This isn't one of those 'Why is slashdot posting this blah blah blah' posts. IMO this is important in case anyone hasn't heard about the name change already.
Seriously though, gov't obfuscation of a questionable project? Please don't act surprised. "Me Ted"
My guess is that most people just don't know about it. They need a big partner I think to help get the word out.
I live in NYC and have been hearing their commercials on the radio and have seen their ads on busses and on the trains. First time I saw one I remember thinking, "Cool, now all I need is a laptop!"
Reading this article makes me wonder about the "Whys" so I think I came up with something. If my company sends someone out with a laptop it's usually not to one of the covered cities. When it is (to a major city we already have offices in almost each one so the user just plugs into the lan and gets what they need. Hotels offer reasonable rates on local calls in addition to the fact that 3 accounts w/ nat'l isps is still under the cost of one ricochet. My company is relatively small. That and the fact that we have worldwide access (with the isp) makes ricochet a bad investment (for my co.).
As far as casual use, I dunno, too expensive for just a laptop. But thats just me.
Submitted for your approval. A man walking down the Las Vegas strip finds a quarter in the street and plays it in a Win a Free Car slot machine he had just passed. As he pulls the arm on the oversized slot machine the video display begins to roll. The first slot stops on Dodge Viper GTS as does the next slot. The third slot is about to stop on Dodge Viper and BSOD's. The man screams as his heart explodes from the emotional trauma. Somewhere in Washington, Bill Gates gets out of his Dodge Viper GTS and high fives Steve Ballmer.
You have entered The Microsoft Embedded Hardware Market. "Me Ted"
aside from that fact that I'm assuming the human race will be long gone (as in extinct) we'll be able to generate our own magnetic fields/gravity wells long before the sun goes nova.
it's not without some good points. I'm not gonna pull quotes out but the part where he says people want a computer that can turn on and off like a lamp (my words, not his) and do very specific things like word processing, internet browsing and video gaming is right on. They need to be done well enough such that people use it instead of learn it.
People like my mom would love computers if the operating system and by extension the apps didn't have a high learning curve. A good example is my TiVo. Once I gave her the DVD menu metaphor she started "getting it". I don't know if it qualifies as an app, an OS or both but it works really well for what it does.
One thing I feel he left out is that (IMO) computers need to come out of the computer room and make their way into the living room. I'm talkin connected to your TV (+cable) and stereo and then distributed to the rest of the house. A terminal in each room. Then you can use biometrics instead of keys and voice command instead of remotes. Just picture it, you could say "Clap Off!" instead of actually clapping off! wow
Never ever play against another (real)person. It's worse then a game of monopoly. It's like one of those really long traffic lights where you can literaly feel yourself aging except it spans 3+ hours of turn-based madness. It can be even worse... the length of a multiplayer game is exponentially proportional to the skillz of the player. You've been warned! "Me Ted"
Maybe this means that the average price in mined commodities will go down. Of course the pessimist in me says that the corps will just pocket whatever savings are realized through these methods.
What I'd really like to know is if any of the advancements they made to make the project work will be given back to the space and robotics community they tapped. "Me Ted"
Re:My favorite Challenger joke --I agree
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 2
I think Anonymous Coward suits you rather nicely.
Damn right! I sacrificed perfectly good karma for my joke. The least I could ask is some backup from some other wise-ass slashdotters... but no, all I get is Anonymous Cowards. fuck karma, you can't trade it up at Thinkgeek... sacrifice some!
"Me Ted"
They are even going so far as implementing policies of "asking" people carrying laptops with sensitive information to not work on/with that info in such a public place as an airport due to shoulder surfers and laptop thieves.
This should tons of fun for casual users but I imagine corps getting scared shitless over this. Even I would be a little nervous checking my yah00 mail. "Me Ted"
Don't forget Dell. They've been offering servers with RH 6.2 for at least 6 or 8 months now, maybe even longer. I know for a fact that Dell outsources its linux server support. I doubt IBM does that but do you think that Compaq does? "Me Ted"
I'm sure when you can buy a machine that can do a couple million mips for $20 ubiquity will result but the number of transistors and raw processing power needed for all the star trek stuff getting them churned out en masse wont help.
yeah i know about parallelism but we still need push Moore's Law some more "Me Ted"
First of all, General and Special Relativity are explained. They aren't proofed, just run-down. One of the running themes of the book is that w/o at least a superficial understanding special relativity the rest of the book will be lost upon the reader.
