Nintendo targets a younger audience, one that likes "cute" games and doesn't need a DVD player or internet access. With the lower price, the GameCube will also appeal to parents who are buying a system for their kids when the kids don't need to buy NFL 2K2 or Perfect Dark.
That said, that leaves Xbox and Playstation 2 competing for the same audience -- and for $300 apiece, it's unlikely most players will want to buy both systems. That's why I'm wondering if Xbox will really be able to gain a foothold; if everyone who has a PS2 already owns one by this fall, why should they buy an Xbox? Only a *HUGE* library of exclusive hits ("The Matrix" alone won't do the trick) and a dramatic improvement in graphics power will seduce fans to wait, at this point, for an Xbox over a PS2.
I imagine this is, at its core, a tactic to find some practical use for the several thousand CD's the post office couldn't deliver due to bad addresses.
For the first time, MSN Messenger installs and loads automatically every time XP is run.
Darn, I bet AOL wishes they'd allowed MSN and AOL's userbases to interact with each other now, don't they? Two years from now the shoe will be on the other foot, and I doubt anyone's going to listen to their complaints.
...this has a huge potential for wireless communications. Because a chip is needed on both ends of the signal, it's possible with this to send and receive digital data securely between two devices (laptop computers, mobile phones, etc). Since up to 40 million digital pulses can be transmitted per second, this sort of secure communication would be essentially uncrackable.
Regular radio sucks, and this will suck worse. Radio stations have become homogenized slaves to the recording industry.
Just the contrary, actually. The problem with American radio today is that 90% of the stations are owned by a handful of companies, and they all play the same pop or classic or country or rock'n'roll songs. The potential for satellite radio is to have a hundred stations broadcast across the continent, reachable from anywhere, and each one targeting a specific niche. One station could just play 80's hits, another grunge metal, another baroque classical, another NPR news, another guitar jazz, and another electronica. If you've ever enjoyed Spinner radio, you've already seen a glimpse of what satellite radio can offer.
Myself, then, I'm all for it. I'd gladly pay $10 a month for the chance to listen to exactly the music I want, rather than music I can tolerate which was compiled by a bunch of suits in New York City for consumption by the masses.
A quick search for "satellite radio" (and when is Taco going to figure out that no one can find a search box at the very bottom of the home page?) turned up:
I imagine that the single best contribution Apple has made to the free software movement with OS X is simply OS X's ability to use free software.
Not just the OS, of course. Apple's computers are now able to run Apache, sendmail, and just about any other BSD-compiled binaries right out of the box. Now, Apple's not Microsoft, but this still should create a noticable increase in the number of users of free software. More users leads to more popularity, more feedback, more development, and a higher profile overall.
what are our plans to bring food to people who need it? Those should be more important than computers.
First, the company making the computers is Indian itself. This is not a case of Western capitalist imperialism at work.
Second, the company isn't trying to hand out computers instead of food; it's trying to sell computers cheaply enough that they don't have to choose between it and food.
Third, the entire Indian subcontinent is not in the grip of starvation. There's a lot of perfectly well-off people there, and some of them are even technologically literate.
And fourth, you may as well have asked the same question about Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Amoco, Sears, Wal-Mart, the Pentagon, etc. They are all businesses, not charity, and their mission is to sell desirable products, not give away every cent they have.
Greenfield believes that multimedia stimulation, ease of access, twenty-four-hour availability, lack of boundaries, loss of time, disinhibition, stimulating and creative content are all factors that can contribute to compulsive, even addictive Net use.
Sounds a lot like the problems people have had for years with cable television--the exception being that I can't watch TV at work and pretend to be productive.
Re:Security for Mac Users
on
Cracking OSX
·
· Score: 4
...but the majority of the Mac world is clueless about security.
Evidence indicates the same is true of Red Hat Linux and Windows 2000 users, as well. But why should this matter?
After all, most people aren't going to be using the server features of OSX any more than they do the server features of Windows 95. Those who do will probably have a wealth of firewall and security programs at their disposal soon enough (Symantec already has 'em for Mac OS 9).
Most crackers still won't bother with OS X, though, for the simple reason that it's such a small target. A few will attack it because they can, but most will stick to Red Hat and Windows because they're more common and more likely to provide useful data.
In "Babylon 5", I'd always assumed the "data crystals" everyone plugs into their computers used holographic memory as mentioned in the last paragraph of this article. JMS probably had that in mind, too, but it's interesting to read this and find that laser-read data crystals might not be two centuries away after all.
