You ask what's the "business sense" in getting a patent like this?
It's called ammunition. Companies build up "war chests" of patents which they use against each other as ways of competing, circumventing the marketplace... or rather, supplementing the marketplace.
Now, as much as we'd all like to see Company A take the high road and refuse to build up a war chest of patents for this purpose, all that means is that Company B builds theirs up without opposition, and uses it against Company A when the opportunity arises.
Comparisons with an arms race are not without merit. Nobody launches a patent lawsuit at IBM because they know IBM has a bunch of ICBMs waiting to send back at them....
It sounds like you're talking about getting a console and geeking out on it. I'll offer two recommendations for PS2 games, then.
Grand Theft Auto 3 (or GTA3: Vice City), as long as you aren't offended by senseless acts of violence. There's a certain joy in playing that game for the first time and the freedom you have to just walk up to someone, kick them out of their car, and go for a spin in it. If you're around 30, you'll definitely dig the Vice City vibe for some 80s retro action, and the soundtrack cannot be beat.
This is not a racing game, but you will get to drive around in fast cars. Plus, you can whip out an uzi in a mall, blow away a store full of gangsters, hop in your car, and escape to the beats of Michael Jackson.
Dark Cloud 2: I haven't played this, but a friend whose opinion I trust was totally sucked into it and spent far more time than makes sense playing this game. Great RPG-style goodness, lots to do, minigames, etc. A real great look at where "video games" have gone since you left the hobby.
While it might be technically possible to do that kind of triangulation, I doubt the infrustracture exists for this in most of the US.
A quick google search turns up this page for Santa Clara County in California where it explains the following:
Cellular phones are different and present a new challenge to 9-1-1 systems. In the San Francisco Bay Area, all 9-1-1 calls from cellular phones are presently routed to the California Highway Patrol Communications Center in Vallejo. Additionally, the information packet that they receive contains only the cellular telephone number. This also means the "location information" cannot be relayed automatically, since a cell phone is mobile. CHP dispatchers must determine the location of the emergency from information the caller provides, and if appropriate, transfer the caller to the proper local jurisdiction.
The only reason I know this is my grandparents (for whom a medical emergency is a real possibility) have a land-line just for that reason.
This might not be an attractive option for some people. For example, dialing 911 from a cell phone doesn't always do what you'd expect. In many areas, it connects you to the state police, or even the highway patrol (the assumption being that you're probably on the road, I guess).
Likewise, dialing 911 from a landline and leaving the phone off the hook will usually result in somebody coming to investigate, as they can figure out where you are. Not always so with a cell phone.
In a medical emergency, those minor differences could turn into life-or-death differences. Some folks just aren't willing to take that risk.
We're not quite at the point where the majority of people are comfortable with losing their normal phone service. In my home, for example, I get lousy reception on my mobile phone -- if I'm talking on the mobile phone, I'm usually confined to finding the "right spot" in the house and not moving much. Even then, the difference in quality is clear (no pun intended).
If everyone decided to not share anything so as to reduse their bandwidthe there would be nothing on any of the P2P networks.
You don't think that's what the RIAA would like to see happen?
If anything is going to be the "death" of P2P I think it'll be that. The casual user will probably stop sharing after one threatening letter from an ISP. People already run mods to the P2P apps which shut down downloads by leechers. Eventually you'll have a few brave souls willing to play dodgeball with their ISPs (or operating offshore) providing for hundreds of leechers who will be constantly trying to get all they can without giving anything.
Sound like anything familiar? Like, oh, warez/MP3 on the web or ftp?
The RIAA et al will never kill P2P no more than they can kill other distribution mechanisms. All they can do is make it so Joe Sixpack still has to go buy their product most of the time.
See, now it's actually going to be economical for the insane Soul Calibur II player to buy all three consoles (and all three versions of the game) so as to play each of the three different "special" characters.
PA's response to this pufferfish threat was to do something that really could get them in trouble.