Words and contexts of blackholes, etc.... doesn't teach you a thing about physics....Besides, if a physics book isn't 60% math, it's no good.
Then I guess we don't have any quarrel since the book is more about celestial anomolies and only touches the physics aspect superficially. I personally didn't read it to learn about physics and didn't think I would, I read because I was curious about how space and time interact.
It really pisses me off when I see slashdot people comment over physics related subjects because everytime they do, Hawkings is always brought up. Well let me tell you, in the physics community, no one gives a shit about Hawkins and his books. It's like the National Enquirer to us.
What you equate his popular work to aside, the fact that he's publishing something you already know in a "for dummies" format doesn't surprise me as being offensive to you. Having said that I honestly don't care what you or your so called community thinks of his work. He brought me closer to understanding to nature of the universe as it pertains to me and that can't be anything less then good thing.
I think Stephen Hawkings A Brief History Of Time is the best summation/applied theory of Einsteins theorys. Hawking gives Einstein mad props throughout the book and Hawkings respect for the guy shines through. After reading A Brief History I think that as a layman the applications of E=MC^2 are more interesting the then the nuts 'n bolts of the theory itself. "Me Ted"
The days of simple PnP pirated video are prob coming to an end.
As the hardware gets smarter and smarter that only means that the game of cat and mouse between the pirates and broadcasters are is going to get more and more heated. As boradcasters get smarter and start adopting new tech, the people supplying the public with the means to circumvent are gonna have to catch up. Remember all those early copies of Phrack that had all those HOWTO-Cable Piracy tx files?
RANT
The worst part is that the paradigm of "pirate" is shifting more and more towards the mainstream, instead of on the fringe as it always was. It's gonna be John Q. Sixpack with his pirated (made in China) VCR that can record everything he wants, watching TV on his pirate TV (made in Taiwan) connected to his pirate Sattelite dish (modded in the good ole US) that lets him watch East Coast NBC and West Coast NBC.
I guess the assumption that Corps are only worried about the "big time" pirates are over. Even I myself had the assumption that they were only worried about the rings that were dupeing their movies across the Atlantic/Pacific in bulk and that reg ppl were small potatoes and could only be prosecuted (picked on) at a loss. Are those days over? Will the FBI bust into trailer parks across the US under FCC/DMCA/UCITA/CPRM laws? Stayed tuned.... "Me Ted"
The only thing worse then doing laundry is cooking a meal (more complicated then pasta or white rice) and camaflouge fatigues will (thankfully) never catch on. They might smell like they need to be washed but they sure as hell wont look it! "Me Ted"
(Whose dollars put those folks up there in the first place?)
I find it curiously odd that NASA emplores our gov't to give them more/stop cutting funding because as they say, space exploration leads to technology that trickles down into the commercial markets and it's our destiny to explore space and yadda yadda yadda. Now they are turning around and saying, we know best and it's best you not know, but let us continue our work. What this really sounds like is that they don't want to catch shit for botched missions so people don't question their abilities and in turn lose funding. Buncha F-tards. "Me Ted"
This sounds like something that would have more use in the professional/educational instutions then it would in my living room.
One thing that confuses me is that all this work is being pushed towards digitizing the home theater and yet the movie studios cling to old film mediums. Someone should tell JVC and their ilk to develop the technology so that digital film isn't just a Speilberg/Lucas specialty. Record the movies in full digital 75gb/minute then worry how to translate that to the home you f-ing moronic hollywood f's! F! "Me Ted"
ColorMax acquired a broad patent license covering the human genes for color vision from the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. The patent also covers a revolutionary test for color blindness based on a simple analysis of the actual genes that cause the problem. The new test is the first major improvement in color vision testing in the last half of a century. It is also the first totally objective color vision test that can consistently classify color vision deficiencies. As such, it offers a solution to the problem of setting uniform standards in the workplace. And, for the first time, accurate testing of preschool and kindergarten aged children will be possible.
