I'm sorry, I thought I made it clear that this was my point. The systems are very different. The systems in a car have been designed for specific purposes with independence and high fault tolerances. Windows CE was designed for high hardware compability and ease-of-use... neither of which apply in cars.
Of course, Microsoft is saying currently that WinCE is aimed at navigation and media playback, not embedded control. That wasn't always their shtick, however, as when they started this initiative they cited "better safety and security," along with reduced hardware duplication as a reason to use WinCE for all of your machine's needs. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but they truly wanted to be a central controller for the machine.
My mother dated a vehicle development engineer who created system diagnostic software for 5 years.
When it becomes obvious that tires are shredding and rolling over, people do. When it becomes obvious that cars are exploding upon a slight rear collision, people do. When cars that are supposed to protect their drivers in a collision instead drive the steering column through their chest, people do.
It's pretty obvious that, for example, when the Windows installer crashes, or a fresh copy of IIS has to be rebooted every 2 weeks despite serving only static HTML, that Windows is somehow at fault. Not only is Windows instability legendary, it is also well documented. Hardware cannot be the issue, because that hardware could be running another OS and have years of uptime. Drivers should not be the issue for the same reason. If the drivers are both put out by the same company, they should have the same level of overall quality.
GM has made an OS... Its cars have been running on microcontrollers for years. They run on the smallest of processors, they can be upgraded for about $100 by replacing a ROM, and they never crash. If you had meant what a horrible mess it would be for GM to attempt to create a desktop operating system, then yes, I agree with you. However, that should extend to any company attempting to do something significant in a field that they don't have experience in.
If Microsoft decided to do this properly by hiring the best kernel developers and experienced automotive programmers, and creating a real-time OS from scratch, people might be persuaded that this was a good idea. But they're not. They're taking an OS made for convincing a printer to communicate with a text processor, and trying to force it into making an antilock braking system communicate with a real-time traction control system.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use an OS specifically designed for reliability if I'm going to spend two hours a day inside something that kills 50,000 people per year.
Dr. Noidburg writes "The scourge of Internet Music and Movie sharing has the Canadian Society of Composers Authors aNd music publishers (SOCAN) pulling out their lawyers. The SCO group, which owns the copyright on the software powering 100% of today's servers, relays, and routers, will be served by SOCAN on Tuesday for their pivotal role in internet piracy. "It's about protecting our artists from those who would make a buck off of their work. 10% of SCO's $699 per-seat license should go to compensating the artists that they have based their business upon. And with SCO's estimated figures of 80% compliance, they owe us about 70 billion in back licensing fees." SOCAN declined to provide any evidence, lest their opponent fabricate enough counter-evidence to convince a judge.
First of all, comparing FMV gaming to making stylish games is like comparing a nuclear blast to a firecracker. FMV gaming, as a mechanic, had no redeeming qualities. It removed control from the player, limiting gameplay to a choose-your-own adventure game with extremely few options. Adding pop cultural references to a game, however, simply risks diluting the original vision. Many games have been both hip and great, but no games have been both FMV and great (Dragon's Lair fans... Watch a video).
To support this assertion, the reviewer points to Jax and Dexter 2 and THPS. Jax and Dexter 2 is generally viewed as one of the year's best games... Adding liberal cultural references hasn't hurt the gameplay one bit. And Tony Hawk wasn't cool or hip until it was so embraced that it defined culture. Even so, gameplay has not been hindered one bit, and the series continues a surprising streak of great games.
Second, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil's original incarnation was hardly a socially ackward girl. Pictures of the original Jade are available here. As you can see, she went from a trendy, hip early 20 something wearing a t-shirt and jeans (look at that off-kilter waist bag), to a trendy, late 20 something dressed like an undercover reporter. She had large breasts, a visible buttline, a waistline like a carrot, and a midriff. The only non-stereotypical aspects of her character are the short hair and short body. Her second incarnation has the same pants, a lower-cut shirt, a green jacket, and a green headband. The last time I went to a club, headbands were not trendy. Though a little desexualization wouldn't hurt, the character is hardly a cash-in.
Licensed games are largely ignored by gamers in-the-know, and are hardly a new scourge. ET on the 2600? Simpsons on the NES? Lethal Weapon for the SNES? Anything THQ touched before the Playstation? If anything, the proportion of licensed drivel on consoles has gone DOWN, if for no other reason than the expense of developing 3d games has reduced the cash-in opportunity.
Breakout characters, and characterizations, are a rarity based more around great games than great design. The Master Chief as the pinnical of character design? One or two new games destined for legend come out every year... And as such we get one or two new characters in our vocabulary. That's not a weakness of the industry so much as a reality of shared experiences. Otherwise we would have Bubsy 3D 11 shoved down our throats. Characters are born, they live, and they die. It is one of the few motivations to create original content.
And as a final note, XIII wouldn't be anywhere near as engrossing an experience if designers had kept the comic book people away. The Final Fantasy series wouldn't be great if they had kept the movie people away. Embrace the artistic qualities and abilities of other forms of communication. Don't use them in inappropriate places, just as they wouldn't put footage from a House of the Dead game into a movie. But don't push them away. We are all entertainment brothers and sisters.
If you are conducting a survey to find out what is the "best of the best" in server software, why survey Family Dollar Store? Or Land 'O Lakes? You should be choosing technically savvy, solution neutral companies are likely to choose the best. These are the actual companies that have a big web presence and you would not expect them to choose a platform which would affect their bottom line badly... As opposed to Sears Roebuck, whose online presence can be compared to Amazon's retail presence. Would we ask Amazon how to organize endcaps? Let's pick a few technically adept companies at random here...
Amazon - Apache AT&T - Netscape Bell South - Apache Cisco - Unix Dell - IIS5 Earthlink - Netscape E-Bay - IIS4 HP - Apache Intel - IIS6 Lucent - Netscape Motorola - Apache National Semiconductor - Netscape Nextel - Netscape Qualcomm - Netscape PC Connection - IIS5
I can't survey any more companies, because Port80's IIS6 server is slashdotted. However, if is apparent from this data that nearly 1/3rd of all websites that count are hosted on Netscape platforms. Apache and IIS share 1/4th each, and Cisco's odd unix variant wrapps up the rest.
