If the internet is competing with television in terms of total amount of time people spend recreationally, and the internet is mostly text, then the electronic text on the internet is utterly stomping traditional books in terms of total reader time.
I don't think e-books are going to take off to be anything other than niche. Why would people replace their books with the same thing, but digital? Long established technologies don't get overthrown by slight improvements, but radical departures. A three inch by four inch by one inch square can provide 40 or 50 hours of entertainment... why replace that with the an expensive, multi-step gizmo that provides functionally the same thing? That being said, people would accept their books being replaced by something different. That something different would appear to be the compellingness of news.bbc.co.uk, or slashdot, or any number of interesting sites and online texts. People are probably going to get wireless web-enabled phones, PDA's, and Palmtops, and will do a lot of reading through these devices, but they won't look like an electronic book any more than a PC resembles an electronic film projector.
You don't actually want your code to be doing that many difficult calculations per second, you just want a big table that tells you what the cosine of 23.2 is in a single memory operation.
Basically he was buying computer equipment NO QUESTIONS ASKED from someone for far less than their value and selling it to retailers, users, and other people for five or six times what he paid for it.
He felt that he was shielded from the law because he wasn't doing anything illegal, and he carefully made sure he didn't know of any illegal activities himself. However, the law says that if it is pretty clear that you are buying and selling stolen goods, and the goods turn out to be stolen, you're guilty. And the courts were right: while he technically didn't know for certain that he was fencing stolen property, he really did know. We're not talking about getting a great deal from a New Egg clearance, we're talking about buying dirt cheap computer equipment repeatedly from shady characters in order to turn around and sell it.
He did a little time. Last I heard, he had created an internet startup company.
Ever since I've moved out here five years ago I've had a yearly ritual to find out how long it would take to drive back home from Boston. Long story short, while doing this last month with Google Earth it appeared that my mother had drained our pool, and finally finished putting up that old porch roof I had started years ago. I gave her a call and yup, the pool had been drained about 6 months back and the roof (a big white rectangle) was finished by a friend.
37d 23' 55.50 N, 121d 59' 31.63" W
You can even see that the backyard has had most of the grass removed, though the patch of the garden she has fixed up nicely is underneath a shadow.
It also turns out that my local school, which closed it's doors years ago, has re-opened as a school... They've re-painted the 4-square and tetherball courts.
Personally I can't wait for google 3D maps. Nothing cures heartache like a VRML walkthrough. Hopefully they will add avatar and family chat options as well. Of course, I would love to have Google Earth connected to Google Chat, so that you could click on someone's physical location to open a chat session with them... I'd love to chat with old friends by going to their house.
OSX is a special case... certain hardware accelerations have been added to the system later in the product's life, rather than earlier, leading to the thing, oddly enough, getting faster as it went along. OS7-9 also underwent a similar process, as certain things were made more efficient and certain systems were made intellegent enough to tolerate wider operating parameters.
This has NEVER happened with Windows, and I've run all of them. XP is slower than ME is slower than 98 is slower than 95 is slower than 3.1. XP is slower than 2000 is slower than NT. The best you can hope for is the ability to "turn back the clock," as if you know what you're doing you can change XP to be basically no slower than a win2K install.
I'm sure that by the time Vista has been out for a few years, the cost of the hardware to run it will be reasonable. Heck, 2GB of RAM is within 200 dollars currently. And I'm sure that after 6 months of being out the hardware sites will know how to tune it to run tollerably on a below min-spec system. But don't expect the Windows world to magically reflect what has happened with Apple's system. Macintoshes get better through code refinements, Windows get better through code volume.
Of course, considering the volume of installed XP users, there really won't be a need to upgrade for a very long time. Anyone not supporting XP will be cutting out a very, very large market. So feel free to waffle for several years, until the time is really right for you.