Yes they did patent the genes. I don't know why but they did. Second of all, if you read that ONE paragraph they also patented a genetic test for colorblindness (which is perfectly fine IMO). I can understand a lot of you being upset over this Co patenting the discovery of which genes cause color-blindness but it's not a completly bad patent. So I think maybe they shouldn't be strung up for this patent, just have all their people in one of those stocks in the middle of a town square for about a week.
Actually there are already working quantum computers. The premise of QC's is that instead of "switches" making up the permutation of 1's and 0's they use atoms which under quantum physical laws can exist as both at the same time. Instead of them being on OR off (1 or 0) its on AND off (1 and 0) at the same time. Definatly some wild shit.
If you have a 2 qubit computer, you have a possible of 4 bit positions- 01, 11, 00, 10. The fun part is that it's all at the same time. This parallelism is what give QC's their theoretical power.
Just yesterday I read an awesome (read: non technical) article on ABCnews' page about this very thing. Here's the link. "Me Ted"
Check this out: Wing Nuts is by far the better of the three products, originally designed for release by Rocket Science Games.
I need to stress again, that this venture is a real risk for a small company like GDG, so support on these initial releases is absolutely CRITICAL for future releases to come to light. If the gaming community supports us, we will continue to support them.
Between the lines it says, Please subsidize our crappy games so we can use that money to release the good game we know you really want. Sounds like shareware on crack to me. Emploring ppl to buy a product they released for the sake of releasing it doesn't inspire any philanthropic emotions. "Me Ted"
puns of wired "checking their sources" aside, this story must have been submitted a month ago and is only seeing press now. I'm sure if this story gets printed (on paper) we'll see a Whited-Out Section where Daikatana was.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't one of those 'Why is slashdot posting this blah blah blah' posts. IMO this is important in case anyone hasn't heard about the name change already.
Seriously though, gov't obfuscation of a questionable project? Please don't act surprised.
"Me Ted"
My guess is that most people just don't know about it. They need a big partner I think to help get the word out.
I live in NYC and have been hearing their commercials on the radio and have seen their ads on busses and on the trains. First time I saw one I remember thinking, "Cool, now all I need is a laptop!"
Reading this article makes me wonder about the "Whys" so I think I came up with something. If my company sends someone out with a laptop it's usually not to one of the covered cities. When it is (to a major city we already have offices in almost each one so the user just plugs into the lan and gets what they need. Hotels offer reasonable rates on local calls in addition to the fact that 3 accounts w/ nat'l isps is still under the cost of one ricochet. My company is relatively small. That and the fact that we have worldwide access (with the isp) makes ricochet a bad investment (for my co.).
As far as casual use, I dunno, too expensive for just a laptop. But thats just me.
"Me Ted"
Submitted for your approval. A man walking down the Las Vegas strip finds a quarter in the street and plays it in a Win a Free Car slot machine he had just passed. As he pulls the arm on the oversized slot machine the video display begins to roll. The first slot stops on Dodge Viper GTS as does the next slot. The third slot is about to stop on Dodge Viper and BSOD's. The man screams as his heart explodes from the emotional trauma. Somewhere in Washington, Bill Gates gets out of his Dodge Viper GTS and high fives Steve Ballmer.
You have entered The Microsoft Embedded Hardware Market.
"Me Ted"
aside from that fact that I'm assuming the human race will be long gone (as in extinct) we'll be able to generate our own magnetic fields/gravity wells long before the sun goes nova.
And yes my crack habit is going strong.
"Me Ted"
it's not without some good points. I'm not gonna pull quotes out but the part where he says people want a computer that can turn on and off like a lamp (my words, not his) and do very specific things like word processing, internet browsing and video gaming is right on. They need to be done well enough such that people use it instead of learn it.
People like my mom would love computers if the operating system and by extension the apps didn't have a high learning curve. A good example is my TiVo. Once I gave her the DVD menu metaphor she started "getting it". I don't know if it qualifies as an app, an OS or both but it works really well for what it does.
