Oops. I forgot to put the paper in! Oops. I forgot to get new ink carts! Oops. I incinerated the damn thing and sent it back to AT&T with a venom-dripping letter!
If AT&T tried push-printing, they'd get crucified. Either by lawyers applying the aforementioned fax-spam laws, or by consumer backlash.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
1. Notepad. 2. WindowBlinds 3. Ask Bruce. 4. VBScript. What rock have you been hiding under? 5. SuSE. 6 CDs and GoOFY Ex-ApPLE ExEC CaPS. 6. Kernel or distro? (I don't know. AAAAhhhhgggghhhh!) 7. Whatever the CPU uses. 8. Buy, run until dead, repeat. 9. Clean. What if I was in an accident? 10. Real redheads first, otherwise it's a non-factor. 11. Paper. Did you get safety scissors, paste, and plastic in kindergarten? I think not. 12. Mary Ann. (Odd considering my response to 10. Guess I wasn't looking at her hair.:-)) 13. n/a 14. 1, 2-hoo, 3, (crunch). Three. 15. Babylon 5. Farscape's cool, but Sheridan would have nuked Scorpius by now. 16. n/a. 17. British Racing Green over tan leather. 18. Frames. Otherwise, I have to tape everything up, and then the paint starts peeling.... 19. Silence. 20. Twisty back road with no cops. 21. Dr. Seuss. 22. How many times do I have to tell you? The right tool for the right job! 23. Unreal Tournament Domination. 24. Some $0.33 stamps and an unplugged modem, until I get a new e-mail/PIM client. Damn Outlook! 25. Hex. 26. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee shoots and scores! Oh, buy Sam a drink, and get his dog one, too! 27. Hemos.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
For example the new Honda hybrid...Why try and make it look all futuristic when it comes out just plain ugly. My friends and I boggle our minds trying to figure out why Honda doesn't convert an Accord or even a Civic over to the hybrid engine. The words out of everyones mouth i talk to about the hybrid car are the same..."It's so damn ugly."
Simple: Aerodynamics. The designers are trying to squeeze every last mile-per-gallon from the vehicle, so we get oddness like fastbacks and fender skirts. If anything, Insight shows what happens when engineers get "final cut" on a car's design.
It almost seems like they have contemporary artists designing cars now instead of engineers.
Good! I'm sick of transportation appliances like Accord and Camry ruling American roads. I wish Peugeot was still in the US market. I'd buy a 406 Coupe on the basis of looks alone. For those who've never seen one, imagine what a Camry Solara would look like if Toyota hadn't sucked the life out of it.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I believe Mitsubishi or Toyota is experimenting with direct-injection gasoline engines. Anyone know how their progress is?
Mitsubishi now has cars on the road in Japan and, iirc, Europe, with Gasoline Direct Injection. They hold the patents, and have licensed the technology to some other manufacturers. I don't remember who they were, or if any of them are on-the-road yet.
According to Mitsu's PR, they dynamically adjust the timing of fuel injection for an efficient, high-torque burn at low RPMs, and horsepower at higher RPMs, with lower emmissions across the board. Unfortunately, the emmissions advantage over conventional intake port injection is nullified by the high sulfur content in American gas, which is why they don't sell them here. Hopefully, when low-sulfur gas is available in the US, GDI engines will follow.
Ooh. This buzzword-laden thought just rattled 'round my head: GDI twin-spark Hemi with camless valvetrain
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Re:I don't think this is a film about scientology.
on
Battlefield Earth
·
· Score: 1
I have gotten as far as 3/4 through Heinlein's "the cat who walks through walls" and dropped it. I have not to this day picked up another of his books.
Bummer of a first impression. It was the second novel novel of his that I read, after Job. I immediately grabbed Stranger In a Strange Land to wash the taste from my mouth. You might try one of the more acclaimed novels, like Stranger... or Friday.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
The unfortunate truth is that "normal" people consider MicroSoft to be gods. They see Bill's incredible success and marvel at it. They see the newest version of Windows and stand bug-eyed when they see their start menu fade in.
