I heard the playtest sucked...
on
Virtual Simerica
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The things that made the original Sims game interesting for more than just a couple hours were all the various ways you could break the game. Installing user-created mods or families. It's one thing to have a textbook adulterous relationship in the context of the game. It's quite another (and significantly more entertaining) when Beavis and Butthead come over and start trashing your house and lighting fires.
The people I've spoken to have all said the same thing. All this has gone from the Sims online. It's all about fighting your meters and trying to keep your sims happy and not about testing the bounds of the electronic world.
Thanks, but when I die in a game, I like it to be from being whacked with a Firey Sword of Cleaving and not because I got a paper-cut reading the newspaper.
Me: I'm looking for an RF Modulator so I can plug my DVD player into a TV without AV inputs. (Don't get me started...)
Shack Sales Clerk: Uhmm... That's like a VCR, right? We've got all our VCRs on that wall right over there.
Me: Uh, no. It's a signal adapater. (Surely someone who works around electronics every day should understand this, right?) It converts composite audio/video signal output to rf signal for a coaxial cable input.
Clerk: It's an adapter?
Me: (Thinking the light has finally turned on) Yes! It's got a coaxial output on one end and RCA style audio-video inputs on the other.
Clerk: Here ya go! (He hands me a RCA 'Y' splitter.)
Me: *Sigh*...
I did manage to get the guy to give me an RF modulator, but only after I retrieved a Radio Shack ad from behind the counter and pointed at it in the ad.
For a while, when working with my video capture/playback setup, RS was the only place where I could buy cables and connectors like I needed. This is no longer the case now that Best Buy carries a wider selection of this sort of thing. At the time, however, I would get an ATM withdrawal before going and pay for the cables, adapters, and one time wall-plates with cash.
"What's your phone number?" I would always be asked.
"You need to have that for a cash purchase?" I replied.
"Uhm..."
Since RS employess get a comission. (Do they still?) They were always quick to try to keep me from leaving. Most of the time I could see that they would type their own or dummy information into the computer when I refused to give them mine.
I've always been fascinated by the fact that mammals have five major appendages... and five major digits on four of those appendages and five major sense organs (tounge, lips, ears, eyes, nose) on the fifth one. Of course, it's pure conjecture that this might be a reflection of a lower-level self-symmetry, but it's still interesting conjecture.
It was also the first to introduce Geordi's new eyes and the EMH (In Next Generation context anyways).
While I won't argue with how much those appealed to zealous Trek fans, I personally think that those two scenes in particular are the two weakest scenes in 'First Contact'.
One was a guest shot. It wasn't necessary in the overall plot of the story other than as a pretty cheap joke-- the MH Doctor offering the Borg skin-cream. The other was a rather pointless segue to demonstrate how Geordi's eyes worked. Lavar Burton must have demanded in his contract that he was not going to work with the hair-clip on his face any more. The eye implants don't do anything differently than the hair-clip did, and are not mentioned at all in the rest of the movie, or even in Insurrection (Weakest of the TNG movies, IMHO.). Personally, I think it would have been better if they had eithe glossed over Geordi's new eyes entirely, or made them central to the plot.
1. The Holodeck is strictly off limits. It may not be metioned, alluded to, or featured as a plot element.
2. Only the badguys quote Shakespear.
3. NOBODY quotes or signs songs from musicals. Not Rogers and Hammerstein. Not Andrew Lloyd Webber. ESPECIALLY not Gilbert and Sullivan!
4. Everybody who dies stays dead.
5. Time-travel is permitted, but must be used as a humourous plot element, and not as part of the denoument.
6. Villans must be sane, intelligent, calculating and preferrably vengeful. Regardless, all villans must have beleivable motivation. Insane, god-like beings need not appear.
7. Little or no new technology should be introduced in the course of the movie, epecially technology relating to time-travel or the holodeck. If technology is introduced it should be treated with care-- do not show a knife on screen unless it's going to end up in someone's back!
