Clean Design - Like Kuro5hin's?
on
Freshmeat II
·
· Score: 3
I think our friends have discovered one of those 'perfect' designs in terms of layout and color combination. On a second glance, the new Freshmeat didn't look exactly like Kuro5hin, but close enough to make me think that they may have arrived at the same goal via different paths.
Bitch-slap CGMI *and* all the other assholes who want to patent common-sense shit.
Come up with an idea... *ANY IDEA*, be it an invention, a logo, a name... and submit it to the engine. It will only take a few years before so little technology and IP is patentable/copyrightable/trademarkable/ that the system will fail from disuse.
"Hey, you wanna crack MSN again?"
"Man, they're on to ya. You're gonna be gettin' a visit from the Feds real soon now."
"Nah, the Larson's next door got wireless. I'm all over that shit. When the feds show up, it ain't gonna be me they're bustin."
Why, these phones are made out of paper! We're working on an all cardboard laptop and next year we're planning to completely replace all the audio recordings in the world with aluminum foil!!!
Why are we doing this? Because *you*, the customer demanded it. With products like these our prices can be LOW! LOW! LOW!
Our paper phone slices! It dices! It juliennes! One tomato lasts a month! How much would you pay for an exquisite phone like this? $99.99? $199.99? $299.99? THAT'S TOO MUCH! We're *giving* this phone away for the rock bottom price of only $29.99!
The Fine Print: This product may not be transferred, sold, reverse engineered, given away, licensed, lent, gifted, or crammed up one's dialated anus. The PaperPhone (tm) is copyrighted, trademarked and patentpending. We can and will release our squadron of trained attack lawers on your ass if you think you can get away with copying our product, Chester!
Holy goatsex, Batman! I think you must be downloading of your university's LAN and not the internet proper because anyone who has a connection capable of sustaining a 2MB/sec per user connection has at *least* dual or triple t1's and probably more. Anyone with this kind of bandwidth has to keep it pretty saturated to pay for it. I'm a heavy downloader, but I *never* *never* *never* max out the 330k/s theoretical limit on my cablemodem.
It will be nice to see a PS2 or Nintendo version of the next 'Sonic', etc. It would be even better if they'd get their ass in gear and start doing reasonable GL or Direct3d ports of their games.
For those of us who code, develop, (or even make graphics) in the workplace, we often do not have the luxury of making our work not suck. The reasons are threefold:
1.) Time. This is caused almost totally by sales and marketing pressure on developlers. As release cycles shorten and deadlines loom, the questions developers ask of themselves stop being 'is it good?' and 'is it usable' and change to 'will it compile with no errors?'
2.) Management. This speaks for itself. When your boss demands that you create a crappy product and you do what you're asked, you have made a crappy product. This is a pretty painful burden to bear in the webdesign world. I once had to design a site for a gas grill company according to the owner's rather dubious tastes. It's pretty horrid:
http://www.tiernanoutdoorproducts.com/
3.)Imitation. This almost belongs in the paragraph above, but when products become successful, there is a drive to imitate them. Take Winamp for example. What audio programs do *not* offer skinning now? Unfortuneately, this can be taken the wrong way. Look at the whole WIMP movment in GUI's. While it's nice to have a graphical interface, *everyone* spends time on the graphics and leaves out really useful features like a semi-natural language interperater. How nice would it be to type "Copy all jpgs with 'sitename' in the filename to 'sitename' directory" rather than a more arcane command or without having to worry about command typos? For the beginner, this would almost completely eliminate the learning curve to using a PC. Nobody spends time on this because there all still busy imitating MacOS.
Corporate types have been trained and trained and trained to think that information is equivalent to money. As long as this way of thinking is popular, we're going to have content protection, upto the 'Snowcrash' level, were even the information in your head is considered someone else's property
I worked for a medium sized ISP doing for-peantus web design. Said ISP was getting too big for its britches. At the time, there were a number of management SNAFU's that crippled the company, yet it continued to sail ahead at full speed while completely ignoring polite suggestions, complaints, and outright cries for help.
The big shafting came when the know-nothing fiancial VP made several decisions that made it impossible for my company to do an IPO. The president and founder hired a bean-counter/head count slasher who dealt with the situation by immediately halting the company's expenditure growth to get the ducks all in a row. Over the next few months, this resulted in needless layoffs and spite firings throughout the company. Not a pretty scene.
