IANAL but... those fishing boats have the right, not out of any moral argument, but through binding international treaty. I suspect there isn't an equilivant treaty that covers spy satellites in geosynchronous orbit over sovereign territory, although maybe 50 years from now there will be.
His problem, which I share, is that he wants both the puzzle/action/gameplay and the narrative. A narrative without an end is unsatisfying (Robert Jordan I'm looking at you), but if you don't give a flying fuck for narrative then of course this won't matter.
Not everyone plays with an eye for narrative, but if you do, it's really frustrating to never be able to finish the story just because some stupid game mechanic forces you into a corner everytime you have an hour or so to devote to the game.
I'll reply to you because you're near the top, but holy fuck people!
IT'S NOT AN ACCESSORY FOR SALE, IT'S AN ART PROJECT
Am I the only person who understood this right away? Please cut the end off the url and visit the main page for more info, here I'll make it easy:
proto-typen.org is a small group of students from the University Karlsruhe and
from the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe.
Having been introduced to the creative and hands-on way of using mikrocontrollers
and elektronics in the Seminar Showoff devices" led by Hannes Nehls and Matt Karau, many students wished to continue experimenting and designing artwork in the future.
Several objects from the seminar have been or are being displayed at the HfG, many other expositions are planned FOR THE FUTURE.
A corporation isn't legally obligated to do what's "best" for their shareholders, it's legally obligated to do what it's corporate charter sets out. Now most corporate charter's say something like "maximize profits" etc, but that isn't a legal requirement, witness Google's corporate charter and rather unique share model (basically the share's you can buy for whatever crazy amount they're selling for now don't really have much voting power, the founders kept the powerful shares to themselves).
But yes, MS isn't google, so MS shareholders would probably have grounds for litigation if the board did something so stupid to piss 1B/year of their (the shareholders) money away for no good reason.
- Forfeit any chance of entering the EU market ever again - Forfeit any assets currently held within EU jurisdiction - Risk serious litigation on the part of shareholders against both the company and the board who decided such a course was justified - Alienate non-EU jurisdictions, basically telling governments around the world that you can't count on microsoft
Microsoft products, especially their infrastructure products, would be better served by some transparency and interoperability. While they probably gained short term market share by forcing the "microsoft way" it's unsustainable because their bread and butter, the big enterprises, simply can't go all microsoft, and the longer you try to implement the "microsoft way" in one section of your enterprise the more you realize that it doesn't play well with the rest of your infrastructure and eventually you start looking for solutions that do.
Anyways, yes, microsoft would be great if they just tried to make great products, but they're too busy trying to kill competition to concentrate on evolving. I suspect they'll go through something like IBM did in the 90s, and 15 years from now will probably be generally respected by the tech community.
I'm pretty sure Gates is either against or has no official position on keeping (or bringing back? I'm not sure what the current status is in the US) the estate tax. The prominent billionaire who's all for the estate tax that you're thinking of is probably Warren Buffet.
Yes the B&M Gates foundation is doing good work, but I'm pretty sure it's more about Melinda and less about Bill, thank god he had the sense to marry someone with a sense of doing good.
It's not about how quick new formats are adopted, but rather about what they bring to the table for the consumer.
MP3's seperated music from the media it was stored on, and was adopted widely as a result. There was significant movement towards the new format because it solved several real annoyances with the then dominant format (CD's), and hasn't been replaced by technically superior formats because none of them do anything other than incrementally upgrade the improvements brought to the table by MP3's. Some (DRM) have even tried to regress and reinstate the problems (from a consumers view) that caused them to move away from CD in the first place.
DVD's offered a whole mess of significant improvements over VHS, much beyond simple improvements in picture quality (although of course it did offer that). Chapter selection, extras, menus, media portability (both physical and between the PC and TV), all of these are significant to the experience of using the damned thing, even if all anyone ever mentions is the better picture. Neither Blu-Ray or HD-DVD offers anything other than an incremental technical improvement over a huge installed base for DVD, so both will have significant difficulties establishing anything like a true consumer standard (IE: your mother owns one).