Personally I'm amazed that Netscape is holding on to a lead... I would have expected them to be out of the running long ago. I'll have to check them out.
Sorry. I know SCO doesn't own any valid patents. You know SCO doesn't own any valid patents. SCO, however, believes that it is "the majority owner of Unix intellectual property" and "has full rights to license this technology, and enforce the associated patents and copyrights." It licensed one of those patents to Microsoft earlier this year, though it refused to mention which one.
If Linux incorporated technologies that were covered by those patents, anyone using those technologies would, in fact, be liable... Like how several years back people who had purchased software that processed GIFS were found to be in an actionable position even though they had nothing to do with designing the software. Copyrights are active, and require choice by the end-user to violate. Patents are passive, and can be violated by, for example, happening to come up with a solution that is similar to an existing patent without checking, or simply using a system purchased from another company whose product they hadn't done sufficient background checks on.
If Google were using any of the technologies covered in SCO's ghostly patents, they would be. Of course, SCO's lawsuit up until this point only covers "trade secrets," which is a sufficiently murky area of law as to provide at least a minor chance of victory. A trade secret violation would not stop the distribution of Linux, nor indebt anyone to SCO. SCO has been claiming patent violations, and as such can cause legal problems for end-users.
It can be useful when everyone is using it... Kind of like phones. Around the office, AIM was a good way to get a quick message across the building without having to spend the 5 minutes walking. "Could you check phone line 15 in the closet?" "It was loose, I switched the wires. Is it working?" "Yeah, working great. Thanks."
As a communications medium, it combines the immediacy of cellular phones with the subtlety of e-mail. Likewise, you can copy/paste, a big bonus in many technical fields. Unfortunately, if not taken seriously this can lead to abuses and general slacking, but so could phones and e-mail if that sort of thing weren't frowned upon.
Still, the holy grail is achieving a single unified standard that will allow all IM systems to interact. This is not a technical hurdle, but a financial one. Much like how the lack of inter-network text messaging killed SMS in the US, the messaging companies are all fighting hard to earn a piece of the surprisingly non-lucrative IM market. Apparently they are under the delusion that infinity times free equals a large sum of money for sufficiently large values of infinity.
If everyone ran a Jabber client, it would quickly become as indispensable as e-mail.
Just adding to the Trillian fodder. There is a user-developed plug-in available to Trillian Pro users that will automatically forward messages to an available e-mail or SMS address when idle. Useful.
Of course, I'm a Pro member for the Jabber support, but little bonuses like this make it worthwhile.
America, and by extension the ESRB, has an odd relationship with violence and sex. Violence is, by and large, seen as a viable solution to the problems of the world (usually violence). Sex, on the other hand, is a morally corrupt abhorration. While videogames, movies, and television have no problems showing camera pans through the heads of suicide victims, women put onto meathooks, gun-toting henchmen having their heads severed in half, sex seems to put the industry in a tussle.
NYPD Blue, a show whose subject is violent homicide, caused quite an uproar when they showed a female breast for a fraction of a second. The violence equivalence of flashing a breast would be to show a quick clip of a knife under someone's jacket. How dare they! In a PG-13 movie, you are allowed to show a gun shooting and have someone falling over in death throes, though you cannot show the gun pointing at someone in the same frame. That's reserved for R. A sex equivalent would be to show someone pointing their "gun" at someone else, and the other person bouncing up and down in pleasure. Not something you could get away with in... For example... Pirates of the Carribbean.
Very few movies have ever received an X or MA for violence, and the few that did were re-cut. Paul Verhoeven is probably the only Hollywood director to achieve such a plateau, but even then the discrepancy shows through. Total Recall had a total of 3 shots altered to achieve an R rating, with no screentime lost. Verhoeven's Basic Instinct had to be re-submitted 7 times before it was accepted, and had 16 minutes altered. It made it to the European market intact. However, his movie RoboCop lost between 4 and 24 minutes depending upon the European market, yet hit the Americans largely unadulterated.
After watching the violence prevalent in, for example, Freddy vs. Jason, it becomes painfully obvious that no amount of videogame violence will draw an AO rating in this country. Not only is violence the core crutch for designers, but no amount of violence will truly exceed the threshold of the movie screen. And while we claim to worry about children's exposure to violence, parents get truly livid when the possibility of sex arises. Ever wonder why we see hostages take bullets to the head in the gritty, realistic world of Max Payne 2, but all sexual activity must be very generally implied?
Simple bloody violence is perfectly OK in this country. Despite most R-rated movies being violence pornography, there is little movement to stop them. When people talk of the sexualization of the youth, they usually point to Brittany Spears or some such. Sex is apparently such a horrific thing that we must protect our youth from the symbols that represent it. Brittany spears doesn't have sex on television. Brittany spears doesn't simulate having sex on television. Many people on MTV either kill or die in their videos.
Theories about the ramifications this prioritization has on international affairs are welcome. However, WRT the subject at hand, Manhunt doesn't achieve the level of violence required to be considered perverse because we have given up all concept that pure violence can be perverse: That there is anything at all wrong with watching a man use a lawnmower against a room full of the rotting undead, or melting a man's skin off his body then running him over with a car is a foreign concept to us Americans.
Show all of the pain you like. Just don't have any characters pleasure eachother.
Not actually true. Patent violation in this (weird) country applies even if there was a good-faith effort to avoid such tussles. Most courts would look kindly upon a group that, upon discovery of the problem, removed all areas of offence. However, as a proven by microsoft's previous tussles in this area, ongoing usage once a patent violation is discovered requires payment. If SCO had any evidence, and Google was found to be in violation, a court may waive an initial damages clause but would require that they either pay up for a license or switch to a different OS.
If mere Copyright violations are found, suits against end users would have no basis, but the result would be the same. Distribution of Linux would become illegal, therefore Google would still need to pay a gaggle of *bsd programmers for a port. I may be off in this regard, but I believe Google would retain the right to their current server farm... but without security patches, the system would be quickly hacked. Maybe.
Either way, Linux end users need to understand that they cannot be sued *without proof.* So far, SCO has dodged every possible opportunity to provide proof, and likely will continue to do so. They have already been banned from this extortion racket in other countries, where they declined to show any evidence of their claims. Why would they behave any differently with any other company? A year into the IBM case and they are still stalling on procedure.
