Maybe this boxing match will also resolve an ages-old argument: Who do geeks hate more, Wesley Crusher or Barney?
Re:Not everything has changed in the last 50 years
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Of course in the reviewer's own estimation, by this time everyone should wear pseudo-future space clothes and all restaurants are Taco Bell.
I thought the mixture of futurism while maintaining modern elements is a pretty good guess. It's 50 years in the future, I don't see our society changing too much. But anything can happen. No one can predict the future (well, except maybe the precogs:))
This is just one view of the future, and it seems realistic enough. I thought it was done tastefully and thoughtfully, unlike such tripe as Battlefield Earth. My only qualm with the story was the ending, which, like AI, would have been better had they cut the last 10-15 minutes out.
national security at stake. Let's see, between SQL worms, IE patches, and OE viruses, I for one am glad the Pentagon is using more secure software. Maybe this will make MS rethink their position on putting out bad code. Then again....nawww...
Interviewee #1: Umm, not much. Interviewee #2: Umm, not much. My dog ate my development notes. Interviewee #3: I'd program more, but umm, not much. See I met this real non-plastic girl and we [censored- see alt.furries.erotica] Interviewee #4: I program a lot except on the PS2. Can I talk about how uninteresting my job at [insert acronym] is? Interviewee #5: I was just explaining how the RISC chip architecture worked when you interrupted me. Oh yes, what was the question? Oh yeah...umm, not much. Interviewee #6: I'm too busy trying to get to the next level of GTA3 to actually code on it. Is that what that beta thingy I received in the mail was for? Interviewee #7: (aptly named Sporkhead): Cool! My PS2 says 'Hello, World'!
He made a perfect replica of a highway sign, which probably isn't all that easy to do on your own. He did it in broad daylight. He got away with it for months. Besides, art imitates life (or in this case, makes life a little easier for everyone else.)
Is it just me or does the cover art look like a tacky romance novel? I'm not going to argue the quality of the book without reading it, but...ick, it looks worse than the cover art from Randland (except first book, TEOTW had pretty cool-looking cover art)
One thing you've got to look at is warranty coverage and who will support these boxes once they're made. Most of these components will have warranties, but there's different coverage for each one you'd have to keep track of, you might get a bad batch if you order in bulk, which can cost time and money in the long run. For a business environment, even small business, I'd recommend looking to a solid company that has a good service record and see if you can get a bid war going between two companies who have small business plans to have your business. Bottom line, it's probably more hassle than you'd want.
I can't wait for one of these to be benchmarked against the current Intel line. But Opteron? Reminds me of Optimus Prime from Transformers. Then again, you may need a transformer just to run one of these:)
Criswell estimates it would take about $15 billion to launch the project and then about $135 billion more before the investment begins to break even.
The energy crisis has never been so economically feasible!
"Honey, umm, I just got a bill from that new lunar electric company. Apparently we owe about 20 million dollars for something called an 'intergalactic tax'?"
In a related news story, CEO Kenneth Lay will be shot to the moon to do the accounting for this new energy company in the hopes that he never, EVER comes back.
Whether its use is to destroy data or merely to send out data without your knowledge. Eventually there will be a legal battle over this. I don't care what the TOS say.
Wow. Picking up garbage. That is lame. Next let's make a game called "Day at the Beach" where in the time between flashing people and selling crack to preschoolers you pick up hypodermic needles and dead fish.
What would have been better is to make a game where you find say a gun and just start capping everyone in line in front of you. Call it 'Universal Studios Rampage.' As a person who used to wait in lines, it would be quite therapeutic. Such missions could include going 'Back to the Future' to destroy Kevin Costner before he makes Waterworld. (Or the Postman, or that crappy movie about Bottles, or pretty much anything after Field of Dreams.)
Vicious circle.
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"It would have been best if they had just taken engineering challenge and designed something that couldn't be detected. but instead they just decided to break our program. That's kind of lame."
Whatever works for them, you can't blame a company for pulling this kind of tactic if it's the easiest way to do it.