The problem with the power glove wasn't that it was idiotic or without merit: playing punch-out with the power glove was an experience above and beyond any other on the NES. The problem was that almost no games were coded to take advantage of it. The same is true of all of the other perhipherals you mentioned. Everything from the SEGA Justifier to Konami's DDR mats can be considered failures because of the simple fact that none of them shipped with a console and none of them reached their full potential. The SNES and Genesis mice were complete failures in the market, as they only had one game that supported them, yet as we all know mice are not at all failures as interface devices. The only truly "successful" addition to a console can be considered the 4MB memory pack for the N64, primarily because that sucker shipped with a few massively popular games that used it. In other words, no attachment to a console has ever been successfully supported, because it didn't come standard with the console. That shouldn't be a failure here, as this is the controller, and as such will be supported extensively.
Think of it this way, it's a pointer. It's a 3D pointer with angle information. All of the games on the PC can now be done with an even more naturally 3D controller. RPG's menu systems should become a lot more intuitive with just point and click. Click on the ground and your characters will walk over to it. Click on a menu to attack. This seems somehow more civilized than trying to hotspot around with a d-pad. You can steer a plane by, well, steering a plane, or swing a bat by swinging a bat.
I suspect it will be a little uncomfortable at first, but I remember how much my thumbs used to cramp up when I first started pressing down on buttons. I also remember how uncomfortable using a mouse used to be. If you rest your elbows on a knee this should be fine.
Not to burst any bubbles, but the PS2 launch was 90% hype and conjecture that really had no intention of panning out, much the same way that ROB the robot was not intended to be used as anything other than a way to sneak into electronics stores. All system launches are like this. Remember how the Saturn was going to replace your home computer for all internet-related activities? The PS2 had nothing like this. Honestly, I've been waiting for wand input for consoles for some time now... the closest thing was the aforementioned Power Glove, but the Power Glove really was the wrong input for a batch of games that had no analog sensitivity, let along z-axis.
Nintendo knows what they are doing in general... Except for the second analog stick and L3/R3 buttons, every part of the modern controller design can be traced back to a Nintendo system... D-pad came from the NES (and the game-and-watch), the analog stick from the N64. Shoulder buttons and the diamond button layout were from the SNES. The rumble pack first appeared on the N64. So nintendo should be given some credit. Even the Virtual Boy controller was a great piece of work... the dual D-pads with triggers were perfect for TeleroBoxer.
Nintendo is positioning themselves interestingly in this next generation. With the radically visceral controller and a slightly lower system cost / power, they seem to be going for shorter, more intense experiences. This seems like a wise way to differentiate themselves from all of the other consoles and computers. For physical games, you can use the controller in a very natural fashion. Tennis on this system would be brilliant, Golf could be great. Pool. Baseball. Burnout: Revolution. I'm afraid to think of how many of these things are going to get accidentally thrown through windows, but it sounds like a fun process of discovery to me. For intellectual games like the Sims, you have a natural cursor-style input device. I'm not so sure how the z-axis would play into such an arrangement, but maybe it doesn't have to.
And then you have Tekken and a whole bunch of other games that probably can't physically be played o
On the other hand, I feel compelled to point out that the Macintosh V OS6+ used a similar system whereby all UI elements were laid out in a graphical interface first, before being hooked up to code. Basically all screens and menu elements were simple resources to be putzed around with, and the code interacted with these resources.
That's not to deride the achievement... just to give it some perspective. Certainly Sparkle is the most advanced form of the concept I've seen so far, and I look forward to seeing what gets created with it.
Supposedly, the earlier versions of HL2 did exactly this, but unfortunately the process was an either-or situation (as it frequently is). Either you have your entire processor generating great visuals or you have the processor / etc spending half of it's time doing something else, and the inevitable glitching this may cause.
They gave up on the glitching.
Remember, though, that HDR is not for people who have bought HL2, or who may be about to buy HL2. This lighting and other techniques, and in fact the entire level, is intented to sell the engine to other developers to use in their games. Half Life is more than just a game, it is also a platform, and in this case they need to keep the technology current if they want to sell the platform to other developers.
