Woah, that's a relief. I was afraid that I might be buying a device with billions of non-functional or even disfunctional transistors.
Actually, they can be hugely useful.
There was an old experiment I read about where they used a gentic algorithm to build an amplifier. I forget the exact numbers but it was something like "there are 27 essential components to an optimum simplicity design - we wanted to see how many it could get down to."
It promptly got down to something like 16. Despite the optimum simplicity designed by a human requiring 27 and there be "no way to simplify beyond that."
Except, it turns out that, sure: discrete elements, functioning entirely discretely, behave one way. Put in to a system though, they're not discrete. Be it the lag from one, the RF noise from another, whatever... they do affect each other.
Just because a human isn't smart enough to see a way they can interact and do something totally outside what's supposed to happen doesn't mean there isn't an even better way.
For me, I'll quite happily buy a chip with a huge number of faulty transistors if those faulty ones happen to do something radically useful that couldn't be done without spending many times more.
How long before IBM can have a dot matrix version sent to Guantanamo Bay? Forget about torturing them with Christina Aguilera - 330ppm of dot matrix should be enough to crack anyone.
If IBM could help the Department Of Fatherland Security (S.S.) surely, helping the Department Of Homeland Security is a matter of patriotic duty?
Perhaps a More Efficient Way...would have been to simply enforce the "AO" rating given out by the ESRB. Why invent your own sticker and everything?
Going from memory of a G4TV interview with Yee, all he claimed to be pushing for was to make it legally punishable for a store to sell a game to someone outside the ESRB's label.
That's not actually any different to a child not being allowed to buy porn, cigarettes or alcohol and those stores that sell them anyway risking getting fined.
Now, the way the ESRB makes it sound, it sounds as if Yee is creating a blanket law that bans games without sensible consideration of content. My guess is this may well be much like the gun lobby protesting gun safes or trigger locks - they really don't have a problem with them themselves but they don't want to conceed this issue only to start down a slippery slope. Similarly, I'm guessing the ESRB don't want laws passed forcing stores to abide by the ESRB's own ratings - because that gets legislators thinking they can create other laws - potentially ones that push the ESRB out of its role.
I mean, it's already enforced that children in the US cannot enter a movie rated NC-17 (no one 17 or under is admitted).
Effectively, yes. Legally, no.
If I recall correctly, the movie industry faced almost exactly the same issue the games industry is facing. So they instituted their own body and got theaters to agree to it. By acting promptly, they forestalled any actual laws.
It's a common misconception but R, NC-17, etc. aren't legal terms. They are a voluntary code followed by theaters to keep the government off their backs. A theater could quite openly sell NC-17 tickets to ten year olds and there's nothing the authorities could do (save maybe a charge of contributing to the corruption of a minor).
The problem the games industry has is that, whereas most theaters apply the rating system as though it was law, about 30% of major stores and about 80% of independent stores (again, quoting the G4 interview) ignore the law. Those numbers are large enough that the games industry is shooting itself in the foot. If they'd stop whining and start applying the ESRB suggestions as strongly as the MPAA suggestions, the problem would go away - or would have done had they acted sooner and not waited until it's critical.
The second world war has several key events that are, literally, that black and white. Any one of them literally had civilization hanging on them:
Had Hitler refused Goering's request to use the Luftwaffe to destroy the British at Dunkirk, the British army wouldn't have escaped, Hitler would have walked in to England in 1940, RAF or not, and, from a consolidated Europe would have likely beaten Russia.
Had the Luftwaffe not switched to city bombing, the RAF was literally down to its last day of fighter strength. Without that switch, Eagle day would have gone ahead and the above remained true.
Had Hitler taken Vicini's advice and never gone up against a Sci... never started a land war in Asia... and finished Britain first, it may well have been a very different war.
Had Hitler knocked out Britain in 1940, the British wouldn't have had the next two or three years of nuclear weapons research that formed much of the basis of the Manhattan Project. Most likely, with Britain out and thus no staging post for U.S. attacks, Germany would have had the bomb long before the U.S. You may recall, they allied with the Japanese against the U.S.
Had Bletchley not existed, had they not had the bombes, had Turing and other geniuses not worked there, had they failed to crack the Enigma, the U-Boats would have continued in the Atlantic pretty much without limitation. Sending troops and arms to England would have been a near impossibility under those conditions, pulling pressure off the Western front long enough for Germany to have a significantly different war in the East. Same situations as above then happening.
The truth is that many people died (and many more risked but didn't - I'm always bemused how dying is more heroic than being willing to) and, yes, without them the victories couldn't have happened. Similarly, without that one app, most likely, the victories couldn't have happened either.
No one thing won the war on its own. Many individual things, in their absence, would have been enough to have lost it.
Thus, claiming an app saved civilisation is true. As is claiming Goering's stupidity did. As is claiming the D-Day ruse did. As are countless other totally valid claims. And, yes, behind all of them, there were masses of individuals fighting and dying.
To be fair, I'd argue the first killer app was cracking. The very reason the first computers were ever built was to do this task which really was a matter of life or death.