It brings up a very interesting question. Which will die first... The case, or the company?
Actually, there really isn't a great reason to use Sky OS over Linux or BSD... and that's not the point. Sky OS is one of many smaller projects whose primary purpose is to satisfy the hobby needs of the creator... Kind of like where Linux was when Linus decided his schoolwork was too boring.
There are also Open Source, commercial, and potentially useful hobbyist systems out there. However, if you are looking for the most comprehensive, useful desktop suite, look elsewhere. All of these Os's are unique and well-intentioned, but very few are actually practical.
Practicality is not the point. Curiosity is the point. What would a different implementation look like? What if all the graphics subsystems were contained in the kernel? How would a real-time OS feel to the user? These questions can't be answered by just releasing a new X theme, and there aren't very many people curious enough to find out.
These people are true geeks... Software for software's sake. Kudos to you all.
Trade with Cuba is wrong because Castro is one of THEM. Iraq needed to be cleansed because Hussein was one of THEM. Kim Jong-il and the Ayatollah Khamenei are also evil men, and therefore their countries are evil.
Vietnam and China, however, don't have such controversial leaders. Jiang Zemin has few blemishes on his record, and therefore China has few blemishes on it's record (despite having human rights violations codified into law). And who knows who Tran Du Luong is or what he has done? Obviously they can't be put onto the axis of evil, because they aren't lead by a James Bond supervillian.
I think few people in this country reacted when George Bush gave his "axis of evil" speech because it was so patently ridiculous to point at three countries with improving diplomatic relations and call them the devil. When Bush gave his "you're either with us or against us" line, people seemed to accept it as a liberally used figure of speech. Now that Bush is claiming that the people who wanted a UN resolution before declaring war in Iraq were supporting Osama Bin Laden, it has become clear that this is actually how the man thinks.
Bush believes himself to be good, therefore everything he does is good and above questioning. Clinton did bad things and therefore is bad, therefore everything he did should be overturned and turned over to the press. Ashcroft is a good man, acting in what he believes to be the public's best interest. Therefore whatever Ashcroft does is in the public's best interest. This logic is, of course, flawed. I'm sure Ashcroft believes he is acting in the public's best interests, but his viewpoint of the world is greatly skewed by the line of work he is in.
In a way it is an extension of the monarchy. Bush has actually said on occasion that he has been chosen by God to rule. Once again, this was taken to be the liberal sprinkling of praise for God that peppers oscar acceptance speeches and winning locker rooms. But in light of actions, it is becoming apparent that the man truly believes he has a divine mandate to rule... That god works through him and therefore he is above reproach. As his decisions are perfect, so too must be the decisions of those people whom he chooses, and such the divine mandate trickles to his staff and people.
This is not just a crackpot theory on how the president thinks. This is a theory based upon how the president himself claims that he thinks. Honestly, I would be surprised if he found any problem with either the accuracy of the theory or the morality behind the thought pattern.
So far this week our government has passed laws legalizing spam and giving huge kickbacks to insurance companies. They have a majority on a bill indemnifying oil companies for MTBE pollution. They declared intent to ban gay marriages in the US. Now there is a bill that would give all publishers the right to become monopolies? And this actually received sponsorship?
Isn't our government supposed to behave near elections?
ATM cards require confirmation in order to protect the contents of your bank account from someone who may have stolen or cloned your card. Credit Cards require a signature to ensure accountability and traceability. What do RFID tags do that makes them fundamentally secure?
Nothing, apparently. Not having to type in numbers or sign a receipt are touted as the advantages of the new system. Yet traditional cards could have easily forgone the secondary identification, simply by sacrificing the security we have come to expect.
By the proliferation of universal garage remotes out there, and RFID's lack of a challenge-response system, it's obvious that if you will be able to get within 3 feet of someone you can steal their identity without their knowledge. Without the secondary identification, the system is useless. With secondary identification, it's a credit card.
Furthermore, why implant? Everyone has to have their keys with them at all time... The speedpass route seems like the more intelligent and flexible way to go. Implanting could be convenient once all of the bugs are hammered out and it is accepted as a universal form of payment, but for a 1st generation technology likely to be upgraded quickly, why commit?
This reminds me a lot of the Dot Com days, when people attempted to sell anything that was possible, without even bothering to think if it should be done.
Right. Because we all know that it is the tax burden which keeps demand for labor in developing countries low.
A Thai Jasmine farmer earns about 200 US dollars per year, or about 8,000 Baht, which means they don't pay any taxes. An average family income is 161,016 Baht per year, or about 4,000 dollars. That number is skewed a bit high, as it is average rather than median, but we'll accept it. Of that 161k Baht, 60k is a standard deduction, there are personal deductions of 30k per parent and 15k per child, and 2k per child in school. Our theoretical 2 parent, two-child household has 154k in deductions, and falls into the lowest tax bracket. The average Thai citizen doesn't pay any taxes.
What about someone well off? 20k US dollars would be a very good living in Thailand, so let's say that both parents are struggling to give their children the kind of opportunity that can only come with education. At 800k Baht, 646k Baht after deductions, they fall into the 20% taxable range.
Those poor, struggling people, why does the government punish them so? Let's say it decides not to tax them at all. "Yay!" They think, and one of them quits their job. Assuming their incomes were split evenly between them, they suddenly have gone from taking home 670k per year, to 400k per year, or a total cut of 40% of their household income. Their not going to be able to keep up with their bills.
If you are going to post that Government taxation is the big bad boogieman destroying the life of it's average citizen, at least pick a government that taxes it's average citizen. A few facts wouldn't hurt either.
We're trying to organize our apartment for a guest, and guess what is causing the #1 headache?
Realistically, when are you going to need another 7 case fans from 1994? Or a card-based P2? Or 100 Y-Molex connectors? That old C3 you intended to turn into a server before you turned your old P3 into one? The broken mac portable printer you have been intending to fix since... Well... You had a mac?
Bin it. I know we become attached to our technology, but there comes a point where it doesn't do us any more good. A good rule of thumb is to have 1 medium tub of stored support equipment for every 2 running machines. Any more, and you're really overdoing it.