I disagree. I think the original strip was more questionable than the new one.
Obviously I am not an expert on IP, or a lawyer, or even an IP law hobbyist, but I do know that directly poking fun at how a company does business is a protected form of speech with a rich history. What we have here is basically a "political cartoon" targeting a business for their bullying method of dealing with the public.
It is a very interesting thing to think about. I agree that the text update was thought-provoking.
One difference between me telling someone: "Take a left at the Texaco" and the PA strip is that I'm not making any money by telling someone to take a left at the Texaco, whereas PA is making money (albeit not a lot) off people laughing at the Strawberry Shortcake comic.
There are tons of complications here -- as two others have already said, why didn't Pepsi send Mel Brooks a threatening letter when Pizza the Hut was used in Spaceballs... I don't know. Did they? Hmm. Maybe the real reason is that MGM could have fought back, and Tycho and Gabe obviously can't.
It's also possible MGM called Pepsi and said, "Hey, here's what we're thinking of doing with Spaceballs...."
In any case, it's not an obvious open-and-shut case of parody. Gabe and Tycho would be spending money and (perhaps more importantly) time on defending their work. So they took it down, but not before offering one potshot (a funnier, and more clearly protected-speech one, at that).
I actually came away with the opposite feeling. While the first strip was clearly a parody, it was a parody of American McGee, and not a parody of American Greetings. They'd probably have a strong legal leg to stand on if McGee came to them with a lawsuit.
However, because they're using a third party's intellectual property in the context of the parody, it's a little fuzzier. Spaceballs parodying Star Wars is cool... Spaceballs parodying Star Wars with a title character named Strawberry Shortcake might be a different story.
The more recent strip, however, is clearly a criticism of American Greetings' policies, and seems more obviously "safe" under various free-speech umbrellas than the first one. It's not even using any of their IP.
1: Monopoly broken up by government. 2: Local companies and national carriers hold secret meetings with government regulators, decide how to screw customer over. 3: ??? 4: Profit!!
Given all the possible problems with an email culture, it is still vastly superior to any alternative I can come up with.
I can choose to ignore a new email. In fact, my taskbar shows that I have new mail _right now_ but I'm typing this instead. Wow!
I cannot choose to ignore somebody walking into my cube and yapping away. I cannot choose to ignore the phone (well, I could take it off the hook, or silence the ringer).
On the other hand, I can easily read the subject of an email and know right away if it's something I can read in an hour, or if it's something I need to answer right away. Try that with a phone call or visit.
I can't tell you how angry it makes me when I get a phone call or a visit. I'd rather have the person in the next cube send me an email than holler over the wall. I know some people prefer face-to-face... that's fine. But send me a meeting request via email, don't just drop by. Let me manage my distractions, instead of vice-versa.
And, as many others have already said -- email provides a permanent record of things. I can't count the number of times I've left a meeting, typed up (or received) a summary for distribution to everyone, and had someone reply to the mail with a misunderstanding. Especially in an environment where not everyone speaks the same language at the same skill level, having the chance to clarify every detail in writing is invaluable.
This article, from Wired in May 2001, talks about how Sony was giving developers access to some prototype PS3-style hardware for tinkering/hacking. Granted it was just a bunch of beefed-up PS-1 processors in parallel, but it shows they were already courting developers for the PS3 a year ago.
And, for more on the "cell" technology, check out this Red Herring article from last summer, and this Inquirier.net article that includes a picture from the USPT office.
Given all that, I'd still be surprised if this was in US stores in time for XMas. I just don't think they'll have enough time to hype it sufficiently. On the other hand, if the tech is really almost done, do they want to wait until XMas 2004? Hrm....
Sony may be winning the console war, but I'd say their hold on their lead is pretty tenuous. They need to keep people buying their systems.