Ironic, when you think about it: The first killer app, the reason computers first got built, the app that saved civilization, was encryption cracking. Now we have the DMCA to save us from it and the MPAA arresting sixteen year old Swedish kids for doing it.
first _consumer_ camera with wifi...Which largely defeats the value of it.
Wifi is a huge thing in pro level cameras because it means you can shoot effectively infinitely without having to stop to change out cards (including the down time of waiting to write to them before you can safely power off). Accepting being tethered by a power cable, your shoot can last as long as you want without needing to stop. When you're paying for model, make up artist and assistant time, that's huge.
The downside being that that you need a computer within range. Ideal for the studio, managable for on-location where a pro will happily carry a laptop if it gives them the freedom......And next to useless for the average consumer who takes shots over a long day out at the zoo, no wifi access point in sight, no laptop with them and certainly no desire to have the camera pause while it attempts to find a network and authenticate every single shot because auto power-off keeps kicking in when you only shoot a couple of shots then wander off for five minutes.
Of course, all that being said, it was home porn that drove home video camera sales, polaroid sales and early digital camera sales and so, who knows, maybe consumers will get a lot of use out of not having to, uh, pull out their floppy (I'm talking about the old Sonys, you pervert!)
The patent, which the company calls the Zen Patent
Something tells me that Apple's chances of finding prior art on the topic of Zen are pretty good. Maybe they should see if anyone in the East has ever written anything about it.
Now all we need to do is make fighter jets space worthy for that true Star Wars feel.
Why do I get the feeling Fox News won't exactly portray it as heroic when a member of the Iraqi rebellion clips the wing of Lord Bush's experimental craft, sending him spiralling off?
Bush, like Vader, is [allegedly] afterall a hotshot pilot. Granted, Vader didn't request assignment to Tattoine so he could hide from the clone wars and then rarely even turn up. But he did do a totally sweet photo op on a carrier on the day the war in Iraq was won - all those years ago.
You mean, I shouldn't post to Slashdot asking, "Wanted: Business model for bumming around the house all day whilst buying cool geek toys!"?
You are, of course, entirely correct. I see so many people who are outraged that their noble cause in the face of any business sense doesn't get to somehow work. Just because you decide you want to set up a nicer, gentler way of doing things than an existing business - even if it does feel that should be a better way - doesn't entitle you to make just as much, if not more, money than the existing businesses.
There are absolutely ways to make being a news agency profitable. It's just that those ways (subscriptions, advertising, selling out to a parent company who'll tie you in with their geek merchandizing) aren't necessarily ways you're happy with. But think for a moment...
If you're saying "We want to run a service whilst rejecting all the ways of making money as not noble enough. How do we make money?" What does that tell you?
Jurassic Park involves dinosaurs. This involves moving modern mammals, no doubt including large numbers of apes, to the U.S. in an era when Bush has decided to restart nuclear weapons research and countries like Iran would rather put up with the sanctions than be denied the one sure thing that stops the U.S. deciding you're evil and invading.
How could apes and nuclear war be bad? There's plenty of planet for everyone.
Politicians and automakers say a car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries.
And as the average American wants a big SUV and certainly isn't going to accept downgrading to something the size of a Prius and losing all of their trunk space to 18 brick sized batteries, it looks like the politicians and auto makers are correct.
In 1904 or whenever it was, two guys managed to invent a plane that, yes, technically could fly. A full hundred years later, why don't we all have our own planes or flying cars? Because, for the average person, they're totally impractical - they simply cost too much and have too many trade-offs for the benefits gained.
A Prius stacked full of batteries with no trunk space is exactly the same: Sure, you can do it. But that doesn't mean everyone in America is going to rush out and get one.
The theory is that it'll take years or decades to reach the point where it is practical for the masses. And that theory remains true.
As Microsoft demonstrated, you just need to buy the right congresscritters.
Microsoft had lost. The judgment was already in against them. All the government had to do was decide what the punishment was. Did they want to declare "The operating systems business must be separated from the application and web browser business"? Did they want to levy a multi-billion dollar fine? How about $x million per day until Microsoft disentangled Media Player and IE?
Instead, they contributed heavily to the Republican election campaign in 1999/2000 and, within months of Bush coming to office, the arm of government assigned to this was told that it wasn't in the public interest to keep fighting. Keep fighting? They'd won! Yet enough money to the right campaign and the whole trial was a joke.
And that was in 2000 when there were the checks and balances in the U.S. constitution were supposed to still work. Right now there's a Republican congress, senate and presidency and as soon as cancer takes one more democratic supreme court judge, the sitting president gets to choose another republican to move the supreme court firmly republican for the lifetime of its members. There are no checks and balances left in the U.S. Maybe in three and a half years? We'll have to wait an see.
So, as Microsoft demonstrated, whether the U.S. legal system is a 50 ton tank or a 100lb skinny guy who gets sand kicked in his face, all you have to do is buy enough politicians and any judgment the courts hand down is void anyway.
And that was back when there was at least a two party system to keep the worst of that in check.
"We'll keep doing it in the face of all of this legal precedent that says we can't" doesn't seem like a sound long-term legal strategy.
You've not come across this Microsoft company of which you speak before, have you.
