Total useful things to say about nuclear energy in the current debate:
James Lovelock - 0.5
Bruce Sterling - 0
Am I alone in thinking they're equally full of crap, judging the evidence to date? Each of them blatantly refuses to present a sound argument by presenting and refuting counterarguments, and pretend that there's no reasonable way to hold a viewpoint conflicting with theirs. I'm fairly sure we're trolled by both of them here.
Tony Martin shot a 16-year old unarmed burglar in the back as he was running away. He'd already successfully defended his property, but I guess that wasn't enough for him. The jury didn't think it was enough either and found him guilty.
Funny thing: the burglar's mate also got caught in the leg by a couple of bits of shot. He sued Tony Martin for "loss of earnings".
Well, after carefully re-reading that edifying discourse, I've come to a conclusion: you're right, of course - brutalised victims of Saddam Hussein deserve nothing better from the occupying forces than to be sexually abused, to be photographed being sexually abused, and have those images of sexual abuse transmitted across the world (coincidentally to their families and friends). Imagine that bunch of sissies complaining about it? What a nerve! And people (with feelings) taking them and the injury done to them in our name seriously?
... threatening to undermine the world's energy supply.
The world's energy supply? Since when was the world entitled to an energy supply? You're mistaking the status quo for physical reality and using it as a reason to justify all the non-combatants that have been killed. Just keeping the wheels greased is no reason to murder people.
You seem to have done your research and you know for a fact that Donald Rumsfeld has been evangelising the invasion of Iraq to 'secure future energy supplies' for over 15 years. Not to otherthrow a murderous dictator, but to keep the petroleum economy running smoothly. A lot of people in OPEC nations will see this as pretty good first step in channelling the last of the world's oil reserves into bootstrapping the next generation of energy production techniques for the benefit of the USA and leaving them penniless and marginalised. And they're going to feel very threatened and hurt more folk. And this is going to be used as a reason to drop a bunch of ordnance on more folk that have nothing to do with any of this. Cycle of violence. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. A cosy reason to buy more of everything that goes bang, as we've used them all up now. Now who gets that money?
Find some other way of getting your SUV moving and you can forget all this crap. Anything else is just being a sucker.
because holding a nationwide referendum in a country which was a few months ago ruled by a genocidal dictator, to vote on terms for procurement contracts is a very realistic and practical idea
How many of those contracts can force a US company to return funds in the event of breach of contract, malfeasance, or mismanagement? Hmm? What are the penalty clauses? And who appointed the auditors? Has there been any public scrutiny of the contracts by any independent legal teams before the Iraqis were indentured for a generation?
The Iraqis are locked into contracts they can't get out of without serious economic backlash from US corporations, government, and courts. At the very least. If a democratically-elected governement tried to throw out US interests after taking control of their own country it's dollars to donuts they'd get re-invaded in a heartbeat.
And don't think I missed the qualification of direct taxes.
And we didn't "bomb the fuck" out of the country. The US knew they would have to rebuild the craphole country and minimized damange to infrastructure.
1. Alliance forces bombed, and continue to bomb, the fuck out of Iraq. Do you seriously think that all the improvised explosives detonated so far in Iraq have done as much damage and caused as much loss of life as Alliance high explosives?
2. The money to rebuild Iraq is being paid for from their own oil revenues. The cost to repair the damaged Iraqi infrastructure after GWI, sanctions, and GWII is, IIRC, about $36billion. Their oil reserves are about $30billion.
And with more being money lost in the graft and corruption endemic in contracts with US corporations, signed without the Iraqi people's ratification, they're in a hole so deep that they'll be lucky if their grandchildren see daylight.
It might be easier for a citizen of the United States of America to understand the 'insurgents' actions in these term: the Iraqis are being taxed without representation by a colonial power. Their actions are no more or less than the actions of your own founding fathers in response to equally, if not more, provactive injury.
The rest of the world doesn't get pissed off by Americans because the have so much, or they waste so much - it's because they tend to be too dumb to realise what tremendous two-faced assholes they can be, and that saying sorry later doesn't actually fix dead people now.
Some of the stories posted to this site are pretty lame. Others are obviously flamebait or troll. Why can't we moderate the top level as well as the comments?
Because CowboyNeal doesn't want to be replaced by a very small shell script?
Seriously though it'd be cool: 7 of 15 stories, 8 stories beneath your contempt (or whatever).
Woohoo! Talk about coming back swinging. You are very right on a lot of your points but you are forgetting something essential: you are a rational consumer - there is no reason to believe this is generally true. People have a short attention span and they don't want last year's stuff. If you can get a game on that machine (no matter what its capabilities or limitations) that captures the imagination of the nippers they'll nag their parents to fuck until they deliver the goodies.
