You're still talking about a 68000, a chip introduced in 1979 and whose lineup maxes out at 16 mhz with no likelyhood of ever going higher. A low-powered arm would be a far more modern and powerful choice. In addition, a GB of ram these days costs 100 dollars. 256 MB of Compact Flash costs 20 bucks.
The HP calculators are generally more powerful, though they have stagnated too, but they're bloody impossible to use. HP's odd notation is not something to be taken lightly.
TI has long included 3D as a function in its calculators, so obviously there is some demand there. When working with 3 Dimensional graphing in college, I had to pull out my laptop and use Apple's built-in graphing calculator because my 200 dollar TI-92+ would choke on it. TI also includes the useful ability to graph multiple functions on top of eachother, but provides no clear way to tell them apart. Again, color would be useful here.
My old Clie which I use constantly can go for months between charges, has 16 MB of ram, a 16 MHz 68000, a greyscale display, and I bought it for 50 dollars. And it's positively antiquated compared to the Full-color clie I bought my girlfriend with a 400 MHz Arm and 32 MB ram with a Compact Flash card slot for LESS than the cost of the v200.
My point is not that the calculators are useless, my point is that they are taking a years-old design that rightfully should cost about 20 bucks and making a fortune on markup. They're doing the bare minimum required to stay in the game, when they could be doing far, far better for their customers.
The calculator racket is due for a shakeup, and soon. Nobody can rest on their haunches to the degree that TI has and expect to stay on top... If for no other reason than technology has passed them by.
They used to be the best, back in the early days of the 'net. I haven't followed that scene seriously in a while, so I really can't say anymore. Still, they've got some good stuff there, including (yes) a section on overclocking.
Yoda turns out to be a traitor, then regrets his actions, leading to a life of atonement, exile, and speech impediments. Obi-Wan is indicted for training a Sith lord against the will of the council and the mysterious circumstances around the death of his master. In a dark twist, Amidala is forced to keep her children by a desperate light side, whose lightsaber-cesarian results in her death. Luke, Leia, and Wedge are born. Luke is promply dropped on his face. Jar Jar binks falls for an ewok, and gives birth to a boy named "Chewie." A working jetpack and cutting torch in an acid-proof pouch is accidently dropped into the stomach of the Sarlacc Pit Monster. All of the empire's superweapons-related construction activities are subcontracted out to Jabba's Worker's Union of Punishable Evil.
In addition to all of this, there will be a series of loosely connected fight scenes drawn together by some severely thin plot strands. A new sport involving extreme speeds and force powers will be discovered just in time for the videogame version to be released. Either Jar Jar or Lucas will survive, but not both. Memories will be stomped on. Illusions of youth, shattered.
What happened to graphing calculator development? While I was in High School there was this burst of activity with the TI line, with frequent new models and upgrades. And then they stalled. And stymed. I got a TI-92 Plus my senior year in High School, and that has stayed TI's top-of-the-line ever since. It's like they've done zero development for the past ten years. You can get full color-screen Game Boy Advances with hardware far in advance of what you would find in a TI for about 100 dollars less, yet you have to use hardware trickery to fake greyscale on these dinosaurs. Their Ancient. Years after I've graduated college, they're still the best you can get. Now they're called the Voyage 200, but they're still the same 68000 - based calc with very similar limitations.
Where is somebody to steal TI's crown? Somebody has to recognize the power of full-color 3D graphics in mathematics. Doesn't anyone want the market TI has abandoned?
I bet we could all just buy advanced tickets for the first few showings, using this hyper-advanced "IntorNet" technology from the comfort of our homes, and squeeze him out. Or maybe we could just pay to have one of those animated LCD billboards put up next to him, and have it loop that irritating Fandango commercial.
Interesting, an "Hourly or Monthly" payment model. I bet that's a great way to let people try out your game without committing too much to the experience. You don't even have to download: the cafe already has it.
Engineer Dastardly Slaphapple took a break from his day job as a hardware and firmware designer at Bumbrubbley Audio Studebakery (maker of the iPod competitor Slompet player, among other things) to give us some more info on the OGG-on-iPod plausibility, including why the iPod mini (and future iPods) might have a better shot at getting OGG support than the older, whiter iPods. There's even information about why Apple may have chosen to implement their 'Lossless AAC' instead of the more widely adopted FLAC lossless format.
