The first commercially available product that incorporates the System LCD architecture is Sharp's Zaurus SL-C700 PDA, recently released in Japan.
If that's true, then it's about time. I can't count how many next-gen display technology announcements I've seen on/. about stuff that's supposed to make better displays cheaper, and then the product never comes to market.
The fact that there's something already out there using it means that we're much more likely to see the technology become more widespread and adapted to other devices.
"The Little Mermaid" was written by Hans Christian Andersen. Disney took the story, mangled it a bit, didn't credit the original author, and now protects it like a rabid bulldog. Same with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". Written by Victor Hugo. He's not credited either. "Pocahontas" was a (more or less) true story. "Mulan" is based on a Chinese legend. "Atlantis" is an adaptation of "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" (and draws many compelling comparisons to "Nadia: Secret of Blue Water"). "The Lion King" was a direct ripoff of "Kimba, The White Lion", an original work done by Osamu Tezuka. "Cinderella", "Snow White", "Beauty and the Beast" and "Sleeping Beauty" are all widely known faerie tales.
Disney most certainly got to "steal from the cultural works of their fathers and grandfathers".
The boxing game you speak of is called Mo-Cap Boxing, and it's produced by Konami, the same company that brings us Dance Dance Revolution, Para Para Paradise, DrumMania and Percussion Freaks (the drumming game you mention), and a wide variety of other motion-sensor and music-based games. Their Bemani division produces all of these (except for Police 911 and Mo-Cap Boxing).
The Korean knock-off is called Pump It Up, and it's produced by Andamiro. It is more difficult, but in my opinion it's not as fun as DDR. The song selection isn't very good. Another Korean knock-off, Techno Motion, basically builds off the Andamiro formula, which says "More arrows *must* mean more fun!" There's also Stepping Selection, by Jaleco, which is the system that is the basis for Britney's Dance Beat. That's a pretty loathsome game there.
Para Para Paradise, for the uninformed, uses five vertically positioned infrared beams placed in a pentagon shape around you. Similarly to DDR, you follow the arrows on the screen and break the light beams at the appropriate time. You don't have to use your feet, unlike DDR - Any body part will do. The orientation of the arrows makes it so that you have to rotate and twist more often, frequently making upper-body motions more efficient and viable. It's named Para Para Paradise because the motions you perform in the game are similar to a type of Japanese karaoke bar dancing called "parapara".
For a good combination of both DDR and Para Para Paradise, try DanceManiax/Dance Freaks. These games have sensors on the front of the machine which you can place your hands/arms/knees/whatever over or under, and foot panels on the bottom similar to DDR.
Bemani makes a lot of other good stuff too (Like Beatmania!), but it's not exercise-oriented, and so I won't mention it here. For anyone interested in Bemani products, take a look at BemaniStyle.com and DDRFreak.
Because if your $100 sink gives way, you can have $50000+ of water damage to contend with.... whereas on a computer the stakes are usually much lower.
We could argue back and forth about the monetary value of my personal data and files, as well as my user account credentials for online services, which could be damaged/destroyed/compromised if I were to take my system in for service. I'd say that's a fairly large liability, wouldn't you?
Suppose I run my own legitimate business at home from my computer? That's a pretty hefty burden to deal with if the shop I take my system to screws it up. You could say that it's my responsibility to keep backups of my data, but I'd just as easily say it's the shop's responsibility to make sure that they don't break what isn't already broken. You know...the ol' Hippocratic oath - "First, do no harm."
Anyway, some friends of mine at Michigan State developed this game, a useful Kanji flashcard game. Something like this with a larger vocabulary and a better-rounded dictionary (some characters only have the on-reading or the kun-reading, but not both) would be an excellent tool to work with in a student lab.
Please direct me to the user(s) that claimed that being able to format your hard disk by visiting a website is a feature, and not a bug. I'd like to introduce them to my friend, Mr. Aluminum Bat.
If adding features to your product introduces potential for known exploits that didn't previously exist (the potential, not the exploits), then you don't add the features. Doing so is brain-dead. And *that* we can scream at Microsoft for.
If I know that language X was designed to be sandboxed by a bytecode interpreter, and I remove that sandbox, then I'm perfectly responsible for any behavior that didn't get contained by that code.
Considering the Japanese ethic against violence and common respect for individuals...and the very low crime rate, I'd have to say you're either confused or making that up.
In Japan, a shooting would make national news, since they're so rare. Suicides are actually more common than homicides in Japan. You make it sound like the Yakuza was running a black market in EQ items, and were putting out hits on people who weren't payin' them off.
He's too right about the elitism attitude on the part of many in-deep Linux users. It's probably one of the biggest barriers-to-entry for well-seasoned Windows veterans.
