The name Teoma is just another product of today's pattern of "Let's choose exotic, foreign-sounding words so people will think we're *kewl*, man!".
Have you tried to find an english world 6 letters or fewer that hasn't already been registered as a.com? I think the name Teoma is more a product of a radically diminished namespace...
I must be missing something. I fail to see how paying $30 for 60 minutes of mobile phone time is at all too cheap or too good to be true... Any provider has rates far better that $2/minute, and the savings would exceed the cost of the phone itself after just a couple of months.
Or is this not disposible in the sense that a disposible camera is, i.e. use it up then throw it out? (I didn't realize there *was* another sense of the word...)
The thing that struck me most was this concept of "expensive experts." I could easily see them expanding this campaign by inserting adjectives like "condescending", "difficult to communicate with", "obnoxious", and even "completely other, alien, and kinda creepy." These are all representative of the impression regular folks seem to have of the sysadmin, from what I can tell. As opposed to the impression of your average MS-savvy (love those two words together) "computer guy" who helps get you back on the network or shows you where your downloads go.
I don't think the real concern is about police using these devices, it's that *everyone* will be, without ever explicitly choosing it. Think about it, how many features now come standard on mobile phones that were once extras? We getting the first wave of phones with embedded digital cameras; that will likely soon be ubiquitous and non-optional on mobiles.
Once phones all have digital cameras, it's not a terrible leap to think that a law would be passed (perhaps in London to start with where video surveillance in public spaces is routine) that phones with cameras need to have this auto-facial recognition software built-in. That and some sort of positioning technology (GPS or otherwise) is all that's required. You go to a bar, put your phone on the table and it's checking out the riff-raff around for possible matches. find one, silently dial in to some sort of central DB that records the match/location, and voila. The phone's owner is none the wiser. It doesn't even have to be terribly reliable; with this sort of brute force method even a very low successful match percentage would be a win for law enforcement.
I'm not generally a privacy alarmist, but this is a little scary.
The PS2 wasn't designed to be able to read CD-R/DVD-R media anyway...only developers' blue boxes can reliably do that. So to call this a cripple isn't exactly accurate.
And how long do you imagine it will take someone (or someones) to reverse-engineer the layer separating developers from the hardware? If that were possible, one could put together what's basically a runtime environment to distribute with/around homebrew ps2 games that would run on vanilla systems.
You're forgetting the fact the the PS2 has a USB port. So it should be able to work with any USB media source, e.g. CD/DVD drives, as well as hard disks. That means writing as well as reading...
Sorry, that was a mistake. There *is* an Alzheimer's distributed computing research project, though. Here is a press release with a link to the software.
While I'll admit that the review reads much like the marketing copy they call game journalism these days, I have to disagree with your (terse) assertion that one can't both be quite thrilled with a game and be less than thrilled with said game publisher's corporate policy.
I'd reckon that were one of the Bnetd developers to get a beta (not so hard to imagine, come to think of it), and review it, it would be just as positive -- the guys really have to love the game francise to invest their time and energy in it as they have.
Besides, love the game but hate the seller? There's an age-old (well, at least as old as Cat-Fur and Ascii Express) answer to that one...
Slashdot Mirror
It would appear not -- unlike Kazaa, there is no mention of BDE in Grokster's license. No guarantees, though...
Have you tried to find an english world 6 letters or fewer that hasn't already been registered as a .com? I think the name Teoma is more a product of a radically diminished namespace...
Of course. Sorry for my idiocy. But, as you mention, my point still stands.
Besides, does the world really need to be throwing away more non-biodegradable, ultimately pretty nasty stuff?
I must be missing something. I fail to see how paying $30 for 60 minutes of mobile phone time is at all too cheap or too good to be true... Any provider has rates far better that $2/minute, and the savings would exceed the cost of the phone itself after just a couple of months.
Or is this not disposible in the sense that a disposible camera is, i.e. use it up then throw it out? (I didn't realize there *was* another sense of the word...)
The thing that struck me most was this concept of "expensive experts." I could easily see them expanding this campaign by inserting adjectives like "condescending", "difficult to communicate with", "obnoxious", and even "completely other, alien, and kinda creepy." These are all representative of the impression regular folks seem to have of the sysadmin, from what I can tell. As opposed to the impression of your average MS-savvy (love those two words together) "computer guy" who helps get you back on the network or shows you where your downloads go.
Maybe the bearded ones need a PR campaign.
Check out the archives here.
This comic in particular seems to hit on the salient issues.
I don't think the real concern is about police using these devices, it's that *everyone* will be, without ever explicitly choosing it. Think about it, how many features now come standard on mobile phones that were once extras? We getting the first wave of phones with embedded digital cameras; that will likely soon be ubiquitous and non-optional on mobiles.
Once phones all have digital cameras, it's not a terrible leap to think that a law would be passed (perhaps in London to start with where video surveillance in public spaces is routine) that phones with cameras need to have this auto-facial recognition software built-in. That and some sort of positioning technology (GPS or otherwise) is all that's required. You go to a bar, put your phone on the table and it's checking out the riff-raff around for possible matches. find one, silently dial in to some sort of central DB that records the match/location, and voila. The phone's owner is none the wiser. It doesn't even have to be terribly reliable; with this sort of brute force method even a very low successful match percentage would be a win for law enforcement.
I'm not generally a privacy alarmist, but this is a little scary.
The PS2 wasn't designed to be able to read CD-R/DVD-R media anyway...only developers' blue boxes can reliably do that. So to call this a cripple isn't exactly accurate.
And how long do you imagine it will take someone (or someones) to reverse-engineer the layer separating developers from the hardware? If that were possible, one could put together what's basically a runtime environment to distribute with/around homebrew ps2 games that would run on vanilla systems.
Or am I crazy?
You're forgetting the fact the the PS2 has a USB port. So it should be able to work with any USB media source, e.g. CD/DVD drives, as well as hard disks. That means writing as well as reading...
It looks to be based on the folding@home project.
Apologies for off-topicness.
t.
While I'll admit that the review reads much like the marketing copy they call game journalism these days, I have to disagree with your (terse) assertion that one can't both be quite thrilled with a game and be less than thrilled with said game publisher's corporate policy.
I'd reckon that were one of the Bnetd developers to get a beta (not so hard to imagine, come to think of it), and review it, it would be just as positive -- the guys really have to love the game francise to invest their time and energy in it as they have.
Besides, love the game but hate the seller? There's an age-old (well, at least as old as Cat-Fur and Ascii Express) answer to that one...
t.
Both are non-profit (or not-for-profit) endeavors, as far as I can ascertain, but I haven't done too much digging...
cheers,
t.