Actually, the better comparison would be a 350 hp engine and a 260 hp engine. When the cheats are disabled, performance drops by slightly more than 24 percent.
Now -that- makes a difference in the real world, just as much as it does on paper.
If you can shift the wavelength of a cheapie red laser to become a non-cheapie blue laser, you could utterly revolutionize every aspect of disc-based (CD/DVD/etc) storage and retrieval.
Wouldn't it be impressive if all lasers worked on the exact same technology, with the exception of each having a different vibrating color-shift crystal in them? Make them interchangeable and then anybody can have any laser of any color.
Blue light is more-powerful than red light, because the wavelength is shorter; each blue photon contains slightly more energy than a red one. So, I suppose my biggest question is: If I have a 5mW red-emitting laser, and I pass it through one of these crystals to shift its emitted wavelength to blue, how close to 5mW will the crystal's output power be?
I'm waiting for the day when some other organization with a three or four letter acronym decides as well that singing along while I'm sitting in rush hour traffic is also a violation of the DMCA.
Hey, I'm vocally copying the song! Circumvention of copy protection! eeep! I'm sure they'd nail me extra hard if I had a passenger; I'd get it once for copyright violation and once for publically displaying illegally copied works!
They're lyrics! Only lyrics! People like to know lyrics so they can sing along, right? I've got a directory on my computer called "Lyrics" and I break out the files therein whenever *I* want to sing along. By saying that the lyrics cannot be freely distributed to any and all persons who desire them, it seems to me that they're putting a restriction on singing along as a concept. Kind of like making ammonium nitrate fertilizer harder to get to discourage people from making bombs.
But singing along with a song does not equate to levelling a federal building in Oklahoma state; and the intended purpose for having the lyrics generally is to enable a fun little sing-along. Sing alongs used to be great fun; around the campfire, on long car rides, and etc. But now? Now it's becoming more and more difficult to find lyrics to enable that singing along.
What could be more innocent than a sing-along? Why must I be persecuted for desiring to imitate an artist but not being able to remember all the words to a song?
"Things are not always as they appear." My father once told me this, and he was right, too.
Seeing "Usher" in A FILE NAME, which just happens to end in.mp3, and then sending a threatening letter based upon it is rather stupid in my view. I'd say that making an accusation based upon looks and appearances alone (without even actually doing an acoustic analysis of the file in order to determine if it IS indeed a copy of copyrighted material) is completely and totally idiotic.
Hell, it's roughly the same as seeing a fruit basket and assuming that since it looks like an apple it is an apple, and chowin' down; only to realize halfway through your second very zealous bite that it's wax fruit and you've screwed up.
But odds are, the lesson hasn't been learned: the RIAA will continue to send out very threatening emails with great frequency every time they spot a word in a filename which happens to (by coincidence, I'm sure) belong to a musical artist that the RIAA "looks out for the best interests of."
This was built as a technology experiment (or because it was snowing and I was stuck at home). Now that there's interest, it'll become much more real. The final name is clearly very unlikely to be Roogle. I'm in the process of "de-rooglizing" the look and feel presently. I appreciate your patience and interest. -- Scott
followed by:
Hire Us As we are a consulting company, we are available for engagements.
Please contact us via our FuzzyGroup site for information.
Among the types of projects we can handle:
Web application development using Open Source technologies. Roogle is built with 100% Open Source components. Web site creation with a focus on serving the needs of non-profit organizations. Custom search engines / Knowledge Management systems Consulting on blogging / weblogging
and then contact information and so forth.
the bold is mine; for emphasis. go look for yourself, it'll probably still be there.
man, now I -really- wish it'd snow here. maybe I could get some free publicity on slashdot too!