Broken Voodoo 3's? SDSL modems in an area that only offers ADSL? 32k PCMCIA modem cards?
This "Advisor" takes two inputs... target age and type of game, and outputs a number of games in that category.
Categorizations are somewhat willy-nilly. "Kids" is a category, despite it also being the age group. Note, there are no games for any kids over the age of 6, nor are there games in any other categories for kids under 6. If a categorization fails, the advisor will just revert back to "all game types," though it won't tell you it did so. Categories overlap significantly, such as Sim City not being listed under "Simulation," but "Life Simulation." "Action" vs "Action Adventure." Final Fantasy XI is a featured game in Role Playing, but second in Massively Multiplayer Online. No other MMO game makes it to another category.
The recommendations are questionable at best. For example, Law and Order 2 is apparently a hot seller for the 6 year old adventuring crowd. Myst 3 is apparently so intense it makes the 6-12 Action market. FIFA, Madden, Tiger Woods, and nearly all other sports games are inappropriate for anyone over 16. Their featured family entertainment will teach your 6 to 16 year old to drink and gamble like a real vegas loser. Of course, if you are over 17 you are too old to breed, and no games exist for your family. Strategy games like Warlords are inappropriate for anyone under 13, but Combat Flight Simulator, Lock On, and Forgotten Battles are A-OK. Apparently the only strategy game so violent and lacking in morals as to be locked away until your 17th birthday is... UFO aftermath.
If you want more information about a particular game, you have to go to the publisher's website. No objective reviews, no individualized ratings, not even a paragraph describing the game. As far as "information" goes, this site is sadly lacking.
To see if you can play the game (not a high hurdle, as the site apparently only works under XP), the Active X script attempts to download a program from the aforementioned futuremark. If you choose not to install it, the application hangs. It then gives you a somewhat useless graphical representation of how well your system does as a percentage of the minimum, then tells you to check the "other requirements." These mysterious "other requirements" are apparently just the system specs it just checked, repeated, with your system next to it. Didn't we just check this? Of course it also says to check the system specs with the publisher in 3 different places, making this whole exercise somewhat moot.
Somehow I doubt this will satisfy even the casual gamer. Even when grabbed by a catchy title, the person has to turn to goggle to find out any information at all about it. What advantage does this provide above, say, a trip to videogames.com? Age ranking is something that should be painfully obvious after the first screen shot. So what then... Availability? This is buried in the back end of Microsoft.com. Reliability? Recommending Law and Order to 6 year olds?
Unless Microsoft gets serious about the site, it will fall by the wayside. +1 points for trying, but -2 points for treating a Microsoft Gaming initiative like a Microsoft Business initiative.
P2P as a network protocol is evolving into something that actually works, as opposed to the state that it was at previously. It used to be that you connected to a single fault point, selected a single file from another user, and began downloading. Oh, do that while praying that neither of you got be cut off.
Then download resuming was added. Gnutella removed the central point of failure. Downloading from multiple sources was added. Kazaa added the concept of the supernode. eDonkey allows you to upload files that you haven't finished downloading yet. Soon we will probably see beginning-of-download randomization, so that complete files can be downloaded on a network even if nobody has finished getting it yet..torrent is adding accountability to the mix, which adds great legal uses, along with better HTML integration.
What more will we see in a protocol? Who knows. Encryption? Better IM capabilities? Webcams? Plug-ins? Preview from remote computer? While we still haven't figured out what the parameters of the network should be we shouldn't agree on the holy standard of the one true network.
"If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research"
If you have to ask whether the additional expense is worth it, don't bother. There are few games that support the added resolution or the widescreen features, and many of the few that do suffer from slowdown issues.
The problem is that consoles are pushed as far as they can go during a development process... They just don't have an extra few thousand pixels lying around. Programmers can either spend additional time downtuning the graphics when a HDTV is detected, which makes a nasty mess of the simplicity that a console offers, or they can just ignore the.1% of console owners who have one.
Most companies choose to ignore the HDTV crowd, and for good reason. The same reasons apply to widescreen... You can either redo all of your interface work, clipping planes, timing, surprises, etc, or you can give up on that very small portion of the market and invest those resources in making the game better for everyone.
If you are thinking of spending the 2k for a high-res gaming setup, why not spend that money on a really good gaming computer? True, you will have to re-buy everything in 5 years, but by that time the cost of an HDTV will have gone down enough to warrant developing games compatible with the display.
Of particular interest are claims 5 and six, which sets forth
5. The method set forth in claim 1 wherein:
the communications routing system is a switching portion of a telephone system; and
the step of receiving a transaction specifier includes the steps of:
receiving a special telephone number in the switching portion; and
using the special telephone number to derive the transaction specifier.
6. The method set forth in claim 5 wherein:
the step of receiving a transaction specifier further includes the step of using the special telephone number to derive a telephone number of the vendor and
the step of responding to the transaction specifier includes the step of using the telephone number to obtain transaction information concerning the transaction from or provide transaction information to the vendor.
Claim 7 is similar.
In other words, to be a valid patent violation, the parties must use a telephone number to identify eachother. I don't know about you, but I've never given nor received anyone's telephone telephone numbers on paypal.
Now, AT&T may argue that IP addresses are a "special" telephone number... Which is utter bunk, as VoIP is after 30 years of IP just starting to exist. But even then, Paypal does not connect independent parties with eachother via IP address, but rather e-mail address. Any respectable judge would throw out of his or her courtroom a lawyer that attempted to argue that "telephone number" meant any system that involved routing, including IP, E-mail, Telegraph, AIM, Kazaa, and Shared Printers.
Overall it looks like the original patent wasn't quite that bad... A shared telephone authentication system based upon the telephone company's then-new caller ID system as an identifier. As AT&T noted in their patent application, this is a way to mediate a transaction over the telephone while shielding the buyer's information from the seller. What's bad is then taking this and attempting to apply it to all internet transactions.
You filed your patent application. It was accepted because it was sufficiently narrow. Don't go whining now because it wasn't as broad as you would like.
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I'm sorry, I thought I made it clear that this was my point. The systems are very different. The systems in a car have been designed for specific purposes with independence and high fault tolerances. Windows CE was designed for high hardware compability and ease-of-use... neither of which apply in cars.