Personally, I hate spyware almost as much as I hate popups. Almost. Of course it's all a vicious circle, just like Trillian vs. AOL. One side will do one thing, the other counter it. Rarely does anyone win in the long run, short of taking it to court.
Also, while you can develop your own stuff, there's no way to write it out to a CD/DVD that can play on any PS2 without the linux kit.
Couldn't you just transfer a developed game onto another machine using the ethernet though, and write to a DVD that way? I'm not sure how the game is actually read, but I'd assume someone can figure a way to backwards engineer it.
This is a pretty sweet product, and relatively inexpensive for its usefulness. Too bad I just updated my current system, or I'd probably go out and buy both the system and kit.
A good car you can drive for maybe 12 years and you'll still get about the same gas mileage, etc. It'll depreciate but if you don't crash it and keep it, it'll still work fine. Of course it depends on the type of car, but let's just compare this to a computer.
A good computer, top of the line, best thing money can buy for 5,000 bucks, will likely be obsolete within half that time. If I recall, a 200mhz machine was kicking it in '96 or '97. Now you'd get about 10 times the processing power for the faster machines on the market nowadays.
So the real question is, why would I buy a 1500 dollar iMac, no matter how cute it is, when I can make my own machine for about half to 2/3 that which has just about the same features. I understand quality, and believe me, you do get what you paid for. But if my machine breaks down in say 3 years instead of maybe 6 for the iMac, I've likely already outlived the cycle of the product, and can look for something new.
Personally, I like that Apple has a fully integrated system. There's no incompatibilities for the OS because the hardware and s/w are built together. But I'm not going to pay extra for it.
What Apple has apparently learned over the years is that they are a niche market. They sell to graphics designers, for instance, and people who are mac aficionados. If they want to steal share from other computer companies, they'll have to create low-cost alternatives. Lamp-shape or no lamp-shape, some people may just want a simple monitor to an LCD, particularly those who have old DB-15 monitors laying around the house from the last machine they bought.
Desktops are becoming a commodity. If they want to break into a mass market, they'll have to lower cost.
Seems like it'd be really easy to hide a bomb in one of these farms. They will definently need some good security to make sure these farms don't get sabotaged and in turn wipe out electricity, not to mention the possibility that such a disaster might wreak havok on the ecology. Still, a novel concept, one step closer to cleaning up our environment.
Seems like a waste of noise...
on
Optical Cryptography
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Maybe I'm completely off here, but if you're using noise interference, wouldn't that be sort of wasting bandwidth? This is a cool technology, I wonder if there would be a way to mask a signal and at the same time run multiple signals, so you could essentially split the information through a long pipe (like the laser) using the chaotic noise, and each would be able to be filtered out (at some sort of router) and sent to various places accordingly. Seems it would be much more efficient to carry information that way.
IBM has some pretty nice new security that allows for even the HDDs within laptops to be locked up, even when the HDDs are removed from the machine and put in another machine. Pretty nice for securing data, and would have been nice for the company to know that the data couldn't be accessed.
As kids grow up and older people die, you can bet people will become more tech saavy. I'm 24, but you can bet people just 5-6 years ago didn't have as much exposure to technology that I had in my formative years of college and HS. This is not to say people who are 30 aren't tech saavy or are not learning, but the exposure is out there, people are using computers more and more, just as 3G cells, email, etc, wasn't there 7-8 years ago for the mass public.
Give it a couple of years, and don't despair over a generational gap. I have sisters younger than me who are quickly learning the ins and outs of AIM and web surfing, something I never had when I was 13. It's a steeper learning curve for older generations, and there's always some nostalgia creeping around the corner there as well. The techno-elite will shift some, and there will always be a few luddites in our society, but I doubt the gap is truly widening.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this boxing match will also resolve an ages-old argument: Who do geeks hate more, Wesley Crusher or Barney?
Of course in the reviewer's own estimation, by this time everyone should wear pseudo-future space clothes and all restaurants are Taco Bell.