Dastardly's analysis after the jump:
Firstly, CPUs:
The current iPod gen3 has a PP5002D CPU, the same as the gen1 and gen2. The gen1/2 stored their code from flash, not SDRAM, meaning they had a more limited codesize, and their SDRAM took more power to operate.
The iPod mini has a PP5020 CPU
The Rio Karma (developed in Cambridge UK) uses a PP5003 CPU. It plays OGG (and FLAC and MP3 and WMA).
The old 5002:
The 5002 has a "broken" cache (1 wait state per access for program or data, meaning you effectively have half the effective clock rate when running code from external memory). This means that running code that doesn't fit in the internal 96kbyte SRAM of the player is very inefficient, both in terms of CPU cycles and power. MP3 and AAC just about squeeze into the internal memory (one at a time, obviously!), but anything that didn't would result in a big power hit - my guess is 30-40%+. This would be a bad user experience, considering the already short gen3 battery life.
The newer 5003:
The 5003 in the Karma has this particular silicon deficiency fixed. The Karma plays OGG, though it's still a resource hog - you get about 25% less battery life - about 11-12 hours compared to 15+ for MP3 due to the extra cycles and memory requirements when compared to the more svelte codecs. We didn't do a lot of optimisation, so it's running the Vorbis-supplied tremor decoder with only a few tweaks.
The even newer 5020:
The 5020 is based on the 5003, and so has the cache bug fixed. It's capable of playing OGG with 25% or less hit on power (depending how much optimisation is done). I would suspect the 5020 will find its way into the next iPod, as it's cheaper and integrates both the firewire MAC and the USB2 mac/phy blocks which are separate chips on the gen3.
So in summary:
gen3 - In theory possible, but unlikely. mini - Very possible. gen4 (or my guess at what a gen4 would have in it) - Very possible.
Dastardly Slaphapple is not speaking for his employer Bumbrubbley Audio Studebakery or Slompet Heavy Industries or anybody else. He's just sharing.
To be fair, MIT is really hardcore. You want to be at MIT. Living in Cambridge we have a lot of friends at MIT. At least we think we do, they're studying and researching pretty much constantly. They're also doing some amazing things, like 3D displays which look for eyes in the room and beam each eye a different image. Ok, they're doing mundane things too, like defining the boundaries for realtime software and hardware applications, but overall MIT really deserves it's reputation as a top-notch technical school. While I've heard that Harvard is good as well, it's no more difficult than other schools once you're in, MIT is an entirely different beast, and if you have the opportunity to fight for your child to be in it, I say fight.
Why is it that EQ is hovering around the 500k mark, and a MMPORPG called Lineage is flying around the 3 million mark? Is Lineage big in Korea or something?
video games are nonessential and are one of the first things to disappear from a household budget when money is tight.
Ironically, the opposite is true. Generally in times of bad economic news, people become more escapist in their discretionary entertainment spending. And what is more escapist than video games? The golden years for 16 bit systems correlated pretty well to the recession of 92, and PS2 sales (which had been good before) really got traction when the economy tanked. When things are going better, people tend to go outside or take vacations or eat out with their discretionary income.
Atari, Acclaim both imploded for lack of quality reasons... Because they had become synonymous with terrible games. They were an anti-brand, essentially. However, EA owns a lot of different brands, and publishes for even more. This past year they've put out a good version of Madden, a great version of Tiger Woods, Burnout 3, The Sims 2... They've published Black and White, Medal of Honor, Ultima Online, Command and Conquer, Majestic... The list goes on and on. Unlike Acclaim, some of the games with EA's name on it are really good. And the additional labels add insulation. When you think of Sim City, do you think of EA or of Maxis?
EA is part of the gaming ecosystem, like it or not. They make and distribute more games than any other publisher out there, by a pretty solid margin. We should work to change EA for the better, rather than hope they will implode. Maybe if we could convince them to release a system of their own they would realize the importance of tending a garden rather than going for the slash and burn.
In simpler terms, patent 1 is a vibrating joystick, patent 2 is a force-feedback joystick (over 2 busses, yadda yadda), patent 3 I think it a vibrating joystick but it could be describing a really excited bug.
