Apparently, this chip can flash-fry a buffalo in fourty seconds.
I want it now!!!!
Pilkington have been selling them for a while...
on
Self-Cleaning Glass
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· Score: 1
And though it's a great idea, it only really works in cities, and doesn't clean *everything*, just oil-based stuff from traffic (and then the dust that sticks to those oils).
It creates a small amount of nitrous acid from rain - it seems someone likes acid rain...but only if it does work for us!
While it'll get rid of marks from kids blowing raspberries on the window, it won't clear up the mud from their fingers.
It's all about "high speed access to archived data". Basically, they don't want people to bother with tapes (which are messy, slow...and generally irritating).
Maxtor want you to buy spare drives off them. Why bother spending 1000 on a DLT & 60 on tapes every time you want to take a backup. Stick a months backups on a 360GB drive, and take it home.
Hey, five years from now, people will have 10GB of battery backed up ram for secondary storage, and disks will just be used for backups:)
It's nice that in a way his funeral meant something to his friends, rather than a boring sermon from a speaker that didn't really know him.
A few years back a guy died on the field in the reenactment of the battle of tewksbury (1471).
I think of a burst aorta, possibly exacerbated by hefting a large sword around a field in 33C heat, wearing plate armour...
It wasn't until afterwards that people realised that he was really dead. They had a wonderful funeral the next day, in the nearby abbey (where many of the noble dead from the battle were buried). Thousands turned up to pay their respects, most still in kit. He was buried in the same way a respected knight would have been.
Though I didn't find out personally, I'm told that the pallbearers had a hard time holding up the coffin, as he was buried in plate.
I'm sure that poor norweigan kid thought the same when the cops dragged himself & his father to the police station, after some US executive found out he'd been passing around DeCSS...
Wasn't that the point of "Enders Game" ?
on
GUIs for Robots
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· Score: 1
I bet Ender was a whizz at Starcraft, taking on all those Buggers^WZerglings.
Anyone else think he was very very like the white rabbit from monty python & the holy grail ?
'Great big pointy teeth, and leaping around....'
Hmm.
Is it surprising that it's needed ?
on
GeekPAC
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One of the things that Europeans love to feel smug about is the way that bribery is so indemic in US culture, that they have a special term for "political bribery" - lobbying.
In most European countries, it's illegal to give politicians money in exchange for support for laws. Damn right. Otherwise, you get what happens in the US - rich companies get to make the laws everyone else stands by.
Um..yeah. If you spent 12 years sleeping on the floor of your office, under your desk, you'd be interesting too. As well as mad as a hatter, and without a girlfriend.
Some of use vegetarians don't eat meat for non-wussie
reasons. Personally, I don't believe in eating meat that I don't kill. Why ? I feel that today's society
consideres death-by-proxy to be fine. All part of the desensitization people have to violence.
To me, growing meat in a vat is just sick. If you want
to eat meat, kill something. If that idea disgusts you,
why eat what someone else killed ?
After all, Microsoft has been trying to take the
"enterprise" business from the unix vendors for
years. If linux replaces a traditional unix vendor,
you can be sure they at least considered, and rejected microsoft when considering Linux.
You are sadly deluded if you think that people are killing themselves to change your lifestyle. Change your country's foreign policy, yes. Prod you into looking at what's happening to drive normal people to such extreme measures.
But their ultimate goal is not to make it so that people can't take their leatherman onto an airplane in their hand luggage.
I find it strange that while the USA jumped to calling this latest terrorism a war, the UK spent 25 years denying that terrorism inflicted upon them by the IRA was a war.
Disgustingly, 12 prisoners were allowed to die from hunger strike (among them, an elected member of parlement, Bobby Sands) because the IRA prisoners wanted to be considered prisoners of war.
Bin Laden wanted a war. And the USA has given in to him.
The homeles guy in the street isn't in a Market Segment that nokia care about. They are targeting people with loads of money. And damn straight they want to be entertained.
Apart from being one of the earlier internet games, Netrek remains one of the few true team-strategy games.
Pitting up to eight players against eight (thought I believe there can be 32 in it these days) for three or four hour long battles, Netrek demands the most from it's players. The playing curve is even longer than Quake - it can take 30 hours of practice, before you can even remotely hold your own against good players...but two poor players can sometimes beat one good one.
Over the years, the game has been rebalanced to perfection. I urge everyone to download it, and give it a go!
A few years ago, corporate donations were starting to get out of hand in Ireland, and they passed a law saying that every politican had to tell the press what their contributions were - and more importantly, any party that had close to a controlling interest in the government (6 seats or more) were given money by the government for campaign costs, and told "You shouldn't need to take money from companies".
