Them's fighting words, Coward - Xbox is my preferred gaming platform.
I'll buy a 360 as soon as (a) I feel they're stable, and (b) they can run my library of games, including Toe Jam & Earl III, DDR (XBox), Splinter Cell, Blood Omen 2, and Battlestar Galactica (some of those might be supported now, I didn't check my library yet).
I have a somewhat deficient heart... the doctors tell me that we'll keep an eye on it for now, but I'll probably need some surgery in a couple of decades.
I can't get too upset about this - at the pace that medical technology is progressing. They'll probably be able to grow me a new heart by the time I need one. As long as I can afford it, that is.
Very pretty, that is, until it crashed. Then it took a few minutes for it to restart and for the kid playing it to get back to the game (a Call of Duty game, I think), and then it was pretty again... until it crashed again.
I think I'll wait a while before even thinking of buying one.
On the first problem, opening arbitrary ports isn't so hard if your firewall supports UPnP.
Ignore the people who think UPnP is Windows-only. I use a BitTorrent client (Azareus) on the Mac that opens ports on a Linksys multihomed router/firewall.
I don't know about you but I take my mod point resonsibilities very seriously
Oh, I can tell.
In fact, I heartily encourage you to reply to every post that you moderate and explain exactly why you moderated it the way you did - that'll really help the system work!
Don't get me wrong, I agree with pretty much everything you say... but you had me until the final sentence. Sometimes it's just not that simple.
See, I mostly agree - even though for many many people, Mac OS X, or even a properly configured Linux box, is a perfectly acceptable alternative - my mother (and father before he died), grandmother, and girlfriend are all Mac-only, and my brother only runs Windows because he's a DoD contractor right now.
And that is why fighting this stupidity is difficult with market forces, and probably a doomed effort from the start. It'll take serious, measurable damage and legal action.
Most people don't care enough to make the substantial effort. And just as most people won't make the effort required to not run Windows, most people will still buy that CD from the band they really really like even if it's from Sony. Just like I, even though I don't do anything serious on Windows (and I take my music seriously), still do keep Windows around as a boot loader.
So that's the hell of it - because of the Windows monopoly, we can't even choose not to play their game when they screw us. And we're supposed to hate Sony more than Microsoft for that?
You are not often challenged for your password in Mac OS X. The default installation location is/Applications, which is mode 775 (meaning users can create items in the directory, but not alter files owned by someone else, including root). Most installs you simply drag an item into the Applications folder.
If something's asking you for your password and isn't (a) your security manager wanting to fetch your keychain for a website, or (b) something that should be installing drivers, be very worried and don't type your password until you understand exactly what it's doing. My mother has to type her password so infrequently on Mac OS X that she can never remember what it is.
Even Microsoft Office is a drag-and-drop-to-install application (as well as being a drag), ferchrisakes.
It's more like, does someone leaving their front door wide open and placing a sign out front reading "premises not monitored and we'll be back in a week" bear some blame if their house is looted?
Ummm..."Ha ha, it doesn't affect us!" At least, none of us who don't type in the administrator password without understanding why we're doing it.
Ha ha, only serious. Seriously, this isn't an "any computer" issue. This is an issue with the only "modern" OS that have been specifically engineered to run arbitrary binaries with privileges without challenging the user. It's isn't a matter of Mac OS X or Linux (or VMS or Solaris or SunOS or VM/CMS) being better, it's a matter of Windows being worse.
This isn't even a matter of Windows' original design, as Dave Cutler's original security model was solid and included a good separation of privileges away from the desktop user, drawing on the last half a century of computing experience. This is a matter of Microsoft Management specifically and intentionally deciding to screw you. They will say it was necessary to make a desktop OS usable by novices - Mac OS X does give the lie to such horseshit (and that is the only place Mac OS X specifically figures in this topic).
Yes, Sony deserves a lot of the blame. But Microsoft deserves just as much. You can start to "fight this stupidity" by not using Windows.