Likewise, Linux users need to drop the whole "All Windows users are morons" attitude, because the odds are pretty damned good that at least 3/4's of those preaching the message are probably doing so from a Windows box. I'm on one right now. It's not long left in this world, however - I just need some disk space on the network to back up everything before I format the disks.
Hey. We all have to start somewhere. At least respect the fact that some of us are *interested* in Linux.
*Jump* at the chance to add another one to the fold.
Do what you can to help others out. This doesn't mean "go to LUGs and help out people". This means to actively keep an ear out for people who are interested in Linux. You might view it as signing a support contract for life, but the fact of the matter is that if someone's interested in Linux, you probably wouldn't have to support him for that long, and they're probably wanting a minimal amount of handholding anyway (Since they're being adventurous enough to switch OSes).
You want Linux to succeed? Show people why it's better. If Windows works for them, that's fine. Leave 'em the hell alone. If they come to you with a problem one day, though, then think of a way that Linux can solve it. It might be just the ticket.
Humans are all unique, and not everyone has the same learning process that you do. Furthermore, there isn't a one-to-one correlation between Linux advocates and that same learning process.
I've been trying to get into Linux for the last eight years or so, and I've always been put off by it in some way or another. I've finally got myself a firewall/router set up now using Trustix, and I know my way around the system. It's gratifying to know that I had to do a lot of discovery and playing around to finally get it to work by myself, but it took many, many hours to do it.
It still isn't running named, though. I've read all the HOWTOs and man pages I can find, and I still can't get it working properly. That doesn't mean I'm a stupid lUser...that means that there's a miscommunication between me and the documentation. It'd likely be fixed by...surprise!...different documentation.
If the Linux community wants to see Linux go mainstream, they have to learn how to adapt it to the mainstream. You can't just expect the other 99.9% of the population to "figure things out" in the one specific way that everyone else has done it before, despite how well it may have worked for you.
I feel this may be in part due to culture clashes between programmers and artists.
I have a friend who will be receiving her art degree in the next week, and recently she's been doing a lot of work with Flash and Cold Fusion. On the one hand, I really like her Flash applets, but on the other hand, she always puts them in a popup window, with the webpage itself being just a loader. It's annoying as hell, because her Flash apps were always of reasonably small size, something on the order of 400x300. There are other issues I have with them too, but I won't address those here.
I asked her why she didn't just load the applet in the page itself, and she barked at me, claiming that she did so to retain control of how the app looks. She didn't want any ugly toolbars or whatnot that she had no control over clashing with her design.
I tried to talk to her about HCI concepts and the idea of presenting information in a creative way without interfering with what the user wants, but she'd have absolutely none of it. To suggest such a thing was tantamount to restricting her creative control.
Personally, I thought it was rather presumptuous. Yes, a computer is a tool, but ultimately, it's still a computer, and you have to respect the boundaries of functionality when it comes to designing things to run on a PC.
So, to put it bluntly, I'm starting to believe that the problem isn't that Slashdot readers don't understand W3C/WAI standards or good markup practices - It's that the programmers aren't the ones doing the webpages.
Nobody'll ever get to read this comment, unfortunately, but I've found an absolutely indisposable app for my Palm - GNU Keyring. Essentially, you use it to securely store account/password combinations. It has its own passphrase which you use to enter the database, and timed lockouts. Everything is stored with RC5-64, IIRC. Plus, it has a built-in password generator which can create random passwords with/without a-z, A-Z, 0-9, symbols, and other stuff, between 4 and 20 characters in length. It makes "secure" web browsing a lot easier when I don't even have to try and remember passwords for my online banking and such.
Yeah, a single password is a single point of failure, but since the data is stored on my person, encrypted, and password-locked by me, if someone were to get at my account information, I'd probably have more to worry about than someone making a mess out of my credit. Combined with JotLoc (or a superior gesture-based device security system - I'm sure mine isn't that great), it'd take a rather monumental effort to get at my data.
I also use it to store license keys for software I frequently install. It's really really handy.
Oh...and of course, since it's open source, it'll settle the stomachs of most/.ers.
Everyone else has already had a few words with you, but I'd like to point something else out that's probably the source of your problems...
I have stopped counting the times that I've had to reboot my Jaguar workstation in the school's art lab after it failed to handle some bizarre error in Classic environment.
No offense, dude, but it's probably an asinine machine lockdown policy in place. The system probably has some extra stuff installed to prevent you from doing this, that, or the other thing, and as a result, things are going to break. The admins at my school obviously don't know what the hell they're doing with the Macs - They have authentication with the school financial system on login now (to charge for printouts), and the little lame script and stuff they set up takes login time from two seconds to at least two minutes. No exaggeration here.
