Really, go visit an airport, library, park bench, McDs, waiting room, etc. People are playing games on their mobile phones or tablets.
If you still need high power, play it on your desktop. Consoles are throw-away electronics and their time in the sun is diminishing.
Now, if you'll excuse me I need to get a jump on early Christmas shopping... I need an Angry Birds bed set, Angry Birds jacket, Angry Birds underwear, Angry Birds bicycle, Angry Birds weed whacker, Angry Birds can opener, Ford Focus Angry Birds Limited Edition, Angry Birds home pregnancy kit,...
It's clear the spreading of disbelief is the real motivator here. Kill in the name of God.
It's really about pursuit of power, as in: They who are not in power want to be and will use any means to achieve their ends, including corrupting interpretation of their own "faith" to achieve these ends. It really isn't anything about spreading the good word of the Prophet, who would probably be outraged at the practices these people engage in, recruiting people to become suicide attackers/bombers.
Never attribute to religion what greed and malice can easily explain.
The award was given for devising a method to insert genes from another organism into plant sell, which could produce new genetic lines with highly favorable traits.
What's missing is the next bit, which should be something like this: "And then ream everyone in court who tries to keep some seed and use it to replant. Also, investigate, harass, litigate and otherwise bully Monsanto even suspects of using some of their "Genetic Property". Also, lobby for legislation which requires food aid from the US to be GMO crops and any seed giving to developing nations through US aid to be their property, so they can come knockin' later when that country's farmers prosper a bit and the native seed banks are all but extinct."
1) find an old wall-wart power supply 2) open it and remove the filter capacitors (yank them out or unsolder them) 3) feed the low voltage output to the mic wires
what you've done is created a NICE 60hz hum that will be so strong, nothing the mic will pick up will ever come thru.
(you're welcome)
Why do that when I could just place a little electric fan in front of the mic. Ever try to talk through a rotating fan blade?:o)
If it wasn't for the PS4, MS would have never dropped those requirements. As it was, PS4 was vastly superior (atleast on paper) to the XBone offering. Now, the XBone is on par on some key consumer issues and may just be able to offset expense, inferior hardware and lack of indy gaming with their Kinect.
All that matters is who has the best games at launch which make the hardware "must-have". Gamers have very little loyalty. If Sega suddenly rose from the grave with a totally new platform and a totally engrossing game then Xboxen and PSxen would find themselves occupying the back corner of a closet in short order.
As it is, I still see no reason at all to buy a dedicated game box when my desktop is more than equal to the task, should I want to play games with it (there's some real ROI, there is <_<) As it is I can have fun running the batteries down in my mobile phone, so it's not there when I actually need it for an emergency.
Well it would be kind of interesting to see what the legal case would be in Europe etc, if you buy one without having internet connection now.
If they every re introduced that requirement I would thing you would a case under consumer law.
Probably only aimed at the North American Market - the EU courts probably glare in Redmond's general direction enough they know better than to try any of that there.
"Declining share price"? Have you looked at the stock chart lately?
Collapsing companies are more profitable than growing ones - less to invest in, more of the Gross is Net. A better picture would be looking at Microsoft's Year-on-year revenues.
Characters in stories are created to suffer through most of the plot. Droids are just a little easier to do that with in a serious way than people are, although ultimately, people are more fun.
And droids don't even get medals - after all C3PO and R2D2 went through, you'd think the Rebel Alliance would weld some insignia on their.. uh.. prominent facing trunk, for recognition. Nope, droids are just tools, to be used and thrown away. Disposable people substitutes.
But again it needs to be pointed out - these were Kids Movies and Lucas made that abundantly clear. Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?
It's only called a bug...... because someone noticed it.
I doubt that Oracle would have tried to slip this under the radar. I would expect them to make an announcement that it was coming and ignore the complaints.
Meh - I smell a trial balloon that fell with a thud.
I can see them floating it out there to get reactions, that they can then show the bigger and more assholish game studios (*cough*EA*cough*) and say "See? We told you this is a bad idea."...that or Ballmer really is that frickin' stupid...
Next think you hear they'll put the kabosh on the glove on a loaded spring which throws a creme pie in the face of the new owner upon the box opening.
If you've followed the Xbox One conversation at all (there, I used the real word, now I can call it Xbone), you know that there's only one thing Microsoft could possibly do as damage control at this point, and they just did it. Everyone has expected them to tone down the phoning home and used games policies. The "halfway" is, as many commenters below have pointed out, that they've yet to remove the built-in Kinect.