Of course, Microsoft is saying currently that WinCE is aimed at navigation and media playback, not embedded control. That wasn't always their shtick, however, as when they started this initiative they cited "better safety and security," along with reduced hardware duplication as a reason to use WinCE for all of your machine's needs. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but they truly wanted to be a central controller for the machine.
My mother dated a vehicle development engineer who created system diagnostic software for 5 years.
When it becomes obvious that tires are shredding and rolling over, people do. When it becomes obvious that cars are exploding upon a slight rear collision, people do. When cars that are supposed to protect their drivers in a collision instead drive the steering column through their chest, people do.
It's pretty obvious that, for example, when the Windows installer crashes, or a fresh copy of IIS has to be rebooted every 2 weeks despite serving only static HTML, that Windows is somehow at fault. Not only is Windows instability legendary, it is also well documented. Hardware cannot be the issue, because that hardware could be running another OS and have years of uptime. Drivers should not be the issue for the same reason. If the drivers are both put out by the same company, they should have the same level of overall quality.
GM has made an OS... Its cars have been running on microcontrollers for years. They run on the smallest of processors, they can be upgraded for about $100 by replacing a ROM, and they never crash. If you had meant what a horrible mess it would be for GM to attempt to create a desktop operating system, then yes, I agree with you. However, that should extend to any company attempting to do something significant in a field that they don't have experience in.
If Microsoft decided to do this properly by hiring the best kernel developers and experienced automotive programmers, and creating a real-time OS from scratch, people might be persuaded that this was a good idea. But they're not. They're taking an OS made for convincing a printer to communicate with a text processor, and trying to force it into making an antilock braking system communicate with a real-time traction control system.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use an OS specifically designed for reliability if I'm going to spend two hours a day inside something that kills 50,000 people per year.
Dr. Noidburg writes "The scourge of Internet Music and Movie sharing has the Canadian Society of Composers Authors aNd music publishers (SOCAN) pulling out their lawyers. The SCO group, which owns the copyright on the software powering 100% of today's servers, relays, and routers, will be served by SOCAN on Tuesday for their pivotal role in internet piracy. "It's about protecting our artists from those who would make a buck off of their work. 10% of SCO's $699 per-seat license should go to compensating the artists that they have based their business upon. And with SCO's estimated figures of 80% compliance, they owe us about 70 billion in back licensing fees." SOCAN declined to provide any evidence, lest their opponent fabricate enough counter-evidence to convince a judge.
No, but this one could.
Still, with a name like his I would like to meet the winning bidder...
You mean like what this guy did to a GameBoy?
First of all, comparing FMV gaming to making stylish games is like comparing a nuclear blast to a firecracker. FMV gaming, as a mechanic, had no redeeming qualities. It removed control from the player, limiting gameplay to a choose-your-own adventure game with extremely few options. Adding pop cultural references to a game, however, simply risks diluting the original vision. Many games have been both hip and great, but no games have been both FMV and great (Dragon's Lair fans... Watch a video).
To support this assertion, the reviewer points to Jax and Dexter 2 and THPS. Jax and Dexter 2 is generally viewed as one of the year's best games... Adding liberal cultural references hasn't hurt the gameplay one bit. And Tony Hawk wasn't cool or hip until it was so embraced that it defined culture. Even so, gameplay has not been hindered one bit, and the series continues a surprising streak of great games.
Second, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil's original incarnation was hardly a socially ackward girl. Pictures of the original Jade are available here. As you can see, she went from a trendy, hip early 20 something wearing a t-shirt and jeans (look at that off-kilter waist bag), to a trendy, late 20 something dressed like an undercover reporter. She had large breasts, a visible buttline, a waistline like a carrot, and a midriff. The only non-stereotypical aspects of her character are the short hair and short body. Her second incarnation has the same pants, a lower-cut shirt, a green jacket, and a green headband. The last time I went to a club, headbands were not trendy. Though a little desexualization wouldn't hurt, the character is hardly a cash-in.
Licensed games are largely ignored by gamers in-the-know, and are hardly a new scourge. ET on the 2600? Simpsons on the NES? Lethal Weapon for the SNES? Anything THQ touched before the Playstation? If anything, the proportion of licensed drivel on consoles has gone DOWN, if for no other reason than the expense of developing 3d games has reduced the cash-in opportunity.
Breakout characters, and characterizations, are a rarity based more around great games than great design. The Master Chief as the pinnical of character design? One or two new games destined for legend come out every year... And as such we get one or two new characters in our vocabulary. That's not a weakness of the industry so much as a reality of shared experiences. Otherwise we would have Bubsy 3D 11 shoved down our throats. Characters are born, they live, and they die. It is one of the few motivations to create original content.
And as a final note, XIII wouldn't be anywhere near as engrossing an experience if designers had kept the comic book people away. The Final Fantasy series wouldn't be great if they had kept the movie people away. Embrace the artistic qualities and abilities of other forms of communication. Don't use them in inappropriate places, just as they wouldn't put footage from a House of the Dead game into a movie. But don't push them away. We are all entertainment brothers and sisters.
If you are conducting a survey to find out what is the "best of the best" in server software, why survey Family Dollar Store? Or Land 'O Lakes? You should be choosing technically savvy, solution neutral companies are likely to choose the best. These are the actual companies that have a big web presence and you would not expect them to choose a platform which would affect their bottom line badly... As opposed to Sears Roebuck, whose online presence can be compared to Amazon's retail presence. Would we ask Amazon how to organize endcaps? Let's pick a few technically adept companies at random here...
Amazon - Apache
AT&T - Netscape
Bell South - Apache
Cisco - Unix
Dell - IIS5
Earthlink - Netscape
E-Bay - IIS4
HP - Apache
Intel - IIS6
Lucent - Netscape
Motorola - Apache
National Semiconductor - Netscape
Nextel - Netscape
Qualcomm - Netscape
PC Connection - IIS5
I can't survey any more companies, because Port80's IIS6 server is slashdotted. However, if is apparent from this data that nearly 1/3rd of all websites that count are hosted on Netscape platforms. Apache and IIS share 1/4th each, and Cisco's odd unix variant wrapps up the rest.
