It reminds me of Steve Jobs's comments on "media center" PC's - something about when you're watching TV, you wanna be across the room...
Of everyone I've ever known who has had any kind of handheld gaming device, I honestly can't say I've ever heard even one person say, "You know, I really wish I could make phone calls on this, too."
It used a digital image sensor, and digital storage media, and took still pictures (single frames of digital video). If that doesn't qualify it as a digital camera, I'm not sure what would.
See the description and photo of the original MAVICA (MAgnetic VIdeo CAmera) on digicamhistory.com.
I'm not sure when image compression entered the picture, but unless Kodak came up with it before 1981 and it took them until 1987 or longer to get the patent, it would appear that this constitutes prior art - by Sony themselves.
Despite the fact that my household has 3 Macs, my parents just went out and got a brand new eMachines PC. I can't really blame them; it was half the cost of the cheapest brand new Mac. Oh well.
So, I told them that they can video-chat with their only granddaughter if they go over to the Apple Retail Store two towns from their house. They went to the store. My family and I gathered 'round the iSight. And we video-chatted. First time they'd seen her in over a year.
There are two benefits here. The obvious one is that sooner or later, if we keep doing this, they will think "Oooh, shiny!" and buy something Apple, thus solving the question at hand. The less obvious one is that at least for the duration of their trip to and from the Apple Retail Store, I can be assured of not getting any calls about something or other being busted on their PC.
...there are a few things that'd make it difficult for me to do this successfully.
My ISP wants my bandwidth usage to stay within "reasonable" limits (under, say, 40 gigs one direction or the other) each month.
There are good odds my ISP's policies don't allow me to re-sell my bandwidth.
The local kine working-poor, little old Japanese ladies and feral chickens that make up most of the population of the neighborhood probably wouldn't take advantage of it anyway.
Maybe if I lived on a big street near a center of commerce or something... but I don't think folks are gonna sit around with their laptops at the fishing tackle store a few doors down and surf the web.
I run a site (chocolocate.com - no clickable link because I don't want my DSL to get slashdotted right now, but feel free to visit if you want) that's a searchable index of chocolate web sites around the world. It's been almost 10 years in the making (yes, really), and contains links to sites, as well as brief comments on each and every one. And yeah, I've got all that data, as well as other metadata necessary to the operation of the site, stored in a database.
I realized some time ago that it'd be relatively trivial for someone to come along and scrape all the URLs I link to, put 'em on a page with a buncha ads, and try to make a buck off stuff I'd spent a lot of time on. But I'm not terribly concerned about it happening. Why?
My comments are pretty clearly covered by copyright - so they'd have nothing but a list of links.
I switched some time ago to feeding a site's database ID to a redirect script, which does a quick lookup and issues an HTTP redirect to the desired URL. So there are no links to other sites visible on my site - gotta click. That makes scraping that much harder.
I recently started displaying results in pages of 20 each, so folks no longer have to wait for a page of 600 results (and there were some like that!) to load. (Okay, okay, by breaking it into more pages, I can also increase the odds of them seeing a Google AdSense ad they feel like clicking on.:)
There's no law saying that database output must be presented in a format that's easy for people to scrape, any more than email addresses.
When I ordered my G5, I custom-configured it with dual 250GB drives, Airport Extreme (802.11G) and Bluetooth, but I know what really made it take so long to ship was my decision to omit that modem.
I mean, they probably had to forge a whole different case for it (in the fires of Mount Doom, naturally) and all that.
(11th cousin 5 times removed or some such; our shared ancestor Anthony Morse lived 1606-1686) I suspect he's spinning in his grave, but I can't be sure, so I'll spin on my desk chair a few times for good measure.
2002's "Lilo & Stitch" was a non-Pixar Disney project, animated, fairly well-receivedand a box-office success. The follow-on, "Stitch: The Movie" was a direct-to-DVD vehicle about an hour long created solely to set the stage for some (probably on ABC) children's cartoon about Stitch and Lilo. We've got it on DVD and a huge chunk - if not all - of the animation was farmed out to shops in Korea.
Outsourcing doesn't just happen in I.T. of course...