Releasing a potentially kick-ass new level is just a way of showcasing that technology, and maybe getting a little press in the process.
isn't letting a minor buy a sex-rape-killathon style video game over the counter the same as letting a minor walk into a dirty sex video shop and buy the equliviant video off the shelf?
It would be, except that you can actually buy sex-rape-killathon videos in dirty sex shops. Despite the shouting of misguided parent groups, you can't get sex-rape-killathon games at the local Electronics Boutique... or anywhere else but Japan. Really, the the most violent game content available would still only rate as an R movie, and there still is basically no sex in gaming. Even PG-13 level petting is basically taboo. Sure you can TALK about it, but you can't possibly go as far as, say, the rape / murder scene in Strange Days did, and that recieved an R rating.
Something like GeoCaching combined with Final Fantasy? I could see that working, although it might be difficult to get to work if you had to keep avoiding the Grues.
Mutually Assured Destruction is something very different. The ultimate extension of the MAD policy was the doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove. If you're going to nuke us, we're going to nuke you, and everyone is going to die. Basically, no matter who fires off the first nuke, everyone dies.
MAD didn't just discourage pre-emptive strikes. MAD downright forbade nuclear strikes of any kind. Using nuclear weapons was suicide, period. MAD was not a policy, it was a fact.
And it still is. Sure, people reserve an implicit "first strike" doctrine, but it really doesn't matter. Against any nuclear-capable country, a pre-emptive nuke still assures that everyone is going to die. Even more silly, we still have the capability to return nuclear fire while the first set of weapons are still in the air, so there is no additional protection offered by firing anything first.
The difference between now and 50 years ago, is that 50 years ago nuclear weapons were seen as a last resort that could end mankind either through regular terrible destructive power or through nuclear fallout. Fast forward to the administration of today, and we now have "tactical" nuclear weapons, a nuclear "pre-emptive" capability, and the stated right to use nuclear weapons against countries that may just be stockpiling weapons we don't like.
So far, everything I have read about this policy says that we should have nuked Iraq. I fail to see how that would have helped do anything but basically rendered the Middle East, and anything downwind from it, uninhabitable.
Another easily accessable computer. Sometimes you just need to google to see if a company's driver causes problems.
A completely naked computer that has been optimized for quick booting (a CF-system, perhaps?). Either way, a quick and easy way to test parts for failure.
Voltometer. Always good for testing parts for failure.
USB flash drive with all of your utilities. Linux boot floppies / CD's.
A wired rotary disk-cutting tool. These come in handy far, far more often then they should.
A Lazy Susan. I hate having to constantly turn machines around.
All of the assorted parts you need to put into computers... Things like spare case screws, spare PSU's, little rubber feet...
All of the assorted screw drivers, etc, that you need to fix computers, which i'm sure you have figured out by now.
A bin of dead parts for scrap. Sometimes you just really need a face pannel from a networking card. You'll figure out what the usful scavengable parts are pretty quickly.
This now gives our enemies the moral right to use pre-emptive nuclear strikes.
If we go around saying "Oh God, North Korea is going to nuke us," even if North Korea had no intention of actually using nuclear weapons against us, it now basically has to as US nuclear weapons are probably inbound. The action would even be justified. If Saddam Hussein actually had nuclear weapons, he would have been justified in using them against US stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical wepons, and it isn't much of a stretch to extend that to our other weapons of mass destruction (like our largest-army-in-the-world)
The problem with the current administration, is that it doesn't realize that by choosing a policy it is giving all of the rest of the countries in the world the right to use those policies as well. China now has the right to confine enemy combatants indefinitely without trial. Pakistan can nuke India whenever tensions run high.
It's a brave new world, soon to be ruled by cockroaches.
Meltdown requires heat, and water forms a pretty effective barrier against nuclear radiation. I'd guess that at the first sign of trouble, you sink the whole thing. It's only 200k, after all.
Inflamatory rhetoric aside, this seems like an OK bill. Basically, it is saying that certain types of media can't be sold to kids without parental permission. This is consistent with movies and other forms of entertainment.