Then it's rich as astronauts time. Seriously.
If the keys are bad as you say they then they'll get fixed for N-Gage XS or whatever the next version is. Nokia aren't entirely fucking stupid - they do listen to criticism where it's warranted, and the ZX Spectrum comparison is entirely valid 'cos spongey action was the basic complaints made about the Speccy keyboard. It got fixed. After about 6 years.
Point 1.1 Whaddaya think the kiddies are going to be playing in the playground in 2 years? Dollars to donuts its going to be a wireless networked portable game (for the cool kids with rich parents). The networking is already there with the N-Gage and its siblings, it just needs to be used right.
A bunch of your concerns and issues can be addressed with minor hardware changes and developers getting familiar with the platform. The rest is just being overly critcal of folk learning how to do stuff for the first time.
You think we're all full of shit, but you're striking at the usual straw men. We don't say it sucks because it can't render 13 billion blah blah's per frame. It sucks for many reasons - poor game support, choppy control response, lousy control layout, the crappy view range afforded by the vertical screen, etc etc etc etc etc.
You are full of shit, but as a learning experience, I'll be reasonable and tell you exactly why you are full of shit. Let's have a look at those little winnits you flicked at the world:
1. Poor game support. Once upon a time games programmers didn't need DirectX APIs, IDEs, debuggers, profilers, modelling tools, level editors, and a whole raft of other crap to make games. They experimented and they learned all the details of the computer they were programming. Then they made games and bought Ferraris.
2. Choppy control response. Down to inexperienced or poor programmers. Nothing to do with the hardware. Are you telling me that there's a magic eddy in the space-time continuum built into each N-Gage that slows down the transfer of electrons? Otherwise the controls are working just fine, just not being responded to by the game. A world of difference.
3. Lousy control layout. The QD doesn't look any worse to use than the Gameboy. D-pad, check. Fire buttons, check. You need a trackball, or something? Maybe one of those cute Nintendo power gloves? I honestly can't see what you're talking about here.
4. Vertical screen? Eh?! So what? You aren't playing widescreen movies on it. Your expectations regarding the screen's conventional orientation are challenged? Boo. Hoo. Games will still be playable and, if it's really, really necessary, you can turn the thing on it's side.
Anyway, my point was parents don't give a shit about performance they just want something that makes Junior shut up when they want him quiet and makes him talk when they want him noisy. The N-Gage QD is perfect for this and it's now reasonably priced. Sure the games aren't all that, but I remember what games were like for the ZX Spectrum when it came out (Jetpac) and how much better they got in the next few years (Fairlight, Batman, Heavy on the Magick). Lazy ports of PC games don't show what the hardware can do.
Plus how many kids are going to get a boost into programming writing games for the QD and similar platforms? Like we wrote games for the ZX81 and Spectrum and BBC model B? They might not have been good games (technically I'd hesitate to call them games at all - games don't look like a bunch of random stupid shit) but they taught us stuff and we still get to use it. Limited resources, slow hardware, questionable graphics, not much in the way of sound - that's where computer games came from.
Yeah, it's a gadget, and a portable console, and a phone, and stuff. But 25-35 year old folks won't be the main customer, it will be mums and dads. They'll buy one for junior because that means they don't have to spring twice for a Gameboy and a phone to keep tabs on their tyke. The QD is a perfectly good piece of kit, and at the 99USD,EUR,GBP price point it's going to get quite a few sales if they advertise it heavily during kids TV. There are plenty of J2ME games that can be downloaded for it too, so mum and dad don't have to keep springing for new carts all the time and junior doesn't look like he'd be having more fun playing with the box.
Seriously, I think the majority of nay-sayers are totally full of shit on this one. Yes, the original N-Gage was a donkey - ugly, awkward, expensive and therefore by necessity marketed wrongly at the 25-35 demographic. The slinky, reasonably-priced N-Gage QD is going to have a much broader appeal. And so what if it can't render 13 billion multi-shadered dynamically-lit triangles per clock-cycle? That's only really necessary for one type of game. There are plenty of other games that 2D will be just fine for, and they're fun too. Seriously, crack yourself away from the spec sheet for the latest transistor-pr0n from NVidia and ATI and look at all the puzzles, dance games, RPGs, adventures, and other stuff that just don't need stellar specs to be fun.
In summary, the N-Gage QD will sell like hot-cakes. Everyone programming games for it will be richer than astronauts. I am right and you are all wrong.
