I would highly reccommend anything in the "His Dark Materials" series by Philip Pullman. It's age-appropriate, both genders appreciate it, and the story is absolutely beautiful and really unlike anything else in the genre.
That said, I think you're going in the right direction with Pratchett and Gaiman.
Tolkien's always worthwhile as well, but i'm sure you already know that. If you have any relations you particularly dislike or want to intimidate, you can always give them the Silmirillion.
Microsoft has never been about innovation. It's always about the package.
There was absolutely nothing innovative about the original XBox. All of the basic concepts used by MS in it were either heavily derived from earlier systems or grabbed from the PC world.
The fact is that the success of the XBox can be attributed to the fact that Microsoft bundled all of these ideas into a package in a manner that had never been done before in the console world. Microsoft has always focused on the sum of the parts rather than the parts themselves.
Windows 95 was the first consumer OS to successfully combine multitasking with a decent GUI. Unix was without a doubt better at multitasking, and most would argue that the Mac OS GUI was a lot more mature than the Win9x GUI... Of course, this is an over-simplification of the facts, but the point stands.
Halo was far from an innovative FPS. It's incredibly fun because it took the best aspects of all the successful FPS games from the past few years and combined them into one package. If you pick the XBox apart point by point, you can find another console that outdoes the XBox hin that particular category, but once you compare them as a whole, the XBox comes out on top.
I remain unconvinced that Linux is the best choice for a wireless access point. It's a really simple application, and an operating system as complex as linux has so many potential points of failure, not to mention the extremely poor track record the WRT54G has in terms of hardware reliability. Those Nortel PoE access points you see all over the place would seem to be a better choice for in the enterprise
If we're lucky, we're going to have carbon nanotubes, a space elevator, and practical nuclear fusion within the next 20-30 years.
These are more of a mixture of physics and engineering, but important nonetheless. Three of your four 1930s 'discoveries' have little to do with physics, and more to do with engineering already-discovered physical principles into practical end-products.
The recent discoveries you mention have been purely physics-oriented. We've done a lot of cool stuff lately with stuff that was originally discovered in the 1950s.
The difference between MP3/OGG and GIF/PNG is that PNG is clearly technically superior to GIF and offers huge advantages to both developers & end-users.
Apart from licensing considerations, the advantages of using OGG are few and far between, not to mention the general lack of support for the format.
No. The difference is that the various HP has no real reason to have this many models. (And with toothpaste, it's basically irrelevant which type you choose unless you have specific needs such as whitening or tartar control, in which case the product selection is pretty straightforward. The car market would have been a much more apt analogy)
HP will often make the same computer in a different chasis and sell at a radically different price point. You can only get a celron in a certain chasis/form-facrtor, only get AMD in others, etc.... I remember buying a few HP PCs awhile ago, and it was an absolute nightmare to sift through the 3 dozen models they had available to determine which one best suited our needs and had the best value for the money.
To complicate matters, it was almost always cheaper to buy a pre-determined configuration rather than custom-specifying the specs, and we found that in many instances, you could SAVE money by increasing the specs on the machine. Not increase your value for the money, but just downright save money. And of course there were always tradeoffs where you could get a PC with a slower FSB, but faster processor and more RAM. It's confusing as hell.
As much as I despise Dell, it seems like they have (or at least had) the right ideas in this respect, and made sure there were no overlaps in their product line. Each model they produced had a specific target market to it. Likewise, I enjoyed the 4 or 5 year period starting in the late 90s where all of their Latitude computers had interchangable parts and power supplies. It almost made up for the fact that the laptops themselves were rather poorly constructed.
I could also point out that Apple greatly simplifies things in this respect by essentially having 3 desktop models and 2 laptop models that pretty much fill every niche possible in their target market.
Re:Dvorak also said cable modems were stupid
on
Prepping For The 360
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· Score: 1
I hate to vouch for Cringley, but he makes a number of good points in there that are ceratinly valid and show just how lucky we got with the rollout of broadband development.
If you remember properly, the early incarnations of cable internet sucked. Just like he predicted they would in 1995.
Cable companies definitely have a reputation for not having their act together. This hasn't changed. The backbone network infrastructure of the cable ISPs only recently stopped sucking. (yeah, there are exceptions to the rule, although many of them are now bankrupt. isn't it funny how that works?)