Re:Feasibility of Panspermia
on
Space Lichens
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What I've never understood about that theory, though, is how the life forms got off their home planet and onto an interstellar-bound rock.
If you've got life floating around in your atmosphere, it might not even require ejecta but instead just near collisions with porous asteroids passing through the upper atmosphere.
The space shuttle masses over 10 metric tons at liftoff itself with its tanks (and for our purposes, metric tons and 2000 pound tons are interchangeable). The shuttle itself is 2 tons and is capable of delivering payloads of up to 25 metric tons.
So a loaded shuttle with enough fuel to take it out of LEO would be good enough - and this spacecraft would be a lot less sophisticated than the shuttle.
Also, given the low thrust requirements for "towing," this could be a good application for the ion drive, which is high efficiency / ultra low thrust.
That's true, but according to court findings,Microsoft threatened in 1997 to stop support for Office, and used that threat to force Apple to bundle Internet Explorer as part of their campaign against Netscape.
Shortly thereafter is when Microsoft recommitted to the Mac for five years as in the infamous Jobs/Gates presentation, as part of the deal where Microsoft invested in Apple and paid to get off the hook for several of Apple's patents they had been violating.
People really like to repeat that VHS vs. Betamax canard, while completely missing the important lesson.
The thing that really killed Betamax wasn't so much the licensing issues as the fact that you for early US models, you couldn't put a 2 hour movie on a betamax tape, but you could on a VHS.
That's huge. Being able to ship movies on a single VHS tape is what estabilshed the distirbution channels for those tapes and is what encouraged people to buy in to the VHS technology, in turn creating the demand for more VHS tapes, and so on.
And that's the big lesson lurking behind it all: pay attention to what your customers actually need, and what aspects of the technology will support the distribution and consumption models. It doesn't matter if your product will do a thousand things more cheaply than the other product, if most people can't easily get it to do the one thing they really buy it for. That's why the iPod has been so successful, even though there are tons of cheaper, more feature-rich products out there.
Record companies make their living off having a lock on promotional and distribution outlets, and use that lock to sign artists into highly exploitive contracts. The iTMS removes that lock (and they make deals with individual new artists), which undercuts the recording companies' long term survival strategy.
Which is exactly why it's only a matter of time before there's a huge backlash from these content distributors, much like the music industry is already against iTunes.
I wouldn't term it a backlash so much as a lot of griping.
Here's the thing - once they have a substantial revenue stream through a particular outlet (like iTunes), they might whine, they might complain, and they might try to weasel around their commitments. But in the end, they won't do anything to endanger the revenue stream that they're seeing - revenue is their crack.
As long as Apple holds the vast majority of the download market and is adept at playing the traditional content distributors against each other, they're stuck. It's Apple's way or the highway, and they can't jump ship or they'll lose all of that oh-so-delicious free money they're seeing. The only success they'd have against Apple is to stage a mass revolt - which would be illegal collusion.
Jobs really has lured them into a trap where they'll end up destroying their long-term interests for short term profit. It's their nature, they can't help it.
Evil monopolist? Perhaps, but I can't think of anyone (other than maybe the oil companies) I'd rather see this happen to than the record labels and (eventually) the television studios.
It's good to see that he's keeping with the times. This is the same argument that the neocons use to galvinize their base.
Just like the oh-so-threatened christians out there, the PC users are being oppressed by the nasty minority! Woe is them! Oh, the humanity! The unjustness of it all!
How dare this minority continue to exist and, worse, be noticed!
It's as easy case to make, to upsell someone with expanding needs from MySQL to Oracle. It makes sense the Oracle would want to bind more of those users to Oracle as an upgrade path.
It's much less easy to make the case for someone to "upgrade" from PostgreSQL to Oracle. PostgreSQL would cannibalize a small-but-significant portion of Oracle's more expensive sales, once the Oracle brand name was attached to it.
I can think of one big down side... I can see it now:
Apple: Stealing your bandwidth for their profit?