8. Redshirts must die by the score.
9. There must be at least 25 minutes of space battle footage in which at least one ship is violently and graphically ripped apart.
and
10. The Enterprise must suffer heavy, even crippling damage in the course of the fight. It may even be destroyed.
First thing that popped into my head when I read this was the Oingo-Boingo 'Weird Science' theme. Dates me pretty soundly, I guess.
This here is the time to start thinking about everything science fiction has ever told us when dealing with artificaial life. It's one of the few sub-genres of science fiction that's almost always cautionary... from 'Frankenstein'--
"FIRST POST... BAAAAD!!"
--to 'Species'--
"That hole in his back makes him look just like the goatse.cx guy... except it's because his spine was torn out."
Man will create life. There's no doubt about it. It's a given. Eventually, we'll no doubt even create life that looks, acts, and feels human. What we should never forget, however, is that we are stepping into territory where angels fear to tread and should take each action with only after gut-wrenching, soul-searching thought.
Is it resonsible, moral, or ethical to create life when the planet is as overcrowded as it is?
Is it ethical to create life that can feel, think, or be hurt when you *know* we're going to dissect and vivisect of what we create?
Is it ethical or responsible to create life, when we know that we're already making serious mistakes in genetic engineering, such as the genes that recently jumped between soya and corn?
This is a wonderful new field of science that has incredible potential for human advancement. It also has incredible potential for misuse and unethical behavior.
For those who don't understand Hindu (Very, very common religion in India), one of the basic premises of the religion is that people are reincarnated over and over again after they die until they generate enough Karma in the form of good deeds, positive experiences, and general learning and understanding that they reach a state of enlightenment and can proceed on from the cycle of mortal reincarnation to Nirvana-- a state of ultimate contentment with no worries, cares, needs, or demands.
Thats why cows are sacred to Hindus... not because of some strange religious edict or a prejudice against beef, but because cattle seen as a higher, more enlightened life form than humans. While I make no pretense about my love of beef in the grilled-to-a-juicy-medium-rare sense, you have to admit that cows do more for the environment we do on an invidual basis (entire herds and livestock yards can be pretty polluting and are responsible for a lot of C02 emission, tho) and with remarkably fewer cares than a human.
Karma has been westernized to mean the total of good deeds a person has and it's used here on Slashdot to indicate a measure of thoughtful posting, but don't forget that 'real' karma is the unmeasurable enlightenment you have acheived.
A person who loses a hand will have the part of his brain which was previously used to control this hand 'absorbed' by sections of the brain with totally different functions.
Which brings up the physiology behind phantom sensations. I read a Discover article a little while back about a man who lost an arm in a car accident. He, like many amputees, could still feel his arm and was able to describe what it was feeling.
Reasearchers figured out that any sensation that the man felt on his chest, neck or chin was also felt on this phantom arm. The part of the brain that was used to feeling inputs from his arm started getting inputs from the adjacent areas-- the front of his torso-- as the neurons for those areas grew new dendrites into the 'abandoned' area of his brain.
Launch a powerful laser into orbit... or put it someplace high enough on the earth so that it doesn't lose power in the atmosphere. Aim at the asteroid. Use computer controlled aim to correct the targeting as both the earth and the asteroid move through space. Use said laser to heat up, melt, or even vaporize the rock on a particular point on the asteroid. Turn the power on the laser up high enough that the plume of heated material eventually rockets the asteroid into a new orbit.
I think I read somewhere that brain fires bursts of neurotransmitters in the range of 40 Hz. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, you're conciousness is running on a processor that's slower than the chip in your GBA or your Palm Pilot.
I think that what most people don't get is that the brain is not that powerful a computer... It's just very, very good at what it's supposed to do.
Think of it this way. Instead of a computer and mobo combination, consider the brain as dozens and dozens of embedded micro-controllers that talk to eachother via a protocol. Each one is very specific. We have one that handles getting audio signals, one that handles getting video signals... and then completely different controllers for recognizing voice, music, speech, text, and images. There is one overlying controller-- the frontal lobe-- but most of what is does is pattern matching and random number generation. It's the combination or all these working together, not the raw ability of the brain to process information, that makes the magic of 'conciousness'.