I cannot believe you posted this "story" ...
on
Finally, A Working NES!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I cannot believe this story got linked. Look, the ars technica story is bullshit. It's half-assed and it's absolutely idiotic. Go to mcmelectronics.com, get part number 83-3785, the "NINTENDO TYPE 72 PIN CONNECTOR" and then just take apart your nintendo, pull out the old edge connector (it's a slide-on/slide-off procedure, no soldering or glue involved) and REPLACE IT WITH A NEW ONE. Then you're out like $6 + shipping and you didn't have to cut a hole in anything. Then again, if you like sticking it in from behind, this might be the mod for you.
a tax on software downloads? what do they define as a 'software download' ? If I download a non-binary-compatible software application (like a macintosh formatted binhex file, which is opposite-endian from the intel platform, although I forget which end is which presently) which will not run on the platform I downloaded the file with, is it classified as a software download even though to me and my computer it's just nonsensical raw binary garbage? Also, bios updates- are they software? how about drivers? powerpoint presentations? where's the line going to be drawn and who's going to draw it?
It installs without permission. It does a lot of things that you don't want it to. It checks for updates on reboot.
I think that anybody that finds this on their system should sue them as a hacker spreading virii personally, because that's what it sounds like they're doing.:(
wow. it sounds like Overpeer just patented MP3s and peer-to-peer networks!
MP3s are a lossy digital compression of music. It is not even a copy, so much as a deteriorated and damaged imitation of the original. (double-deteriorated and double-damaged usually, because of the initial conversion from analog audio into digital waveform audio, and from there again to MP3 format)
Compressing an analog sound into ANY digital format (not just MP3s) will result in a deterioration or damaging of the sound quality.
Digital equipment (like computers) doesn't understand curvy waveforms; digital equipment understands digits and how they represent a stair-stepping imitation of curvy waveforms. The higher the bitrate, the more stair-steps can be used to represent a curved wave and the more similarly the digital imitation will sound like the original. The lower the bitrate, the fewer steps and the less like the original it will sound. Making a digital recording of ANYTHING will diminish the sound quality, and compressing it as an MP3 will diminish the quality furhter as well as also screwing up the harmonics of the recording. (There was a bit
That patent needs to be struck down. That patent, the patent office, and the whole patent process. We need a new one, pronto.
no reason? No reason other than the limitless budget of the United States of America. They can write a cheque with more ones and zeroes than you'll find in your average intel CPU...Everything has a price; I think -you- are the one that needs to not be dense.
I have a friend who used to be a telemarketer, and he used to tell me all kinds of fun stuff about their lists of phone numbers they'd have to call. They'd get lists of people who just had children born to them from the hospitals, so they can be called up and offered parenting magazine subscriptions. They'd get reports from police stations about illegal possession of firearms and then these people would be targeted for sales of "guns and ammo." If the hospitals and the police are already willing to sell their lists, what makes you think that something as "reputable" as a TIRE MANUFACTURER won't sell theirs? heh.
Furthermore, although it is true that everything can be used for both good and bad, the greater likelihood is that it will be used for something bad or oppressive. The DMCA is a great example of what people initially thought would be a "good" law, but it turns out it prevents people from posting ads from newspapers on black friday and all other kinds of inane bullshit that the DMCA shouldn't even apply to.
If you give those "in control" a way to more-efficiently or more-effectively "control" the ones they're "in control" of, they're going to use this new technology or method exhaustively "for the greater good" even if it walks all over our rights, because it holds the illusion of making their job easy or making a human system flawless. A human system by its nature will never be flawless, because it is human, but that doesn't mean that those "in power" or "in control" aren't lusting after a "perfect solution" which will put them in the position to watch everybody and make sure they behave.
The more you take things like this lightly, the more you're letting your guard down. You need to believe that the only person that will protect you and your rights is yourself, and you need to believe that everybody else out there has wants and desires FOR or OF you which are completely counter to your own. Only by encountering all friends as enemies can you ensure that your personal privacy and security will be preserved.
how about magnets? Big ones, made from NdFeB (Neodymium-Iron-Boron)... they aren't too expensive, and boy they do the job. Hop over to ebay and get one.
I don't get this. Why do they keep raising the taxes in the interest of "the economy" ? What does raising the taxes do?