The same company that sucks up $1m/day fines for monopolistic practices, loses its case in the U.S. and just buys the Bush administration in order to have the government decide, "Pursuing any damages isn't worthwhile, even though we've already won."
Microsoft knows that with a five year generation per console, they can bury this one in court time for way longer than that, for a fraction of what they can make if they make $5/accessory sold to 30m users, and then meekly promise the courts, "Oh, OK, we see your point - but we stopped selling that console two years ago and our new one uses something different."
Damn. When I read that, I was hoping for something doublewide and porcelain, maybe with padded arms, to make my morning, uh, reading time, more comforable.
Frankly, anything with Linux and embedded sensors there is going to provide far more information than this geek feels the need to know.
I think it's a great idea. As you point out, within 30 minutes someone will have malicious access. Within a month every script kiddie on the net will have access to every PC in America.
At which point, I welcome the government's attempt to successfully prosecute me for anything whatsoever: "No, that file of Dubbya, the underage pretzel salesgirl and the goat wasn't mine. You idiots left the backdoor to my system wide open. Literally anyone on the net could have used my PC to host it and you guys are responsible for that one. And may I just say thank you for establishing 'reasonable doubt.'"
The legal definition of guilt in a criminal case is beyond all reasonable doubt (as opposed to balance of evidence for civil cases). If they're absolutely determined to ensure it's completely impossible to achieve 'beyond all reasonable doubt', and thus any successful prosecutions, I'm all for it.
This is one where, legitimately, they can claim it's only for catching terrorists - because they've destroyed any legal standing for a successful prosecution (suspected terrorists not getting prosecutions, just export to a country that uses torture).
Uses 1/2 a gallon of water per hour - which it converts to hydrogen and oxygen - which it then burns and thus recombines - thus creating half a gallon of water again, only [temporarily] in vapour form.
I pity the poor bastard who leaves this thing running, in his poorly ventilated home, for two weeks, while on vacation only to find what 168 gallons of water in vapour form does once it cools down.
Though, granted, given how inefficient the thing is, his cleanup bills will be as nothing compared to his electricity bill.
And before anyone tries arguing that only some of the oxygen is recombined with the hydrogen, remember this is nearly as misguided as the website's claim that it "provides beneficial oxygen". Hydrogen on its own doesn't burn - try filling a container with some and sticking a lit taper in, it'll go out. It needs oxygen to combine with it to make it burn. Sure, not all of the split oxygen is being recombined - but it's leeching the exact same quantity back out of the air. Thus you're not gaining any oxygen, you're just trading some of what you already had for some newly split stuff and a huge energy bill. In exactly the same way, as every two hydrogen atoms recombine with an oxygen atom from the air, you'll get exactly the same volume of water back - it'll just be in vapour form until it finally cools down and helps fungus grow throughout your home.
That solution is unacceptable to many of us who do not own a Windows PC. The DexDrive does not have macintosh support, so I am out of luck.
Oh, come now. Do you seriously expect us to believe any Mac users use PlayStations? There's no way a Mac user's brain could handle all the buttons on a Dual Shock, it'd explode (very creatively) or something.
Of course this does open up a massive niche for third party developers - the crossover device: A controller with no buttons, no D-pads, no analog sticks. It's just a reassuring white blob that you can hug to your chest and stroke/squeeze as if it did have buttons while not having to admit to them.
Either Microsoft doesn't realize that people will always spend within their means (ie if you have $500 in disposable income a year to spend on games, youre going to spend it if they are $50 or $60)
It's been five years since the last round of console releases, where games standardized at $50.
Assuming 4% inflation over five years, compounding, that works out to a just over 21.5% increase.
$50 + 21.5% = $60.8
Working for a games developer, even in the dotbomb era, my salary has always averaged at least that 4% increase. So, arguably, game dev staffing costs have gone up by an average of at least 20% (or $10/title) in the last five years.
If that's the increase in game developer costs per employee and if inflation and consumer salaries have also all raised by about that amount, why wouldn't they increase prices?
I know it's tempting to feel insulted if we get anything less than a 5% payrise while equally insulted if any product (that still has to offer pay raises to its staff) increases by anything at all, but inflation does happen and this isn't outpacing it - it just hurts because it comes all at once.
To put it in more ridiculous terms:
The first game I bought, Elite, cost me GBP 14.99 ~ $20 US.
The first game my father bought, though not a computer game, likely cost in about a ha'penny ~1 US cent.
My grandfather, a Yorkshireman (which seems fitting given a certain Monty Python sketch going through my head right now) will likely tell you something like, "Games?! When I were a lad, we'd be lucky to have two sticks we found in t' street. But, being all, we were happy."
So, which is the correct price for a game? $60, $50, $40, $25, $20, $0.01, free? Or all of the above given where inflation is in the era you're playing?
Every single time, Rockstar stated, "altering the game's source code". They never said the content wasn't in there. That was a complete misinterpretation of their statement.
What they said was the equivalent of saying, "We did not distribute porn to kids. The claims that we did were the equivalent of a bunch of guys who broke a window, climbed in to our locked house, raided every drawer and closet, finally found our safe, spent hours cracking it, and finally found the porn that, sure, we owned, but we never made even slightly accessible to kids."
