste-by-middle-button method, and so on. With so many incompatible clipboard mechanisms on X, you need lotsa shortcut buttons!
But this company must deal with thousands, if not tens of thousands of delinquint accounts. People don't pay, they get warned, they don't pay, they get cut off. They can't do a psychological or social analysis on every customer to see if they need to be especially compassionate. That's up to the family, friends, caretakers, or whatever of the people. They can't, as a policy, share cutoff information with social services, either, due to the privacy act.
So when they were asked why they cut off this customer's power without notifying social services, the answer was obvious. I think this is media sensationalism at its worst. (Well, okay, not it's worst, but it's still sensationalism.)
Well, let's just say it wasn't CD quality audio. And it was *very* sensitive to the volume level (since it only had two states, on or off) to get anything audible. And yes, a recording of a voice sounded like a faint voice behind a massive veil of static. But it did work, and was discrenable as speech. More a novelty than anything else.
Circa 1978, when I was 11, I had a great little Z-80 box, an Exidy Sorcerer (2 mhz or so, 32K RAM, but I hacked it to 48!!!) Anyhow, it had no sound. Jealous of those Apple II owners who could make various beeps, I hooked a speaker directly to the +5 and GND contacts on the parallel port. By toggling the port, I could make all manner of sounds. I even hooked up my tape recorder and mic to a parallel port input line, and with the volume set right, recorded and played back voice and audio. Worked for years, never fried anything!
I gained a bit of insight a few years back into bipolar people, in particular the manic phase. This person in particular was quite creative (as many bipolars are), and it seemed that in the euphoria of the mania, they would make some pretty shaky assumptions about reality, and then build on those, sometimes in quite logical ways.
To me, it seemed a bit like how most people, in their dreams, can have major revelations, and even when they awake in the middle of the night, their dream seems like a major discovery, breakthrough. But in the morning, they realize "man, that was dumb." A classic example, I believe, in the psychology texts, is a famous psychology expert, who had a dream for the solution to all of mankind's problems, scribbled it down when he woke up, then went back to sleep. In the morning, what he had written was "the universe is permeated with the scent of kerosene." Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
It seems like the human brain in most of us, at certain times (normally when we're asleep) can be a pretty fanciful thing, mistaking different senses across modalities (interpreting a scent as a thought, and such). In some people, such things seem to happen during their waking hours, causing them much grief.
At least, that is my take on things. The "mucked up dream that seemed to make sense at the time" is a great parallel, I believe, that kind of demystifies the rather frightening behaviour of people with these problems. Just picture the bizarre perception of those dreams crossing over into the waking hours, and things seem less frightening.
Since I'm the only person who uses my domain, and I don't read Portuguese anyway, these are nothing but a drain on my bandwidth and resources, even if I were inclined to buy penis enlargement cream for my wife.
Dude, I think you might want to read those instructions again...
Slashdot Mirror
There is the aspect that it's *easier* to spoof by having your buddy bring in your tag when you're not really there; that strikes me as *less* of an invasion of your personal status, than calling your name and visually verifying you're there. :)
The username illumin8 of the posted kind of smells a bit of a conspiracy theorist (the illuminati are running things!) Also, getting code snippets off a whiteboard could hardly be a useful approach; the amount of code held by a whiteboard, and the effort involved, would be greater than simply writing the code. (Now, marketing plans, announcements, etc., maybe.)
Anyhow, I know MS plays dirty, and the government (the US govt at least) will never call them on it; but this post just seems a bit unbelievable to me.
Often stories are posted that refer to products or code names, with no description, which is quite annoying.
I'm glad to see this post doesn't run that risk.
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
-d
I recommend the Panasonic SV-AV100. Tapeless, 512M SD Card, 20min per tape (on good quality, there is a 10min/tape setting, but I find it's overkill). Very small, great battery life, nice unit all around (and Pansonic is the one brand, with which I've never had *any* disappointment; definitely an underrated brand).
Pure speculation, but I could just picture this causing the problem, and when the authorities show up, buddy ditching the smart card, then saying "ummm, errr, it must be the TV, yeah, that's it!"
Worth checking out, if Office availability is your only reason not to be moving people to Linux.
I'm looking forward to comparing Google's offering, and seeing how it stacks up; if it's even close, I'm sure it will take over on brand name alone.
Products like this definitely does change the way one uses their PC, not having to worry about finding things.
It's always been a thorn in my side, that (here in Canada, and no doubt elswhere) tax money pays for government agencies to collect map and aerial photography data (and land records), and do not make it properly accessible to the public.
Prior to the internet, you could buy the maps and aerial photographs for a fee, which was a bit high, I always thought, but reasonable considering the trouble and costs associated with the physical reproduction of the media.