Now, the critical point of this entire mess was when the hidden paycuts started coming. The first of these was the sudden worthlessness of all our stock options due to the failed IPO. Many of us were depending on this money for college, house down payments, etc. It was a kick in the balls to lose. The second came when the new bean-counter decided to forego the usual Christmas Bonus.
Now, usually when a company says 'No Christmas Bonus', you look to your other raises and the growth of the company and see that you have still profited. Unfortuneately, this company's Christmas bonus was a significant portion of all our yearly salaries and part of the reason most of us agreed to work for the relatively low pay.
Raises stopped, even though the company wasn't really in any financial straits. Hires stopped. New hardware and software purchases stopped. Training was nonexistant.
At the time, our development staff consisted of eight people: Four coders, two artists and two web developers. None of the coders were competent to design customer sites and neither of the artists were competent to write HTML, let alone script SQL driven sites or customize DB2 code for the ecommerce sites we were doing.
One morning, I walked into the office and told my close friend, the other designer, that I had jumped ship. I hired on as a company webmaster for a financial institution at over twice the pay and was about to turn in my resignation. Somewhat surprised, he told me that he was also drafting a resignation because he had just been hired as a network administrator in CA.
We quit the same morning. It destroyed the company's web design business and one of the coders (our close friend) was fired for undisclosed reasons.
Now, I work with no fewer than five of the people I worked with at the old company. As the old company struggles to rebuild their web design department, we see more and more of their gifted employees interview at the new company.
The moral of this story: If you're hurting, you can bet your buddies are too. Do your best to find them jobs when you jump ship, and they might actually *stay* your buddies.
Plastic is pretty obviously a Slashclone, but I can not find mention of Slashcode, GPL, OSDN or any source code modifications anywhere on their site.
(I love all the 'first new Web site in the Automatic Media network shtick')
Surely, they've honored the GPL and made their source modifications public. I can't find them, though. Surely Feed Magazine didn't put it up without modifying even a single line. This is possible, I guess.
While this article was great in terms of general programming knowledge, it seemed to neglect a detail that many game developers sadly overlook. A game is *nothing* without playability.
Mr. Abrash spends quite a bit of time in the article talking about the best ways to go about programming a game. This is obviously something that comes through in his designs, since the certain software company he developed for spent more time on their game engine than they did level design. This tendancy is even stronger in today's game market where the 'definitive' FPS's are Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament. Both of these spent much, *much* more time on engine development and programming than they did on making their games enjoyable.
Don't get me wrong... Q3A and UT are loads of fun, but compare them to the playability of Half-Life, a little older game that is based (IIRC) on the Quake 2 Engine. There's a lot of custom code in HL, but the majority of it is still a big Q2 total conversion. Valve focussed on playability, story, and fun in HL, rather than code and this shows. I'll play Q3A for a little while, especially if I'm waiting on a long download, but I've lost entire weekends to the plot details in Half-Life.
Programming can be and end unto itself, and even *should* be in some circumstances, but its only half of the equation when building a video game.
The best book I have ever read about Einstein's theories was 'Relativity Visualized' by Lewis Epstein.
It gives a semi-complete history of the developments of relativistic science, going through the discovery of Newtonian motion and covering the dismissal of the 'Cosmic Aether' theory. It then goes in to explaining how relativity works in both simple terms that my Dad could get and then gives more explicit examples, complete with 'da math. This was the first book that made me really understand how time works in gravitational field.
Good reading for the expert and the casual intelectual.
Hmmm....
It's a lean, mean, Penguin grillin' machine!
Theoretically, even though it runs Linux, Nokia's hardware license/service contract could be restrictive. GNU Experts: How does the GPL effect hardware and service restrictions?
Since what makes Windoze a popular target for Virus and Worm hackers is its popularity. Since the popularity of Linux is growing (RH in particular as the distro most well known outside the hacker community), it was only a matter of time until someone started exploiting security flaws that plague non-experienced user/administrators.
"Quick, Robin!" Batman said. "To the Batmobile. That nefarious fiend, our archnemisis, Google, is at it again."
"Holy Goatsex, Batman!" Batman's young charge exclaimed, quickly minimzing his browser window. "What dastardly deed is he up to this time?"
"Well, Robin. It seems that our old enemy is engaging in the dread business of Patent Infringment!"
"No!"
"Yes, Robin. It's a shame, but some criminals think that they can just employ what ever technology they want to without paying the rightful licensing fees to the patent holders, in this case a company that Commisioner Gordon has invested heavily in."
"Those monsters!" The boy wonder agreed.