If you start to tax internet purchases, people will gradually stop buying things online. If I live 10 miles from the state line and I know that my neighboring state doesn't have gas taxes, where will I go to fill up my truck? I'll go to the place with none of these goddamned taxes. If it's 30 miles away then I'll bring a gas can or three so that I don't have to come back the next time I need a fill-up.
Raising the taxes (or making new ones) will not give the government more money, it will just give the people more of a headache and give them one more reason to take their business elsewhere, or at least to avoid the condition which is being taxed. If you make purchasing an item more difficult or expensive, people will simply NOT buy it unless it's a necessity; they'll find another way.
I was talking to my uncle the other day about neat little legal methods of tax evasion. When he worked for a steel mill in Pennsylvania as a trucker, the county implemented this ghetto-ass "warehouse inventory tax" or some bullshit. They said you'd be taxed based upon how much stuff you had in inventory in your warehouse at the end of the month. (This applied to grocery stores as well, and he told me that he saw numerous stores in the county close down because they couldn't pay the tax. This is dozens of jobs lost due to taxes.. yay taxes!) At the company my uncle worked for, their way around the tax was to do all shipments at two days before the end of the month, as you cannot tax what isn't in inventory... all the steel was out on the road, warehouse was empty, no taxes being paid. simple as that.
I already illustrated above with cheap gas, and now with the steel. How many more examples are needed, before a -taxmaker- is going to understand? For the number of people who are going to get pissed off and stop buying online once online buying starts being taxed, do you think they'll end up with a number of joe schmucks who're willing to pay the tax to compensate for the loss?
I think that, in this crappy economical condition we've got going, RAISING the prices in any way shape or form is really one of the more idiotic things that should be done.
Instead, I think governors need to stop buying $900 toilet seats and senators need to stop putting $60,000 cars on the government bankroll. I'm sure there are ways we can come up with some money somewhere that does NOT involve pissing off the public. The outgoing governor of Illinois (I think it's Illinois) just commuted the sentences of all death row inmates. Now, in Illinois, death row is empty. 156 death sentences became 152 life sentences and 4 40-to-life sentences. While this is a good humanitarian thing to do, and he acknowledged that our system(s) are flawed and need changing, he also took a bunch of people that we (as the taxpayers) would not have to feed, clothe, and keep warm by this time next year, and he ensured that our money will now go to feed, clothe, and keep warm a bunch of people whose death warrants were already signed. You wouldn't think it initially, but keeping an inmate ALIVE in prison is rather expensive.
So while it was a nice gesture on the governor's part, it was also costly. If everything boils down to the great American buck (as I know it does) then the only justification for doing anything should be because it's the CHEAPEST, not because it's the most MORAL. If everybody made sure the buck came first, I bet the economy wouldn't be in the position it's in. (I also bet nobody in a political office would have a $900 toilet seat.)
There are two things regarding computers in schools that are holding people back instead of launching them forward.
1. Macintoshes in schools, PCs in the real world. This needs to stop, and it needs to stop soon. Macintoshes just train people to be stupid, whereas PCs are irritatingly kludgy and they force you to learn. Irritable smart people are much more useful than happy stupid people.
2. Educators who live in the stone age. You can't really teach a class full of students to use a computer when the instructor doesn't know the power switch from the eject button on the cdrom drive. (saw this scenario like seven years ago when I was still in school, actually. heh. he was an english teacher.) We should educate our educators FIRST and our children SECOND. heh.
This has long been the case. If you want performance and reliability, you pay through the nose. Computers ARE made this well. They're the variety made by Cray that cost $10M USD a pop.
well it depends on what they mean by 8 bits. VGA is 8 bit color; 256 colors onscreen at once, from a palette of 262,144. 64 different colors would be 6 bits, no? I think they may be underselling.;)
"This seems a little extreme to me, since sitting at the computer just to listen to music is stupid. What about car stereos and high-fidelity CD players?"
