Microsoft is a private corporation. Do they actually have any right to check on whether the software you use is legal? I realise that the police/copyright theft department/whatever have legal rights to find out whether you're running licensed applications, but does the company that created them? Certainly they're not within their rights to come in uninvited. Could the city have simply asked Microsoft to go away?
Also, what effect will this have on the use of Microsoft software in the future within the city? I would imagine it'd have little affect, once the platform is chosen it tends to stay the same for a long time. On the other hand this sort of stuff causes much aggro. I say bring back site licenses.
Yes, lots of people are doing it. Millions of them. But, as Ghandi said, 'Even if you're in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.' Millions doing it doesn't make it any less wrong.
Stand up now for true copyright protection as afforded under the U.S. constitution or risk giving it up forever to global monopolies such as this.
Oh yeah, we can't possibily live on a planet that isn't entirely governed by the U.S. constitution. After all, less than 10% of the population live in America, so why shouldn't we all be governed by their laws?
Frankly, a global law on copyright is the only way to protect the interests of the artists. One that everyone agrees to, one that is enforced, one that is fair regardless of creed, colour or country. Copying material around the globe without paying for it is not 'free speech', nor is it 'free expression'. Its ripping people off.
I was once a Mac user. Many moons ago I liked MacOS. I enjoyed using the various design applications around. I lamented the lack of games, and I had to use substandard office applications, but the design stuff was industry standard. Slowly I drifted toward the WinTel side as more and more of my favourites were ported across, until I eventually decided that I'd bin my Mac and go totally PC. I learnt the OS, and learnt all the new shortcut keys, and I never looked back.
What it boils down to, from a user point of view, is that applications make an OS. Sure, open source is good. A free base is nice too. But if the software simply doesn't exist then you can't use it. I've taught myself linux in my spare time, but only as a challenge. I could never use it for work because the things I do (web development and print media) aren't supported by the software houses as well as they are on a PC platform. Perhaps OSX will get support from Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, Kinetix and so on. But until it does, for me, it'll be little more than a nice distraction.
While the nostalgia factor is really kinda cool, and certainly one a groovy application of the technology in these homemade cabinets, its not the only possibility.
For some time I've been considering building an upright cabinet for more modern games such as Quake 3, Midtown Madness, and Call to Power. The primary difficulty is finding a good interface to the games as they all seem to require many more control inputs these days than the standard 8-way stick and 6 fire buttons offered by the newest jamma cabinets. Track balls seem good, but I've yet to work out a good configuration of buttons that equate to the inverted T of a keyboard direction control. The best so far has been a keyboard number pad.
I reckon a bunch of linked Quake 3 cabinets would be one of the coolest things ever..
This seems like a very clear case of the few making life crap for the many. There are some people that think its fair and reasonable to distribute copyright material from their web sites. The actions of these people mean that the ISP has to try various things to stop being sued by the copyright owners. In this case they tried an automated process which then fell down. Unfortunate yes, a better process would have been to flag those accounts holding 'MP3's and to check them out. But the real blame lies with the pirates.
Example: If it weren't for car thieves we'd not have to bother locking our cars.
People that pirate material make things less easy for the rest of us, the honest people. We shouldn't have to put up with people deleting things from our web sites, but then, bands shouldn't have to put up with people copying their art around the internet to avoid paying for somethig they want.
So, does this means that its up to Microsoft who can write software that will be signed? What if they decide that Netscape is a profits^h^h^h^h^h^hsecurity risk and don't let them have a signature? Or, more comically, what if the post-breakup Microsoft OS division don't let the post-breakup Microsoft Office division have a certificate? Surely having the OS creator certify the applications is a conflict of interest. It'd be better to have a third party validate stuff. Right?
For the most part AMD certainly seemed to have topped the Pentium 4 chip on those benchmark tests. This seems to be a bit weird, but..
At CPU speeds more than about 1GHz theres little to choose between the various options on clock speed alone. At these speeds the chips are limited by memory bandwidth, code optimization, and instruction sizes. Once a CPU is going faster than the maximum memory throughput of the RAM then any increase in clock speed is going to go to waste. As the article mentions, the code that was run on the P4 wasn't optimized for it at all. This is another limiting factor. If you optimize code for a 286 instruction set and then run it on an Athlon it won't go as fast as it possibly could. And thirdly, AMD have some instructions that do more than those on the P4, thus appearing to go quicker.
Until memory technology, compilers, and applications start really using the new parts of the P4 chips then there'll not be any quantum leaps forward in 'speed'. But once they do expect benchmarks like these to look very different. (Mind you, by that time AMD should have some new toy out, and the field will be level once again).