And I'm going to be wearing this post round my neck until I die if I'm wrong:P
Well, yeah you can put all your MP3s and OGGs on it. You just can't play them off the disk with firmware installed in the factory. Yet. The trick is finding someone talented enough to replace or patch out the ATRAC codecs in firmware (and thank God for the 95% of humanity that can't get prosecuted under the DMCA) and stream from the files in the FAT partition rather than whatever special magic partition Sony create.
The point is that there's now a mass-market removable re-writable media format that can be attached without further adaptors or configuration to the majority of contemporary PCs (and Macs), with capacities commensurate with today's media-rich created content.
And, after saying that, I feel dirty. Like I've been raped by the Marketing Department or something.
I wouldn't think it take long before folks are selling Hi-MD mods online. And the minidisc recorder becomes what it should have been in the first place - an adaptable media recorder suitable for all digital audio applications instead of timid engineering and a pointless toy emasculated by the Marketing department.
But, hey, they've got all sorts of reasons for making their decisions with their money. Just so long as they spend their money on suicide booths before modder-prosecuting lawyers.
They're still alive. The new Hi-MDs are able to store 1GB of normal data files with the USB Mass Storage standards, alongside the music, and they're looking pretty handy. The prices aren't too bad either - Dabs in the UK is pricing the entry level Hi-MD recorders at 160UKP inc VAT.
If the Hi-MDs themselves aren't too expensive, one slinky box for your music and your pr0n... neat.
The Sony Hi-MDs can only store 1GB (that would be plenty for home user data starage requirements for at least a decade), not 4.5Gb. Too much beef make brain spongey but bouncey.
I also found that they do conform to the USB Mass Storage standard, so when the other manufacturers start making their models (not a big fan of Sony hardware QC) I might just get me one of these.
It makes me unreasonably happy when I find out that someone out there wasn't as stupid and myopic as they could have been.
MiniDiscs aren't a failure by any measure. They haven't replaced CDs, but nothing else has either. They've sold quite well, continue to do so, and replaced DAT almost completely.
DAT was taxed out of the market. Corporate lobbyists got the US Congress to pass the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, taxing both the DATs and DAT equipment.
As for MiniDiscs being successful, I remember thinking they'd be the replacements for 1.44Mb floppies. Zip drives were about and becoming more common but Sony's marketing clout could really have set the standard. Half-hearted attempts to market 300GBP PC drives killed that neat idea stone dead. Now they're just a niche market instead of being in every PC in the planet. And there still isn't a standard for re-writable removable storage for user-created content with today's media-rich requirements. USB keys suck balls but they're all we've got for now. Just don't lose the little bastards down the back of the couch. Losing a 50p floppy is one thing, a 50GBP key is another.
If the new 4.5Gb MiniDiscs can be used just to read/write arbitrary data over USB 2.0 (even if you can't access any of that arbitrary data via the MD players' functionality) then they will be a stellar success and landfills will be overflowing with USB keys. If not, they're just seppukuing themselves in the foot again.
You make some good points. However, I still disagree in many respects. First off is this "high quality" Sony stuff you refer to. I once bought into this argument and had it backfire big time. 5-6 years ago I bought a VAIO laptop that cost me a pretty penny. 1 month out of the year long warranty it took a shit bigger than its intestines and died forever.
I did the same thing and thought buying Sony meant getting a product where quality mattered. Not with my Sony 15SF it didn't. Colour divergence between the red and blue signals in the top left corner was about 1.5mm. About 2 pixels or so at the resolution I was running it at. Now, as I bought it for my Powermac 6600 and that's where the Apple menu lived at the time, it jarred on a daily basis.
I sent the monitor back 3 times and each time they returned it and said the lack of convergence was "within factory tolerances". Well, since then Sony have pretty much been "outside Gary's tolerances" and they haven't exactly been the beneficiaries of any of my spending sprees. Plus, I'm still so bitter about Sony's bloody awful quality control (and getting burned 350GBP of my own earned money when a student) that I'm still ranting about it in public a decade later.
In contrast, my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510 bought to replace it has been nothing but a delight (except when I have to lift the 25kg mofo).
The guy you quoted said:
They have the clout to create a defacto standard, and they're gonna do it.
They thought they had a lock on the VCR market - they had the machines, the patents, and the best picture quality but by reserving the right to determine what could be published on their media (refusing to allow material like pornography) destroyed Betamax's acceptance in the marketplace. Can you imagine George Lucas having to phone up Sony and ask if it's alright to bring out his movie on video tape? "Hmmm... Nope. Sorry, George but those Trade Federation guys really pissed us off in Japan. Maybe you should consider publishing on another format like, say, View-Master?"