The best you can legitimately claim is that, like most people seem to do, Rockstar told the absolute truth but just the very specific version of it that painted them in the best light.
Unfortunately, a bunch of people who don't understand the difference between accessible [if hidden behind certain secret areas] content and content that's absolutely walled and locked off from any user no matter how they interact with the game short of figuratively breaking and entering with tools unavailable to regular users, misinterpretted that statement.
And now others who apparently don't understand computers (or don't bother to actually read the original statement) come out and make more false assumptions.
This is about comparable to SCO saying "Linux isn't fit for even late night TV" under the grounds its source code is legendarily full of profanities. You don't actually see any of them when you run Linux but, just as inaccurately, SCO can claim they exist and therefore children shouldn't be allowed to use it.
Is this really a direction we want to encourage through our own misunderstandings? Come on slashdot, we're supposed to be more intelligent than that.
Anyone who doesn't care, which is going to be a lot of people. They'll buy a new PC, which will merely happen to come with this kind of restrictive DRM. But it'll come with an appropriate monitor too, so they'll never notice.
Everyone buys CDs. Only Pirates (and possibly Ninjas) copy CDs for the illegal purpose of distribution. So Microsoft introduced DRM to Media Player. After all, only a few geeks would notice the limitations and the vast majority would never notice as they simply ripped CDs to their PC and were happy with it.
Only so many people refused to use Media Player, refused to convert to WMA, refused to thus buy WMA supported portable media players, that Microsoft had to rethink and rethink fast.
Now Media Player comes with a config option to turn off DRM if it doesn't suit you. And Microsoft lost the war (or at least five years of it) to MP3, WinAmp, iTunes and iPods.
The truth is that the average Joe does care. Most probably don't really care that much about being able to put files up on Kazaa - but they do care about being able to rip their DVD to the PC then copy that file to their laptop and from there to their portable video player. They want to simply enjoy their content, maybe copy off to their TiVo or take a copy on the road - nothing special - and systems that prevent that will frustrate them.
My guess is that we'll see history repeat itself. The hardcore crowd will hate it but they're such a minority that it doesn't matter. The real issue will be the mainstream. That 10% who use Firefox, the ones who'll move over to MP3 instead of WMA in order to simply do what they legally want. They won't be the majority but they don't have to be. All it takes is a healthy enough minority and Microsoft's monopoly is threatened. To Microsoft's way of thinking, unless they can squeeze every other competitor out, they can't build their next round on top of this round's assumptions. And so, quietly, Microsoft will capitulate just like they did on Media Player - and add an option to disable this ridiculousness in order to get their monopoly back.
It's a balancing act. Microsoft want their monopoly. To do that, they need the content produced in their format. To encourage that, they have to pander to the content producers. The problem is when most content producers are home users ripping their DVDs. At that point no one uses their player and so, whether corporate producers love the DRM or not, they're not going to waste money on a format no one views. Thus pandering to the producers matters somewhat but not exclusively.
It means cheaper prints for consumers (about 24 cents per photo print)
Because, as we all know, printer manufacturers have been selling ink for cost, rather than vastly inflated prices, for years now.
The consumer end of the market is all about giving away the razor and charging double for the blades. Buy enough blades and they make far more than they lose from giving away the razor.
Though this explains why it's aimed at the high end of the market where companies are generally smart enough to factor in total cost of ownership (which this will effect), rather than a cheap purchase price and cursing $40 tiny ink tanks ever after.
Something tells me, we're either not going to see it filter down to the consumer end or, if we do, the ink tanks will remain pretty similar in price while HP takes a slightly larger hit for the initial printer and an even bigger profit at the consumer's expense for the ink. After all, why sell a $40 ink tank that costs you $20 to make when you can sell a $35 one that only costs $5 and tell the user what a great saving they're getting?
Quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty - as a deterrent for the likes of Sasser author Sven Jaschan. Let's face it, businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers but they continue to be a point of failure, and subsequently, frustration through lost profits.
Traditional belief is that life is priceless - that no price can be put on life. Death penalties, thus far, have generally only been applied to [those enforcing like to believe] deter/punish/prevent the destruction of other lives.
It's nice to see that, in modern America, we've finally reached the point where life does now have a dollar value. Cost businesses more than that amount and people argue your life should be taken.
Classy.
Of course, what should be pointed out is that the European Union has the declaration of human rights. One part of it includes the right to life. Another part includes that no European nation may extradite to a nation that threatens the death penalty for the alleged criminal.
So, in the case of the Sasser worm, American academics can posture about death penalties for lost profits all they like - and, in doing so, would simply guarantee the creator would never have been extradited to the U.S. in the first place.
Remember: Just because the United States now regularly features in the top five of Amnesty's annual list of human rights abusing nations, it doesn't mean anyone else is going to play along.
Slashdot Mirror
Woah, that's a relief. I was afraid that I might be buying a device with billions of non-functional or even disfunctional transistors.
Actually, they can be hugely useful.
There was an old experiment I read about where they used a gentic algorithm to build an amplifier. I forget the exact numbers but it was something like "there are 27 essential components to an optimum simplicity design - we wanted to see how many it could get down to."