XP Media Center? Hello? It's not like they put the words MEDIA CENTER in the name of the operating system or anything. Car stereos and high-fidelity cd players will eventually all run microsoft--if microsoft has their way. And it looks good to sony too, if microsoft can squeeze pc users with their iron grip of copyright protection and digital rights management.
The only way a consumerist economy will work is by putting discretionary income in the hands of the consumer. The government actually needs to tax us LESS, so we have more money to spend. If there's more money actually working in the economic system (and not lining some politician's pockets) then consumers will buy more goods. More goods will be produced because people can afford them and demand is high. And *gasp* Then you have MORE JOBS because more of this wonderful stuff that consumers consume is affordable to them, and they want it now!
Taxing people just reduces how much money they can spend in our economic system...It keeps them from going out to McDonalds and instead keeps them inside cooking $1.50 TV Dinners.
Do you know what happens when you over-tax people? You piss them off. Do you know what happens when those you're taxing realise that they're pissed and they don't like your taxes? They throw all your fucking tea into the harbor and do a happy dance because your regime is about to crumble.
Okay. This solution is kind of technically involved, so please just hold on tight.
1. Take a piece of paper, about letter size (8.5 x 11 inches) and set it on top of the glass surface. 2. secure it with tape or glue. 3. Mouse on new paper surface. Consider this a table-top surface-mount upgrade, if you will. This is the PaperSurface 1.0 upgrade, the six-second solution to most of my mousing problems.
I think this is one of those problems that takes less time to actually fix, than to mention it as being a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the better comparison would be a 350 hp engine and a 260 hp engine. When the cheats are disabled, performance drops by slightly more than 24 percent.
Now -that- makes a difference in the real world, just as much as it does on paper.
I wouldn't mind that one. We could follow it with an article on how to amputate limbs with pocketknives.
All I can think of here is lasers.
If you can shift the wavelength of a cheapie red laser to become a non-cheapie blue laser, you could utterly revolutionize every aspect of disc-based (CD/DVD/etc) storage and retrieval.
Wouldn't it be impressive if all lasers worked on the exact same technology, with the exception of each having a different vibrating color-shift crystal in them? Make them interchangeable and then anybody can have any laser of any color.
Blue light is more-powerful than red light, because the wavelength is shorter; each blue photon contains slightly more energy than a red one. So, I suppose my biggest question is: If I have a 5mW red-emitting laser, and I pass it through one of these crystals to shift its emitted wavelength to blue, how close to 5mW will the crystal's output power be?
I'm waiting for the day when some other organization with a three or four letter acronym decides as well that singing along while I'm sitting in rush hour traffic is also a violation of the DMCA.
Hey, I'm vocally copying the song! Circumvention of copy protection! eeep! I'm sure they'd nail me extra hard if I had a passenger; I'd get it once for copyright violation and once for publically displaying illegally copied works!
They're lyrics! Only lyrics! People like to know lyrics so they can sing along, right? I've got a directory on my computer called "Lyrics" and I break out the files therein whenever *I* want to sing along. By saying that the lyrics cannot be freely distributed to any and all persons who desire them, it seems to me that they're putting a restriction on singing along as a concept. Kind of like making ammonium nitrate fertilizer harder to get to discourage people from making bombs.
But singing along with a song does not equate to levelling a federal building in Oklahoma state; and the intended purpose for having the lyrics generally is to enable a fun little sing-along. Sing alongs used to be great fun; around the campfire, on long car rides, and etc. But now? Now it's becoming more and more difficult to find lyrics to enable that singing along.
What could be more innocent than a sing-along? Why must I be persecuted for desiring to imitate an artist but not being able to remember all the words to a song?
"Things are not always as they appear." My father once told me this, and he was right, too.
.mp3, and then sending a threatening letter based upon it is rather stupid in my view. I'd say that making an accusation based upon looks and appearances alone (without even actually doing an acoustic analysis of the file in order to determine if it IS indeed a copy of copyrighted material) is completely and totally idiotic.