The survey, which asked workers about their e-mail and instant messaging habits, found that 34 percent of the internal business e-mail they receive is unnecessary. The survey also said that only 27 percent of the e-mail that workers receive demands their immediate attention.
Most employees I know would say that about 50% of the meetings they attend are unnecessary, and that only 10% of the discussions I hear in meetings demand any of my attention at all. Any dissenting opinions? No?
E-mail is a huge advantage, then, in that it gives me the power to delete memos and announcements that aren't important to me in just a few seconds, instead of having to throw away dead trees or walk in and out of useless meetings that do the same.
I say, viva la company e-mail. We'll always have to deal with useless intra-office crap, but at least with e-mail we can deal with it in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible (well, unless you're the network administrator).
...no joke. Sure, it sounds stupid that they should, of all companies, come up with the replacement for PCI, but remember that it took Apple's decision to completely replace serial with USB and SCSI with FireWire for those two technologies to be seen as bona fide replacements by PC manufacturers. If a practical and real replacement for PCI does come along, I'm going to expect to see it on the new PowerMacs long before I'll see it on an Intel motherboard.
...it's like asking, "what with all the credit cards out there, do we still need paper money?" And the answer is, of course we do. So long as there are people who can't afford a cell phone, the pay phone will still be a vital necessity.
I mean, geez, even the article says it: The point is that a significant number of people still use payphones, although that number has decreased to the point that British Telecom recently doubled the basic charge and is looking at ways to remake the booths into something sexier and more lucrative, like Internet kiosks. They're not making as much money as they used to for the phone companies, but they're not useless nostalgia items, either.
It's no secret that more people watch the annual American Super Bowl for the great commercials more than the actual game, which 75% of the time is decided by the end of the first quarter. I've been to Super Bowl parties where people will get up and refill their food plates during the game, and rush back to watch the million-dollar commercials, over and over again.
If TiVo forces advertisers to come out with better, more entertaining, more compelling ads during viewer's favorite shows, then more power to 'em. It's not commercials I hate, it's boring commercials.
Discover Magazine this month had an article entitled "Radio Flyer" about an inventor of a possibly similar technology. Does anyone know if this is related?
So? The site couldn't work without server-side scripting. Most sites today can't, for that matter. But the first reason for restricting contestants from using ASP should be obvious: security.
b.) their own images are 5k plus
No, they aren't. The site is highly optimized as it is, if you check out the HTML source code, but they couldn't provide you all that information even in plain text for under 5k.
c.) their pages are bland and slow
Their pages are cleanly designed and they're being Slashdotted. Chill.
...to prove that good design and interactivity is possible without heavy downloads. Simple as that.
Perhaps the geek community would understand this contest better if it's explained as an optimization contest. You're given a 5120-byte limit on your entire Web site. Produce the best thing you can, with the best functionality and the best design, under that constraint.
My own entry ("Puzzle Cube") was a fantastic exercise in JavaScript optimization to this end. Make the code as functional as I can. Okay, now remove the whitespace and linebreaks. Retitle the variables and functions with single-letter names. Remove unnecessary braces. Replace array declarations with.split() methods to save a few more characters. Trim the fat. Make it lean. And oh, make it still work for 95% of the browsers.
Of course it's a gimmick -- but more accurately, it's a challenge. Or a proof-of-concept. Whichever you prefer.
Music recorded in the software company's own format, called Windows Media Audio, will sound clearer and require far less storage space on a computer, the paper said.
Well, RealNetworks already makes that claim about their own RealJukebox software. Whether or not it's true, though, this doesn't mean that you can't record better-quality MP3's on Windows -- just not using Microsoft's software.
The upshot is probably that Napster and other MP3-sharing tools will probably have lower-quality MP3 files for you to steal, but you yourself can still record MP3 in high-quality just by changing the prefs or using another ripper.
Don't overreact, all. This is just Microsoft's way of saying once again: "You should use our format instead of an open standard."
I'm out of Everything 2, if you haven't realzed by now.
DMen, DMan627, or whatever you're going by today: if you were really "out of Everything2", I think you wouldn't still be trolling it on/. this heavily. For some reason, you're still carrying your vitriol about with you. My sympathies to the poor soul who next encounters the receiving end of it.
Many of my factual nodes were voted down very quickly. It's not the content, it's the name tagged above it.
Speaking only for myself, I upvoted DMan's well-written factual nodes whenever I found them. It was the prejudicial trolls which he may or may not be confusing with "factual nodes" that usually sank like rocks.