Personally I'm amazed that Netscape is holding on to a lead... I would have expected them to be out of the running long ago. I'll have to check them out.
Sorry. I know SCO doesn't own any valid patents. You know SCO doesn't own any valid patents. SCO, however, believes that it is "the majority owner of Unix intellectual property" and "has full rights to license this technology, and enforce the associated patents and copyrights." It licensed one of those patents to Microsoft earlier this year, though it refused to mention which one.
If Linux incorporated technologies that were covered by those patents, anyone using those technologies would, in fact, be liable... Like how several years back people who had purchased software that processed GIFS were found to be in an actionable position even though they had nothing to do with designing the software. Copyrights are active, and require choice by the end-user to violate. Patents are passive, and can be violated by, for example, happening to come up with a solution that is similar to an existing patent without checking, or simply using a system purchased from another company whose product they hadn't done sufficient background checks on.
If Google were using any of the technologies covered in SCO's ghostly patents, they would be. Of course, SCO's lawsuit up until this point only covers "trade secrets," which is a sufficiently murky area of law as to provide at least a minor chance of victory. A trade secret violation would not stop the distribution of Linux, nor indebt anyone to SCO. SCO has been claiming patent violations, and as such can cause legal problems for end-users.
It can be useful when everyone is using it... Kind of like phones. Around the office, AIM was a good way to get a quick message across the building without having to spend the 5 minutes walking. "Could you check phone line 15 in the closet?" "It was loose, I switched the wires. Is it working?" "Yeah, working great. Thanks."
As a communications medium, it combines the immediacy of cellular phones with the subtlety of e-mail. Likewise, you can copy/paste, a big bonus in many technical fields. Unfortunately, if not taken seriously this can lead to abuses and general slacking, but so could phones and e-mail if that sort of thing weren't frowned upon.
Still, the holy grail is achieving a single unified standard that will allow all IM systems to interact. This is not a technical hurdle, but a financial one. Much like how the lack of inter-network text messaging killed SMS in the US, the messaging companies are all fighting hard to earn a piece of the surprisingly non-lucrative IM market. Apparently they are under the delusion that infinity times free equals a large sum of money for sufficiently large values of infinity.
If everyone ran a Jabber client, it would quickly become as indispensable as e-mail.
Just adding to the Trillian fodder. There is a user-developed plug-in available to Trillian Pro users that will automatically forward messages to an available e-mail or SMS address when idle. Useful.
Of course, I'm a Pro member for the Jabber support, but little bonuses like this make it worthwhile.
America, and by extension the ESRB, has an odd relationship with violence and sex. Violence is, by and large, seen as a viable solution to the problems of the world (usually violence). Sex, on the other hand, is a morally corrupt abhorration. While videogames, movies, and television have no problems showing camera pans through the heads of suicide victims, women put onto meathooks, gun-toting henchmen having their heads severed in half, sex seems to put the industry in a tussle.
NYPD Blue, a show whose subject is violent homicide, caused quite an uproar when they showed a female breast for a fraction of a second. The violence equivalence of flashing a breast would be to show a quick clip of a knife under someone's jacket. How dare they! In a PG-13 movie, you are allowed to show a gun shooting and have someone falling over in death throes, though you cannot show the gun pointing at someone in the same frame. That's reserved for R. A sex equivalent would be to show someone pointing their "gun" at someone else, and the other person bouncing up and down in pleasure. Not something you could get away with in... For example... Pirates of the Carribbean.
Very few movies have ever received an X or MA for violence, and the few that did were re-cut. Paul Verhoeven is probably the only Hollywood director to achieve such a plateau, but even then the discrepancy shows through. Total Recall had a total of 3 shots altered to achieve an R rating, with no screentime lost. Verhoeven's Basic Instinct had to be re-submitted 7 times before it was accepted, and had 16 minutes altered. It made it to the European market intact. However, his movie RoboCop lost between 4 and 24 minutes depending upon the European market, yet hit the Americans largely unadulterated.
After watching the violence prevalent in, for example, Freddy vs. Jason, it becomes painfully obvious that no amount of videogame violence will draw an AO rating in this country. Not only is violence the core crutch for designers, but no amount of violence will truly exceed the threshold of the movie screen. And while we claim to worry about children's exposure to violence, parents get truly livid when the possibility of sex arises. Ever wonder why we see hostages take bullets to the head in the gritty, realistic world of Max Payne 2, but all sexual activity must be very generally implied?
Simple bloody violence is perfectly OK in this country. Despite most R-rated movies being violence pornography, there is little movement to stop them. When people talk of the sexualization of the youth, they usually point to Brittany Spears or some such. Sex is apparently such a horrific thing that we must protect our youth from the symbols that represent it. Brittany spears doesn't have sex on television. Brittany spears doesn't simulate having sex on television. Many people on MTV either kill or die in their videos.
Theories about the ramifications this prioritization has on international affairs are welcome. However, WRT the subject at hand, Manhunt doesn't achieve the level of violence required to be considered perverse because we have given up all concept that pure violence can be perverse: That there is anything at all wrong with watching a man use a lawnmower against a room full of the rotting undead, or melting a man's skin off his body then running him over with a car is a foreign concept to us Americans.
Show all of the pain you like. Just don't have any characters pleasure eachother.
Not actually true. Patent violation in this (weird) country applies even if there was a good-faith effort to avoid such tussles. Most courts would look kindly upon a group that, upon discovery of the problem, removed all areas of offence. However, as a proven by microsoft's previous tussles in this area, ongoing usage once a patent violation is discovered requires payment. If SCO had any evidence, and Google was found to be in violation, a court may waive an initial damages clause but would require that they either pay up for a license or switch to a different OS.
If mere Copyright violations are found, suits against end users would have no basis, but the result would be the same. Distribution of Linux would become illegal, therefore Google would still need to pay a gaggle of *bsd programmers for a port. I may be off in this regard, but I believe Google would retain the right to their current server farm... but without security patches, the system would be quickly hacked. Maybe.
Either way, Linux end users need to understand that they cannot be sued *without proof.* So far, SCO has dodged every possible opportunity to provide proof, and likely will continue to do so. They have already been banned from this extortion racket in other countries, where they declined to show any evidence of their claims. Why would they behave any differently with any other company? A year into the IBM case and they are still stalling on procedure.