If your customer tells you he wants his product to do x, then you give him a piece of software that will do x, even if you know he really wants y and z.
Case in point... DeCSS. The entire CSS scheme, which is fairly robust on its surface, revolved around having a secret key... a secret key that was going to be included in millions of decoder chips and in hundreds of software releases available to millions of people.
All the technical genius in the world can see that the second the key was in the hands of the public in one way or the other, it would be copied and it would be redistributed. The only reason that Jon Johansen got in trouble was because he was a kid and really didn't understand how many powerful entities he was upsetting when he released DeCSS. A person who had to copy the key off of a eprom or decrypt it out of DVD player firmware would probably understand a little better than someone who took a debugger to RealPlayer and found the key there, unencrypted.
The developers of the DeCSS scheme *knew* this would happen, as did the technical minds that came up with the CD watermarking protection scheme. Their bosses, the ones directing the development pretended like they didn't know, but you know they did.
Newton was a classic Victorian prude and mysogynist-- and probably a closet homosexual. He was quite proud of his 'virginity' and proclaimed upon his death bed that no woman had soiled him. (I need to look up the exact quote.)
After his landmark physics theories, Newton spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to use numerology to calculate the end of the world based on passages in the Bible. Despite his intelligence, he had many unreasonable fears hatreds.
Photoshop runs under Wine, I've heard, but not well. Also, type support, which is highly necessary for any kind of decent design work, is miserable under most linux WM's.
One of the tactics Standard Oil would employ was to sell oil and petroleum products well below cost, absorbing the loss for the sake of driving competitors to the point of ruin, and then buying their ruined competitors' assets.
Sony is a strong, powerful company. Nintendo is slightly less so. I think, however, that if you were to do a direct comparison, Microsoft has the ability to lose more money and stay solvent for longer than either Sony or Nintendo.
This tactic was found to be in violation of the Sherman act when applied to Standard oil. It's amazing to me that MS is able to get away with the same thing without its competitors screaming more loudly at the US government.
This seems simple enough to me. If you want your children to access the.kids.us sites, then you have to install a Mozilla or an IE plugin. Those that don't have those plugins can't go (Boo-hoo...) and those that do are subject to the restrictions placed upon them by the.kids.us domain sites.
Does this allow the government or Neustar to spy on people and gather information if they want to? Yes, it does. Since it is an opt-in system, I'm comfortable with it. No serious site will place itself in the.kids.us domain. Those serious websites that do will no doubt also maintain a regular version.
An epoxy glue sold at hardware stores and a glass-like substance were formed into a DVD-size disk able to hold about 87 gigabytes, equal to 87,000 paperback books
Hmm... Since when did a paperback weigh an entire megabyte? Few novels reach 800,000 characters let alone 1M.
An authoring friend tells me that most first time novelists are only allowed 100,000 words... around 400k, or the size of the first Harry Potter book.
That's for the text-only contents of a book. If you start talking about diagrams or fancy print that has to be scanned in as an image, you can go anywhere from 10MB-50MB, depending on detail.
But, sticking to straight byte-weight, Let's try closer to 150,000 paperbacks, if you're going to start making real-world comparisons.
Imagine a world in which they made cartoons that had writing and art that wasn't targeted at small children. Yes, the show may be about racing, (Speed Racer, Initial D) but it might also be about other sports (Battle Athletes, Prince of Tennis). It might also be about robots, space exploration, martial arts, police drama, romance, organized crime, spies, religion, and yes, even sex. I could give you examples for each of the above, but I wouldn't know where to stop.
People find similarity in anime because the art tends to be similar from one artist to another and from one era of anime to another. yes, all anime protaganists have fucking HUGE eyes, tiny mouths and pointed chins. That doesn't mean that the writing, art quality, humour level, or sex quotient is similar between any two different anime.
A person who wasn't familiar with computers might as well ask, "What's the big deal about Linux anyway. Isn't it just a replacement for Windows?"
Re:No, you can't get MTV a la cart, read it again.
on
Cable TV A La Carte?