So they've only shot themselves in one foot so far and are reloading for the other one... still a chance to save that sock a holey demise.
That they even thought of such a concept and it was approved, which it must have been, at the highest level, Mr. Ballmer should be wary of himself wielding chairs and he may be his most worthy target.
Does anyone reading about this Phone-Home DRM hold out much hope of a re-org which will position Microsoft as a viable and large player in the business (and consumer) markets in time to come?
Well, with that logic, Oracle never does anything evil.
Ah, to paraphrase, "there is a principle which is a bar against all knowledge and will never fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- and that is contempt prior to investigation." You can't simply say "because this person/group/organization has done so many evil things in the past, this has to be as well." You start engaging in that kind of thinking regularly and before you know it you'll be a talk show host or running for political office.
Hey now, let's not say such hurtful things!
I do have a probably chalking this whole thing up to a minor slip up - there was a licence there to read, which was purposefully changed as opposed to a lack of licence so some boilerplate was placed in there.
Just bad coding. Any language can be coded with badly. (some more easily or accidentally than others)
Well, yeah, other than [INSERT FAVORITE LANGUAGE HERE]. Any programmer worth his or her salt knows that language has all sorts of obvious safeguards against this sort of thing if you have even the vaguest clue what you're doing, which makes it that much more betterer and you should all use it right now and hire me for lots of money.
Assuming management or the analyst who specs the code gives the coder sufficient time to do it right.
Something I continue to observe in outsourced code is an incredible sense of optimism regarding security. Not because the coder is a fool (well, he/she might be) but because security and good practices are not emphasised, time and cost of up front development are too often the deciding factors.
My High School was lucky enough to have one gifted to it. Apparently, Hugh Hefner (Yes, *that* Hugh Hefner) was an alumnus of my High School and had his daughter come to the school to present the check. I remember learning Assembly, Fortran, Watfiv, PL\1 and I think Cobol as well as rudimentary LED and circuit logic either on it or the IBM 360 downtown. Yes, once upon a time the Chicago public school system had a very good education system. I even remember breaking into the 360 and messing with other school's (and students) teachers assignments (teacher's password: pencil....really?! and taped to the desk next to their terminal./facepalm).
I was stunned in the mid 1980s I was still required to learn RPG, PL/1 and COBOL (COmmon Baboon Oriented Language) punching the code onto a deck of cards, which were batch run on an antique IBM 360. Really. We had this spiffy PDP 11 where you could sit down and type on a terminal and get immediate feedback and test bits of code and they were still teaching with card punches.
Rather then sit in the cardpunch lab, as I was already a student programmer, I typed up my code in EDT and then wrote it to tape (TU16) using my own ASCII to EBCDIC converter. I'd then take the tape over to the IBM and run the tape out to a deck of cards on the card punch (nobody had replaced the ribbon in it in years so many of the letters on my cards were unreadable, but I didn't care it generally ran correct on the first pass.) My professors were puzzled why only my cards were nearly blank, when I turned in my decks and printouts, but once they realized they had a smarter than the average bear in their class they just looked at the output and put A on it. I was writing system utilities at the time, included a major rewrite of the college test scoring system.
Oddly, PL/1 would come back to me in the early 90s, when we brought in a PR1ME 750 system (not to be confused with anything DEC) None of the compilers we had, excepting PL/1, would handle input buffers larger than 512 characters, so I converted the test scoring suite to PL/1. Later I'd rewrite it a 3rd time in c on a DEC Alpha.
They finally retired the PDP 11/50 and IBM 360 in 1986, as PCs were starting to cut into mainframe sales and DoD cutbacks were beginning to thin the herd of giant mainframe companies.
The PDP-11/45 was the very first computer I ever worked with at College in 1978. God I hate to sound like an old guy with a lawn, but they just don't make like that any more. I learned RATFOR, Pascal, c, and Assembler during that time. Even later on, thanks to my time on the PDP11 I expanded system knowledge working with the HP1000 and its front panel switches.
Good times....good times.
May have cut my teeth on an OSI (that's Ohio Scientific) home computer, with a whopping 4K of memory, later expanded to 12K, but honed my skills on a PDP 11/50. When I was hired as a student programmer I was given an admin account, subscription to a couple DEC magazines (which had some great kernal hacks in them, plus a full color map of Zork GUE, which I still have:o) and the privilege of performing the offline backups of the two RP04 drives each Friday. I learned how to dissemble the kernal, where all the fun bits were, how to peek at various terminals (to see what the very few aspiring hackers were up to), wrote honey pots and generally learned everything there was to learn in Fortran IV, RSTS BASIC, UCSD Pascal and assembler (while still an unpaid student I brought the CPU to its knees with an assembler program to calculate Pi to 1,000 places, one of those Oliver Wendell Jones sort of moves.)