The primary effect of the drop in tech stocks is the increased wariness of investors in new and, potentially, innovation ideas. Media hype is predicting the end of a 'dot.com bubble', and this seems to be interpretted as a complete collapse of the internet and e-business industry as a whole.
What is more likely to happen is a simple weeding out of the poorer companys, those without a solid business plan or revenue model. Certainly this'll include some major players, boo.com is a prime example. Whereas, a year ago, investors would throw millions at any project that ended in dot.com now they're going to actually look more closely at the real-world prospects of an idea. I reckon this is a positive thing. The recent glut of internet companies that are little more than a complete waste of time should cease, and maybe investors will have more time for the more innovative ideas such as Indrema and such.
Just as curious as the Northern alignment of the pyramids is the fact that they correlate perfectly to the relative positions of the stars that make up the belt of Orion. Theres a good article about the positions here. Apparently it goes further than the 3 main nodes at Giza too, with the Nile representing the Milky Way, and a few other pyramids further afield being in the exact positions of other prime stars.
A while back, when CD-R was shiny and new, I found I had a problem with my hi-fi. It wouldn't play CD-Rs. Being a bit of a technophile I'd bought the player when they weren't exactly mainstream, and it was getting on a bit. When I bought my first CD-writer I found that my recordings of CD audio weren't compatible with an older cd player. They were fine on computer drives, but audio players didn't like it at all.
Do DVD players of the set-top box variety play DVD-R discs? This is not an obvious attempt at piracy. The company I work for produces video adverts for things, and DVD would be a great medium for sending to people. Unfortunately even the shortest production run of DVDs costs more than my annual salary (well, not quite, but exaggeration is allowable). Would a DVD writer be a viable option instead?
Don't know about anyone else, but to me the ordering of information based on some sort of mapped goegraphic reference seems really mad. Its by no means logical to have to search through something based on where it is in 2, or 3, dimensions. If the challenge was to make an accurate representation of the computer network then they have failed. Theres no way that they could get any sort of vector information from the ODP so directions on the map would be meaningless. If they have tried to make an interface that is easier to use than the ODP directory system then they have once again failed. I couldn't find a link on their maps in ages, in the directory it took me about 20 seconds. If, however, they wanted to make an entertaining and technically accomplished distraction thats kinda fun, then I congratulate them.
Maybe I'm too used to my simple 2D windowed interface, but I like it. Its easy. I don't think I need another dimension. Perhaps they'll prove me wrong.
Better known as flexi-time here in the UK where I work, flex-time's key benefit is allowing workers to do what they like when they like doing it. I'm an early office person. I do some of my best work before 9am when the hordes arrive.
The main arguement against flex-time is that of communication. You can't exactly talk to someone at 5:15pm if they clock off at 5:00pm on the dot everyday. It depends on your job. If you have to talk to people all day long then theres a real arguement for keeping you in the office at times you're going to be needed. Difficult to argue against common sense. But, conversely, if you're someone that is able to get on with your job on your own without the distractions of things like late meetings, then its a preferable situation to have you doing your very best work at the time you prefer to be doing it.
As with everything I suppose, look at it from the managers perspective too, once you can grasp their view its much easier to argue against it.
So far noone has really managed to simulate anything within a fraction of 'realism'. The number of variables that need to be taken into consideration is absolutely horrendous. The nearest we can get without throwing Cray computing power about is a vague approximation.
But...
Isn't a vague approximation enough? Take a recent computer game as an example, say Tekken Tag Tournament or Soul Caliber on the PS2 and Dreamcast respectively. Both these games look damn good. No doubt about that. They're by no means 'realistic', far from it in fact, but who cares? The games are fun. When did gaming take to being real? Its an escape isn't it? Maybe in the future games will look like the world around us, on that day I think I'll be going back to my SNES.
Yet another international perspective I'm afraid..
Are the minutes you get useable at the times you'll be using the phone? Ignore the free minutes if they're off-peak. What are the chances you'll be doing work stuff at night.
Are the free minutes useable to networks you'll be phoning most? Some talk plans don't include free time to other mobile networks, premium rate lines (eg tech support.. or pr0n if you have a weird job 8)).
Is the phone billed per-second? I've heard nasty thing about some US telcos rounding a 65second call up to 2 mintues..
Whats the coverage like? Is it going to work where you are going to be..
What are the toys like? Are the options for things like WAP, email to the phone etc..