I've always felt like that the $10 dollars a month should grant you access to the whole kit and kaboodle, for the reasons you have just stated. You shouldn't have to change subscription plans and payment schedules if you're just jumping from EQ to EQ2, and
I'm personally waiting for the MMPORPG umbrella payment corporation, whereby you give someone 15 dollars a month and get access to most of the MMPORPG's out there, who recieve money based upon usage. That way I don't lose my level 90 elf if I decide to try out Anarchy Online, and I feel it is worth it to keep paying because I'm getting new experiences.
Is he the same marketing guy who wrote "Super Toaster!" on the side? I know that super is supposed to mean "Better than," and therefore a Pink Hello Kitty Ferrari could be considered Super Toaster, but come on. I'm sure they know they're selling a 10,000 dollar toaster. Which in Tokyo just doesn't sound outrageous.
What exactly defines a unix-like operating system? I hear this term a lot, yet I have yet to see a real definition. Is it the command-line? Multi-user aspect? File permissions? Removable GUI?
This isn't intended as a troll. I'm just curious if what one person would call "Unix-like" another would call "modern."
Mandrake has been a great distro for a long time, being many people's introduction to Linux. So now that they're in their time of need, we should all pitch in and donate to their...
What was that? You mean you guys are doing ok? Are you sure? 5 Million you say. You didn't accidentally add a zero, did you?
Ok. I guess Mandrake is doing fine. They don't need us anymore like in the old days. *sniff*
Sorry, that link was for another site. This was the link I intended to include.
And yes, that's great news! From what I can discern from the pictures, it looks like they are using a hydrogen fuel cell. I don't know why they would call it hydro-electric, though, as that has a totally different widely accepted meaning.
Either way, more support for electric based motor vehicles and more development for hydrogen fuel cells. Good news all around.
I love opera: Opera pioneered a lot in this industry. Mouse Gestures. Freestanding searches as folders in e-mail. MDI browsing. Zooming. CSS switching. Using the address bar as a rudimentary command line. Browser identification string monkeying. The Links Pannel. Undoing closing windows. Remembering open windows between sessions or crashes. Storing text editing fields in history. Saving sessions. Automatic reloads. Pop-up blocking. Cookie management. Mouseless arrow-key navigation. Open-in-the-background.
But they didn't do tabbed browsing first. Sorry. If I'm not mistaken that honor goes to iCab. Mozilla (this predated firefox) followed suit and had it for about six months months before Opera de-emphasized the window menu and added a tab bar.
The difference of opinion here seems to come in the degree that people think the mechanism might work. I really doubt such a thing would "just break," like many people here are fearing. A low powered dedicated chip combined with a low powered EPROM and some skin voltage detectors shouldn't take more power than your watch, and would only be active when held. I also doubt that the system will be tuned to ever err on the side of not letting the owner shoot, as all of the biometrics I've seen get oddly more lenient as they age, not less.
Furthermore, education and firearms are a difficult thing. Firearms will always symbolize instantaneous power ("When I hold this gun, I feel an incredible sense of power; just like God feels when he's holding a gun.") and power of course always draws certain people to it. I believe you referred to them as "idiots." That doesn't mean that all gun owners are like that, but rather that there will always be unreachable people who want guns. Given the options between Americans suddenly waking up with the social responsibility and sense to keep guns locked up in a secure safe and a tech fix, I'd put more hope in the tech fix. To most people they're still just props in an Schwarzenegger movie, just big accessories that get you respect.
Then the question becomes one of simple practice... Is it better for a gun to fire by it's owner, or by anybody? This is not an idle question, as the guns of a next-door neighbor and a neighbor three houses down were stolen. One was locked in a small gun safe, which was taken whole and probably had the pins of the lock drilled out. How do I feel about this? I'd much rather those stolen guns roving around my neighborhood not fire for anyone but the owner.
Assuming the implementation can be made well, I don't see any drawbacks in principle.
If you're worried about burning hydrogen and the resultant water vapor, you can much more cleanly use Hydrogen Fuel Cells for energy needs. Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars would be a lot like the electric cars of today, with no transmission, relatively silent operation, and more efficient energy transfer than burning. Did I mention electric cars can accelerate like a bat out of hell?