The one big shock, going from completely nailed down security on a PDP 11 to Windows was how utterly lax and clueless the Microsoft software architects were on dealing with any kind of security - literally babes in the woods, totally unaware of decades of good security practices of mainframe environments. People who think Bill Gates was brilliant need to look more closely at how oblivious he was to threats before unleashing Windows 95 on the world.
I have a PDP emulator for the PC, but without all my old code, I don't know what I'd really do with it. I once had sources to Mark Turmell's early games written on a PDP, such as Squash, all collision detection peformed with an 80x24 integer array and VT52 cursor controls (I bet nobody heard about those early beginnings before.) Before Atari, C64, Nintendo, etc, we played video games on VT52 and VT100 terminals.:o)
Wait a second. I had an Apple ][, and it came with Integer Basic on the ROM. You had to run floating point Basic off a cassette tape (it was a while before I got a floppy disk) but Integer Basic was built in.
Ah, the Red Book... ALL of the monitor code to read. Small enough that you could actually understand what was going on. Those were the days.
They had the lab ones monkeyed up, so you needed a boot disk so you could launch Integer Basic. I think it was supposed to be some sort of educational software, but not many people used them for it, most we like me and brought in a boot disk to get around it and start in on coding.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, go visit an airport, library, park bench, McDs, waiting room, etc. People are playing games on their mobile phones or tablets.
If you still need high power, play it on your desktop. Consoles are throw-away electronics and their time in the sun is diminishing.
Now, if you'll excuse me I need to get a jump on early Christmas shopping... I need an Angry Birds bed set, Angry Birds jacket, Angry Birds underwear, Angry Birds bicycle, Angry Birds weed whacker, Angry Birds can opener, Ford Focus Angry Birds Limited Edition, Angry Birds home pregnancy kit, ...
It's clear the spreading of disbelief is the real motivator here. Kill in the name of God.
It's really about pursuit of power, as in: They who are not in power want to be and will use any means to achieve their ends, including corrupting interpretation of their own "faith" to achieve these ends. It really isn't anything about spreading the good word of the Prophet, who would probably be outraged at the practices these people engage in, recruiting people to become suicide attackers/bombers.
Never attribute to religion what greed and malice can easily explain.
It is Monsanto. "Sell" isn't exactly wrong.
True dat.
The award was given for devising a method to insert genes from another organism into plant sell, which could produce new genetic lines with highly favorable traits.
What's missing is the next bit, which should be something like this: "And then ream everyone in court who tries to keep some seed and use it to replant. Also, investigate, harass, litigate and otherwise bully Monsanto even suspects of using some of their "Genetic Property". Also, lobby for legislation which requires food aid from the US to be GMO crops and any seed giving to developing nations through US aid to be their property, so they can come knockin' later when that country's farmers prosper a bit and the native seed banks are all but extinct."
Well done them.
Bugs? In Windows? I'm gonna be rich!
They're gonna be bankrupt.
to 'fix' the mic problem, do the following:
1) find an old wall-wart power supply
2) open it and remove the filter capacitors (yank them out or unsolder them)
3) feed the low voltage output to the mic wires
what you've done is created a NICE 60hz hum that will be so strong, nothing the mic will pick up will ever come thru.
(you're welcome)
Why do that when I could just place a little electric fan in front of the mic. Ever try to talk through a rotating fan blade? :o)
If it wasn't for the PS4, MS would have never dropped those requirements.
As it was, PS4 was vastly superior (atleast on paper) to the XBone offering.
Now, the XBone is on par on some key consumer issues and may just be able to offset expense, inferior hardware and lack of indy gaming with their Kinect.
All that matters is who has the best games at launch which make the hardware "must-have". Gamers have very little loyalty. If Sega suddenly rose from the grave with a totally new platform and a totally engrossing game then Xboxen and PSxen would find themselves occupying the back corner of a closet in short order.
As it is, I still see no reason at all to buy a dedicated game box when my desktop is more than equal to the task, should I want to play games with it (there's some real ROI, there is <_<) As it is I can have fun running the batteries down in my mobile phone, so it's not there when I actually need it for an emergency.
Well it would be kind of interesting to see what the legal case would be in Europe etc, if you buy one without having internet connection now.