Whats the phone itself like? Theres nothing worse than having a chunky, poor quality, poor interfaced phone that you need to use quickly and easily everyday.
I've heard some pretty good stories about Bell Atlantic's SingleRate tarrif, its a good network with coast to coast coverage. A couple of American consulatants I've spoken to are with the network. That said though, I'm fortunate enough to live and work in the uk, our 4 mobile operators are pretty much equal.
Theres a reasonable Byte article on these things here. These things sounds like DVD killers, assuming they're practical. They hold more, they're just as speedy, and they could be made at a good price.
But.. they're 5 inches across still. When are we going to get something smaller? Why not stick 30Gb on a 2 inch disc? That'd be a killer for portables.
I've been using the preview releases of NS6 for some time, and I've never been hugely impressed. Sure, theres all the usual standards (non)compliance issues, and theres that 'its-not-IE' look to it (could be a bonus if you're anti-MS). But what has killed Netscape for me is the lack of innovation.
Back in the old days of Version 3 browsers there was real difference between the options. IE was headed toward DHTML, and NS was going down the road of JavaScript. People complained bitterly about their sites not working on one browser or another, but they also managed to come up with some really cracking stuff.
These days theres little real innovation. If MS or NS come up with something cool that the other doen't support it gets labelled as 'proprietary'. And we never use 'proprietary' things because they're 'non-standard'. Its all well and good having the exact same standard XML parser, the exact same DHTML support, and the exact same JavaScript command set, but then you end up with two exact same browsers.
Standards are fantastic for the essentials. HTML made the WWW what it is today. But standards can often get in the way of the cool stuff.
"We think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to develop a competing technology to RDRAM and not infringe on our patents," he said. "We are extremely confident in our legal position."
And they say that patents push for innovation.. This is utterly crazy. While I'm all for a company protecting its intellectual property, and even making big piles of cash from it, I feel that Rambus have taken patenting to be a method of market domination. This isn't what patents are about.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that Linux supports java really well. When I'm installing RH7 I need all the coffee I can get...
Microsoft is a private corporation. Do they actually have any right to check on whether the software you use is legal? I realise that the police/copyright theft department/whatever have legal rights to find out whether you're running licensed applications, but does the company that created them? Certainly they're not within their rights to come in uninvited. Could the city have simply asked Microsoft to go away?
Also, what effect will this have on the use of Microsoft software in the future within the city? I would imagine it'd have little affect, once the platform is chosen it tends to stay the same for a long time. On the other hand this sort of stuff causes much aggro. I say bring back site licenses.
Yes, lots of people are doing it. Millions of them. But, as Ghandi said, 'Even if you're in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.' Millions doing it doesn't make it any less wrong.
Stand up now for true copyright protection as afforded under the U.S. constitution or risk giving it up forever to global monopolies such as this.
Oh yeah, we can't possibily live on a planet that isn't entirely governed by the U.S. constitution. After all, less than 10% of the population live in America, so why shouldn't we all be governed by their laws?
Frankly, a global law on copyright is the only way to protect the interests of the artists. One that everyone agrees to, one that is enforced, one that is fair regardless of creed, colour or country. Copying material around the globe without paying for it is not 'free speech', nor is it 'free expression'. Its ripping people off.
I was once a Mac user. Many moons ago I liked MacOS. I enjoyed using the various design applications around. I lamented the lack of games, and I had to use substandard office applications, but the design stuff was industry standard. Slowly I drifted toward the WinTel side as more and more of my favourites were ported across, until I eventually decided that I'd bin my Mac and go totally PC. I learnt the OS, and learnt all the new shortcut keys, and I never looked back.
What it boils down to, from a user point of view, is that applications make an OS. Sure, open source is good. A free base is nice too. But if the software simply doesn't exist then you can't use it. I've taught myself linux in my spare time, but only as a challenge. I could never use it for work because the things I do (web development and print media) aren't supported by the software houses as well as they are on a PC platform. Perhaps OSX will get support from Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, Kinetix and so on. But until it does, for me, it'll be little more than a nice distraction.
While the nostalgia factor is really kinda cool, and certainly one a groovy application of the technology in these homemade cabinets, its not the only possibility.
For some time I've been considering building an upright cabinet for more modern games such as Quake 3, Midtown Madness, and Call to Power. The primary difficulty is finding a good interface to the games as they all seem to require many more control inputs these days than the standard 8-way stick and 6 fire buttons offered by the newest jamma cabinets. Track balls seem good, but I've yet to work out a good configuration of buttons that equate to the inverted T of a keyboard direction control. The best so far has been a keyboard number pad.