The whole "2-inch sticker" seems a bit ridiculous, especially because it implies a new ratings system, a new ratings board, etc. But that's a pragmatic problem, not an ethical one. Both sides come out smelling like zealots here, with one side saying that it will destroy first amendment rights, and the other saying that videogames are as bad for you physically as smoking.
I also don't necessarily agree with the findings of the bills, that "Even minors who do not commit acts of violence suffer psychological harm from prolonged exposure to violent video games." Taken literally, this is true of basically anything. It does go into some lovingly crafted detail on what constitutes violence. I'll be amused to find out how the courts decide to interpret the requirement that a virtual victim must be conscious of the abuse at the time it is inflicted.
What it seems like the submitter wants, is an existing online video rental company with a bunch of licensed videos who he can partner with to rent to people who use his PVR / set-top box. In much the same way that there are companies that handle B2B licensing and delivery of music, are there established companies that handle licensing and delivery of movies to hardware vendors? Who handles the in-house entertainment systems for motels and hotels?
It's really kind of sad how poorly the telecom firms handle technology in the US. It's like they're afraid the public will discover VOIP and cannibalize their old business, so they've marginalized themselves to the point where nearly everyone gets their network connection from their cable company.
The phone companies have a unique chance to deploy an amazing new tech, which would probably go up faster and serve more people than replacing the old lines. And they could definitely piggyback one onto the other. They should be doing it anyway, but they won't do it during this unique opportunity.
Sadly, they're probably afraid they'd setup and maintain WiMax for less money than the land lines, but that they couldn't charge a "premium" for this "amazing new service."...Trying so hard to maintain their price structure that they make themselves irrelevant.
This is all conjecture, of course. The phone companies may be doing exactly the right things for themselves and their future. But it looks like they're betting their future on the telegraph.
if you turn off the eye-candy , it'll run as well as xp does today.
Vista is going to a completely different rendering paradigm. This is not just like the easily reversed eye-candy switch from 2000 to XP, they're actually changing how the OS thinks about graphics, in much the same way that Apple transitioned from the older bitmapped model of OS9 to the object oriented Quartz for OSX. Microsoft could include the older rendering engine from XP to allay this problem, but my guess is they just won't support that backwards compatibility.
When I install XP onto older computers, I can be pretty confident that going back to 2000 levels of performance is easy. I'm not so convinced that such a transition with Vista will be easy or even possible.
Can they leave out the manual, put it in a small cardboard sleeve, and shave off 10 dollars from the price? It seems like packaging should be either original and very, very cool, or dirt cheap. Where are the games that come wrapped in a bloody cloth from the game, or that are trapped in a chinese puzzlebox? Or at least have some cool pack-in... even stickers these days would be a rare treat. I never understood why publishers decided to stop with the cool free advertising of sticker pack-ins, but keep making 50-page utterly, utterly useless manuals that nobody ever reads. I know how to put a disk into my Playstation, thanks.
If you have Vonage with a routerphonethingie, you take your local calling area wherever you are on the network. If you take your New York Vonage router with you to China, you can make local calls to New York. Calls to China, not surprisingly, are long distance.
Just one more way that VOIP is changing the face of telecommunications.
Seems to work fine in opera 7 so long as you Identify as MSIE 6.0. No problem with the capcha or anything.
Of course, I didn't finish the registration process fully, so I can't say for sure. But it looks like the broweser banning is just a choice on their part rather than a technical limitation.
Slashdot Mirror
You're reading this, aren't you?
If the internet is competing with television in terms of total amount of time people spend recreationally, and the internet is mostly text, then the electronic text on the internet is utterly stomping traditional books in terms of total reader time.
I don't think e-books are going to take off to be anything other than niche. Why would people replace their books with the same thing, but digital? Long established technologies don't get overthrown by slight improvements, but radical departures. A three inch by four inch by one inch square can provide 40 or 50 hours of entertainment... why replace that with the an expensive, multi-step gizmo that provides functionally the same thing? That being said, people would accept their books being replaced by something different. That something different would appear to be the compellingness of news.bbc.co.uk, or slashdot, or any number of interesting sites and online texts. People are probably going to get wireless web-enabled phones, PDA's, and Palmtops, and will do a lot of reading through these devices, but they won't look like an electronic book any more than a PC resembles an electronic film projector.