They're so anal about keeping things locked down that they *taped up the Zip drives* on the Power Macs. I guess they didn't want anyone copying software off the system, or running any apps. Never mind that someone could just as easily do it on the Dells that are far more prolific in the lab...
In short, don't pass judgment on an operating system based on *one* person's deployment of it in a specific environment.
Your analogy is invalid. In the restaurant scenario, the waitress is the only one serving your needs, and thus it is appropriate that she should be able to help you out. You don't have to worry about twenty waiters and waitresses all bouncing over each other, interrupting your dinner, trying to sell you this, that, and the other thing. And if you tell them to go away, they will. And if you leave, they won't follow you.
I remember people mentioning this a few/. articles back when we were talking about an effective way to stop spammers and Bernard Shifman...by reporting them to the Chinese government.
Earlier this month, said Ralsky, somebody told the Chinese government that a Web company from which he leases e-mail servers in Beijing was sending messages critical of Chinese policy.
Police promptly raided the business and confiscated Ralsky's servers. Although they were returned a few days later, Ralsky now tries to cover his tracks better, so opponents won't know what companies and servers he's using.
Linford said he heard of the raid. "It wasn't us that caused it," he said. "But there are a lot of anti-spam activists, and apparently some of them on their own started organizing a campaign to get the Chinese government to think that Ralsky was supporting" the Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual group the Chinese government considers subversive. "We didn't endorse that, but it shows you how deep the anti-Ralsky feelings are."
If that worked, maybe we can find someone with a much *longer* reach to take him down.
We need to start reporting him as a terrorist to the FBI. We know how pushy they can be.:) As was mentioned in the Buckeye case from last night, they'll steal^H^H^H^H^Hconfiscate all his equipment during the "investigation"...
I was just curious. I wasn't trying to skew your statements or anything by saying "Oh...well you just think that because ___".
do you also say it is just a myth that consoles have often been sold below their manufacturing costs?
Point one: make that "initial cost".
Personally, I don't know how much I trust ActsOfGord. I long subscribed to the belief that consoles were sold at or around cost, and that the royalties were where the profits came from. If necessary, a console could sell under cost, so long as the market conditions would support it. Sony, for instance, could have afforded to sell the PS2 at $249 on its launch, as the only competition it had at the time was the Dreamcast, which, as history shows, wasn't doing all that well to begin with. The GameCube now has a higher install base in the US than the Dreamcast does.
Of course, Sony sold the PS2 at $299 because it was the right price for the hardware, and they had generated enough hype to make that price seem perfectly feasible. It was the price that the market would support. It's a shame too, because the Dreamcast had exceptional hardware, and a *proper* Internet gaming model - Give everyone the hardware, let the publishers do stuff with it.
The thing is, as I said before, the market has to support your ability to take a loss on the hardware. The dotcom "market" demonstrated this all too well. If you have five vendors in the same space that are all competing to be "loss leaders", you might be the first one hitting the ground, but you're no better off without a parachute. Microsoft had the right idea, but
Shackled itself to the hardware of the ever-advancing computer market
Didn't adequately negotiate with the Japanese market and publishers, who will ultimately make or break a console
Put the name Microsoft on it
Realistically speaking, had Microsoft built the *whole* system and put it out to market under another name or another company (Sega comes to mind), it'd probably be doing *ten* times as well as it is now. However, it's still a gaijin system, and it's made by a company that more and more people are growing to distrust.
A lot of gamers I know that are fans of the Xbox say "Microsoft has $40B in the bank. I know that if I buy this console, my investment isn't going to just go away. Microsoft has the cash to do whatever it takes to make this a worthwhile investment.", which is essentially based off the selfish premise that Microsoft would actually *use* that much money to push the console off on people. Yeah, if there weren't any product-dumping laws, and if the government wasn't keeping such a watchful eye on Microsoft, they'd probably have taken the risk of selling the Xbox even cheaper just to get it out to market.
Actually, I think he's much closer to the mark than you are.
If you consider Office to be one product (although it actually consists of more than ten different apps) then by this logic the number is way less than one hundred.
Second, Windows servers (quite different from your home windows) are profitable.
SQL Server is profitable.
Exchange server is profitable.
Most of the other server apps (Biztalk, SharePoint etc.) are also profitable.
All the development tools are profitable.
MS Press is profitable.
Hardware (other than XBox) is profitable.
PC Games are profitable.
etc. etc. I don't remember all the different products.
Those are product *divisions*, not products. You're crazy if you think divisions of a company this big produce only a single product. And really, I can think off the top of my head of *PLENTY* of products in each of these categories.