My impression, and I admit it's from a pretty cursory overview of the console world, is that the PS2 gets its market share because of its market recognition (the name "Playstation" means "home console" in much the same way "Atari" used to) and its huge game library. Folks who are real graphics nuts are talking about how much the PS2 lags behind the competitors in terms of how "pretty" the games are.
A fully backwards-compatible PS3 would definitely help this, without losing their two main advantages in the market. A PS3 that isn't backwards compatible had better have some real big pluses going for it.
In a web-based hardware-monitoring product (reports on the status of hardware, does not allow changes to anything), we've built in several known ways to circumvent system behavior (including authentication and authorization) via configuration file changes. These are used internally to facilitate testing or debugging, or in the field to help with customer support.
Some of these are in the customer documentation, and some only documented internally.
However, these are not traditional back doors as they require access to the server. To make the change the administrator must shut down the application, change a configuration file, and start it back up. So, the application is at worst as secure as the server it is on - as is the case with many applications.
So, no, I've never put in a "true" back door, nor has anyone on a group I've worked on (that I'm aware of). But, we've put in many ways to get around system behaviors, some of which have security implications.
Arcades still see some action, worldwide, as a way to balance a game before its console conversion.
I speak specifically of fighting games, where the arcade version will come out while the console version is still in development. The arcade version will be tweaked and studied, and any lessons learned there will find their way into the console game.
Or so goes the theory.
I know I personally dumped about 1/4 the purcahse price of the (not yet released) Soul Calibur 2 into a SC2 arcade machine. But, of course, knowing the game was coming out on the consoles within 6 months kept me from going back and dumping any more....
Given that I have said I wouldn't want to change anything in my own past, would I want to have some information about the future -now- or would I rather stumble into it?
Very insightful. If I had mod points today it would be marked as such:)
In another post I said I wouldn't change anything -- and I wouldn't. But these are things I'd give as advice to generic twelve year olds in a similar position to myself at that age -- a nerdy kid who gets picked on because he's poor, weak, nerdy, and in a fanatical religion.
Become an independent thinker as soon as possible. A good part of your pain comes from the brainwashing of your religious youth. Read _Stranger in a Strange Land_ and _Job: A Comedy of Justice_ before you go to High School. I read them halfway through and they changed my life. Maybe reading them sooner would have prevented some high school pain.
Don't just give your friendship to anybody who is willing to take it. There is a perceived solidarity among those who are downtrodden, but some of those people are real low-lifes and will try to drag you down. It's not really true that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Pick your friends carefully -- they have a profound influence on you.
Don't count on being lucky and not getting caught. There's nothing wrong with breaking some rules, but don't assume because you've never been caught you can't get caught. Don't get stupid. One mistake at the wrong time can change everything.
Don't confuse your hormones with genuine affection. She's not perfect. She's probably not even perfect for you.
Life is full of unique opportunities. You might die tomorrow. Take those opportunities when you can. Don't assume you're immortal and will have forever to chase those things down.
Ok, maybe not. But in truth, I look at where I got in life, and even though there were some awful years between 12 and 18, I think if I somehow dodged them then the great things that happened in the 12 years after that wouldn't have happened.
I would love to see an alternate universe where my teenage self made different decisions. I'd like to observe -- if I had done this differently, would a certain relationship have ended differently? Would I have done as well in school? Would I have made more friends, or diferent friends?
But, I hold no illusions that making those decisions would still leave me the person I am today. I find the idea of reversing them interesting in an intellectual sense, but I'd never ask my past self to do reverse them, for fear of losing the core of "me" that makes me everything I am today.
Re:Conservative/Liberal take on it
on
Fooled by Randomness
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the truth is more complex than your cardboard liberals or conservatives would have us believe.
The truth is that while some people may become successful or suffer terribly largely through luck, there are situations where you can drastically improve or destroy your life through your own choices.
You can't blame everything on circumstance, but you can't take credit for every good thing that happens to you, either.
