Some of the software interfaces with your PC, but you still need a PC card reader or a mem stick reader for your PC. Wouldn't it be simpler to add a serial or USB port to the thing... hell put it right inder the tail and label it I/O interface:)
That it is graphics that make it more or less fun persay. It is the ever increasing complexity of the interface. You used to have an 8 direction pad and 1 or 2 buttons on console games and most computer games. Then on consoles designers have continually added more and more buttons. I feel like I need 3 more fingers and an extra bundle of control nerves to use them.
Now look at games like FPS's. I am a keyboard+mouse FPS player and that is fine and dandy when all you have is AIM, move, jump and strafe. Add a wheel mouse for weaponswitch and its great. But now, you get FPS's and mods wigh 5 grenade buttons, multiple modes on each weapon, pick up and drop items, use items, open doors, manual reload, ect. Most of which require unique key bindings. now.. with my fingers on the arrow kews and the other hand on the mouse, how much can I reach with my pinky? Not much.
Yes, I shamelessly promote my music in my sig, even if it sucks. Check it out and tell me what you think, especially if you really are anti RIAA and not just napster leeches.
How long it will be before the the Internet Explorer install routine will put speed bumps around its icon and oil slicks around other browser icons making it easier for the end user to click on Exploder as oposed to say, netscape.
Hell you could even web enable the stuff and force people to slow down over your links.
Yes moderators this is meant to be sarcastic and funny.. not trolling!
I wonder when the following will come to pass? Someone chemically analizes a food product (say a Post Cereal), and starts to report his findings in public.
Among the findings, are results that opoint to the fact that Post lied on the RDA label, and in fact if you dig depper are including small amounts of addictive chemicals designed to make you crave more of their foods.
enter the DMCA, before this information could be readily studied, Post Cereal Inc. issued a cease and desist letter based on the fact that this information is protected by a weak cryptography (the glue holding the box shut).
See how insane this is? This is what corporations want, a way into your lives to monitor and control what you do, see, buy, think, and say. Unfortunately things like the DMCA make it even easier.
Aneheim, CA Analysts bemoan the downfall of Intel, as yet another Slashdot article fails to mention the aging chipmaker. Insiders say this is a great tradgedy that geeks actually have choices in the PC x86 processor market. "We used to run the show," said one anonymous employee. Analysts also mentioned that unless Intel can discover a way to compete in a non-monoplistic market, hoards of "Open Source" assembler and processor gurus will migrate to helping Transmeta and AMD build better products.
Re:(offtopic) Responding to your .sig
on
Ready-To-Wear PCs
·
· Score: 1
Heh.. thanks... just don't get a speeding ticket on the way home to listen!
When I was 8 or 9 years old I made myself a 'robot' haloween costume out of empty boxes of my sisters empty pampers boxes painted black and silver. Inbedded in the back was a simple 2 oscillator synthesizer I mad from parts disected from a radio shack 101 in 1 electronics kit, and in the front I had some simon like game with more buttons, only I had taken it apart and run wires from the lights in the game to leds at all my joints.
Granted the boxes were a little klunky and it was early eighties so it didnt run *nix, but I think with a little work we could alleviate that!
Yes, I shamelessly promote my music in my signature. with all the anti-RIAA talk on/. you would think that people would check out more things like that, but no. It would seem most would rather leech commercial music from gnutella or napster than check out an 'unknown'. Oh well, maybe my music just sucks. But if you feel like it, check it out and check out some of the artists linked from my page and in my station.
I did not realize spud guns had become a corporate venture.
Far gone are the days where you could duct tape a soda can to a piece of pvc, throw in some zippo fuel, and light it with a lighter next to a little hole in the side of tha can and call it a spud gun.
Now, you have to have rifled barrels, metered propane insertion, and electronic ignition.
I wonder when california will start to put emmisions regulations on Spud Guns, or require that they all be compressed air as opposed to fossil fuel.
Aww fuck it, I think I will go suck on the Nitrous for a while and forget about it.
While, no this isn't exactly 'free music', the service and the bill represent a good step towards true fair use. It is unfortunate that the music companies whish to throttle all fair use. If it was up to them they would charge 0.50-1.00 dollars PER listen, to net them a few million more a year. And that when you already bought the material in question.
I can only hope this passes and we have a little more sanity in these laws. While email may not be the best way to get in touch with congress, we are talking about a digital format and digital media. What better way to show support. Hopefully it will all be tracked by mp3.com or better yet a third party so there is a physical record of the volume of email. That is if there are enough of us that are not so apathetic that we can't type 2 lines and hit send. Most of our generation can't be bothered to even get up and vote, yet they complain about the state of the world.
