Consoles have ALWAYS been sold at a loss. This has been true from the days of the Famicom (Nintendo's 8-bit NES). You know what? Sega/Nintendo/Sony don't care about the profit margin on the consoles themselves, because their business model works on the huge margins involved in software sales. It's a lot like your local burger joint. They don't make a whole lot of money selling burgers and fries. It's the markup on the drinks you buy that keeps their lights on.
The CTD Resource Network has a very fine examination on all kinds of keyboards, including several like the one you're looking for. These are all, as to be expected, quite pricey, but each has something to offer to everybody.
I fully agree that too many 'ergonomic' keyboards still require typists to squeeze their shoulders together. I would really love a typing solution that let me place my hands wherever I please (like a motion-sensitive pair of gloves, or a pair of flexible mats), so I can reposition my arms however I like (on my lap, at my sides) and not lose any typing speed.
This post is completely off topic. Why on earth is it 'Insightful?' It's not even factually correct.
Humans have evolved into omnivores, which means we have the necessary equipment to eat both meat and vegetable matter. If we were inherently vegetarians, we would have evolved the rest equipment that other vegetarian animals come with (a much longer intestinal tract and the ability to digest cellulose, to name a few). Our teeth are highly adapted (with sharp cutting incisors and tearing canines, alongside our crushing molars) to eating a variety of foodstuffs, as well.
Not to make light of the moral/health arguments for vegetarianism (for which they are many), we must at a minimum demand more rigor in our informed discussion of any topic. Of course, this slashdot topic has absolutely nothing to do with vegetarianism.
Are we also forgetting about Frank Miller's prior contributions to cinema, which include the abysmally bad Robocops 2 and 3? To be fair, studio intervention probably got in the way of better scripts, but good comic book writer != good screenwriter. In any case, a mouthy individualist like Miller in a world perpetuated by committee thinking (major motion picture studios) has the forces of history working against his creative input really reaching any significant part of the screen. Ditto for Aronofsky.
Don't get me wrong, I want the movie to be good, too. Just don't expect a revolution just because 'our boy Frank' is reportedly pulling some strings behind the script.
Subject: [7-5] How long do CD-Rs and CD-RWs last?
(1999/12/18)
There doesn't seem to be a clear answer for CD-RW. The rest of this section applies to CD-R.
The manufacturers claim 75 years (cyanine dye, used in "green" discs), 100 years (phthalocyanine dye, used in "gold" discs), or even 200 years ("advanced" phthalocyanine dye, used in "platinum" discs) once the disc has been written. The shelf life of an unrecorded disc has been estimated at between 5 and 10 years. There is no standard agreed-upon way to test discs for lifetime viability. Accelerated aging tests have been done, but they may not provide a meaningful analogue to real-world aging.
Some newsgroup reports have complained of discs becoming unreadable in as little as three years, but without knowing how the discs were handled and stored such anecdotes are useless. Try to keep a little perspective on the situation: a disc that degrades very little over 100 years is useless if it can't be read in your CD-ROM drive today.
By some estimates, pressed CD-ROMs may only last for 10 to 25 years, because the aluminum reflective layer starts to corrode after a while.
This being the case, they'd really have to make that CD out of bloody Kryptonite if they expect it to last fifty thousand years. They really ought to have picked a smarter media that doesn't decay this quickly.
It would also be prudent to point out that it's a rumor about the working title. Working titles RARELY become production titles, and are often little more than a hastily stamped name on a script.
Here's a decent list of the working titles to some familiar movies. Just thought it would better illustrate how unimportant working titles are.
Not to split hairs or anything, but the study specifically states the potentially negative impact of using computers as instructional tools...this is far from banishing computers from the classroom altogether. Computers are GREAT in schools just as they are great in offices. Communication and employee (read: teachers) efficiency are two horrendously overlooked problems in modern schools. Teachers filling out sheets by hand versus making entries into Excel are wasting too much time on paperwork and losing time to give kids individual attention.
Let's not get carried away by saying we should banish the computer from the classroom entirely. Sure, they're pretty awful at teaching critical thinking, but if they help the classroom run better then we should pause short of a summary judgment of them as 'bad' in the classroom.
If you're that addicted...try fansubs
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
You might consider paying a visit to Anime Expo 2000 in Southern California in a month or so. Sure, it's fulla otaku dorks, but if you're the founder of 'news for nerds,' you shouldn't mind too much. The reason for going isn't so much to buy anime and congregate with men in skirts (yup, even in Orange County) but to watch all the glorious fan subtitled anime which has become all the rage. This way, you get to watch anime you might never get to buy or experience any other way. I've seen a good deal of fansubs, but even then I've only gotten a small taste of what the community has to offer.