If they every re introduced that requirement I would thing you would a case under consumer law.
Probably only aimed at the North American Market - the EU courts probably glare in Redmond's general direction enough they know better than to try any of that there.
"Declining share price"? Have you looked at the stock chart lately?
Collapsing companies are more profitable than growing ones - less to invest in, more of the Gross is Net. A better picture would be looking at Microsoft's Year-on-year revenues.
Characters in stories are created to suffer through most of the plot. Droids are just a little easier to do that with in a serious way than people are, although ultimately, people are more fun.
And droids don't even get medals - after all C3PO and R2D2 went through, you'd think the Rebel Alliance would weld some insignia on their .. uh .. prominent facing trunk, for recognition. Nope, droids are just tools, to be used and thrown away. Disposable people substitutes.
But again it needs to be pointed out - these were Kids Movies and Lucas made that abundantly clear. Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?
It's only called a bug...... because someone noticed it.
I doubt that Oracle would have tried to slip this under the radar. I would expect them to make an announcement that it was coming and ignore the complaints.
Then a lackey trying to polish Ellison's yacht?
Meh - I smell a trial balloon that fell with a thud.
I can see them floating it out there to get reactions, that they can then show the bigger and more assholish game studios (*cough*EA*cough*) and say "See? We told you this is a bad idea." ...that or Ballmer really is that frickin' stupid...
Next think you hear they'll put the kabosh on the glove on a loaded spring which throws a creme pie in the face of the new owner upon the box opening.
If you've followed the Xbox One conversation at all (there, I used the real word, now I can call it Xbone), you know that there's only one thing Microsoft could possibly do as damage control at this point, and they just did it. Everyone has expected them to tone down the phoning home and used games policies. The "halfway" is, as many commenters below have pointed out, that they've yet to remove the built-in Kinect.
So they've only shot themselves in one foot so far and are reloading for the other one ... still a chance to save that sock a holey demise.
Whew, that chair was clos.....
That they even thought of such a concept and it was approved, which it must have been, at the highest level, Mr. Ballmer should be wary of himself wielding chairs and he may be his most worthy target.
Does anyone reading about this Phone-Home DRM hold out much hope of a re-org which will position Microsoft as a viable and large player in the business (and consumer) markets in time to come?
Now you're on a list for drones to monitor!
Watch, it's not the type of drones you expect - you are suddenly set upon by telephone sanitizers, account executives, and marketing analysts.
Don't try to shoo them away to another world, for all you know someone may catch a disease from a dirty telephone.
I mean Jimmy Hoffa's body, as they once again called off another of their infamous digs!
They dug in the wrong spot, he's really burie
s zxio
[NO CARRIER]
I thought there seemed to be a large rise in RC Model clubs around here suddenly.
This goes for web languages in general.
Pointers are too hard :(
Drop-through logic made easy:
if (x < 100) { do_stuff(); } elseif (x > 100) {do_other_stuff();}
mind the gap
Well, with that logic, Oracle never does anything evil.
Ah, to paraphrase, "there is a principle which is a bar against all knowledge and will never fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- and that is contempt prior to investigation." You can't simply say "because this person/group/organization has done so many evil things in the past, this has to be as well." You start engaging in that kind of thinking regularly and before you know it you'll be a talk show host or running for political office.
Hey now, let's not say such hurtful things!
I do have a probably chalking this whole thing up to a minor slip up - there was a licence there to read, which was purposefully changed as opposed to a lack of licence so some boilerplate was placed in there.
Just bad coding. Any language can be coded with badly. (some more easily or accidentally than others)
Well, yeah, other than [INSERT FAVORITE LANGUAGE HERE]. Any programmer worth his or her salt knows that language has all sorts of obvious safeguards against this sort of thing if you have even the vaguest clue what you're doing, which makes it that much more betterer and you should all use it right now and hire me for lots of money.
Assuming management or the analyst who specs the code gives the coder sufficient time to do it right.
Something I continue to observe in outsourced code is an incredible sense of optimism regarding security. Not because the coder is a fool (well, he/she might be) but because security and good practices are not emphasised, time and cost of up front development are too often the deciding factors.
My High School was lucky enough to have one gifted to it. Apparently, Hugh Hefner (Yes, *that* Hugh Hefner) was an alumnus of my High School and had his daughter come to the school to present the check. I remember learning Assembly, Fortran, Watfiv, PL\1 and I think Cobol as well as rudimentary LED and circuit logic either on it or the IBM 360 downtown. Yes, once upon a time the Chicago public school system had a very good education system. I even remember breaking into the 360 and messing with other school's (and students) teachers assignments (teacher's password: pencil....really?! and taped to the desk next to their terminal. /facepalm).