That my friends, has to change, and unfortunately it is not happening fast enough.
Ok.. I think I am done with that rant:P
On a personal level, I am very happy with mp3.com and the ways I am able to promote my music, now if they would just approve new song uploads faster, I have 2 stuck in the queue!
Actually, no.. our preference would be not to interrupt service at all, but we needed to get those boxes out of production. It happens from time to time. But, if less than a year after the initial switchover, we are forced to do it again at the whim of the vendor, thats just plain insane and problematic.
"Cobalt's [devices] are true appliances," Ingram said. "You do not care about the operating system. If we were to convert these over to Solaris, the end-user wouldn't care. We don't have the energy to drive two operating systems."
-Andy Ingram, Senior VP - Solaris
Just a few months ago, I worked for an ISP that transitioned over 1000 commercial web hosting customers from a DEC box and a sun E450 to 3 Cobalt RAQ's.
Within DAYS of making the transition (painful to be sure), we were already hacking apart the way the RAQ's handles some of the CGI, and apache aspects of site hosting. We were also making custom scripts for system admin tasks that we needed to change some from the way the RAQ's web admin interface did things.
While this could be done in solaris as well, it would have taken a little more work, and of course someone more knowledgable with solaris. We had that manpower, but not all people do. Plus, if you are forced to switch your hardware to Solaris for continued support, you then have to fix any and all custom work you did, with most likely LIVE customers, and in a hurry.
As they are, the Cobalt boxes I have worked on are a BREEZE to configure and maintain, I would like to ask this VP, WTF is the point in changing it?
The 1.1.1 patch to half-Life broke a lot of mods.. while it added support for in game menus, and a lot of improved netcode, it changed the way the model animation works, breaking one of my Favorite mods:
Even though not as far along as things like Counter-Strike, Action had some nice features such as dives, rolls and making a corpse dance to your machine-gun.
All of which broke. Now the A-Team is spending more time on Action Unreal Tournament, than AHL. They promise to bring those features back in AHL once they get a working AUT running. At least AUT looks more true to the first Action, Action Quake 2. That mod is a classic, who remembers that lovely sniped headshot sound, or limping around bleeding from your leg?
Yes, I shamelessly plug my lousy music in my sig. Tell me what you think of it sometime!
Actually.. look in the background of this video.. the man has a doily on the table. This proves he is really stuck in the 60s-70s and need to make a handheld trash-80 with an integrated walkman tape drive.
But do we really need another dist ported to sparc?
IMHO, for higher end sparc's the best OS is a finely tuned Solaris, 2.6 or higher.
Now it may well runn better on older boxes but for any real production work, on a big box, solaris is still the king regardless of whether you actually like the OS.
With the help of god mode, I completed quake on the Hurt Me Plenty skill level in exactly 90 days. With no break. Do I qualify for the slowest?
Seriously though, that is pretty intense. I would like to see what the fastest single person run through would be without multiple retries per level. That would be a feat.
Joe customer get's his account and browser cookies from online store 'X'. Online store tracks Joe's purchases, observing that he buys about 2 dvd's and 4 cd's in a months time, every month.
Online store 'X' then decides to raise the price (for Joe ONLY) $0.50 to $1.00 on those items that Joe buys regularly. Joe, seeing a mild price increase continues his buying habits, maybe mumbling about inflation.
For 80-90% of the stupid consumers out there, would they really notice that they were paying a little more than everyone else? Meanwhile store 'X' has just increased revenue from one customer by $3.00 to $6.00 a month. Multiply that by thousands of idiot consumers and many who may buy MORE than Joe on a regular basis and you have a significant amount of money.
Think this doesn't appeal to greedy corporations selling things electronically? Guess again.
This article is pretty sparse, there is no meat or fact here. That being said, I do think that it is extremely probable that M$ is using various unices for those services.
Personally, I think the sad fact, is like most big corporations, they lie about it in order to sell more product.
How many upeer managment board room meetings across the world do you think there have been, with some MS Sales Engineer or such present, saying yep, we run all of "insert service/site here" on NT 4.0, when in reality it was bullshit.
I think M$ has gone the backwards road in development, they have refined and refined the UI, but the core of the OS'es ahve suffered. Most Unices on the other hand, ahve a very stable core with (name UI) stuck on top.
Arguably, some *nix's are better than others with the UI, but it is becomming more and more where the UI is completely independant of the nix underneath, I mean hell, I have helix-code gnome running on my Ultra 10, because I like it better than CDE (crappy desktop environment??)