Anyway, switching to hydrogen electric will produce it's own pollution problems, just far, far smaller than we have today. Remember, gas burning cars were considered the zero pollution option when horses were laying down thick layers of manure across New York City. But like the cars now which pollute 1/10 th as much as the horses they replace, so too will Hydrogen be much cleaner than cars. And eventually we'll abuse the tech so much and grow so large that it too will become a problem. But I'd rather have the problem of a little too much water vapor in the air than a hell of a lot of other pollutants.
To be fair, Vicarious Visions has done an incredible job of porting Pro-Skater to the GBA, with excellent 2.5 D graphics. I'd argue that the GBA version is almost as good as the console versions, with the only drawback being the amount of field that you can see at any one time.
Except that you're more likely to have your gun pointed at you than you are to point it at someone else. I'd much rather take a 10% forward firing failure rate to reduce the chances of backfire by 100%.
I don't know why this is such a hard statistic for people to understand. It's very clear. You're at home asleep in bed. Your gun is sensibly in a drawer somewhere. Did I mention that you're asleep? If someone knows you and wants to kill you (ex-lover, family member, etc), it's trivial to pick your front door lock, calmly get your gun, and kill you. Or impulsively run up the stairs while you're having dinner, get your gun, and shoot you. Or take your gun while you're out and kill a neighbor. If, on the other hand, it is a burgler, you're far more likely to survive the incident unscathed if you just feign sleep until the person goes away. If you go for your gun, you are far more likely to get shot, beaten in transit, or otherwise permanently injured.
If you have kids, a smart gun is the only way to have a gun in the house anyway. Don't tell me that you're going to unlock your gun cabinet, unlock your ammunition cabinet, and load your firearm while someone is charging at you with a crowbar.
If you really want to protect yourself and your property, install an alarm system and perimeter cameras. Let whoever it is take whatever it is they want, then nail them with 5 - 10 years in jail because they didn't realize you had a hundred disposable electronic cameras monitoring your perimeter.
Protect your family. Don't be stupid and macho. Let your television go. Your kids need someone to take care of them.
Has everybody on Slashdot lost all perspective on how much of the software out there gets made? Some guy in a basement somewhere, usually Norway or Denmark, starts coding up something. Other people respond to the idea, and encourage them. They polish it and release it as shareware, which people decry as buggy junk. They then get more people, polish it up as much as they can, and the public starts to respond. They get more funding, hire more people, and repeat until you have a nice little independent company owned by a coder with an idea and lots of work ethic.
The people work on the software full-time because they don't have to have a primary job. Working on the software is their job. And isn't that what most people want to do?
I see a ton posts here about "F*ck them, they should have made it Open Source and looked for other ways to make money." What would be the point of that? That's saying they should have given up on the browser and done something else. They're doing something nobody thought possible: Surviving selling an independent browser in a hotly contested market. They're an independent company taking on a behemoth on their terms and shaking things up in the process. Give up on the fanboyisms and get a little perspective on what they've done.
I hate to break your illusions, but a lot of the development effort (and all of the full-time coders) for the Mozilla / Firefox rendering effort has been funded by large non-free software corporations. GASP Oh the horrors!
I'm not saying that free software is good or bad or dead. But I am saying that the software ecosystem is a lot more complicated than the pundits here are making it out to be. Stop taking such a simplistic view of things, it makes it harder for me to convince people that the OSS movement isn't a bunch of raving loonies. I had to live with an Access database for several months last time that happened.
Everyone is trying to pull this now. I just had a clause for binding arbitration in some obscure state come wrapped around a food processor. Of course, no mention of giving up any rights were made before money changed hands, so I fail to see how it could be considered a contract or a negotiation of equal parties. In addition, if I didn't want to accept the EULA I was supposed to ship the thing back to them at my expense. Now there is an additional monetary cost associated with the EULA. When is the supreme court going to step in and put a stop to these practices?
BTW, you have no right to return the software. There is nothing inherent in the nature of software that would make the company you bought it from need to accept returns on it, and quite a bit in the nature and history of software that would make it a bad business idea. EULA's have been thrown out in California for this and other reasons. Other states have had varying responses.