Posted by Zonk on Mon 17 Mar 05:33PM
from the if-it-bleeds-it-leads dept.
Seriously, people might not be thrilled about donating their upstream bandwidth to help defray's Apple's bandwidth costs... and I guarantee you that some people will frame it that way.
The important thing is that it's a Mercury program that will be able to survive on profits from the free market, not subject to the whims of some political hacks. This is sustainable, and will continue and be built upon no matter what fools take control of NASA's purse strings.
A real company? There is demand for going into space for people with the financial resources, but do you really believe this will happen in the next 5-10 years? Negative.
You're a fool. It will clearly happen in the next few years, composite craft just don't take that long to manufacture. The technology is already proven, Rutan just needs to crank 'em out.
I wouldn't spend my last $200K on it, but even if prices stabilize at $200K, I'd probably spend it if I had a mere $1M and felt I couldn't wait. And there are a lot of people with a mere $1M. As is, I'll wait to see if the prices start to come down, but if they don't I'll probably pony up the cash in a couple of decades. If I were 60 or 70 instead of 35, I'd pony up the cash right now.
Are you willing to take a rollercoaster ride into space in a damn kite with a rocket strapped to it? Not me, you only have one chance to land one of these things.
Big deal. I've done 280 landings of normal aircraft according to my log book... haven't blown one yet.
In any case, that's fine. Cowards will inherit the Earth - the bold will go to the stars, sooner or later.
Here's the thing: Recording companies have exactly two reasons they can continue to exist in the face of deep resentment from their artists:
They have a lock on distribution (that is, only they can get your album into stores),and
They have a lock on promotion (that is, only they can get your songs onto the radio).
As a result, recording companies can ream new artists in exchange for the promotion and distribution that only they could offer.
The iTunes music store destroys the first advantage. No longer does a musician have to sell their soul (in the form of the rights to their creative output) to a record company in order to sell their music to you: they only have to talk to Apple now in order to sell their music (in fact, I have a number of indie friends who have done just that).
The second advantage will fade on its own, hurried on by payola scandals. The internet has taken the popularity of music out of the hands of recording industry executives, since fans can now communicate with each other.
The iTunes Music Store is driving a stake through the recording industry's dead, desicated heart. This was all largely inevitable, but now that they're starting to realize that they're doomed they're going to fight Apple in increasingly shrill manners.
I hope that someday the same structural shift will kill the deadlock television executives have over TV content.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony troll?
Them's fighting words, Coward - Xbox is my preferred gaming platform.
I'll buy a 360 as soon as (a) I feel they're stable, and (b) they can run my library of games, including Toe Jam & Earl III, DDR (XBox), Splinter Cell, Blood Omen 2, and Battlestar Galactica (some of those might be supported now, I didn't check my library yet).
So, how long until we're growing whole organs?
I have a somewhat deficient heart... the doctors tell me that we'll keep an eye on it for now, but I'll probably need some surgery in a couple of decades.
I can't get too upset about this - at the pace that medical technology is progressing. They'll probably be able to grow me a new heart by the time I need one. As long as I can afford it, that is.
The one I saw at Target today was really pretty.
Very pretty, that is, until it crashed. Then it took a few minutes for it to restart and for the kid playing it to get back to the game (a Call of Duty game, I think), and then it was pretty again... until it crashed again.
I think I'll wait a while before even thinking of buying one.
On the first problem, opening arbitrary ports isn't so hard if your firewall supports UPnP.
Ignore the people who think UPnP is Windows-only. I use a BitTorrent client (Azareus) on the Mac that opens ports on a Linksys multihomed router/firewall.
One of the articles about this says that they'll be bringing more than 300 shows. Still, that sample of the list looks pretty interesting.
In fact, I heartily encourage you to reply to every post that you moderate and explain exactly why you moderated it the way you did - that'll really help the system work!
And that is why fighting this stupidity is difficult with market forces, and probably a doomed effort from the start. It'll take serious, measurable damage and legal action.