That's why I can't stand cardboard conservatives or cardboard liberals. The world is so much more complicated than either of them give it credit for.
"my software is being updated, but libX isn't, then i wouldn't want to recompile libX"
I guess it depends on exactly how much you trust the software that decides what depends on what and what's changed. Can you honestly tell me you've never had a problem that doing a "make clean" fixed?
All I'm saying is that for the groups I've worked in, the cost of having the automated script do a "make clean all" as opposed to "make all" each night is considered acceptable for the peace of mind that knowing that absolutely every change is accounted for and there's no possible dependencies that got dropped in by make.
In all the software groups I've been involved in, it's considered good practice to do a full clean build nightly. Doing incremental builds is fine for developers, but when you want to make a drop that goes into an automated testing suite, etc., you do a full clean build each time, "just to be safe."
Poor Google Sets. I wanted to see if it would figure out a list of hair colors, so I put in "Blonde" and "Brunette."
The rest of the set? (I should have predicted this):
Fetish
Breasts
Amateur
Exhibitionism Redhead
Mature
Babes
Underwear
Group
Latina.
Ok, then let's not use installing a new video card; let's use something my computer-phobic in-laws just did: buying a digital camera.
They're using XP Home. They plugged the camera into the port and _blam_ everything just _worked_. No fuss. Nothing. They actually called me to tell me how easy it was, after warning me it was likely I'd hear from them.
I have this mental image of something like The Iron Chef. I think the commentary style would work well:)
Male Voice: "Iron Hacker Ginsburg is opening another xterm. I wonder what's going on?" Female Voice: "Is that kshell?" Male Voice: "Hrm. Well, I don't know...." Male Voice (from floor): "Sysop!" Male Voice: "Yes?" Male Voice (from floor): "Ginsburg is indeed opening another xterm, and it's not kshell, it's a special shell he's written himself. When I asked about it, he told me it has a custom completion tool and command substitution algorithm." Female Voice: "Oooh.." Male Voice: "Very unusual. Let's see what challenger Fordham has up his sleeve...."
Slashdot Mirror
You ask what's the "business sense" in getting a patent like this?
... or rather, supplementing the marketplace.
It's called ammunition. Companies build up "war chests" of patents which they use against each other as ways of competing, circumventing the marketplace
Now, as much as we'd all like to see Company A take the high road and refuse to build up a war chest of patents for this purpose, all that means is that Company B builds theirs up without opposition, and uses it against Company A when the opportunity arises.
Comparisons with an arms race are not without merit. Nobody launches a patent lawsuit at IBM because they know IBM has a bunch of ICBMs waiting to send back at them....
It sounds like you're talking about getting a console and geeking out on it. I'll offer two recommendations for PS2 games, then.
Grand Theft Auto 3 (or GTA3: Vice City), as long as you aren't offended by senseless acts of violence. There's a certain joy in playing that game for the first time and the freedom you have to just walk up to someone, kick them out of their car, and go for a spin in it. If you're around 30, you'll definitely dig the Vice City vibe for some 80s retro action, and the soundtrack cannot be beat.
This is not a racing game, but you will get to drive around in fast cars. Plus, you can whip out an uzi in a mall, blow away a store full of gangsters, hop in your car, and escape to the beats of Michael Jackson.
Dark Cloud 2: I haven't played this, but a friend whose opinion I trust was totally sucked into it and spent far more time than makes sense playing this game. Great RPG-style goodness, lots to do, minigames, etc. A real great look at where "video games" have gone since you left the hobby.
Have fun with your video game craziness!
A quick google search turns up this page for Santa Clara County in California where it explains the following:
Cellular phones are different and present a new challenge to 9-1-1 systems. In the San Francisco Bay Area, all 9-1-1 calls from cellular phones are presently routed to the California Highway Patrol Communications Center in Vallejo. Additionally, the information packet that they receive contains only the cellular telephone number. This also means the "location information" cannot be relayed automatically, since a cell phone is mobile. CHP dispatchers must determine the location of the emergency from information the caller provides, and if appropriate, transfer the caller to the proper local jurisdiction.