There are some notebooks (I think Fujitsu has some Lifebook models for example) that maintain a traditional form-factor (and price, for the most part!) while including touch-sensitive screens and styluses. Those might be more useful and cost-effective than tablets.
In some places, mosquitos are not a natural part of the ecosystem, having been inadvertently introduced in bilge-water of ships. That's the case here in Hawaii.
Other detrimental species have also been introduced by ships, like rats, mice, and of course haoles like me.;)
And then someone got the bright idea of shipping in mongoose to control the rats... but rats are nocturnal and mongoose are diurnal... whoops.
I fix PC's by day... and use Macs at home.
on
Mac v. Microsoft TCO
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Some people might consider me a "PC technician" as various people pay me good money to take care of their beleaguered (Apple in-joke) PC's. I don't have A+ or Network+ certifications, but I've got 15 years of IT experience and familiarity with a good bit of hardware and more OSes than most people would ever want to touch.
At home, I use primarily Macs running OS X. (There is one PC running Linux.) Why? Well, no one pays me to work on my own computers, so I choose hardware and software that won't require me to fix it all the time.
Three words: "Insecure by default." Windows is. Linux and MacOS X aren't.
There have been reports of people setting up brand spankin' new computers during some of the worse recent infestations of the Internet, and getting infected basically as soon as they touched the network, before they ever even had a chance to download the patches.
I know, I know, now you're going to say that a good sysadmin (as if a good sysadmin would even touch Windows;) or clueful user (ditto) would simply wait a day, or a week, or whatever, for the worms to cease, before setting up the computer.
Right. Hey, it's only lost productivity, no biggie!
Generally when something bad happens, you do try to figure out who might have made it happen. There are "usual suspects" for a lot of things. And "people who dislike or are mad at the victim of this particular thing" tends to be part of that set...
However, there's also the matter of a modus operandi. While the Linux community certainly doesn't like SCO or Microsoft, its members aren't particularly known for writing virus code. In fact, writing Windows virus code would probably require greater... intimacy with Windows than most users of other operating systems would ever want to have.
My guess is that it's either a rogue coder or a coder in the employ of somebody (spammers are "the usual suspects" for employing virus writers lately, but why attack Microsoft and SCO, then?) who's probably using, and used to coding for, Windows. That's far more logical.
Yeah, WarCraft III was, if I recall, the first game to ship a hybrid Windows/MacOS X CD in the retail box. I bought it the day it came out, solely to show my support for that practice.:)
Formerly made and marketed by Intel Play (a division of Intel) it's a cheap little microscope with a digital sensor and a USB connector. Got talked about in this Slashdot thread.
Oh and then there's Motic who apparently make a somewhat better product and have a site that doesn't want to load for me right now...
Wow. Out here in the unfashionable backwaters of the Pacific, where our little TV set's antenna pulled in basically nothing on the airwaves, we're getting somewhere around 40 channels (that's about a half-dozen broadcast stations from the nearest big city, 200 miles away, plus about 4 local public/educational/government access channels, and about 30 cable-only channels... for about $10-$11 a month. And that's after a rate increase last year.;)
See my other followup higher in this thread... 1920x1080 single link DVI, 2048x1536 dual link DVI.
And besides, Dahan, nobody would want 40000 x 30000. 4:3 ratios are no fun. Gotta have the widescreen 16:10 (that'd be 40000 x 25000, if my math isn't bad this late at night) for watching DVD's!:)
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Of everyone I've ever known who has had any kind of handheld gaming device, I honestly can't say I've ever heard even one person say, "You know, I really wish I could make phone calls on this, too."
Feeping creaturism.
"People who talk back to the television," I call them.
Not a sign of a healthy mind, in my book. :)
I'm not sure when image compression entered the picture, but unless Kodak came up with it before 1981 and it took them until 1987 or longer to get the patent, it would appear that this constitutes prior art - by Sony themselves.
So, I told them that they can video-chat with their only granddaughter if they go over to the Apple Retail Store two towns from their house. They went to the store. My family and I gathered 'round the iSight. And we video-chatted. First time they'd seen her in over a year.
There are two benefits here. The obvious one is that sooner or later, if we keep doing this, they will think "Oooh, shiny!" and buy something Apple, thus solving the question at hand. The less obvious one is that at least for the duration of their trip to and from the Apple Retail Store, I can be assured of not getting any calls about something or other being busted on their PC.
