This Saturday The Happening will bring Second Life to first life. The Electric Sheep Company, a new metaverse developer, has virtually recreated R&B Coffee in Washington DC for use in a mixed-reality party and benefit for the DC art scene and several local nonprofits.
1) What's "The Happening"?
2) What's "Second Life"?
3) What's "The Electric Sheep Company"?
4) How are they developing Stephenson's "Metaverse"?
5) What's "R&B Coffee"?
6) What's a "Mixed Reality Party"
This could very well be the most pretentious article posted to Slashdot I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.
Interesting. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had an article about the slow uptake in 3G services in the US. I have a Motorola E815 that had Verizon's VCast installed on it free for a month, and I thought it was kinda nifty to be able to download the news and watch on my cell phone on the train, but totally not worth the extra $15/mo. fees. I think that the mobile companies are having problems selling these services because they're pricing them way too high. I might pay $5/mo for the ability to watch the news on my 2"x2" screen, but $15 is way too much. Maybe I'm being a bit egotistical here, but if I think this is too much to spend for bells and whistles, I'm sure others feel the same (then again, you have idiots buying ringtones for their pink rhinestone encrusted phones, so I guess people do waste their money on pointless crap). I hope there will come a point when consumer fatigue with the nickel-and-dime business model prevents these companies from pulling this crap.
That's why we aren't having an all out world war about this.
Ah, have you read the papers recently? If this isn't WWIII, I don't know what is. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that Iran gets attacked within the next six months, if not by the US, then by Israel or Europe, or Israel with European backing. The messianic nutjob leading Iran won't back down, he's a True Believer! Watch for more European involvement in the region, too, fueled by this latest round of anti-european extremism. My thinking is that Europe has held back, taking a "live and let live" attitude towards the Islamists, thinking that if they just buy all the wackos a Coke, they'll live in Perfect Harmony. This violence may show them that this attitude won't work for much longer, and the Islamists won't rest until they replace the Napoleonic Code with Sharia.
Ahh yes. I stand corrected. I googled this and found a 2001 press release from Brocade saying they were releasing 10Gb FC switches. I'm a bit out of the loop on this.
Fiber Channel only runs at 2Gb/sec, which sucks. With 10Gb ethernet pushing its way out and FC not reallydoing anything new (though admittedly I could be out of the loop on this), I'm wondering if FC will be replaced by ATA-over-ethernet for SAN usage.
Janine Melnitz: Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?
Winston Zeddemore: Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.
There were bots in those games for MP because they used the Unreal Tournament engine, which had great bot support out of the box. Counterstrike was a user mod written by people who had no interest in coding an AI -- Half Life had no suitable AI for them to use.
What I'm waiting for is for another multiplayer co-op game, like the original Doom or System Shock 2. Doom 3 was supposed to have co-op support, and I think there were a few mods to add it, but it didn't ship with the game. Disappointing.
I think the point of the GP was that they appear to now have the technology to ferment the cellulose itself into ethanol. The problems of which you speak appear to be overcome. Time will tell if this is indeed the case, however.
Hey, I never said it was good, I just said it was there. I personally use it at work all the time to transfer files from my Windows box to my Linux box, and I find it a bit slow, but works well enough and is easier than some other methods.
We just bought a nice 40" HDTV, and our old antenna pulls down Over-The-Air HD broadcasts just fine. In fact, we get better quality from OTA than we do from our Dish Network box, because the satellite box does a D to A conversion (yes, I know I need to buy the HD sat reciever and spend the extra $5/mo to fix this).
It took long enough to make the rounds on every other board before it made it here. I heard about this from a post on another non-technology-related board like 3 days ago. Hell, my future father-in-law knew about this yesterday, and he can barely use a mouse.
I totally agree. The DMCA here is a bit like fishing with dynamite. Sure, you get the fish, but what other damage are you causing in the process? I think these guys were properly busted for this, but I think they still could have been caught and prosecuted if the DMCA were more narrowly worded.
Wow, you're in the minority here. Most of the critics loved the film, even the indie critics at efilmcritic.com, who usually don't like anything unless it came out of some film festival...
58% of the critics on that site gave it their highest rating (for comparison: 21% for Phantom Menace and 65.95% for the original Matrix). Less than 10% felt it was below average; only 4.5% said that Serenity was "total crap."