I reckon a bunch of linked Quake 3 cabinets would be one of the coolest things ever..
This seems like a very clear case of the few making life crap for the many. There are some people that think its fair and reasonable to distribute copyright material from their web sites. The actions of these people mean that the ISP has to try various things to stop being sued by the copyright owners. In this case they tried an automated process which then fell down. Unfortunate yes, a better process would have been to flag those accounts holding 'MP3's and to check them out. But the real blame lies with the pirates.
Example: If it weren't for car thieves we'd not have to bother locking our cars.
People that pirate material make things less easy for the rest of us, the honest people. We shouldn't have to put up with people deleting things from our web sites, but then, bands shouldn't have to put up with people copying their art around the internet to avoid paying for somethig they want.
So, does this means that its up to Microsoft who can write software that will be signed? What if they decide that Netscape is a profits^h^h^h^h^h^hsecurity risk and don't let them have a signature? Or, more comically, what if the post-breakup Microsoft OS division don't let the post-breakup Microsoft Office division have a certificate? Surely having the OS creator certify the applications is a conflict of interest. It'd be better to have a third party validate stuff. Right?
For the most part AMD certainly seemed to have topped the Pentium 4 chip on those benchmark tests. This seems to be a bit weird, but..
At CPU speeds more than about 1GHz theres little to choose between the various options on clock speed alone. At these speeds the chips are limited by memory bandwidth, code optimization, and instruction sizes. Once a CPU is going faster than the maximum memory throughput of the RAM then any increase in clock speed is going to go to waste. As the article mentions, the code that was run on the P4 wasn't optimized for it at all. This is another limiting factor. If you optimize code for a 286 instruction set and then run it on an Athlon it won't go as fast as it possibly could. And thirdly, AMD have some instructions that do more than those on the P4, thus appearing to go quicker.
Until memory technology, compilers, and applications start really using the new parts of the P4 chips then there'll not be any quantum leaps forward in 'speed'. But once they do expect benchmarks like these to look very different. (Mind you, by that time AMD should have some new toy out, and the field will be level once again).
"Why would we want to beat our heads against the wall trying to get people to switch from Microsoft Word?"
For the good of humanity as a whole I'd say.
A company of free developers by free developers, for a free world
Theres a free world? Why wasn't I told?
Cool.. Can I mount my laser pointer on it and scare the hell out of people? (Fear the little red dot from space!!)
The primary effect of the drop in tech stocks is the increased wariness of investors in new and, potentially, innovation ideas. Media hype is predicting the end of a 'dot.com bubble', and this seems to be interpretted as a complete collapse of the internet and e-business industry as a whole.
What is more likely to happen is a simple weeding out of the poorer companys, those without a solid business plan or revenue model. Certainly this'll include some major players, boo.com is a prime example. Whereas, a year ago, investors would throw millions at any project that ended in dot.com now they're going to actually look more closely at the real-world prospects of an idea. I reckon this is a positive thing. The recent glut of internet companies that are little more than a complete waste of time should cease, and maybe investors will have more time for the more innovative ideas such as Indrema and such.
Just as curious as the Northern alignment of the pyramids is the fact that they correlate perfectly to the relative positions of the stars that make up the belt of Orion. Theres a good article about the positions here. Apparently it goes further than the 3 main nodes at Giza too, with the Nile representing the Milky Way, and a few other pyramids further afield being in the exact positions of other prime stars.
A while back, when CD-R was shiny and new, I found I had a problem with my hi-fi. It wouldn't play CD-Rs. Being a bit of a technophile I'd bought the player when they weren't exactly mainstream, and it was getting on a bit. When I bought my first CD-writer I found that my recordings of CD audio weren't compatible with an older cd player. They were fine on computer drives, but audio players didn't like it at all.
Do DVD players of the set-top box variety play DVD-R discs? This is not an obvious attempt at piracy. The company I work for produces video adverts for things, and DVD would be a great medium for sending to people. Unfortunately even the shortest production run of DVDs costs more than my annual salary (well, not quite, but exaggeration is allowable). Would a DVD writer be a viable option instead?
*Sneeze* .. 'Bugger, I fell off that cliff again'
Don't know about anyone else, but to me the ordering of information based on some sort of mapped goegraphic reference seems really mad. Its by no means logical to have to search through something based on where it is in 2, or 3, dimensions. If the challenge was to make an accurate representation of the computer network then they have failed. Theres no way that they could get any sort of vector information from the ODP so directions on the map would be meaningless. If they have tried to make an interface that is easier to use than the ODP directory system then they have once again failed. I couldn't find a link on their maps in ages, in the directory it took me about 20 seconds. If, however, they wanted to make an entertaining and technically accomplished distraction thats kinda fun, then I congratulate them.