The only reason I know this is my grandparents (for whom a medical emergency is a real possibility) have a land-line just for that reason.
This might not be an attractive option for some people. For example, dialing 911 from a cell phone doesn't always do what you'd expect. In many areas, it connects you to the state police, or even the highway patrol (the assumption being that you're probably on the road, I guess).
Likewise, dialing 911 from a landline and leaving the phone off the hook will usually result in somebody coming to investigate, as they can figure out where you are. Not always so with a cell phone.
In a medical emergency, those minor differences could turn into life-or-death differences. Some folks just aren't willing to take that risk.
We're not quite at the point where the majority of people are comfortable with losing their normal phone service. In my home, for example, I get lousy reception on my mobile phone -- if I'm talking on the mobile phone, I'm usually confined to finding the "right spot" in the house and not moving much. Even then, the difference in quality is clear (no pun intended).
You don't think that's what the RIAA would like to see happen?
If anything is going to be the "death" of P2P I think it'll be that. The casual user will probably stop sharing after one threatening letter from an ISP. People already run mods to the P2P apps which shut down downloads by leechers. Eventually you'll have a few brave souls willing to play dodgeball with their ISPs (or operating offshore) providing for hundreds of leechers who will be constantly trying to get all they can without giving anything.
Sound like anything familiar? Like, oh, warez/MP3 on the web or ftp?
The RIAA et al will never kill P2P no more than they can kill other distribution mechanisms. All they can do is make it so Joe Sixpack still has to go buy their product most of the time.
I can't be the only one with Star Trek III flashbacks here.
See, now it's actually going to be economical for the insane Soul Calibur II player to buy all three consoles (and all three versions of the game) so as to play each of the three different "special" characters.
Not that I know any such people. Ahem.
I disagree. I think the original strip was more questionable than the new one.
Obviously I am not an expert on IP, or a lawyer, or even an IP law hobbyist, but I do know that directly poking fun at how a company does business is a protected form of speech with a rich history. What we have here is basically a "political cartoon" targeting a business for their bullying method of dealing with the public.
It is a very interesting thing to think about. I agree that the text update was thought-provoking.
... I don't know. Did they? Hmm. Maybe the real reason is that MGM could have fought back, and Tycho and Gabe obviously can't.
One difference between me telling someone: "Take a left at the Texaco" and the PA strip is that I'm not making any money by telling someone to take a left at the Texaco, whereas PA is making money (albeit not a lot) off people laughing at the Strawberry Shortcake comic.
There are tons of complications here -- as two others have already said, why didn't Pepsi send Mel Brooks a threatening letter when Pizza the Hut was used in Spaceballs
It's also possible MGM called Pepsi and said, "Hey, here's what we're thinking of doing with Spaceballs...."
In any case, it's not an obvious open-and-shut case of parody. Gabe and Tycho would be spending money and (perhaps more importantly) time on defending their work. So they took it down, but not before offering one potshot (a funnier, and more clearly protected-speech one, at that).
I actually came away with the opposite feeling. While the first strip was clearly a parody, it was a parody of American McGee, and not a parody of American Greetings. They'd probably have a strong legal leg to stand on if McGee came to them with a lawsuit.
... Spaceballs parodying Star Wars with a title character named Strawberry Shortcake might be a different story.
:).
However, because they're using a third party's intellectual property in the context of the parody, it's a little fuzzier. Spaceballs parodying Star Wars is cool
The more recent strip, however, is clearly a criticism of American Greetings' policies, and seems more obviously "safe" under various free-speech umbrellas than the first one. It's not even using any of their IP.
I also think it's funnier, but that's just me
(Is this joke dead yet?)
1: Monopoly broken up by government.