Fave fansubs (some have been released commercially)
I was hoping that this month was April, and that tomorrow id would say something like 'June Fools!' and promise us they'd never fight again.
However, I think most posters lately have been unnecessarily dismissive of id as 'just another game company' who produces the same game over and over and over again. Do these folks not understand that Doom and its successors spawned uniquely enormous gaming communities unrivaled in their game genre? id is in the serious business of nurturing these fans, thereby guaranteeing loyalty to their brand of products. Perhaps only Blizzard produces a similar effect with their games and the communities built up around them.
id's new game is more than 'just another first-person shooter.' Fans look forward to more than just another mindless opportunity to blow computer-generated monsters to pieces. If it were just that it wouldn't be fun for anybody anymore.
Could it also be that the Powers That Be scour for postings like these on Slashdot before launching a new assault on the next threat? I recall when Gnutella, Napster, lyrics.ch, DeCSS, et al became big news on Slashdot. Not long after, the RIAA, HFA, MPAA (and their comrades) were hot on the trail of all of these with an army of high-priced lawyers. Many lawsuits later, most of these things are still under heavy fire from corporate lawyers. Is the attention given to grey-market stuff on Slashdot contributing to this, do you think? You'd think that lyrics.ch was originally safe from 'U.S. law', as the post puts it, but copyrights are perfectly enforceable internationally. It only takes a few phone calls to the local police station to go and raid the home of the instigators (which is exactly what happened to lyrics.ch). Thuggish, true, but they can and probably will do it again.
What's missing before we have a full set of standardized, gaming-friendly APIs? OpenGL and OpenAL (if it lives up to its promise) provide the output, but are there analogues to the rest of DirectX (the competition)? The need for a DirectInput analogue springs immediately to mind. Does one exist? From a developer's standpoint, these cross-platform APIs are A Good Thing but if the open platforms are limited to graphics and sound alone then Linux game dev will continue on its slow, six-months-behind-Wintel-releases course.
Notwithstanding the general distaste people would have towards such a broad geography of the Internet, I wonder if it isn't more misleading to consider these entities 'distinctly separate.' CorporateNet seems to be using its economic leverate to take over GamingNet, BuyNet, CultureNet and InfoNet at an alarming rate (one would only need to see the herd of acquisitions by AOL/Microsoft to see evidence of this). Perhaps their interest is only monetary in these acquisitions, and hence their limited control otherwise over the subnets leaves the separation suggested by JonKatz intact. Nevertheless, it is foolish to ignore the connection altogether. The best use of such a geography of the Internet is to answer questions like 'which fish is getting too big?' That is, we want to know when any one interest is dipping their fingers too far into too many of these 'continents.' But rather than seeing distinct continents of the internet, it is probably more useful to think of them as overlapping subsets of The Big Picture. This way the consumers of the Internet at large aren't misled into thinking they can necessarily escape from one into another by clicking on a link to leave a site, or switching from one news/search portal to another...often times you're really not.
To dismiss this as 'just another spin off' does absolutely no justice to the beauty of this book. It is in the spirit of Stardust (another excellent tale, I might add), a four-part illustrated book that came out about two years ago, and tells a story that isn't found in Grimm or Aesop. Most importantly, it is not a comic book. It is also not a 'graphic novel.' It is a book, with a beautiful story, and beautiful paintings inside, and should be judged as such.
Indeed, if you are looking for a comic, look elsewhere. Don't read this and expect a comic book. It is much, much more than that.
While it is desperately important that JP be branded for the disreputable scoundrel he tends to be in the mainstream media, what should really worry us about this article is an admission of something I've suspected for years: journalistic sources start out horribly biased then proliferate through a lovely grapevine of other newspapers. That is: 'CNN has just learned of a Washington Post Article covering a story in TIME Magazine that quotes a line from the New York Times in an article by a journalist whose source was interviewed while rooting around in a dumpster.' Immediately the word 'expert' loses all credibility so the lingering question becomes, 'Who do I trust?' Ideally the community would self-police and release publicly accessible docs to the press so that the lone-gunman mercenary tactics of AntiOnline would lose credibility quicker, but the internet community is such a cacophony of opposing voices that most journalists are quick to give up on their old research methods and give ol' JP a call. Do this more than once and you've created a monster. So what's the answer? Switch to a new 'expert,' and watch them go down in flames? This goes beyond JP's megalomaniacal campaign since 'experts' get quoted all the time in the news. Experts who dictate the laws government will pass on violence in movies/games/TV and the like.