Batman looked at Robin's computer monitor again. "Hey, that wasn't Batgirl's pornographic DivX site, was it, Boy Wonder."
"Uhh... Of course not, Batman!"
The caped crusader scowled at his young charge. "You are aware that the MPEG 4 technology used in the DivX codec violates a number of intellectual property patents and encourages the theft of big-name Hollywood Movies, aren't you?"
"Yes, Batman," Robin sighed.
"Take heart, Boy Wonder. Copyright Law isn't for us to understand. 'Ours is to do and die', after all."
"Okay, Batman! Let's get started."
"Do you want to slide down the long pole first, or shall I?"
Man, I have never heard such a load of concocted bullshit in all my life. 'The Tech Industry' is responsible for overloading 19th Century era electic lines, as stated in the article.
HELLO? MCFLY? HELLO?!
What the hell were all the SoCal electric companies doing when the rest of the world was busy upgrading their infrastructure over the last 10 years to cope with the technology boom? Here, in Pissant Amarillo, TX, *all* the utilities have slowly been upgrading their infrastructure. Both SWB and Cox Cable have been putting in fibre lines. SPS Electric has been slowly upgrading their capacity, both in terms of generators, lines and high-tension poles.
At *some* point, deregulation or no, the SoCal power companies made the decision that upgrading infrastructure would not look good on the bottom line. Rather than use half a coked-up brain cell to figure out that the industry was growing fast and they needed to keep up with it to stay profitable in the future, some power executive chose profit *now* rather than survival *later*.
Well, this is a dangerous step toward the evolution and existence of sovreign corporations.
The real problem with the concept of 'private networks of information' is that they tend to grow, especially with the impetus this one has. It's in their best interest to keep as much of the knowledge they gather classified for as long as they can. If there is the perception that this kind of limited sharing is effective and one has to pay to become a member, there will be leaps and bounds of growth to this organization. Unlike the federal government, there are no laws in place to protect average citezens from this type of secrecy.
What's even more disturbing is the kind of actions this organization will eventually take to protect its secrets. At first it will be legal actions. They will sue to prevent people from releasing important security information. Then the proliferation of 'inter-agency' controls will increase, say giving back-doors to certain law enforcement agencies into certain applications. I'm certain this already goes on to some extent, but this gives tech companies a reason for this to become common practice.
How long is it before this kind of alliance has the ability to conduct its own 'Security' raids and anti-hacker activities through its contacts in law enforcement? Not too damn long, if I'm not mistaken.
What laws are in place to keep a corporation from harrasing and causing problems for an individual? Abso-fricken-lutely none. American business law is written to favor a business or corporation over an individual every single time.
"Quick Igor, get the wooden stake! The garlic's not working!"
"Yeth, Mathter."
"And now the axe! I should have listened to old man Ellison when he said you had to properly dispose of these things."
"Thall we be burning it, Mathter?"
"One step at a time, Igor. To properly dispose of a vampire SQL package, you have to make sure none of the embers escape, or we'll have to deal with this all over again!"
I hate spam as much as the next guy, BUT...
on
Norway Bans Spam
·
· Score: 3
All the free speech concerns aside, this stilly has some pretty scary implications. What constitutes spam? Is it unsolicited commercial email? Is it harrasment? Or will this turn out to be abused in much the same way the (very necessary) sexual harrasment laws have been?
Does anyone have an Eigo translation of this article so that we can get the specifcs? The fishy don't do Norweigan.
"Sir, you're under arrest for spamming your coworkers."
"But they *asked* me to send them 'The Big List of Blonde Jokes'! Honest, officer!"
Okay, they give your 10$ worth of 'credits' to start playing. One would assume that you actually have to wager this to start getting money. Where do the prizes come from? Who funds this? Ads? Gamblers?
The tradeoff that makes small computers inherently better than big computers is *heat* dissipation. Every inch of your MB generates heat. Every PCI and AGP card generates a shitload of heat. Every cable, every powercord, every drive generates heat.
It's a misnomer that all the heat in a PC comes from the CPU. This is not the case. Anyone seen the heat sinks on mobo growing lately? Hmmm...? By making componenets larger, you merely make them hotter. Not faster...
Embedded Linux is okay, but you can run an entire distribution off one of one of these guys.
The notebook market must be pretty saturated...
on
Digital Doodling
·
· Score: 2
If there are so many different variations on the same theme of hardware. How many times have we seen the stylus to OCR/Image concept since the Newton?
How hard would it be for some enterprising haquers out to build a generic handwriting OCR engine? What are the technical problems involved with this sort of thing?