Seeing "Usher" in A FILE NAME, which just happens to end in
Hell, it's roughly the same as seeing a fruit basket and assuming that since it looks like an apple it is an apple, and chowin' down; only to realize halfway through your second very zealous bite that it's wax fruit and you've screwed up.
But odds are, the lesson hasn't been learned: the RIAA will continue to send out very threatening emails with great frequency every time they spot a word in a filename which happens to (by coincidence, I'm sure) belong to a musical artist that the RIAA "looks out for the best interests of."
I think "Law Enforcement Organization" m'self.
gone to the site lately? read the "about" page? it's just a test to gauge interest and promote a consulting company.
somebody just got a ton of free advertising, nothing more. says the functional system won't be operational for a couple of days. heh.
can we get stories with substance, please? not about an alpha stage website some dude threw together some day when it was snowing?
no, seriously:
This is from their about page:
There are a couple of things to understand here:
This was built as a technology experiment (or because it was snowing and I was stuck at home). Now that there's interest, it'll become much more real.
The final name is clearly very unlikely to be Roogle. I'm in the process of "de-rooglizing" the look and feel presently.
I appreciate your patience and interest.
-- Scott
followed by:
Hire Us
As we are a consulting company, we are available for engagements.
Please contact us via our FuzzyGroup site for information.
Among the types of projects we can handle:
Web application development using Open Source technologies. Roogle is built with 100% Open Source components.
Web site creation with a focus on serving the needs of non-profit organizations.
Custom search engines / Knowledge Management systems
Consulting on blogging / weblogging
and then contact information and so forth.
the bold is mine; for emphasis. go look for yourself, it'll probably still be there.
man, now I -really- wish it'd snow here. maybe I could get some free publicity on slashdot too!
I cannot believe this story got linked. Look, the ars technica story is bullshit. It's half-assed and it's absolutely idiotic. Go to mcmelectronics.com, get part number 83-3785, the "NINTENDO TYPE 72 PIN CONNECTOR" and then just take apart your nintendo, pull out the old edge connector (it's a slide-on/slide-off procedure, no soldering or glue involved) and REPLACE IT WITH A NEW ONE. Then you're out like $6 + shipping and you didn't have to cut a hole in anything. Then again, if you like sticking it in from behind, this might be the mod for you.
a tax on software downloads? what do they define as a 'software download' ? If I download a non-binary-compatible software application (like a macintosh formatted binhex file, which is opposite-endian from the intel platform, although I forget which end is which presently) which will not run on the platform I downloaded the file with, is it classified as a software download even though to me and my computer it's just nonsensical raw binary garbage? Also, bios updates- are they software? how about drivers? powerpoint presentations? where's the line going to be drawn and who's going to draw it?
temperatures yes, explosions...no.
It installs without permission.
:(
It does a lot of things that you don't want it to.
It checks for updates on reboot.
I think that anybody that finds this on their system should sue them as a hacker spreading virii personally, because that's what it sounds like they're doing.
wow. it sounds like Overpeer just patented MP3s and peer-to-peer networks!
MP3s are a lossy digital compression of music. It is not even a copy, so much as a deteriorated and damaged imitation of the original. (double-deteriorated and double-damaged usually, because of the initial conversion from analog audio into digital waveform audio, and from there again to MP3 format)
Compressing an analog sound into ANY digital format (not just MP3s) will result in a deterioration or damaging of the sound quality.
Digital equipment (like computers) doesn't understand curvy waveforms; digital equipment understands digits and how they represent a stair-stepping imitation of curvy waveforms. The higher the bitrate, the more stair-steps can be used to represent a curved wave and the more similarly the digital imitation will sound like the original. The lower the bitrate, the fewer steps and the less like the original it will sound. Making a digital recording of ANYTHING will diminish the sound quality, and compressing it as an MP3 will diminish the quality furhter as well as also screwing up the harmonics of the recording. (There was a bit
That patent needs to be struck down. That patent, the patent office, and the whole patent process. We need a new one, pronto.
it probably won't, because the media is probably being puppeted to the same "other interests" as the "figurehead" is.
no reason? No reason other than the limitless budget of the United States of America. They can write a cheque with more ones and zeroes than you'll find in your average intel CPU...Everything has a price; I think -you- are the one that needs to not be dense.
