MIT has an interest in ensuring that people do not fear technology. Worst case scenario: a technophobic generation starts shunning the MITs of the world for agricultural colleges.
Appending the MIT brand to someone's opinion doesn't necessarily mean the author is any more knowledgeable than the clerk at your local 7-eleven.
The author is not an MIT professor of economics, political science, sociology, literature, comp-sci or any other subject that would qualify him as an authority on the subjects covered by 1984. He teaches astrogeophysics at Berkeley. He currently teaches a course called "Physics for future Presidents" ["my goal is to cover the physics that future world leaders need to know (and maybe present world leaders too....)."] and is the author of a historical novel called "The Sins of Jesus."
The assumption that presidents need to understand physics (rather than employ well-informed experts as advisors on the subject) and the profession that Jesus used "magic and deception" to pose as the son of God (based on "historical facts and biblical references") makes me wary of his preaching.
The software giant said Windows XP Media Center, formerly codenamed Freestyle, was aimed at "digital media enthusiasts, college dorm rooms and teen bedrooms."
Yeah, I had this in 1998 (it had been out for a few years already by that time). It was called Apple TV Tuner.
For about $100 I got a box with two cards to add to my Performa 6360 (one added an RCA-in and an S-video-in while the second added a connection for an antenna or cable) and a remote (that could talk to an existing IR port on the front of the machine) that could control the volume, change channels, control the machine's CD player and even turn the computer on and off. My roommate had a Power Mac 5400 that had the same IR port on the front -- I stopped using the remote for a while after I inadvertantly turned his computer off from across the room while he was typing a paper.
A $150 kit I was never able to find added the same plus an FM tuner (anyone have one of these?).
With my newly upgraded machine I was able to record MPEGs from any source that came through the cable, antenna, S-video or RCA cables. Yes, it ignored Macrovision. With a larger hard drive (I only had the stock 1.2 GB) and a cron job (an AppleScript probably would have sufficed) the machine could have recorded TV shows while I was in class. I haven't bought a TV since purchasing that card -- I just wish the machine had more than 1MB VRAM soldered to the motherboard.
The interesting thing is that Apple dropped this great toy. Why? Was there too little interest? My friends complained that a 15-inch monitor just doesn't make a good TV, but that was the only complaint. Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that there once was a Mac-in-TV initiative at Apple that got killed by management as an overzealous, unworkable project. Will Apple resurrect that now, or is Microsoft going to find the same trouble selling this?
USB? What were they thinking?
on
Mac PVR Coming Soon
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
it hooks up to one of the Mac's USB ports and captures MPEG-1 video... and here I was, thinking I wouldn't fill up my new 160GB hard drive any time soon. Silly me.
I have a USB TV Tuner (Eskape's MyTV, which produces abysmal video) that requires separate hardware for the audio because USB couldn't handle full-screen video plus audio. If the maker of this PVR is trying to squeeze video and audio into a USB (not USB 2) cable, I imagine the quality will be even worse.
This doesn't make any sense. If the Macintosh is really the target platform for this, why didn't they use Firewire? All current Macs ship with Firewire (even the $799 G3 iMac).
That's the most frightening thought I've had in a long time... N'Sync dancing on-stage to an acapella remix of the Chocobo theme with thousands of teenage girls screaming...::shiver::
Do "They" think we just don't see enough advertising in a day?
First law of advertising saturation: the more advertisements a person sees in a given day, the less impact they have.
If I see one to three advertisements in a day, I'll probably remember them all. I might even think about them later on and buy something. If I see 300 ads in a day, they're no more memorable than the individual cars on the freeway -- which means I only remember the really obnoxious ones that pissed me off and caused me to swear revenge.
One would think that advertisers would understand this, and while they probably do, they ignore it because advertising is one of the great hoaxes of modern society. Every ad you see represents money in the bank for someone who suckered someone else into paying him to conceive or display the ad.
The person paying for the advertising really has no way of determining the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Increasing or decreasing sales could be attributed to any one of a number of factors. That's why so many organizations ask "How did you hear about us?" or "What caused you to buy our product?" (I always answer "Satan")
If a computer can take the pictures, distinguish the things in the pictures (make, model, year, color, the plate), and cross reference all that information on its own, it sounds like the infrastructure for Big Brother is already in place.