You don't actually want your code to be doing that many difficult calculations per second, you just want a big table that tells you what the cosine of 23.2 is in a single memory operation.
Basically he was buying computer equipment NO QUESTIONS ASKED from someone for far less than their value and selling it to retailers, users, and other people for five or six times what he paid for it.
He felt that he was shielded from the law because he wasn't doing anything illegal, and he carefully made sure he didn't know of any illegal activities himself. However, the law says that if it is pretty clear that you are buying and selling stolen goods, and the goods turn out to be stolen, you're guilty. And the courts were right: while he technically didn't know for certain that he was fencing stolen property, he really did know. We're not talking about getting a great deal from a New Egg clearance, we're talking about buying dirt cheap computer equipment repeatedly from shady characters in order to turn around and sell it.
He did a little time. Last I heard, he had created an internet startup company.
Ever since I've moved out here five years ago I've had a yearly ritual to find out how long it would take to drive back home from Boston. Long story short, while doing this last month with Google Earth it appeared that my mother had drained our pool, and finally finished putting up that old porch roof I had started years ago. I gave her a call and yup, the pool had been drained about 6 months back and the roof (a big white rectangle) was finished by a friend.
37d 23' 55.50 N, 121d 59' 31.63" W
You can even see that the backyard has had most of the grass removed, though the patch of the garden she has fixed up nicely is underneath a shadow.
It also turns out that my local school, which closed it's doors years ago, has re-opened as a school... They've re-painted the 4-square and tetherball courts.
Personally I can't wait for google 3D maps. Nothing cures heartache like a VRML walkthrough. Hopefully they will add avatar and family chat options as well. Of course, I would love to have Google Earth connected to Google Chat, so that you could click on someone's physical location to open a chat session with them... I'd love to chat with old friends by going to their house.
OSX is a special case... certain hardware accelerations have been added to the system later in the product's life, rather than earlier, leading to the thing, oddly enough, getting faster as it went along. OS7-9 also underwent a similar process, as certain things were made more efficient and certain systems were made intellegent enough to tolerate wider operating parameters.
This has NEVER happened with Windows, and I've run all of them. XP is slower than ME is slower than 98 is slower than 95 is slower than 3.1. XP is slower than 2000 is slower than NT. The best you can hope for is the ability to "turn back the clock," as if you know what you're doing you can change XP to be basically no slower than a win2K install.
I'm sure that by the time Vista has been out for a few years, the cost of the hardware to run it will be reasonable. Heck, 2GB of RAM is within 200 dollars currently. And I'm sure that after 6 months of being out the hardware sites will know how to tune it to run tollerably on a below min-spec system. But don't expect the Windows world to magically reflect what has happened with Apple's system. Macintoshes get better through code refinements, Windows get better through code volume.
Of course, considering the volume of installed XP users, there really won't be a need to upgrade for a very long time. Anyone not supporting XP will be cutting out a very, very large market. So feel free to waffle for several years, until the time is really right for you.
The problem with the power glove wasn't that it was idiotic or without merit: playing punch-out with the power glove was an experience above and beyond any other on the NES. The problem was that almost no games were coded to take advantage of it. The same is true of all of the other perhipherals you mentioned. Everything from the SEGA Justifier to Konami's DDR mats can be considered failures because of the simple fact that none of them shipped with a console and none of them reached their full potential. The SNES and Genesis mice were complete failures in the market, as they only had one game that supported them, yet as we all know mice are not at all failures as interface devices. The only truly "successful" addition to a console can be considered the 4MB memory pack for the N64, primarily because that sucker shipped with a few massively popular games that used it. In other words, no attachment to a console has ever been successfully supported, because it didn't come standard with the console. That shouldn't be a failure here, as this is the controller, and as such will be supported extensively.