In fact, I doubt either will supplant DVD. Hell, if you ask consumers if DVD is already HD 99% will say hell yeah, because that's what they've been marketed as for the last 5 years. Maybe the words Hi-def weren't used, but the marketing for DVD's has emphasized improved picture quality. Combine that with the sheer inertia of the amount of DVD playing options available, and the way people expect to move a disc from their player at home to the one for the kids in the car to the laptop on a business trip, I doubt either hi-def media formats will win.
The true next video format will be to DVD what MP3 was to CD, maybe H.264 or some evolution of it. I think there'll be a place for a high capacity media format, perhaps HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, but nobody'll be buying movies on it.
I disagree completely, I find the process of listening/interpreting/noting allows me to grok the material I am presented. Without the active aspect, the actual typing of the notes (typing because I'm frankly much faster and neater using the laptop), my mind wanders.
To each his own, it's hard to say what works universally because learning is a very individual thing.
IMHO the onus is on the professor to adapt to their students needs, and on the students to meet the professor half way by actually doing the assigned readings/coursework before class and trying. Sadly, most professors are more interested in research and find teaching a burden, hence they don't give a shit about their students needs, and most students have a massive sense of entitlement that interferes with actually being productive students.
Come off it, what makes you think that everyone who brings a laptop is simply transcribing?
I did a 4 year Arts undergraduate degree taking notes on my laptop all the way through (except for the occassional math refresher course for shits 'n' giggles) and I never transcribed word for word.
A word processor is just another note taking tool, just like a pen and paper, if you take good notes and can organize your thoughts it doesn't get in the way of the learning process but instead augments it. I was able to organize disjointed lectures under organized headings (haven't you ever had professor tangent?), write down questions or comments to myself in different font/colour, search through notes from other classes during lecture to cut'n'paste relevant sections in, and easily create, when combined with notes taken from readings, course summaries.
Yes, taking down every word isn't necessarily useful, but you won't stop that by banning laptops.
You don't need to bring your laptop into court because they have people who's job it is to transcribe every word of the proceedings.
I took both math and humanities courses during my undergraduate. For math paper and pencil was the only thing that did the job properly, there's just no way to effectively get notes down any other way, but for humanities courses the laptop was far far superior than anything my classmates produced. The ability to auto-bullet and tab indent alone, along with cutting and pasting rambling bits of lecture under coherent subject headings is priceless.
The right tool for the job, for law, a laptop is damn near required unless you've always taken your notes paper and pencil and are very very proficient at it. As time progresses it'll be harder and harder to ban laptops, simply because if forced to I'm sure plenty of students would qualify as learning impaired on pen and paper and would petition the school on that basis.
Now WI-FI, that shit should be banned from classrooms that don't need it, the ability to surf the web during lectures is scary.
where the fuck do you work that throws money around like that?
Holy fuck buying a hundred licenses when one would do is damn near criminal, especially if you're a public company, I certainly hope you're just wildly exagerating. It's one thing to order 25 licenses when you're pretty sure you just need 20, but talk sense man, if they're ordering a tenfold excess someone's getting a kickback.
Google's majority shareholders are the founders, effectively they do what they want. The shares they sold have limited voting ability, thus limited ability to direct how the company operates. Investors knew, or should have known, those very important facts before investing.
Wall St. is just very used to getting their way, so when an organization doesn't toe the line they get pissy, as another poster mentioned this is a test of Google's business ethic. Either they'll stick to their guns or fold. IMHO folding will be the first substantive sign that Google as a business is morphing into our next technology monopoly that 15 years from now will be the equilivant of MS now or IBM in the 80s.
I live in Toronto and what do I hear from my alarm clock this morning? An interview with a Toronto police officer regarding this crash, the host (andy barrie, who's not normally a douche-bag but was acting like one this morning) was trying his hardest to get the cop to blame the game, but the cop was all "I've had this game in my home, my kids have played it, real life is not a game" etc... a very balanced and thoughful position actually.
The media is doing it's normal job trying to make headlines, nothing more, nothing less. It's tragic yes, poor parenting and stupid people are always a tragic combination.
"We aren't here to teach you things - we are here to teach you how to think"
Getting a quality degree means tells a potential employer that you have the ability to stick with a difficult task and succeed.