Slashdot Mirror
I think our friends have discovered one of those 'perfect' designs in terms of layout and color combination. On a second glance, the new Freshmeat didn't look exactly like Kuro5hin, but close enough to make me think that they may have arrived at the same goal via different paths.
Bitch-slap CGMI *and* all the other assholes who want to patent common-sense shit.
Come up with an idea... *ANY IDEA*, be it an invention, a logo, a name... and submit it to the engine. It will only take a few years before so little technology and IP is patentable/copyrightable/trademarkable/ that the system will fail from disuse.
Have you had any overt opposition from the 'For Pay' publishing industries? If so, what is it like. Do you expect legal challenges?
"Hey, you wanna crack MSN again?" "Man, they're on to ya. You're gonna be gettin' a visit from the Feds real soon now." "Nah, the Larson's next door got wireless. I'm all over that shit. When the feds show up, it ain't gonna be me they're bustin."
Why, these phones are made out of paper! We're working on an all cardboard laptop and next year we're planning to completely replace all the audio recordings in the world with aluminum foil!!!
Why are we doing this? Because *you*, the customer demanded it. With products like these our prices can be LOW! LOW! LOW!
Our paper phone slices! It dices! It juliennes! One tomato lasts a month! How much would you pay for an exquisite phone like this? $99.99? $199.99? $299.99? THAT'S TOO MUCH! We're *giving* this phone away for the rock bottom price of only $29.99!
The Fine Print: This product may not be transferred, sold, reverse engineered, given away, licensed, lent, gifted, or crammed up one's dialated anus. The PaperPhone (tm) is copyrighted, trademarked and patentpending. We can and will release our squadron of trained attack lawers on your ass if you think you can get away with copying our product, Chester!
Holy goatsex, Batman! I think you must be downloading of your university's LAN and not the internet proper because anyone who has a connection capable of sustaining a 2MB/sec per user connection has at *least* dual or triple t1's and probably more. Anyone with this kind of bandwidth has to keep it pretty saturated to pay for it. I'm a heavy downloader, but I *never* *never* *never* max out the 330k/s theoretical limit on my cablemodem.
It will be nice to see a PS2 or Nintendo version of the next 'Sonic', etc. It would be even better if they'd get their ass in gear and start doing reasonable GL or Direct3d ports of their games.
For those of us who code, develop, (or even make graphics) in the workplace, we often do not have the luxury of making our work not suck. The reasons are threefold:
1.) Time. This is caused almost totally by sales and marketing pressure on developlers. As release cycles shorten and deadlines loom, the questions developers ask of themselves stop being 'is it good?' and 'is it usable' and change to 'will it compile with no errors?'
2.) Management. This speaks for itself. When your boss demands that you create a crappy product and you do what you're asked, you have made a crappy product. This is a pretty painful burden to bear in the webdesign world. I once had to design a site for a gas grill company according to the owner's rather dubious tastes. It's pretty horrid: http://www.tiernanoutdoorproducts.com/
3.)Imitation. This almost belongs in the paragraph above, but when products become successful, there is a drive to imitate them. Take Winamp for example. What audio programs do *not* offer skinning now? Unfortuneately, this can be taken the wrong way. Look at the whole WIMP movment in GUI's. While it's nice to have a graphical interface, *everyone* spends time on the graphics and leaves out really useful features like a semi-natural language interperater. How nice would it be to type "Copy all jpgs with 'sitename' in the filename to 'sitename' directory" rather than a more arcane command or without having to worry about command typos? For the beginner, this would almost completely eliminate the learning curve to using a PC. Nobody spends time on this because there all still busy imitating MacOS.
Corporate types have been trained and trained and trained to think that information is equivalent to money. As long as this way of thinking is popular, we're going to have content protection, upto the 'Snowcrash' level, were even the information in your head is considered someone else's property
I worked for a medium sized ISP doing for-peantus web design. Said ISP was getting too big for its britches. At the time, there were a number of management SNAFU's that crippled the company, yet it continued to sail ahead at full speed while completely ignoring polite suggestions, complaints, and outright cries for help.
The big shafting came when the know-nothing fiancial VP made several decisions that made it impossible for my company to do an IPO. The president and founder hired a bean-counter/head count slasher who dealt with the situation by immediately halting the company's expenditure growth to get the ducks all in a row. Over the next few months, this resulted in needless layoffs and spite firings throughout the company. Not a pretty scene.