You've just touched on the one thing that has kept Microsoft free of "entanglements" over the years: the Great, Unwashed Masses. One day, way back when, Gates had the epiphany that the average computer user probably won't understand what they're using. Ever since then, Microsoft has thrived by using "mushroom marketing": Keep consumers in the dark, feed them male bovine waste, and hope nobody realizes what they're swallowing.
The majority of Americans are anti-breakup because they probably don't know how many times Microsoft has shrugged off repeated slaps on the wrist. Had this happened in a more traditional industry, like automobiles or household appliances or the phone company;-), the offending company would have been crucified by now.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Jason, not to quibble over semantics, but I think there's a difference between the Web's infrastructure (the Internet) and the Web itself.
You're right that the whole thing didn't happen in some digital parthenogenesis of computer geeks, Amazon wannabees, Buffy otaku, Russian mail-order brides, and wave after wave of AOL newbies. But beyond the top-level domains, IETF and W3C didn't really do anything about the structure and community of the Web. They just built the superhighways. We lined them with subdivisions and shopping malls.
<apology>I know I dragged the "information superhighway" metaphor out of its tomb, but it's not a bad description of the infrastructure. Blame the clue-impaired politicians and media slugs for ruining it.;-)</apology>
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
If you spray paint your manifesto all over the walls of someone else's building, it's still graffiti, and it's still vandalism, no matter how insightful or eloquent you may be.
If a virus displays "i am a 31337 hax0r! fsck the mpaa!" in 96 point type while sending your credit card numbers to some Pakistani server, then reformatting your hard drive, it's still theft and destruction of property.
Of course, IANA Supreme Court Justice.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Who here can name the "last" man on the Moon, without looking it up? I just took the tour at Kennedy Space Center last week, and I don't think I can name one member of Apollo 17's crew.
To a geek, yes, the Moon is still cool. To Joe and Jane Average, with their 2.3 kids, 2 cars, and 1 dog, it wasn't such a big deal. Never mind that without all those later Apollo and Apollo/Soyuz missions, the DirecTV dish on the roof and the iMac in the den probably wouldn't exist, and the Explorer and Camry in the driveway might as well be a Galaxie and a Valiant. Having only a layman's understanding of the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs leads to the firsts as the only things that stand out: Apollo 11 and STS-1. Been There, Done That.
The general (meaning non-geek) public was told Iridium would revolutionize communications. It didn't, and now the satellites, and the money to develop and launch them, are going up in the friction-induced flames of re-entry. Compound that by the aftermath of the Mars mission snafus, and you can understand the public perception, echoed by Sterling, that space is turning out to be a letdown.
Sure, we know better. That's why we're bitching on Slashdot, not reading it in a newspaper and bitching to the room at-large.
BTW, Cryptonomicon is the latest by Neal Stephenson. Bruce Sterling's latest book was Distraction.
BTW2, I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center if you are at all interested in space exploration. Standing next to a real Saturn V will give you a whole new appreciation for the acheivements of the Apollo astronauts.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
DVD: I think there are some licensing issues Be is struggling with. Be would probably get themselves sued hard if they decided to support DVD media the same way they support CD media (ripper built in to CD Player, CD Burner designed for audio, etc.) Of course, Xing isn't getting sued for leaving their keys lying about where any Scandinavian hacker could find them, but that's a whole 'nother rant.
GL Hardware Accel.: Still in development. BeNews had a couple of articles (OpenGL Status in Release 5 and R. Jason Sams Talks About the OpenGL on BeOS) on this last month. Sams goes into the guts of the new OpenGL subsystem. They're using some neat tricks to optimize the performance, so when it (finally) arrives, it should be lickety-split quick.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
This article on BeNews describes how to work around the "limitations" of the FreeBe package. I haven't yet looked to see if the CD image has been posted yet, but if you install from that, you can create a full-fledged BFS partition, without size limitations. And if you boot from it, or from a boot floppy, SMP will be enabled. It's only disabled in the Win9x-based bootloader. <sarcasm>Thanks, Microsoft, for disabling that "extraneous" processor!</sarcasm>
I've read through BeNews' preview, and the only thing that really stands out among missing features (compared to the boxed version) is the MP3 codec, because of licensing issues, naturally. Other than that, everything works. It just takes more work if you won't or can't run things from Win9x.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
While it would be nice to see the whole package on Linux, just having the renderer is still a big deal. Most computer animation studios use a "render farm," which is, basically, a room full of workstations doing all of the rendering gruntwork in parallel. Right now, that's all done with expensive MIPS/Sparc/Alpha-class iron. With Maya's renderer for Linux, building a render farm becomes easier and cheaper, since you can now use cheap, off-the-shelf x86 PC components.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast
You're OK as long as you don't have Sprint Wireless Web.