Funny, those are basically the exact things we hear in a liberal arts program. I'm not trying to continue the whole engineering vs liberal arts flamewar, just trying to point out that they are more similar than most think. The difference is, I think (and speaking as someone who professionally counts many engineers as peers, but just completed a liberal arts degree), in the character of the work required to excel in each field. In science and engineering, you are solving problem sets and working in labs... you are 'doing' something. In liberal arts, if you want to excel, you spend all that time reading and digesting material (through note taking and group discussion). The typical engineering student doesn't count reading and discussion as work, although a frighteningly large number of them can't string three sentences together in a coherent manner, and the typical liberal arts student doesn't have any clue the kind of brain sweat required to finish those labs and problem sets while dismissing engineering out of hand.
The words of wisdom I received from one particularly talented professor went something like this, "your education is as difficult and rewarding as you make it" . That holds true in both the 'hard' and 'soft' disciplines. Some coast through engineering, others coast through social science, while others work hard and tackle the difficult problems regardless of the discipline they enter.
I don't know about others, but I never expected it to be free.
I've got a job, if I need to shell out a couple bucks to challenge a friend to some classic gaming action I won't complain.
And for that matter, I don't expect the whole catalog, I don't want it... just give me a decent, diverse, selection of games to play (in the little time i've got to play em) and I'm happy.
Well, I can't speak for the grandparent poster, but here's why I'm excited for the revolution.
1. Known company with proven (to me, through personal experience) commitment to keeping games fun and trying interesting things with hardware (some fails sure, but at least they're trying)
2. Ability to play every nintendo console game! I missed N64 so I'm really looking forward to that. (btw this is a feature announced at E3)
3. A feeling that they'll try to keep the cost to consumer down. They've pretty much got the low cost thing down, and I'm hoping it'll be a console I don't have to think too hard about picking up. The 360 and PS3 are too expensive to 'just buy' I need to wait and see which is better before making a purchase of that size.
Put all that together and I'm excited... I'm also excited about both the 360 and ps3, but more so to determine which of the two I will buy. I was actually hoping for a more media centre type function from the 360, so it's making me lean more toward waiting and seeing rather than buying anyways.
There are DVD transfers from the original unedited laserdisc version floating around, the best you're going to get if you want to see original effects and original plot/dialogue.
Slashdot Mirror
No I didn't.... sad news, didn't mean to kick someone while he's down. =\
IANAL but ... those fishing boats have the right, not out of any moral argument, but through binding international treaty. I suspect there isn't an equilivant treaty that covers spy satellites in geosynchronous orbit over sovereign territory, although maybe 50 years from now there will be.
His problem, which I share, is that he wants both the puzzle/action/gameplay and the narrative. A narrative without an end is unsatisfying (Robert Jordan I'm looking at you), but if you don't give a flying fuck for narrative then of course this won't matter.
Not everyone plays with an eye for narrative, but if you do, it's really frustrating to never be able to finish the story just because some stupid game mechanic forces you into a corner everytime you have an hour or so to devote to the game.
l4h
10 times the number of voters = 10 times the number of people available to count the damned votes
IT'S NOT AN ACCESSORY FOR SALE, IT'S AN ART PROJECT
Am I the only person who understood this right away? Please cut the end off the url and visit the main page for more info, here I'll make it easy:
sheesh!
A corporation isn't legally obligated to do what's "best" for their shareholders, it's legally obligated to do what it's corporate charter sets out. Now most corporate charter's say something like "maximize profits" etc, but that isn't a legal requirement, witness Google's corporate charter and rather unique share model (basically the share's you can buy for whatever crazy amount they're selling for now don't really have much voting power, the founders kept the powerful shares to themselves).
But yes, MS isn't google, so MS shareholders would probably have grounds for litigation if the board did something so stupid to piss 1B/year of their (the shareholders) money away for no good reason.
l4h
Microsoft would have to be willing to:
- Forfeit any chance of entering the EU market ever again
- Forfeit any assets currently held within EU jurisdiction
- Risk serious litigation on the part of shareholders against both the company and the board who decided such a course was justified
- Alienate non-EU jurisdictions, basically telling governments around the world that you can't count on microsoft
Would never happen
l4h
amen brother
Microsoft products, especially their infrastructure products, would be better served by some transparency and interoperability. While they probably gained short term market share by forcing the "microsoft way" it's unsustainable because their bread and butter, the big enterprises, simply can't go all microsoft, and the longer you try to implement the "microsoft way" in one section of your enterprise the more you realize that it doesn't play well with the rest of your infrastructure and eventually you start looking for solutions that do.
