Two points: A) Choice. If a crappy printout is good enough for me, then it should be possible to make one. Of course, the producers have manifold reasons to block such manoeuvres (profit?) to the full extent of the law, so there's... B) Price. How much does it actually cost to make a cartridge, including the head? I'm not saying that outrageous margins should be illegal (hey - if you can get away with it...), or even that there's some kind of bait-and-switch going on (so no-one can tell you how many pages you get per cartridge, because they don't know how much ink you use, but you can guess, and the prices for cartridges are known before you decide on a printer), but in the marketplace the way it is now, there's no producer who has not jumped on the bandwagon of cheap-printer / expensive cartridges. I just hope that someone at some point will trust consumer's intelligence so far that they believe the message "printer for $300, but cartridges for $8" will hit home. It sure would for me.
Yes, they put a lot of effort into R&D, yes it's a captive market subject to all the profit-maximisation formulas, yes I admit that the cartridge designs merit patents, thus preventing third-party cartridge producers from entering the marketplace... maybe I just think it's a shame to see the fantastic invention of affordable photo-quality printing at home not panning out.
I'll have a word with sysAdmin-dude... leaving out the original anecdote, perhaps:) (don't think he/.s... Peter? You there?)
Aaargh. Just talked to co-worker-dude: he's already formatted his disk & has started re-installing. Oh well. It comes to light that co-worker-dude no.2 has had the same LART applied. Maybe we can save him some time at least.
(... having used the word "LART" above, it occurs to me that maybe the procedure was intentional? Heh. A BOFH true to mine heart. Jus' don't touch my machine, eh.)
Anyway - thanks guys.
(Hah! I'll have to bring this one up next time someone makes the accusation that/. is a waste of time)
(Note: IANAA) Just now my co-worker came up to me with a tale of grief:
He came across a website with the iFrame-showing-the-local-disk trick. It was a new one on him (he's more on the business side of things), and he expressed outrage towards our sysAdmin. Unfortunately, the iFrame trick was a new one on our sysAdmin, too, and he (apparently) doesn't have a clue about permissions across frames in the browser. So instead of simply checking for the newest security patches and applying some soothing words, he feigns competence and resets all the permissions on all the local drives... leaving out any adminitrators and the computer itself. Try to reboot, and... fail. This leaves the poor sod of a co-worker with an un-bootable box, and two days worth of lost data.
(Heck, I'm not sure if the above is accurate, IANAA, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm jus' tellin' it how I hear it)... This was just an hour ago - I won't be mentioning sysAdmin day around here anyway, lest it be misinterpreted as "nail-the-sysAdmin-to-the-wall-day".
(PS: Anyone have a neat trick for recovering a Win2k box with SNAFU'd permissions? Bootdisk, and... ?... meh, I'm just the programmer)
This would be an interesting story purely from a business perspective, but the fact that it's about printers gives it a different spin.
Printer profits also depend on sales of ink, since the printers themselves are often sold at a loss [...]
The lack of true competition specifically in the inkjet / bubblejet market is sickening - there is hardly any other market where producers can get away with the shameless margins seen here. Basically you're paying $50 for a $5 piece of hobbled (i.e., you can't refil it) equipment, over and over again. I would prefer to pay a market price for a printer, if I got to pay a fair price for the cartridges later on. Hopefully a additional big player will even things out a bit.
1. Grab the cup with your thumb at the water level. 2. Pour the water into your mouth, but don't swallow. 3. Whip out your dick and piss in the cup, up to the level of your thumb. 4. Spit the water back into the cup.
If the water + piss fills the cup exactly, the cup was half full. If it spills over, the cup was more than half full. If it comes up short, the cup was less than half full.
Mmmmkay. Hafta have an answer that would be accepted by the archetypal anal-retentive Examinator in the thread somewhere tho...
Tip the cylinder until the water is almost starting to pour out, then check the level at the back. Compensate for surface tension (how? uh...).
(OK. So that just made me the anal-retentive examinee.)
I'm most certainly not in favor of censorship or any kind of control. The only exception is child pornography. Those kind of things can't be enough censored or condemned.
Doesn't it make you somehow suspicious if you have a general sweeping rule that covers absolutely everything for a certain subject - and then one needlepoint of exception, where the rule is turned completely on its head?