I have a friend who used to be a telemarketer, and he used to tell me all kinds of fun stuff about their lists of phone numbers they'd have to call. They'd get lists of people who just had children born to them from the hospitals, so they can be called up and offered parenting magazine subscriptions. They'd get reports from police stations about illegal possession of firearms and then these people would be targeted for sales of "guns and ammo." If the hospitals and the police are already willing to sell their lists, what makes you think that something as "reputable" as a TIRE MANUFACTURER won't sell theirs? heh.
Furthermore, although it is true that everything can be used for both good and bad, the greater likelihood is that it will be used for something bad or oppressive. The DMCA is a great example of what people initially thought would be a "good" law, but it turns out it prevents people from posting ads from newspapers on black friday and all other kinds of inane bullshit that the DMCA shouldn't even apply to.
If you give those "in control" a way to more-efficiently or more-effectively "control" the ones they're "in control" of, they're going to use this new technology or method exhaustively "for the greater good" even if it walks all over our rights, because it holds the illusion of making their job easy or making a human system flawless. A human system by its nature will never be flawless, because it is human, but that doesn't mean that those "in power" or "in control" aren't lusting after a "perfect solution" which will put them in the position to watch everybody and make sure they behave.
The more you take things like this lightly, the more you're letting your guard down. You need to believe that the only person that will protect you and your rights is yourself, and you need to believe that everybody else out there has wants and desires FOR or OF you which are completely counter to your own. Only by encountering all friends as enemies can you ensure that your personal privacy and security will be preserved.
Question everything.
how about magnets? Big ones, made from NdFeB (Neodymium-Iron-Boron) ... they aren't too expensive, and boy they do the job. Hop over to ebay and get one.
Snood is just a ripoff of SNK's Bust a Move, which was released in 1994. See here.
I don't get this. Why do they keep raising the taxes in the interest of "the economy" ? What does raising the taxes do?
If you start to tax internet purchases, people will gradually stop buying things online. If I live 10 miles from the state line and I know that my neighboring state doesn't have gas taxes, where will I go to fill up my truck? I'll go to the place with none of these goddamned taxes. If it's 30 miles away then I'll bring a gas can or three so that I don't have to come back the next time I need a fill-up.
Raising the taxes (or making new ones) will not give the government more money, it will just give the people more of a headache and give them one more reason to take their business elsewhere, or at least to avoid the condition which is being taxed. If you make purchasing an item more difficult or expensive, people will simply NOT buy it unless it's a necessity; they'll find another way.
I was talking to my uncle the other day about neat little legal methods of tax evasion. When he worked for a steel mill in Pennsylvania as a trucker, the county implemented this ghetto-ass "warehouse inventory tax" or some bullshit. They said you'd be taxed based upon how much stuff you had in inventory in your warehouse at the end of the month. (This applied to grocery stores as well, and he told me that he saw numerous stores in the county close down because they couldn't pay the tax. This is dozens of jobs lost due to taxes.. yay taxes!) At the company my uncle worked for, their way around the tax was to do all shipments at two days before the end of the month, as you cannot tax what isn't in inventory... all the steel was out on the road, warehouse was empty, no taxes being paid. simple as that.
I already illustrated above with cheap gas, and now with the steel. How many more examples are needed, before a -taxmaker- is going to understand? For the number of people who are going to get pissed off and stop buying online once online buying starts being taxed, do you think they'll end up with a number of joe schmucks who're willing to pay the tax to compensate for the loss?
I think that, in this crappy economical condition we've got going, RAISING the prices in any way shape or form is really one of the more idiotic things that should be done.
Instead, I think governors need to stop buying $900 toilet seats and senators need to stop putting $60,000 cars on the government bankroll. I'm sure there are ways we can come up with some money somewhere that does NOT involve pissing off the public. The outgoing governor of Illinois (I think it's Illinois) just commuted the sentences of all death row inmates. Now, in Illinois, death row is empty. 156 death sentences became 152 life sentences and 4 40-to-life sentences. While this is a good humanitarian thing to do, and he acknowledged that our system(s) are flawed and need changing, he also took a bunch of people that we (as the taxpayers) would not have to feed, clothe, and keep warm by this time next year, and he ensured that our money will now go to feed, clothe, and keep warm a bunch of people whose death warrants were already signed. You wouldn't think it initially, but keeping an inmate ALIVE in prison is rather expensive.
So while it was a nice gesture on the governor's part, it was also costly. If everything boils down to the great American buck (as I know it does) then the only justification for doing anything should be because it's the CHEAPEST, not because it's the most MORAL. If everybody made sure the buck came first, I bet the economy wouldn't be in the position it's in. (I also bet nobody in a political office would have a $900 toilet seat.)
There are two things regarding computers in schools that are holding people back instead of launching them forward.
1. Macintoshes in schools, PCs in the real world. This needs to stop, and it needs to stop soon. Macintoshes just train people to be stupid, whereas PCs are irritatingly kludgy and they force you to learn. Irritable smart people are much more useful than happy stupid people.
2. Educators who live in the stone age. You can't really teach a class full of students to use a computer when the instructor doesn't know the power switch from the eject button on the cdrom drive. (saw this scenario like seven years ago when I was still in school, actually. heh. he was an english teacher.) We should educate our educators FIRST and our children SECOND. heh.
Yes.
the comments on the WHAT?
Next thing I know it'll be the comments on sally selling seashells by the seashore; who comes up with these names that are six mouth-fulls long?
Price, Performance, Reliability. Pick two.
This has long been the case. If you want performance and reliability, you pay through the nose. Computers ARE made this well. They're the variety made by Cray that cost $10M USD a pop.
Quality comes at a price.
well it depends on what they mean by 8 bits. VGA is 8 bit color; 256 colors onscreen at once, from a palette of 262,144. 64 different colors would be 6 bits, no? I think they may be underselling. ;)
"This seems a little extreme to me, since sitting at the computer just to listen to music is stupid. What about car stereos and high-fidelity CD players?"
XP Media Center? Hello? It's not like they put the words MEDIA CENTER in the name of the operating system or anything. Car stereos and high-fidelity cd players will eventually all run microsoft--if microsoft has their way. And it looks good to sony too, if microsoft can squeeze pc users with their iron grip of copyright protection and digital rights management.
The only way a consumerist economy will work is by putting discretionary income in the hands of the consumer. The government actually needs to tax us LESS, so we have more money to spend. If there's more money actually working in the economic system (and not lining some politician's pockets) then consumers will buy more goods. More goods will be produced because people can afford them and demand is high. And *gasp* Then you have MORE JOBS because more of this wonderful stuff that consumers consume is affordable to them, and they want it now!
Taxing people just reduces how much money they can spend in our economic system...It keeps them from going out to McDonalds and instead keeps them inside cooking $1.50 TV Dinners.
Do you know what happens when you over-tax people? You piss them off. Do you know what happens when those you're taxing realise that they're pissed and they don't like your taxes? They throw all your fucking tea into the harbor and do a happy dance because your regime is about to crumble.
Okay. This solution is kind of technically involved, so please just hold on tight.
1. Take a piece of paper, about letter size (8.5 x 11 inches) and set it on top of the glass surface.
2. secure it with tape or glue.
3. Mouse on new paper surface. Consider this a table-top surface-mount upgrade, if you will. This is the PaperSurface 1.0 upgrade, the six-second solution to most of my mousing problems.
I think this is one of those problems that takes less time to actually fix, than to mention it as being a problem.