Not to mention that Microsoft has also announced their entrance into the still-growing Digital Video Recorder market with their own DirectTV-TiVo combo challenger -- except that there's can record two different streams at the same time!
Microsoft is continuing to invade ever more markets, not fewer!
Speaking to the pause between tracks problem, this went away as soon as I upgraded my Nomad with the latest OS upgrade. You can find it on Creative's sight.
Really, this is nothing special. Seriously, I came up with a primitive, if completely non-effective, idea for the same thing in a high school science project. Essentially, it'd just be a series of solonoids powered up and down in order so as to propel a "bullet" forward through a barrel. The tricky part, at least for a kid who was, at the time, in high school, would have been controlling the timing on the solenoids -- and getting enough power to do some damage. Of course, I'm sure that many of you out there had more talent for electrical engineering than I did/do.
Really, is this any different than having a high end graphics card offload processing from the CPU so that it can concern itself with more generic processing? Yes, one could consider personal information management software as a memory sink for the human brain; however, one could also contend that such artifacts abstract the more trivial elements of our lives out of our cognitive processes thereby providing more time to the mind to deal with more important matters. Rather than worrying about when to walk the dog or the time of your next meeting, you now have time to post comments/. or contemplate the cultural ramifications of PDAs and PIMs upon society.
RE: above
Don't you love self-referencing arguments?;-)
From the Salon.com article...
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
According to the inventor of "Ginger," Dean Kamen, his device will be an alternative to products that "are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
---
Sounds like a replacement for the automobile -- which is what most people are speculating. I have to wonder if it might be some sort of personal flying device. That would definitely result in several of the legal barries that Kemper hints at in the original article. Of course, that seems pretty fantastical.
Admittedly, a close friend of mine is a "suit". You know, one of those guys who flies a desk for a living and writes text documents instead of code on his computer?;-)
Seriously speaking, he told me a few days ago, and I quote, "[Businesses] value what they pay for." This came out of a discussion of why businesses prefer spending money on inferior products instead of using superior open source products (e.g., using Weblogic as a Servlet/JSP container instead of Tomcat).
Also, there's the matter of accountability. You can't sue someone as easily if you didn't pay them for the product.
Of course this is about XML! Specifically, it's about whose DTDs/XML Schemas will be used by the rest of the world.
XML is just text until it is put into a context by a DTD/Schema. "The medium is the message", neh?
As always, it's in Microsoft's best interest to depart from the standard because it will force customers to use ~100% Microsoft solutions. Only Microsoft products will speak the Microsoft DTD -- at first, anyway. Again, as always, integration products will follow on later to fill in the niches.
I can't belive that /. has /.'ed the Guardian!!!!
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand any of the excitement -- apart from perhaps the Transmeta chip under the hood. There's very little difference between this toy and Compaq's new iPaq web appliance. They're both desktop/tabletop devices and they both have wires (although fewer than your standard PC.
I think what most of us would like would be a "web tablet"; something about the form factor of a tablet of paper with 802.11 connectivity to a base station of some sort.
If it weren't for the ridiculous expense of 802.11 (as Lucent is the sole provider I know of these days), I'd turn my iPaq PocketPC into a small version of what I describe above.
Somewhere on the Web (SleightNews) - Slashdot: News For Nerds, Stuff that matters, a web site catering to the eclectic tastes of techies, suddenly suffered from a massive dip in readership following the posting of Jon Katz's latest article: "Aristotle, Dilbert And The Working Life". Upon reading this article, a full 50% of the full-time employed techies reading the Slashdot article committed mass uncoordinated suicide, apparently in a fit of angst, when confronted with the depressing nature of their labor.
The remaining 50% demanded 300% pay increases, inducing managers worldwide to commit mass suicide. There was much rejoicing.
Seriously, what the hairy heck is happenning to/. such tht a "funny" post like this, out of 22 comments, is the only one rated a "5" and, not only that, but is categorized incorrectly. Moderators, clearly you are doing something wrong here...
Specifically speaking, Moderators, read -1 on up and please don't read them sorted. Quality posts should be "5"s and not drivel like this.
I'll give Raven points for the quality of the graphics and the detail with which they emulated the various environments of the different species that inhabit the Star Trek universe.