It promptly got down to something like 16. Despite the optimum simplicity designed by a human requiring 27 and there be "no way to simplify beyond that."
Except, it turns out that, sure: discrete elements, functioning entirely discretely, behave one way. Put in to a system though, they're not discrete. Be it the lag from one, the RF noise from another, whatever... they do affect each other.
Just because a human isn't smart enough to see a way they can interact and do something totally outside what's supposed to happen doesn't mean there isn't an even better way.
For me, I'll quite happily buy a chip with a huge number of faulty transistors if those faulty ones happen to do something radically useful that couldn't be done without spending many times more.
How long before IBM can have a dot matrix version sent to Guantanamo Bay? Forget about torturing them with Christina Aguilera - 330ppm of dot matrix should be enough to crack anyone.
If IBM could help the Department Of Fatherland Security (S.S.) surely, helping the Department Of Homeland Security is a matter of patriotic duty?
Perhaps a More Efficient Way...would have been to simply enforce the "AO" rating given out by the ESRB. Why invent your own sticker and everything?
Going from memory of a G4TV interview with Yee, all he claimed to be pushing for was to make it legally punishable for a store to sell a game to someone outside the ESRB's label.
That's not actually any different to a child not being allowed to buy porn, cigarettes or alcohol and those stores that sell them anyway risking getting fined.
Now, the way the ESRB makes it sound, it sounds as if Yee is creating a blanket law that bans games without sensible consideration of content. My guess is this may well be much like the gun lobby protesting gun safes or trigger locks - they really don't have a problem with them themselves but they don't want to conceed this issue only to start down a slippery slope. Similarly, I'm guessing the ESRB don't want laws passed forcing stores to abide by the ESRB's own ratings - because that gets legislators thinking they can create other laws - potentially ones that push the ESRB out of its role.
I mean, it's already enforced that children in the US cannot enter a movie rated NC-17 (no one 17 or under is admitted).
Effectively, yes. Legally, no.
If I recall correctly, the movie industry faced almost exactly the same issue the games industry is facing. So they instituted their own body and got theaters to agree to it. By acting promptly, they forestalled any actual laws.
It's a common misconception but R, NC-17, etc. aren't legal terms. They are a voluntary code followed by theaters to keep the government off their backs. A theater could quite openly sell NC-17 tickets to ten year olds and there's nothing the authorities could do (save maybe a charge of contributing to the corruption of a minor).
The problem the games industry has is that, whereas most theaters apply the rating system as though it was law, about 30% of major stores and about 80% of independent stores (again, quoting the G4 interview) ignore the law. Those numbers are large enough that the games industry is shooting itself in the foot. If they'd stop whining and start applying the ESRB suggestions as strongly as the MPAA suggestions, the problem would go away - or would have done had they acted sooner and not waited until it's critical.
The second world war has several key events that are, literally, that black and white. Any one of them literally had civilization hanging on them:
Had Hitler refused Goering's request to use the Luftwaffe to destroy the British at Dunkirk, the British army wouldn't have escaped, Hitler would have walked in to England in 1940, RAF or not, and, from a consolidated Europe would have likely beaten Russia.
Had the Luftwaffe not switched to city bombing, the RAF was literally down to its last day of fighter strength. Without that switch, Eagle day would have gone ahead and the above remained true.
Had Hitler taken Vicini's advice and never gone up against a Sci... never started a land war in Asia... and finished Britain first, it may well have been a very different war.
Had Hitler knocked out Britain in 1940, the British wouldn't have had the next two or three years of nuclear weapons research that formed much of the basis of the Manhattan Project. Most likely, with Britain out and thus no staging post for U.S. attacks, Germany would have had the bomb long before the U.S. You may recall, they allied with the Japanese against the U.S.
Had Bletchley not existed, had they not had the bombes, had Turing and other geniuses not worked there, had they failed to crack the Enigma, the U-Boats would have continued in the Atlantic pretty much without limitation. Sending troops and arms to England would have been a near impossibility under those conditions, pulling pressure off the Western front long enough for Germany to have a significantly different war in the East. Same situations as above then happening.
The truth is that many people died (and many more risked but didn't - I'm always bemused how dying is more heroic than being willing to) and, yes, without them the victories couldn't have happened. Similarly, without that one app, most likely, the victories couldn't have happened either.
No one thing won the war on its own. Many individual things, in their absence, would have been enough to have lost it.
Thus, claiming an app saved civilisation is true. As is claiming Goering's stupidity did. As is claiming the D-Day ruse did. As are countless other totally valid claims. And, yes, behind all of them, there were masses of individuals fighting and dying.
To be fair, I'd argue the first killer app was cracking. The very reason the first computers were ever built was to do this task which really was a matter of life or death.
Ironic, when you think about it: The first killer app, the reason computers first got built, the app that saved civilization, was encryption cracking. Now we have the DMCA to save us from it and the MPAA arresting sixteen year old Swedish kids for doing it.
first _consumer_ camera with wifi ...Which largely defeats the value of it.
