The platform isn't that complicated. The graphics might be, but you could incrementally improve those. And a place like Sony could crank out the manufacturing engineering in a couple of months.
Must just want to spread out the innovation space to give the PS2 time to make cash.
In three years, PS2 will be a board-game spinner compared to the cards available for desktops.
Maybe they're looking for the next great parts shortage so they can order a zillion of those...
In many tech companies, the employees have stock options. There is a presumption in the law that someone holding equity in a company can not be objective about that company or its competitors. Thus the disclaimers you see in journalism about "The San Abysmo Monocle is owned by the same parent company as Yada.Com" and so on; if not because of direct application of proscriptions in the code, then because of warnings by lawyers that failing to do so opens the company up to libel and shareholder suits. Anyone reading those disclaimers who does not immediately color their interpretation of the rest of the article is ignoring the facts.
This onus is passed on to non-equity employees of the company, on the principle that there are people who are equity holders and have managerial control over that employee at some level.
Mr. Schuchart may believe he is above such pitfalls. He is, but not in the sense of above he would like.
--Blair
"IANAL. Disclaimer: The United States is part-owned by Microsoft Corporation."
What is the advantage of this monstrosity over a tabletop projector that costs a fraction as much and can probably use a bigger screen?
Daylight operation.
You don't have to put your projector in the middle of the audience; especially if the audience is constantly moving, as in a conference hall.
It's not cross-illuminating your presenter, making him look like Bozo the Cyberclown.
No geometry/focus/vibration problems.
90% of presentation selling is, "If you think my dick is big, you should see the one we couldn't bring along." Get their attention, hold it, and imply indirectly that you can exceed their expectations. Use every means to inflate their value estimates.
If the picture is reliable (yeah, right), then all they've standardized is the upper interface to the drivers. The right third of that is generic driver API; i.e., open, close, read, write, yadda, blah, etc.
So, putatively (and I ain't puting until I see it on 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one), you could add any HW driver you want. Provided you know the HW. And how to write drivers and alter the initialization scripts to turn off OEM drivers that try to open the same HW.
The definition of the interface strongly implies some definition of the function to be performed when you call across that interface. But no, that's not an interface spec, that's a software functional spec. Side effects. Some of which you'd hope they'd standardize. There's a big difference between a standard that says "calling int power_off(void) returns 0 for success and 1 for failure" and one that says "calling power_off() turns the power off". Big enough that it makes me think that the picture in the article was typical bogus hack-journalistic Not Getting the Point.
But. I still expect the standard API to be there. And the source code for non-proprietary drivers. Or else Limux might just have to start migrating certain things at a faster rate than the "standards" people can keep up with.
Saw this on the tee.vee the other day. Joan Lunden is much more enjoyable when you don't have to wake up at 6 a.m. just to see her.
Anyway.
The machine is a box about 3 m on a side with a CRT on a table next to it. The customs agents have to decide that you're worth searching before they send you into it, because it's not instantaneous, it's probably a bad idea to create a situation for mayhem in a crowd, and they have to decide which gender of agent will view the results, which are graphic enough to deserve blurring-out on Joan's show.
It's not the X-ray Hallway from Total Recall. Yet.
But isn't it sweet that while the agents are probing your pockets, moneybelt, and package they have the courtesy not to expose your goodies to an agent of another gender? Which makes me wonder if US Customs has a rule against homosexuals on the force...
--Blair
"Don't ask, don't tell, just GIF! GIF! GIF!"
The government can be a capitalist as easily as the people can. Cf. ownership of the right to field a police force and the use of traffic tickets and zero-tolerance seizures as "revenue enhancement".
The Dictionary.Com definition is one of those cases of confusion I mentioned. It confuses capitalism, the free market, privatization, and partial profit reinvestment. They likely devolved it from Marx, who is one of the most confused cats in human history.
Certain positions strain my wrists and hands; certain other positions don't.
Given that I can spend upwards of 100 hours a week on a keyboard, it's obvious I spend most of that time in positions that don't.