Not wanting to get into the specific discussion the boogyman kid pr0n, I merely want to point out that other people have other exceptions: blasphemy (this case), violence (images of real-life ritual mass murder are "okay"? Real-life rape vids are "okay" as long as all participants are of [an arbitrary] legal age?), political views (e.g. Nazi memorabilia in Germany), technical info ("how to build a nulcear bomb in twelve easy steps"), etc.
In this case, an Italian site (as I understand) was banned. They might ban an international site for all Italian ISPs, but they're not attempting to close down a site outside of Italy. Unless someone can come up with a general rule that has _no_ exceptions, I figure we're stuck with the moral quandary of relative ethics to no lesser degree than we are off the net. I agree that this article is newsworthy (/. worthy, even), but only as an example how the 'net is gradually meshing with meatspace, an "overlay" of the 'net onto a broad range of social environments, mores, histories. The Danish issue I find more alarming, although newsbooster is Danish site, too.
A mile is 1760 yards (or 5280 feet, or 63360 inches) BTW (get it? got it? good). What pressure does a cubic pint of water placed on a table excert on the table top, in pounds per square inch? What's that in tons per square yard?
Hey - you're just taking the piss, aren't you? (hey - I usually do that... darn, I missed that in this discussion)
Ten responses to this, and no-one points out the obvious: The main difference between imperial and metric measures is not the basis (human body versus some "arbitrary" measure), but rather the ease of use.
For instance: how much does a pint of water weigh, in imperial measure (in ounces, pounds, whatever)? What is the length of the edge of a cubic pint of water (in inches, furlongs,...). Or even the simple ones: how many inches to a mile? How many ounces to an imperial ton (or would that be "tonne")?
In metric measures the equivalent questions are trivial to answer (still didn't stop Arianne-V from crashing & burning tho:)
And as for the changeover: the question is hardly one of total cost, but rather one of specific cost. Think of the savings, in the very long run - the sooner the switch is made, the better.
I bought a Panasonic SV-SD75 MP3 player a couple of weeks back. Note the "SD" in the name - yes, it uses an SD-card. Means that I have to use their exteneded Real Jukebox (which incidentally runs ONLY on Win-98, not even any other Win) to pump anything to the card, and it takes >100 times as long as it should, no exaggeration: drag-dropping fills the card in seconds, but it takes Jukebox about 35 minutes to write 2 hours worth of files. Why? Encription. The files cannot be retrieved from the device, except by the device itself, to play them.
This has proven to be a complete showstopper for me, i.e. "Crap functionality that I don't fucking want" and which is supposed to benefit only the producer, the manufacturer, anyone but me, and it's doubtful that it does even that.
Anyway - this kind of stuff is exactly what I expect from Palladium, and I'm not looking forward to it.
Contrary to some comments to this article, I would say that cameras in mobile phones is an absolute lifestyle MUST-HAVE.
I mean, it's one thing hanging out on a beach on Ko Tao and just *calling* your friends back home in the drizzle - you only get to tell them how nice it is.
But if you can give them a vidio-pan of your surroundings at the same time, the whole undertaking acquires an actual point...
"Bert... check this out!" [pans camera]
Bert: "Uh..." [sound of jaw dropping]
"Wait! Who was that?!"
"Oh, just the beach bunnies who bring the drinks. They're always dressed like that."
Bert: "Uh... I wouldn't call that dressed, exactly."
"Anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm having a great time, and that I wish you could be here too."
- what I like about the strong guidelines is, that if they are followed, you "only" need to know what an app is supposed to be able to do (you need a pretty clear idea though) and, hey presto, you can make it do it. Everything falls into place according to some "hidden logic" - that is, the user is not conscious of the logic. (Like cutlery - if you can't exactly remember what the spoon was like that you used to eat your ice cream - then it was a good spoon. If it was memorable, then probably because it was unwieldy.)
- Apple is often touted to "have got it right the first time". This is the great strength of Apple OS, IMHO. I worked on some very early Macs, and now with OS 9x, things have been extended considerably, but fundamentally, it's just the same. The mark of genius (um, OK... nah, I think it's cool) is that the OS was extended to encompass stuff which hadn't even been dreamt up when it was first conceived - without breaking the basic look and feel. I guess this is why MS Office for Mac is often said to be better than the "native" version - the MS guys have sensible Apple guidelines to follow rather than having to reinvent the wheel. (And - compare Win 3x to Win 9x+... MS definitely got it wrong the first time)
The interesting question is how right they got OSX... time will tell.