:))
I thought the mixture of futurism while maintaining modern elements is a pretty good guess. It's 50 years in the future, I don't see our society changing too much. But anything can happen. No one can predict the future (well, except maybe the precogs
This is just one view of the future, and it seems realistic enough. I thought it was done tastefully and thoughtfully, unlike such tripe as Battlefield Earth. My only qualm with the story was the ending, which, like AI, would have been better had they cut the last 10-15 minutes out.
I was hoping that link would take me to the doctored nude photos. Of course that would probably get slashdot sued, too...
Thank god for Anna Kournikova...
Sherwin-Williams can only sell the color Blue.
national security at stake. Let's see, between SQL worms, IE patches, and OE viruses, I for one am glad the Pentagon is using more secure software. Maybe this will make MS rethink their position on putting out bad code. Then again....nawww...
"How much do you program on the PS2 kit?"
Interviewee #1: Umm, not much.
Interviewee #2: Umm, not much. My dog ate my development notes.
Interviewee #3: I'd program more, but umm, not much. See I met this real non-plastic girl and we [censored- see alt.furries.erotica]
Interviewee #4: I program a lot except on the PS2. Can I talk about how uninteresting my job at [insert acronym] is?
Interviewee #5: I was just explaining how the RISC chip architecture worked when you interrupted me. Oh yes, what was the question? Oh yeah...umm, not much.
Interviewee #6: I'm too busy trying to get to the next level of GTA3 to actually code on it. Is that what that beta thingy I received in the mail was for?
Interviewee #7: (aptly named Sporkhead): Cool! My PS2 says 'Hello, World'!
Congratulations for reading the article.
He made a perfect replica of a highway sign, which probably isn't all that easy to do on your own. He did it in broad daylight. He got away with it for months. Besides, art imitates life (or in this case, makes life a little easier for everyone else.)
Is it just me or does the cover art look like a tacky romance novel? I'm not going to argue the quality of the book without reading it, but...ick, it looks worse than the cover art from Randland (except first book, TEOTW had pretty cool-looking cover art)
One thing you've got to look at is warranty coverage and who will support these boxes once they're made. Most of these components will have warranties, but there's different coverage for each one you'd have to keep track of, you might get a bad batch if you order in bulk, which can cost time and money in the long run. For a business environment, even small business, I'd recommend looking to a solid company that has a good service record and see if you can get a bid war going between two companies who have small business plans to have your business. Bottom line, it's probably more hassle than you'd want.
I can't wait for one of these to be benchmarked against the current Intel line. But Opteron? Reminds me of Optimus Prime from Transformers. Then again, you may need a transformer just to run one of these :)
Criswell estimates it would take about $15 billion to launch the project and then about $135 billion more before the investment begins to break even.
The energy crisis has never been so economically feasible!
"Honey, umm, I just got a bill from that new lunar electric company. Apparently we owe about 20 million dollars for something called an 'intergalactic tax'?"
In a related news story, CEO Kenneth Lay will be shot to the moon to do the accounting for this new energy company in the hopes that he never, EVER comes back.
Whether its use is to destroy data or merely to send out data without your knowledge. Eventually there will be a legal battle over this. I don't care what the TOS say.
Maybe Wil's working with the Borg like in this article.
Wow. Picking up garbage. That is lame. Next let's make a game called "Day at the Beach" where in the time between flashing people and selling crack to preschoolers you pick up hypodermic needles and dead fish.
What would have been better is to make a game where you find say a gun and just start capping everyone in line in front of you. Call it 'Universal Studios Rampage.' As a person who used to wait in lines, it would be quite therapeutic. Such missions could include going 'Back to the Future' to destroy Kevin Costner before he makes Waterworld. (Or the Postman, or that crappy movie about Bottles, or pretty much anything after Field of Dreams.)
"It would have been best if they had just taken engineering challenge and designed something that couldn't be detected. but instead they just decided to break our program. That's kind of lame."
Whatever works for them, you can't blame a company for pulling this kind of tactic if it's the easiest way to do it.