The modem companies did all indeed flop and miss the boat completely when it came to broadband. 3com tried and failed. Hayes is dead. It was indeed the big networking companies that made cable work.
And it wasn't until a central standardized governing body (DOCSIS) was formed that decent modems came to market.
you could write books on why ISDN failed where cable succeeded, but that's really not the point. Comparing ISDN to cable is like comparing apples to oranges. The telecoms saw that DSL would provide more benefits than ISDN at a much reduced cost, and jumped on the opportunity. The only reason cable succeeded in this respect was that the cable companies wanted a slice of the pie and a share of the market, and got it using the assets they already had. It had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with business.
cringley knowingly makes some pretty bold predictions, and does his best with the data and knowledge that he has at the time. for the most part, I think he does a pretty decent job at guessing these things. he may guess the final outcome improperly, but as you saw in the cable modem example, he perfectly nailed each one of the issues square on the head. all of the problems he mentioned were indeed a huge hinderance to the cable modem industry for the first few years.
A solid innovative product that people actually want to buy helps a company turn a profit!
Now if only the rest of the gaming industry (I'm talking to you, EA!) would catch up, we might be able to escape the FPS monotony we've fallen into.
It seems that the popularity of a game is solely determined by the level of hype surrounding it. Halo specifically comes to mind. I'll concede that it's a solid FPS, but the level of hype surrounding the launch of Halo 2 was obscene.
I'm sorry, but there are just so many things about the gaming industry that irritate me. The companies. Overinflated prices. Overinflated gamer egos. Lack of innovation. Hype. Obscene system requirements.....
Here's what I've been playing in the past year: -More SNES/N64 games than you can shake a stick at. I'll probably buy a gamecube because Nintendo's games seem to have the greatest degree of innovation/replayability right now (and yet they're the least popular, go figure) -Liero (hailing all the way from 1993) -All of these downright bizarre arcade-style shooters that are strangely addictive -Wulfram. One of the first good online games back from 2000. It's finally being actively developed once again... -Darwinia. Another great non-photorealistic game. (Could be better to tell the truth, but a solid game nonetheless) -Escape Velocity Series -- they've been around forever for the mac. A few have been ported to Windows. Go see what the PC world has been missing out on for over a decade! -Freespace 2 -- One of the best space shooters ever made. Period. Made by a major studio, but enjoyed little commercial success. I can't even begin to fathom why....
Clippybot: "Hi! I was monitoring your other conversation, and it looks like you're trying to hook up. MSN Chat can help you do this. Would you like me to launch the Getting Laid Wizard?"
Let this be a lesson. In the days of cheap digital cameras, if you're going to take on a task like this woman did, you might as well photograph every last thing and notate when the pictures were taken, and under what circumstances.
Parent is wrong. Taking pictures with a digital camera may hurt your case. There are courts in the US which consider digital photographs not to be valid evidence due to the ease of photographic manipulation through photoshop. I have no idea about canada, but I don't imagine it would be very different.
If you're going to photograph something to be used in court, you're probably better off using 35mm. Granted, digital is certainly ten times better than nothing, but unless you have film photographs and/or eyewitnesses, you might be SOL. But, again, the sheer volume of photographs on the site should be enough evidence for the courts.
That said, the parent poster has a very good point. Lots of pictures will definitely help your case.
Re:It'll be a sad state of affairs when this happe
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
You've got to look at this from the viewpoint of the pharmeceutical companies.
For one, although most people cite the fact that individual pills cost VERY little to produce, the R&D costs and FDA approval fees are astronomical. Thanks to the FDA, dangerous medications almost never make it to the market -- did I mention that these R&D & Approval fees still apply to drugs that get rejected? It's very difficult to be profitable in the pharmeceutical business. Go look it up.
If governments are going to step in and invalidate patents on drugs that are needed to fight AIDS and other diseases rare in the US, this is only going to further deter pharmeceutical companies from producing drugs to combat these diseases.
And I genuinely believe that if we could discover an AIDS vaccine, the sheer volume of demand would make up for the extremely low profit margin.
If there's nobody making it worthwhile to produce vaccines for these diseases, it's not going to happen!
I don't see how darknets will make things any different. For years we've had gopher, IRC and other communication channels that have been below the vision of the management elite.