Some people may not be able to find such positions on available hardware and workspaces. OSHA rules meant to encourage employers to correct that problem were, predictably, turfed by the current administration.
Should everyone pay for that in terms of higher keyboard prices to cover lawsuits? I don't think we do. Fry's Electronics in San Jose has a big stack of keyboards priced at $2.99 each. (Ironically, they had the best sound and feel of any of the dozen models on the shelf; except the Enter key, which clanked like a Daihatsu trunk lid...)
The two phrases that best describe this issue are "IANAL" and "YMMV".
An Anonymous Coward wrote: > Hey! That's what Capitalism is all about: making money regardless of ideals.
Actually, Capitalism is about making money by owning the tools, materials, and land that others work with; i.e., without working.
It's often confused with the Free Market, which is about letting buyers and sellers set their own pricesi; i.e., giving the seller a chance to fool the buyer, or vice versa, or just taking advantage of the natural difference between the value of the desired and the cost of the supplied.
What you're talking about isn't Capitalism or the Free Market. It's Profiteering. And it is illegal in many cases. Except Healthcare. And the Military-Industrial Complex absent a Declaration of War. And Higher Education. And Cable.
> ust have your users pick a phrase from a current song that they like
Yay. You've just reduced the phrase dictionary to 100KB of lyrics. And posted the same idea every IT whackjob has had since the first luser said "but I can't remember long passwords..." So it's going to be a well-thumbed dictionary.
An edict that limits password choice to create "strong" passwords actually weakens the system by reducing the pattern space that must be tiled by the cracker. "8*&ks-c%" is only secure if 8 tabs is secure, and vice versa.
And, as always, password guessing is an idiotic thing to fear. Any system that permits or fails to report more than a few login attempts per minute is broken. Any system that lets the cracker copy out a statically encrypted password for later cracking is broken.
Then again, this oft-repeated organizational boondoggle is handy. It lets us know which of our IT and management people have a clue, and which have been faking it and are trying to get their noses all the farther up our asses by renting an urban legend of a clue. Time to look for ways to can them.
Well...I was a year old when this happened, but...
This is a cyberspace parallel to the situation at Berkeley in '64 that created the Free Speech Movement and made Mario Savio an international leader.
--Blair
P.S. Of course, because of the novel and creative nature of the first Free Speech Movement protests, people decided that such things were a lot of fun, and started looking for reasons to have "happening" protests --sometimes just to mock their own herd-like sociology-- and you know how the '60s ended up. In the '70s.
> There was a time when netscape.com was the most popular destination on the Internet b/c it was the default start page for almost every browser. This was back in the days when a lot of people didn't understand how the Net worked and were willing to be guided by the hand.
1. AOL Time Warner 37,812,191
2. Yahoo! 30,903,169
3. MSN 27,571,264
4. Lycos Network 9,271,098
5. Microsoft 9,262,228
. . .
Every time I lower my standards and open IE, no matter what my homepage was last set to, I see it contacting a Microsoft or MSN site. If I open a defaulted browser, it touches microsoft.com and then loads MSN.Com. I.e., the reason you see them broken out in the Nielsen numbers is Microsoft wants you to do the math and not realize they're double-dipping. (If you go to the Nielsen table you see that microsoft.com has by far the lowest time-per-session of any of the top 10 properties. Millions of 1-millisecond trips tends to pull one's average down, wot?)
AOL gets a hit every time an AOLer dials in, and any time Netscape redirects a user to Netscape.Com.
This hasn't changed at all. It's getting worse. AOL will probably do everything it can to keep Microsoft from usurping it on this list, including making pacts with them that make it worth Microsoft's while not to take them down.
I don't know anything about Photoshop, but GIMP is built on image processing libraries that also have program interfaces associated with them that can be used as commands in UNIX shell scripts. And OS X has UNIX shell scripting (or so I've read).
I.e., if your professional colleagues have common picture munging tasks that are racking up carpal-tunnel exposure points and driving them insane with boredom, they could write a script to do the same thing, and feed the picture files into it.