Personally, I hate spyware almost as much as I hate popups. Almost. Of course it's all a vicious circle, just like Trillian vs. AOL. One side will do one thing, the other counter it. Rarely does anyone win in the long run, short of taking it to court.
Also, while you can develop your own stuff, there's no way to write it out to a CD/DVD that can play on any PS2 without the linux kit.
Couldn't you just transfer a developed game onto another machine using the ethernet though, and write to a DVD that way? I'm not sure how the game is actually read, but I'd assume someone can figure a way to backwards engineer it.
This is a pretty sweet product, and relatively inexpensive for its usefulness. Too bad I just updated my current system, or I'd probably go out and buy both the system and kit.
A good car you can drive for maybe 12 years and you'll still get about the same gas mileage, etc. It'll depreciate but if you don't crash it and keep it, it'll still work fine. Of course it depends on the type of car, but let's just compare this to a computer.
A good computer, top of the line, best thing money can buy for 5,000 bucks, will likely be obsolete within half that time. If I recall, a 200mhz machine was kicking it in '96 or '97. Now you'd get about 10 times the processing power for the faster machines on the market nowadays.
So the real question is, why would I buy a 1500 dollar iMac, no matter how cute it is, when I can make my own machine for about half to 2/3 that which has just about the same features. I understand quality, and believe me, you do get what you paid for. But if my machine breaks down in say 3 years instead of maybe 6 for the iMac, I've likely already outlived the cycle of the product, and can look for something new.
Personally, I like that Apple has a fully integrated system. There's no incompatibilities for the OS because the hardware and s/w are built together. But I'm not going to pay extra for it.
What Apple has apparently learned over the years is that they are a niche market. They sell to graphics designers, for instance, and people who are mac aficionados. If they want to steal share from other computer companies, they'll have to create low-cost alternatives. Lamp-shape or no lamp-shape, some people may just want a simple monitor to an LCD, particularly those who have old DB-15 monitors laying around the house from the last machine they bought.
Desktops are becoming a commodity. If they want to break into a mass market, they'll have to lower cost.
Seems like it'd be really easy to hide a bomb in one of these farms. They will definently need some good security to make sure these farms don't get sabotaged and in turn wipe out electricity, not to mention the possibility that such a disaster might wreak havok on the ecology. Still, a novel concept, one step closer to cleaning up our environment.
Maybe I'm completely off here, but if you're using noise interference, wouldn't that be sort of wasting bandwidth? This is a cool technology, I wonder if there would be a way to mask a signal and at the same time run multiple signals, so you could essentially split the information through a long pipe (like the laser) using the chaotic noise, and each would be able to be filtered out (at some sort of router) and sent to various places accordingly. Seems it would be much more efficient to carry information that way.
So you know when the next version of Windows is coming out?
IBM has some pretty nice new security that allows for even the HDDs within laptops to be locked up, even when the HDDs are removed from the machine and put in another machine. Pretty nice for securing data, and would have been nice for the company to know that the data couldn't be accessed.
So far, I've found a ton of em. Too Easy.
:)
My favorite though:
Thwack Googolplexes
Try 'Calciferous Harrying' :)
That didn't take long to find one. seems too easy.
As kids grow up and older people die, you can bet people will become more tech saavy. I'm 24, but you can bet people just 5-6 years ago didn't have as much exposure to technology that I had in my formative years of college and HS. This is not to say people who are 30 aren't tech saavy or are not learning, but the exposure is out there, people are using computers more and more, just as 3G cells, email, etc, wasn't there 7-8 years ago for the mass public.
Give it a couple of years, and don't despair over a generational gap. I have sisters younger than me who are quickly learning the ins and outs of AIM and web surfing, something I never had when I was 13. It's a steeper learning curve for older generations, and there's always some nostalgia creeping around the corner there as well. The techno-elite will shift some, and there will always be a few luddites in our society, but I doubt the gap is truly widening.
I'm a bit confused here. Does Inferno have its own language to be compiled within the VM like Java?