It's exactly the same mistake they're making with the MiniDisc and they're going to make with their TVs, dictating what can and can't be stored on what they see as their media (even if you've done something insignificant, like pay for it). Thinking about it, if you consider the frame-buffers in their TVs to be short-term storage solutions, then dictating what can and can't be written to it is pretty much Sony's speed. Cue big black screen when you put in a DVD from 20th Century Fox: Sony Consumer Electronics does not grant you the right to store this information in our photon-emitting storage array.
Sounds fucking stupid, doesn't it? But do you want to bet multiple thousands of dollars buying their TV hoping Sony won't brain damage it? That you won't have to break the law in order to get it modded to play unsigned content? With SCE that is a sucker bet.
The most disturbing thing about the article for me was the way, right from the start, that Bozell wants parents to endorse violence, role playing as a calculating killer, or a vicious thug capable of rupturing organs with their fists in preference to playing a game that lets you hope that one day sex might be a normal part of your life. He's happy with kids putrefying in their bedrooms as long as it's only deliberate brutal murder they're planning, not getting to second base.
That's perverse.
What sort of person is happier with junior killbots than junior people?
Why do we need passwords when we can just swipe into our terminal with our government-issued biometric ID cards? Add a quick check of the fingerprints, iris scan, cheek swab for DNA, and a urine and stool sample and we're good to go. You can then start the day with all waste voided, your eyeballs scrubbed for greater acuity over those long productive work sessions, and your employer can keep signing those paycheck with a smile in their heart knowing that you've never actually spent any of the money they've given you doing anything as crass as enjoying yourself.
Plus the government will know you've been good too. You. Specifically. That ought to thrill you down to your toes.
Trial by ordeal is actually a very old way of determining justice (after all, what are witches made of?) Not that I'm against it or anything - although one of those mines might be a claymore with my twitchy finger on the button waiting for rapists and stuff.
Just because they think we're being fair with them...
It depends on the quality of the photos and Reuters biometric identification software.
Re:Americas Army is the model for next gen online
on
E3 Wrapup Documented
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· Score: 3, Informative
Pretty much the Honor systems is like levels and experience points: the better you do at things like your mission, keeping your troops alive, patching up wounded soldiers and not blowing the hell out of your own team with the RPG the higher you score. Your score gets kept as experience points and you increase in Honor levels with success. Higher levels need more points needed to advance, etc. And you can lose Honor levels with Rules of Engagement violations like shooting your own team or civilians (and friendly fire detection is always on). You also get little incentives for to increase in Honor, like unlocking the Special Forces at 15 Honor and official 'Elite' servers that you need to have 25 Honor to join.
As you sign in with an account and the official servers ban you if your Honor drops below 9 (it starts at 10) then there are very few TKers willing to put up with the crap of creating a new account all the time. Which only leaves the cheaters...
I was hoping the Army would, you know, hunt them down and gut them - but no such luck.
Check out this concept car for a euro-interpretation of your vision. They're hoping for fuel consumption rate of 188 miles per gallon.
They are also calling it the C.L.E.V.E.R. car (to cash in on the Smart car's advertising budget I assume). A nice idea but a dumb name.
If the construction cost is minimal, then the sky is quite literally the limit.
Uh, if you wanted to go into space wouldn't it be easier to take a ride up on the space elevator instead? The one that manufactured carbon nanotubes would enable? It would do far more damage to environment to launch a rocket and choke a whole island's ecosystem to death with the fumes.
Unless you want to save the planet when Ming arrives?
But the idea of a whole bunch of Hans Zarkoff wannabes with script-kiddy rocket plans just gives me the creeps. All those lamée jumpsuits! With the shoulderpads! And they'd give each other cool nicknames like Ace and Neo (or something from some obscure manga pr0n with demon phalluses). Oh, and they're going to be training hard on the caribbean island, are they? Doing press-ups? Running? Swimming? Studying weapons systems design schematics? Practicing bursting into someone's house and shooting them? Hmm? Or are they going to be skinning up huge spliffs all day from the cannabis plantation that they can grow on their deserted island?
That's right: spliffs.
Even worse, what would happen if a bunch of amateur, drug-addled space cadets were to save the planet? The racial shame would be intolerable. All the other sapients would laugh at us when we joined the interstellar community. "Don't bother developing science, engineering, or culture monkeys! Just go back into your tree and inhale your burnt plant fumes! That'll keep your civilisation advancing in leaps and bounds! Bwahahaha!" It'd be horrible. We'd be stigmatised in space for millions of years.
More importantly, who will adopt this 'improved' electronic voting system? Very few.