Good for fixing systematic problems with images from a certain piece of camera equipment, for example. Or cropping and tweaking a time-lapse sequence, maybe. Stuff like that.
But that's only helpful if Photoshop won't do scripting or batch processing or macros or whatever they would have decided to call it.
I just spent half an hour searching through the U.S. Code for the prohibition on interstate gambling, and the couple of things I found that talked about wire transmission were only about sports or horses. I recall seing a broader prohibition, but it's not coming up on that search engine, so maybe I recall incorrectly.
If Nevada allows the game, and your state allows the game, then federal law isn't involved, even though the games are coming over a wire. Even in the case of sports bets and betting information, which are spelled out clearly as illegal to transmit over interstate wires, there's a loophole for transmissions to and from states that permit that kind of sports betting. Intervening states can't stop it.
Of course, the Internet is pervasive, and completely insecure. If people in Atlantic City can log into video poker machines in Las Vegas, then so can the 12-year-old h4xx0r son of a Mormon Elder's Wife Number 9 in Salt Lake City, in between Jenna Jameson tapes and shots of Herradura.
Cable modem was out first with 10X DSL's speeds at the same price.
That DSL made inroads in any neighborhood where Cable TV exists--and therefore where cable internet could be run--is testament to the power of the con game run by the LECs.
Broadband RF such as SpeedChoice only made the DSL marketing more pointless. But somehow barely slowed sales.
Clearly, many people don't want the best service. They want to be had. I'm only sorry I'm not the one taking their money for jiggly clods of dirt.
This loser shouldn't be allowed near perishable items. He certainly should not be given sharp knives and hot oil and then stoked into a competitive fervor.
Last time they met, Flay flailed around, complained like the childish egomaniac that he is, and insulted Morimoto, the Iron Chef concept, and all of the cooking industry by putting his grimy noo-yawkuh boots on the cutting board.
Justice was served, though, when he got his ass handed back to him by the judges. No way is a "rematch" justified. Morimoto-san should have told them to fuck off and called out Emeril or Ming Tsai instead.
'Sides. I've watched Flay's show. My dog eats better. And he eats his own poo.
--Blair
"How do you say 'Woof! Woof, woof-woof!' in Japanese?"
Cro-Magnon spokesman Korg has issued a press release stating that the Cro-Magnon are suing Blue Seude for infliction of emotional distress.
Their suit, Korg contends, stems not from the repeated use of the phrase "Ooga-Chaka", but from the tens of thousands of hours of airplay afforded to "Hooked on a Feeling? one of the worst songs ever recorded. The Cro-Magnon claim that this threat to human survival affects their 70,000-year-old culture the most, and is amplified by their innate susceptibility to the introductory refrain. They concluded that the effect is deliberate, according to the release.
Also named in the suit are several hundred radio stations, '70s-night disco bars, and Cher ("just for the hell of it", said Korg).
Slashdot Mirror
The platform isn't that complicated. The graphics might be, but you could incrementally improve those. And a place like Sony could crank out the manufacturing engineering in a couple of months.
Must just want to spread out the innovation space to give the PS2 time to make cash.
In three years, PS2 will be a board-game spinner compared to the cards available for desktops.
Maybe they're looking for the next great parts shortage so they can order a zillion of those...
--Blair
In many tech companies, the employees have stock options. There is a presumption in the law that someone holding equity in a company can not be objective about that company or its competitors. Thus the disclaimers you see in journalism about "The San Abysmo Monocle is owned by the same parent company as Yada.Com" and so on; if not because of direct application of proscriptions in the code, then because of warnings by lawyers that failing to do so opens the company up to libel and shareholder suits. Anyone reading those disclaimers who does not immediately color their interpretation of the rest of the article is ignoring the facts.
This onus is passed on to non-equity employees of the company, on the principle that there are people who are equity holders and have managerial control over that employee at some level.
Mr. Schuchart may believe he is above such pitfalls. He is, but not in the sense of above he would like.