·
· Score: 2
They just need to make every channel a 'premium' channel like HBO. I'd buy that, 'Comedy Central', 'Cartoon Network', 'Animeal Planet', and maybe 'TLC', and no others. I'd still spend less than I am now.
I understood that a significant number of German speaking internet-users use 'ss' instead of the 'spassbe' (sp?) character so as not to confuse computers without an extended character set.
Hmm... Even with cookies blocked from Excite, I can still view their front page with Moz 1.1. (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826)If this was a site 'feature' in the past, it's obviously been reclassified as a bug and has been fixed.
"My prediction is that within three years time, Microsoft will `give away' its operating system to preserve its revenue in the applications business."
Stephenson hints around this concept in 'In the Beginning was the Command Line'. I don't remember the exact wording, but the concept was that the operating system is basically a commodity when compared to application software. The only thing that makes an OS necessary is that you'll use it to accomplish tasks necessary to run an application.
We've seen this kind of commoditization in browser software. I know I'm not the only who remembers walking into an EB and seeing a boxed copy of Netscape on the wall. What Netscape realized and MS copied was that the browser was merely a commodity necessary for individuals to access the internet. There were already freeware browsers. Netscape essentially gave away its browser so that it's compliment, Netscape Web Server-- later iPlanet server-- would sell better.
OS's are going the same way. Where does MS make its money? Windows revenue accounts for precisely *dick* when measured up against a million OEM MSOffice licenses, per-seat DB licenses, multiprocessor Exchange licenses, etc. (My company recently dropped $15k for MSSQL on a 2 processor box.) If Windows was more important in terms of revenue than Office, why is Microsoft still making Office for Mac? Why not force those users to switch to Windows to use Office?
Microsoft wants to charge for Windows and bust people for using pirated copies simply because they still can get away with it at this point. When they can't-- such as currently is the case in the PRChina-- they'll start turning a blind eye to OS piracy and may even tacitly circulate a few copies themselves to increase 'market penetration'. Eventually, they'll start offering ridiculously low-priced 'Student Discount' copies of Windows, like they have in the past, with both OS's and development tools. Eventually, as OpenOffice, AbiWord, and other Office competitors mature, You'll start being able to get more and more Windows feature for free while MS continues to extract flesh for licenses for Office, MSSQL, Exchange, and other servers and apps.
My question here is what you have to do to be officially be qualified as one of the above TLAs (Three letter acronyms). I run my own website for which I write and paint. Does that make me an 'ICP'-- Internet Content Provider, according to the definitions her honor gave at the end of the document.
Re:What if they don't find the gravity waves?
on
Examining Gravity Waves
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Then we'd have to remove der liebe Herr Einstein from the pedestal of science, and put someone else there, someone who "saw clearly where everyone else saw nothing".
We didn't do that to Issac Newton did we?
I am very firmly convinced that the universe is far stranger than even the most brilliant minds alive today or yesterday ever give it credit for. I'm also very firmly convinced that no matter what mathmatical model we try to cram the universe into, we'll always find exceptions and things we don't understand. We'll find evidence to back up existing theories and postulates, yes, but we will also find evidence that takes current theories in a back alley, beats them across the head with a lead pipe, and then steals their credit cards.
Look at the research being done on gravity suppression or-- dare I say it-- anti-gravity. This research is considered quackerie and bad science by legitimate scientists who come across it. The fact remains, however, that this guy's research has such a huge potential to undermine existing theory and completely rewrite the books concerning propulsion that Boeing has made a major investment in his work.
One day, maybe one day soon, some scientist or group of scientists will make a major refinement on Einsteinian 'General Relativity' just as Einstein made a major refinement on Newtonian 'Classical Physics'. That doesn't mean that the work Newton did or the work Einstein did weren't major acheivments in and of themselves. It doesn't mean that they don't predict a great deal of what's going on, both out there in the cold reaches and here on Earth.
If you beleive that Einstein is 100% correct about everything he theorized then you're going to be in the same boat as people who beleived Newton was 100% correct. We don't know everything and we never will. Get over it already.