Anyways, yes, microsoft would be great if they just tried to make great products, but they're too busy trying to kill competition to concentrate on evolving. I suspect they'll go through something like IBM did in the 90s, and 15 years from now will probably be generally respected by the tech community.
I'm pretty sure Gates is either against or has no official position on keeping (or bringing back? I'm not sure what the current status is in the US) the estate tax. The prominent billionaire who's all for the estate tax that you're thinking of is probably Warren Buffet.
Yes the B&M Gates foundation is doing good work, but I'm pretty sure it's more about Melinda and less about Bill, thank god he had the sense to marry someone with a sense of doing good.
l4h
Go re-read the post you're replying to, proportional representation was specifically mentioned.
l4h
It's not about how quick new formats are adopted, but rather about what they bring to the table for the consumer.
MP3's seperated music from the media it was stored on, and was adopted widely as a result. There was significant movement towards the new format because it solved several real annoyances with the then dominant format (CD's), and hasn't been replaced by technically superior formats because none of them do anything other than incrementally upgrade the improvements brought to the table by MP3's. Some (DRM) have even tried to regress and reinstate the problems (from a consumers view) that caused them to move away from CD in the first place.
DVD's offered a whole mess of significant improvements over VHS, much beyond simple improvements in picture quality (although of course it did offer that). Chapter selection, extras, menus, media portability (both physical and between the PC and TV), all of these are significant to the experience of using the damned thing, even if all anyone ever mentions is the better picture. Neither Blu-Ray or HD-DVD offers anything other than an incremental technical improvement over a huge installed base for DVD, so both will have significant difficulties establishing anything like a true consumer standard (IE: your mother owns one).
In fact, I doubt either will supplant DVD. Hell, if you ask consumers if DVD is already HD 99% will say hell yeah, because that's what they've been marketed as for the last 5 years. Maybe the words Hi-def weren't used, but the marketing for DVD's has emphasized improved picture quality. Combine that with the sheer inertia of the amount of DVD playing options available, and the way people expect to move a disc from their player at home to the one for the kids in the car to the laptop on a business trip, I doubt either hi-def media formats will win.
The true next video format will be to DVD what MP3 was to CD, maybe H.264 or some evolution of it. I think there'll be a place for a high capacity media format, perhaps HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, but nobody'll be buying movies on it.
l4h
Google will probably offer an appliance to do this, like their search appliance, within a year*.
*All dates are pure speculation pulled right out of my arse, can I get a job as an analyst?
A quick look at the Apple Store found this:
Apple DVI to ADC Display Adapter
Go to apple.com --> Store --> (left side navigation under Mac Accessories) Displays --> should be on the first page for $99
I disagree completely, I find the process of listening/interpreting/noting allows me to grok the material I am presented. Without the active aspect, the actual typing of the notes (typing because I'm frankly much faster and neater using the laptop), my mind wanders.
To each his own, it's hard to say what works universally because learning is a very individual thing.
IMHO the onus is on the professor to adapt to their students needs, and on the students to meet the professor half way by actually doing the assigned readings/coursework before class and trying. Sadly, most professors are more interested in research and find teaching a burden, hence they don't give a shit about their students needs, and most students have a massive sense of entitlement that interferes with actually being productive students.
sigh
Come off it, what makes you think that everyone who brings a laptop is simply transcribing?
I did a 4 year Arts undergraduate degree taking notes on my laptop all the way through (except for the occassional math refresher course for shits 'n' giggles) and I never transcribed word for word.
A word processor is just another note taking tool, just like a pen and paper, if you take good notes and can organize your thoughts it doesn't get in the way of the learning process but instead augments it. I was able to organize disjointed lectures under organized headings (haven't you ever had professor tangent?), write down questions or comments to myself in different font/colour, search through notes from other classes during lecture to cut'n'paste relevant sections in, and easily create, when combined with notes taken from readings, course summaries.