However, the single player game play is awful. The game is terribly repetitive. Primarily, you have an objective -- reaching it involves kill aliens, move to next room, kill aliens, repeat, ad inf. until end of level. Pretty disappointing really.
I can see how the reviewer might've been terribly impressed with the game -- if he only played it for all of twenty minutes. The "Gee Whiz" factor wouldn't have worn off by then. However, after about 4 hours of the afforementioned tedium, it grows old fast.
Clearly, technology is slowly supplanting culture. However, there will always be luddites who choose to remain separate.
It has been argued that technology is itself a religion. If this is indeed true, then , as this "movement" gains converts, the islands of people that used to make up the old mainstream cultures will become further separated by the ever-growing oceans of technologists that make up the new mainstream.
As old-school extremists, and not moderates, tend to constitue the majority of governments, does this mean that governments will become increasingly out of touch with their constituents and with each other? As the distances of perspective that separate governments widen, won't understanding in turn fail? Where does this leave our world as a whole?
Ironically, I began on a cultural premise and now find myself drawing a political conclusion. Politicians have a tendency for flamboyance in their outspokeness. Visionaries garner more attention than moderates -- safe isn't sexy. Perhaps the extremists, who grow ever more out of touch with their changing constituency should slowly be supplanted by a new type of politician that actually represents his constituency rather than the narrow focus of his/her party.
Most of us agreed, when TiVo started hitting it big, that the establishment would either have to fight the saturation of "personal television" devices (i.e., TiVo, Replay, etc.) or adapt. Television earns its keep through drawing in viewers to watch advertisements. Now, more and more people are circumventing that mechanism by, via one medium or another, recording television programming for later viewing and skipping the commercials.
Clearly, it is far simpler for the MPAA to decry change rather than to adapt. The MPAA and the RIAA have taken horrifically similar approaches to the vagaries of the recently commercialized digital distribution channels. While the RIAA attacks Napster and dogs MP3 player manufacturers, the MPAA attacks DeCCS, 2600, and now you and everyone else with a VCR-like device.
Isn't it wonderful how, in this modern day and age, that the first and seemingly most popular approach taken by establishment against innovation is a law suit?
So we want to replace Democracy with Capitalism?
on
Voteauction.com
·
· Score: 1
To take this idea to an extreme, where voters can put their individual votes up for sale, doesn't the individual/group with the most money win?
For example, let's say that Bill Gates, after selling his humongous stake in Microsoft for a total of $30 billion, decided that he wanted to support a particular presidential candidate. If we take the rough estimate that there are 300 million Americans, of which, on a whim, I'll say 20% vote (that's 60 million), if Bill were to pay 60 million Americans, who are totally ambivalent, $5,000 each to vote for his candidate, don't you think that Bill's candidate would win the election?
Sure, Bill's broke, at this point, but I'm just illustrating a point here. If votes were up for sale, then business would drive politics, not people. Perhaps the more jaded among us would say that this is already the case but, personally, I believe that we live in a world where an individual can still make a difference. Selling votes, were it legalized, puts government fully at the service of businesses and not individuals. This is flat wrong.
If we are to take Jon's definition as rote, "Closed media operate by permitting a handful of individuals to select information and distribute it, in the hopes that people will want and buy it", then doesn't that make Slashdot a form of Closed Media? Hundreds of posts are submitted daily (or is it more now?) to Slashdot but only handful see the light of day.
Is this really all that different from the traditional press? Stories frequently reach the press because someone informs a member of the press. Slashdot merely provides a convenient mechanism for the public to notify the press, in this case Slashdot's staff, of a potential story.
From that standpoint, does that really make Slashdot all that different from a conventional newspaper -- complete with Jon's commentary. They even get some of their funding from advertisements posted on their pages.
Finding happiness in a perfect world
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
In contemplating Jon's rhetoric to the nth degree, I found myself mulling over this thought: if the ancient Greeks were right, in that happiness is "the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope" then how could anyone in a world, where people are designed by nature to excel, be happy?
Would the very lack of imperfection negate scope?
Would we be left with a society of extremely capable but terribly underutilized and unhappy people?
In regard to the Olympic example, I would also contend that immersion is key.