Slashdot Mirror
You're still talking about a 68000, a chip introduced in 1979 and whose lineup maxes out at 16 mhz with no likelyhood of ever going higher. A low-powered arm would be a far more modern and powerful choice. In addition, a GB of ram these days costs 100 dollars. 256 MB of Compact Flash costs 20 bucks.
The HP calculators are generally more powerful, though they have stagnated too, but they're bloody impossible to use. HP's odd notation is not something to be taken lightly.
TI has long included 3D as a function in its calculators, so obviously there is some demand there. When working with 3 Dimensional graphing in college, I had to pull out my laptop and use Apple's built-in graphing calculator because my 200 dollar TI-92+ would choke on it. TI also includes the useful ability to graph multiple functions on top of eachother, but provides no clear way to tell them apart. Again, color would be useful here.
My old Clie which I use constantly can go for months between charges, has 16 MB of ram, a 16 MHz 68000, a greyscale display, and I bought it for 50 dollars. And it's positively antiquated compared to the Full-color clie I bought my girlfriend with a 400 MHz Arm and 32 MB ram with a Compact Flash card slot for LESS than the cost of the v200.
My point is not that the calculators are useless, my point is that they are taking a years-old design that rightfully should cost about 20 bucks and making a fortune on markup. They're doing the bare minimum required to stay in the game, when they could be doing far, far better for their customers.
The calculator racket is due for a shakeup, and soon. Nobody can rest on their haunches to the degree that TI has and expect to stay on top... If for no other reason than technology has passed them by.
ticalc.org
They used to be the best, back in the early days of the 'net. I haven't followed that scene seriously in a while, so I really can't say anymore. Still, they've got some good stuff there, including (yes) a section on overclocking.
Yoda turns out to be a traitor, then regrets his actions, leading to a life of atonement, exile, and speech impediments. Obi-Wan is indicted for training a Sith lord against the will of the council and the mysterious circumstances around the death of his master. In a dark twist, Amidala is forced to keep her children by a desperate light side, whose lightsaber-cesarian results in her death. Luke, Leia, and Wedge are born. Luke is promply dropped on his face. Jar Jar binks falls for an ewok, and gives birth to a boy named "Chewie." A working jetpack and cutting torch in an acid-proof pouch is accidently dropped into the stomach of the Sarlacc Pit Monster. All of the empire's superweapons-related construction activities are subcontracted out to Jabba's Worker's Union of Punishable Evil.
In addition to all of this, there will be a series of loosely connected fight scenes drawn together by some severely thin plot strands. A new sport involving extreme speeds and force powers will be discovered just in time for the videogame version to be released. Either Jar Jar or Lucas will survive, but not both. Memories will be stomped on. Illusions of youth, shattered.
What happened to graphing calculator development? While I was in High School there was this burst of activity with the TI line, with frequent new models and upgrades. And then they stalled. And stymed. I got a TI-92 Plus my senior year in High School, and that has stayed TI's top-of-the-line ever since. It's like they've done zero development for the past ten years. You can get full color-screen Game Boy Advances with hardware far in advance of what you would find in a TI for about 100 dollars less, yet you have to use hardware trickery to fake greyscale on these dinosaurs. Their Ancient. Years after I've graduated college, they're still the best you can get. Now they're called the Voyage 200, but they're still the same 68000 - based calc with very similar limitations.
Where is somebody to steal TI's crown? Somebody has to recognize the power of full-color 3D graphics in mathematics. Doesn't anyone want the market TI has abandoned?
I bet we could all just buy advanced tickets for the first few showings, using this hyper-advanced "IntorNet" technology from the comfort of our homes, and squeeze him out. Or maybe we could just pay to have one of those animated LCD billboards put up next to him, and have it loop that irritating Fandango commercial.
Interesting, an "Hourly or Monthly" payment model. I bet that's a great way to let people try out your game without committing too much to the experience. You don't even have to download: the cafe already has it.
From Gizmodo, and a rebuttal. There is also a way to do it, albeit with a hack.
Engineer Dastardly Slaphapple took a break from his day job as a hardware and firmware designer at Bumbrubbley Audio Studebakery (maker of the iPod competitor Slompet player, among other things) to give us some more info on the OGG-on-iPod plausibility, including why the iPod mini (and future iPods) might have a better shot at getting OGG support than the older, whiter iPods. There's even information about why Apple may have chosen to implement their 'Lossless AAC' instead of the more widely adopted FLAC lossless format.