...And next to useless for the average consumer who takes shots over a long day out at the zoo, no wifi access point in sight, no laptop with them and certainly no desire to have the camera pause while it attempts to find a network and authenticate every single shot because auto power-off keeps kicking in when you only shoot a couple of shots then wander off for five minutes.
Wifi is a huge thing in pro level cameras because it means you can shoot effectively infinitely without having to stop to change out cards (including the down time of waiting to write to them before you can safely power off). Accepting being tethered by a power cable, your shoot can last as long as you want without needing to stop. When you're paying for model, make up artist and assistant time, that's huge.
The downside being that that you need a computer within range. Ideal for the studio, managable for on-location where a pro will happily carry a laptop if it gives them the freedom...
Of course, all that being said, it was home porn that drove home video camera sales, polaroid sales and early digital camera sales and so, who knows, maybe consumers will get a lot of use out of not having to, uh, pull out their floppy (I'm talking about the old Sonys, you pervert!)
The patent, which the company calls the Zen Patent
Something tells me that Apple's chances of finding prior art on the topic of Zen are pretty good. Maybe they should see if anyone in the East has ever written anything about it.
Now all we need to do is make fighter jets space worthy for that true Star Wars feel.
Why do I get the feeling Fox News won't exactly portray it as heroic when a member of the Iraqi rebellion clips the wing of Lord Bush's experimental craft, sending him spiralling off?
Bush, like Vader, is [allegedly] afterall a hotshot pilot. Granted, Vader didn't request assignment to Tattoine so he could hide from the clone wars and then rarely even turn up. But he did do a totally sweet photo op on a carrier on the day the war in Iraq was won - all those years ago.
Economics is worth listening to sometimes.
You mean, I shouldn't post to Slashdot asking, "Wanted: Business model for bumming around the house all day whilst buying cool geek toys!"?
You are, of course, entirely correct. I see so many people who are outraged that their noble cause in the face of any business sense doesn't get to somehow work. Just because you decide you want to set up a nicer, gentler way of doing things than an existing business - even if it does feel that should be a better way - doesn't entitle you to make just as much, if not more, money than the existing businesses.
There are absolutely ways to make being a news agency profitable. It's just that those ways (subscriptions, advertising, selling out to a parent company who'll tie you in with their geek merchandizing) aren't necessarily ways you're happy with. But think for a moment...
If you're saying "We want to run a service whilst rejecting all the ways of making money as not noble enough. How do we make money?" What does that tell you?
I guess this means I'll have to scrap my plan of sending Charleton Heston away in a space ship.
No. Just postpone until March to ensure you can send him safely. Wouldn't want his ship falling in to a wormhole or anything.
Jurassic Park involves dinosaurs. This involves moving modern mammals, no doubt including large numbers of apes, to the U.S. in an era when Bush has decided to restart nuclear weapons research and countries like Iran would rather put up with the sanctions than be denied the one sure thing that stops the U.S. deciding you're evil and invading.
How could apes and nuclear war be bad? There's plenty of planet for everyone.
Politicians and automakers say a car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries.
And as the average American wants a big SUV and certainly isn't going to accept downgrading to something the size of a Prius and losing all of their trunk space to 18 brick sized batteries, it looks like the politicians and auto makers are correct.
In 1904 or whenever it was, two guys managed to invent a plane that, yes, technically could fly. A full hundred years later, why don't we all have our own planes or flying cars? Because, for the average person, they're totally impractical - they simply cost too much and have too many trade-offs for the benefits gained.
A Prius stacked full of batteries with no trunk space is exactly the same: Sure, you can do it. But that doesn't mean everyone in America is going to rush out and get one.
The theory is that it'll take years or decades to reach the point where it is practical for the masses. And that theory remains true.
As Microsoft demonstrated, you just need to buy the right congresscritters.
Microsoft had lost. The judgment was already in against them. All the government had to do was decide what the punishment was. Did they want to declare "The operating systems business must be separated from the application and web browser business"? Did they want to levy a multi-billion dollar fine? How about $x million per day until Microsoft disentangled Media Player and IE?
Instead, they contributed heavily to the Republican election campaign in 1999/2000 and, within months of Bush coming to office, the arm of government assigned to this was told that it wasn't in the public interest to keep fighting. Keep fighting? They'd won! Yet enough money to the right campaign and the whole trial was a joke.
And that was in 2000 when there were the checks and balances in the U.S. constitution were supposed to still work. Right now there's a Republican congress, senate and presidency and as soon as cancer takes one more democratic supreme court judge, the sitting president gets to choose another republican to move the supreme court firmly republican for the lifetime of its members. There are no checks and balances left in the U.S. Maybe in three and a half years? We'll have to wait an see.
So, as Microsoft demonstrated, whether the U.S. legal system is a 50 ton tank or a 100lb skinny guy who gets sand kicked in his face, all you have to do is buy enough politicians and any judgment the courts hand down is void anyway.
And that was back when there was at least a two party system to keep the worst of that in check.
"We'll keep doing it in the face of all of this legal precedent that says we can't" doesn't seem like a sound long-term legal strategy.
You've not come across this Microsoft company of which you speak before, have you.
The same company that sucks up $1m/day fines for monopolistic practices, loses its case in the U.S. and just buys the Bush administration in order to have the government decide, "Pursuing any damages isn't worthwhile, even though we've already won."