The problem with the USA is that it's effectively a popularity contest - in most nations, the leader (Taoiseach, Prime Minsister, Chief Secratary, President) is elected by the politicians - in the USA, it's by the people. So they have to spend a lot of money...so have to get a lot of money...so have to give out a lot of favours, once in office.
Once political contributions are considered bribes, it makes politics a lot cleaner.
Xanim will play all these movies!
on
TIE-Tanic Movie
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· Score: 1
Get & install the Radius Cinepak Codec, and you can play QuickTime movies.
It was good fun alright - afterwards ESR came to the pub with about fifty of the attendees, and he flitted about for ages, chatting to people he'd never seen before, and getting on really well with them. He told all sorts off stories - everything from his disappointment that Colt aren't selling handguns to civilians to protesting that he still can't believe that he was an unheard of hacker two years ago, and now ORA reckon a book by him could get into the top-five non-fiction best seller list.
ESR is really nice to get on with, and he's obviously very used to people contradicting his opinions - he has a credible comeback for any argument the audience had for him...and I felt that he liked the audience testing his conclusions and beliefs 100%. Despite being in a pub with 50 Irish geeks, he said "I don't drink - it doesn't mix well with the two things I like most - Guns and Women".
It was a great talk, and I can't wait for the RMS talk in the spring.
It's easy enough to gauge. If you sit someone that's not installed it before in front of a terminal, and if he can get it up & running in five minutes....and keep it running in "average" use for an hour. Then the install script works, the READMEs are there to get it running, and it doesn't crash if you fart at it. That's Alpha.
Some chance. They are going to find themselves trying to play catchup with Dell (between their standard site and www.gigabuys.com they are trying to sew the online PC market up). This is IBM's way of saying "Fair enough. We've had enough". The economies of scale companies get from bulk-manufacture of PC's, as well as the clout they get in getting first-dibs on scarce parts (like RAM and LCD screens) mean that companies like IBM and Siemens that are trying to make money by flogging not-much-better-than-dell/compaq PCs, but charging a lot more, are going to get swept away. There is money to be made by selling PCs in retail, to morons that don't know better, but it's a shrinking market.
If something strange happened in Redmond, and DirectX was for sale for $30 for Linux, BeOS and every OS under the sun, would it be possible to write games on it, that would require minimal porting effort ? Why did you get into the games business ?
It has to be said that the most humourous part of Cringley's article was "the censorship of the nerderati is still censorship" - let me get this straight; if a teacher tells her student "You have spelt that wrong", it's censorship ? There is a line being censored, and being corrected. It seems that Cringley really doesn't like either. But saying he doesn't like being censored is a lot easier to take.
Slashdot Mirror
The MPAA doesn't want you taking these new fangled things into cinemas, and taping the latest films to be uploaded...
Cut the time to an hour, and the best they can manage is the trailer for the "Lord of the Rings III, Sauron vs. Frodo".
Warning. Dramatisation may not have happened.
Apparently, this chip can flash-fry a buffalo in fourty seconds.
I want it now!!!!
And though it's a great idea, it only really works in cities, and doesn't clean *everything*, just oil-based stuff from traffic (and then the dust that sticks to those oils).
It creates a small amount of nitrous acid from rain - it seems someone likes acid rain...but only if it does work for us!
While it'll get rid of marks from kids blowing raspberries on the window, it won't clear up the mud from their fingers.
Read the press release.
:)
It's all about "high speed access to archived data". Basically, they don't want people to bother with tapes (which are messy, slow...and generally irritating).
Maxtor want you to buy spare drives off them. Why bother spending 1000 on a DLT & 60 on tapes every time you want to take a backup. Stick a months backups on a 360GB drive, and take it home.
Hey, five years from now, people will have 10GB of battery backed up ram for secondary storage, and disks will just be used for backups
It's nice that in a way his funeral meant something to his friends, rather than a boring sermon from a speaker that didn't really know him.
A few years back a guy died on the field in the reenactment of the battle of tewksbury (1471).
I think of a burst aorta, possibly exacerbated by hefting a large sword around a field in 33C heat, wearing plate armour...
It wasn't until afterwards that people realised that he was really dead. They had a wonderful funeral the next day, in the nearby abbey (where many of the noble dead from the battle were buried). Thousands turned up to pay their respects, most still in kit. He was buried in the same way a respected knight would have been.
Though I didn't find out personally, I'm told that the pallbearers had a hard time holding up the coffin, as he was buried in plate.
I'm sure that poor norweigan kid thought the same
when the cops dragged himself & his father to the
police station, after some US executive found out
he'd been passing around DeCSS...
I bet Ender was a whizz at Starcraft, taking on all those Buggers^WZerglings.