Now, the critical point of this entire mess was when the hidden paycuts started coming. The first of these was the sudden worthlessness of all our stock options due to the failed IPO. Many of us were depending on this money for college, house down payments, etc. It was a kick in the balls to lose. The second came when the new bean-counter decided to forego the usual Christmas Bonus.
Now, usually when a company says 'No Christmas Bonus', you look to your other raises and the growth of the company and see that you have still profited. Unfortuneately, this company's Christmas bonus was a significant portion of all our yearly salaries and part of the reason most of us agreed to work for the relatively low pay.
Raises stopped, even though the company wasn't really in any financial straits. Hires stopped. New hardware and software purchases stopped. Training was nonexistant.
At the time, our development staff consisted of eight people: Four coders, two artists and two web developers. None of the coders were competent to design customer sites and neither of the artists were competent to write HTML, let alone script SQL driven sites or customize DB2 code for the ecommerce sites we were doing.
One morning, I walked into the office and told my close friend, the other designer, that I had jumped ship. I hired on as a company webmaster for a financial institution at over twice the pay and was about to turn in my resignation. Somewhat surprised, he told me that he was also drafting a resignation because he had just been hired as a network administrator in CA.
We quit the same morning. It destroyed the company's web design business and one of the coders (our close friend) was fired for undisclosed reasons.
Now, I work with no fewer than five of the people I worked with at the old company. As the old company struggles to rebuild their web design department, we see more and more of their gifted employees interview at the new company.
The moral of this story: If you're hurting, you can bet your buddies are too. Do your best to find them jobs when you jump ship, and they might actually *stay* your buddies.
Plastic is pretty obviously a Slashclone, but I can not find mention of Slashcode, GPL, OSDN or any source code modifications anywhere on their site.
(I love all the 'first new Web site in the Automatic Media network shtick')
Surely, they've honored the GPL and made their source modifications public. I can't find them, though. Surely Feed Magazine didn't put it up without modifying even a single line. This is possible, I guess.
Would anyone who has a cached copy be so kind as to post or mirror the text?
While this article was great in terms of general programming knowledge, it seemed to neglect a detail that many game developers sadly overlook. A game is *nothing* without playability.
Mr. Abrash spends quite a bit of time in the article talking about the best ways to go about programming a game. This is obviously something that comes through in his designs, since the certain software company he developed for spent more time on their game engine than they did level design. This tendancy is even stronger in today's game market where the 'definitive' FPS's are Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament. Both of these spent much, *much* more time on engine development and programming than they did on making their games enjoyable.
Don't get me wrong... Q3A and UT are loads of fun, but compare them to the playability of Half-Life, a little older game that is based (IIRC) on the Quake 2 Engine. There's a lot of custom code in HL, but the majority of it is still a big Q2 total conversion. Valve focussed on playability, story, and fun in HL, rather than code and this shows. I'll play Q3A for a little while, especially if I'm waiting on a long download, but I've lost entire weekends to the plot details in Half-Life.
Programming can be and end unto itself, and even *should* be in some circumstances, but its only half of the equation when building a video game.
The best book I have ever read about Einstein's theories was 'Relativity Visualized' by Lewis Epstein.
It gives a semi-complete history of the developments of relativistic science, going through the discovery of Newtonian motion and covering the dismissal of the 'Cosmic Aether' theory. It then goes in to explaining how relativity works in both simple terms that my Dad could get and then gives more explicit examples, complete with 'da math. This was the first book that made me really understand how time works in gravitational field.
Good reading for the expert and the casual intelectual.
Hmmm.... It's a lean, mean, Penguin grillin' machine!
Theoretically, even though it runs Linux, Nokia's hardware license/service contract could be restrictive. GNU Experts: How does the GPL effect hardware and service restrictions?
Since what makes Windoze a popular target for Virus and Worm hackers is its popularity. Since the popularity of Linux is growing (RH in particular as the distro most well known outside the hacker community), it was only a matter of time until someone started exploiting security flaws that plague non-experienced user/administrators.
"Quick, Robin!" Batman said. "To the Batmobile. That nefarious fiend, our archnemisis, Google, is at it again."
"Holy Goatsex, Batman!" Batman's young charge exclaimed, quickly minimzing his browser window. "What dastardly deed is he up to this time?"
"Well, Robin. It seems that our old enemy is engaging in the dread business of Patent Infringment!"
"No!"
"Yes, Robin. It's a shame, but some criminals think that they can just employ what ever technology they want to without paying the rightful licensing fees to the patent holders, in this case a company that Commisioner Gordon has invested heavily in."