Most people don't care enough to make the substantial effort. And just as most people won't make the effort required to not run Windows, most people will still buy that CD from the band they really really like even if it's from Sony. Just like I, even though I don't do anything serious on Windows (and I take my music seriously), still do keep Windows around as a boot loader.
So that's the hell of it - because of the Windows monopoly, we can't even choose not to play their game when they screw us. And we're supposed to hate Sony more than Microsoft for that?
No, it doesn't.
/Applications, which is mode 775 (meaning users can create items in the directory, but not alter files owned by someone else, including root). Most installs you simply drag an item into the Applications folder.
You are not often challenged for your password in Mac OS X. The default installation location is
If something's asking you for your password and isn't (a) your security manager wanting to fetch your keychain for a website, or (b) something that should be installing drivers, be very worried and don't type your password until you understand exactly what it's doing. My mother has to type her password so infrequently on Mac OS X that she can never remember what it is.
Even Microsoft Office is a drag-and-drop-to-install application (as well as being a drag), ferchrisakes.
(and mods, please mod parent down for using Andrew Tanenbaum's name).
It's more like, does someone leaving their front door wide open and placing a sign out front reading "premises not monitored and we'll be back in a week" bear some blame if their house is looted?
And the answer to that is, "Yes. Yes, they do."
Ummm..."Ha ha, it doesn't affect us!" At least, none of us who don't type in the administrator password without understanding why we're doing it.
Ha ha, only serious. Seriously, this isn't an "any computer" issue. This is an issue with the only "modern" OS that have been specifically engineered to run arbitrary binaries with privileges without challenging the user. It's isn't a matter of Mac OS X or Linux (or VMS or Solaris or SunOS or VM/CMS) being better, it's a matter of Windows being worse .
This isn't even a matter of Windows' original design, as Dave Cutler's original security model was solid and included a good separation of privileges away from the desktop user, drawing on the last half a century of computing experience. This is a matter of Microsoft Management specifically and intentionally deciding to screw you. They will say it was necessary to make a desktop OS usable by novices - Mac OS X does give the lie to such horseshit (and that is the only place Mac OS X specifically figures in this topic).
Yes, Sony deserves a lot of the blame. But Microsoft deserves just as much. You can start to "fight this stupidity" by not using Windows.
If you've got life floating around in your atmosphere, it might not even require ejecta but instead just near collisions with porous asteroids passing through the upper atmosphere.
20 tons just isn't that big.
The space shuttle masses over 10 metric tons at liftoff itself with its tanks (and for our purposes, metric tons and 2000 pound tons are interchangeable). The shuttle itself is 2 tons and is capable of delivering payloads of up to 25 metric tons.
So a loaded shuttle with enough fuel to take it out of LEO would be good enough - and this spacecraft would be a lot less sophisticated than the shuttle.
Also, given the low thrust requirements for "towing," this could be a good application for the ion drive, which is high efficiency / ultra low thrust.
That's true, but according to court findings,Microsoft threatened in 1997 to stop support for Office, and used that threat to force Apple to bundle Internet Explorer as part of their campaign against Netscape.
Shortly thereafter is when Microsoft recommitted to the Mac for five years as in the infamous Jobs/Gates presentation, as part of the deal where Microsoft invested in Apple and paid to get off the hook for several of Apple's patents they had been violating.
People really like to repeat that VHS vs. Betamax canard, while completely missing the important lesson.
The thing that really killed Betamax wasn't so much the licensing issues as the fact that you for early US models, you couldn't put a 2 hour movie on a betamax tape, but you could on a VHS.
That's huge. Being able to ship movies on a single VHS tape is what estabilshed the distirbution channels for those tapes and is what encouraged people to buy in to the VHS technology, in turn creating the demand for more VHS tapes, and so on.
And that's the big lesson lurking behind it all: pay attention to what your customers actually need, and what aspects of the technology will support the distribution and consumption models. It doesn't matter if your product will do a thousand things more cheaply than the other product, if most people can't easily get it to do the one thing they really buy it for. That's why the iPod has been so successful, even though there are tons of cheaper, more feature-rich products out there.