I was stunned in the mid 1980s I was still required to learn RPG, PL/1 and COBOL (COmmon Baboon Oriented Language) punching the code onto a deck of cards, which were batch run on an antique IBM 360. Really. We had this spiffy PDP 11 where you could sit down and type on a terminal and get immediate feedback and test bits of code and they were still teaching with card punches.
Rather then sit in the cardpunch lab, as I was already a student programmer, I typed up my code in EDT and then wrote it to tape (TU16) using my own ASCII to EBCDIC converter. I'd then take the tape over to the IBM and run the tape out to a deck of cards on the card punch (nobody had replaced the ribbon in it in years so many of the letters on my cards were unreadable, but I didn't care it generally ran correct on the first pass.) My professors were puzzled why only my cards were nearly blank, when I turned in my decks and printouts, but once they realized they had a smarter than the average bear in their class they just looked at the output and put A on it. I was writing system utilities at the time, included a major rewrite of the college test scoring system.
Oddly, PL/1 would come back to me in the early 90s, when we brought in a PR1ME 750 system (not to be confused with anything DEC) None of the compilers we had, excepting PL/1, would handle input buffers larger than 512 characters, so I converted the test scoring suite to PL/1. Later I'd rewrite it a 3rd time in c on a DEC Alpha.
They finally retired the PDP 11/50 and IBM 360 in 1986, as PCs were starting to cut into mainframe sales and DoD cutbacks were beginning to thin the herd of giant mainframe companies.
... because someone noticed it. <_<
The PDP-11/45 was the very first computer I ever worked with at College in 1978. God I hate to sound like an old guy with a lawn, but they just don't make like that any more. I learned RATFOR, Pascal, c, and Assembler during that time. Even later on, thanks to my time on the PDP11 I expanded system knowledge working with the HP1000 and its front panel switches.
Good times....good times.
May have cut my teeth on an OSI (that's Ohio Scientific) home computer, with a whopping 4K of memory, later expanded to 12K, but honed my skills on a PDP 11/50. When I was hired as a student programmer I was given an admin account, subscription to a couple DEC magazines (which had some great kernal hacks in them, plus a full color map of Zork GUE, which I still have :o) and the privilege of performing the offline backups of the two RP04 drives each Friday. I learned how to dissemble the kernal, where all the fun bits were, how to peek at various terminals (to see what the very few aspiring hackers were up to), wrote honey pots and generally learned everything there was to learn in Fortran IV, RSTS BASIC, UCSD Pascal and assembler (while still an unpaid student I brought the CPU to its knees with an assembler program to calculate Pi to 1,000 places, one of those Oliver Wendell Jones sort of moves.)
The one big shock, going from completely nailed down security on a PDP 11 to Windows was how utterly lax and clueless the Microsoft software architects were on dealing with any kind of security - literally babes in the woods, totally unaware of decades of good security practices of mainframe environments. People who think Bill Gates was brilliant need to look more closely at how oblivious he was to threats before unleashing Windows 95 on the world.
I have a PDP emulator for the PC, but without all my old code, I don't know what I'd really do with it. I once had sources to Mark Turmell's early games written on a PDP, such as Squash, all collision detection peformed with an 80x24 integer array and VT52 cursor controls (I bet nobody heard about those early beginnings before.) Before Atari, C64, Nintendo, etc, we played video games on VT52 and VT100 terminals. :o)
This is because there is no market for graphing calculators outside of what the school requires.
This is why a Ti-83 still costs $100 even though it could be replaced by a $50 china tablet or something even cheaper.
Show me a tablet that will run for about 2 years on a set of AAA cells.
Wait a second. I had an Apple ][, and it came with Integer Basic on the ROM. You had to run floating point Basic off a cassette tape (it was a while before I got a floppy disk) but Integer Basic was built in.
Ah, the Red Book... ALL of the monitor code to read. Small enough that you could actually understand what was going on. Those were the days.
They had the lab ones monkeyed up, so you needed a boot disk so you could launch Integer Basic. I think it was supposed to be some sort of educational software, but not many people used them for it, most we like me and brought in a boot disk to get around it and start in on coding.
I have a table that wobbles.
Good plan. You can save that coaster for a cold one. Get one for me, too, while your at it.