Slashdot Mirror
The things that made the original Sims game interesting for more than just a couple hours were all the various ways you could break the game. Installing user-created mods or families. It's one thing to have a textbook adulterous relationship in the context of the game. It's quite another (and significantly more entertaining) when Beavis and Butthead come over and start trashing your house and lighting fires.
The people I've spoken to have all said the same thing. All this has gone from the Sims online. It's all about fighting your meters and trying to keep your sims happy and not about testing the bounds of the electronic world.
Thanks, but when I die in a game, I like it to be from being whacked with a Firey Sword of Cleaving and not because I got a paper-cut reading the newspaper.
Me: I'm looking for an RF Modulator so I can plug my DVD player into a TV without AV inputs. (Don't get me started...)
Shack Sales Clerk: Uhmm... That's like a VCR, right? We've got all our VCRs on that wall right over there.
Me: Uh, no. It's a signal adapater. (Surely someone who works around electronics every day should understand this, right?) It converts composite audio/video signal output to rf signal for a coaxial cable input.
Clerk: It's an adapter?
Me: (Thinking the light has finally turned on) Yes! It's got a coaxial output on one end and RCA style audio-video inputs on the other.
Clerk: Here ya go! (He hands me a RCA 'Y' splitter.)
Me: *Sigh*...
I did manage to get the guy to give me an RF modulator, but only after I retrieved a Radio Shack ad from behind the counter and pointed at it in the ad.
For a while, when working with my video capture/playback setup, RS was the only place where I could buy cables and connectors like I needed. This is no longer the case now that Best Buy carries a wider selection of this sort of thing. At the time, however, I would get an ATM withdrawal before going and pay for the cables, adapters, and one time wall-plates with cash.
"What's your phone number?" I would always be asked.
"You need to have that for a cash purchase?" I replied.
"Uhm..."
Since RS employess get a comission. (Do they still?) They were always quick to try to keep me from leaving. Most of the time I could see that they would type their own or dummy information into the computer when I refused to give them mine.
I've always been fascinated by the fact that mammals have five major appendages... and five major digits on four of those appendages and five major sense organs (tounge, lips, ears, eyes, nose) on the fifth one. Of course, it's pure conjecture that this might be a reflection of a lower-level self-symmetry, but it's still interesting conjecture.
It was also the first to introduce Geordi's new eyes and the EMH (In Next Generation context anyways).
While I won't argue with how much those appealed to zealous Trek fans, I personally think that those two scenes in particular are the two weakest scenes in 'First Contact'.
One was a guest shot. It wasn't necessary in the overall plot of the story other than as a pretty cheap joke-- the MH Doctor offering the Borg skin-cream. The other was a rather pointless segue to demonstrate how Geordi's eyes worked. Lavar Burton must have demanded in his contract that he was not going to work with the hair-clip on his face any more. The eye implants don't do anything differently than the hair-clip did, and are not mentioned at all in the rest of the movie, or even in Insurrection (Weakest of the TNG movies, IMHO.). Personally, I think it would have been better if they had eithe glossed over Geordi's new eyes entirely, or made them central to the plot.
1. The Holodeck is strictly off limits. It may not be metioned, alluded to, or featured as a plot element.
2. Only the badguys quote Shakespear.
3. NOBODY quotes or signs songs from musicals. Not Rogers and Hammerstein. Not Andrew Lloyd Webber. ESPECIALLY not Gilbert and Sullivan!
4. Everybody who dies stays dead.
5. Time-travel is permitted, but must be used as a humourous plot element, and not as part of the denoument.
6. Villans must be sane, intelligent, calculating and preferrably vengeful. Regardless, all villans must have beleivable motivation. Insane, god-like beings need not appear.
7. Little or no new technology should be introduced in the course of the movie, epecially technology relating to time-travel or the holodeck. If technology is introduced it should be treated with care-- do not show a knife on screen unless it's going to end up in someone's back!