Register array for utilizing burst mode transfer on local bus (5,687,357)
Apparatus adapted to be joined between the system I/O bus and I/O devices which translates addresses furnished directly by an application program (5,721,947)
DMA controller translates virtual I/O device address received directly from application program command to physical i/o device address of I/O device on device bus (5,758,182)
Method and apparatus for accelerating the transfer of graphical images (6,023,738)
Method and apparatus for accelerating the rendering of images (6,092,124)
Now, don't get me wrong but aren't most of these items things that ANY graphic card should do? I partcularly like the last one, "Method and apparutus for the accelerating of images."
Great, now I can't accelerate images because nVidia has the patent. This stinks, I love their products, they are the best on the market right now, and they have to do stupid shit like this.
I can tell I won't be using them for a good long while, they have turned into a shitpile like almost everyone else with some market leverage and greedy board of directors.
can anyone explain what makes corporations do stupid things like this? I mean, we have had the marketing fiasco, the open source code used and then close soured until people screamed (that may have been an honest mistake, but who knows). And now this, WHAT IS NEXT?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm.... Office 2000 and Visio just WILL NOT run under Windows 3.0 or 3.1, guess that means thay won't run under Windows 2000 either...
How ludicrous!
-Gandalf
Plus mine is really high in analog mode and the provider for mine has almost no digital service.
So.. in 30 years, my wife and I can spend our time in the hospital together dying from brain cancer.
I love our world.
Some of the software interfaces with your PC, but you still need a PC card reader or a mem stick reader for your PC. Wouldn't it be simpler to add a serial or USB port to the thing... hell put it right inder the tail and label it I/O interface :)
Now look at games like FPS's. I am a keyboard+mouse FPS player and that is fine and dandy when all you have is AIM, move, jump and strafe. Add a wheel mouse for weaponswitch and its great. But now, you get FPS's and mods wigh 5 grenade buttons, multiple modes on each weapon, pick up and drop items, use items, open doors, manual reload, ect. Most of which require unique key bindings. now.. with my fingers on the arrow kews and the other hand on the mouse, how much can I reach with my pinky? Not much.
Yes, I shamelessly promote my music in my sig, even if it sucks. Check it out and tell me what you think, especially if you really are anti RIAA and not just napster leeches.
Hell you could even web enable the stuff and force people to slow down over your links.
Yes moderators this is meant to be sarcastic and funny.. not trolling!
That alone is almost half my yearly salary. And I support 3 kids.. any chance of sharing? :-)
Among the findings, are results that opoint to the fact that Post lied on the RDA label, and in fact if you dig depper are including small amounts of addictive chemicals designed to make you crave more of their foods.
enter the DMCA, before this information could be readily studied, Post Cereal Inc. issued a cease and desist letter based on the fact that this information is protected by a weak cryptography (the glue holding the box shut).
See how insane this is? This is what corporations want, a way into your lives to monitor and control what you do, see, buy, think, and say. Unfortunately things like the DMCA make it even easier.
Analysts bemoan the downfall of Intel, as yet another Slashdot article fails to mention the aging chipmaker. Insiders say this is a great tradgedy that geeks actually have choices in the PC x86 processor market. "We used to run the show," said one anonymous employee. Analysts also mentioned that unless Intel can discover a way to compete in a non-monoplistic market, hoards of "Open Source" assembler and processor gurus will migrate to helping Transmeta and AMD build better products.
Heh.. thanks... just don't get a speeding ticket on the way home to listen!
When I was 8 or 9 years old I made myself a 'robot' haloween costume out of empty boxes of my sisters empty pampers boxes painted black and silver. Inbedded in the back was a simple 2 oscillator synthesizer I mad from parts disected from a radio shack 101 in 1 electronics kit, and in the front I had some simon like game with more buttons, only I had taken it apart and run wires from the lights in the game to leds at all my joints.
Granted the boxes were a little klunky and it was early eighties so it didnt run *nix, but I think with a little work we could alleviate that!
Yes, I shamelessly promote my music in my signature. with all the anti-RIAA talk on /. you would think that people would check out more things like that, but no. It would seem most would rather leech commercial music from gnutella or napster than check out an 'unknown'. Oh well, maybe my music just sucks. But if you feel like it, check it out and check out some of the artists linked from my page and in my station.
Far gone are the days where you could duct tape a soda can to a piece of pvc, throw in some zippo fuel, and light it with a lighter next to a little hole in the side of tha can and call it a spud gun.
Now, you have to have rifled barrels, metered propane insertion, and electronic ignition.
I wonder when california will start to put emmisions regulations on Spud Guns, or require that they all be compressed air as opposed to fossil fuel.