Which I don't, thank God. I can't picture the web on my Palm, let alone the 4x12 character display on my cell phone. I don't surf the web with my land-line phone. Why would I with a cell phone? Let's leave data access to data devices.
Ahh. Glad to have that off my chest.:-)
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast
There is no profit in video game console hardware. From Day One, the boxes themselves are sold at a loss. They start out with a relatively high price, say US$225-US$275, and a selection of (hopefully) very high quality software, to get the ball rolling. The key is that there will always be huge margins on the software. If the first batch of games catches on, and the second wave generates enough buzz, the system becomes self-sustaining, and the console's price begins to drop. Hence, $99 Playstations and N64s.
Besides, there's a big difference between using monopoly power to crush one little company in an emerging market, and entering a space that's already occupied by three firmly entrenched players.
On which network would this mini series air on? Sci-Fi?
Yessiree, Bob! Sci Fi has been talking about this for a couple years, and they started promoting it during their "Sci2K" campaign this past December. So we can probably expect to see it premier during the fall sweeps.
As long it's closer in quality to Farscape than Welcome To Paradox, I'll be happy. Anything's better than Lynch's long, strange trip.
You have to click on one of the buttons that doesn't look like a button inside the speech bubble that most people don't read. So they sit there clicking on the close icon for a bit longer. Gagh. Has this been fixed in O2K?
No, they made it worse: There's no bounding window! The character floats freestyle above the application window. You have to right-click on it to do anything except drag it out of the way. I use Outlook 2000 at home, and Outlook 98 at work. 98 came with an "Absolutely no moving parts" version of the Office Logo character that, as advertised, did absolutely nothing. I'd turn everything off except showing alarms for appointments, and it worked great. Now, in 2000, the animated Office Logo is back, and swirling and spinning and gleaming every time I do something. I'd turn the damn thing off, except I prefer the yellow-bubble alarms to the messageboxes that tend to pop up over whatever I'm working on.
Starting with a simplified system would perhaps alleviate this. But how can this be done? Simply taking out half the menu options seems a bit crude.:-)
Crude, yet effective. Maybe not from the point of view of progressive disclosure, but from what I call "How'd I do that?" Syndrome. I don't know how many times I've gotten "tech support" calls from family members, asking about some weird thing that just happened in Word 97 (which doesn't have the personal menus feature). Almost without fail, the problem was that they clicked somewhere they shouldn't have, and executed some obscure command, or moved a toolbar, or some other nonsense. All of this could easily have been prevented by simply hiding the things they don't use. That way, there are fewer click targets to hit by accident.
Of course, upgrading them to Word 2000 would help. So would taking their power cords away until they actually read the Dummies books I got them, instead of complaining that they don't know what to look up in the index. Of course, if Windows and Word were properly designed, we wouldn't need the Dummies books. And so it goes....
Once, Word and Excel had a Tip Wizard that watched what the user did, and suggested alternative methods for some tasks. In Office 4.2 (from the otherwise bad, old 16-bit days), this was a toolbar that docked at the top or bottom of the screen. When it had a tip, it simply scrolled into view, accompanied by nothing more than a light bulb icon at one end of the bar lighting up. Simple, non-disruptive, and sometimes quite helpful. Now, that function has been rolled into the Office Assistant, more commonly known as "That *%(*%&^%&^ Paper Clip!" When Office has a tip for you, the Paper Clip makes some animated noise to get your attention. You have to stop what you're doing, and click on the little light bulb next to the Paper Clip to get to the tip. And if you've hidden the Paper Clip, thus banishing it to the Circle of Hell which spawned it, you don't get any tips at all! Leave it to Microsoft to come up with software with the personality of a surly DMV clerk or a clingy, co-dependent girlfriend, with no useful middle ground.