Hey - that's right! The GCS crack was available a while after the game first came out. But if you copied the original disk (even using all the tricks I've long forgotten), you got the degredation. But GCS got it right... hmmm... basically proving what everybody says: there's ain't no uncrackable copy inhibition system.
I remember a clever copy-control mechanism the comapany making Zaxxon for the C-64 ("GCS" or something?) used: You could copy the disk, and even play the game, but all the graphics were degraded and semi-transparent. I guess it was supposed to aminate the copier to go purchase an original. Guess it worked, too, at least on me.
1: SD-cards. Pity to see this device being used so widely. WMMV, but round here they're about 80% more expensive that CF oe SM cards of the same capacity, and the one device I do have that uses them is prohibitively slow because of their SDMI implementation (an MP3 player that insists on secure formats: uploading 2 hours of music takes about half an hour). But that just aside - the Dana takes MMCs as well. They got that right, at least.
2: One of my favourite hobby horses: Apple's old e-mate (basically a newton in a clamshell, with a keyboard). Imagine a mobile that is useful - or at least amusing - and usable for market segments pre-schoolers, over students, up to professionals. You can use it as a glorified etch-a-sketch, or you can network it in a heterogenous environment. Takes a PCMCIA for WL and all. Plus - and this is always my main gripe: you could read a book on it. The screen was big enough for a page of text. My main turnoff for the Dana.
This my sound a bit, uh, arrogant, but in the basics this seems a bit unimaginitive to me. Two points:
- Snowcrash (been mentioned in some comments above): what I found frustrating about that story was the limitations: "teleporting in cyberspace is impossible [not implemented] because it would confuse users." Huh? What's the point of having a freely configurable environment if you're going to make it just like meatspace?
- Cthulu: I've never actually read any Lovelace (yet), but I really dug a description I read once: "Space around Cthulu becomes non-Euclidian..." Yay! Now if I go into a virtual environment, and I'm stuck with variations in gravity, perhaps some cludge to bend the law of conservation of momentum or something, but other than that, straight vanilla three-dee space, unit-style avatars etc. etc.... well, I'd be kinda disappointed.
(yadda yadda, so if I'm so cool, why don't I do it myself... heh... fine, I'm a user, "my passions are quotations", I confess!)
Point, though: how does pornography harm women? My thought would be that it permeates or even subverts society, and that in the long-to-very-long run, where will be more men (especially) than there would be without pornography, to whom it never occurs that, basically (and this is quite banal), woman are people too. I posit that it actually goes that far. What annoys me is some stuff on the web of the extreme style "and here's a vidcap of a bitch being raped. But she's enjoying it really. Don't they all". I get the feeling that too many actually believe it, on some level.
Of course, censorship in any form is not the solution (like making the "Auschwitzlüge" a crime in many European coutries. Let them expose themselves for the fools they are, I say), but rather the frustratingly gradual process of individual viligance. Teach your children. Teach anyone. Friend laughing at a comment like the one above? "Uh, dude, that ain't really funny you know."
And in the end, each society will receive just what it deserves (then again, maybe it's as effective as the invisible hand. But I digress.)
Your kids have better chance of turning out well-adjusted be modern-day standards (well, mainly yours, but I assume you are not an island). The other's kids have a even chance of turning out either maladjusted "by modern standards", or working it out for themselves.
And the result is the stunning mix we call society.
A bit abstract, but my point is that what I find interesting about a person is not how well they fit in, how well-adjusted they are, but rather what is different about them, how they see the world in a different way from the way I do. It sporadically occurs to me that I value conformity way too highly. Nonconformities can too quickly be put down as maladjustments. Heck, it could be artistic genius for all I know.
So... you bring up your kids responsibly, others seem not to. Why are you worrying about other people's kids?
[...] while the librarians, hampered by legal constraints [...]