Definition: elite -- A choice or select body. i.e., not everybody.:-)
Stuff that isn't cool enough will be immediately softlinked to "your radical ideas..." nodes, or "did you hear about the man who told his ass how to talk?"
Anybody can make a softlink, just as anybody can cast a vote, but editors can now delete softlinks if they're blatantly inappropriate.
Re factual nodes: Nobody talks about them. Nobody upvotes them. Nobody/msg's you to say they liked them.
I do. Not every time, but I do. Look, you can't expect to be patted on the back and handed a Cuban every time you provide relevant information on your college, an old video game, or advanced mathematics. All writers have to deal with the fact that some things just aren't interesting to other people.
But that doesn't mean the moderation system is a failure. So what if people vote up cool, funny, and entertaining writeups, and not boring, factual ones? E2 is made up of a hugs body of facts and opinions, amusements and data. It covers both ends of the spectrum and whatever's in between. It's about everything.
I checked out the writeup for American Boychoir, and I imagine it's not been highly upvoted for three reasons: almost nobody's heard of it, there's very few softlinks to it, and it's less than comprehensive. If this upsets you, you're invited (if not expected) to revisit your writeup, update it, edit it, improve it, enhance it, append an amusing anecdote, whatever the heck does the trick, and then let people know it's been done. Actively softlink it to new related nodes so that people will find it again. The Votes Will Come, if the writeup is worthy.
You don't have to be "cool enough for E2". There is no such thing. You just have to write, relentlessly and continuously and effectively. After fifty writeups, the average E2 noder will learn a lot. After two hundred, he's learned even more. After five hundred, he's either noding for numbers or he's pretty damned good at what he does. An artist doesn't expect to be displayed in the Washington Gallery after just fifty works. You shouldn't expect to be a widely read and acknowledged writer after just fifty writeups.
I use and love E2 for several reasons -- the esoterica, the pop culture, the way something completely new and different is always just a click away from whatever page I'm on. But I'm also indebted to it for helping me learn how to be a better writer, how to compose facts and dull, raw information into a few compact paragraphs that can inform others. I'm not going to be presenting a column to the syndicates anytime soon with this material, but I'm a better writer for it. And the votes, the C!s, the/msgs, the responses and examples and counterexamples, are all teaching me a little more every day.
But don't blame the E2 community just because you're not widely loved from the get-go. Like anything else in this wide world, you have to work at it.
Meanwhile excellently written informative (as opposed to whiney or ranting) nodes sit in the single digits, too boring for the E2 elite to bother with.
Silly boy, the E2 "elite" have nothing to do with that. Every E2 denizen, no matter how long they've been there, has exactly one vote per writeup. "REMOVE" has that many votes because it's a prominent title, it's well-written, it's attention-getting, it's relevant to many people's experience, and it's funny. People enjoy that sort of thing. Just ask Dave Barry.
Factual noding doesn't get as many votes, but they're still loved and cherished and, gradually, voted up by people who find them interesting and/or can verify that they're accurate. Facts are what make e2 relevant, and they're what keep people coming back to the site time and time again. For those who have issues with this sort of thing, we encourage XP stoicism.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, that leaves Xbox and Playstation 2 competing for the same audience -- and for $300 apiece, it's unlikely most players will want to buy both systems. That's why I'm wondering if Xbox will really be able to gain a foothold; if everyone who has a PS2 already owns one by this fall, why should they buy an Xbox? Only a *HUGE* library of exclusive hits ("The Matrix" alone won't do the trick) and a dramatic improvement in graphics power will seduce fans to wait, at this point, for an Xbox over a PS2.
I imagine this is, at its core, a tactic to find some practical use for the several thousand CD's the post office couldn't deliver due to bad addresses.
Darn, I bet AOL wishes they'd allowed MSN and AOL's userbases to interact with each other now, don't they? Two years from now the shoe will be on the other foot, and I doubt anyone's going to listen to their complaints.
...this has a huge potential for wireless communications. Because a chip is needed on both ends of the signal, it's possible with this to send and receive digital data securely between two devices (laptop computers, mobile phones, etc). Since up to 40 million digital pulses can be transmitted per second, this sort of secure communication would be essentially uncrackable.