In Britain we have the Sale of Goods Act where, if the products weren't of merchantable quality when they're sold, you get to get your money back. Now as it's been proved that Diebold provided uncertified machines and a number of failures have occurred why can't Californian election officials just return the machines and ask for their cash back? Then they'd have plenty of money to implement the OSV systems. Even if they didn't get all their money back they might get enough to cover the costs of the new system.
And would Diebold fight California in court, pretty much guaranteeing zero sales of the machines to other states for the rest of ever? I doubt it.
Maybe making a huge loss out of the e-voting thing is what it'll take for companies like Diebold to get out of the e-voting market and start letting people with a stake in functional democracies provide the systems.
Hah! You never played System Shock 2. I could go away and get a cup of tea in the time it took for a "quickload".
I remember the first time I crossed the bridge in GTA3 and it paused for about half a moment and then got on with the next bit of the game. That was cool. After that it started getting on my nerves when games had to load the next level, reaching it's peak with Deus Ex IW's insanity where the levels are about 3 feet across and loading times are 30-40 seconds. At least the levels in SS2 took you around a level of the ship and stuff.
It jars. If you had to wait 30 seconds between scenes on a film you'd beat the popcorn guy on the way out. And what you'd do to the ticket seller would make Satan puke.
Games are more involving when they don't do the loading thing, the feeling of immersion is more profound. I want never to see "Loading..." again.
I wonder how hard it'd be to write a litte app that'd take books a sentence at a time and stick them through AT&T's Natural Voices demo. Mash up all the MP3s at the end and, hey presto, free audiobooks.
As long as the author isn't inconsiderate enough to write sentence longer than 30 words...
But, before this egregarious misapplication of provisionally available proprietary technology commences, does anyone know what good, free (as in speech and beer) text-to-voice tools are available?
Slashdot Mirror
James Lovelock - 0.5
Bruce Sterling - 0
Am I alone in thinking they're equally full of crap, judging the evidence to date? Each of them blatantly refuses to present a sound argument by presenting and refuting counterarguments, and pretend that there's no reasonable way to hold a viewpoint conflicting with theirs. I'm fairly sure we're trolled by both of them here.
Tony Martin shot a 16-year old unarmed burglar in the back as he was running away. He'd already successfully defended his property, but I guess that wasn't enough for him. The jury didn't think it was enough either and found him guilty. Funny thing: the burglar's mate also got caught in the leg by a couple of bits of shot. He sued Tony Martin for "loss of earnings".
It's a crazy world, isn't it?
The world's energy supply? Since when was the world entitled to an energy supply? You're mistaking the status quo for physical reality and using it as a reason to justify all the non-combatants that have been killed. Just keeping the wheels greased is no reason to murder people.
You seem to have done your research and you know for a fact that Donald Rumsfeld has been evangelising the invasion of Iraq to 'secure future energy supplies' for over 15 years. Not to otherthrow a murderous dictator, but to keep the petroleum economy running smoothly. A lot of people in OPEC nations will see this as pretty good first step in channelling the last of the world's oil reserves into bootstrapping the next generation of energy production techniques for the benefit of the USA and leaving them penniless and marginalised. And they're going to feel very threatened and hurt more folk. And this is going to be used as a reason to drop a bunch of ordnance on more folk that have nothing to do with any of this. Cycle of violence. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. A cosy reason to buy more of everything that goes bang, as we've used them all up now. Now who gets that money?
Find some other way of getting your SUV moving and you can forget all this crap. Anything else is just being a sucker.
How many of those contracts can force a US company to return funds in the event of breach of contract, malfeasance, or mismanagement? Hmm? What are the penalty clauses? And who appointed the auditors? Has there been any public scrutiny of the contracts by any independent legal teams before the Iraqis were indentured for a generation?
The Iraqis are locked into contracts they can't get out of without serious economic backlash from US corporations, government, and courts. At the very least. If a democratically-elected governement tried to throw out US interests after taking control of their own country it's dollars to donuts they'd get re-invaded in a heartbeat.
And don't think I missed the qualification of direct taxes.
Oh, yeah, and I forgot:
The one motherfucker the Alliance didn't manage to kill, maim, or torture.1. Alliance forces bombed, and continue to bomb, the fuck out of Iraq. Do you seriously think that all the improvised explosives detonated so far in Iraq have done as much damage and caused as much loss of life as Alliance high explosives?
2. The money to rebuild Iraq is being paid for from their own oil revenues. The cost to repair the damaged Iraqi infrastructure after GWI, sanctions, and GWII is, IIRC, about $36billion. Their oil reserves are about $30billion. And with more being money lost in the graft and corruption endemic in contracts with US corporations, signed without the Iraqi people's ratification, they're in a hole so deep that they'll be lucky if their grandchildren see daylight.