Yes, taking down every word isn't necessarily useful, but you won't stop that by banning laptops.
You don't need to bring your laptop into court because they have people who's job it is to transcribe every word of the proceedings.
I took both math and humanities courses during my undergraduate. For math paper and pencil was the only thing that did the job properly, there's just no way to effectively get notes down any other way, but for humanities courses the laptop was far far superior than anything my classmates produced. The ability to auto-bullet and tab indent alone, along with cutting and pasting rambling bits of lecture under coherent subject headings is priceless.
The right tool for the job, for law, a laptop is damn near required unless you've always taken your notes paper and pencil and are very very proficient at it. As time progresses it'll be harder and harder to ban laptops, simply because if forced to I'm sure plenty of students would qualify as learning impaired on pen and paper and would petition the school on that basis.
Now WI-FI, that shit should be banned from classrooms that don't need it, the ability to surf the web during lectures is scary.
l4h
where the fuck do you work that throws money around like that?
Holy fuck buying a hundred licenses when one would do is damn near criminal, especially if you're a public company, I certainly hope you're just wildly exagerating. It's one thing to order 25 licenses when you're pretty sure you just need 20, but talk sense man, if they're ordering a tenfold excess someone's getting a kickback.
l4h
Actually not really, since the GC CPU is already PowerPC, and IBM is making a new, presumably multicore, powerpc cpu for revolution.
MS needed to emulate intel on powerpc, which is a much harder proposition.
l4h
You know not of which you speak.
Google's majority shareholders are the founders, effectively they do what they want. The shares they sold have limited voting ability, thus limited ability to direct how the company operates. Investors knew, or should have known, those very important facts before investing.
Wall St. is just very used to getting their way, so when an organization doesn't toe the line they get pissy, as another poster mentioned this is a test of Google's business ethic. Either they'll stick to their guns or fold. IMHO folding will be the first substantive sign that Google as a business is morphing into our next technology monopoly that 15 years from now will be the equilivant of MS now or IBM in the 80s.
l4h
I live in Toronto and what do I hear from my alarm clock this morning? An interview with a Toronto police officer regarding this crash, the host (andy barrie, who's not normally a douche-bag but was acting like one this morning) was trying his hardest to get the cop to blame the game, but the cop was all "I've had this game in my home, my kids have played it, real life is not a game" etc... a very balanced and thoughful position actually.
The media is doing it's normal job trying to make headlines, nothing more, nothing less. It's tragic yes, poor parenting and stupid people are always a tragic combination.
The words of wisdom I received from one particularly talented professor went something like this, "your education is as difficult and rewarding as you make it" . That holds true in both the 'hard' and 'soft' disciplines. Some coast through engineering, others coast through social science, while others work hard and tackle the difficult problems regardless of the discipline they enter.
I don't know about others, but I never expected it to be free.
I've got a job, if I need to shell out a couple bucks to challenge a friend to some classic gaming action I won't complain.
And for that matter, I don't expect the whole catalog, I don't want it... just give me a decent, diverse, selection of games to play (in the little time i've got to play em) and I'm happy.
Well, I can't speak for the grandparent poster, but here's why I'm excited for the revolution.
1. Known company with proven (to me, through personal experience) commitment to keeping games fun and trying interesting things with hardware (some fails sure, but at least they're trying)
2. Ability to play every nintendo console game! I missed N64 so I'm really looking forward to that. (btw this is a feature announced at E3)
3. A feeling that they'll try to keep the cost to consumer down. They've pretty much got the low cost thing down, and I'm hoping it'll be a console I don't have to think too hard about picking up. The 360 and PS3 are too expensive to 'just buy' I need to wait and see which is better before making a purchase of that size.
Put all that together and I'm excited... I'm also excited about both the 360 and ps3, but more so to determine which of the two I will buy. I was actually hoping for a more media centre type function from the 360, so it's making me lean more toward waiting and seeing rather than buying anyways.
There are DVD transfers from the original unedited laserdisc version floating around, the best you're going to get if you want to see original effects and original plot/dialogue.
dude!
He was like, *totally* joking...
Also, CBC TV is chock full of adverts, those damned politicians cut the funding for ad-free tv a long time ago. Radio is still ad-free thankfully...
l4h