... which is just as it should be. Who are the librarians to say who gets to see what? They might set neutral time limits to ensure equal access, but frowning upon adolescents viewing porn is based purely on moral outrage. Perhaps move the computers to a more open area? Glass desks - screen facing a wall though - who cares who surfs what? Point being the one of free speech: if the librarians, lawmakers, whoever, get to say porn is not OK to surf, down the road they get to say materials of a libertarian or green nature are not OK to surf. Stop people whacking off in the library - fine. Stop people from *viewing* anything in the library - uh, no.
Beat me with a clue-stick and mod me down, but here's an idea which probably is decades old and has a nifty name:
Space is rather inhomogeneous in this age. Matter and energy (well, yeah, essentially the same thing) is concentrated in points - stars and surrounding planets - and merrily radiating itself into the great heat sink which is the sky, and into oblivion. Life, as we understand it, but also how we may come to understand it in the future, thrives on the "interface", physically speaking simply slowing down flow of energy toward the heat sink by a very minute bit. For instance - all energy the human race uses is "old energy": either from the sun (food, oil,...) or good old mother earth (geothermal, the fact that the earth isn't an ice planet, nuclear etc.). This interface is where "Things Happen" - where there is a source of energy on the one side, and a sink on the other. Within such a thin "biosphere", things at least have the possibility of becoming complex - as they have done on earth. Now my point is that there are plenty of other places even within the solar system where things have the potential for complexity, moreover steadily so over the millennia necessary for systems as complex as life to develop: the surface of the sun, the surfaces of the inner planets (the outer ones might be too cold), the moons of the gas giants, or the atmospheres of the gas giants themselves. So, especially if we include the surface of stars, there are at least as many places in the galaxy where life might occur as there are stars - even more, life we might be capable of recognising as such. Just don't expect SETI to pick up radio signals off the "surface" of stars - I think interference might prove to be a bit of a hindrance there. We might not have very much in common with the majority of conceivable forms of life out there, and thus little to communicate about, but we might at least discover it some day, and recognise it as life.
Why this post?... Just a counterpoint to the idea "life = water, carbon , median temperature ~ 20 deg. C, ozone layer against radiation, bla bla".
I posit that "life (*may*) = some kind of building blocks, plus an energy differential of some kind."
The keyword for me is "non-obvious". And this is the point there I have the impression the patent office is letting way too much through. In this instance the question could be "if I let a bunch of GUI hacks loose on this problem, how likely are they to come up with something similar?". I would think close to 100% certainty.
Adobe addresses this aspect only in Q8: "Adobe will not be the R&D department for its competitors". ... Arr and Dee? This isn't a rocket engine whose blast chamber is cooled by its own liquid hydrogen fuel... more likely it's something some annoyed user-cum-developper prototyped in two New York minutes, and said "uh, sure. whatever." when asked if Adobe could use it.
IAdefinitelyNAL, so I go by the spirit of the law - and in this case (as many others) I see nothing but a straight-out lie in the answer to Q10, "[...] is Adobe simply using litigation as a tool to beat its competitor?"
Sun says that the background of this decision is many customers' desire to receive professional support as part of their software licence. This includes for example distribution in a package with CD-ROMs and manuals, corresponding agreements as to the number of licenses, as well as continual software maintenance and upgrades from Sun. In this case, corporate customers will receive an Enterprise Edition at "cost-covering prices", the height of which has not yet been released by Sun.
Director of marketing Martin Häring declares: "With this decision Sun is emphasising the strategic significance of StarOffice for the company. Licence fees guarantee our continued development and support for this product, and are at the same time a reaction to the stance of many customers take, who out of principle do not allow free [as in beer] software to be used for mission-critical applications."
... sounds sensible to me. OpenOffice stays free, and PHBs have far less of a reason to nix the switch away from the evil empire. Sun can hardly offer professional-level support on a free product. They might offer just the support, but then the package would be missing (with the doorstops, eh, manuals, and the coasters, eh, CDs). Sounds great... simply, to each his own.
Slashdot Mirror
Two points: ... ...), or even that there's some kind of bait-and-switch going on (so no-one can tell you how many pages you get per cartridge, because they don't know how much ink you use, but you can guess, and the prices for cartridges are known before you decide on a printer), but in the marketplace the way it is now, there's no producer who has not jumped on the bandwagon of cheap-printer / expensive cartridges. I just hope that someone at some point will trust consumer's intelligence so far that they believe the message "printer for $300, but cartridges for $8" will hit home. It sure would for me.