Think of it this way, it's a pointer. It's a 3D pointer with angle information. All of the games on the PC can now be done with an even more naturally 3D controller. RPG's menu systems should become a lot more intuitive with just point and click. Click on the ground and your characters will walk over to it. Click on a menu to attack. This seems somehow more civilized than trying to hotspot around with a d-pad. You can steer a plane by, well, steering a plane, or swing a bat by swinging a bat.
I suspect it will be a little uncomfortable at first, but I remember how much my thumbs used to cramp up when I first started pressing down on buttons. I also remember how uncomfortable using a mouse used to be. If you rest your elbows on a knee this should be fine.
Not to burst any bubbles, but the PS2 launch was 90% hype and conjecture that really had no intention of panning out, much the same way that ROB the robot was not intended to be used as anything other than a way to sneak into electronics stores. All system launches are like this. Remember how the Saturn was going to replace your home computer for all internet-related activities? The PS2 had nothing like this. Honestly, I've been waiting for wand input for consoles for some time now... the closest thing was the aforementioned Power Glove, but the Power Glove really was the wrong input for a batch of games that had no analog sensitivity, let along z-axis.
Nintendo knows what they are doing in general... Except for the second analog stick and L3/R3 buttons, every part of the modern controller design can be traced back to a Nintendo system... D-pad came from the NES (and the game-and-watch), the analog stick from the N64. Shoulder buttons and the diamond button layout were from the SNES. The rumble pack first appeared on the N64. So nintendo should be given some credit. Even the Virtual Boy controller was a great piece of work... the dual D-pads with triggers were perfect for TeleroBoxer.
Nintendo is positioning themselves interestingly in this next generation. With the radically visceral controller and a slightly lower system cost / power, they seem to be going for shorter, more intense experiences. This seems like a wise way to differentiate themselves from all of the other consoles and computers. For physical games, you can use the controller in a very natural fashion. Tennis on this system would be brilliant, Golf could be great. Pool. Baseball. Burnout: Revolution. I'm afraid to think of how many of these things are going to get accidentally thrown through windows, but it sounds like a fun process of discovery to me. For intellectual games like the Sims, you have a natural cursor-style input device. I'm not so sure how the z-axis would play into such an arrangement, but maybe it doesn't have to.
And then you have Tekken and a whole bunch of other games that probably can't physically be played o
On the one hand, that's very cool.
On the other hand, I feel compelled to point out that the Macintosh V OS6+ used a similar system whereby all UI elements were laid out in a graphical interface first, before being hooked up to code. Basically all screens and menu elements were simple resources to be putzed around with, and the code interacted with these resources.
That's not to deride the achievement... just to give it some perspective. Certainly Sparkle is the most advanced form of the concept I've seen so far, and I look forward to seeing what gets created with it.
Supposedly, the earlier versions of HL2 did exactly this, but unfortunately the process was an either-or situation (as it frequently is). Either you have your entire processor generating great visuals or you have the processor / etc spending half of it's time doing something else, and the inevitable glitching this may cause.
They gave up on the glitching.
Remember, though, that HDR is not for people who have bought HL2, or who may be about to buy HL2. This lighting and other techniques, and in fact the entire level, is intented to sell the engine to other developers to use in their games. Half Life is more than just a game, it is also a platform, and in this case they need to keep the technology current if they want to sell the platform to other developers.
Releasing a potentially kick-ass new level is just a way of showcasing that technology, and maybe getting a little press in the process.
isn't letting a minor buy a sex-rape-killathon style video game over the counter the same as letting a minor walk into a dirty sex video shop and buy the equliviant video off the shelf?
It would be, except that you can actually buy sex-rape-killathon videos in dirty sex shops. Despite the shouting of misguided parent groups, you can't get sex-rape-killathon games at the local Electronics Boutique... or anywhere else but Japan. Really, the the most violent game content available would still only rate as an R movie, and there still is basically no sex in gaming. Even PG-13 level petting is basically taboo. Sure you can TALK about it, but you can't possibly go as far as, say, the rape / murder scene in Strange Days did, and that recieved an R rating.