8. Redshirts must die by the score.
9. There must be at least 25 minutes of space battle footage in which at least one ship is violently and graphically ripped apart.
and
10. The Enterprise must suffer heavy, even crippling damage in the course of the fight. It may even be destroyed.
First thing that popped into my head when I read this was the Oingo-Boingo 'Weird Science' theme. Dates me pretty soundly, I guess.
This here is the time to start thinking about everything science fiction has ever told us when dealing with artificaial life. It's one of the few sub-genres of science fiction that's almost always cautionary... from 'Frankenstein'--
"FIRST POST... BAAAAD!!"
--to 'Species'--
"That hole in his back makes him look just like the goatse.cx guy... except it's because his spine was torn out."
Man will create life. There's no doubt about it. It's a given. Eventually, we'll no doubt even create life that looks, acts, and feels human. What we should never forget, however, is that we are stepping into territory where angels fear to tread and should take each action with only after gut-wrenching, soul-searching thought.
Is it resonsible, moral, or ethical to create life when the planet is as overcrowded as it is?
Is it ethical to create life that can feel, think, or be hurt when you *know* we're going to dissect and vivisect of what we create?
Is it ethical or responsible to create life, when we know that we're already making serious mistakes in genetic engineering, such as the genes that recently jumped between soya and corn?
This is a wonderful new field of science that has incredible potential for human advancement. It also has incredible potential for misuse and unethical behavior.
Mod parent up +1 Funny
For those who don't understand Hindu (Very, very common religion in India), one of the basic premises of the religion is that people are reincarnated over and over again after they die until they generate enough Karma in the form of good deeds, positive experiences, and general learning and understanding that they reach a state of enlightenment and can proceed on from the cycle of mortal reincarnation to Nirvana-- a state of ultimate contentment with no worries, cares, needs, or demands.
Thats why cows are sacred to Hindus... not because of some strange religious edict or a prejudice against beef, but because cattle seen as a higher, more enlightened life form than humans. While I make no pretense about my love of beef in the grilled-to-a-juicy-medium-rare sense, you have to admit that cows do more for the environment we do on an invidual basis (entire herds and livestock yards can be pretty polluting and are responsible for a lot of C02 emission, tho) and with remarkably fewer cares than a human.
Karma has been westernized to mean the total of good deeds a person has and it's used here on Slashdot to indicate a measure of thoughtful posting, but don't forget that 'real' karma is the unmeasurable enlightenment you have acheived.
A person who loses a hand will have the part of his brain which was previously used to control this hand 'absorbed' by sections of the brain with totally different functions.
Which brings up the physiology behind phantom sensations. I read a Discover article a little while back about a man who lost an arm in a car accident. He, like many amputees, could still feel his arm and was able to describe what it was feeling.
Reasearchers figured out that any sensation that the man felt on his chest, neck or chin was also felt on this phantom arm. The part of the brain that was used to feeling inputs from his arm started getting inputs from the adjacent areas-- the front of his torso-- as the neurons for those areas grew new dendrites into the 'abandoned' area of his brain.
Launch a powerful laser into orbit... or put it someplace high enough on the earth so that it doesn't lose power in the atmosphere. Aim at the asteroid. Use computer controlled aim to correct the targeting as both the earth and the asteroid move through space. Use said laser to heat up, melt, or even vaporize the rock on a particular point on the asteroid. Turn the power on the laser up high enough that the plume of heated material eventually rockets the asteroid into a new orbit.
No asteroid intercept mission needed.
I think I read somewhere that brain fires bursts of neurotransmitters in the range of 40 Hz. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, you're conciousness is running on a processor that's slower than the chip in your GBA or your Palm Pilot.
I think that what most people don't get is that the brain is not that powerful a computer... It's just very, very good at what it's supposed to do.
Think of it this way. Instead of a computer and mobo combination, consider the brain as dozens and dozens of embedded micro-controllers that talk to eachother via a protocol. Each one is very specific. We have one that handles getting audio signals, one that handles getting video signals... and then completely different controllers for recognizing voice, music, speech, text, and images. There is one overlying controller-- the frontal lobe-- but most of what is does is pattern matching and random number generation. It's the combination or all these working together, not the raw ability of the brain to process information, that makes the magic of 'conciousness'.