... maybe I just think it's a shame to see the fantastic invention of affordable photo-quality printing at home not panning out.
A) Choice. If a crappy printout is good enough for me, then it should be possible to make one. Of course, the producers have manifold reasons to block such manoeuvres (profit?) to the full extent of the law, so there's
B) Price. How much does it actually cost to make a cartridge, including the head? I'm not saying that outrageous margins should be illegal (hey - if you can get away with it
Yes, they put a lot of effort into R&D, yes it's a captive market subject to all the profit-maximisation formulas, yes I admit that the cartridge designs merit patents, thus preventing third-party cartridge producers from entering the marketplace
Thanks Sylver Dragon and Amazing Quantum Man ...
... leaving out the original anecdote, perhaps :) /.s ... Peter? You there?)
/. is a waste of time)
I'll have a word with sysAdmin-dude
(don't think he
Aaargh. Just talked to co-worker-dude: he's already formatted his disk & has started re-installing. Oh well.
It comes to light that co-worker-dude no.2 has had the same LART applied. Maybe we can save him some time at least.
(... having used the word "LART" above, it occurs to me that maybe the procedure was intentional? Heh. A BOFH true to mine heart. Jus' don't touch my machine, eh.)
Anyway - thanks guys.
(Hah! I'll have to bring this one up next time someone makes the accusation that
(Note: IANAA)
... leaving out any adminitrators and the computer itself. Try to reboot, and ... fail.
... This was just an hour ago - I won't be mentioning sysAdmin day around here anyway, lest it be misinterpreted as "nail-the-sysAdmin-to-the-wall-day".
... ? ... meh, I'm just the programmer)
Just now my co-worker came up to me with a tale of grief:
He came across a website with the iFrame-showing-the-local-disk trick. It was a new one on him (he's more on the business side of things), and he expressed outrage towards our sysAdmin. Unfortunately, the iFrame trick was a new one on our sysAdmin, too, and he (apparently) doesn't have a clue about permissions across frames in the browser. So instead of simply checking for the newest security patches and applying some soothing words, he feigns competence and resets all the permissions on all the local drives
This leaves the poor sod of a co-worker with an un-bootable box, and two days worth of lost data.
(Heck, I'm not sure if the above is accurate, IANAA, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm jus' tellin' it how I hear it)
(PS: Anyone have a neat trick for recovering a Win2k box with SNAFU'd permissions? Bootdisk, and
This would be an interesting story purely from a business perspective, but the fact that it's about printers gives it a different spin.
Printer profits also depend on sales of ink, since the printers themselves are often sold at a loss [...]
The lack of true competition specifically in the inkjet / bubblejet market is sickening - there is hardly any other market where producers can get away with the shameless margins seen here. Basically you're paying $50 for a $5 piece of hobbled (i.e., you can't refil it) equipment, over and over again. I would prefer to pay a market price for a printer, if I got to pay a fair price for the cartridges later on. Hopefully a additional big player will even things out a bit.
1. Grab the cup with your thumb at the water level.
...
2. Pour the water into your mouth, but don't swallow.
3. Whip out your dick and piss in the cup, up to the level of your thumb.
4. Spit the water back into the cup.
If the water + piss fills the cup exactly, the cup was half full. If it spills over, the cup was more than half full. If it comes up short, the cup was less than half full.
Mmmmkay. Hafta have an answer that would be accepted by the archetypal anal-retentive Examinator in the thread somewhere tho
Tip the cylinder until the water is almost starting to pour out, then check the level at the back. Compensate for surface tension (how? uh...).
(OK. So that just made me the anal-retentive examinee.)
Damn. I have a cordless mouse.
a.k.a. "IOBM" - Intra-Office Ballistic Missile.
That's some dangerous shit you've got there.
I'm most certainly not in favor of censorship or any kind of control. The only exception is child pornography. Those kind of things can't be enough censored or condemned.
/. worthy, even), but only as an example how the 'net is gradually meshing with meatspace, an "overlay" of the 'net onto a broad range of social environments, mores, histories. The Danish issue I find more alarming, although newsbooster is Danish site, too.
Doesn't it make you somehow suspicious if you have a general sweeping rule that covers absolutely everything for a certain subject - and then one needlepoint of exception, where the rule is turned completely on its head?