Dastardly's analysis after the jump:
Firstly, CPUs:
The current iPod gen3 has a PP5002D CPU, the same as the gen1 and gen2. The gen1/2 stored their code from flash, not SDRAM, meaning they had a more limited codesize, and their SDRAM took more power to operate.
The iPod mini has a PP5020 CPU
The Rio Karma (developed in Cambridge UK) uses a PP5003 CPU. It plays OGG (and FLAC and MP3 and WMA).
The old 5002:
The 5002 has a "broken" cache (1 wait state per access for program or data, meaning you effectively have half the effective clock rate when running code from external memory). This means that running code that doesn't fit in the internal 96kbyte SRAM of the player is very inefficient, both in terms of CPU cycles and power. MP3 and AAC just about squeeze into the internal memory (one at a time, obviously!), but anything that didn't would result in a big power hit - my guess is 30-40%+. This would be a bad user experience, considering the already short gen3 battery life.
The newer 5003:
The 5003 in the Karma has this particular silicon deficiency fixed. The Karma plays OGG, though it's still a resource hog - you get about 25% less battery life - about 11-12 hours compared to 15+ for MP3 due to the extra cycles and memory requirements when compared to the more svelte codecs. We didn't do a lot of optimisation, so it's running the Vorbis-supplied tremor decoder with only a few tweaks.
The even newer 5020:
The 5020 is based on the 5003, and so has the cache bug fixed. It's capable of playing OGG with 25% or less hit on power (depending how much optimisation is done). I would suspect the 5020 will find its way into the next iPod, as it's cheaper and integrates both the firewire MAC and the USB2 mac/phy blocks which are separate chips on the gen3.
So in summary:
gen3 - In theory possible, but unlikely. mini - Very possible. gen4 (or my guess at what a gen4 would have in it) - Very possible.
Dastardly Slaphapple is not speaking for his employer Bumbrubbley Audio Studebakery or Slompet Heavy Industries or anybody else. He's just sharing.
To be fair, MIT is really hardcore. You want to be at MIT. Living in Cambridge we have a lot of friends at MIT. At least we think we do, they're studying and researching pretty much constantly. They're also doing some amazing things, like 3D displays which look for eyes in the room and beam each eye a different image. Ok, they're doing mundane things too, like defining the boundaries for realtime software and hardware applications, but overall MIT really deserves it's reputation as a top-notch technical school. While I've heard that Harvard is good as well, it's no more difficult than other schools once you're in, MIT is an entirely different beast, and if you have the opportunity to fight for your child to be in it, I say fight.
How about Berklee? It's got the right number of E's.
Why is it that EQ is hovering around the 500k mark, and a MMPORPG called Lineage is flying around the 3 million mark? Is Lineage big in Korea or something?
video games are nonessential and are one of the first things to disappear from a household budget when money is tight.
Ironically, the opposite is true. Generally in times of bad economic news, people become more escapist in their discretionary entertainment spending. And what is more escapist than video games? The golden years for 16 bit systems correlated pretty well to the recession of 92, and PS2 sales (which had been good before) really got traction when the economy tanked. When things are going better, people tend to go outside or take vacations or eat out with their discretionary income.
Atari, Acclaim both imploded for lack of quality reasons... Because they had become synonymous with terrible games. They were an anti-brand, essentially. However, EA owns a lot of different brands, and publishes for even more. This past year they've put out a good version of Madden, a great version of Tiger Woods, Burnout 3, The Sims 2... They've published Black and White, Medal of Honor, Ultima Online, Command and Conquer, Majestic... The list goes on and on. Unlike Acclaim, some of the games with EA's name on it are really good. And the additional labels add insulation. When you think of Sim City, do you think of EA or of Maxis?
EA is part of the gaming ecosystem, like it or not. They make and distribute more games than any other publisher out there, by a pretty solid margin. We should work to change EA for the better, rather than hope they will implode. Maybe if we could convince them to release a system of their own they would realize the importance of tending a garden rather than going for the slash and burn.
Sadly enlightenment doesn't run on OSX.
In simpler terms, patent 1 is a vibrating joystick, patent 2 is a force-feedback joystick (over 2 busses, yadda yadda), patent 3 I think it a vibrating joystick but it could be describing a really excited bug.