Something like GeoCaching combined with Final Fantasy? I could see that working, although it might be difficult to get to work if you had to keep avoiding the Grues.
Mutually Assured Destruction is something very different. The ultimate extension of the MAD policy was the doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove. If you're going to nuke us, we're going to nuke you, and everyone is going to die. Basically, no matter who fires off the first nuke, everyone dies.
MAD didn't just discourage pre-emptive strikes. MAD downright forbade nuclear strikes of any kind. Using nuclear weapons was suicide, period. MAD was not a policy, it was a fact.
And it still is. Sure, people reserve an implicit "first strike" doctrine, but it really doesn't matter. Against any nuclear-capable country, a pre-emptive nuke still assures that everyone is going to die. Even more silly, we still have the capability to return nuclear fire while the first set of weapons are still in the air, so there is no additional protection offered by firing anything first.
The difference between now and 50 years ago, is that 50 years ago nuclear weapons were seen as a last resort that could end mankind either through regular terrible destructive power or through nuclear fallout. Fast forward to the administration of today, and we now have "tactical" nuclear weapons, a nuclear "pre-emptive" capability, and the stated right to use nuclear weapons against countries that may just be stockpiling weapons we don't like.
So far, everything I have read about this policy says that we should have nuked Iraq. I fail to see how that would have helped do anything but basically rendered the Middle East, and anything downwind from it, uninhabitable.
Another easily accessable computer. Sometimes you just need to google to see if a company's driver causes problems.
A completely naked computer that has been optimized for quick booting (a CF-system, perhaps?). Either way, a quick and easy way to test parts for failure.
Voltometer. Always good for testing parts for failure.
USB flash drive with all of your utilities.
Linux boot floppies / CD's.
A wired rotary disk-cutting tool. These come in handy far, far more often then they should.
A Lazy Susan. I hate having to constantly turn machines around.
All of the assorted parts you need to put into computers... Things like spare case screws, spare PSU's, little rubber feet...
All of the assorted screw drivers, etc, that you need to fix computers, which i'm sure you have figured out by now.
A bin of dead parts for scrap. Sometimes you just really need a face pannel from a networking card. You'll figure out what the usful scavengable parts are pretty quickly.
A pen and a notepad, believe it or not.
This now gives our enemies the moral right to use pre-emptive nuclear strikes.
If we go around saying "Oh God, North Korea is going to nuke us," even if North Korea had no intention of actually using nuclear weapons against us, it now basically has to as US nuclear weapons are probably inbound. The action would even be justified. If Saddam Hussein actually had nuclear weapons, he would have been justified in using them against US stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical wepons, and it isn't much of a stretch to extend that to our other weapons of mass destruction (like our largest-army-in-the-world)
The problem with the current administration, is that it doesn't realize that by choosing a policy it is giving all of the rest of the countries in the world the right to use those policies as well. China now has the right to confine enemy combatants indefinitely without trial. Pakistan can nuke India whenever tensions run high.
It's a brave new world, soon to be ruled by cockroaches.
Meltdown requires heat, and water forms a pretty effective barrier against nuclear radiation. I'd guess that at the first sign of trouble, you sink the whole thing. It's only 200k, after all.
Inflamatory rhetoric aside, this seems like an OK bill. Basically, it is saying that certain types of media can't be sold to kids without parental permission. This is consistent with movies and other forms of entertainment.
The whole "2-inch sticker" seems a bit ridiculous, especially because it implies a new ratings system, a new ratings board, etc. But that's a pragmatic problem, not an ethical one. Both sides come out smelling like zealots here, with one side saying that it will destroy first amendment rights, and the other saying that videogames are as bad for you physically as smoking.
I also don't necessarily agree with the findings of the bills, that "Even minors who do not commit acts of violence suffer psychological harm from prolonged exposure to violent video games." Taken literally, this is true of basically anything. It does go into some lovingly crafted detail on what constitutes violence. I'll be amused to find out how the courts decide to interpret the requirement that a virtual victim must be conscious of the abuse at the time it is inflicted.