Not wanting to get into the specific discussion the boogyman kid pr0n, I merely want to point out that other people have other exceptions: blasphemy (this case), violence (images of real-life ritual mass murder are "okay"? Real-life rape vids are "okay" as long as all participants are of [an arbitrary] legal age?), political views (e.g. Nazi memorabilia in Germany), technical info ("how to build a nulcear bomb in twelve easy steps"), etc.
In this case, an Italian site (as I understand) was banned. They might ban an international site for all Italian ISPs, but they're not attempting to close down a site outside of Italy. Unless someone can come up with a general rule that has _no_ exceptions, I figure we're stuck with the moral quandary of relative ethics to no lesser degree than we are off the net. I agree that this article is newsworthy (
A mile is 1760 yards (or 5280 feet, or 63360 inches) BTW (get it? got it? good).
... darn, I missed that in this discussion)
What pressure does a cubic pint of water placed on a table excert on the table top, in pounds per square inch? What's that in tons per square yard?
Hey - you're just taking the piss, aren't you? (hey - I usually do that
Ten responses to this, and no-one points out the obvious: The main difference between imperial and metric measures is not the basis (human body versus some "arbitrary" measure), but rather the ease of use.
...). Or even the simple ones: how many inches to a mile? How many ounces to an imperial ton (or would that be "tonne")?
:)
For instance: how much does a pint of water weigh, in imperial measure (in ounces, pounds, whatever)? What is the length of the edge of a cubic pint of water (in inches, furlongs,
In metric measures the equivalent questions are trivial to answer (still didn't stop Arianne-V from crashing & burning tho
And as for the changeover: the question is hardly one of total cost, but rather one of specific cost. Think of the savings, in the very long run - the sooner the switch is made, the better.
I bought a Panasonic SV-SD75 MP3 player a couple of weeks back. Note the "SD" in the name - yes, it uses an SD-card. Means that I have to use their exteneded Real Jukebox (which incidentally runs ONLY on Win-98, not even any other Win) to pump anything to the card, and it takes >100 times as long as it should, no exaggeration: drag-dropping fills the card in seconds, but it takes Jukebox about 35 minutes to write 2 hours worth of files. Why? Encription. The files cannot be retrieved from the device, except by the device itself, to play them.
This has proven to be a complete showstopper for me, i.e. "Crap functionality that I don't fucking want" and which is supposed to benefit only the producer, the manufacturer, anyone but me, and it's doubtful that it does even that.
Anyway - this kind of stuff is exactly what I expect from Palladium, and I'm not looking forward to it.
Contrary to some comments to this article, I would say that cameras in mobile phones is an absolute lifestyle MUST-HAVE.
...
... check this out!" [pans camera]
..." [sound of jaw dropping]
... I wouldn't call that dressed, exactly."
... I've got to get one of these ...
I mean, it's one thing hanging out on a beach on Ko Tao and just *calling* your friends back home in the drizzle - you only get to tell them how nice it is.
But if you can give them a vidio-pan of your surroundings at the same time, the whole undertaking acquires an actual point
"Bert
Bert: "Uh
"Wait! Who was that?!"
"Oh, just the beach bunnies who bring the drinks. They're always dressed like that."
Bert: "Uh
"Anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm having a great time, and that I wish you could be here too."
Bert: "You got that bloody right, mate."
Yes
I agree (me too! me too! :)
... nah, I think it's cool) is that the OS was extended to encompass stuff which hadn't even been dreamt up when it was first conceived - without breaking the basic look and feel. I guess this is why MS Office for Mac is often said to be better than the "native" version - the MS guys have sensible Apple guidelines to follow rather than having to reinvent the wheel. (And - compare Win 3x to Win 9x+ ... MS definitely got it wrong the first time)
... time will tell.
Two points:
- what I like about the strong guidelines is, that if they are followed, you "only" need to know what an app is supposed to be able to do (you need a pretty clear idea though) and, hey presto, you can make it do it. Everything falls into place according to some "hidden logic" - that is, the user is not conscious of the logic. (Like cutlery - if you can't exactly remember what the spoon was like that you used to eat your ice cream - then it was a good spoon. If it was memorable, then probably because it was unwieldy.)