One thing I feel he left out is that (IMO) computers need to come out of the computer room and make their way into the living room. I'm talkin connected to your TV (+cable) and stereo and then distributed to the rest of the house. A terminal in each room. Then you can use biometrics instead of keys and voice command instead of remotes. Just picture it, you could say "Clap Off!" instead of actually clapping off! wow
"Me Ted"
Never ever play against another (real)person. It's worse then a game of monopoly. It's like one of those really long traffic lights where you can literaly feel yourself aging except it spans 3+ hours of turn-based madness. It can be even worse... the length of a multiplayer game is exponentially proportional to the skillz of the player. You've been warned!
"Me Ted"
Maybe this means that the average price in mined commodities will go down. Of course the pessimist in me says that the corps will just pocket whatever savings are realized through these methods.
What I'd really like to know is if any of the advancements they made to make the project work will be given back to the space and robotics community they tapped.
"Me Ted"
I think Anonymous Coward suits you rather nicely.
Damn right! I sacrificed perfectly good karma for my joke. The least I could ask is some backup from some other wise-ass slashdotters... but no, all I get is Anonymous Cowards. fuck karma, you can't trade it up at Thinkgeek... sacrifice some!
"Me Ted"
They are even going so far as implementing policies of "asking" people carrying laptops with sensitive information to not work on/with that info in such a public place as an airport due to shoulder surfers and laptop thieves.
This should tons of fun for casual users but I imagine corps getting scared shitless over this. Even I would be a little nervous checking my yah00 mail.
"Me Ted"
Don't forget Dell. They've been offering servers with RH 6.2 for at least 6 or 8 months now, maybe even longer. I know for a fact that Dell outsources its linux server support. I doubt IBM does that but do you think that Compaq does?
"Me Ted"
I'm sure when you can buy a machine that can do a couple million mips for $20 ubiquity will result but the number of transistors and raw processing power needed for all the star trek stuff getting them churned out en masse wont help.
yeah i know about parallelism but we still need push Moore's Law some more
"Me Ted"
Actually I have my money on Lowtax.
"Me Ted"
Thats a bunch of shit.
...Besides, if a physics book isn't 60% math, it's no good.
First of all, General and Special Relativity are explained. They aren't proofed, just run-down. One of the running themes of the book is that w/o at least a superficial understanding special relativity the rest of the book will be lost upon the reader.
Words and contexts of blackholes, etc.... doesn't teach you a thing about physics.
Then I guess we don't have any quarrel since the book is more about celestial anomolies and only touches the physics aspect superficially. I personally didn't read it to learn about physics and didn't think I would, I read because I was curious about how space and time interact.
It really pisses me off when I see slashdot people comment over physics related subjects because everytime they do, Hawkings is always brought up. Well let me tell you, in the physics community, no one gives a shit about Hawkins and his books. It's like the National Enquirer to us.
What you equate his popular work to aside, the fact that he's publishing something you already know in a "for dummies" format doesn't surprise me as being offensive to you. Having said that I honestly don't care what you or your so called community thinks of his work. He brought me closer to understanding to nature of the universe as it pertains to me and that can't be anything less then good thing.
This is not a flame
"Me Ted"
I think Stephen Hawkings A Brief History Of Time is the best summation/applied theory of Einsteins theorys. Hawking gives Einstein mad props throughout the book and Hawkings respect for the guy shines through. After reading A Brief History I think that as a layman the applications of E=MC^2 are more interesting the then the nuts 'n bolts of the theory itself.
"Me Ted"
I thought crypt/brute force ratios increased exponentially in real time and cpu years, not incrementatlly.
"Me Ted"
The days of simple PnP pirated video are prob coming to an end.
As the hardware gets smarter and smarter that only means that the game of cat and mouse between the pirates and broadcasters are is going to get more and more heated. As boradcasters get smarter and start adopting new tech, the people supplying the public with the means to circumvent are gonna have to catch up. Remember all those early copies of Phrack that had all those HOWTO-Cable Piracy tx files?
RANT
The worst part is that the paradigm of "pirate" is shifting more and more towards the mainstream, instead of on the fringe as it always was. It's gonna be John Q. Sixpack with his pirated (made in China) VCR that can record everything he wants, watching TV on his pirate TV (made in Taiwan) connected to his pirate Sattelite dish (modded in the good ole US) that lets him watch East Coast NBC and West Coast NBC.