Microsoft knows that with a five year generation per console, they can bury this one in court time for way longer than that, for a fraction of what they can make if they make $5/accessory sold to 30m users, and then meekly promise the courts, "Oh, OK, we see your point - but we stopped selling that console two years ago and our new one uses something different."
Damn. When I read that, I was hoping for something doublewide and porcelain, maybe with padded arms, to make my morning, uh, reading time, more comforable.
Frankly, anything with Linux and embedded sensors there is going to provide far more information than this geek feels the need to know.
I think it's a great idea. As you point out, within 30 minutes someone will have malicious access. Within a month every script kiddie on the net will have access to every PC in America.
At which point, I welcome the government's attempt to successfully prosecute me for anything whatsoever: "No, that file of Dubbya, the underage pretzel salesgirl and the goat wasn't mine. You idiots left the backdoor to my system wide open. Literally anyone on the net could have used my PC to host it and you guys are responsible for that one. And may I just say thank you for establishing 'reasonable doubt.'"
The legal definition of guilt in a criminal case is beyond all reasonable doubt (as opposed to balance of evidence for civil cases). If they're absolutely determined to ensure it's completely impossible to achieve 'beyond all reasonable doubt', and thus any successful prosecutions, I'm all for it.
This is one where, legitimately, they can claim it's only for catching terrorists - because they've destroyed any legal standing for a successful prosecution (suspected terrorists not getting prosecutions, just export to a country that uses torture).
Uses 1/2 a gallon of water per hour - which it converts to hydrogen and oxygen - which it then burns and thus recombines - thus creating half a gallon of water again, only [temporarily] in vapour form.
I pity the poor bastard who leaves this thing running, in his poorly ventilated home, for two weeks, while on vacation only to find what 168 gallons of water in vapour form does once it cools down.
Though, granted, given how inefficient the thing is, his cleanup bills will be as nothing compared to his electricity bill.
And before anyone tries arguing that only some of the oxygen is recombined with the hydrogen, remember this is nearly as misguided as the website's claim that it "provides beneficial oxygen". Hydrogen on its own doesn't burn - try filling a container with some and sticking a lit taper in, it'll go out. It needs oxygen to combine with it to make it burn. Sure, not all of the split oxygen is being recombined - but it's leeching the exact same quantity back out of the air. Thus you're not gaining any oxygen, you're just trading some of what you already had for some newly split stuff and a huge energy bill. In exactly the same way, as every two hydrogen atoms recombine with an oxygen atom from the air, you'll get exactly the same volume of water back - it'll just be in vapour form until it finally cools down and helps fungus grow throughout your home.
That solution is unacceptable to many of us who do not own a Windows PC. The DexDrive does not have macintosh support, so I am out of luck.
Oh, come now. Do you seriously expect us to believe any Mac users use PlayStations? There's no way a Mac user's brain could handle all the buttons on a Dual Shock, it'd explode (very creatively) or something.
Of course this does open up a massive niche for third party developers - the crossover device: A controller with no buttons, no D-pads, no analog sticks. It's just a reassuring white blob that you can hug to your chest and stroke/squeeze as if it did have buttons while not having to admit to them.
Either Microsoft doesn't realize that people will always spend within their means (ie if you have $500 in disposable income a year to spend on games, youre going to spend it if they are $50 or $60)
It's been five years since the last round of console releases, where games standardized at $50.
Assuming 4% inflation over five years, compounding, that works out to a just over 21.5% increase.
$50 + 21.5% = $60.8
Working for a games developer, even in the dotbomb era, my salary has always averaged at least that 4% increase. So, arguably, game dev staffing costs have gone up by an average of at least 20% (or $10/title) in the last five years.
If that's the increase in game developer costs per employee and if inflation and consumer salaries have also all raised by about that amount, why wouldn't they increase prices?
I know it's tempting to feel insulted if we get anything less than a 5% payrise while equally insulted if any product (that still has to offer pay raises to its staff) increases by anything at all, but inflation does happen and this isn't outpacing it - it just hurts because it comes all at once.
To put it in more ridiculous terms:
The first game I bought, Elite, cost me GBP 14.99 ~ $20 US.
The first game my father bought, though not a computer game, likely cost in about a ha'penny ~1 US cent.
My grandfather, a Yorkshireman (which seems fitting given a certain Monty Python sketch going through my head right now) will likely tell you something like, "Games?! When I were a lad, we'd be lucky to have two sticks we found in t' street. But, being all, we were happy."
So, which is the correct price for a game? $60, $50, $40, $25, $20, $0.01, free? Or all of the above given where inflation is in the era you're playing?
I'll save you time. Here's Rockstar's statement.
Every single time, Rockstar stated, "altering the game's source code". They never said the content wasn't in there. That was a complete misinterpretation of their statement.
What they said was the equivalent of saying, "We did not distribute porn to kids. The claims that we did were the equivalent of a bunch of guys who broke a window, climbed in to our locked house, raided every drawer and closet, finally found our safe, spent hours cracking it, and finally found the porn that, sure, we owned, but we never made even slightly accessible to kids."