Just the contrary, actually. The problem with American radio today is that 90% of the stations are owned by a handful of companies, and they all play the same pop or classic or country or rock'n'roll songs. The potential for satellite radio is to have a hundred stations broadcast across the continent, reachable from anywhere, and each one targeting a specific niche. One station could just play 80's hits, another grunge metal, another baroque classical, another NPR news, another guitar jazz, and another electronica. If you've ever enjoyed Spinner radio, you've already seen a glimpse of what satellite radio can offer.
Myself, then, I'm all for it. I'd gladly pay $10 a month for the chance to listen to exactly the music I want, rather than music I can tolerate which was compiled by a bunch of suits in New York City for consumption by the masses.
Satellite Radio Coming Soon(?)
Satellite Radio Coming in 2001
Not just the OS, of course. Apple's computers are now able to run Apache, sendmail, and just about any other BSD-compiled binaries right out of the box. Now, Apple's not Microsoft, but this still should create a noticable increase in the number of users of free software. More users leads to more popularity, more feedback, more development, and a higher profile overall.
First, the company making the computers is Indian itself. This is not a case of Western capitalist imperialism at work.
Second, the company isn't trying to hand out computers instead of food; it's trying to sell computers cheaply enough that they don't have to choose between it and food.
Third, the entire Indian subcontinent is not in the grip of starvation. There's a lot of perfectly well-off people there, and some of them are even technologically literate.
And fourth, you may as well have asked the same question about Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Amoco, Sears, Wal-Mart, the Pentagon, etc. They are all businesses, not charity, and their mission is to sell desirable products, not give away every cent they have.
Sounds a lot like the problems people have had for years with cable television--the exception being that I can't watch TV at work and pretend to be productive.
Evidence indicates the same is true of Red Hat Linux and Windows 2000 users, as well. But why should this matter?
After all, most people aren't going to be using the server features of OSX any more than they do the server features of Windows 95. Those who do will probably have a wealth of firewall and security programs at their disposal soon enough (Symantec already has 'em for Mac OS 9).
Most crackers still won't bother with OS X, though, for the simple reason that it's such a small target. A few will attack it because they can, but most will stick to Red Hat and Windows because they're more common and more likely to provide useful data.
In "Babylon 5", I'd always assumed the "data crystals" everyone plugs into their computers used holographic memory as mentioned in the last paragraph of this article. JMS probably had that in mind, too, but it's interesting to read this and find that laser-read data crystals might not be two centuries away after all.
Most employees I know would say that about 50% of the meetings they attend are unnecessary, and that only 10% of the discussions I hear in meetings demand any of my attention at all. Any dissenting opinions? No?
E-mail is a huge advantage, then, in that it gives me the power to delete memos and announcements that aren't important to me in just a few seconds, instead of having to throw away dead trees or walk in and out of useless meetings that do the same.
I say, viva la company e-mail. We'll always have to deal with useless intra-office crap, but at least with e-mail we can deal with it in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible (well, unless you're the network administrator).
...no joke. Sure, it sounds stupid that they should, of all companies, come up with the replacement for PCI, but remember that it took Apple's decision to completely replace serial with USB and SCSI with FireWire for those two technologies to be seen as bona fide replacements by PC manufacturers. If a practical and real replacement for PCI does come along, I'm going to expect to see it on the new PowerMacs long before I'll see it on an Intel motherboard.
I mean, geez, even the article says it: The point is that a significant number of people still use payphones, although that number has decreased to the point that British Telecom recently doubled the basic charge and is looking at ways to remake the booths into something sexier and more lucrative, like Internet kiosks. They're not making as much money as they used to for the phone companies, but they're not useless nostalgia items, either.
If TiVo forces advertisers to come out with better, more entertaining, more compelling ads during viewer's favorite shows, then more power to 'em. It's not commercials I hate, it's boring commercials.
Discover Magazine this month had an article entitled "Radio Flyer" about an inventor of a possibly similar technology. Does anyone know if this is related?
So? The site couldn't work without server-side scripting. Most sites today can't, for that matter. But the first reason for restricting contestants from using ASP should be obvious: security.
b.) their own images are 5k plus
No, they aren't. The site is highly optimized as it is, if you check out the HTML source code, but they couldn't provide you all that information even in plain text for under 5k.
c.) their pages are bland and slow
Their pages are cleanly designed and they're being Slashdotted. Chill.
Perhaps the geek community would understand this contest better if it's explained as an optimization contest. You're given a 5120-byte limit on your entire Web site. Produce the best thing you can, with the best functionality and the best design, under that constraint.