Dude. If gopher is the only way you can support your argument, no matter what that argument is, you really need to reevaluate your position:-)
But seriously. The US Government was one of the biggest supporters of Gopher. I'd hardly call that 'below the vision'.
This is true. I know of a friend who worked for sony back in the day who confirmed this observation. For all practical intents and purposes, sony's various divisions are completely separate companies with little more in common then their name.
When the various divisions begin to interact, it has always ended in disaster. Betamax. Atrac8. Minidisc. DRM. Blu-Ray.....
This is hardly news. Anyone living far away from a broadcast tv/radio station knows that wrapping crumpled up tinfoil around the antenna will noticably improve reception.
We did it to the "bunny ears" all the time to help get rid of that little bit extra fuzz (sticking a coat hanger into the end of the antenna also helped)
DUI is a serious offense, and someone who is prone to driving under the influence can be percieved as a threat to the college. Kicking somebody out under these circumstances is easily justifiable in my mind. They were convicted of a crime, and as such, certain rights of theirs are restricted.
On the other hand, there is nothing illegal about keeping a blog. A school punishing students for an activity they perform outside of school that is also perfectly legal outside of school is ludicrious.
Amen to that, bro. (Although it does suck that we have to pay out-of-state tuition, eh?)
That said, it was interesting to see how many people instantly looked up the dude who was charged with rape as soon as the news got out. Needless to say, he deleted his account about a day later.
Facebook is certainly an interesting beast.
Oh, and I'm a member of the Facebook Group entitled "I'm Not offensive, You're Just a Pussy"
Slashdot Mirror
I would highly reccommend anything in the "His Dark Materials" series by Philip Pullman. It's age-appropriate, both genders appreciate it, and the story is absolutely beautiful and really unlike anything else in the genre.
That said, I think you're going in the right direction with Pratchett and Gaiman.
Tolkien's always worthwhile as well, but i'm sure you already know that. If you have any relations you particularly dislike or want to intimidate, you can always give them the Silmirillion.
Microsoft has never been about innovation. It's always about the package.
There was absolutely nothing innovative about the original XBox. All of the basic concepts used by MS in it were either heavily derived from earlier systems or grabbed from the PC world.
The fact is that the success of the XBox can be attributed to the fact that Microsoft bundled all of these ideas into a package in a manner that had never been done before in the console world. Microsoft has always focused on the sum of the parts rather than the parts themselves.
Windows 95 was the first consumer OS to successfully combine multitasking with a decent GUI. Unix was without a doubt better at multitasking, and most would argue that the Mac OS GUI was a lot more mature than the Win9x GUI... Of course, this is an over-simplification of the facts, but the point stands.
Halo was far from an innovative FPS. It's incredibly fun because it took the best aspects of all the successful FPS games from the past few years and combined them into one package. If you pick the XBox apart point by point, you can find another console that outdoes the XBox hin that particular category, but once you compare them as a whole, the XBox comes out on top.
The lack of an arrowhead on the right end of that graph concerns me ;-)
as a gaming system, it was pretty poor.
if it was usable as a portable gaming system, I think they would have sold the projected 6-million.
the hype was probably responsible for the 2 million sales they DID get.
I remain unconvinced that Linux is the best choice for a wireless access point. It's a really simple application, and an operating system as complex as linux has so many potential points of failure, not to mention the extremely poor track record the WRT54G has in terms of hardware reliability. Those Nortel PoE access points you see all over the place would seem to be a better choice for in the enterprise
If we're lucky, we're going to have carbon nanotubes, a space elevator, and practical nuclear fusion within the next 20-30 years.
These are more of a mixture of physics and engineering, but important nonetheless. Three of your four 1930s 'discoveries' have little to do with physics, and more to do with engineering already-discovered physical principles into practical end-products.
The recent discoveries you mention have been purely physics-oriented. We've done a lot of cool stuff lately with stuff that was originally discovered in the 1950s.
The difference between MP3/OGG and GIF/PNG is that PNG is clearly technically superior to GIF and offers huge advantages to both developers & end-users.
Apart from licensing considerations, the advantages of using OGG are few and far between, not to mention the general lack of support for the format.