Examine modern competitive sports. Hazarding a guess, chess is probably the most popular purely cerebral competitive sport whereas soccer probably rules the physical world. Soccer certainly has more ardent fans than chess. Why?
Hypothetically speaking, people can relate to the physical sports on a primal level where most cerebral sports are wanting.
To leap ahead to a conclusion, I doubt that computer game enthusaists will ever reach the level of stardom as the current era athletes until such a time as computer games allow for complete and utter immersion.
For me, I've found that leveraging every newly aquired skill against the current job hunt has been the solution to my problems. With that in mind, I've gone from C to C using Motif, C++/CORBA, to Java/EJB in that order. I went from being an awful coder to a rather proficient (IMHO, of course) well-off ratbert... er... contractor.;-)
Wherever you are, leverage what you have already to get toward where you want to be. The trick is that you need to plan several steps ahead and aim one step ahead at a time.
I will also attest that a constant willingness to learn is mandatory. If you're afraid of picking up a new language because you're afraid that you'll loose your "guru" status, then you're going to get lost to technological Darwinism.
Grab a hold of a new technology, play with it on the job (as part of your daily work), chalk it up on the resume once your good at it, and move on to the next job/technology. Not only do you get paid to play with toys, but you'll just keep getting paid better and better (up until a maximum, of course, although I haven't found it yet).
Terminus is not Everquest. An Everquest server (which, I believe, is actually a cluster of servers) can host 2000+ users simultaneously. Everquest is also a service.
One of the things that separates Terminus from Everquest, and that makes it beautiful, is that Terminus is not a service but a product that allows any old user to set up a persistent universe and allow other people to play within it.
In short, Terminus allows an owner of the game unlimited usage of others "universes", provides the ability to instantiate your own, or to just play solo.
Now, if only some insane fanboys out there would set up a cluster running Termins (is this possible?) so that we could have several hundred people existing the in the same universe.;-)
Majel Barret Roddenberry is using this idea in another "Gene Roddenberry" (in the same vein as Earth Final Conflict) series called "Andromeda" originally titled "Phoenix Rising". I believe that it will begin to air this fall.
Unfortunately, "Andromeda" will not take place in a post-Federation Star Trek universe but one very similar to it.
Anyone have any insight (or, preferrably, a source) that can confirm what the PDA will use for a windowing environment? I was already lightly crisped for suggesting that the environment might be X (and somewhat understandably so). Here's to hoping that whatever the environment, it has a published API!
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that Microsoft has also announced their entrance into the still-growing Digital Video Recorder market with their own DirectTV-TiVo combo challenger -- except that there's can record two different streams at the same time!
Microsoft is continuing to invade ever more markets, not fewer!
Speaking to the pause between tracks problem, this went away as soon as I upgraded my Nomad with the latest OS upgrade. You can find it on Creative's sight.
Really, this is nothing special. Seriously, I came up with a primitive, if completely non-effective, idea for the same thing in a high school science project. Essentially, it'd just be a series of solonoids powered up and down in order so as to propel a "bullet" forward through a barrel. The tricky part, at least for a kid who was, at the time, in high school, would have been controlling the timing on the solenoids -- and getting enough power to do some damage. Of course, I'm sure that many of you out there had more talent for electrical engineering than I did/do.
Really, is this any different than having a high end graphics card offload processing from the CPU so that it can concern itself with more generic processing? Yes, one could consider personal information management software as a memory sink for the human brain; however, one could also contend that such artifacts abstract the more trivial elements of our lives out of our cognitive processes thereby providing more time to the mind to deal with more important matters. Rather than worrying about when to walk the dog or the time of your next meeting, you now have time to post comments /. or contemplate the cultural ramifications of PDAs and PIMs upon society.
;-)
RE: above
Don't you love self-referencing arguments?
According to the inventor of "Ginger," Dean Kamen, his device will be an alternative to products that "are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
---
Sounds like a replacement for the automobile -- which is what most people are speculating. I have to wonder if it might be some sort of personal flying device. That would definitely result in several of the legal barries that Kemper hints at in the original article. Of course, that seems pretty fantastical.