If I lived in London, I don't think I'd be all that concerned about toll-enforcement. I'd be more concerned about whether my health insurance company is examining my gait on the street for an excuse to raise my rates. Or whether the politicians in power are using this to dig up dirt on their political adversaries.
Where did all the good video game music go anyway?
I understand the appeal of a relatively simple tune (like the three Tetris tracks), but I think as the industry has moved toward CD-quality audio, it has found it cheaper/hipper to use existing music than to hire a composer. PlayStation games are notorious for this -- I sometimes wonder if the developers are paying to use the music or if the studios are paying the developers to "push" their music to a captive, impressionable audience.
Composer Nobuo Uematsu and Final Fantasy's music have developed quite a following over the years. The tradition of original soundtracks has survived in the Final Fantasy Dynasty because players have come to expect each new FF to raise the bar for the rest of the industry's music.
I remember making my own tape of FF2's soundtrack by hooking my SNES up to my tape recorder. FF3 had equally memorable, thematic music. FF7 was a whole new ballgame -- someone in my college dorm reached the game's final battle WAY before the rest of us (he didn't sleep much), and we stood around the TV in awe as we realized the track contained actual singing. It was actually creepy, because we thought it was coming from somewhere else until the voices began chanting the name of the bad guy. In particular, I recommend the orchestral version of the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack.
Regardless of the quality of the music, I think one's impression of the associated game influences your appreciation of the music. With that in mind, I'd suggest playing the games before diving into the music.
No, what you need is a really good artist to paint a copy of your neighbor's license plate on the shutter. When you're driving in London the police won't notice because it looks like you have plates and when your neighbor (preferably not your immediate next-door neighbor) gets the bill, he can point out that his plates are securely fastened and registered to a car that is an entirely different make, model, year and color from the one in the picture.
I was listed with high Tetris scores many times in Nintendo Power magazine. I also sent letters showing how I'd given GameBoys to Gorbachev and Bush. The latter was seen playing one shortly thereafter on TV in a hospital after a heart problem. It got to the point that Nintendo Power wouldn't list my name again so I sent in a score photo and used the name "Evets Kainzow" which is both my names backwards. When I got the next issue and flipped to see if anyone had beaten my high score, I saw this name but forgot having sent it in. I was worried that someone was close to me. I noticed that he had a foreign sounding name and that he lived in Saratoga, the next city over. Then I realized that it was my own trick.
His high score is 710,000 (beat that, Mr. Nintendo World Championships!) and he was invited to play "King-Sized Tetris" at Brown.
The unfortunate reality is that in most jobs (unless you work for the government), "gracious professionalism" is seen as a liability, while "ruthless marketing" is considered a virtue.
Corporations -- and even some public universities that behave like corporations -- worship the god of profit because at the end of the day, that's what pays everyone's salaries (actually that's a corporate myth, but it may as well be true because if you're not contributing to profitability you're likely to get "laid off"). They'd rather hire the kid who won $1,000 building a robotic monster that desroyed the competition than a FIRST national finalist, and many parents/educators are going to favor Battlebots over FIRST for that reason.
I'd say it was probably struck by some of the space junk that's orbiting the earth at thousands of miles per hour. They should ask the folks on the ISS to keep an eye out for a deflated beach ball.
I looked into doing this with an iMac and a GPS receiver (much safer than strapping my PowerBook into the passenger seat and turning my head 90 degrees to check the map), but ultimately I decided that would be like begging for someone to steal my car.
Page 32 of the August 2002 issue of Popular Mechanics (arrived in the mail yesterday):
Despite its physical growth, the value of the ISS as a research platform has plummeted. Budget-pressed NASA says it cannot afford to keep seven astronauts on the ISS. Only three will fly at a time, and most of their work will involve maintenance, not science.
Reminds me of the story of the kid who bought a car to get him to work, and now he works to put gas in the car to get him to work to put gas in the car to...
NASA's spending billions of dollars just to maintain the ISS because it can't afford to do anything else with it.
Look, there's absolutely no evidence to link that episode to the fact that each of the people in that room was laid off a month later. None whatsoever. They told me so: "The Company encourages employees to take the initiative in boosting morale."
I used to host a weekly movie night in one of the conference rooms for people who had to stay late, and the one night we watched Office Space our new VP of Human Resources popped her head in.