- My ISP wants my bandwidth usage to stay within "reasonable" limits (under, say, 40 gigs one direction or the other) each month.
- There are good odds my ISP's policies don't allow me to re-sell my bandwidth.
- The local kine working-poor, little old Japanese ladies and feral chickens that make up most of the population of the neighborhood probably wouldn't take advantage of it anyway.
Maybe if I lived on a big street near a center of commerce or something... but I don't think folks are gonna sit around with their laptops at the fishing tackle store a few doors down and surf the web.Just engage in any sort of activity that requires your brain to be active, rather than passive. Read. Code. Race down hills. Whatever.
...NEC alleges that IBM improperly copied carbon nanotubes into Linux. :)
I realized some time ago that it'd be relatively trivial for someone to come along and scrape all the URLs I link to, put 'em on a page with a buncha ads, and try to make a buck off stuff I'd spent a lot of time on. But I'm not terribly concerned about it happening. Why?
There's no law saying that database output must be presented in a format that's easy for people to scrape, any more than email addresses.
Yup! I actually have that CD... didn't get a Mac to run it on 'til 2001, tho. :)
I mean, they probably had to forge a whole different case for it (in the fires of Mount Doom, naturally) and all that.
Okay, now I'm all dizzy.
Outsourcing doesn't just happen in I.T. of course...
There are some notebooks (I think Fujitsu has some Lifebook models for example) that maintain a traditional form-factor (and price, for the most part!) while including touch-sensitive screens and styluses. Those might be more useful and cost-effective than tablets.
Other detrimental species have also been introduced by ships, like rats, mice, and of course haoles like me. ;)
And then someone got the bright idea of shipping in mongoose to control the rats... but rats are nocturnal and mongoose are diurnal... whoops.
At home, I use primarily Macs running OS X. (There is one PC running Linux.) Why? Well, no one pays me to work on my own computers, so I choose hardware and software that won't require me to fix it all the time.
Just an anecdotal data-point.
There have been reports of people setting up brand spankin' new computers during some of the worse recent infestations of the Internet, and getting infected basically as soon as they touched the network, before they ever even had a chance to download the patches.
I know, I know, now you're going to say that a good sysadmin (as if a good sysadmin would even touch Windows ;) or clueful user (ditto) would simply wait a day, or a week, or whatever, for the worms to cease, before setting up the computer.
Right. Hey, it's only lost productivity, no biggie!
I wonder if Rob has a Hot Wheels PC on his desk?
Well, there's always Purring Kitty...
Thank you for ASSuming I'm a Linux zealot or "average Slashdotter." You're wrong on both counts. *Plonk*
However, there's also the matter of a modus operandi. While the Linux community certainly doesn't like SCO or Microsoft, its members aren't particularly known for writing virus code. In fact, writing Windows virus code would probably require greater... intimacy with Windows than most users of other operating systems would ever want to have.
My guess is that it's either a rogue coder or a coder in the employ of somebody (spammers are "the usual suspects" for employing virus writers lately, but why attack Microsoft and SCO, then?) who's probably using, and used to coding for, Windows. That's far more logical.
Yeah, WarCraft III was, if I recall, the first game to ship a hybrid Windows/MacOS X CD in the retail box. I bought it the day it came out, solely to show my support for that practice. :)
Oh and then there's Motic who apparently make a somewhat better product and have a site that doesn't want to load for me right now...
Wow. Out here in the unfashionable backwaters of the Pacific, where our little TV set's antenna pulled in basically nothing on the airwaves, we're getting somewhere around 40 channels (that's about a half-dozen broadcast stations from the nearest big city, 200 miles away, plus about 4 local public/educational/government access channels, and about 30 cable-only channels... for about $10-$11 a month. And that's after a rate increase last year. ;)
See my other followup higher in this thread... 1920x1080 single link DVI, 2048x1536 dual link DVI. And besides, Dahan, nobody would want 40000 x 30000. 4:3 ratios are no fun. Gotta have the widescreen 16:10 (that'd be 40000 x 25000, if my math isn't bad this late at night) for watching DVD's! :)