--Blair
"IANAL. Disclaimer: The United States is part-owned by Microsoft Corporation."
What is the advantage of this monstrosity over a tabletop projector that costs a fraction as much and can probably use a bigger screen?
Daylight operation.
You don't have to put your projector in the middle of the audience; especially if the audience is constantly moving, as in a conference hall.
It's not cross-illuminating your presenter, making him look like Bozo the Cyberclown.
No geometry/focus/vibration problems.
90% of presentation selling is, "If you think my dick is big, you should see the one we couldn't bring along." Get their attention, hold it, and imply indirectly that you can exceed their expectations. Use every means to inflate their value estimates.
--Blair
I dunno.
Why I dunno?
Because the article didn't say shit.
If the picture is reliable (yeah, right), then all they've standardized is the upper interface to the drivers. The right third of that is generic driver API; i.e., open, close, read, write, yadda, blah, etc.
So, putatively (and I ain't puting until I see it on 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one), you could add any HW driver you want. Provided you know the HW. And how to write drivers and alter the initialization scripts to turn off OEM drivers that try to open the same HW.
The definition of the interface strongly implies some definition of the function to be performed when you call across that interface. But no, that's not an interface spec, that's a software functional spec. Side effects. Some of which you'd hope they'd standardize. There's a big difference between a standard that says "calling int power_off(void) returns 0 for success and 1 for failure" and one that says "calling power_off() turns the power off". Big enough that it makes me think that the picture in the article was typical bogus hack-journalistic Not Getting the Point.
But. I still expect the standard API to be there. And the source code for non-proprietary drivers. Or else Limux might just have to start migrating certain things at a faster rate than the "standards" people can keep up with.
--Blair
Saw this on the tee.vee the other day. Joan Lunden is much more enjoyable when you don't have to wake up at 6 a.m. just to see her.
Anyway.
The machine is a box about 3 m on a side with a CRT on a table next to it. The customs agents have to decide that you're worth searching before they send you into it, because it's not instantaneous, it's probably a bad idea to create a situation for mayhem in a crowd, and they have to decide which gender of agent will view the results, which are graphic enough to deserve blurring-out on Joan's show.
It's not the X-ray Hallway from Total Recall. Yet.
But isn't it sweet that while the agents are probing your pockets, moneybelt, and package they have the courtesy not to expose your goodies to an agent of another gender? Which makes me wonder if US Customs has a rule against homosexuals on the force...
--Blair
"Don't ask, don't tell, just GIF! GIF! GIF!"
I think that I shall never see
A program lovely as a directed acyclic graph
Your definition amounts to a troll.
The government can be a capitalist as easily as the people can. Cf. ownership of the right to field a police force and the use of traffic tickets and zero-tolerance seizures as "revenue enhancement".
The Dictionary.Com definition is one of those cases of confusion I mentioned. It confuses capitalism, the free market, privatization, and partial profit reinvestment. They likely devolved it from Marx, who is one of the most confused cats in human history.
--Blair
Certain positions strain my wrists and hands; certain other positions don't.
Given that I can spend upwards of 100 hours a week on a keyboard, it's obvious I spend most of that time in positions that don't.
Some people may not be able to find such positions on available hardware and workspaces. OSHA rules meant to encourage employers to correct that problem were, predictably, turfed by the current administration.
Should everyone pay for that in terms of higher keyboard prices to cover lawsuits? I don't think we do. Fry's Electronics in San Jose has a big stack of keyboards priced at $2.99 each. (Ironically, they had the best sound and feel of any of the dozen models on the shelf; except the Enter key, which clanked like a Daihatsu trunk lid...)
The two phrases that best describe this issue are "IANAL" and "YMMV".
--Blair
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
> Hey! That's what Capitalism is all about: making money regardless of ideals.
Actually, Capitalism is about making money by owning the tools, materials, and land that others work with; i.e., without working.