It brings up a very interesting question. Which will die first... The case, or the company?
Actually, there really isn't a great reason to use Sky OS over Linux or BSD... and that's not the point. Sky OS is one of many smaller projects whose primary purpose is to satisfy the hobby needs of the creator... Kind of like where Linux was when Linus decided his schoolwork was too boring.
There are many other examples out there. Contiki, Triangle Os, and many others.
There are also Open Source, commercial, and potentially useful hobbyist systems out there. However, if you are looking for the most comprehensive, useful desktop suite, look elsewhere. All of these Os's are unique and well-intentioned, but very few are actually practical.
Practicality is not the point. Curiosity is the point. What would a different implementation look like? What if all the graphics subsystems were contained in the kernel? How would a real-time OS feel to the user? These questions can't be answered by just releasing a new X theme, and there aren't very many people curious enough to find out.
These people are true geeks... Software for software's sake. Kudos to you all.
Trade with Cuba is wrong because Castro is one of THEM. Iraq needed to be cleansed because Hussein was one of THEM. Kim Jong-il and the Ayatollah Khamenei are also evil men, and therefore their countries are evil.
Vietnam and China, however, don't have such controversial leaders. Jiang Zemin has few blemishes on his record, and therefore China has few blemishes on it's record (despite having human rights violations codified into law). And who knows who Tran Du Luong is or what he has done? Obviously they can't be put onto the axis of evil, because they aren't lead by a James Bond supervillian.
I think few people in this country reacted when George Bush gave his "axis of evil" speech because it was so patently ridiculous to point at three countries with improving diplomatic relations and call them the devil. When Bush gave his "you're either with us or against us" line, people seemed to accept it as a liberally used figure of speech. Now that Bush is claiming that the people who wanted a UN resolution before declaring war in Iraq were supporting Osama Bin Laden, it has become clear that this is actually how the man thinks.
Bush believes himself to be good, therefore everything he does is good and above questioning. Clinton did bad things and therefore is bad, therefore everything he did should be overturned and turned over to the press. Ashcroft is a good man, acting in what he believes to be the public's best interest. Therefore whatever Ashcroft does is in the public's best interest. This logic is, of course, flawed. I'm sure Ashcroft believes he is acting in the public's best interests, but his viewpoint of the world is greatly skewed by the line of work he is in.
In a way it is an extension of the monarchy. Bush has actually said on occasion that he has been chosen by God to rule. Once again, this was taken to be the liberal sprinkling of praise for God that peppers oscar acceptance speeches and winning locker rooms. But in light of actions, it is becoming apparent that the man truly believes he has a divine mandate to rule... That god works through him and therefore he is above reproach. As his decisions are perfect, so too must be the decisions of those people whom he chooses, and such the divine mandate trickles to his staff and people.
This is not just a crackpot theory on how the president thinks. This is a theory based upon how the president himself claims that he thinks. Honestly, I would be surprised if he found any problem with either the accuracy of the theory or the morality behind the thought pattern.
So far this week our government has passed laws legalizing spam and giving huge kickbacks to insurance companies. They have a majority on a bill indemnifying oil companies for MTBE pollution. They declared intent to ban gay marriages in the US. Now there is a bill that would give all publishers the right to become monopolies? And this actually received sponsorship?
Isn't our government supposed to behave near elections?
ATM cards require confirmation in order to protect the contents of your bank account from someone who may have stolen or cloned your card. Credit Cards require a signature to ensure accountability and traceability. What do RFID tags do that makes them fundamentally secure?
Nothing, apparently. Not having to type in numbers or sign a receipt are touted as the advantages of the new system. Yet traditional cards could have easily forgone the secondary identification, simply by sacrificing the security we have come to expect.
By the proliferation of universal garage remotes out there, and RFID's lack of a challenge-response system, it's obvious that if you will be able to get within 3 feet of someone you can steal their identity without their knowledge. Without the secondary identification, the system is useless. With secondary identification, it's a credit card.
Furthermore, why implant? Everyone has to have their keys with them at all time... The speedpass route seems like the more intelligent and flexible way to go. Implanting could be convenient once all of the bugs are hammered out and it is accepted as a universal form of payment, but for a 1st generation technology likely to be upgraded quickly, why commit?
This reminds me a lot of the Dot Com days, when people attempted to sell anything that was possible, without even bothering to think if it should be done.
Right. Because we all know that it is the tax burden which keeps demand for labor in developing countries low.
A Thai Jasmine farmer earns about 200 US dollars per year, or about 8,000 Baht, which means they don't pay any taxes. An average family income is 161,016 Baht per year, or about 4,000 dollars. That number is skewed a bit high, as it is average rather than median, but we'll accept it. Of that 161k Baht, 60k is a standard deduction, there are personal deductions of 30k per parent and 15k per child, and 2k per child in school. Our theoretical 2 parent, two-child household has 154k in deductions, and falls into the lowest tax bracket. The average Thai citizen doesn't pay any taxes.
What about someone well off? 20k US dollars would be a very good living in Thailand, so let's say that both parents are struggling to give their children the kind of opportunity that can only come with education. At 800k Baht, 646k Baht after deductions, they fall into the 20% taxable range.
Those poor, struggling people, why does the government punish them so? Let's say it decides not to tax them at all. "Yay!" They think, and one of them quits their job. Assuming their incomes were split evenly between them, they suddenly have gone from taking home 670k per year, to 400k per year, or a total cut of 40% of their household income. Their not going to be able to keep up with their bills.
If you are going to post that Government taxation is the big bad boogieman destroying the life of it's average citizen, at least pick a government that taxes it's average citizen. A few facts wouldn't hurt either.
Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered?
There have always been male / female converters for cabling. If only humans were so lucky.
We're trying to organize our apartment for a guest, and guess what is causing the #1 headache?
Realistically, when are you going to need another 7 case fans from 1994? Or a card-based P2? Or 100 Y-Molex connectors? That old C3 you intended to turn into a server before you turned your old P3 into one? The broken mac portable printer you have been intending to fix since... Well... You had a mac?
Bin it. I know we become attached to our technology, but there comes a point where it doesn't do us any more good. A good rule of thumb is to have 1 medium tub of stored support equipment for every 2 running machines. Any more, and you're really overdoing it.