Wow, Rob, that "overhype just like a real local newscaster" class is really paying off. What's up for next week? "What THEY Don't Want You To Know About HTML"?
This is an easy shot to take, especially after the L0phtCrack debacle. Speaking as a UI developer, however, I'd have to agree with Rob on this one.
The whole thing falls apart because local affiliates get screwed out of local time in network programming. If everyone's watching iCraveTV, nobody's watching WPXI in Pittsburgh.* Outside big markets like New York and Los Angeles, most affiliates run on tight budgets, particularly if the network is small, like The WB or UPN. If small affiliates like those go under, the network loses impressions (RealPlayer on a 56K dialup is a poor substitute), the network loses money, and the already below-average programming gets worse.
* I chose WPXI as an example only because I can see their studio outside my office window. If I was on the other side of the building, it would be KDKA. No commentary is expressed or implied. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. See dealer for lease terms.
6. AOL Time Warner will allow ISPs to provide video streaming. AOL Time Warner recognizes that some consumers desire video streaming, and AOL Time Warner will not block or limit it.
The pessimist in me will only believe it when he sees it. OTOH, this could push @Home and it's affiliates to remove their blocks/limits. I guess this is an advantage of owning movie and TV studios: If it's a Warner Bros. production, the money still makes its way back to them.
It's a win-win for AOLTW. If a subscriber wants AOL, AOLTW makes money directly from subscription fees. If the subscriber wants another ISP, AOLTW makes money from the access aggreement between themselves and the ISP. As long as they live up to their promise to treat all ISPs equally, the competition should make it a win for consumers as well.
By "consumer choice," they mean that TW cable customers can choose from multiple ISPs who offer broadband over TW's cable lines. AOL will be one of those ISPs, with AOL's client and "features" on top. It would be nice if I could get Time Warner cable over Comcast's lines, but Microsoft would sooner switch to ELF binaries!:-)
Have you noticed how Gibson & Maddox always make Scully in to an ass-kicking Mini-Trinity? In the "upload" episode, the VR Scully did a Chun-Li on the evil nurse. Last night, she comes in, dressed to frag, with guns blazing, to save Mulder's ammo-count-impaired butt.
I wonder if Gibson is secretly casting Neuromancer, and wants Anderson to play Molly?:-)
I think you can find accurate male/female abilities in fighting games. If you watch the more realistic ones, like Virtua Fighter or Tekken, the female characters don't do as much damage with strikes, but are faster and more agile to maintain the balance. When a male character does a throw, it is usually a wrestling move, like a body slam or suplex, where the damage comes from landing alone. The women's throws are more judo-style leverage moves followed by strikes once the opponent is on the ground. Or she just grabs the guy by the collar, bitchslaps him around a little, then finishes him off with a knee to the head. (Bonus points to anyone who gets that reference.)
I think game designers deal with gender issues in one of four ways:
Real World: Typically fighting or sports games, where realistic gender differences add to the experience.
Balancing Act: The game relies on character classes, with men and women being equal within the class. This is easy to do in RPGs like Might and Magic (to pick an example I'm familiar with). It's also the "politically correct" way.
Deal With It!: The characters have specific gender either for plot or design purposes. Good examples would be Alpha Centauri (where a rule-driven choice of faction comes with a gender-specific character as leader), Tomb Raider and Oni (where the central character just happens to be a woman), and Diablo (where Sorcerors are men and Rogues are women, and allowing you to switch would have made the game even later.:-))
You're The Character: Think about Gran Turismo. You don't have any representation in the virtual world; just the car you're driving. And the car has tinted windows, so you can't see in!:-)
Probably not much. Hallmark is the main production company, along with SciFi and Nine Network. They contract out to Henson's Creature Shop for makeup and muppets like Rygel and Pilot, IIRC.
Slightly offtopic, but does anyone else here think Rygel looks like a hideously failed attempt to cross-breed Yoda and Beaker?:-)
Xerox may be a bad example. The vernacular form is a verb, not a proper name. It certainly gives Xerox credit for inventing the texhnology, but it doesn't directly claim that a Canon is a Xerox. As long as it's used in that manner, Xerox can afford to be a little lax. (But not much, thanks to the US' burdensome trademark enforcement laws.)