It's often confused with the Free Market, which is about letting buyers and sellers set their own pricesi; i.e., giving the seller a chance to fool the buyer, or vice versa, or just taking advantage of the natural difference between the value of the desired and the cost of the supplied.
What you're talking about isn't Capitalism or the Free Market. It's Profiteering. And it is illegal in many cases. Except Healthcare. And the Military-Industrial Complex absent a Declaration of War. And Higher Education. And Cable.
--Blair
> It might work.
It will work. I sent this idea in to DoD ten years ago. I just didn't think of using existing cell service. I bet they did.
--Blair
> ust have your users pick a phrase from a current song that they like
Yay. You've just reduced the phrase dictionary to 100KB of lyrics. And posted the same idea every IT whackjob has had since the first luser said "but I can't remember long passwords..." So it's going to be a well-thumbed dictionary.
An edict that limits password choice to create "strong" passwords actually weakens the system by reducing the pattern space that must be tiled by the cracker. "8*&ks-c%" is only secure if 8 tabs is secure, and vice versa.
And, as always, password guessing is an idiotic thing to fear. Any system that permits or fails to report more than a few login attempts per minute is broken. Any system that lets the cracker copy out a statically encrypted password for later cracking is broken.
Then again, this oft-repeated organizational boondoggle is handy. It lets us know which of our IT and management people have a clue, and which have been faking it and are trying to get their noses all the farther up our asses by renting an urban legend of a clue. Time to look for ways to can them.
--Blair
Well...I was a year old when this happened, but...
This is a cyberspace parallel to the situation at Berkeley in '64 that created the Free Speech Movement and made Mario Savio an international leader.
--Blair
P.S. Of course, because of the novel and creative nature of the first Free Speech Movement protests, people decided that such things were a lot of fun, and started looking for reasons to have "happening" protests --sometimes just to mock their own herd-like sociology-- and you know how the '60s ended up. In the '70s.
> There was a time when netscape.com was the most popular destination on the Internet b/c it was the default start page for almost every browser. This was back in the days when a lot of people didn't understand how the Net worked and were willing to be guided by the hand.
What makes you think this isn't still the case?
Unique visitors over the week ended 5/27, from Nielsen//Netratings:
1. AOL Time Warner 37,812,191
2. Yahoo! 30,903,169
3. MSN 27,571,264
4. Lycos Network 9,271,098
5. Microsoft 9,262,228
. . .
Every time I lower my standards and open IE, no matter what my homepage was last set to, I see it contacting a Microsoft or MSN site. If I open a defaulted browser, it touches microsoft.com and then loads MSN.Com. I.e., the reason you see them broken out in the Nielsen numbers is Microsoft wants you to do the math and not realize they're double-dipping. (If you go to the Nielsen table you see that microsoft.com has by far the lowest time-per-session of any of the top 10 properties. Millions of 1-millisecond trips tends to pull one's average down, wot?)
AOL gets a hit every time an AOLer dials in, and any time Netscape redirects a user to Netscape.Com.
This hasn't changed at all. It's getting worse. AOL will probably do everything it can to keep Microsoft from usurping it on this list, including making pacts with them that make it worth Microsoft's while not to take them down.
--Blair
Why, yes, I have...
--Blair
"NSA N.B.: I'm kidding."
I don't know anything about Photoshop, but GIMP is built on image processing libraries that also have program interfaces associated with them that can be used as commands in UNIX shell scripts. And OS X has UNIX shell scripting (or so I've read).
I.e., if your professional colleagues have common picture munging tasks that are racking up carpal-tunnel exposure points and driving them insane with boredom, they could write a script to do the same thing, and feed the picture files into it.
Good for fixing systematic problems with images from a certain piece of camera equipment, for example. Or cropping and tweaking a time-lapse sequence, maybe. Stuff like that.
But that's only helpful if Photoshop won't do scripting or batch processing or macros or whatever they would have decided to call it.
--Blair
Sorry about that link.
Here's the non-safewebbed link to the
FindLaw.Com: Laws: Cases and Codes: U.S. Code: Keyword Search page.