Maybe I'm too used to my simple 2D windowed interface, but I like it. Its easy. I don't think I need another dimension. Perhaps they'll prove me wrong.
Better known as flexi-time here in the UK where I work, flex-time's key benefit is allowing workers to do what they like when they like doing it. I'm an early office person. I do some of my best work before 9am when the hordes arrive.
The main arguement against flex-time is that of communication. You can't exactly talk to someone at 5:15pm if they clock off at 5:00pm on the dot everyday. It depends on your job. If you have to talk to people all day long then theres a real arguement for keeping you in the office at times you're going to be needed. Difficult to argue against common sense. But, conversely, if you're someone that is able to get on with your job on your own without the distractions of things like late meetings, then its a preferable situation to have you doing your very best work at the time you prefer to be doing it.
As with everything I suppose, look at it from the managers perspective too, once you can grasp their view its much easier to argue against it.
All this would be done automatically, effortlessly, without human hands or labor, by a fleet of tiny, invisible robots
Thats funny, thats exactly how my boss thinks work gets done too.
So far noone has really managed to simulate anything within a fraction of 'realism'. The number of variables that need to be taken into consideration is absolutely horrendous. The nearest we can get without throwing Cray computing power about is a vague approximation.
But...
Isn't a vague approximation enough? Take a recent computer game as an example, say Tekken Tag Tournament or Soul Caliber on the PS2 and Dreamcast respectively. Both these games look damn good. No doubt about that. They're by no means 'realistic', far from it in fact, but who cares? The games are fun. When did gaming take to being real? Its an escape isn't it? Maybe in the future games will look like the world around us, on that day I think I'll be going back to my SNES.
- Are the minutes you get useable at the times you'll be using the phone? Ignore the free minutes if they're off-peak. What are the chances you'll be doing work stuff at night.
- Are the free minutes useable to networks you'll be phoning most? Some talk plans don't include free time to other mobile networks, premium rate lines (eg tech support.. or pr0n if you have a weird job 8)).
- Is the phone billed per-second? I've heard nasty thing about some US telcos rounding a 65second call up to 2 mintues..
- Whats the coverage like? Is it going to work where you are going to be..
- What are the toys like? Are the options for things like WAP, email to the phone etc..
- Whats the phone itself like? Theres nothing worse than having a chunky, poor quality, poor interfaced phone that you need to use quickly and easily everyday.
I've heard some pretty good stories about Bell Atlantic's SingleRate tarrif, its a good network with coast to coast coverage. A couple of American consulatants I've spoken to are with the network. That said though, I'm fortunate enough to live and work in the uk, our 4 mobile operators are pretty much equal.Theres a reasonable Byte article on these things here. These things sounds like DVD killers, assuming they're practical. They hold more, they're just as speedy, and they could be made at a good price.
But.. they're 5 inches across still. When are we going to get something smaller? Why not stick 30Gb on a 2 inch disc? That'd be a killer for portables.
I've been using the preview releases of NS6 for some time, and I've never been hugely impressed. Sure, theres all the usual standards (non)compliance issues, and theres that 'its-not-IE' look to it (could be a bonus if you're anti-MS). But what has killed Netscape for me is the lack of innovation.
Back in the old days of Version 3 browsers there was real difference between the options. IE was headed toward DHTML, and NS was going down the road of JavaScript. People complained bitterly about their sites not working on one browser or another, but they also managed to come up with some really cracking stuff.
These days theres little real innovation. If MS or NS come up with something cool that the other doen't support it gets labelled as 'proprietary'. And we never use 'proprietary' things because they're 'non-standard'. Its all well and good having the exact same standard XML parser, the exact same DHTML support, and the exact same JavaScript command set, but then you end up with two exact same browsers.
Standards are fantastic for the essentials. HTML made the WWW what it is today. But standards can often get in the way of the cool stuff.
"We think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to develop a competing technology to RDRAM and not infringe on our patents," he said. "We are extremely confident in our legal position."
And they say that patents push for innovation.. This is utterly crazy. While I'm all for a company protecting its intellectual property, and even making big piles of cash from it, I feel that Rambus have taken patenting to be a method of market domination. This isn't what patents are about.
'topple the choking monopolies within the industry'
Can't have more than one monopoly in an industry. Doh!