- Apple is often touted to "have got it right the first time". This is the great strength of Apple OS, IMHO. I worked on some very early Macs, and now with OS 9x, things have been extended considerably, but fundamentally, it's just the same. The mark of genius (um, OK
The interesting question is how right they got OSX
Hey - that's right! The GCS crack was available a while after the game first came out. But if you copied the original disk (even using all the tricks I've long forgotten), you got the degredation. But GCS got it right ... hmmm ... basically proving what everybody says: there's ain't no uncrackable copy inhibition system.
... now who actually made Zaxxon, I wonder?
I remember a clever copy-control mechanism the comapany making Zaxxon for the C-64 ("GCS" or something?) used:
You could copy the disk, and even play the game, but all the graphics were degraded and semi-transparent. I guess it was supposed to aminate the copier to go purchase an original. Guess it worked, too, at least on me.
1: SD-cards. Pity to see this device being used so widely. WMMV, but round here they're about 80% more expensive that CF oe SM cards of the same capacity, and the one device I do have that uses them is prohibitively slow because of their SDMI implementation (an MP3 player that insists on secure formats: uploading 2 hours of music takes about half an hour). But that just aside - the Dana takes MMCs as well. They got that right, at least.
2: One of my favourite hobby horses: Apple's old e-mate (basically a newton in a clamshell, with a keyboard). Imagine a mobile that is useful - or at least amusing - and usable for market segments pre-schoolers, over students, up to professionals. You can use it as a glorified etch-a-sketch, or you can network it in a heterogenous environment. Takes a PCMCIA for WL and all. Plus - and this is always my main gripe: you could read a book on it. The screen was big enough for a page of text. My main turnoff for the Dana.
Uh ... yeah. Thanks.
(Hey, I was programming at the time. I plead temporary misassociation.)
This my sound a bit, uh, arrogant, but in the basics this seems a bit unimaginitive to me.
..." Yay! Now if I go into a virtual environment, and I'm stuck with variations in gravity, perhaps some cludge to bend the law of conservation of momentum or something, but other than that, straight vanilla three-dee space, unit-style avatars etc. etc. ... well, I'd be kinda disappointed.
... heh ... fine, I'm a user, "my passions are quotations", I confess!)
Two points:
- Snowcrash (been mentioned in some comments above): what I found frustrating about that story was the limitations: "teleporting in cyberspace is impossible [not implemented] because it would confuse users." Huh? What's the point of having a freely configurable environment if you're going to make it just like meatspace?
- Cthulu: I've never actually read any Lovelace (yet), but I really dug a description I read once: "Space around Cthulu becomes non-Euclidian
(yadda yadda, so if I'm so cool, why don't I do it myself
Whatever. I'll get round to it. Sometime.
Excellent post - thank you.
Point, though: how does pornography harm women? My thought would be that it permeates or even subverts society, and that in the long-to-very-long run, where will be more men (especially) than there would be without pornography, to whom it never occurs that, basically (and this is quite banal), woman are people too. I posit that it actually goes that far.
What annoys me is some stuff on the web of the extreme style "and here's a vidcap of a bitch being raped. But she's enjoying it really. Don't they all". I get the feeling that too many actually believe it, on some level.
Of course, censorship in any form is not the solution (like making the "Auschwitzlüge" a crime in many European coutries. Let them expose themselves for the fools they are, I say), but rather the frustratingly gradual process of individual viligance. Teach your children. Teach anyone. Friend laughing at a comment like the one above? "Uh, dude, that ain't really funny you know."
And in the end, each society will receive just what it deserves (then again, maybe it's as effective as the invisible hand. But I digress.)
You're a responsible parent. Good.
... you bring up your kids responsibly, others seem not to. Why are you worrying about other people's kids?
Others are irresponsible parents. Whatever.
Your kids have better chance of turning out well-adjusted be modern-day standards (well, mainly yours, but I assume you are not an island).
The other's kids have a even chance of turning out either maladjusted "by modern standards", or working it out for themselves.
And the result is the stunning mix we call society.
A bit abstract, but my point is that what I find interesting about a person is not how well they fit in, how well-adjusted they are, but rather what is different about them, how they see the world in a different way from the way I do. It sporadically occurs to me that I value conformity way too highly. Nonconformities can too quickly be put down as maladjustments. Heck, it could be artistic genius for all I know.