I'd call that "medium term" interest.
Record companies make their living off having a lock on promotional and distribution outlets, and use that lock to sign artists into highly exploitive contracts. The iTMS removes that lock (and they make deals with individual new artists), which undercuts the recording companies' long term survival strategy.
Here's the thing - once they have a substantial revenue stream through a particular outlet (like iTunes), they might whine, they might complain, and they might try to weasel around their commitments. But in the end, they won't do anything to endanger the revenue stream that they're seeing - revenue is their crack.
As long as Apple holds the vast majority of the download market and is adept at playing the traditional content distributors against each other, they're stuck. It's Apple's way or the highway, and they can't jump ship or they'll lose all of that oh-so-delicious free money they're seeing. The only success they'd have against Apple is to stage a mass revolt - which would be illegal collusion.
Jobs really has lured them into a trap where they'll end up destroying their long-term interests for short term profit. It's their nature, they can't help it.
Evil monopolist? Perhaps, but I can't think of anyone (other than maybe the oil companies) I'd rather see this happen to than the record labels and (eventually) the television studios.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
It's good to see that he's keeping with the times. This is the same argument that the neocons use to galvinize their base.
Just like the oh-so-threatened christians out there, the PC users are being oppressed by the nasty minority! Woe is them! Oh, the humanity! The unjustness of it all!
How dare this minority continue to exist and, worse, be noticed!
It's as easy case to make, to upsell someone with expanding needs from MySQL to Oracle. It makes sense the Oracle would want to bind more of those users to Oracle as an upgrade path.
It's much less easy to make the case for someone to "upgrade" from PostgreSQL to Oracle. PostgreSQL would cannibalize a small-but-significant portion of Oracle's more expensive sales, once the Oracle brand name was attached to it.
Seriously, people might not be thrilled about donating their upstream bandwidth to help defray's Apple's bandwidth costs... and I guarantee you that some people will frame it that way.
Interesting. This is in effect a bounty for attorneys to hunt phishers.
Expect to see some fraction of ambulance-chaser commercials in California turn into phisher-chaser commercials.
SS1 isn't the Shuttle. It's Mercury.
The important thing is that it's a Mercury program that will be able to survive on profits from the free market, not subject to the whims of some political hacks. This is sustainable, and will continue and be built upon no matter what fools take control of NASA's purse strings.
I wouldn't spend my last $200K on it, but even if prices stabilize at $200K, I'd probably spend it if I had a mere $1M and felt I couldn't wait. And there are a lot of people with a mere $1M. As is, I'll wait to see if the prices start to come down, but if they don't I'll probably pony up the cash in a couple of decades. If I were 60 or 70 instead of 35, I'd pony up the cash right now. Big deal. I've done 280 landings of normal aircraft according to my log book... haven't blown one yet.
In any case, that's fine. Cowards will inherit the Earth - the bold will go to the stars, sooner or later.
To the people asking about the reusability of a craft that's being put on display...
SpaceShip One was the testing prototype. The production models are already being built, for Virgin Galactic.
Yeah, that's right. A real company, run by someone who owns a real world-wide airline, will be using these babies for (near-) space tourism.
As a result, recording companies can ream new artists in exchange for the promotion and distribution that only they could offer.
The iTunes music store destroys the first advantage. No longer does a musician have to sell their soul (in the form of the rights to their creative output) to a record company in order to sell their music to you: they only have to talk to Apple now in order to sell their music (in fact, I have a number of indie friends who have done just that).
The second advantage will fade on its own, hurried on by payola scandals. The internet has taken the popularity of music out of the hands of recording industry executives, since fans can now communicate with each other.
The iTunes Music Store is driving a stake through the recording industry's dead, desicated heart. This was all largely inevitable, but now that they're starting to realize that they're doomed they're going to fight Apple in increasingly shrill manners.
I hope that someday the same structural shift will kill the deadlock television executives have over TV content.