This is a software developer's greatest weakness.
If your customer tells you he wants his product to do x, then you give him a piece of software that will do x, even if you know he really wants y and z.
Case in point... DeCSS. The entire CSS scheme, which is fairly robust on its surface, revolved around having a secret key... a secret key that was going to be included in millions of decoder chips and in hundreds of software releases available to millions of people.
All the technical genius in the world can see that the second the key was in the hands of the public in one way or the other, it would be copied and it would be redistributed. The only reason that Jon Johansen got in trouble was because he was a kid and really didn't understand how many powerful entities he was upsetting when he released DeCSS. A person who had to copy the key off of a eprom or decrypt it out of DVD player firmware would probably understand a little better than someone who took a debugger to RealPlayer and found the key there, unencrypted.
The developers of the DeCSS scheme *knew* this would happen, as did the technical minds that came up with the CD watermarking protection scheme. Their bosses, the ones directing the development pretended like they didn't know, but you know they did.
Newton was a classic Victorian prude and mysogynist-- and probably a closet homosexual. He was quite proud of his 'virginity' and proclaimed upon his death bed that no woman had soiled him. (I need to look up the exact quote.)
After his landmark physics theories, Newton spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to use numerology to calculate the end of the world based on passages in the Bible. Despite his intelligence, he had many unreasonable fears hatreds.
One App:
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop runs under Wine, I've heard, but not well. Also, type support, which is highly necessary for any kind of decent design work, is miserable under most linux WM's.
One of the tactics Standard Oil would employ was to sell oil and petroleum products well below cost, absorbing the loss for the sake of driving competitors to the point of ruin, and then buying their ruined competitors' assets.
Sony is a strong, powerful company. Nintendo is slightly less so. I think, however, that if you were to do a direct comparison, Microsoft has the ability to lose more money and stay solvent for longer than either Sony or Nintendo.
This tactic was found to be in violation of the Sherman act when applied to Standard oil. It's amazing to me that MS is able to get away with the same thing without its competitors screaming more loudly at the US government.
This seems simple enough to me. If you want your children to access the .kids.us sites, then you have to install a Mozilla or an IE plugin. Those that don't have those plugins can't go (Boo-hoo...) and those that do are subject to the restrictions placed upon them by the .kids.us domain sites.
.kids.us domain. Those serious websites that do will no doubt also maintain a regular version.
Does this allow the government or Neustar to spy on people and gather information if they want to? Yes, it does. Since it is an opt-in system, I'm comfortable with it. No serious site will place itself in the
An epoxy glue sold at hardware stores and a glass-like substance were formed into a DVD-size disk able to hold about 87 gigabytes, equal to 87,000 paperback books
Hmm... Since when did a paperback weigh an entire megabyte? Few novels reach 800,000 characters let alone 1M.
An authoring friend tells me that most first time novelists are only allowed 100,000 words... around 400k, or the size of the first Harry Potter book.
That's for the text-only contents of a book. If you start talking about diagrams or fancy print that has to be scanned in as an image, you can go anywhere from 10MB-50MB, depending on detail.
But, sticking to straight byte-weight, Let's try closer to 150,000 paperbacks, if you're going to start making real-world comparisons.
Imagine a world in which they made cartoons that had writing and art that wasn't targeted at small children. Yes, the show may be about racing, (Speed Racer, Initial D) but it might also be about other sports (Battle Athletes, Prince of Tennis). It might also be about robots, space exploration, martial arts, police drama, romance, organized crime, spies, religion, and yes, even sex. I could give you examples for each of the above, but I wouldn't know where to stop.
People find similarity in anime because the art tends to be similar from one artist to another and from one era of anime to another. yes, all anime protaganists have fucking HUGE eyes, tiny mouths and pointed chins. That doesn't mean that the writing, art quality, humour level, or sex quotient is similar between any two different anime.
A person who wasn't familiar with computers might as well ask, "What's the big deal about Linux anyway. Isn't it just a replacement for Windows?"