I thought I heard that Arrested Development was being shopped to Showtime or HBO. Anyone else hear anything like this? That would be an excellent pick-up for either one of them, IMHO. If they can get good ratings from Curb Your Enthusiasm, they can get good ratings for AD.
I don't know about the gp, but I find Microsoft style ACL's to be overly complex and confusing. NTFS and SMB permissions on the same files? What a PITA. NFS does it much nicer. You set up the share permissions separate from the filesystem permissions -- Microsoft has them in the same place, causing a lot of confusion. Give me the standard Unix -rwxr-xr-- style permissions for my filesystem, and share permissions in a config file, and I'll be happy.
what ever happened to running a business on the merits of its product, not on cash generated by hidden surcharges?
That is so 1985! Don't you realize that businesses need to pick pockets these days with hidden surcharges and whatnot in order to keep the exec bonuses high? I mean, what would happen if you didn't get charged to get your own money out of the bank? The bank would have to rely on the money it makes from interest payments only, depriving the CEO of his new BMW. The CEO of AT&T will be living on food stamps if they're not allowed to charge their customers twice for the same service, while forcing competitors out of the market.
I disagree. An upper limit would not be necessary, because the market will impose the limit. If a song becomes so expensive that no one will buy it, then the price will have to come down to a point where people will buy. Say the evil recording execs want to sell 100 copies per hour of the latest emo band. They will start pricing at $.99, and if they sell more than their target of 100 per hour, they raise the price to $1.25. But at that price, they miss their sales target. So they lower the price to $1.10. At that price, they make their sales quota, so they let it ride until the emo band's fans go through puberty, and no longer like said band. So the evil recording exec drops the price to $.75 to maintain their sales target for the song. Soon, it's in the $.25 bargain bin, until the fans of the band get nostalgic in their late 20's. Then the market for the song goes up, and again, they raise the price to meet their sales quota. However you look at it, the song will be priced at a level that the market will pay for the level of sales the company wants.
The only problem I see is if the execs set a profit target per download instead of a target sales quota. If that's the case, then as the popularity of a song wanes, the price will rise to keep their profits coming. If they do that, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot, because they will never obtain optimum profit on a song.
Slashdot Mirror
1) What's "The Happening"?
2) What's "Second Life"?
3) What's "The Electric Sheep Company"?
4) How are they developing Stephenson's "Metaverse"?
5) What's "R&B Coffee"?
6) What's a "Mixed Reality Party"
This could very well be the most pretentious article posted to Slashdot I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.
No problem. I have an old Pentium Pro chip and heat sink I use as a paperweight!
Interesting. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had an article about the slow uptake in 3G services in the US. I have a Motorola E815 that had Verizon's VCast installed on it free for a month, and I thought it was kinda nifty to be able to download the news and watch on my cell phone on the train, but totally not worth the extra $15/mo. fees. I think that the mobile companies are having problems selling these services because they're pricing them way too high. I might pay $5/mo for the ability to watch the news on my 2"x2" screen, but $15 is way too much. Maybe I'm being a bit egotistical here, but if I think this is too much to spend for bells and whistles, I'm sure others feel the same (then again, you have idiots buying ringtones for their pink rhinestone encrusted phones, so I guess people do waste their money on pointless crap). I hope there will come a point when consumer fatigue with the nickel-and-dime business model prevents these companies from pulling this crap.
Ah, have you read the papers recently? If this isn't WWIII, I don't know what is. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that Iran gets attacked within the next six months, if not by the US, then by Israel or Europe, or Israel with European backing. The messianic nutjob leading Iran won't back down, he's a True Believer! Watch for more European involvement in the region, too, fueled by this latest round of anti-european extremism. My thinking is that Europe has held back, taking a "live and let live" attitude towards the Islamists, thinking that if they just buy all the wackos a Coke, they'll live in Perfect Harmony. This violence may show them that this attitude won't work for much longer, and the Islamists won't rest until they replace the Napoleonic Code with Sharia.
Ahh yes. I stand corrected. I googled this and found a 2001 press release from Brocade saying they were releasing 10Gb FC switches. I'm a bit out of the loop on this.