A better example would be Jeep. Have you ever noticed how every Jeep advertisement, no matter what media form it takes, has the disclaimer "Jeep is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler" tacked on? It's because DC has to constantly remind everyone that Jeep is not a generic term for "sport-utility vehicle." People would call everything from Suzuki X-90 to Lexus RX300 to Chevy Blazer "jeep." The Jeep brand was being diluted because the Jeep name was being attached to golf carts, oversized station wagons, and, worst of all, General Motors products. It's also where the slogan "There's Only One" came from.
Note: Jeep is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler. The rest of you know who you are.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. I forgot to put the paper in!
Oops. I forgot to get new ink carts!
Oops. I incinerated the damn thing and sent it back to AT&T with a venom-dripping letter!
If AT&T tried push-printing, they'd get crucified. Either by lawyers applying the aforementioned fax-spam laws, or by consumer backlash.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
1. Notepad.
2. WindowBlinds
3. Ask Bruce.
4. VBScript. What rock have you been hiding under?
5. SuSE. 6 CDs and GoOFY Ex-ApPLE ExEC CaPS.
6. Kernel or distro? (I don't know. AAAAhhhhgggghhhh!)
7. Whatever the CPU uses.
8. Buy, run until dead, repeat.
9. Clean. What if I was in an accident?
10. Real redheads first, otherwise it's a non-factor.
11. Paper. Did you get safety scissors, paste, and plastic in kindergarten? I think not.
12. Mary Ann. (Odd considering my response to 10. Guess I wasn't looking at her hair.:-))
13. n/a
14. 1, 2-hoo, 3, (crunch). Three.
15. Babylon 5. Farscape's cool, but Sheridan would have nuked Scorpius by now.
16. n/a.
17. British Racing Green over tan leather.
18. Frames. Otherwise, I have to tape everything up, and then the paint starts peeling....
19. Silence.
20. Twisty back road with no cops.
21. Dr. Seuss.
22. How many times do I have to tell you? The right tool for the right job!
23. Unreal Tournament Domination.
24. Some $0.33 stamps and an unplugged modem, until I get a new e-mail/PIM client. Damn Outlook!
25. Hex.
26. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee shoots and scores! Oh, buy Sam a drink, and get his dog one, too!
27. Hemos.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
The designers are trying to squeeze every last mile-per-gallon from the vehicle, so we get oddness like fastbacks and fender skirts. If anything, Insight shows what happens when engineers get "final cut" on a car's design.
Good! I'm sick of transportation appliances like Accord and Camry ruling American roads. I wish Peugeot was still in the US market. I'd buy a 406 Coupe on the basis of looks alone. For those who've never seen one, imagine what a Camry Solara would look like if Toyota hadn't sucked the life out of it.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
According to Mitsu's PR, they dynamically adjust the timing of fuel injection for an efficient, high-torque burn at low RPMs, and horsepower at higher RPMs, with lower emmissions across the board. Unfortunately, the emmissions advantage over conventional intake port injection is nullified by the high sulfur content in American gas, which is why they don't sell them here. Hopefully, when low-sulfur gas is available in the US, GDI engines will follow.
Ooh. This buzzword-laden thought just rattled 'round my head:
GDI twin-spark Hemi with camless valvetrain
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
The majority of Americans are anti-breakup because they probably don't know how many times Microsoft has shrugged off repeated slaps on the wrist. Had this happened in a more traditional industry, like automobiles or household appliances or the phone company
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Jason, not to quibble over semantics, but I think there's a difference between the Web's infrastructure (the Internet) and the Web itself.
;-)</apology>
You're right that the whole thing didn't happen in some digital parthenogenesis of computer geeks, Amazon wannabees, Buffy otaku, Russian mail-order brides, and wave after wave of AOL newbies. But beyond the top-level domains, IETF and W3C didn't really do anything about the structure and community of the Web. They just built the superhighways. We lined them with subdivisions and shopping malls.
<apology>I know I dragged the "information superhighway" metaphor out of its tomb, but it's not a bad description of the infrastructure. Blame the clue-impaired politicians and media slugs for ruining it.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
If you spray paint your manifesto all over the walls of someone else's building, it's still graffiti, and it's still vandalism, no matter how insightful or eloquent you may be.