I disagree strongly with the assertion that 'speed is everything,' and if 'too much typing' were a concern to any developer, then I would wonder why anything but Perl would be used. In truth, I've never seen OpenStep/GNUStep in action, and a quick glance at the tutorials for both show me a lot (albeit in Objective-C) of what I have already seen accomplished by Metwowerks Power Plant. Although it's platform (Mac) specific, it is an elegantly designed framework built from the ground (Mac Toolbox) up in perfectly readable C++. What browsing through docs need to be done is quick (all you need is written into a fat pdf 'Power Plant book' supplied to whomever buys the product) and easy. Moreover, Constructor lets you do that 'drag and drop' layout promised by OpenStep/GNUStep, so the details of implementing your program are neatly separated from managing the state of your program. I'm a big fan of that. Just thought I'd put in a word or two for the lonely mac developers out there. MFC sucks. Hard.
While I have faith that AOL will continue to let Nullsoft and its existing staff make its own decisions about development of Winamp, I wonder if this was really a decision brought on by Playmedia's suit, or a sudden case of greed down in Sedona. Granted, it does seem like the RIAA for a while there was bullying Nullsoft around, and true, it would be convenient to have your share of $400 million to defend yourself with legally, but has anybody wondered if this is a business decision a long time in the making? Shoutcast isn't a technology necessarily designed to exclusively legitimize mp3. Shoutcast is just as capable of streaming news, commercials and other salable audio. IE 5.0 tries the same with it's silly 'Internet Radio' features, and god knows broadcast.com has been doing this for far too long. The winamp homepage, which has apparently yet to make news of this to anybody ('Oh by the way, our new version 2.2.3b21 features AOL's logo peppered here and there'), features screenshots of the minibrowser being used to sell CDs on Amazon.com. I imagine we would be rather dense to ignore this obvious marketing ploy. 'Hey investors! Winamp now has space for your advertisements! Give us money!' The Preferences dialog also has space for select links, and it's only a matter of time before companies start using THIS for ad space, too. Conclusion? Don't hastily assume that Nullsoft was so-suddenly gobbled up by a greedy ISP (even if it IS AOL). Justin Frankel is in this for the money, not because he wants to evangelize for the FSF. We can safely assume Nullsoft won't do to Winamp what was done to the latest version of RealPlayer (I hate a 12-meg download for a bloated piece of software with WAYYYY too many unnecessary features), but we must recognize that it was inevitable they do SOMETHING profitable with their technology. As for competing with Microsoft, I don't know. My musings don't lead my train of thought to see this as a direct assault on Redmond. MediaPlayer supports MP3 (badly), and Winamp supports.WMA (badly). So this doesn't necessarily break down to a EBM + MP3 vs. MS + WMA battle. Here's hoping, tho'.
Slashdot Mirror
Consoles have ALWAYS been sold at a loss. This has been true from the days of the Famicom (Nintendo's 8-bit NES). You know what? Sega/Nintendo/Sony don't care about the profit margin on the consoles themselves, because their business model works on the huge margins involved in software sales. It's a lot like your local burger joint. They don't make a whole lot of money selling burgers and fries. It's the markup on the drinks you buy that keeps their lights on.
The CTD Resource Network has a very fine examination on all kinds of keyboards, including several like the one you're looking for. These are all, as to be expected, quite pricey, but each has something to offer to everybody.
The Alternative Keyboard FAQ
I fully agree that too many 'ergonomic' keyboards still require typists to squeeze their shoulders together. I would really love a typing solution that let me place my hands wherever I please (like a motion-sensitive pair of gloves, or a pair of flexible mats), so I can reposition my arms however I like (on my lap, at my sides) and not lose any typing speed.
This post is completely off topic. Why on earth is it 'Insightful?' It's not even factually correct.
Humans have evolved into omnivores, which means we have the necessary equipment to eat both meat and vegetable matter. If we were inherently vegetarians, we would have evolved the rest equipment that other vegetarian animals come with (a much longer intestinal tract and the ability to digest cellulose, to name a few). Our teeth are highly adapted (with sharp cutting incisors and tearing canines, alongside our crushing molars) to eating a variety of foodstuffs, as well.
Not to make light of the moral/health arguments for vegetarianism (for which they are many), we must at a minimum demand more rigor in our informed discussion of any topic. Of course, this slashdot topic has absolutely nothing to do with vegetarianism.
Actually, that would be Nicole Brown Simpson's body. Anna Nicolle Smith was a playboy model.