I guess the assumption that Corps are only worried about the "big time" pirates are over. Even I myself had the assumption that they were only worried about the rings that were dupeing their movies across the Atlantic/Pacific in bulk and that reg ppl were small potatoes and could only be prosecuted (picked on) at a loss. Are those days over? Will the FBI bust into trailer parks across the US under FCC/DMCA/UCITA/CPRM laws? Stayed tuned....
"Me Ted"
The only thing worse then doing laundry is cooking a meal (more complicated then pasta or white rice) and camaflouge fatigues will (thankfully) never catch on. They might smell like they need to be washed but they sure as hell wont look it!
"Me Ted"
(Whose dollars put those folks up there in the first place?)
I find it curiously odd that NASA emplores our gov't to give them more/stop cutting funding because as they say, space exploration leads to technology that trickles down into the commercial markets and it's our destiny to explore space and yadda yadda yadda. Now they are turning around and saying, we know best and it's best you not know, but let us continue our work.
What this really sounds like is that they don't want to catch shit for botched missions so people don't question their abilities and in turn lose funding. Buncha F-tards.
"Me Ted"
a intarviwe wiht JeffK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
"Waht iS Lunix and woh cals yuo AAT?"
"Me Ted"
This sounds like something that would have more use in the professional/educational instutions then it would in my living room.
One thing that confuses me is that all this work is being pushed towards digitizing the home theater and yet the movie studios cling to old film mediums. Someone should tell JVC and their ilk to develop the technology so that digital film isn't just a Speilberg/Lucas specialty.
Record the movies in full digital 75gb/minute then worry how to translate that to the home you f-ing moronic hollywood f's! F!
"Me Ted"
First of all, RTFA.
ColorMax acquired a broad patent license covering the human genes for color vision from the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. The patent also covers a revolutionary test for color blindness based on a simple analysis of the actual genes that cause the problem. The new test is the first major improvement in color vision testing in the last half of a century. It is also the first totally objective color vision test that can consistently classify color vision deficiencies. As such, it offers a solution to the problem of setting uniform standards in the workplace. And, for the first time, accurate testing of preschool and kindergarten aged children will be possible.
Yes they did patent the genes. I don't know why but they did. Second of all, if you read that ONE paragraph they also patented a genetic test for colorblindness (which is perfectly fine IMO). I can understand a lot of you being upset over this Co patenting the discovery of which genes cause color-blindness but it's not a completly bad patent. So I think maybe they shouldn't be strung up for this patent, just have all their people in one of those stocks in the middle of a town square for about a week.
"Me Ted"
Actually there are already working quantum computers. The premise of QC's is that instead of "switches" making up the permutation of 1's and 0's they use atoms which under quantum physical laws can exist as both at the same time. Instead of them being on OR off (1 or 0) its on AND off (1 and 0) at the same time. Definatly some wild shit.
If you have a 2 qubit computer, you have a possible of 4 bit positions- 01, 11, 00, 10. The fun part is that it's all at the same time. This parallelism is what give QC's their theoretical power.
Just yesterday I read an awesome (read: non technical) article on ABCnews' page about this very thing. Here's the link.
"Me Ted"
Check this out:
Wing Nuts is by far the better of the three products, originally designed for release by Rocket Science Games.
I need to stress again, that this venture is a real risk for a small company like GDG, so support on these initial releases is absolutely CRITICAL for future releases to come to light. If the gaming community supports us, we will continue to support them.
Between the lines it says, Please subsidize our crappy games so we can use that money to release the good game we know you really want. Sounds like shareware on crack to me. Emploring ppl to buy a product they released for the sake of releasing it doesn't inspire any philanthropic emotions.
"Me Ted"
puns of wired "checking their sources" aside, this story must have been submitted a month ago and is only seeing press now. I'm sure if this story gets printed (on paper) we'll see a Whited-Out Section where Daikatana was.
"Me Ted"
... that Japanese booth babes are just as cute as their American counterparts? :)
Disclaimer: IANA (Asian)
"Me Ted"