If a virus displays "i am a 31337 hax0r! fsck the mpaa!" in 96 point type while sending your credit card numbers to some Pakistani server, then reformatting your hard drive, it's still theft and destruction of property.
Of course, IANA Supreme Court Justice.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Hollow?
Who here can name the "last" man on the Moon, without looking it up? I just took the tour at Kennedy Space Center last week, and I don't think I can name one member of Apollo 17's crew.
To a geek, yes, the Moon is still cool. To Joe and Jane Average, with their 2.3 kids, 2 cars, and 1 dog, it wasn't such a big deal. Never mind that without all those later Apollo and Apollo/Soyuz missions, the DirecTV dish on the roof and the iMac in the den probably wouldn't exist, and the Explorer and Camry in the driveway might as well be a Galaxie and a Valiant. Having only a layman's understanding of the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs leads to the firsts as the only things that stand out: Apollo 11 and STS-1. Been There, Done That.
The general (meaning non-geek) public was told Iridium would revolutionize communications. It didn't, and now the satellites, and the money to develop and launch them, are going up in the friction-induced flames of re-entry. Compound that by the aftermath of the Mars mission snafus, and you can understand the public perception, echoed by Sterling, that space is turning out to be a letdown.
Sure, we know better. That's why we're bitching on Slashdot, not reading it in a newspaper and bitching to the room at-large.
BTW, Cryptonomicon is the latest by Neal Stephenson. Bruce Sterling's latest book was Distraction.
BTW2, I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center if you are at all interested in space exploration. Standing next to a real Saturn V will give you a whole new appreciation for the acheivements of the Apollo astronauts.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
DVD: I think there are some licensing issues Be is struggling with. Be would probably get themselves sued hard if they decided to support DVD media the same way they support CD media (ripper built in to CD Player, CD Burner designed for audio, etc.) Of course, Xing isn't getting sued for leaving their keys lying about where any Scandinavian hacker could find them, but that's a whole 'nother rant.
GL Hardware Accel.: Still in development. BeNews had a couple of articles (OpenGL Status in Release 5 and R. Jason Sams Talks About the OpenGL on BeOS) on this last month. Sams goes into the guts of the new OpenGL subsystem. They're using some neat tricks to optimize the performance, so when it (finally) arrives, it should be lickety-split quick.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
This article on BeNews describes how to work around the "limitations" of the FreeBe package. I haven't yet looked to see if the CD image has been posted yet, but if you install from that, you can create a full-fledged BFS partition, without size limitations. And if you boot from it, or from a boot floppy, SMP will be enabled. It's only disabled in the Win9x-based bootloader. <sarcasm>Thanks, Microsoft, for disabling that "extraneous" processor!</sarcasm>
I've read through BeNews' preview, and the only thing that really stands out among missing features (compared to the boxed version) is the MP3 codec, because of licensing issues, naturally. Other than that, everything works. It just takes more work if you won't or can't run things from Win9x.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
While it would be nice to see the whole package on Linux, just having the renderer is still a big deal. Most computer animation studios use a "render farm," which is, basically, a room full of workstations doing all of the rendering gruntwork in parallel. Right now, that's all done with expensive MIPS/Sparc/Alpha-class iron. With Maya's renderer for Linux, building a render farm becomes easier and cheaper, since you can now use cheap, off-the-shelf x86 PC components.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast
You're OK as long as you don't have Sprint Wireless Web.
:-)
Which I don't, thank God. I can't picture the web on my Palm, let alone the 4x12 character display on my cell phone. I don't surf the web with my land-line phone. Why would I with a cell phone? Let's leave data access to data devices.
Ahh. Glad to have that off my chest.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast
There is no profit in video game console hardware. From Day One, the boxes themselves are sold at a loss. They start out with a relatively high price, say US$225-US$275, and a selection of (hopefully) very high quality software, to get the ball rolling. The key is that there will always be huge margins on the software. If the first batch of games catches on, and the second wave generates enough buzz, the system becomes self-sustaining, and the console's price begins to drop. Hence, $99 Playstations and N64s.
Besides, there's a big difference between using monopoly power to crush one little company in an emerging market, and entering a space that's already occupied by three firmly entrenched players.