Also, don't forget that Microsoft has yet to release any significant number of apps to public domain, so those legacy products are still products, whether or not the codebase is actively maintained.
Think about all the 1st party Xbox games Microsoft publishes. There's at least ten in that number alone.
Microsoft Press publishes a (guessed) average of 2.5 books for each of its commercial releases, and generally at least 1 book for its consumer releases, not including Windows (the averages likely balance out). That means that, assuming that Microsoft has only 40 commercial products (WAY low-balling here), they likely have about 80-120 more in just the books. And the serious SDK offerings are separate products.
License packs and renewals are products.
The Sidewinder series has 11 *current* product offerings alone. The mouse division has 14 current products. 8 keyboards. In case you weren't counting, that's 33 products alone...in *just* the peripheral hardware division.
you dont have to, NFS works fine with HFS+, but you risk screwing yourself with the file name case insensitivity of the mac. A rare event since most people dont have important files that differ in name only in their case but it's lurking.
It's possible that perhaps the UNIX community needs to move past case-sensitivity in filenames and foldernames. Just because UNIX has been doing it that way for 30 years doesn't mean that it needs to be done that way, and apparently both Windows and MacOS have a hard time cooperating with it.
Example - I'm doing development on a local machine with Visual Studio 6. I try to move my project to a Samba share so that I can work with it in a different lab...but suddenly my project won't build. It turns out that Visual Studio makes assumptions about lowercase letters in the pathing for the various files it creates during compilation. UNIX obviously doesn't abide by this, and so returns "file not found".
Sloppy? You bet. Important? Outside of anal-retentiveness, I can't think of a single reason that you'd *WANT* to be able to support filenames that differ only by case. It's an HCI issue for one thing, and the system incompatibility issues that are now surfacing are making the issue more visible.
I'd welcome some examples of places/functionality where case is of critical importance.
Your real question, I guess, is hidden in your leading comment, that Microsoft is "pretty much doing what they want these days." After this antitrust decision, they're going to be watched intensely for evidence of anticompetitive behavior. I don't think they're going to be doing only what they want, at least for a few years.
<vader>I find your proliferation of faith disturbing...</vader>
I don't think I'm being too paranoid when I say that I agree with the questioner. Microsoft has already had its warnings in previous suits. In the media, the winning and losing parties always have some one-liner to say about trial results that goes something along the lines of "This case demonstrates that ___".
I think we can easily say that "This case demonstrates that even the government is too dependent upon Microsoft (technologically, likely contractually, and *definitely* economically) to put a stop to their offenses committed against businesses and consumers."
It took the power of 10,000 computers running around the clock for 549 days, coupled with the brain power of a mathematician at Indiana's University of Notre Dame, to complete one of the world's largest single math computations.
Calc.exe says that's 1.50 years, with 10,000 systems (no mention of CPU speed or configuration. The contest started four years ago, but Notre Dame didn't start participating until almost two years ago.
Furthermore, today's Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (or Athlon XP if you prefer) is far more powerful than the <=1 GHz CPUs available around the time that these systems were constructed. The article's short on details, so it doesn't mention if the systems were SMP-configured, or if they were all single-CPU nodes.
This was a brute force attack as well - You can always decrease the time by throwing more computing power at it.
The number *is* still incredibly huge, but not quite as huge as you say.
There's an easy solution, and I don't know why nobody's thought of it.
Make the voting machines print out a summary page.
Confirm your votes on the screen. The machine prints out a list of your votes, with a stamp on it to confirm which machine it came from and when it was made. You visually inspect the list and compare it to your choices on the screen, and then confirm a second time. Then you're done.
If something doesn't work right, then one of those 10,000+ lawyers that were at the polls yesterday could raise a Big Stink(TM) about it.
Sure, it could be hijacked. I mean, if it's got rogue code which is designed to only register votes for John Q. Incumbent, then maybe it'll print your results accurately, but actually log a vote for the other guy. SO...you do a secondary confirmation count by machine processing the paper votes, just like your fill-in-the-bubble ballots. Check the paper results against the electronic results. There you go. And in the event of extreme paranoia/lawsuits, you've got the *voter confirmed* paper printouts which can be visually inspected for a recount.
2. Common sense would tell you that a desktop processor running at full speed would drain a battery far too quickly.
How does this apply to Apple and its PowerBooks/iBooks, which get far greater battery life than PC laptops? Sorry, but that's quite a broad generalization you've got there.
Slashdot Mirror
The first commercially available product that incorporates the System LCD architecture is Sharp's Zaurus SL-C700 PDA, recently released in Japan.