No. The difference is that the various HP has no real reason to have this many models. (And with toothpaste, it's basically irrelevant which type you choose unless you have specific needs such as whitening or tartar control, in which case the product selection is pretty straightforward. The car market would have been a much more apt analogy)
HP will often make the same computer in a different chasis and sell at a radically different price point. You can only get a celron in a certain chasis/form-facrtor, only get AMD in others, etc.... I remember buying a few HP PCs awhile ago, and it was an absolute nightmare to sift through the 3 dozen models they had available to determine which one best suited our needs and had the best value for the money.
To complicate matters, it was almost always cheaper to buy a pre-determined configuration rather than custom-specifying the specs, and we found that in many instances, you could SAVE money by increasing the specs on the machine. Not increase your value for the money, but just downright save money. And of course there were always tradeoffs where you could get a PC with a slower FSB, but faster processor and more RAM. It's confusing as hell.
As much as I despise Dell, it seems like they have (or at least had) the right ideas in this respect, and made sure there were no overlaps in their product line. Each model they produced had a specific target market to it. Likewise, I enjoyed the 4 or 5 year period starting in the late 90s where all of their Latitude computers had interchangable parts and power supplies. It almost made up for the fact that the laptops themselves were rather poorly constructed.
I could also point out that Apple greatly simplifies things in this respect by essentially having 3 desktop models and 2 laptop models that pretty much fill every niche possible in their target market.
I hate to vouch for Cringley, but he makes a number of good points in there that are ceratinly valid and show just how lucky we got with the rollout of broadband development.
If you remember properly, the early incarnations of cable internet sucked. Just like he predicted they would in 1995.
Cable companies definitely have a reputation for not having their act together. This hasn't changed. The backbone network infrastructure of the cable ISPs only recently stopped sucking. (yeah, there are exceptions to the rule, although many of them are now bankrupt. isn't it funny how that works?)
The modem companies did all indeed flop and miss the boat completely when it came to broadband. 3com tried and failed. Hayes is dead. It was indeed the big networking companies that made cable work.
And it wasn't until a central standardized governing body (DOCSIS) was formed that decent modems came to market.
you could write books on why ISDN failed where cable succeeded, but that's really not the point. Comparing ISDN to cable is like comparing apples to oranges. The telecoms saw that DSL would provide more benefits than ISDN at a much reduced cost, and jumped on the opportunity. The only reason cable succeeded in this respect was that the cable companies wanted a slice of the pie and a share of the market, and got it using the assets they already had. It had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with business.
cringley knowingly makes some pretty bold predictions, and does his best with the data and knowledge that he has at the time. for the most part, I think he does a pretty decent job at guessing these things. he may guess the final outcome improperly, but as you saw in the cable modem example, he perfectly nailed each one of the issues square on the head. all of the problems he mentioned were indeed a huge hinderance to the cable modem industry for the first few years.
You're supposed to punch while you jump. Not even Mario broke bricks with his *head*. (Score: 5, Informative)
MODS ON CRACK! Are you out of your minds???
I have a feeling that this would be a pretty BAD IDEA (check out that bowtie and haircut!)
That said, 20 years later, Steve Jobs has taken the hint. Black turtlenecks look good on just about anyone
According to the article, he initially tried using nitric acid to color the bubbles because of its red color.
The fact that he thought he could sell nitric acid as a child's toy I believe qualifies him as being legitimately crazy.
Now that's news!
A solid innovative product that people actually want to buy helps a company turn a profit!
Now if only the rest of the gaming industry (I'm talking to you, EA!) would catch up, we might be able to escape the FPS monotony we've fallen into.
It seems that the popularity of a game is solely determined by the level of hype surrounding it. Halo specifically comes to mind. I'll concede that it's a solid FPS, but the level of hype surrounding the launch of Halo 2 was obscene.
I'm sorry, but there are just so many things about the gaming industry that irritate me. The companies. Overinflated prices. Overinflated gamer egos. Lack of innovation. Hype. Obscene system requirements.....
Here's what I've been playing in the past year:
-More SNES/N64 games than you can shake a stick at. I'll probably buy a gamecube because Nintendo's games seem to have the greatest degree of innovation/replayability right now (and yet they're the least popular, go figure)
-Liero (hailing all the way from 1993)
-All of these downright bizarre arcade-style shooters that are strangely addictive
-Wulfram. One of the first good online games back from 2000. It's finally being actively developed once again...