Admittedly, a close friend of mine is a "suit". You know, one of those guys who flies a desk for a living and writes text documents instead of code on his computer? ;-)
Seriously speaking, he told me a few days ago, and I quote, "[Businesses] value what they pay for." This came out of a discussion of why businesses prefer spending money on inferior products instead of using superior open source products (e.g., using Weblogic as a Servlet/JSP container instead of Tomcat).
Also, there's the matter of accountability. You can't sue someone as easily if you didn't pay them for the product.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't ZDNet partially owned by Microsoft?
Of course this is about XML! Specifically, it's about whose DTDs/XML Schemas will be used by the rest of the world.
XML is just text until it is put into a context by a DTD/Schema. "The medium is the message", neh?
As always, it's in Microsoft's best interest to depart from the standard because it will force customers to use ~100% Microsoft solutions. Only Microsoft products will speak the Microsoft DTD -- at first, anyway. Again, as always, integration products will follow on later to fill in the niches.
'nuff said
I don't understand any of the excitement -- apart from perhaps the Transmeta chip under the hood. There's very little difference between this toy and Compaq's new iPaq web appliance. They're both desktop/tabletop devices and they both have wires (although fewer than your standard PC.
I think what most of us would like would be a "web tablet"; something about the form factor of a tablet of paper with 802.11 connectivity to a base station of some sort.
If it weren't for the ridiculous expense of 802.11 (as Lucent is the sole provider I know of these days), I'd turn my iPaq PocketPC into a small version of what I describe above.
802.11 is too damned expensive.
Somewhere on the Web (SleightNews) - Slashdot: News For Nerds, Stuff that matters, a web site catering to the eclectic tastes of techies, suddenly suffered from a massive dip in readership following the posting of Jon Katz's latest article: "Aristotle, Dilbert And The Working Life". Upon reading this article, a full 50% of the full-time employed techies reading the Slashdot article committed mass uncoordinated suicide, apparently in a fit of angst, when confronted with the depressing nature of their labor.
The remaining 50% demanded 300% pay increases, inducing managers worldwide to commit mass suicide. There was much rejoicing.
Guys,
/. such tht a "funny" post like this, out of 22 comments, is the only one rated a "5" and, not only that, but is categorized incorrectly. Moderators, clearly you are doing something wrong here...
Seriously, what the hairy heck is happenning to
Specifically speaking, Moderators, read -1 on up and please don't read them sorted. Quality posts should be "5"s and not drivel like this.
I'll give Raven points for the quality of the graphics and the detail with which they emulated the various environments of the different species that inhabit the Star Trek universe.
However, the single player game play is awful. The game is terribly repetitive. Primarily, you have an objective -- reaching it involves kill aliens, move to next room, kill aliens, repeat, ad inf. until end of level. Pretty disappointing really.
I can see how the reviewer might've been terribly impressed with the game -- if he only played it for all of twenty minutes. The "Gee Whiz" factor wouldn't have worn off by then. However, after about 4 hours of the afforementioned tedium, it grows old fast.
Clearly, technology is slowly supplanting culture. However, there will always be luddites who choose to remain separate.
It has been argued that technology is itself a religion. If this is indeed true, then , as this "movement" gains converts, the islands of people that used to make up the old mainstream cultures will become further separated by the ever-growing oceans of technologists that make up the new mainstream.
As old-school extremists, and not moderates, tend to constitue the majority of governments, does this mean that governments will become increasingly out of touch with their constituents and with each other? As the distances of perspective that separate governments widen, won't understanding in turn fail? Where does this leave our world as a whole?
Ironically, I began on a cultural premise and now find myself drawing a political conclusion. Politicians have a tendency for flamboyance in their outspokeness. Visionaries garner more attention than moderates -- safe isn't sexy. Perhaps the extremists, who grow ever more out of touch with their changing constituency should slowly be supplanted by a new type of politician that actually represents his constituency rather than the narrow focus of his/her party.
Most of us agreed, when TiVo started hitting it big, that the establishment would either have to fight the saturation of "personal television" devices (i.e., TiVo, Replay, etc.) or adapt. Television earns its keep through drawing in viewers to watch advertisements. Now, more and more people are circumventing that mechanism by, via one medium or another, recording television programming for later viewing and skipping the commercials.