"What's this? A movie night? What a great idea! What are you watching?"
Complete build of win2k time is 8hrs on 4way PIII and requires 50GB of hard drive space...
Only 8 hours to build the complete Win2K? That's pretty impressive, considering that every piece of software Microsoft develops is "part" of Windows... or does the 8-hour figure refer only to what we consider to be Win2K?
WB can have a stunt man act in all the scenes, then CGI Reeve's face in and use a computer to simulate his voice.
But forget Keaton. He had his shot and gave it up to Val Kilmer. I want to see Bill Gates play Batman The character is in line with the image he is trying to present -- the filthy rich genius who fights for the people!
Some envisioned scenes from the CGI-Reeve v Gates movie:
"Alfred?! Why isn't my Batmobile ready for launch? What's this blue crap all over the windshield? What the fuck do I pay you for? You're fired!"
"Steve, have your developers finished the new BatmobileXP yet? Ah good."
"You idiots! I specifically told you to put kryptonite in all the new systems, not palladium. How am I supposed to kill Superman with something that poisons humans?"
Of course, any real web business would have to be insane to limit its clientele to Passport account holders...
I don't think you understand how most PHBs think. Most are not going to listen to their informed engineer who tells them that Passport "only" has 14 million registered users, that many of the accounts are bogus and that people who know better will never purchase anything through Passport.
They will read an article and say, "Wow! Microsoft has just fixed the problem of online payments for us, and the service is free! This will save us a fortune, and soon everyone will be using this. Bob, cancel our contract with the credit card companies and get us set up for Passport. Joe, book me a flight to Tahiti."
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Just wait until China gets an "early release" of book seven: Harry Potter and the Deadly Wang Ba
Back Cover Summary:
Harry's back for his final year at Hogwarts, but something's not right -- once again. Students who slip out at night to visit wang bas in Hogsmeade are dying in mysterious fires. When Dobby the house elf warns Harry not to go to the wang ba run by Voldemort, Harry has no choice but to dust off his invisibility cloak and investigate. Will Harry survive this last book of the series?
Slashdot Mirror
The assumption that presidents need to understand physics (rather than employ well-informed experts as advisors on the subject) and the profession that Jesus used "magic and deception" to pose as the son of God (based on "historical facts and biblical references") makes me wary of his preaching.
For about $100 I got a box with two cards to add to my Performa 6360 (one added an RCA-in and an S-video-in while the second added a connection for an antenna or cable) and a remote (that could talk to an existing IR port on the front of the machine) that could control the volume, change channels, control the machine's CD player and even turn the computer on and off. My roommate had a Power Mac 5400 that had the same IR port on the front -- I stopped using the remote for a while after I inadvertantly turned his computer off from across the room while he was typing a paper.
A $150 kit I was never able to find added the same plus an FM tuner (anyone have one of these?).
With my newly upgraded machine I was able to record MPEGs from any source that came through the cable, antenna, S-video or RCA cables. Yes, it ignored Macrovision. With a larger hard drive (I only had the stock 1.2 GB) and a cron job (an AppleScript probably would have sufficed) the machine could have recorded TV shows while I was in class. I haven't bought a TV since purchasing that card -- I just wish the machine had more than 1MB VRAM soldered to the motherboard.
The interesting thing is that Apple dropped this great toy. Why? Was there too little interest? My friends complained that a 15-inch monitor just doesn't make a good TV, but that was the only complaint. Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that there once was a Mac-in-TV initiative at Apple that got killed by management as an overzealous, unworkable project. Will Apple resurrect that now, or is Microsoft going to find the same trouble selling this?
This doesn't make any sense. If the Macintosh is really the target platform for this, why didn't they use Firewire? All current Macs ship with Firewire (even the $799 G3 iMac).
That's the most frightening thought I've had in a long time... N'Sync dancing on-stage to an acapella remix of the Chocobo theme with thousands of teenage girls screaming... ::shiver::
If I see one to three advertisements in a day, I'll probably remember them all. I might even think about them later on and buy something. If I see 300 ads in a day, they're no more memorable than the individual cars on the freeway -- which means I only remember the really obnoxious ones that pissed me off and caused me to swear revenge.