Aww fuck it, I think I will go suck on the Nitrous for a while and forget about it.
Keep up the work promoting the indie artists! I say that because I myself am an indie electronic artist!
I can only hope this passes and we have a little more sanity in these laws. While email may not be the best way to get in touch with congress, we are talking about a digital format and digital media. What better way to show support. Hopefully it will all be tracked by mp3.com or better yet a third party so there is a physical record of the volume of email. That is if there are enough of us that are not so apathetic that we can't type 2 lines and hit send. Most of our generation can't be bothered to even get up and vote, yet they complain about the state of the world.
That my friends, has to change, and unfortunately it is not happening fast enough.
Ok.. I think I am done with that rant :P
On a personal level, I am very happy with mp3.com and the ways I am able to promote my music, now if they would just approve new song uploads faster, I have 2 stuck in the queue!
Actually, no.. our preference would be not to interrupt service at all, but we needed to get those boxes out of production. It happens from time to time. But, if less than a year after the initial switchover, we are forced to do it again at the whim of the vendor, thats just plain insane and problematic.
Just a few months ago, I worked for an ISP that transitioned over 1000 commercial web hosting customers from a DEC box and a sun E450 to 3 Cobalt RAQ's.
Within DAYS of making the transition (painful to be sure), we were already hacking apart the way the RAQ's handles some of the CGI, and apache aspects of site hosting. We were also making custom scripts for system admin tasks that we needed to change some from the way the RAQ's web admin interface did things.
While this could be done in solaris as well, it would have taken a little more work, and of course someone more knowledgable with solaris. We had that manpower, but not all people do. Plus, if you are forced to switch your hardware to Solaris for continued support, you then have to fix any and all custom work you did, with most likely LIVE customers, and in a hurry.
As they are, the Cobalt boxes I have worked on are a BREEZE to configure and maintain, I would like to ask this VP, WTF is the point in changing it?
Action Half-Life
Even though not as far along as things like Counter-Strike, Action had some nice features such as dives, rolls and making a corpse dance to your machine-gun.
All of which broke. Now the A-Team is spending more time on Action Unreal Tournament, than AHL. They promise to bring those features back in AHL once they get a working AUT running. At least AUT looks more true to the first Action, Action Quake 2. That mod is a classic, who remembers that lovely sniped headshot sound, or limping around bleeding from your leg?
Yes, I shamelessly plug my lousy music in my sig. Tell me what you think of it sometime!
But do we really need another dist ported to sparc? IMHO, for higher end sparc's the best OS is a finely tuned Solaris, 2.6 or higher. Now it may well runn better on older boxes but for any real production work, on a big box, solaris is still the king regardless of whether you actually like the OS.
Seriously though, that is pretty intense. I would like to see what the fastest single person run through would be without multiple retries per level. That would be a feat.
Online store 'X' then decides to raise the price (for Joe ONLY) $0.50 to $1.00 on those items that Joe buys regularly. Joe, seeing a mild price increase continues his buying habits, maybe mumbling about inflation.
For 80-90% of the stupid consumers out there, would they really notice that they were paying a little more than everyone else? Meanwhile store 'X' has just increased revenue from one customer by $3.00 to $6.00 a month. Multiply that by thousands of idiot consumers and many who may buy MORE than Joe on a regular basis and you have a significant amount of money.
Think this doesn't appeal to greedy corporations selling things electronically? Guess again.
Personally, I think the sad fact, is like most big corporations, they lie about it in order to sell more product.
How many upeer managment board room meetings across the world do you think there have been, with some MS Sales Engineer or such present, saying yep, we run all of "insert service/site here" on NT 4.0, when in reality it was bullshit.
I think M$ has gone the backwards road in development, they have refined and refined the UI, but the core of the OS'es ahve suffered. Most Unices on the other hand, ahve a very stable core with (name UI) stuck on top.
Arguably, some *nix's are better than others with the UI, but it is becomming more and more where the UI is completely independant of the nix underneath, I mean hell, I have helix-code gnome running on my Ultra 10, because I like it better than CDE (crappy desktop environment??)
Great, now I can't accelerate images because nVidia has the patent. This stinks, I love their products, they are the best on the market right now, and they have to do stupid shit like this.
I can tell I won't be using them for a good long while, they have turned into a shitpile like almost everyone else with some market leverage and greedy board of directors.
can anyone explain what makes corporations do stupid things like this? I mean, we have had the marketing fiasco, the open source code used and then close soured until people screamed (that may have been an honest mistake, but who knows). And now this, WHAT IS NEXT?