So
[...] while the librarians, hampered by legal constraints [...]
... which is just as it should be. Who are the librarians to say who gets to see what? They might set neutral time limits to ensure equal access, but frowning upon adolescents viewing porn is based purely on moral outrage. Perhaps move the computers to a more open area? Glass desks - screen facing a wall though - who cares who surfs what? Point being the one of free speech: if the librarians, lawmakers, whoever, get to say porn is not OK to surf, down the road they get to say materials of a libertarian or green nature are not OK to surf.
Stop people whacking off in the library - fine. Stop people from *viewing* anything in the library - uh, no.
Beat me with a clue-stick and mod me down, but here's an idea which probably is decades old and has a nifty name:
...) or good old mother earth (geothermal, the fact that the earth isn't an ice planet, nuclear etc.). This interface is where "Things Happen" - where there is a source of energy on the one side, and a sink on the other. Within such a thin "biosphere", things at least have the possibility of becoming complex - as they have done on earth.
... Just a counterpoint to the idea "life = water, carbon , median temperature ~ 20 deg. C, ozone layer against radiation, bla bla".
Space is rather inhomogeneous in this age. Matter and energy (well, yeah, essentially the same thing) is concentrated in points - stars and surrounding planets - and merrily radiating itself into the great heat sink which is the sky, and into oblivion. Life, as we understand it, but also how we may come to understand it in the future, thrives on the "interface", physically speaking simply slowing down flow of energy toward the heat sink by a very minute bit. For instance - all energy the human race uses is "old energy": either from the sun (food, oil,
Now my point is that there are plenty of other places even within the solar system where things have the potential for complexity, moreover steadily so over the millennia necessary for systems as complex as life to develop: the surface of the sun, the surfaces of the inner planets (the outer ones might be too cold), the moons of the gas giants, or the atmospheres of the gas giants themselves.
So, especially if we include the surface of stars, there are at least as many places in the galaxy where life might occur as there are stars - even more, life we might be capable of recognising as such. Just don't expect SETI to pick up radio signals off the "surface" of stars - I think interference might prove to be a bit of a hindrance there. We might not have very much in common with the majority of conceivable forms of life out there, and thus little to communicate about, but we might at least discover it some day, and recognise it as life.
Why this post?
I posit that "life (*may*) = some kind of building blocks, plus an energy differential of some kind."
The keyword for me is "non-obvious". And this is the point there I have the impression the patent office is letting way too much through. In this instance the question could be "if I let a bunch of GUI hacks loose on this problem, how likely are they to come up with something similar?". I would think close to 100% certainty.
... more likely it's something some annoyed user-cum-developper prototyped in two New York minutes, and said "uh, sure. whatever." when asked if Adobe could use it.
Adobe addresses this aspect only in Q8: "Adobe will not be the R&D department for its competitors".
... Arr and Dee? This isn't a rocket engine whose blast chamber is cooled by its own liquid hydrogen fuel
IAdefinitelyNAL, so I go by the spirit of the law - and in this case (as many others) I see nothing but a straight-out lie in the answer to Q10, "[...] is Adobe simply using litigation as a tool to beat its competitor?"
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaarg!
... I thought I was painting a vivid worst-case scenario there ... but noooo )
:)
(ugh
Sun says that the background of this decision is many customers' desire to receive professional support as part of their software licence. This includes for example distribution in a package with CD-ROMs and manuals, corresponding agreements as to the number of licenses, as well as continual software maintenance and upgrades from Sun. In this case, corporate customers will receive an Enterprise Edition at "cost-covering prices", the height of which has not yet been released by Sun.
... simply, to each his own.
Director of marketing Martin Häring declares: "With this decision Sun is emphasising the strategic significance of StarOffice for the company. Licence fees guarantee our continued development and support for this product, and are at the same time a reaction to the stance of many customers take, who out of principle do not allow free [as in beer] software to be used for mission-critical applications."
... sounds sensible to me. OpenOffice stays free, and PHBs have far less of a reason to nix the switch away from the evil empire.
Sun can hardly offer professional-level support on a free product. They might offer just the support, but then the package would be missing (with the doorstops, eh, manuals, and the coasters, eh, CDs). Sounds great
Someone, somewhere, is thinking about a remake.
Lord, please stop them.