Vader: Do you not know who I am? I am Darth Vader, I could kill you with a single thought, I do not need a tray, though I could kill you with a tray if I so wished for I would hack at your neck with the thin bit until the blood flowed--
Canteen Worker: No, the food is hot, you'll need a tray to put the food on.
Vader: Oh, oh, alright then
Paraphrased a bit, and it loses it's lustre a bit without Eddie delivering the lines
The article talks about the first flash-based and the first hard-drive based portables, but they overlook the glorious cheaply-made first portable CD-Based player, the Genica MPTrip. At the time I wanted my whole MP3 collection with me. Yeah, a CD binder full of 100 MP3 discs may have looked a little lame, but remember that everyone who wanted their collection with them would need a binder 10x as big for a non-MP3 cd player.
My library for my portable was an order of magnitude more than the first iPod could store, nearly 2 years before the iPod even existed, and it cost 1/4 the price of the first iPod, AND it could play regular CDs. You couldn't fit it in your pocket, but it worked great for the car at a time when car CD players didn't do audio CD-Rs, much less MP3s.
Now, even though someone has broken an ineffective encryption method, they can't use the files due to the DMCA. Maybe they'll just keep buying companies until they have all the IP they need?:)
I've seen a few combo video/still cameras that do data transfer for the still camera over USB and video over Firewire. That only further proves my point that they're only marginally competing busses without 100% overlap.
Actually the OP was serious, in another post he equates Apple involvement in Firewire and Intel involvement in USB as reason enough for Microsoft to consider Firewire "competition". Never mind the fact that they address two completely different usage profiles. When's the last time you saw a Firewire PC keyboard, or a consumer DV camera with USB-based video transfer?
Lets time-shift a bit and look for a theoretical scenario in the past that would be similar to today's situation to see if it makes any sense. Apple only had serial interconnects to printers back in the day... It's like saying a patch to Win 3.1 that breaks serial printing was done because serial is supported by Apple, and parallel is a more common bus for printing on the PC.
I know these are getting tired real quick, but I couldn't resist. A penny, doubled every 18 months since 1965 would be $671,088.64. Intel is trying to get a bargain on eBay!
Motley Crue has remarkable longevity for an 80's hair band. They're probably on the 3rd face lift of Vince Neil's 237th clone in AO. I'd still consider them a more likely candidate for lasting longer than the entirety of all human civilization up to now than, say, G4 TV.
Uh, I don't know, maybe the fact that he owns a Mac and he's making his living because of downloadable music?
I timed it, it took 5 seconds to look up iTMS in Google and click the first link. I don't think it's right to jump on the guy for not knowing something, but its not exactly like it's a hard-to-know acronym either.
When you're watching Ron in action, or reading Perl... it can be difficult to make out what's going on.
It's often hairy, confusing, and messy.
In the end, though it may not have been pretty, they get the job done and produce results.
Ron has more humps than a pack of camels, perhaps he sould be the mascot for Perl 6.
Honestly, the intent wasn't to insult, just to note a peculiar style of writing. I actually don't recall having read any of your posts specifically, though I do recognize your nick since I've been around a while (my other car has a much lower ID). You have to admit that passage did have a knack for a high density buzzwords, but I do that myself, and I don't consider Negroponte to be that bad of a writer.
If I were trying to insult you, it would have been "John Katz, is that you?"
One exception: their "refurbished" stuff. They sent me a dirty DOA video card with a crumpled manual, in an open antistatic bag. It was not "refurbished" by any definition of the word. I had prior success purchasing new items from newegg, so I assumed they'd have the same level of service for reconditioned merchandise. Nope. They charged me a restocking fee, and I paid for shipping twice on a DOA card, which they no doubt sent right back on to the next sucker.
They claimed that their vendors are responsible for making sure the refurbished items work, and that they do not test them. I'm sure the vendor was the untested overrun of an RMA department, since no machine the video card was plugged into would boot. Avoid purchasing anything marked refurbished from newegg.
Was it? The only Tom Clancy I've been exposed to also involved Harrison Ford.
The point of it is, you have 625 lasers, they don't need to be finely calibrated. You are playing the odds, and random or perfectly aligned won't make much of a difference in this case, since you'll probably be waiting until the plane's pretty close before pulling the trigger, your aim won't be perfect, you're just hoping the pilot's eyes are in the gigantic bright splotch you've created.
And DAMN would it look cool, especially if they were all slightly off.:)
I would use multiple cheap consumer green laser pointers packed into a tight area to target about the size of a single window of a cockpit. Imagine a rack of 25x25 lasers modded to output 15mw (search ebay for "laser pointer mod*"), which could be purchased for the $50,000 the FBI said a system could be built for. It would be about 1-2ft square. and mounted on a piece of plywood.
To fire it I would find high ground near the approach for an airport, attempting to get as close to straight in front of the approach path for the plane as possible. This way, from the firing perspective, even though the plane may be going at an very high speed, it will be virtually still since it's coming right at me. Since I'm on the approach for the plane, I stand to do the most damage since landing is the trickiest part of flying, and if I catch the pilot in-flight they may have time for their eyes to recover. Since I'm on high ground, and if I find a really good spot, I can be more or less parallel with the cockpit... though it doesn't matter too much since the pilot will be looking downward (toward the instruments and/or landing strip).
This eliminates the tracking issue, the power issue, and you can use the little cheap batteries that come with the laser pointers. The only thing that may be questionable is the effectiveness of 15mw lasers at the distances involved, but it only takes a split second to blind a guy and you have the whole approach to try to hit the pilot. With a good firing position, you could certainly aim the array within less than a mile's range.
Confidence is most important, looks are secondary, and money comes last... at least if you're looking for a woman who you'd actually want to be with right? You can always counteract being good-looking with a little bit of money, and a lot of condfidence. But you can't have more confidence than your looks, or you'll end up looking like an ass. So the equation goes:
For those of you who popped in to irc.scifi.com during the campaign to get the show back on the air, that server has gone the way of the dodo.
Many folks have ended up at #scapers on irc.scifi-fans.net and alternately #farscape on irc.chorn.com. Happy yakking!
Ummmm, probably the biggest complaints users had were: Poor quality, size, non-integrated low-res camera, lack of speakerphone. To me it looks like they listened.
Having a memory slot is contrary to the thin-client, sync-to-the-network sort of architecture... and is really not too neccessary when the only files you're going to be offloading is pictures, and you can just mail them to your regular email account or pull them off the desktop interface.
Go ahead and complain about paying $5, once, for an application that can rescue your server from the grave without leaving the strip club. I won't.
Yeah, there isn't a ton of software for it... but then again I had a couple of PalmOS units for a while and I spent way more time fiddling with terrible shareware, crummy built-in apps, and endless syncing/backing up problems. All of the built-in applications on the SK beat the crap out of other handheld software in terms of making the stuff I do the most go the quickest. The 3rd party PalmOS stuff was horrible with scant few exceptions, and though there isn't much software available for the SK, the stuff I can install is quite good. Well, maybe not LED Football, but then again I think that one's still free.:) I never have to worry about backups because all of the data is synced to the net.
Who actually pays for ringtones? If you do, who moans about the price that much? Its either worth five bucks to have Insane Clown Possee doing "Row Row Row Your Boat" when your mom calls, or it isn't. It probably isn't. Complaints about giving up your hard earned cash for frivolous crap will fall on deaf ears when nobody's forcing you to make the purchase.
The only argument you can make that they weren't listening to users is on the sync issue. That is a big one, but the other features make up for it... maybe I have that opinion because I've written more than one screen-scraper in my day. I dunno. The blame on that seems to be on T-mo, not Danger.
In addition to the legal risks and direct costs others have mentioned, It's a lot cheaper to develop an e-commerce product that only supports U.S. domestic shipping and payment methods. Often the APIs for foreign locations require a complete re-work of the product... it's twice as much work to write a postal code and province validator for another country, so you have to justify the time and expense. Not to mention if you're doing things right you're quoting prices in loonies not USD. It's not that much work, but it is the perception of a ton of extra work that is the barrier to entry for internationalizing systems.
IIRC 30 second samples are legal under fair use (though I'm not sure about public performance)... The chorus of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" would get callers dropping in less than 5 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Vader: I'll have the Penne a le arrabiata
Canteen Worker: You'll need a tray
Vader: Do you not know who I am? I am Darth Vader, I could kill you with a single thought, I do not need a tray, though I could kill you with a tray if I so wished for I would hack at your neck with the thin bit until the blood flowed--
Canteen Worker: No, the food is hot, you'll need a tray to put the food on.
Vader: Oh, oh, alright then
Paraphrased a bit, and it loses it's lustre a bit without Eddie delivering the lines
The article talks about the first flash-based and the first hard-drive based portables, but they overlook the glorious cheaply-made first portable CD-Based player, the Genica MPTrip. At the time I wanted my whole MP3 collection with me. Yeah, a CD binder full of 100 MP3 discs may have looked a little lame, but remember that everyone who wanted their collection with them would need a binder 10x as big for a non-MP3 cd player.
My library for my portable was an order of magnitude more than the first iPod could store, nearly 2 years before the iPod even existed, and it cost 1/4 the price of the first iPod, AND it could play regular CDs. You couldn't fit it in your pocket, but it worked great for the car at a time when car CD players didn't do audio CD-Rs, much less MP3s.
First, Adobe has a guy arrested, and then tried under the DMCA, for having the gall to crack the PDF format, which Adobe voilated the DMCA by embedding other font vendors' information into.
Now, even though someone has broken an ineffective encryption method, they can't use the files due to the DMCA. Maybe they'll just keep buying companies until they have all the IP they need? :)
I've seen a few combo video/still cameras that do data transfer for the still camera over USB and video over Firewire. That only further proves my point that they're only marginally competing busses without 100% overlap.
Actually the OP was serious, in another post he equates Apple involvement in Firewire and Intel involvement in USB as reason enough for Microsoft to consider Firewire "competition". Never mind the fact that they address two completely different usage profiles. When's the last time you saw a Firewire PC keyboard, or a consumer DV camera with USB-based video transfer?
Lets time-shift a bit and look for a theoretical scenario in the past that would be similar to today's situation to see if it makes any sense. Apple only had serial interconnects to printers back in the day... It's like saying a patch to Win 3.1 that breaks serial printing was done because serial is supported by Apple, and parallel is a more common bus for printing on the PC.
Why the hell would Microsoft consider a device connection bus standard to be competition? That statement makes absolutley no sense.
I know these are getting tired real quick, but I couldn't resist. A penny, doubled every 18 months since 1965 would be $671,088.64. Intel is trying to get a bargain on eBay!
Motley Crue has remarkable longevity for an 80's hair band. They're probably on the 3rd face lift of Vince Neil's 237th clone in AO. I'd still consider them a more likely candidate for lasting longer than the entirety of all human civilization up to now than, say, G4 TV.
Google is your friend. Just put the UPS in the PC.
Uh, I don't know, maybe the fact that he owns a Mac and he's making his living because of downloadable music?
I timed it, it took 5 seconds to look up iTMS in Google and click the first link. I don't think it's right to jump on the guy for not knowing something, but its not exactly like it's a hard-to-know acronym either.
When you're watching Ron in action, or reading Perl... it can be difficult to make out what's going on. It's often hairy, confusing, and messy. In the end, though it may not have been pretty, they get the job done and produce results.
Ron has more humps than a pack of camels, perhaps he sould be the mascot for Perl 6.
It's amazing that something so ugly can be so well endowed, and do such beautiful things. So where, exactly, does the analogy break down?
Honestly, the intent wasn't to insult, just to note a peculiar style of writing. I actually don't recall having read any of your posts specifically, though I do recognize your nick since I've been around a while (my other car has a much lower ID). You have to admit that passage did have a knack for a high density buzzwords, but I do that myself, and I don't consider Negroponte to be that bad of a writer. If I were trying to insult you, it would have been "John Katz, is that you?"
Negroponte, is that you?
One exception: their "refurbished" stuff. They sent me a dirty DOA video card with a crumpled manual, in an open antistatic bag. It was not "refurbished" by any definition of the word. I had prior success purchasing new items from newegg, so I assumed they'd have the same level of service for reconditioned merchandise. Nope. They charged me a restocking fee, and I paid for shipping twice on a DOA card, which they no doubt sent right back on to the next sucker.
They claimed that their vendors are responsible for making sure the refurbished items work, and that they do not test them. I'm sure the vendor was the untested overrun of an RMA department, since no machine the video card was plugged into would boot. Avoid purchasing anything marked refurbished from newegg.
Was it? The only Tom Clancy I've been exposed to also involved Harrison Ford.
:)
The point of it is, you have 625 lasers, they don't need to be finely calibrated. You are playing the odds, and random or perfectly aligned won't make much of a difference in this case, since you'll probably be waiting until the plane's pretty close before pulling the trigger, your aim won't be perfect, you're just hoping the pilot's eyes are in the gigantic bright splotch you've created.
And DAMN would it look cool, especially if they were all slightly off.
If I were making a laser blinding system...
I would use multiple cheap consumer green laser pointers packed into a tight area to target about the size of a single window of a cockpit. Imagine a rack of 25x25 lasers modded to output 15mw (search ebay for "laser pointer mod*"), which could be purchased for the $50,000 the FBI said a system could be built for. It would be about 1-2ft square. and mounted on a piece of plywood.
To fire it I would find high ground near the approach for an airport, attempting to get as close to straight in front of the approach path for the plane as possible. This way, from the firing perspective, even though the plane may be going at an very high speed, it will be virtually still since it's coming right at me. Since I'm on the approach for the plane, I stand to do the most damage since landing is the trickiest part of flying, and if I catch the pilot in-flight they may have time for their eyes to recover. Since I'm on high ground, and if I find a really good spot, I can be more or less parallel with the cockpit... though it doesn't matter too much since the pilot will be looking downward (toward the instruments and/or landing strip).
This eliminates the tracking issue, the power issue, and you can use the little cheap batteries that come with the laser pointers. The only thing that may be questionable is the effectiveness of 15mw lasers at the distances involved, but it only takes a split second to blind a guy and you have the whole approach to try to hit the pilot. With a good firing position, you could certainly aim the array within less than a mile's range.
Confidence = c
Eyecatching = e
Money = m
Confidence is most important, looks are secondary, and money comes last... at least if you're looking for a woman who you'd actually want to be with right? You can always counteract being good-looking with a little bit of money, and a lot of condfidence. But you can't have more confidence than your looks, or you'll end up looking like an ass. So the equation goes:
e=mc^2
YMMV. It's all relative
For those of you who popped in to irc.scifi.com during the campaign to get the show back on the air, that server has gone the way of the dodo. Many folks have ended up at #scapers on irc.scifi-fans.net and alternately #farscape on irc.chorn.com. Happy yakking!
I always though Sony's memory stick format looked like Trek's isolinear chips. Grim outlook on the future, eh?
Ummmm, probably the biggest complaints users had were: Poor quality, size, non-integrated low-res camera, lack of speakerphone. To me it looks like they listened.
Having a memory slot is contrary to the thin-client, sync-to-the-network sort of architecture... and is really not too neccessary when the only files you're going to be offloading is pictures, and you can just mail them to your regular email account or pull them off the desktop interface.
Go ahead and complain about paying $5, once, for an application that can rescue your server from the grave without leaving the strip club. I won't.
Yeah, there isn't a ton of software for it... but then again I had a couple of PalmOS units for a while and I spent way more time fiddling with terrible shareware, crummy built-in apps, and endless syncing/backing up problems. All of the built-in applications on the SK beat the crap out of other handheld software in terms of making the stuff I do the most go the quickest. The 3rd party PalmOS stuff was horrible with scant few exceptions, and though there isn't much software available for the SK, the stuff I can install is quite good. Well, maybe not LED Football, but then again I think that one's still free. :) I never have to worry about backups because all of the data is synced to the net.
Who actually pays for ringtones? If you do, who moans about the price that much? Its either worth five bucks to have Insane Clown Possee doing "Row Row Row Your Boat" when your mom calls, or it isn't. It probably isn't. Complaints about giving up your hard earned cash for frivolous crap will fall on deaf ears when nobody's forcing you to make the purchase.
The only argument you can make that they weren't listening to users is on the sync issue. That is a big one, but the other features make up for it... maybe I have that opinion because I've written more than one screen-scraper in my day. I dunno. The blame on that seems to be on T-mo, not Danger.
All of that and a thumb keyboard, and available right now for less moolah.
In addition to the legal risks and direct costs others have mentioned, It's a lot cheaper to develop an e-commerce product that only supports U.S. domestic shipping and payment methods. Often the APIs for foreign locations require a complete re-work of the product... it's twice as much work to write a postal code and province validator for another country, so you have to justify the time and expense. Not to mention if you're doing things right you're quoting prices in loonies not USD. It's not that much work, but it is the perception of a ton of extra work that is the barrier to entry for internationalizing systems.
At night you can't see black helicopters.
IIRC 30 second samples are legal under fair use (though I'm not sure about public performance)... The chorus of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" would get callers dropping in less than 5 minutes.