It might be easier for a citizen of the United States of America to understand the 'insurgents' actions in these term: the Iraqis are being taxed without representation by a colonial power. Their actions are no more or less than the actions of your own founding fathers in response to equally, if not more, provactive injury.
The rest of the world doesn't get pissed off by Americans because the have so much, or they waste so much - it's because they tend to be too dumb to realise what tremendous two-faced assholes they can be, and that saying sorry later doesn't actually fix dead people now.
Because CowboyNeal doesn't want to be replaced by a very small shell script?
Seriously though it'd be cool: 7 of 15 stories, 8 stories beneath your contempt (or whatever).
Then it's rich as astronauts time. Seriously.
If the keys are bad as you say they then they'll get fixed for N-Gage XS or whatever the next version is. Nokia aren't entirely fucking stupid - they do listen to criticism where it's warranted, and the ZX Spectrum comparison is entirely valid 'cos spongey action was the basic complaints made about the Speccy keyboard. It got fixed. After about 6 years.
Point 1.1 Whaddaya think the kiddies are going to be playing in the playground in 2 years? Dollars to donuts its going to be a wireless networked portable game (for the cool kids with rich parents). The networking is already there with the N-Gage and its siblings, it just needs to be used right.
A bunch of your concerns and issues can be addressed with minor hardware changes and developers getting familiar with the platform. The rest is just being overly critcal of folk learning how to do stuff for the first time.
You are full of shit, but as a learning experience, I'll be reasonable and tell you exactly why you are full of shit. Let's have a look at those little winnits you flicked at the world:
1. Poor game support. Once upon a time games programmers didn't need DirectX APIs, IDEs, debuggers, profilers, modelling tools, level editors, and a whole raft of other crap to make games. They experimented and they learned all the details of the computer they were programming. Then they made games and bought Ferraris.
2. Choppy control response. Down to inexperienced or poor programmers. Nothing to do with the hardware. Are you telling me that there's a magic eddy in the space-time continuum built into each N-Gage that slows down the transfer of electrons? Otherwise the controls are working just fine, just not being responded to by the game. A world of difference.
3. Lousy control layout. The QD doesn't look any worse to use than the Gameboy. D-pad, check. Fire buttons, check. You need a trackball, or something? Maybe one of those cute Nintendo power gloves? I honestly can't see what you're talking about here.
4. Vertical screen? Eh?! So what? You aren't playing widescreen movies on it. Your expectations regarding the screen's conventional orientation are challenged? Boo. Hoo. Games will still be playable and, if it's really, really necessary, you can turn the thing on it's side.
Anyway, my point was parents don't give a shit about performance they just want something that makes Junior shut up when they want him quiet and makes him talk when they want him noisy. The N-Gage QD is perfect for this and it's now reasonably priced. Sure the games aren't all that, but I remember what games were like for the ZX Spectrum when it came out (Jetpac) and how much better they got in the next few years (Fairlight, Batman, Heavy on the Magick). Lazy ports of PC games don't show what the hardware can do.
Plus how many kids are going to get a boost into programming writing games for the QD and similar platforms? Like we wrote games for the ZX81 and Spectrum and BBC model B? They might not have been good games (technically I'd hesitate to call them games at all - games don't look like a bunch of random stupid shit) but they taught us stuff and we still get to use it. Limited resources, slow hardware, questionable graphics, not much in the way of sound - that's where computer games came from.
Seriously, I think the majority of nay-sayers are totally full of shit on this one. Yes, the original N-Gage was a donkey - ugly, awkward, expensive and therefore by necessity marketed wrongly at the 25-35 demographic. The slinky, reasonably-priced N-Gage QD is going to have a much broader appeal. And so what if it can't render 13 billion multi-shadered dynamically-lit triangles per clock-cycle? That's only really necessary for one type of game. There are plenty of other games that 2D will be just fine for, and they're fun too. Seriously, crack yourself away from the spec sheet for the latest transistor-pr0n from NVidia and ATI and look at all the puzzles, dance games, RPGs, adventures, and other stuff that just don't need stellar specs to be fun.
In summary, the N-Gage QD will sell like hot-cakes. Everyone programming games for it will be richer than astronauts. I am right and you are all wrong.
And I'm going to be wearing this post round my neck until I die if I'm wrong :P
The point is that there's now a mass-market removable re-writable media format that can be attached without further adaptors or configuration to the majority of contemporary PCs (and Macs), with capacities commensurate with today's media-rich created content.
And, after saying that, I feel dirty. Like I've been raped by the Marketing Department or something.