What it seems like the submitter wants, is an existing online video rental company with a bunch of licensed videos who he can partner with to rent to people who use his PVR / set-top box. In much the same way that there are companies that handle B2B licensing and delivery of music, are there established companies that handle licensing and delivery of movies to hardware vendors? Who handles the in-house entertainment systems for motels and hotels?
As a side note, there are legal videos online. Check the internet archives feature film division for quite a few classics, including The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Night of the Living Dead, The Charlie Chaplin Film Festival, and period genre shlock like sex madness and hemp for victory. That's not really what he's asking for, but it's worth mentioning for the other people who may be reading. Anywhere that has Santa Claus Conquers the Martians deserves a nod.
It's really kind of sad how poorly the telecom firms handle technology in the US. It's like they're afraid the public will discover VOIP and cannibalize their old business, so they've marginalized themselves to the point where nearly everyone gets their network connection from their cable company.
...Trying so hard to maintain their price structure that they make themselves irrelevant.
The phone companies have a unique chance to deploy an amazing new tech, which would probably go up faster and serve more people than replacing the old lines. And they could definitely piggyback one onto the other. They should be doing it anyway, but they won't do it during this unique opportunity.
Sadly, they're probably afraid they'd setup and maintain WiMax for less money than the land lines, but that they couldn't charge a "premium" for this "amazing new service."
This is all conjecture, of course. The phone companies may be doing exactly the right things for themselves and their future. But it looks like they're betting their future on the telegraph.
if you turn off the eye-candy , it'll run as well as xp does today.
Vista is going to a completely different rendering paradigm. This is not just like the easily reversed eye-candy switch from 2000 to XP, they're actually changing how the OS thinks about graphics, in much the same way that Apple transitioned from the older bitmapped model of OS9 to the object oriented Quartz for OSX. Microsoft could include the older rendering engine from XP to allay this problem, but my guess is they just won't support that backwards compatibility.
When I install XP onto older computers, I can be pretty confident that going back to 2000 levels of performance is easy. I'm not so convinced that such a transition with Vista will be easy or even possible.
Can they leave out the manual, put it in a small cardboard sleeve, and shave off 10 dollars from the price? It seems like packaging should be either original and very, very cool, or dirt cheap. Where are the games that come wrapped in a bloody cloth from the game, or that are trapped in a chinese puzzlebox? Or at least have some cool pack-in... even stickers these days would be a rare treat. I never understood why publishers decided to stop with the cool free advertising of sticker pack-ins, but keep making 50-page utterly, utterly useless manuals that nobody ever reads. I know how to put a disk into my Playstation, thanks.
If you have Vonage with a routerphonethingie, you take your local calling area wherever you are on the network. If you take your New York Vonage router with you to China, you can make local calls to New York. Calls to China, not surprisingly, are long distance.
Just one more way that VOIP is changing the face of telecommunications.
Why? Why did we play God?
(5) Get yourself another job before all of the problems can be found. When they're found, come back as an even higher-paid consultant to fix them.
On the one hand, I agree that such a system is how an ideal world would operate. On the other hand, I'm guessing a typical conversation would go:
Server: "Can you handle PNG's?"
Client: "Yes"
Server: "Are you sure?"
Client: "Yes"
Server: "The entire spec?"
Client: "Yes"
Server: "...Are you I.E. 5?"
Client: "Yes"
Server: "You're a dirty liar."
Oh, sure I.E. thinks it handles CSS properly. It will probably even tell you it handles tables properly. It just doesn't.
I'll be happy the day we can ditch the user agent string. But then again, I'll be happy the day we can use alpha transparency in a PNG on the web.
Seems to work fine in opera 7 so long as you Identify as MSIE 6.0. No problem with the capcha or anything.
Of course, I didn't finish the registration process fully, so I can't say for sure. But it looks like the broweser banning is just a choice on their part rather than a technical limitation.
It also wasn't a Nintendo game as the article implied, but was by Atari.