They just need to make every channel a 'premium' channel like HBO. I'd buy that, 'Comedy Central', 'Cartoon Network', 'Animeal Planet', and maybe 'TLC', and no others. I'd still spend less than I am now.
I understood that a significant number of German speaking internet-users use 'ss' instead of the 'spassbe' (sp?) character so as not to confuse computers without an extended character set.
Hmm... Even with cookies blocked from Excite, I can still view their front page with Moz 1.1. (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826)If this was a site 'feature' in the past, it's obviously been reclassified as a bug and has been fixed.
"My prediction is that within three years time, Microsoft will `give away' its operating system to preserve its revenue in the applications business."
Stephenson hints around this concept in 'In the Beginning was the Command Line'. I don't remember the exact wording, but the concept was that the operating system is basically a commodity when compared to application software. The only thing that makes an OS necessary is that you'll use it to accomplish tasks necessary to run an application.
We've seen this kind of commoditization in browser software. I know I'm not the only who remembers walking into an EB and seeing a boxed copy of Netscape on the wall. What Netscape realized and MS copied was that the browser was merely a commodity necessary for individuals to access the internet. There were already freeware browsers. Netscape essentially gave away its browser so that it's compliment, Netscape Web Server-- later iPlanet server-- would sell better.
OS's are going the same way. Where does MS make its money? Windows revenue accounts for precisely *dick* when measured up against a million OEM MSOffice licenses, per-seat DB licenses, multiprocessor Exchange licenses, etc. (My company recently dropped $15k for MSSQL on a 2 processor box.) If Windows was more important in terms of revenue than Office, why is Microsoft still making Office for Mac? Why not force those users to switch to Windows to use Office?
Microsoft wants to charge for Windows and bust people for using pirated copies simply because they still can get away with it at this point. When they can't-- such as currently is the case in the PRChina-- they'll start turning a blind eye to OS piracy and may even tacitly circulate a few copies themselves to increase 'market penetration'. Eventually, they'll start offering ridiculously low-priced 'Student Discount' copies of Windows, like they have in the past, with both OS's and development tools. Eventually, as OpenOffice, AbiWord, and other Office competitors mature, You'll start being able to get more and more Windows feature for free while MS continues to extract flesh for licenses for Office, MSSQL, Exchange, and other servers and apps.
Look at the technology and effort that went into Daikatana.... without anybody ever playing the game to see if it was fun.
My question here is what you have to do to be officially be qualified as one of the above TLAs (Three letter acronyms). I run my own website for which I write and paint. Does that make me an 'ICP'-- Internet Content Provider, according to the definitions her honor gave at the end of the document.
Then we'd have to remove der liebe Herr Einstein from the pedestal of science, and put someone else there, someone who "saw clearly where everyone else saw nothing".
We didn't do that to Issac Newton did we?
I am very firmly convinced that the universe is far stranger than even the most brilliant minds alive today or yesterday ever give it credit for. I'm also very firmly convinced that no matter what mathmatical model we try to cram the universe into, we'll always find exceptions and things we don't understand. We'll find evidence to back up existing theories and postulates, yes, but we will also find evidence that takes current theories in a back alley, beats them across the head with a lead pipe, and then steals their credit cards.
Look at the research being done on gravity suppression or-- dare I say it-- anti-gravity. This research is considered quackerie and bad science by legitimate scientists who come across it. The fact remains, however, that this guy's research has such a huge potential to undermine existing theory and completely rewrite the books concerning propulsion that Boeing has made a major investment in his work.
One day, maybe one day soon, some scientist or group of scientists will make a major refinement on Einsteinian 'General Relativity' just as Einstein made a major refinement on Newtonian 'Classical Physics'. That doesn't mean that the work Newton did or the work Einstein did weren't major acheivments in and of themselves. It doesn't mean that they don't predict a great deal of what's going on, both out there in the cold reaches and here on Earth.
If you beleive that Einstein is 100% correct about everything he theorized then you're going to be in the same boat as people who beleived Newton was 100% correct. We don't know everything and we never will. Get over it already.