/. about stuff that's supposed to make better displays cheaper, and then the product never comes to market.
If that's true, then it's about time. I can't count how many next-gen display technology announcements I've seen on
The fact that there's something already out there using it means that we're much more likely to see the technology become more widespread and adapted to other devices.
It's not about the mouse.
"The Little Mermaid" was written by Hans Christian Andersen. Disney took the story, mangled it a bit, didn't credit the original author, and now protects it like a rabid bulldog. Same with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". Written by Victor Hugo. He's not credited either. "Pocahontas" was a (more or less) true story. "Mulan" is based on a Chinese legend. "Atlantis" is an adaptation of "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" (and draws many compelling comparisons to "Nadia: Secret of Blue Water"). "The Lion King" was a direct ripoff of "Kimba, The White Lion", an original work done by Osamu Tezuka. "Cinderella", "Snow White", "Beauty and the Beast" and "Sleeping Beauty" are all widely known faerie tales.
Disney most certainly got to "steal from the cultural works of their fathers and grandfathers".
The boxing game you speak of is called Mo-Cap Boxing, and it's produced by Konami, the same company that brings us Dance Dance Revolution, Para Para Paradise, DrumMania and Percussion Freaks (the drumming game you mention), and a wide variety of other motion-sensor and music-based games. Their Bemani division produces all of these (except for Police 911 and Mo-Cap Boxing).
The Korean knock-off is called Pump It Up, and it's produced by Andamiro. It is more difficult, but in my opinion it's not as fun as DDR. The song selection isn't very good. Another Korean knock-off, Techno Motion, basically builds off the Andamiro formula, which says "More arrows *must* mean more fun!" There's also Stepping Selection, by Jaleco, which is the system that is the basis for Britney's Dance Beat. That's a pretty loathsome game there.
Para Para Paradise, for the uninformed, uses five vertically positioned infrared beams placed in a pentagon shape around you. Similarly to DDR, you follow the arrows on the screen and break the light beams at the appropriate time. You don't have to use your feet, unlike DDR - Any body part will do. The orientation of the arrows makes it so that you have to rotate and twist more often, frequently making upper-body motions more efficient and viable. It's named Para Para Paradise because the motions you perform in the game are similar to a type of Japanese karaoke bar dancing called "parapara".
For a good combination of both DDR and Para Para Paradise, try DanceManiax/Dance Freaks. These games have sensors on the front of the machine which you can place your hands/arms/knees/whatever over or under, and foot panels on the bottom similar to DDR.
Bemani makes a lot of other good stuff too (Like Beatmania!), but it's not exercise-oriented, and so I won't mention it here. For anyone interested in Bemani products, take a look at BemaniStyle.com and DDRFreak.
Because if your $100 sink gives way, you can have $50000+ of water damage to contend with.... whereas on a computer the stakes are usually much lower.
We could argue back and forth about the monetary value of my personal data and files, as well as my user account credentials for online services, which could be damaged/destroyed/compromised if I were to take my system in for service. I'd say that's a fairly large liability, wouldn't you?
Suppose I run my own legitimate business at home from my computer? That's a pretty hefty burden to deal with if the shop I take my system to screws it up. You could say that it's my responsibility to keep backups of my data, but I'd just as easily say it's the shop's responsibility to make sure that they don't break what isn't already broken. You know...the ol' Hippocratic oath - "First, do no harm."
from the konishi-wa-ogenki-desu-ka dept.
That should be konnichi, not konishi.
Anyway, some friends of mine at Michigan State developed this game, a useful Kanji flashcard game. Something like this with a larger vocabulary and a better-rounded dictionary (some characters only have the on-reading or the kun-reading, but not both) would be an excellent tool to work with in a student lab.
Please direct me to the user(s) that claimed that being able to format your hard disk by visiting a website is a feature, and not a bug. I'd like to introduce them to my friend, Mr. Aluminum Bat.
If adding features to your product introduces potential for known exploits that didn't previously exist (the potential, not the exploits), then you don't add the features. Doing so is brain-dead. And *that* we can scream at Microsoft for.
If I know that language X was designed to be sandboxed by a bytecode interpreter, and I remove that sandbox, then I'm perfectly responsible for any behavior that didn't get contained by that code.
Finally! Something we can use to fight off Casanova Frankenstein and Captain Amazing! Was it designed by Dr. Heller?
Considering the Japanese ethic against violence and common respect for individuals...and the very low crime rate, I'd have to say you're either confused or making that up.
In Japan, a shooting would make national news, since they're so rare. Suicides are actually more common than homicides in Japan. You make it sound like the Yakuza was running a black market in EQ items, and were putting out hits on people who weren't payin' them off.