One would think that advertisers would understand this, and while they probably do, they ignore it because advertising is one of the great hoaxes of modern society. Every ad you see represents money in the bank for someone who suckered someone else into paying him to conceive or display the ad.
The person paying for the advertising really has no way of determining the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Increasing or decreasing sales could be attributed to any one of a number of factors. That's why so many organizations ask "How did you hear about us?" or "What caused you to buy our product?" (I always answer "Satan")
If I lived in London, I don't think I'd be all that concerned about toll-enforcement. I'd be more concerned about whether my health insurance company is examining my gait on the street for an excuse to raise my rates. Or whether the politicians in power are using this to dig up dirt on their political adversaries.
Composer Nobuo Uematsu and Final Fantasy's music have developed quite a following over the years. The tradition of original soundtracks has survived in the Final Fantasy Dynasty because players have come to expect each new FF to raise the bar for the rest of the industry's music.
I remember making my own tape of FF2's soundtrack by hooking my SNES up to my tape recorder. FF3 had equally memorable, thematic music. FF7 was a whole new ballgame -- someone in my college dorm reached the game's final battle WAY before the rest of us (he didn't sleep much), and we stood around the TV in awe as we realized the track contained actual singing. It was actually creepy, because we thought it was coming from somewhere else until the voices began chanting the name of the bad guy. In particular, I recommend the orchestral version of the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack.
Regardless of the quality of the music, I think one's impression of the associated game influences your appreciation of the music. With that in mind, I'd suggest playing the games before diving into the music.
No, what you need is a really good artist to paint a copy of your neighbor's license plate on the shutter. When you're driving in London the police won't notice because it looks like you have plates and when your neighbor (preferably not your immediate next-door neighbor) gets the bill, he can point out that his plates are securely fastened and registered to a car that is an entirely different make, model, year and color from the one in the picture.
Corporations -- and even some public universities that behave like corporations -- worship the god of profit because at the end of the day, that's what pays everyone's salaries (actually that's a corporate myth, but it may as well be true because if you're not contributing to profitability you're likely to get "laid off"). They'd rather hire the kid who won $1,000 building a robotic monster that desroyed the competition than a FIRST national finalist, and many parents/educators are going to favor Battlebots over FIRST for that reason.
I'd say it was probably struck by some of the space junk that's orbiting the earth at thousands of miles per hour. They should ask the folks on the ISS to keep an eye out for a deflated beach ball.
Try turning the sound off before watching some more recent movies and see if you can discern their underlying messages. Here's what I came up with:
- Training Day: Cops do drugs and beat up homeless/crippled people.
- 2001: Always bring your helmet when leaving the space ship.
- Tron: Jeff Bridges should not smoke crack before operating a computer.
- Full Metal Jacket: Soldiers kill people.
- Dr. Strangelove: Peace is the military's profession.
- AI: What the hell was that all about?
It's not so easy, is it?I looked into doing this with an iMac and a GPS receiver (much safer than strapping my PowerBook into the passenger seat and turning my head 90 degrees to check the map), but ultimately I decided that would be like begging for someone to steal my car.
NASA's spending billions of dollars just to maintain the ISS because it can't afford to do anything else with it.
"What's this? A movie night? What a great idea! What are you watching?"
But forget Keaton. He had his shot and gave it up to Val Kilmer. I want to see Bill Gates play Batman The character is in line with the image he is trying to present -- the filthy rich genius who fights for the people!
Some envisioned scenes from the CGI-Reeve v Gates movie:
"Alfred?! Why isn't my Batmobile ready for launch? What's this blue crap all over the windshield? What the fuck do I pay you for? You're fired!"
"Steve, have your developers finished the new BatmobileXP yet? Ah good."
"You idiots! I specifically told you to put kryptonite in all the new systems, not palladium. How am I supposed to kill Superman with something that poisons humans?"
He makes the important point that Linux is not the only refuge for OpenGL.
Perhaps this explains why eBay bought PayPal yesterday, despite PayPal's fairly recent IPO.
They will read an article and say, "Wow! Microsoft has just fixed the problem of online payments for us, and the service is free! This will save us a fortune, and soon everyone will be using this. Bob, cancel our contract with the credit card companies and get us set up for Passport. Joe, book me a flight to Tahiti."
Google has already demonstrated that pigeons are far more effective than chickens.
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Back Cover Summary: