but it sounds as if this is just a pipe dream at the moment. The article is filled with phrases like "will conceivably", "would work", and "might activate".
I have an RCA television with "Guide Plus". I don't have cable,so the TV apparently downloads listings from local broadcasters at night, for a few days at a time. There are small ads on the left sides of the listings, and many times there will be gaps in the listings. The whole system is a little clunky; it takes a while to actually bring up the menu, a while to scroll ahead, and sometimes it'll "crash", causing the TV to suddenly turn off, and all the listings to be lost. The whole thing reminds a little of using Gnome a couple years ago.
This television was only bought a couple months ago, but hopefully RCA will improve the software before they bring this PVR to market. It's not such a big deal that the software's buggy in my case, because the TV itself is fine; I just don't use the Guide Plus function much. With a PVR, it'd be a much bigger problem, I think.
SPAM: -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results SPAM: This mail is probably spam. The original message has been altered SPAM: so you can recognise or block similar unwanted mail in future. SPAM: See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details. SPAM: SPAM: Content analysis details: (6.1 hits, 5 required) SPAM: SUBJ_ENDS_IN_Q_MARK (-0.1 points) Subject: ends in a question mark SPAM: FROM_HAS_MIXED_NUMS (2.6 points) From: contains numbers mixed in with letters SPAM: GAPPY_TEXT (0.4 points) BODY: Contains 'G.a.p.p.y-T.e.x.t' SPAM: DOUBLE_CAPSWORD (1.1 points) BODY: A word in all caps repeated on the line SPAM: CLICK_BELOW (1.5 points) BODY: Asks you to click below SPAM: LINES_OF_YELLING (-0.0 points) BODY: A WHOLE LINE OF YELLING DETECTED SPAM: LINES_OF_YELLING_3 (0.5 points) BODY: 3 WHOLE LINES OF YELLING DETECTED SPAM: LINES_OF_YELLING_2 (0.1 points) BODY: 2 WHOLE LINES OF YELLING DETECTED SPAM: SPAM: -------------------- End of SpamAssassin results
A couple years after Fender started making Japanese "Squier" guitars, they had to stop selling them in the US because they were a plainly superior guitar at 1/4-1/3rd the price of the American made equivalent. Eventually, they moved the line to Korea, where the guitars were suitably inferior, and began selling them in the US again. Those Japanese Squiers have appreciated in value by as much as 200% since then, while the American-made Fenders of the same time have depreciated.
The only really bad guitars, nowadays, are made in Indonesia, but they are dirt cheap anyways. Korean-made guitars tend to be hit or miss, but are generally improving. Only a few Japanese-made guitars are even sold in the US, but those that are (Yamaha and Fernandes being the main makers), are generally at least worth the price, something that can hardly be said for many American-made Fenders and Gibsons. Now, if you were to talk up a company like Heritage, you'd have a point.
They probably sound ok. I played bass in an all-girl punk band a few years back, and our guitar player had a couple Fernandes stratocaster copies. For cheap guitars, they were pretty decent-sounding.
The reason why MS is so adamant about the ACPI on/off issue, I suspect, is because Windows XP (and 2000 before it) generally requires a full re-install if you switch between APM and ACPI. I imagine they don't want consumers fiddling around with harmless-sounding settings in their bioses, and then finding out that their computers won't boot.
when it's set to produce bytecode? If it produces slow bytecode, then it wouldn't be that surprising for it to produce slow native code as well. This could just mean that it's immature and not well optimized. The article would've been more useful if he'd tried out more than the one native compiler, as well, since he lists eight of them.
He was almost right.... sort of. If you drop down to the fourth smallest disk size, it's $114 for 80GB Maxtors, or $1.425/GB. That's substantially cheaper than the 160GB drives, but still not cheap enough to make up for the fact that you'll need another controller card (or a more expensive card with more ports), and probably a bigger, better ventilated case, and probably a better power supply.
but the implementation will be a bear. First there is the relatively low hurdle of standardizing communications between IDS's. The IETF has been working on such a format for a while.
The main problem, though, will be in establishing automatic systems that are able to judge "threat levels" and act accordingly. People will sign on to such a network only if it's more likely to benefit than to inconvenience them. Such a system won't be of much use if it requires human intervention every time an alert goes up, but it is notoriously difficult to program computers to take the place of simple human judgement.
There have been many cases over the years in which judges have accepted various parodies as fair use. The most definitive ruling, though, came in the 1994 case Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, in which 2 Live Crew was being sued over their "parody" of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman". The US Supreme Court here clearly established parody as a potential fair use. From that ruling:
Parody presents a difficult case. Parody's humor, or in any event its comment, necessarily springs from recognizable allusion to its object through distorted imitation. Its art lies in the tension between a known original and its parodic twin. When parody takes aim at a particular original work, the parody must be able to "conjure up" at least enough of that original to make the object of its critical wit recognizable.
The idea of "conjuring up" the original work has become both a basis for protection, and a limitation. You can use enough of the original so that the target of your parody is obvious, but you can't simply copy the original, hoping to benefit from its success, and then throw in a few jokes in order to gain protection. Commercial parodies are just as entitled to this protection as non-commercial ones, as well.
Sony didn't (or hasn't yet) pursue legal action. They did hold out the threat of legal action under the DMCA, but they have since reached an agreement with this guy allowing him to put most of his software back on the web. The SciAm article only makes that they still could start legal action, but this seems unlikely given the agreement.
They do make money from sales of Sony-produced software addons to the Aibo ($150 per upgrade, according to the article), so this guy's software could potentially cost them some revenue. Of course, this might well be offset by the increased sales of hardware AiboPet's software generates. I imagine some Sony bean-counters figured out the balance between the two, and decide it was in their interest to let AiboPet keep at it.
Hard but brittle is what I think he meant. You can use a diamond to scratch or cut anything (it is hard), but you can also easily smash one with a hammer (it is brittle).
I am not a programmer, but this works for me. The "code", such as it is, was taken directly from the Perl MIME::Parser module man page. Install MIME::Tools first, and then make a script like:
---
#!/usr/bin/perl
use MIME::Parser;
my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
$parser->output_under("/tmp");
$entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN);
---
(call it unmht.pl for this example).
Make that script executable, and then just "cat yourmhtfile.mht | unmht.pl". The files contained within the mht should all end up in a directory under/tmp in this case. If you change "output_under" to "output_dir", it will dump them all directly in/tmp, or in whatever directory you specified there.
Linux is even sold at Walmart nowadays. The store near me had Redhat and Mandrake distros in the electronics section, and a few different "teach yourself linux" books which included installation cds. The clerk I talked to didn't know what Linux was, and couldn't recall having ever sold it, but it was there nonetheless. Judging by the checkout lines, Mandrake would fly off the shelves if they "bundled" it with tube socks and huge bags of beef jerky.
I'd rather see pragmatism than evangelism at this point. Some form of.NET style framework is going to become a standard in the next few years, and I'd rather it were an open source one than an MS one. 50 volunteers and 5 Ximian developers simply don't stand a chance against MS. If it takes a BSD-style license to get Intel and HP on board, then so be it. Evangelize later, once you've got the leverage and mindshare.
Do whatever it takes to get a foothold now, instead of trying to play catch-up when it's too late. "About 50 people are working on Mono, five of them full-time Ximian employees, de Icaza said." Several more than 50 are working on.NET at Microsoft, I imagine. If it takes a switch to a BSD-style license to get big companies like Intel and HP on board, then hell yes, do it.
The Chinese are the most technologically advanced people on earth, and will likely eclipse the Americans as world leaders in short order. As a nation, their industriousness and ingenuity are unmatched. While "fat cat" nations like the USA and those of Western Europe rest on their laurels of years long gone by, China forges ahead with a clear purpose and not a little justifiable umbrage at the rest of the world's perception of it. Advances like this FCPGA will more and more often come from China in the future.
It's sickening to me that we spend as much on NASA as we do. Around the world, people starve and die of diseases that would be cured by a quick trip to an American doctor. Yet we continue to pour billions of dollars into fruitless, pointless, space exploration, dollars that could be used for very real good here on Earth.
NASA long ago finished serving its purpose as a national cheerleading institution. We haven't done anything of significance in space since the moon landings, and we won't in the near future, either. The only way to "save" NASA is to let it die a much-needed death. Commercial interests will eventually take over and put money into doing meaningful space exploration: exploration with a goal beyond "because it's there".
As a typical woman, I'm not really interested in video games. I am, however, interested in video games as a societal force. The jury's still out as to how much of an effect on our kids this type of violent video game has, but it's safe to say that the effect exists and is significant. I don't see anything being done about this soon, though, simply because these games are already so wide-spread.
This game, however, goes far beyond the usual blood, gore, and gratuitous violence that is the standard today. In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, you don't just fight the Nazis, you can actually play as one. It's troubling to me that, in these difficult times, we have video games that plainly glorify such a manifestly evil group of people. What's next, a game where you act as a lackey to Pol Pot, and must curry the dictator's favor by killing thousands of helpless Cambodians before the timer runs out? Maybe a game where you "role play" a famous serial killer or rapist? Ten years down the road a "strategy" game where you plot terrorist bombings, culminating in the "great work" of flying planes in to the World Trade Center?
I think it's time we put a collective foot down, and let the software industry know that this kind of greedy, amoral, capitalization on the horrors of history is not acceptable. Our children deserve a chance at growing up into good, kind, people, without the obvious and irreresistable corrupting influence this game presents.
Slashdot Mirror
but it sounds as if this is just a pipe dream at the moment. The article is filled with phrases like "will conceivably", "would work", and "might activate".
I have an RCA television with "Guide Plus". I don't have cable,so the TV apparently downloads listings from local broadcasters at night, for a few days at a time. There are small ads on the left sides of the listings, and many times there will be gaps in the listings. The whole system is a little clunky; it takes a while to actually bring up the menu, a while to scroll ahead, and sometimes it'll "crash", causing the TV to suddenly turn off, and all the listings to be lost. The whole thing reminds a little of using Gnome a couple years ago.
This television was only bought a couple months ago, but hopefully RCA will improve the software before they bring this PVR to market. It's not such a big deal that the software's buggy in my case, because the TV itself is fine; I just don't use the Guide Plus function much. With a PVR, it'd be a much bigger problem, I think.
Subject: *****SPAM***** ZDNET NEWS: Spam blocklists going too far?
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 06:21:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: "ZDNet News E-mail Alert"
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A couple years after Fender started making Japanese "Squier" guitars, they had to stop selling them in the US because they were a plainly superior guitar at 1/4-1/3rd the price of the American made equivalent. Eventually, they moved the line to Korea, where the guitars were suitably inferior, and began selling them in the US again. Those Japanese Squiers have appreciated in value by as much as 200% since then, while the American-made Fenders of the same time have depreciated.
The only really bad guitars, nowadays, are made in Indonesia, but they are dirt cheap anyways. Korean-made guitars tend to be hit or miss, but are generally improving. Only a few Japanese-made guitars are even sold in the US, but those that are (Yamaha and Fernandes being the main makers), are generally at least worth the price, something that can hardly be said for many American-made Fenders and Gibsons. Now, if you were to talk up a company like Heritage, you'd have a point.
They probably sound ok. I played bass in an all-girl punk band a few years back, and our guitar player had a couple Fernandes stratocaster copies. For cheap guitars, they were pretty decent-sounding.
The reason why MS is so adamant about the ACPI on/off issue, I suspect, is because Windows XP (and 2000 before it) generally requires a full re-install if you switch between APM and ACPI. I imagine they don't want consumers fiddling around with harmless-sounding settings in their bioses, and then finding out that their computers won't boot.
when it's set to produce bytecode? If it produces slow bytecode, then it wouldn't be that surprising for it to produce slow native code as well. This could just mean that it's immature and not well optimized. The article would've been more useful if he'd tried out more than the one native compiler, as well, since he lists eight of them.
He was almost right.... sort of. If you drop down to the fourth smallest disk size, it's $114 for 80GB Maxtors, or $1.425/GB. That's substantially cheaper than the 160GB drives, but still not cheap enough to make up for the fact that you'll need another controller card (or a more expensive card with more ports), and probably a bigger, better ventilated case, and probably a better power supply.
but the implementation will be a bear. First there is the relatively low hurdle of standardizing communications between IDS's. The IETF has been working on such a format for a while.
The main problem, though, will be in establishing automatic systems that are able to judge "threat levels" and act accordingly. People will sign on to such a network only if it's more likely to benefit than to inconvenience them. Such a system won't be of much use if it requires human intervention every time an alert goes up, but it is notoriously difficult to program computers to take the place of simple human judgement.
The idea of "conjuring up" the original work has become both a basis for protection, and a limitation. You can use enough of the original so that the target of your parody is obvious, but you can't simply copy the original, hoping to benefit from its success, and then throw in a few jokes in order to gain protection. Commercial parodies are just as entitled to this protection as non-commercial ones, as well.
Just the Loki-written stuff that hasn't already been released under other projects. The installer, stuff like that.