He's too right about the elitism attitude on the part of many in-deep Linux users. It's probably one of the biggest barriers-to-entry for well-seasoned Windows veterans.
Likewise, Linux users need to drop the whole "All Windows users are morons" attitude, because the odds are pretty damned good that at least 3/4's of those preaching the message are probably doing so from a Windows box. I'm on one right now. It's not long left in this world, however - I just need some disk space on the network to back up everything before I format the disks.
Hey. We all have to start somewhere. At least respect the fact that some of us are *interested* in Linux.
*Jump* at the chance to add another one to the fold.
Do what you can to help others out. This doesn't mean "go to LUGs and help out people". This means to actively keep an ear out for people who are interested in Linux. You might view it as signing a support contract for life, but the fact of the matter is that if someone's interested in Linux, you probably wouldn't have to support him for that long, and they're probably wanting a minimal amount of handholding anyway (Since they're being adventurous enough to switch OSes).
You want Linux to succeed? Show people why it's better. If Windows works for them, that's fine. Leave 'em the hell alone. If they come to you with a problem one day, though, then think of a way that Linux can solve it. It might be just the ticket.
Humans are all unique, and not everyone has the same learning process that you do. Furthermore, there isn't a one-to-one correlation between Linux advocates and that same learning process.
I've been trying to get into Linux for the last eight years or so, and I've always been put off by it in some way or another. I've finally got myself a firewall/router set up now using Trustix, and I know my way around the system. It's gratifying to know that I had to do a lot of discovery and playing around to finally get it to work by myself, but it took many, many hours to do it.
It still isn't running named, though. I've read all the HOWTOs and man pages I can find, and I still can't get it working properly. That doesn't mean I'm a stupid lUser...that means that there's a miscommunication between me and the documentation. It'd likely be fixed by...surprise!...different documentation.
If the Linux community wants to see Linux go mainstream, they have to learn how to adapt it to the mainstream. You can't just expect the other 99.9% of the population to "figure things out" in the one specific way that everyone else has done it before, despite how well it may have worked for you.
I feel this may be in part due to culture clashes between programmers and artists.
I have a friend who will be receiving her art degree in the next week, and recently she's been doing a lot of work with Flash and Cold Fusion. On the one hand, I really like her Flash applets, but on the other hand, she always puts them in a popup window, with the webpage itself being just a loader. It's annoying as hell, because her Flash apps were always of reasonably small size, something on the order of 400x300. There are other issues I have with them too, but I won't address those here.
I asked her why she didn't just load the applet in the page itself, and she barked at me, claiming that she did so to retain control of how the app looks. She didn't want any ugly toolbars or whatnot that she had no control over clashing with her design.
I tried to talk to her about HCI concepts and the idea of presenting information in a creative way without interfering with what the user wants, but she'd have absolutely none of it. To suggest such a thing was tantamount to restricting her creative control.
Personally, I thought it was rather presumptuous. Yes, a computer is a tool, but ultimately, it's still a computer, and you have to respect the boundaries of functionality when it comes to designing things to run on a PC.
So, to put it bluntly, I'm starting to believe that the problem isn't that Slashdot readers don't understand W3C/WAI standards or good markup practices - It's that the programmers aren't the ones doing the webpages.
If you had checked the link in the story, you'd see the pricing of $899 US for the 500 GB model.
Nobody'll ever get to read this comment, unfortunately, but I've found an absolutely indisposable app for my Palm - GNU Keyring. Essentially, you use it to securely store account/password combinations. It has its own passphrase which you use to enter the database, and timed lockouts. Everything is stored with RC5-64, IIRC. Plus, it has a built-in password generator which can create random passwords with/without a-z, A-Z, 0-9, symbols, and other stuff, between 4 and 20 characters in length. It makes "secure" web browsing a lot easier when I don't even have to try and remember passwords for my online banking and such.
/.ers.
Yeah, a single password is a single point of failure, but since the data is stored on my person, encrypted, and password-locked by me, if someone were to get at my account information, I'd probably have more to worry about than someone making a mess out of my credit. Combined with JotLoc (or a superior gesture-based device security system - I'm sure mine isn't that great), it'd take a rather monumental effort to get at my data.
I also use it to store license keys for software I frequently install. It's really really handy.
Oh...and of course, since it's open source, it'll settle the stomachs of most
Everyone else has already had a few words with you, but I'd like to point something else out that's probably the source of your problems...
I have stopped counting the times that I've had to reboot my Jaguar workstation in the school's art lab after it failed to handle some bizarre error in Classic environment.