In other words, yes, it is a bogus patent.
I've always felt like that the $10 dollars a month should grant you access to the whole kit and kaboodle, for the reasons you have just stated. You shouldn't have to change subscription plans and payment schedules if you're just jumping from EQ to EQ2, and
I'm personally waiting for the MMPORPG umbrella payment corporation, whereby you give someone 15 dollars a month and get access to most of the MMPORPG's out there, who recieve money based upon usage. That way I don't lose my level 90 elf if I decide to try out Anarchy Online, and I feel it is worth it to keep paying because I'm getting new experiences.
Is he the same marketing guy who wrote "Super Toaster!" on the side? I know that super is supposed to mean "Better than," and therefore a Pink Hello Kitty Ferrari could be considered Super Toaster, but come on. I'm sure they know they're selling a 10,000 dollar toaster. Which in Tokyo just doesn't sound outrageous.
What exactly defines a unix-like operating system? I hear this term a lot, yet I have yet to see a real definition. Is it the command-line? Multi-user aspect? File permissions? Removable GUI?
This isn't intended as a troll. I'm just curious if what one person would call "Unix-like" another would call "modern."
Mandrake has been a great distro for a long time, being many people's introduction to Linux. So now that they're in their time of need, we should all pitch in and donate to their...
What was that? You mean you guys are doing ok? Are you sure? 5 Million you say. You didn't accidentally add a zero, did you?
Ok. I guess Mandrake is doing fine. They don't need us anymore like in the old days. *sniff*
Sorry, that link was for another site. This was the link I intended to include.
And yes, that's great news! From what I can discern from the pictures, it looks like they are using a hydrogen fuel cell. I don't know why they would call it hydro-electric, though, as that has a totally different widely accepted meaning.
Either way, more support for electric based motor vehicles and more development for hydrogen fuel cells. Good news all around.
I love opera: Opera pioneered a lot in this industry. Mouse Gestures. Freestanding searches as folders in e-mail. MDI browsing. Zooming. CSS switching. Using the address bar as a rudimentary command line. Browser identification string monkeying. The Links Pannel. Undoing closing windows. Remembering open windows between sessions or crashes. Storing text editing fields in history. Saving sessions. Automatic reloads. Pop-up blocking. Cookie management. Mouseless arrow-key navigation. Open-in-the-background.
But they didn't do tabbed browsing first. Sorry. If I'm not mistaken that honor goes to iCab. Mozilla (this predated firefox) followed suit and had it for about six months months before Opera de-emphasized the window menu and added a tab bar.
The difference of opinion here seems to come in the degree that people think the mechanism might work. I really doubt such a thing would "just break," like many people here are fearing. A low powered dedicated chip combined with a low powered EPROM and some skin voltage detectors shouldn't take more power than your watch, and would only be active when held. I also doubt that the system will be tuned to ever err on the side of not letting the owner shoot, as all of the biometrics I've seen get oddly more lenient as they age, not less.
Furthermore, education and firearms are a difficult thing. Firearms will always symbolize instantaneous power ("When I hold this gun, I feel an incredible sense of power; just like God feels when he's holding a gun.") and power of course always draws certain people to it. I believe you referred to them as "idiots." That doesn't mean that all gun owners are like that, but rather that there will always be unreachable people who want guns. Given the options between Americans suddenly waking up with the social responsibility and sense to keep guns locked up in a secure safe and a tech fix, I'd put more hope in the tech fix. To most people they're still just props in an Schwarzenegger movie, just big accessories that get you respect.
Then the question becomes one of simple practice... Is it better for a gun to fire by it's owner, or by anybody? This is not an idle question, as the guns of a next-door neighbor and a neighbor three houses down were stolen. One was locked in a small gun safe, which was taken whole and probably had the pins of the lock drilled out. How do I feel about this? I'd much rather those stolen guns roving around my neighborhood not fire for anyone but the owner.
Assuming the implementation can be made well, I don't see any drawbacks in principle.
If you're worried about burning hydrogen and the resultant water vapor, you can much more cleanly use Hydrogen Fuel Cells for energy needs. Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars would be a lot like the electric cars of today, with no transmission, relatively silent operation, and more efficient energy transfer than burning. Did I mention electric cars can accelerate like a bat out of hell?