Don't get me wrong, I want the movie to be good, too. Just don't expect a revolution just because 'our boy Frank' is reportedly pulling some strings behind the script.
This being the case, they'd really have to make that CD out of bloody Kryptonite if they expect it to last fifty thousand years. They really ought to have picked a smarter media that doesn't decay this quickly.
Here's a decent list of the working titles to some familiar movies. Just thought it would better illustrate how unimportant working titles are.
q: What do you call a person who speaks 4 languages?
a: A polyglot
q: What do you call a person who speaks 5 languages?
a: A showoff
That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them.
-- Dorothy Parker
Not to split hairs or anything, but the study specifically states the potentially negative impact of using computers as instructional tools...this is far from banishing computers from the classroom altogether. Computers are GREAT in schools just as they are great in offices. Communication and employee (read: teachers) efficiency are two horrendously overlooked problems in modern schools. Teachers filling out sheets by hand versus making entries into Excel are wasting too much time on paperwork and losing time to give kids individual attention.
Let's not get carried away by saying we should banish the computer from the classroom entirely. Sure, they're pretty awful at teaching critical thinking, but if they help the classroom run better then we should pause short of a summary judgment of them as 'bad' in the classroom.
You might consider paying a visit to Anime Expo 2000 in Southern California in a month or so. Sure, it's fulla otaku dorks, but if you're the founder of 'news for nerds,' you shouldn't mind too much. The reason for going isn't so much to buy anime and congregate with men in skirts (yup, even in Orange County) but to watch all the glorious fan subtitled anime which has become all the rage. This way, you get to watch anime you might never get to buy or experience any other way. I've seen a good deal of fansubs, but even then I've only gotten a small taste of what the community has to offer.
Fave fansubs (some have been released commercially)
Irresponsible Captain Tylor
Photon
Porco Rosso
Rurouni Kenshin TV/OAV
Saber Marionnette J
I was hoping that this month was April, and that tomorrow id would say something like 'June Fools!' and promise us they'd never fight again.
However, I think most posters lately have been unnecessarily dismissive of id as 'just another game company' who produces the same game over and over and over again. Do these folks not understand that Doom and its successors spawned uniquely enormous gaming communities unrivaled in their game genre? id is in the serious business of nurturing these fans, thereby guaranteeing loyalty to their brand of products. Perhaps only Blizzard produces a similar effect with their games and the communities built up around them.
id's new game is more than 'just another first-person shooter.' Fans look forward to more than just another mindless opportunity to blow computer-generated monsters to pieces. If it were just that it wouldn't be fun for anybody anymore.
Could it also be that the Powers That Be scour for postings like these on Slashdot before launching a new assault on the next threat?
I recall when Gnutella, Napster, lyrics.ch, DeCSS, et al became big news on Slashdot. Not long after, the RIAA, HFA, MPAA (and their comrades) were hot on the trail of all of these with an army of high-priced lawyers. Many lawsuits later, most of these things are still under heavy fire from corporate lawyers. Is the attention given to grey-market stuff on Slashdot contributing to this, do you think?
You'd think that lyrics.ch was originally safe from 'U.S. law', as the post puts it, but copyrights are perfectly enforceable internationally. It only takes a few phone calls to the local police station to go and raid the home of the instigators (which is exactly what happened to lyrics.ch). Thuggish, true, but they can and probably will do it again.
What's missing before we have a full set of standardized, gaming-friendly APIs? OpenGL and OpenAL (if it lives up to its promise) provide the output, but are there analogues to the rest of DirectX (the competition)? The need for a DirectInput analogue springs immediately to mind. Does one exist?
From a developer's standpoint, these cross-platform APIs are A Good Thing but if the open platforms are limited to graphics and sound alone then Linux game dev will continue on its slow, six-months-behind-Wintel-releases course.
Notwithstanding the general distaste people would have towards such a broad geography of the Internet, I wonder if it isn't more misleading to consider these entities 'distinctly separate.' CorporateNet seems to be using its economic leverate to take over GamingNet, BuyNet, CultureNet and InfoNet at an alarming rate (one would only need to see the herd of acquisitions by AOL/Microsoft to see evidence of this). Perhaps their interest is only monetary in these acquisitions, and hence their limited control otherwise over the subnets leaves the separation suggested by JonKatz intact. Nevertheless, it is foolish to ignore the connection altogether. The best use of such a geography of the Internet is to answer questions like 'which fish is getting too big?' That is, we want to know when any one interest is dipping their fingers too far into too many of these 'continents.'