No offense, dude, but it's probably an asinine machine lockdown policy in place. The system probably has some extra stuff installed to prevent you from doing this, that, or the other thing, and as a result, things are going to break. The admins at my school obviously don't know what the hell they're doing with the Macs - They have authentication with the school financial system on login now (to charge for printouts), and the little lame script and stuff they set up takes login time from two seconds to at least two minutes. No exaggeration here.
They're so anal about keeping things locked down that they *taped up the Zip drives* on the Power Macs. I guess they didn't want anyone copying software off the system, or running any apps. Never mind that someone could just as easily do it on the Dells that are far more prolific in the lab...
In short, don't pass judgment on an operating system based on *one* person's deployment of it in a specific environment.
Your analogy is invalid. In the restaurant scenario, the waitress is the only one serving your needs, and thus it is appropriate that she should be able to help you out. You don't have to worry about twenty waiters and waitresses all bouncing over each other, interrupting your dinner, trying to sell you this, that, and the other thing. And if you tell them to go away, they will. And if you leave, they won't follow you.
It's greed, plain and simple.
I remember people mentioning this a few /. articles back when we were talking about an effective way to stop spammers and Bernard Shifman...by reporting them to the Chinese government.
:) As was mentioned in the Buckeye case from last night, they'll steal^H^H^H^H^Hconfiscate all his equipment during the "investigation"...
Earlier this month, said Ralsky, somebody told the Chinese government that a Web company from which he leases e-mail servers in Beijing was sending messages critical of Chinese policy.
Police promptly raided the business and confiscated Ralsky's servers. Although they were returned a few days later, Ralsky now tries to cover his tracks better, so opponents won't know what companies and servers he's using.
Linford said he heard of the raid. "It wasn't us that caused it," he said. "But there are a lot of anti-spam activists, and apparently some of them on their own started organizing a campaign to get the Chinese government to think that Ralsky was supporting" the Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual group the Chinese government considers subversive. "We didn't endorse that, but it shows you how deep the anti-Ralsky feelings are."
If that worked, maybe we can find someone with a much *longer* reach to take him down.
We need to start reporting him as a terrorist to the FBI. We know how pushy they can be.
I was just curious. I wasn't trying to skew your statements or anything by saying "Oh...well you just think that because ___".
do you also say it is just a myth that consoles have often been sold below their manufacturing costs?
Point one: make that "initial cost".
Personally, I don't know how much I trust ActsOfGord. I long subscribed to the belief that consoles were sold at or around cost, and that the royalties were where the profits came from. If necessary, a console could sell under cost, so long as the market conditions would support it. Sony, for instance, could have afforded to sell the PS2 at $249 on its launch, as the only competition it had at the time was the Dreamcast, which, as history shows, wasn't doing all that well to begin with. The GameCube now has a higher install base in the US than the Dreamcast does.
Of course, Sony sold the PS2 at $299 because it was the right price for the hardware, and they had generated enough hype to make that price seem perfectly feasible. It was the price that the market would support. It's a shame too, because the Dreamcast had exceptional hardware, and a *proper* Internet gaming model - Give everyone the hardware, let the publishers do stuff with it.
The thing is, as I said before, the market has to support your ability to take a loss on the hardware. The dotcom "market" demonstrated this all too well. If you have five vendors in the same space that are all competing to be "loss leaders", you might be the first one hitting the ground, but you're no better off without a parachute. Microsoft had the right idea, but
- Shackled itself to the hardware of the ever-advancing computer market
- Didn't adequately negotiate with the Japanese market and publishers, who will ultimately make or break a console
- Put the name Microsoft on it
Realistically speaking, had Microsoft built the *whole* system and put it out to market under another name or another company (Sega comes to mind), it'd probably be doing *ten* times as well as it is now. However, it's still a gaijin system, and it's made by a company that more and more people are growing to distrust.A lot of gamers I know that are fans of the Xbox say "Microsoft has $40B in the bank. I know that if I buy this console, my investment isn't going to just go away. Microsoft has the cash to do whatever it takes to make this a worthwhile investment.", which is essentially based off the selfish premise that Microsoft would actually *use* that much money to push the console off on people. Yeah, if there weren't any product-dumping laws, and if the government wasn't keeping such a watchful eye on Microsoft, they'd probably have taken the risk of selling the Xbox even cheaper just to get it out to market.
Just out of curiosity, what company did you work for?
Obviously not 3DO (not zero)...but who? And in a console division, or in PC/Mac software?
Actually, I think he's much closer to the mark than you are.
etc. etc. I don't remember all the different products.
Those are product *divisions*, not products. You're crazy if you think divisions of a company this big produce only a single product. And really, I can think off the top of my head of *PLENTY* of products in each of these categories.