Fiber Channel only runs at 2Gb/sec, which sucks. With 10Gb ethernet pushing its way out and FC not reallydoing anything new (though admittedly I could be out of the loop on this), I'm wondering if FC will be replaced by ATA-over-ethernet for SAN usage.
No, an orgy, silly!
And dr_dank has officially revealed his true identity -- T. HERMAN ZWIEBEL!
heh.... Reminds me the time a brit asked me for a "rubber"
I hope I'm not talking out of my ass on this...
There were bots in those games for MP because they used the Unreal Tournament engine, which had great bot support out of the box. Counterstrike was a user mod written by people who had no interest in coding an AI -- Half Life had no suitable AI for them to use.
What I'm waiting for is for another multiplayer co-op game, like the original Doom or System Shock 2. Doom 3 was supposed to have co-op support, and I think there were a few mods to add it, but it didn't ship with the game. Disappointing.
I think the point of the GP was that they appear to now have the technology to ferment the cellulose itself into ethanol. The problems of which you speak appear to be overcome. Time will tell if this is indeed the case, however.
Hey, I never said it was good, I just said it was there. I personally use it at work all the time to transfer files from my Windows box to my Linux box, and I find it a bit slow, but works well enough and is easier than some other methods.
I thought this what Sarbanes-Oxley was supposed to do. Anyone more knowledgeable than I know for sure?
MOD THIS GUY UP.
We just bought a nice 40" HDTV, and our old antenna pulls down Over-The-Air HD broadcasts just fine. In fact, we get better quality from OTA than we do from our Dish Network box, because the satellite box does a D to A conversion (yes, I know I need to buy the HD sat reciever and spend the extra $5/mo to fix this).
But if you're stupid, you don't get ahead -- look at the Democrats.
It took long enough to make the rounds on every other board before it made it here. I heard about this from a post on another non-technology-related board like 3 days ago. Hell, my future father-in-law knew about this yesterday, and he can barely use a mouse.
I totally agree. The DMCA here is a bit like fishing with dynamite. Sure, you get the fish, but what other damage are you causing in the process? I think these guys were properly busted for this, but I think they still could have been caught and prosecuted if the DMCA were more narrowly worded.
Wow, you're in the minority here. Most of the critics loved the film, even the indie critics at efilmcritic.com, who usually don't like anything unless it came out of some film festival...
58% of the critics on that site gave it their highest rating (for comparison: 21% for Phantom Menace and 65.95% for the original Matrix). Less than 10% felt it was below average; only 4.5% said that Serenity was "total crap."
I thought I heard that Arrested Development was being shopped to Showtime or HBO. Anyone else hear anything like this? That would be an excellent pick-up for either one of them, IMHO. If they can get good ratings from Curb Your Enthusiasm, they can get good ratings for AD.
I disagree. If you teach that man to fish, he'll sit around on a boat drinking beer all day.
I don't know about the gp, but I find Microsoft style ACL's to be overly complex and confusing. NTFS and SMB permissions on the same files? What a PITA. NFS does it much nicer. You set up the share permissions separate from the filesystem permissions -- Microsoft has them in the same place, causing a lot of confusion. Give me the standard Unix -rwxr-xr-- style permissions for my filesystem, and share permissions in a config file, and I'll be happy.
Just my $.02
I disagree. An upper limit would not be necessary, because the market will impose the limit. If a song becomes so expensive that no one will buy it, then the price will have to come down to a point where people will buy. Say the evil recording execs want to sell 100 copies per hour of the latest emo band. They will start pricing at $.99, and if they sell more than their target of 100 per hour, they raise the price to $1.25. But at that price, they miss their sales target. So they lower the price to $1.10. At that price, they make their sales quota, so they let it ride until the emo band's fans go through puberty, and no longer like said band. So the evil recording exec drops the price to $.75 to maintain their sales target for the song. Soon, it's in the $.25 bargain bin, until the fans of the band get nostalgic in their late 20's. Then the market for the song goes up, and again, they raise the price to meet their sales quota. However you look at it, the song will be priced at a level that the market will pay for the level of sales the company wants.
The only problem I see is if the execs set a profit target per download instead of a target sales quota. If that's the case, then as the popularity of a song wanes, the price will rise to keep their profits coming. If they do that, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot, because they will never obtain optimum profit on a song.