But rather than seeing distinct continents of the internet, it is probably more useful to think of them as overlapping subsets of The Big Picture. This way the consumers of the Internet at large aren't misled into thinking they can necessarily escape from one into another by clicking on a link to leave a site, or switching from one news/search portal to another...often times you're really not.
To dismiss this as 'just another spin off' does absolutely no justice to the beauty of this book. It is in the spirit of Stardust (another excellent tale, I might add), a four-part illustrated book that came out about two years ago, and tells a story that isn't found in Grimm or Aesop. Most importantly, it is not a comic book. It is also not a 'graphic novel.' It is a book, with a beautiful story, and beautiful paintings inside, and should be judged as such.
Indeed, if you are looking for a comic, look elsewhere. Don't read this and expect a comic book. It is much, much more than that.
While it is desperately important that JP be branded for the disreputable scoundrel he tends to be in the mainstream media, what should really worry us about this article is an admission of something I've suspected for years: journalistic sources start out horribly biased then proliferate through a lovely grapevine of other newspapers. That is: 'CNN has just learned of a Washington Post Article covering a story in TIME Magazine that quotes a line from the New York Times in an article by a journalist whose source was interviewed while rooting around in a dumpster.' Immediately the word 'expert' loses all credibility so the lingering question becomes, 'Who do I trust?' Ideally the community would self-police and release publicly accessible docs to the press so that the lone-gunman mercenary tactics of AntiOnline would lose credibility quicker, but the internet community is such a cacophony of opposing voices that most journalists are quick to give up on their old research methods and give ol' JP a call. Do this more than once and you've created a monster.
So what's the answer? Switch to a new 'expert,' and watch them go down in flames? This goes beyond JP's megalomaniacal campaign since 'experts' get quoted all the time in the news. Experts who dictate the laws government will pass on violence in movies/games/TV and the like.
I disagree strongly with the assertion that 'speed is everything,' and if 'too much typing' were a concern to any developer, then I would wonder why anything but Perl would be used.
In truth, I've never seen OpenStep/GNUStep in action, and a quick glance at the tutorials for both show me a lot (albeit in Objective-C) of what I have already seen accomplished by Metwowerks Power Plant. Although it's platform (Mac) specific, it is an elegantly designed framework built from the ground (Mac Toolbox) up in perfectly readable C++. What browsing through docs need to be done is quick (all you need is written into a fat pdf 'Power Plant book' supplied to whomever buys the product) and easy. Moreover, Constructor lets you do that 'drag and drop' layout promised by OpenStep/GNUStep, so the details of implementing your program are neatly separated from managing the state of your program. I'm a big fan of that.
Just thought I'd put in a word or two for the lonely mac developers out there.
MFC sucks. Hard.
While I have faith that AOL will continue to let Nullsoft and its existing staff make its own decisions about development of Winamp, I wonder if this was really a decision brought on by Playmedia's suit, or a sudden case of greed down in Sedona. Granted, it does seem like the RIAA for a while there was bullying Nullsoft around, and true, it would be convenient to have your share of $400 million to defend yourself with legally, but has anybody wondered if this is a business decision a long time in the making? Shoutcast isn't a technology necessarily designed to exclusively legitimize mp3. Shoutcast is just as capable of streaming news, commercials and other salable audio. IE 5.0 tries the same with it's silly 'Internet Radio' features, and god knows broadcast.com has been doing this for far too long. The winamp homepage, which has apparently yet to make news of this to anybody ('Oh by the way, our new version 2.2.3b21 features AOL's logo peppered here and there'), features screenshots of the minibrowser being used to sell CDs on Amazon.com. I imagine we would be rather dense to ignore this obvious marketing ploy. 'Hey investors! Winamp now has space for your advertisements! Give us money!' The Preferences dialog also has space for select links, and it's only a matter of time before companies start using THIS for ad space, too. Conclusion? Don't hastily assume that Nullsoft was so-suddenly gobbled up by a greedy ISP (even if it IS AOL). Justin Frankel is in this for the money, not because he wants to evangelize for the FSF. We can safely assume Nullsoft won't do to Winamp what was done to the latest version of RealPlayer (I hate a 12-meg download for a bloated piece of software with WAYYYY too many unnecessary features), but we must recognize that it was inevitable they do SOMETHING profitable with their technology. .WMA (badly). So this doesn't necessarily break down to a EBM + MP3 vs. MS + WMA battle. Here's hoping, tho'.
As for competing with Microsoft, I don't know. My musings don't lead my train of thought to see this as a direct assault on Redmond. MediaPlayer supports MP3 (badly), and Winamp supports
$0.02