Anyway, switching to hydrogen electric will produce it's own pollution problems, just far, far smaller than we have today. Remember, gas burning cars were considered the zero pollution option when horses were laying down thick layers of manure across New York City. But like the cars now which pollute 1/10 th as much as the horses they replace, so too will Hydrogen be much cleaner than cars. And eventually we'll abuse the tech so much and grow so large that it too will become a problem. But I'd rather have the problem of a little too much water vapor in the air than a hell of a lot of other pollutants.
To be fair, Vicarious Visions has done an incredible job of porting Pro-Skater to the GBA, with excellent 2.5 D graphics. I'd argue that the GBA version is almost as good as the console versions, with the only drawback being the amount of field that you can see at any one time.
Except that you're more likely to have your gun pointed at you than you are to point it at someone else. I'd much rather take a 10% forward firing failure rate to reduce the chances of backfire by 100%.
I don't know why this is such a hard statistic for people to understand. It's very clear. You're at home asleep in bed. Your gun is sensibly in a drawer somewhere. Did I mention that you're asleep? If someone knows you and wants to kill you (ex-lover, family member, etc), it's trivial to pick your front door lock, calmly get your gun, and kill you. Or impulsively run up the stairs while you're having dinner, get your gun, and shoot you. Or take your gun while you're out and kill a neighbor. If, on the other hand, it is a burgler, you're far more likely to survive the incident unscathed if you just feign sleep until the person goes away. If you go for your gun, you are far more likely to get shot, beaten in transit, or otherwise permanently injured.
If you have kids, a smart gun is the only way to have a gun in the house anyway. Don't tell me that you're going to unlock your gun cabinet, unlock your ammunition cabinet, and load your firearm while someone is charging at you with a crowbar.
If you really want to protect yourself and your property, install an alarm system and perimeter cameras. Let whoever it is take whatever it is they want, then nail them with 5 - 10 years in jail because they didn't realize you had a hundred disposable electronic cameras monitoring your perimeter.
Protect your family. Don't be stupid and macho. Let your television go. Your kids need someone to take care of them.
Has everybody on Slashdot lost all perspective on how much of the software out there gets made? Some guy in a basement somewhere, usually Norway or Denmark, starts coding up something. Other people respond to the idea, and encourage them. They polish it and release it as shareware, which people decry as buggy junk. They then get more people, polish it up as much as they can, and the public starts to respond. They get more funding, hire more people, and repeat until you have a nice little independent company owned by a coder with an idea and lots of work ethic.
The people work on the software full-time because they don't have to have a primary job. Working on the software is their job. And isn't that what most people want to do?
I see a ton posts here about "F*ck them, they should have made it Open Source and looked for other ways to make money." What would be the point of that? That's saying they should have given up on the browser and done something else. They're doing something nobody thought possible: Surviving selling an independent browser in a hotly contested market. They're an independent company taking on a behemoth on their terms and shaking things up in the process. Give up on the fanboyisms and get a little perspective on what they've done.
I hate to break your illusions, but a lot of the development effort (and all of the full-time coders) for the Mozilla / Firefox rendering effort has been funded by large non-free software corporations. GASP Oh the horrors!
I'm not saying that free software is good or bad or dead. But I am saying that the software ecosystem is a lot more complicated than the pundits here are making it out to be. Stop taking such a simplistic view of things, it makes it harder for me to convince people that the OSS movement isn't a bunch of raving loonies. I had to live with an Access database for several months last time that happened.
Everyone is trying to pull this now. I just had a clause for binding arbitration in some obscure state come wrapped around a food processor. Of course, no mention of giving up any rights were made before money changed hands, so I fail to see how it could be considered a contract or a negotiation of equal parties. In addition, if I didn't want to accept the EULA I was supposed to ship the thing back to them at my expense. Now there is an additional monetary cost associated with the EULA. When is the supreme court going to step in and put a stop to these practices?
BTW, you have no right to return the software. There is nothing inherent in the nature of software that would make the company you bought it from need to accept returns on it, and quite a bit in the nature and history of software that would make it a bad business idea. EULA's have been thrown out in California for this and other reasons. Other states have had varying responses.