My own entry ("Puzzle Cube") was a fantastic exercise in JavaScript optimization to this end. Make the code as functional as I can. Okay, now remove the whitespace and linebreaks. Retitle the variables and functions with single-letter names. Remove unnecessary braces. Replace array declarations with .split() methods to save a few more characters. Trim the fat. Make it lean. And oh, make it still work for 95% of the browsers.
Of course it's a gimmick -- but more accurately, it's a challenge. Or a proof-of-concept. Whichever you prefer.
Well, RealNetworks already makes that claim about their own RealJukebox software. Whether or not it's true, though, this doesn't mean that you can't record better-quality MP3's on Windows -- just not using Microsoft's software.
The upshot is probably that Napster and other MP3-sharing tools will probably have lower-quality MP3 files for you to steal, but you yourself can still record MP3 in high-quality just by changing the prefs or using another ripper.
Don't overreact, all. This is just Microsoft's way of saying once again: "You should use our format instead of an open standard."
That does it. From now on I'm going to post a story five times, at five different times of day, before I consider it "rejected".
This kind of reckless ignorance of Slashdot's own archives is bordering on obscene.
DMen, DMan627, or whatever you're going by today: if you were really "out of Everything2", I think you wouldn't still be trolling it on /. this heavily. For some reason, you're still carrying your vitriol about with you. My sympathies to the poor soul who next encounters the receiving end of it.
Speaking only for myself, I upvoted DMan's well-written factual nodes whenever I found them. It was the prejudicial trolls which he may or may not be confusing with "factual nodes" that usually sank like rocks.
Definition: elite -- A choice or select body. i.e., not everybody. :-)
Stuff that isn't cool enough will be immediately softlinked to "your radical ideas..." nodes, or "did you hear about the man who told his ass how to talk?"
Anybody can make a softlink, just as anybody can cast a vote, but editors can now delete softlinks if they're blatantly inappropriate.
Re factual nodes: Nobody talks about them. Nobody upvotes them. Nobody /msg's you to say they liked them.
I do. Not every time, but I do. Look, you can't expect to be patted on the back and handed a Cuban every time you provide relevant information on your college, an old video game, or advanced mathematics. All writers have to deal with the fact that some things just aren't interesting to other people.
But that doesn't mean the moderation system is a failure. So what if people vote up cool, funny, and entertaining writeups, and not boring, factual ones? E2 is made up of a hugs body of facts and opinions, amusements and data. It covers both ends of the spectrum and whatever's in between. It's about everything.
I checked out the writeup for American Boychoir, and I imagine it's not been highly upvoted for three reasons: almost nobody's heard of it, there's very few softlinks to it, and it's less than comprehensive. If this upsets you, you're invited (if not expected) to revisit your writeup, update it, edit it, improve it, enhance it, append an amusing anecdote, whatever the heck does the trick, and then let people know it's been done. Actively softlink it to new related nodes so that people will find it again. The Votes Will Come, if the writeup is worthy.
You don't have to be "cool enough for E2". There is no such thing. You just have to write, relentlessly and continuously and effectively. After fifty writeups, the average E2 noder will learn a lot. After two hundred, he's learned even more. After five hundred, he's either noding for numbers or he's pretty damned good at what he does. An artist doesn't expect to be displayed in the Washington Gallery after just fifty works. You shouldn't expect to be a widely read and acknowledged writer after just fifty writeups.
I use and love E2 for several reasons -- the esoterica, the pop culture, the way something completely new and different is always just a click away from whatever page I'm on. But I'm also indebted to it for helping me learn how to be a better writer, how to compose facts and dull, raw information into a few compact paragraphs that can inform others. I'm not going to be presenting a column to the syndicates anytime soon with this material, but I'm a better writer for it. And the votes, the C!s, the /msgs, the responses and examples and counterexamples, are all teaching me a little more every day.
But don't blame the E2 community just because you're not widely loved from the get-go. Like anything else in this wide world, you have to work at it.
Silly boy, the E2 "elite" have nothing to do with that. Every E2 denizen, no matter how long they've been there, has exactly one vote per writeup. "REMOVE" has that many votes because it's a prominent title, it's well-written, it's attention-getting, it's relevant to many people's experience, and it's funny. People enjoy that sort of thing. Just ask Dave Barry.
Factual noding doesn't get as many votes, but they're still loved and cherished and, gradually, voted up by people who find them interesting and/or can verify that they're accurate. Facts are what make e2 relevant, and they're what keep people coming back to the site time and time again. For those who have issues with this sort of thing, we encourage XP stoicism.