Sony didn't (or hasn't yet) pursue legal action. They did hold out the threat of legal action under the DMCA, but they have since reached an agreement with this guy allowing him to put most of his software back on the web. The SciAm article only makes that they still could start legal action, but this seems unlikely given the agreement.
They do make money from sales of Sony-produced software addons to the Aibo ($150 per upgrade, according to the article), so this guy's software could potentially cost them some revenue. Of course, this might well be offset by the increased sales of hardware AiboPet's software generates. I imagine some Sony bean-counters figured out the balance between the two, and decide it was in their interest to let AiboPet keep at it.
Hard but brittle is what I think he meant. You can use a diamond to scratch or cut anything (it is hard), but you can also easily smash one with a hammer (it is brittle).
I am not a programmer, but this works for me. The "code", such as it is, was taken directly from the Perl MIME::Parser module man page. Install MIME::Tools first, and then make a script like:
/tmp in this case. If you change "output_under" to "output_dir", it will dump them all directly in /tmp, or in whatever directory you specified there.
---
#!/usr/bin/perl
use MIME::Parser;
my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
$parser->output_under("/tmp");
$entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN);
---
(call it unmht.pl for this example).
Make that script executable, and then just "cat yourmhtfile.mht | unmht.pl". The files contained within the mht should all end up in a directory under
Linux is even sold at Walmart nowadays. The store near me had Redhat and Mandrake distros in the electronics section, and a few different "teach yourself linux" books which included installation cds. The clerk I talked to didn't know what Linux was, and couldn't recall having ever sold it, but it was there nonetheless. Judging by the checkout lines, Mandrake would fly off the shelves if they "bundled" it with tube socks and huge bags of beef jerky.
I'd rather see pragmatism than evangelism at this point. Some form of .NET style framework is going to become a standard in the next few years, and I'd rather it were an open source one than an MS one. 50 volunteers and 5 Ximian developers simply don't stand a chance against MS. If it takes a BSD-style license to get Intel and HP on board, then so be it. Evangelize later, once you've got the leverage and mindshare.
Do whatever it takes to get a foothold now, instead of trying to play catch-up when it's too late. "About 50 people are working on Mono, five of them full-time Ximian employees, de Icaza said." Several more than 50 are working on .NET at Microsoft, I imagine. If it takes a switch to a BSD-style license to get big companies like Intel and HP on board, then hell yes, do it.
There's a mirror of the proposed bill here.
The Chinese are the most technologically advanced people on earth, and will likely eclipse the Americans as world leaders in short order. As a nation, their industriousness and ingenuity are unmatched. While "fat cat" nations like the USA and those of Western Europe rest on their laurels of years long gone by, China forges ahead with a clear purpose and not a little justifiable umbrage at the rest of the world's perception of it. Advances like this FCPGA will more and more often come from China in the future.
It's sickening to me that we spend as much on NASA as we do. Around the world, people starve and die of diseases that would be cured by a quick trip to an American doctor. Yet we continue to pour billions of dollars into fruitless, pointless, space exploration, dollars that could be used for very real good here on Earth.
NASA long ago finished serving its purpose as a national cheerleading institution. We haven't done anything of significance in space since the moon landings, and we won't in the near future, either. The only way to "save" NASA is to let it die a much-needed death. Commercial interests will eventually take over and put money into doing meaningful space exploration: exploration with a goal beyond "because it's there".
As a typical woman, I'm not really interested in video games. I am, however, interested in video games as a societal force. The jury's still out as to how much of an effect on our kids this type of violent video game has, but it's safe to say that the effect exists and is significant. I don't see anything being done about this soon, though, simply because these games are already so wide-spread.
This game, however, goes far beyond the usual blood, gore, and gratuitous violence that is the standard today. In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, you don't just fight the Nazis, you can actually play as one. It's troubling to me that, in these difficult times, we have video games that plainly glorify such a manifestly evil group of people. What's next, a game where you act as a lackey to Pol Pot, and must curry the dictator's favor by killing thousands of helpless Cambodians before the timer runs out? Maybe a game where you "role play" a famous serial killer or rapist? Ten years down the road a "strategy" game where you plot terrorist bombings, culminating in the "great work" of flying planes in to the World Trade Center?
I think it's time we put a collective foot down, and let the software industry know that this kind of greedy, amoral, capitalization on the horrors of history is not acceptable. Our children deserve a chance at growing up into good, kind, people, without the obvious and irreresistable corrupting influence this game presents.