2: Local companies and national carriers hold secret meetings with government regulators, decide how to screw customer over.
3: ???
4: Profit!!
Given all the possible problems with an email culture, it is still vastly superior to any alternative I can come up with.
... that's fine. But send me a meeting request via email, don't just drop by. Let me manage my distractions, instead of vice-versa.
I can choose to ignore a new email. In fact, my taskbar shows that I have new mail _right now_ but I'm typing this instead. Wow!
I cannot choose to ignore somebody walking into my cube and yapping away. I cannot choose to ignore the phone (well, I could take it off the hook, or silence the ringer).
On the other hand, I can easily read the subject of an email and know right away if it's something I can read in an hour, or if it's something I need to answer right away. Try that with a phone call or visit.
I can't tell you how angry it makes me when I get a phone call or a visit. I'd rather have the person in the next cube send me an email than holler over the wall. I know some people prefer face-to-face
And, as many others have already said -- email provides a permanent record of things. I can't count the number of times I've left a meeting, typed up (or received) a summary for distribution to everyone, and had someone reply to the mail with a misunderstanding. Especially in an environment where not everyone speaks the same language at the same skill level, having the chance to clarify every detail in writing is invaluable.
Here is a similar story on CNet.
And, for more on the "cell" technology, check out this Red Herring article from last summer, and this Inquirier.net article that includes a picture from the USPT office.
Given all that, I'd still be surprised if this was in US stores in time for XMas. I just don't think they'll have enough time to hype it sufficiently. On the other hand, if the tech is really almost done, do they want to wait until XMas 2004? Hrm....
Sony may be winning the console war, but I'd say their hold on their lead is pretty tenuous. They need to keep people buying their systems.
My impression, and I admit it's from a pretty cursory overview of the console world, is that the PS2 gets its market share because of its market recognition (the name "Playstation" means "home console" in much the same way "Atari" used to) and its huge game library. Folks who are real graphics nuts are talking about how much the PS2 lags behind the competitors in terms of how "pretty" the games are.
A fully backwards-compatible PS3 would definitely help this, without losing their two main advantages in the market. A PS3 that isn't backwards compatible had better have some real big pluses going for it.
In a web-based hardware-monitoring product (reports on the status of hardware, does not allow changes to anything), we've built in several known ways to circumvent system behavior (including authentication and authorization) via configuration file changes. These are used internally to facilitate testing or debugging, or in the field to help with customer support.
Some of these are in the customer documentation, and some only documented internally.
However, these are not traditional back doors as they require access to the server. To make the change the administrator must shut down the application, change a configuration file, and start it back up. So, the application is at worst as secure as the server it is on - as is the case with many applications.
So, no, I've never put in a "true" back door, nor has anyone on a group I've worked on (that I'm aware of). But, we've put in many ways to get around system behaviors, some of which have security implications.
Arcades still see some action, worldwide, as a way to balance a game before its console conversion.
I speak specifically of fighting games, where the arcade version will come out while the console version is still in development. The arcade version will be tweaked and studied, and any lessons learned there will find their way into the console game.
Or so goes the theory.
I know I personally dumped about 1/4 the purcahse price of the (not yet released) Soul Calibur 2 into a SC2 arcade machine. But, of course, knowing the game was coming out on the consoles within 6 months kept me from going back and dumping any more....
That's a much more interesting question.
:)
Given that I have said I wouldn't want to change anything in my own past, would I want to have some information about the future -now- or would I rather stumble into it?
Very insightful. If I had mod points today it would be marked as such
Well, in that case, here's some advice.
In another post I said I wouldn't change anything -- and I wouldn't. But these are things I'd give as advice to generic twelve year olds in a similar position to myself at that age -- a nerdy kid who gets picked on because he's poor, weak, nerdy, and in a fanatical religion.