Also, don't forget that Microsoft has yet to release any significant number of apps to public domain, so those legacy products are still products, whether or not the codebase is actively maintained.
Think about all the 1st party Xbox games Microsoft publishes. There's at least ten in that number alone.
Microsoft Press publishes a (guessed) average of 2.5 books for each of its commercial releases, and generally at least 1 book for its consumer releases, not including Windows (the averages likely balance out). That means that, assuming that Microsoft has only 40 commercial products (WAY low-balling here), they likely have about 80-120 more in just the books. And the serious SDK offerings are separate products.
License packs and renewals are products.
The Sidewinder series has 11 *current* product offerings alone. The mouse division has 14 current products. 8 keyboards. In case you weren't counting, that's 33 products alone...in *just* the peripheral hardware division.
So, who's arbitrarily making up numbers?
Microsoft, like every other game console producer, takes a hit on the console.
Geez...you don't still believe that myth, do you?
Chapter of Proclamations
you dont have to, NFS works fine with HFS+, but you risk screwing yourself with the file name case insensitivity of the mac. A rare event since most people dont have important files that differ in name only in their case but it's lurking.
It's possible that perhaps the UNIX community needs to move past case-sensitivity in filenames and foldernames. Just because UNIX has been doing it that way for 30 years doesn't mean that it needs to be done that way, and apparently both Windows and MacOS have a hard time cooperating with it.
Example - I'm doing development on a local machine with Visual Studio 6. I try to move my project to a Samba share so that I can work with it in a different lab...but suddenly my project won't build. It turns out that Visual Studio makes assumptions about lowercase letters in the pathing for the various files it creates during compilation. UNIX obviously doesn't abide by this, and so returns "file not found".
Sloppy? You bet. Important? Outside of anal-retentiveness, I can't think of a single reason that you'd *WANT* to be able to support filenames that differ only by case. It's an HCI issue for one thing, and the system incompatibility issues that are now surfacing are making the issue more visible.
I'd welcome some examples of places/functionality where case is of critical importance.
Your real question, I guess, is hidden in your leading comment, that Microsoft is "pretty much doing what they want these days." After this antitrust decision, they're going to be watched intensely for evidence of anticompetitive behavior. I don't think they're going to be doing only what they want, at least for a few years.
<vader>I find your proliferation of faith disturbing...</vader>
I don't think I'm being too paranoid when I say that I agree with the questioner. Microsoft has already had its warnings in previous suits. In the media, the winning and losing parties always have some one-liner to say about trial results that goes something along the lines of "This case demonstrates that ___".
I think we can easily say that "This case demonstrates that even the government is too dependent upon Microsoft (technologically, likely contractually, and *definitely* economically) to put a stop to their offenses committed against businesses and consumers."
Four years?
It took the power of 10,000 computers running around the clock for 549 days, coupled with the brain power of a mathematician at Indiana's University of Notre Dame, to complete one of the world's largest single math computations.
Calc.exe says that's 1.50 years, with 10,000 systems (no mention of CPU speed or configuration. The contest started four years ago, but Notre Dame didn't start participating until almost two years ago.
Furthermore, today's Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (or Athlon XP if you prefer) is far more powerful than the <=1 GHz CPUs available around the time that these systems were constructed. The article's short on details, so it doesn't mention if the systems were SMP-configured, or if they were all single-CPU nodes.
This was a brute force attack as well - You can always decrease the time by throwing more computing power at it.
The number *is* still incredibly huge, but not quite as huge as you say.
There's an easy solution, and I don't know why nobody's thought of it.
Make the voting machines print out a summary page.
Confirm your votes on the screen. The machine prints out a list of your votes, with a stamp on it to confirm which machine it came from and when it was made. You visually inspect the list and compare it to your choices on the screen, and then confirm a second time. Then you're done.
If something doesn't work right, then one of those 10,000+ lawyers that were at the polls yesterday could raise a Big Stink(TM) about it.
Sure, it could be hijacked. I mean, if it's got rogue code which is designed to only register votes for John Q. Incumbent, then maybe it'll print your results accurately, but actually log a vote for the other guy. SO...you do a secondary confirmation count by machine processing the paper votes, just like your fill-in-the-bubble ballots. Check the paper results against the electronic results. There you go. And in the event of extreme paranoia/lawsuits, you've got the *voter confirmed* paper printouts which can be visually inspected for a recount.
2. Common sense would tell you that a desktop processor running at full speed would drain a battery far too quickly.
How does this apply to Apple and its PowerBooks/iBooks, which get far greater battery life than PC laptops? Sorry, but that's quite a broad generalization you've got there.