-Darwinia. Another great non-photorealistic game. (Could be better to tell the truth, but a solid game nonetheless)
-Escape Velocity Series -- they've been around forever for the mac. A few have been ported to Windows. Go see what the PC world has been missing out on for over a decade!
-Freespace 2 -- One of the best space shooters ever made. Period. Made by a major studio, but enjoyed little commercial success. I can't even begin to fathom why....
Although I agree with you, picking Paul McCartney was probably a bad choice to support your argument ;-)
Clippybot: "Hi! I was monitoring your other conversation, and it looks like you're trying to hook up. MSN Chat can help you do this. Would you like me to launch the Getting Laid Wizard?"
It seems as though Greenland seems completely immune to this rootkit (and bad music for that matter)
Let this be a lesson. In the days of cheap digital cameras, if you're going to take on a task like this woman did, you might as well photograph every last thing and notate when the pictures were taken, and under what circumstances.
/or eyewitnesses, you might be SOL. But, again, the sheer volume of photographs on the site should be enough evidence for the courts.
Parent is wrong. Taking pictures with a digital camera may hurt your case. There are courts in the US which consider digital photographs not to be valid evidence due to the ease of photographic manipulation through photoshop. I have no idea about canada, but I don't imagine it would be very different.
If you're going to photograph something to be used in court, you're probably better off using 35mm. Granted, digital is certainly ten times better than nothing, but unless you have film photographs and
That said, the parent poster has a very good point. Lots of pictures will definitely help your case.
You've got to look at this from the viewpoint of the pharmeceutical companies.
For one, although most people cite the fact that individual pills cost VERY little to produce, the R&D costs and FDA approval fees are astronomical. Thanks to the FDA, dangerous medications almost never make it to the market -- did I mention that these R&D & Approval fees still apply to drugs that get rejected? It's very difficult to be profitable in the pharmeceutical business. Go look it up.
If governments are going to step in and invalidate patents on drugs that are needed to fight AIDS and other diseases rare in the US, this is only going to further deter pharmeceutical companies from producing drugs to combat these diseases.
And I genuinely believe that if we could discover an AIDS vaccine, the sheer volume of demand would make up for the extremely low profit margin.
If there's nobody making it worthwhile to produce vaccines for these diseases, it's not going to happen!
I don't see how darknets will make things any different. For years we've had gopher, IRC and other communication channels that have been below the vision of the management elite.
:-)
Dude. If gopher is the only way you can support your argument, no matter what that argument is, you really need to reevaluate your position
But seriously. The US Government was one of the biggest supporters of Gopher. I'd hardly call that 'below the vision'.
This is true. I know of a friend who worked for sony back in the day who confirmed this observation. For all practical intents and purposes, sony's various divisions are completely separate companies with little more in common then their name.
When the various divisions begin to interact, it has always ended in disaster. Betamax. Atrac8. Minidisc. DRM. Blu-Ray.....
Shhhh! It's not like the goth/emo kids need any encouragement!
on the other hand, it'd go down as the second least expensive fashion trend ever (the cheapest being nudism)
To the three moderators who modded this as informative/insightful insightful, I salute you.
This is hardly news. Anyone living far away from a broadcast tv/radio station knows that wrapping crumpled up tinfoil around the antenna will noticably improve reception.
We did it to the "bunny ears" all the time to help get rid of that little bit extra fuzz (sticking a coat hanger into the end of the antenna also helped)
There's a difference here:
DUI is a serious offense, and someone who is prone to driving under the influence can be percieved as a threat to the college. Kicking somebody out under these circumstances is easily justifiable in my mind. They were convicted of a crime, and as such, certain rights of theirs are restricted.
On the other hand, there is nothing illegal about keeping a blog. A school punishing students for an activity they perform outside of school that is also perfectly legal outside of school is ludicrious.
Amen to that, bro. (Although it does suck that we have to pay out-of-state tuition, eh?)
That said, it was interesting to see how many people instantly looked up the dude who was charged with rape as soon as the news got out. Needless to say, he deleted his account about a day later.
Facebook is certainly an interesting beast.
Oh, and I'm a member of the Facebook Group entitled "I'm Not offensive, You're Just a Pussy"