Anyone else think he was very very like the white
rabbit from monty python & the holy grail ?
'Great big pointy teeth, and leaping around....'
Hmm.
One of the things that Europeans love to feel smug about is the way that bribery is so indemic in US culture, that they have a special term for "political bribery" - lobbying.
In most European countries, it's illegal to give politicians money in exchange for support for laws. Damn right. Otherwise, you get what happens in the US - rich companies get to make the laws everyone else stands by.
You've obviously never met the man...
Um..yeah. If you spent 12 years sleeping on the floor
of your office, under your desk, you'd be interesting too. As well as mad as a hatter, and without a girlfriend.
Respect and all that...but he is a freak.
Some of use vegetarians don't eat meat for non-wussie
reasons. Personally, I don't believe in eating meat that I don't kill. Why ? I feel that today's society
consideres death-by-proxy to be fine. All part of the desensitization people have to violence.
To me, growing meat in a vat is just sick. If you want
to eat meat, kill something. If that idea disgusts you,
why eat what someone else killed ?
After all, Microsoft has been trying to take the
"enterprise" business from the unix vendors for
years. If linux replaces a traditional unix vendor,
you can be sure they at least considered, and rejected microsoft when considering Linux.
Something that my girlfriend won't kill when she decides that my shirt needs to be washed...
You are sadly deluded if you think that people are killing themselves to change your lifestyle. Change your country's foreign policy, yes. Prod you into looking at what's happening to drive normal people to such extreme measures.
But their ultimate goal is not to make it so that people can't take their leatherman onto an airplane in their hand luggage.
I find it strange that while the USA jumped to calling this latest terrorism a war, the UK spent 25 years denying that terrorism inflicted upon them by the IRA was a war.
Disgustingly, 12 prisoners were allowed to die from hunger strike (among them, an elected member of parlement, Bobby Sands) because the IRA prisoners wanted to be considered prisoners of war.
Bin Laden wanted a war. And the USA has given in to him.
The homeles guy in the street isn't in a Market Segment that nokia care about. They are targeting people with loads of money. And damn straight they want to be entertained.
Apart from being one of the earlier internet games, Netrek remains one of the few true team-strategy games. Pitting up to eight players against eight (thought I believe there can be 32 in it these days) for three or four hour long battles, Netrek demands the most from it's players. The playing curve is even longer than Quake - it can take 30 hours of practice, before you can even remotely hold your own against good players...but two poor players can sometimes beat one good one. Over the years, the game has been rebalanced to perfection. I urge everyone to download it, and give it a go!
The problem with the USA is that it's effectively a popularity contest - in most nations, the leader (Taoiseach, Prime Minsister, Chief Secratary, President) is elected by the politicians - in the USA, it's by the people. So they have to spend a lot of money...so have to get a lot of money...so have to give out a lot of favours, once in office.
Once political contributions are considered bribes, it makes politics a lot cleaner.
Get & install the Radius Cinepak Codec, and you can play QuickTime movies.
ESR is really nice to get on with, and he's obviously very used to people contradicting his opinions - he has a credible comeback for any argument the audience had for him...and I felt that he liked the audience testing his conclusions and beliefs 100%. Despite being in a pub with 50 Irish geeks, he said "I don't drink - it doesn't mix well with the two things I like most - Guns and Women".
It was a great talk, and I can't wait for the RMS talk in the spring.
It's easy enough to gauge. If you sit someone that's not installed it before in front of a terminal, and if he can get it up & running in five minutes....and keep it running in "average" use for an hour. Then the install script works, the READMEs are there to get it running, and it doesn't crash if you fart at it. That's Alpha.
Some chance. They are going to find themselves trying to play catchup with Dell (between their standard site and www.gigabuys.com they are trying to sew the online PC market up). This is IBM's way of saying "Fair enough. We've had enough". The economies of scale companies get from bulk-manufacture of PC's, as well as the clout they get in getting first-dibs on scarce parts (like RAM and LCD screens) mean that companies like IBM and Siemens that are trying to make money by flogging not-much-better-than-dell/compaq PCs, but charging a lot more, are going to get swept away. There is money to be made by selling PCs in retail, to morons that don't know better, but it's a shrinking market.
If something strange happened in Redmond, and DirectX was for sale for $30 for Linux, BeOS and every OS under the sun, would it be possible to write games on it, that would require minimal porting effort ? Why did you get into the games business ?
It has to be said that the most humourous part of Cringley's article was "the censorship of the nerderati is still censorship" - let me get this straight; if a teacher tells her student "You have spelt that wrong", it's censorship ? There is a line being censored, and being corrected. It seems that Cringley really doesn't like either. But saying he doesn't like being censored is a lot easier to take.