"Those monsters!" The boy wonder agreed.
Batman looked at Robin's computer monitor again. "Hey, that wasn't Batgirl's pornographic DivX site, was it, Boy Wonder."
"Uhh... Of course not, Batman!"
The caped crusader scowled at his young charge. "You are aware that the MPEG 4 technology used in the DivX codec violates a number of intellectual property patents and encourages the theft of big-name Hollywood Movies, aren't you?"
"Yes, Batman," Robin sighed.
"Take heart, Boy Wonder. Copyright Law isn't for us to understand. 'Ours is to do and die', after all."
"Okay, Batman! Let's get started."
"Do you want to slide down the long pole first, or shall I?"
Man, I have never heard such a load of concocted bullshit in all my life. 'The Tech Industry' is responsible for overloading 19th Century era electic lines, as stated in the article.
HELLO? MCFLY? HELLO?!
What the hell were all the SoCal electric companies doing when the rest of the world was busy upgrading their infrastructure over the last 10 years to cope with the technology boom? Here, in Pissant Amarillo, TX, *all* the utilities have slowly been upgrading their infrastructure. Both SWB and Cox Cable have been putting in fibre lines. SPS Electric has been slowly upgrading their capacity, both in terms of generators, lines and high-tension poles.
At *some* point, deregulation or no, the SoCal power companies made the decision that upgrading infrastructure would not look good on the bottom line. Rather than use half a coked-up brain cell to figure out that the industry was growing fast and they needed to keep up with it to stay profitable in the future, some power executive chose profit *now* rather than survival *later*.
This is so damn typical...
Well, this is a dangerous step toward the evolution and existence of sovreign corporations.
The real problem with the concept of 'private networks of information' is that they tend to grow, especially with the impetus this one has. It's in their best interest to keep as much of the knowledge they gather classified for as long as they can. If there is the perception that this kind of limited sharing is effective and one has to pay to become a member, there will be leaps and bounds of growth to this organization. Unlike the federal government, there are no laws in place to protect average citezens from this type of secrecy.
What's even more disturbing is the kind of actions this organization will eventually take to protect its secrets. At first it will be legal actions. They will sue to prevent people from releasing important security information. Then the proliferation of 'inter-agency' controls will increase, say giving back-doors to certain law enforcement agencies into certain applications. I'm certain this already goes on to some extent, but this gives tech companies a reason for this to become common practice.
How long is it before this kind of alliance has the ability to conduct its own 'Security' raids and anti-hacker activities through its contacts in law enforcement? Not too damn long, if I'm not mistaken.
What laws are in place to keep a corporation from harrasing and causing problems for an individual? Abso-fricken-lutely none. American business law is written to favor a business or corporation over an individual every single time.
"Quick Igor, get the wooden stake! The garlic's not working!"
"Yeth, Mathter."
"And now the axe! I should have listened to old man Ellison when he said you had to properly dispose of these things."
"Thall we be burning it, Mathter?"
"One step at a time, Igor. To properly dispose of a vampire SQL package, you have to make sure none of the embers escape, or we'll have to deal with this all over again!"
All the free speech concerns aside, this stilly has some pretty scary implications. What constitutes spam? Is it unsolicited commercial email? Is it harrasment? Or will this turn out to be abused in much the same way the (very necessary) sexual harrasment laws have been?
Does anyone have an Eigo translation of this article so that we can get the specifcs? The fishy don't do Norweigan.
"Sir, you're under arrest for spamming your coworkers."
"But they *asked* me to send them 'The Big List of Blonde Jokes'! Honest, officer!"
Okay, they give your 10$ worth of 'credits' to start playing. One would assume that you actually have to wager this to start getting money. Where do the prizes come from? Who funds this? Ads? Gamblers?
Jezus, this is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.
The tradeoff that makes small computers inherently better than big computers is *heat* dissipation. Every inch of your MB generates heat. Every PCI and AGP card generates a shitload of heat. Every cable, every powercord, every drive generates heat.
It's a misnomer that all the heat in a PC comes from the CPU. This is not the case. Anyone seen the heat sinks on mobo growing lately? Hmmm...? By making componenets larger, you merely make them hotter. Not faster...
Embedded Linux is okay, but you can run an entire distribution off one of one of these guys.
If there are so many different variations on the same theme of hardware. How many times have we seen the stylus to OCR/Image concept since the Newton?
How hard would it be for some enterprising haquers out to build a generic handwriting OCR engine? What are the technical problems involved with this sort of thing?