I wouldn't think it take long before folks are selling Hi-MD mods online. And the minidisc recorder becomes what it should have been in the first place - an adaptable media recorder suitable for all digital audio applications instead of timid engineering and a pointless toy emasculated by the Marketing department.
But, hey, they've got all sorts of reasons for making their decisions with their money. Just so long as they spend their money on suicide booths before modder-prosecuting lawyers.
If the Hi-MDs themselves aren't too expensive, one slinky box for your music and your pr0n... neat.
I also found that they do conform to the USB Mass Storage standard, so when the other manufacturers start making their models (not a big fan of Sony hardware QC) I might just get me one of these. It makes me unreasonably happy when I find out that someone out there wasn't as stupid and myopic as they could have been.
DAT was taxed out of the market. Corporate lobbyists got the US Congress to pass the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, taxing both the DATs and DAT equipment.
As for MiniDiscs being successful, I remember thinking they'd be the replacements for 1.44Mb floppies. Zip drives were about and becoming more common but Sony's marketing clout could really have set the standard. Half-hearted attempts to market 300GBP PC drives killed that neat idea stone dead. Now they're just a niche market instead of being in every PC in the planet. And there still isn't a standard for re-writable removable storage for user-created content with today's media-rich requirements. USB keys suck balls but they're all we've got for now. Just don't lose the little bastards down the back of the couch. Losing a 50p floppy is one thing, a 50GBP key is another.
If the new 4.5Gb MiniDiscs can be used just to read/write arbitrary data over USB 2.0 (even if you can't access any of that arbitrary data via the MD players' functionality) then they will be a stellar success and landfills will be overflowing with USB keys. If not, they're just seppukuing themselves in the foot again.
I did the same thing and thought buying Sony meant getting a product where quality mattered. Not with my Sony 15SF it didn't. Colour divergence between the red and blue signals in the top left corner was about 1.5mm. About 2 pixels or so at the resolution I was running it at. Now, as I bought it for my Powermac 6600 and that's where the Apple menu lived at the time, it jarred on a daily basis.
I sent the monitor back 3 times and each time they returned it and said the lack of convergence was "within factory tolerances". Well, since then Sony have pretty much been "outside Gary's tolerances" and they haven't exactly been the beneficiaries of any of my spending sprees. Plus, I'm still so bitter about Sony's bloody awful quality control (and getting burned 350GBP of my own earned money when a student) that I'm still ranting about it in public a decade later.
In contrast, my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510 bought to replace it has been nothing but a delight (except when I have to lift the 25kg mofo).
They thought they had a lock on the VCR market - they had the machines, the patents, and the best picture quality but by reserving the right to determine what could be published on their media (refusing to allow material like pornography) destroyed Betamax's acceptance in the marketplace. Can you imagine George Lucas having to phone up Sony and ask if it's alright to bring out his movie on video tape? "Hmmm... Nope. Sorry, George but those Trade Federation guys really pissed us off in Japan. Maybe you should consider publishing on another format like, say, View-Master?"
It's exactly the same mistake they're making with the MiniDisc and they're going to make with their TVs, dictating what can and can't be stored on what they see as their media (even if you've done something insignificant, like pay for it). Thinking about it, if you consider the frame-buffers in their TVs to be short-term storage solutions, then dictating what can and can't be written to it is pretty much Sony's speed. Cue big black screen when you put in a DVD from 20th Century Fox: Sony Consumer Electronics does not grant you the right to store this information in our photon-emitting storage array.
Sounds fucking stupid, doesn't it? But do you want to bet multiple thousands of dollars buying their TV hoping Sony won't brain damage it? That you won't have to break the law in order to get it modded to play unsigned content? With SCE that is a sucker bet.
The most disturbing thing about the article for me was the way, right from the start, that Bozell wants parents to endorse violence, role playing as a calculating killer, or a vicious thug capable of rupturing organs with their fists in preference to playing a game that lets you hope that one day sex might be a normal part of your life. He's happy with kids putrefying in their bedrooms as long as it's only deliberate brutal murder they're planning, not getting to second base.
That's perverse.
What sort of person is happier with junior killbots than junior people?
Why do we need passwords when we can just swipe into our terminal with our government-issued biometric ID cards? Add a quick check of the fingerprints, iris scan, cheek swab for DNA, and a urine and stool sample and we're good to go. You can then start the day with all waste voided, your eyeballs scrubbed for greater acuity over those long productive work sessions, and your employer can keep signing those paycheck with a smile in their heart knowing that you've never actually spent any of the money they've given you doing anything as crass as enjoying yourself.
Plus the government will know you've been good too. You. Specifically. That ought to thrill you down to your toes.