Broken Voodoo 3's? SDSL modems in an area that only offers ADSL? 32k PCMCIA modem cards?
Live without.
This "Advisor" takes two inputs... target age and type of game, and outputs a number of games in that category.
Categorizations are somewhat willy-nilly. "Kids" is a category, despite it also being the age group. Note, there are no games for any kids over the age of 6, nor are there games in any other categories for kids under 6. If a categorization fails, the advisor will just revert back to "all game types," though it won't tell you it did so. Categories overlap significantly, such as Sim City not being listed under "Simulation," but "Life Simulation." "Action" vs "Action Adventure." Final Fantasy XI is a featured game in Role Playing, but second in Massively Multiplayer Online. No other MMO game makes it to another category.
The recommendations are questionable at best. For example, Law and Order 2 is apparently a hot seller for the 6 year old adventuring crowd. Myst 3 is apparently so intense it makes the 6-12 Action market. FIFA, Madden, Tiger Woods, and nearly all other sports games are inappropriate for anyone over 16. Their featured family entertainment will teach your 6 to 16 year old to drink and gamble like a real vegas loser. Of course, if you are over 17 you are too old to breed, and no games exist for your family. Strategy games like Warlords are inappropriate for anyone under 13, but Combat Flight Simulator, Lock On, and Forgotten Battles are A-OK. Apparently the only strategy game so violent and lacking in morals as to be locked away until your 17th birthday is... UFO aftermath.
If you want more information about a particular game, you have to go to the publisher's website. No objective reviews, no individualized ratings, not even a paragraph describing the game. As far as "information" goes, this site is sadly lacking.
To see if you can play the game (not a high hurdle, as the site apparently only works under XP), the Active X script attempts to download a program from the aforementioned futuremark. If you choose not to install it, the application hangs. It then gives you a somewhat useless graphical representation of how well your system does as a percentage of the minimum, then tells you to check the "other requirements." These mysterious "other requirements" are apparently just the system specs it just checked, repeated, with your system next to it. Didn't we just check this? Of course it also says to check the system specs with the publisher in 3 different places, making this whole exercise somewhat moot.
Somehow I doubt this will satisfy even the casual gamer. Even when grabbed by a catchy title, the person has to turn to goggle to find out any information at all about it. What advantage does this provide above, say, a trip to videogames.com? Age ranking is something that should be painfully obvious after the first screen shot. So what then... Availability? This is buried in the back end of Microsoft.com. Reliability? Recommending Law and Order to 6 year olds?
Unless Microsoft gets serious about the site, it will fall by the wayside. +1 points for trying, but -2 points for treating a Microsoft Gaming initiative like a Microsoft Business initiative.
P2P as a network protocol is evolving into something that actually works, as opposed to the state that it was at previously. It used to be that you connected to a single fault point, selected a single file from another user, and began downloading. Oh, do that while praying that neither of you got be cut off.
.torrent is adding accountability to the mix, which adds great legal uses, along with better HTML integration.
Then download resuming was added. Gnutella removed the central point of failure. Downloading from multiple sources was added. Kazaa added the concept of the supernode. eDonkey allows you to upload files that you haven't finished downloading yet. Soon we will probably see beginning-of-download randomization, so that complete files can be downloaded on a network even if nobody has finished getting it yet.
What more will we see in a protocol? Who knows. Encryption? Better IM capabilities? Webcams? Plug-ins? Preview from remote computer? While we still haven't figured out what the parameters of the network should be we shouldn't agree on the holy standard of the one true network.
"If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research"
Pot doesn't kill brain cells, Inhaling THC until 6 in the morning while watching TelleTubbies kills brain cells?
If you have to ask whether the additional expense is worth it, don't bother. There are few games that support the added resolution or the widescreen features, and many of the few that do suffer from slowdown issues.
.1% of console owners who have one.
The problem is that consoles are pushed as far as they can go during a development process... They just don't have an extra few thousand pixels lying around. Programmers can either spend additional time downtuning the graphics when a HDTV is detected, which makes a nasty mess of the simplicity that a console offers, or they can just ignore the
Most companies choose to ignore the HDTV crowd, and for good reason. The same reasons apply to widescreen... You can either redo all of your interface work, clipping planes, timing, surprises, etc, or you can give up on that very small portion of the market and invest those resources in making the game better for everyone.
If you are thinking of spending the 2k for a high-res gaming setup, why not spend that money on a really good gaming computer? True, you will have to re-buy everything in 5 years, but by that time the cost of an HDTV will have gone down enough to warrant developing games compatible with the display.
Of particular interest are claims 5 and six, which sets forth
5. The method set forth in claim 1 wherein:
the communications routing system is a switching portion of a telephone system; and
the step of receiving a transaction specifier includes the steps of:
receiving a special telephone number in the switching portion; and
using the special telephone number to derive the transaction specifier.
6. The method set forth in claim 5 wherein:
the step of receiving a transaction specifier further includes the step of using the special telephone number to derive a telephone number of the vendor and
the step of responding to the transaction specifier includes the step of using the telephone number to obtain transaction information concerning the transaction from or provide transaction information to the vendor.
Claim 7 is similar.
In other words, to be a valid patent violation, the parties must use a telephone number to identify eachother. I don't know about you, but I've never given nor received anyone's telephone telephone numbers on paypal.
Now, AT&T may argue that IP addresses are a "special" telephone number... Which is utter bunk, as VoIP is after 30 years of IP just starting to exist. But even then, Paypal does not connect independent parties with eachother via IP address, but rather e-mail address. Any respectable judge would throw out of his or her courtroom a lawyer that attempted to argue that "telephone number" meant any system that involved routing, including IP, E-mail, Telegraph, AIM, Kazaa, and Shared Printers.
Overall it looks like the original patent wasn't quite that bad... A shared telephone authentication system based upon the telephone company's then-new caller ID system as an identifier. As AT&T noted in their patent application, this is a way to mediate a transaction over the telephone while shielding the buyer's information from the seller. What's bad is then taking this and attempting to apply it to all internet transactions.
You filed your patent application. It was accepted because it was sufficiently narrow. Don't go whining now because it wasn't as broad as you would like.