Now in this age of the Internet and blank DVD's priced well under $1 (even our lame Cdn $), providing that "public data" far more cheaply (and allowing copying) should be allowed.
Instead the fees for getting large sets of map data are exorbitant. I just hope that more competitive privatized satellite photography concerns can provide a lot of this, far more economically.
This is especially annoying, since here in Canada, we are taxed quite heavily; if you make more than $50K Cdn [30K+-ish US], your incremental tax rate is something like 50c on the dollar. Plus in some provinces, you pay 15% GST on everything you purchase; booze and gas have taxes that are astronomical (more than 100%, I believe). (Not that we Canadians drink a lot, *cough* *cough*.)
In many cases, those tax dollars are put to great use, incredible and accessible health care (as much as we like to bitch about it, it's great), generally excellent and free highways (toll roads are fairly rare in Canada), and so forth. Granted, those are more critical than map data, but I still hope we come around on the mapping issue some day.
I believe that here in Canada, there's a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits, since it's far easier to get losing sides to pay defendant's costs. I think it's a great system; you go around suing people frivolously, trying to be a bully, you primarily end up paying their court costs in battles you lose. The US should really consider moving towards this approach.
D'oh... By "Service contract" I now assume this isn't a warrantee, but the Tivo listing/etc. service. Oh well, I tried... Please disregard above post :$
[Quoted from the final phase of Homer's redumbening. Wait, is redumbening a word?]
Do people on here actually buy those? I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that these things are just gravy for the companies, and extra commissions for sales clerks. Especially these days, when something new and better will be available at 1/4 the price in a year or two.
After being a MythTV user for a year or so, I'm amazed this type of thing isn't pretty much ubiquitous among Linux geeks such as muchself.
Unfortunately, the black box will not detect some of the more dangerous forms of driving, such as weaving and my biggest peeve, tail gating. (People just don't seem to clue in, that if you don't leave enough space between you and the car in front of you, any accident with them is going to be your fault.)
So it encourages people to fix the problem in a few minutes, rather than to make sure it's fixed right?
Yeah, that'll increase product realiability and eliminate bugs.
You need more shortcut buttons on Linux/X; one for copy-by-Ctrl-C-method, one for cut-by-click-method, one for paste-by-Ctrl-V-method, one for paste-by-middle-button method, and so on. With so many incompatible clipboard mechanisms on X, you need lotsa shortcut buttons!
-d
So when they were asked why they cut off this customer's power without notifying social services, the answer was obvious. I think this is media sensationalism at its worst. (Well, okay, not it's worst, but it's still sensationalism.)
Well, let's just say it wasn't CD quality audio. And it was *very* sensitive to the volume level (since it only had two states, on or off) to get anything audible. And yes, a recording of a voice sounded like a faint voice behind a massive veil of static. But it did work, and was discrenable as speech. More a novelty than anything else.
Circa 1978, when I was 11, I had a great little Z-80 box, an Exidy Sorcerer (2 mhz or so, 32K RAM, but I hacked it to 48!!!) Anyhow, it had no sound. Jealous of those Apple II owners who could make various beeps, I hooked a speaker directly to the +5 and GND contacts on the parallel port. By toggling the port, I could make all manner of sounds. I even hooked up my tape recorder and mic to a parallel port input line, and with the volume set right, recorded and played back voice and audio. Worked for years, never fried anything!
Ummm, don't most digital watches and calculators, too?
-d
That's because you got the name wrong, it's the "Tragically Hip," not "Tragically The Who."
Awesome band, gotta love their "Darkest One" video with the Trailer Park Boys in it :-)
-d
In Soviet Russia . . .
Oh, never mind.
To me, it seemed a bit like how most people, in their dreams, can have major revelations, and even when they awake in the middle of the night, their dream seems like a major discovery, breakthrough. But in the morning, they realize "man, that was dumb." A classic example, I believe, in the psychology texts, is a famous psychology expert, who had a dream for the solution to all of mankind's problems, scribbled it down when he woke up, then went back to sleep. In the morning, what he had written was "the universe is permeated with the scent of kerosene." Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
It seems like the human brain in most of us, at certain times (normally when we're asleep) can be a pretty fanciful thing, mistaking different senses across modalities (interpreting a scent as a thought, and such). In some people, such things seem to happen during their waking hours, causing them much grief.
At least, that is my take on things. The "mucked up dream that seemed to make sense at the time" is a great parallel, I believe, that kind of demystifies the rather frightening behaviour of people with these problems. Just picture the bizarre perception of those dreams crossing over into the waking hours, and things seem less frightening.
Dude, I think you might want to read those instructions again...