--Blair
"-1: Doofus."
I just spent half an hour searching through the U.S. Code for the prohibition on interstate gambling, and the couple of things I found that talked about wire transmission were only about sports or horses. I recall seing a broader prohibition, but it's not coming up on that search engine, so maybe I recall incorrectly.
If Nevada allows the game, and your state allows the game, then federal law isn't involved, even though the games are coming over a wire. Even in the case of sports bets and betting information, which are spelled out clearly as illegal to transmit over interstate wires, there's a loophole for transmissions to and from states that permit that kind of sports betting. Intervening states can't stop it.
Of course, the Internet is pervasive, and completely insecure. If people in Atlantic City can log into video poker machines in Las Vegas, then so can the 12-year-old h4xx0r son of a Mormon Elder's Wife Number 9 in Salt Lake City, in between Jenna Jameson tapes and shots of Herradura.
--Blair
Elmore Leonard wrote a Chili Palmer book involving the music industry in LA, the indy promoters, and wise guys, called Be Cool.
Chili Palmer, you may recall, is the protagonist of Get Shorty, involving the motion picture industry in LA, movie stars, and wise guys.
John Travolta played him in the movie. Yeah, that dude. And the nifty jazz trumpet riff. You remember it. "It's the Cadillac of minivans".
Be Cool is its sequel. And it's typically good Elmore Leonard.
--Blair
All encodings can handle the entire character set. They'd be pointless if they couldn't!
Do they have all my Zapf DingBats?
--Blair
"And what do we do when the Venutians touch down?"
imagine if 5% of all Americans all played the same online game, for instance.
I don't know the actual percentage, but we already do.
It's called "find the defunct ISP and make them stop charging my credit card for the monthly fee".
--Blair
DSL is a total con job.
Cable modem was out first with 10X DSL's speeds at the same price.
That DSL made inroads in any neighborhood where Cable TV exists--and therefore where cable internet could be run--is testament to the power of the con game run by the LECs.
Broadband RF such as SpeedChoice only made the DSL marketing more pointless. But somehow barely slowed sales.
Clearly, many people don't want the best service. They want to be had. I'm only sorry I'm not the one taking their money for jiggly clods of dirt.
--Blair
This loser shouldn't be allowed near perishable items. He certainly should not be given sharp knives and hot oil and then stoked into a competitive fervor.
Last time they met, Flay flailed around, complained like the childish egomaniac that he is, and insulted Morimoto, the Iron Chef concept, and all of the cooking industry by putting his grimy noo-yawkuh boots on the cutting board.
Justice was served, though, when he got his ass handed back to him by the judges. No way is a "rematch" justified. Morimoto-san should have told them to fuck off and called out Emeril or Ming Tsai instead.
'Sides. I've watched Flay's show. My dog eats better. And he eats his own poo.
--Blair
"How do you say ' Woof! Woof, woof-woof! ' in Japanese?"
Cro-Magnon spokesman Korg has issued a press release stating that the Cro-Magnon are suing Blue Seude for infliction of emotional distress.
Their suit, Korg contends, stems not from the repeated use of the phrase "Ooga-Chaka", but from the tens of thousands of hours of airplay afforded to "Hooked on a Feeling? one of the worst songs ever recorded. The Cro-Magnon claim that this threat to human survival affects their 70,000-year-old culture the most, and is amplified by their innate susceptibility to the introductory refrain. They concluded that the effect is deliberate, according to the release.
Also named in the suit are several hundred radio stations, '70s-night disco bars, and Cher ("just for the hell of it", said Korg).
--Blair
It is an association of music-industry conglomerates.
These conglomerates own the rights because they purchased them from the artists.
The system seems to be:
- Lure young, stupid, talented artists, and convince them to sign onerous contracts.
- Gussy them up and present them as the sole progenitors of their creativity and marketability.
- Discard them, retaining the intellectual property harvested by them from their own creative soil.
Is it not?So:
--Blair
Then Microsoft is Biological Warfare.
--Blair