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
As long it's closer in quality to Farscape than Welcome To Paradox, I'll be happy. Anything's better than Lynch's long, strange trip.
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
Of course, upgrading them to Word 2000 would help. So would taking their power cords away until they actually read the Dummies books I got them, instead of complaining that they don't know what to look up in the index. Of course, if Windows and Word were properly designed, we wouldn't need the Dummies books. And so it goes....
Once, Word and Excel had a Tip Wizard that watched what the user did, and suggested alternative methods for some tasks. In Office 4.2 (from the otherwise bad, old 16-bit days), this was a toolbar that docked at the top or bottom of the screen. When it had a tip, it simply scrolled into view, accompanied by nothing more than a light bulb icon at one end of the bar lighting up. Simple, non-disruptive, and sometimes quite helpful. Now, that function has been rolled into the Office Assistant, more commonly known as "That *%(*%&^%&^ Paper Clip!" When Office has a tip for you, the Paper Clip makes some animated noise to get your attention. You have to stop what you're doing, and click on the little light bulb next to the Paper Clip to get to the tip. And if you've hidden the Paper Clip, thus banishing it to the Circle of Hell which spawned it, you don't get any tips at all! Leave it to Microsoft to come up with software with the personality of a surly DMV clerk or a clingy, co-dependent girlfriend, with no useful middle ground.
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
The whole thing falls apart because local affiliates get screwed out of local time in network programming. If everyone's watching iCraveTV, nobody's watching WPXI in Pittsburgh.* Outside big markets like New York and Los Angeles, most affiliates run on tight budgets, particularly if the network is small, like The WB or UPN. If small affiliates like those go under, the network loses impressions (RealPlayer on a 56K dialup is a poor substitute), the network loses money, and the already below-average programming gets worse.
* I chose WPXI as an example only because I can see their studio outside my office window. If I was on the other side of the building, it would be KDKA. No commentary is expressed or implied. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. See dealer for lease terms.
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
It's a win-win for AOLTW. If a subscriber wants AOL, AOLTW makes money directly from subscription fees. If the subscriber wants another ISP, AOLTW makes money from the access aggreement between themselves and the ISP. As long as they live up to their promise to treat all ISPs equally, the competition should make it a win for consumers as well.
:-)
By "consumer choice," they mean that TW cable customers can choose from multiple ISPs who offer broadband over TW's cable lines. AOL will be one of those ISPs, with AOL's client and "features" on top. It would be nice if I could get Time Warner cable over Comcast's lines, but Microsoft would sooner switch to ELF binaries!
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
Have you noticed how Gibson & Maddox always make Scully in to an ass-kicking Mini-Trinity? In the "upload" episode, the VR Scully did a Chun-Li on the evil nurse. Last night, she comes in, dressed to frag, with guns blazing, to save Mulder's ammo-count-impaired butt.
:-)
I wonder if Gibson is secretly casting Neuromancer, and wants Anderson to play Molly?
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
I think game designers deal with gender issues in one of four ways:
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
Probably not much. Hallmark is the main production company, along with SciFi and Nine Network. They contract out to Henson's Creature Shop for makeup and muppets like Rygel and Pilot, IIRC.
:-)
Slightly offtopic, but does anyone else here think Rygel looks like a hideously failed attempt to cross-breed Yoda and Beaker?
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
Xerox may be a bad example. The vernacular form is a verb, not a proper name. It certainly gives Xerox credit for inventing the texhnology, but it doesn't directly claim that a Canon is a Xerox. As long as it's used in that manner, Xerox can afford to be a little lax. (But not much, thanks to the US' burdensome trademark enforcement laws.)
:-)
A better example would be Jeep. Have you ever noticed how every Jeep advertisement, no matter what media form it takes, has the disclaimer "Jeep is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler" tacked on? It's because DC has to constantly remind everyone that Jeep is not a generic term for "sport-utility vehicle." People would call everything from Suzuki X-90 to Lexus RX300 to Chevy Blazer "jeep." The Jeep brand was being diluted because the Jeep name was being attached to golf carts, oversized station wagons, and, worst of all, General Motors products. It's also where the slogan "There's Only One" came from.
Note: Jeep is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler. The rest of you know who you are.
Keith Russell
OS != Religion