Become an independent thinker as soon as possible. A good part of your pain comes from the brainwashing of your religious youth. Read _Stranger in a Strange Land_ and _Job: A Comedy of Justice_ before you go to High School. I read them halfway through and they changed my life. Maybe reading them sooner would have prevented some high school pain.
Don't just give your friendship to anybody who is willing to take it. There is a perceived solidarity among those who are downtrodden, but some of those people are real low-lifes and will try to drag you down. It's not really true that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Pick your friends carefully -- they have a profound influence on you.
Don't count on being lucky and not getting caught. There's nothing wrong with breaking some rules, but don't assume because you've never been caught you can't get caught. Don't get stupid. One mistake at the wrong time can change everything.
Don't confuse your hormones with genuine affection. She's not perfect. She's probably not even perfect for you.
Life is full of unique opportunities. You might die tomorrow. Take those opportunities when you can. Don't assume you're immortal and will have forever to chase those things down.
Twelve was too late to change anything.
Ok, maybe not. But in truth, I look at where I got in life, and even though there were some awful years between 12 and 18, I think if I somehow dodged them then the great things that happened in the 12 years after that wouldn't have happened.
I would love to see an alternate universe where my teenage self made different decisions. I'd like to observe -- if I had done this differently, would a certain relationship have ended differently? Would I have done as well in school? Would I have made more friends, or diferent friends?
But, I hold no illusions that making those decisions would still leave me the person I am today. I find the idea of reversing them interesting in an intellectual sense, but I'd never ask my past self to do reverse them, for fear of losing the core of "me" that makes me everything I am today.
I think the truth is more complex than your cardboard liberals or conservatives would have us believe.
:) )
The truth is that while some people may become successful or suffer terribly largely through luck, there are situations where you can drastically improve or destroy your life through your own choices.
You can't blame everything on circumstance, but you can't take credit for every good thing that happens to you, either.
That's why I can't stand cardboard conservatives or cardboard liberals. The world is so much more complicated than either of them give it credit for.
(Yeah, I know, off-topic
"my software is being updated, but libX isn't, then i wouldn't want to recompile libX"
I guess it depends on exactly how much you trust the software that decides what depends on what and what's changed. Can you honestly tell me you've never had a problem that doing a "make clean" fixed?
All I'm saying is that for the groups I've worked in, the cost of having the automated script do a "make clean all" as opposed to "make all" each night is considered acceptable for the peace of mind that knowing that absolutely every change is accounted for and there's no possible dependencies that got dropped in by make.
In all the software groups I've been involved in, it's considered good practice to do a full clean build nightly. Doing incremental builds is fine for developers, but when you want to make a drop that goes into an automated testing suite, etc., you do a full clean build each time, "just to be safe."
Poor Google Sets. I wanted to see if it would figure out a list of hair colors, so I put in "Blonde" and "Brunette."
The rest of the set? (I should have predicted this):
Fetish
Breasts
Amateur
Exhibitionism
Redhead
Mature
Babes
Underwear
Group
Latina.
Ok, then let's not use installing a new video card; let's use something my computer-phobic in-laws just did: buying a digital camera.
They're using XP Home. They plugged the camera into the port and _blam_ everything just _worked_. No fuss. Nothing. They actually called me to tell me how easy it was, after warning me it was likely I'd hear from them.
Think it would be that easy with Linux?
I have this mental image of something like The Iron Chef. I think the commentary style would work well :)
Male Voice: "Iron Hacker Ginsburg is opening another xterm. I wonder what's going on?"
Female Voice: "Is that kshell?"
Male Voice: "Hrm. Well, I don't know...."
Male Voice (from floor): "Sysop!"
Male Voice: "Yes?"
Male Voice (from floor): "Ginsburg is indeed opening another xterm, and it's not kshell, it's a special shell he's written himself. When I asked about it, he told me it has a custom completion tool and command substitution algorithm."
Female Voice: "Oooh.."
Male Voice: "Very unusual. Let's see what challenger Fordham has up his sleeve...."