C'mon! What are we waiting for?!
Trial by ordeal is actually a very old way of determining justice (after all, what are witches made of?) Not that I'm against it or anything - although one of those mines might be a claymore with my twitchy finger on the button waiting for rapists and stuff. Just because they think we're being fair with them...
It depends on the quality of the photos and Reuters biometric identification software.
Pretty much the Honor systems is like levels and experience points: the better you do at things like your mission, keeping your troops alive, patching up wounded soldiers and not blowing the hell out of your own team with the RPG the higher you score. Your score gets kept as experience points and you increase in Honor levels with success. Higher levels need more points needed to advance, etc. And you can lose Honor levels with Rules of Engagement violations like shooting your own team or civilians (and friendly fire detection is always on). You also get little incentives for to increase in Honor, like unlocking the Special Forces at 15 Honor and official 'Elite' servers that you need to have 25 Honor to join.
As you sign in with an account and the official servers ban you if your Honor drops below 9 (it starts at 10) then there are very few TKers willing to put up with the crap of creating a new account all the time. Which only leaves the cheaters...
I was hoping the Army would, you know, hunt them down and gut them - but no such luck.
Check out this concept car for a euro-interpretation of your vision. They're hoping for fuel consumption rate of 188 miles per gallon. They are also calling it the C.L.E.V.E.R. car (to cash in on the Smart car's advertising budget I assume). A nice idea but a dumb name.
If the construction cost is minimal, then the sky is quite literally the limit.
Uh, if you wanted to go into space wouldn't it be easier to take a ride up on the space elevator instead? The one that manufactured carbon nanotubes would enable? It would do far more damage to environment to launch a rocket and choke a whole island's ecosystem to death with the fumes.
Unless you want to save the planet when Ming arrives?
But the idea of a whole bunch of Hans Zarkoff wannabes with script-kiddy rocket plans just gives me the creeps. All those lamée jumpsuits! With the shoulderpads! And they'd give each other cool nicknames like Ace and Neo (or something from some obscure manga pr0n with demon phalluses). Oh, and they're going to be training hard on the caribbean island, are they? Doing press-ups? Running? Swimming? Studying weapons systems design schematics? Practicing bursting into someone's house and shooting them? Hmm? Or are they going to be skinning up huge spliffs all day from the cannabis plantation that they can grow on their deserted island?
That's right: spliffs.
Even worse, what would happen if a bunch of amateur, drug-addled space cadets were to save the planet? The racial shame would be intolerable. All the other sapients would laugh at us when we joined the interstellar community. "Don't bother developing science, engineering, or culture monkeys! Just go back into your tree and inhale your burnt plant fumes! That'll keep your civilisation advancing in leaps and bounds! Bwahahaha!" It'd be horrible. We'd be stigmatised in space for millions of years.
More importantly, who will adopt this 'improved' electronic voting system? Very few.
In Britain we have the Sale of Goods Act where, if the products weren't of merchantable quality when they're sold, you get to get your money back. Now as it's been proved that Diebold provided uncertified machines and a number of failures have occurred why can't Californian election officials just return the machines and ask for their cash back? Then they'd have plenty of money to implement the OSV systems. Even if they didn't get all their money back they might get enough to cover the costs of the new system.
And would Diebold fight California in court, pretty much guaranteeing zero sales of the machines to other states for the rest of ever? I doubt it.
Maybe making a huge loss out of the e-voting thing is what it'll take for companies like Diebold to get out of the e-voting market and start letting people with a stake in functional democracies provide the systems.
Hah! You never played System Shock 2. I could go away and get a cup of tea in the time it took for a "quickload".
I remember the first time I crossed the bridge in GTA3 and it paused for about half a moment and then got on with the next bit of the game. That was cool. After that it started getting on my nerves when games had to load the next level, reaching it's peak with Deus Ex IW's insanity where the levels are about 3 feet across and loading times are 30-40 seconds. At least the levels in SS2 took you around a level of the ship and stuff.
It jars. If you had to wait 30 seconds between scenes on a film you'd beat the popcorn guy on the way out. And what you'd do to the ticket seller would make Satan puke.
Games are more involving when they don't do the loading thing, the feeling of immersion is more profound. I want never to see "Loading..." again.
I wonder how hard it'd be to write a litte app that'd take books a sentence at a time and stick them through AT&T's Natural Voices demo. Mash up all the MP3s at the end and, hey presto, free audiobooks.
As long as the author isn't inconsiderate enough to write sentence longer than 30 words...
But, before this egregarious misapplication of provisionally available proprietary technology commences, does anyone know what good, free (as in speech and beer) text-to-voice tools are available?