Clearly, it is far simpler for the MPAA to decry change rather than to adapt. The MPAA and the RIAA have taken horrifically similar approaches to the vagaries of the recently commercialized digital distribution channels. While the RIAA attacks Napster and dogs MP3 player manufacturers, the MPAA attacks DeCCS, 2600, and now you and everyone else with a VCR-like device.
Isn't it wonderful how, in this modern day and age, that the first and seemingly most popular approach taken by establishment against innovation is a law suit?
To take this idea to an extreme, where voters can put their individual votes up for sale, doesn't the individual/group with the most money win?
For example, let's say that Bill Gates, after selling his humongous stake in Microsoft for a total of $30 billion, decided that he wanted to support a particular presidential candidate. If we take the rough estimate that there are 300 million Americans, of which, on a whim, I'll say 20% vote (that's 60 million), if Bill were to pay 60 million Americans, who are totally ambivalent, $5,000 each to vote for his candidate, don't you think that Bill's candidate would win the election?
Sure, Bill's broke, at this point, but I'm just illustrating a point here. If votes were up for sale, then business would drive politics, not people. Perhaps the more jaded among us would say that this is already the case but, personally, I believe that we live in a world where an individual can still make a difference. Selling votes, were it legalized, puts government fully at the service of businesses and not individuals. This is flat wrong.
If we are to take Jon's definition as rote, "Closed media operate by permitting a handful of individuals to select information and distribute it, in the hopes that people will want and buy it", then doesn't that make Slashdot a form of Closed Media? Hundreds of posts are submitted daily (or is it more now?) to Slashdot but only handful see the light of day.
Is this really all that different from the traditional press? Stories frequently reach the press because someone informs a member of the press. Slashdot merely provides a convenient mechanism for the public to notify the press, in this case Slashdot's staff, of a potential story.
From that standpoint, does that really make Slashdot all that different from a conventional newspaper -- complete with Jon's commentary. They even get some of their funding from advertisements posted on their pages.
In contemplating Jon's rhetoric to the nth degree, I found myself mulling over this thought: if the ancient Greeks were right, in that happiness is "the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope" then how could anyone in a world, where people are designed by nature to excel, be happy?
Would the very lack of imperfection negate scope?
Would we be left with a society of extremely capable but terribly underutilized and unhappy people?
Examine modern competitive sports. Hazarding a guess, chess is probably the most popular purely cerebral competitive sport whereas soccer probably rules the physical world. Soccer certainly has more ardent fans than chess. Why?
Hypothetically speaking, people can relate to the physical sports on a primal level where most cerebral sports are wanting.
To leap ahead to a conclusion, I doubt that computer game enthusaists will ever reach the level of stardom as the current era athletes until such a time as computer games allow for complete and utter immersion.
Wherever you are, leverage what you have already to get toward where you want to be. The trick is that you need to plan several steps ahead and aim one step ahead at a time.
I will also attest that a constant willingness to learn is mandatory. If you're afraid of picking up a new language because you're afraid that you'll loose your "guru" status, then you're going to get lost to technological Darwinism.
Grab a hold of a new technology, play with it on the job (as part of your daily work), chalk it up on the resume once your good at it, and move on to the next job/technology. Not only do you get paid to play with toys, but you'll just keep getting paid better and better (up until a maximum, of course, although I haven't found it yet).
One of the things that separates Terminus from Everquest, and that makes it beautiful, is that Terminus is not a service but a product that allows any old user to set up a persistent universe and allow other people to play within it.
In short, Terminus allows an owner of the game unlimited usage of others "universes", provides the ability to instantiate your own, or to just play solo.
Now, if only some insane fanboys out there would set up a cluster running Termins (is this possible?) so that we could have several hundred people existing the in the same universe. ;-)
Majel Barret Roddenberry is using this idea in another "Gene Roddenberry" (in the same vein as Earth Final Conflict) series called "Andromeda" originally titled "Phoenix Rising". I believe that it will begin to air this fall.
Unfortunately, "Andromeda" will not take place in a post-Federation Star Trek universe but one very similar to it.
Anyone have any insight (or, preferrably, a source) that can confirm what the PDA will use for a windowing environment?
I was already lightly crisped for suggesting that the environment might be X (and somewhat understandably so).
Here's to hoping that whatever the environment, it has a published API!