The best you can legitimately claim is that, like most people seem to do, Rockstar told the absolute truth but just the very specific version of it that painted them in the best light.
Unfortunately, a bunch of people who don't understand the difference between accessible [if hidden behind certain secret areas] content and content that's absolutely walled and locked off from any user no matter how they interact with the game short of figuratively breaking and entering with tools unavailable to regular users, misinterpretted that statement.
And now others who apparently don't understand computers (or don't bother to actually read the original statement) come out and make more false assumptions.
This is about comparable to SCO saying "Linux isn't fit for even late night TV" under the grounds its source code is legendarily full of profanities. You don't actually see any of them when you run Linux but, just as inaccurately, SCO can claim they exist and therefore children shouldn't be allowed to use it.
Is this really a direction we want to encourage through our own misunderstandings? Come on slashdot, we're supposed to be more intelligent than that.
Anyone who doesn't care, which is going to be a lot of people. They'll buy a new PC, which will merely happen to come with this kind of restrictive DRM. But it'll come with an appropriate monitor too, so they'll never notice.
Everyone buys CDs. Only Pirates (and possibly Ninjas) copy CDs for the illegal purpose of distribution. So Microsoft introduced DRM to Media Player. After all, only a few geeks would notice the limitations and the vast majority would never notice as they simply ripped CDs to their PC and were happy with it.
Only so many people refused to use Media Player, refused to convert to WMA, refused to thus buy WMA supported portable media players, that Microsoft had to rethink and rethink fast.
Now Media Player comes with a config option to turn off DRM if it doesn't suit you. And Microsoft lost the war (or at least five years of it) to MP3, WinAmp, iTunes and iPods.
The truth is that the average Joe does care. Most probably don't really care that much about being able to put files up on Kazaa - but they do care about being able to rip their DVD to the PC then copy that file to their laptop and from there to their portable video player. They want to simply enjoy their content, maybe copy off to their TiVo or take a copy on the road - nothing special - and systems that prevent that will frustrate them.
My guess is that we'll see history repeat itself. The hardcore crowd will hate it but they're such a minority that it doesn't matter. The real issue will be the mainstream. That 10% who use Firefox, the ones who'll move over to MP3 instead of WMA in order to simply do what they legally want. They won't be the majority but they don't have to be. All it takes is a healthy enough minority and Microsoft's monopoly is threatened. To Microsoft's way of thinking, unless they can squeeze every other competitor out, they can't build their next round on top of this round's assumptions. And so, quietly, Microsoft will capitulate just like they did on Media Player - and add an option to disable this ridiculousness in order to get their monopoly back.
It's a balancing act. Microsoft want their monopoly. To do that, they need the content produced in their format. To encourage that, they have to pander to the content producers. The problem is when most content producers are home users ripping their DVDs. At that point no one uses their player and so, whether corporate producers love the DRM or not, they're not going to waste money on a format no one views. Thus pandering to the producers matters somewhat but not exclusively.
According to the new study, about a third of all major studies from the last 15 years were subsequently shown to be inaccurate or overblown.
The actual figure turns out to have been 26.4% - much closer to 1/4 than 1/3.
It means cheaper prints for consumers (about 24 cents per photo print)
Because, as we all know, printer manufacturers have been selling ink for cost, rather than vastly inflated prices, for years now.
The consumer end of the market is all about giving away the razor and charging double for the blades. Buy enough blades and they make far more than they lose from giving away the razor.
Though this explains why it's aimed at the high end of the market where companies are generally smart enough to factor in total cost of ownership (which this will effect), rather than a cheap purchase price and cursing $40 tiny ink tanks ever after.
Something tells me, we're either not going to see it filter down to the consumer end or, if we do, the ink tanks will remain pretty similar in price while HP takes a slightly larger hit for the initial printer and an even bigger profit at the consumer's expense for the ink. After all, why sell a $40 ink tank that costs you $20 to make when you can sell a $35 one that only costs $5 and tell the user what a great saving they're getting?
Quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty - as a deterrent for the likes of Sasser author Sven Jaschan. Let's face it, businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers but they continue to be a point of failure, and subsequently, frustration through lost profits.
Traditional belief is that life is priceless - that no price can be put on life. Death penalties, thus far, have generally only been applied to [those enforcing like to believe] deter/punish/prevent the destruction of other lives.
It's nice to see that, in modern America, we've finally reached the point where life does now have a dollar value. Cost businesses more than that amount and people argue your life should be taken.
Classy.
Of course, what should be pointed out is that the European Union has the declaration of human rights. One part of it includes the right to life. Another part includes that no European nation may extradite to a nation that threatens the death penalty for the alleged criminal.
So, in the case of the Sasser worm, American academics can posture about death penalties for lost profits all they like - and, in doing so, would simply guarantee the creator would never have been extradited to the U.S. in the first place.
Remember: Just because the United States now regularly features in the top five of Amnesty's annual list of human rights abusing nations, it doesn't mean anyone else is going to play along.
That's alright, you probably would have made a crappy roleplayer anyways.
Don't be so quick to judge. Evidence suggests he'd probably have made a fantastic prestige class Troll.