I drive a car with 287hp. It does 0-60 in 5.8 seconds, and a quarter mile in 14 seconds, at 99.3 mph. My quick maneuverable car has gotten me out of *MANY* potential accidents. There's no way I'd drive a car that took 12 seconds to get to 60, let alone 20.
I like the Rifftrax better than the MST3k series. The problem with MST3k is the movies are *so* horrible they are simply not entertaining.
I know they can't license these films, but MST3k is *so* much better when the movie is reasonably modern. I'd love to see them take on some recent stinkers like I Robot.
I have been thinking about this problem for a long time. Since the studios will never license their content to be made fun of... Perhaps a special DVD player ciould be made that overlay's the MST3k silhouette on top of a standard DVD (this would be legal, right?), and splices in the interstitial bits. Or a PC application which does the same and outputs a new DVD or encodes for an Apple TV box. They could partner with Amazon to offer the physical DVDs at a severe discount.
Yes, I have been thinking about this too much. BTW if any MST3k guys would like to discuss these ideas I'm an accomplished SW engineer:)
I hate MS, I own a MAC, I helped found a linux distribution. Mac software cannot be nearly as profitable as PC software for simple economic reasons. Assume the dev costs are the same for Office for Mac and Office for Windows (in fact they are probably much higher for mac -- but assume with me). Development is a fixed cost. Curiously enough, software has almost zero marginal cost (it doesn't cost very much to make x+1 units, if you're already making x units). Point being, at what 6 or 7% of the marketshare -- Mac software incurs the SAME expenses as word but has an order of magnitude less avenues for sales. It *HAS* to be less profitable.
Id like to point out that in the theoretical there is *NO* way for software to detect if it is running on a virtual machine. Any action the software can take can be emulated by the virtual machine.
That being said MS hasn't tried to lock people out -- virtualization is standard sw testing procedure now, breaking that would would be disruptive. I have vista installed under Parallels, it works fine. (well, its fucking slow as a dog and memory hoggish -- but it runs)
I pine for the LucasArts games of old. The Monkey Islands, the Day of the Tentacles, and Grim Fandango which was more art than a videogame.
Why is it that everything good and full of art, thought and wit must make way for what is base and stupid and vulgar? I pine for charm and subtle humor, for fully developed characters, for well developed plots for the denouement... for story telling and all the other things forgotten.
Fuck it, I'm going to write a video game and show 'em how it's done.
It seems really strange now to hear well-off Americans complain that learning languages is "too hard" and requires special talent
Learn some neurology then. The brain looses its plasticity for languages after the age of about 14. It *IS* extremely difficult to acquire a language after that age -- and if you do it is actually stored in a physically different location in your brain than your primary language.
This is the same reason that people who don't learn to read after a certain age almost *NEVER* learn to read.
The human brain has windows during which it is most receptive to acquiring new abilities. After those windows expire it is very difficult and in some cases impossible to acquire those abilities.
So blame the American educational system. Most language courses are offered at the freshman level of high school -- about the age of 15.
My aunt was making 70k/yr in San Jose as a secretary. As I understand it, going out to dinner can cost 200$... I would believe that 14/hr would make you quite poor.
You have just discovered Money=Freedom. Those who don't have money are not free. Those who have money are free in proportional to their wealth. This is the paradox of the capitalism.
I generally buy large orders of cds, 50 or 100 at a time. I spend a lot of time on the road and a lot of time listening to music at work... so if I buy a cd it might be months before I listen to it, and it is not going to be returnable at that time;)
Preventing casual infringement also depends on your definition of infringement. I bought the new David Gray CD. It wouldnt play in my computer for some reason, so I bought another copy. Then I found out it was copy protected. I don't *OWN* a cd player and I couldn't rip it.
I have two copies of the album and to this day I have only heard it via an mp3 downloaded illegally. In this case they just prevented me from legal fair use and its the last sony album I'll every buy.
No, I don't ant to take on the task of correcting your world view. Your argument makes sense if you accept a handful of premises which aren't true. Your perception is flawed therefore your conclusions are flawed.
Is exploitation such as slave labor in China or child labor in Indonesia a consensual economic relationship? How can America compete on a world stage with forced labor?
Everything else you said is too stupid to warrant a response.
You forfeited the debate with the phrase "...sticking the gun to their head and telling them they are not allowed to purchase goods from people with different skin colors and religions." Which is an outrageous statement on all levels.
What wishful thinking. This process allows the ownership class (read: not you) to capture the wealth of the middle class. Any time you hear the term "globalization" or someone singing it's praises this is secret code for "capturing the wealth of the middle class."
A subject that nobody *EVER* discusses is the limits of human perception. Our brains our designed to make quick evaluations about things. This is the *ONLY* strategy that works because you have to evaluate thousands of things in your life.
When we give a name to something, an entity as large as walmart for instance, that allows us to sum up the hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions they take on behalf of walmart as one concept. But in reality, walmart is hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions.
Add this to a blurry concept of good and evil, and you've got a real mess that can't be summarized easily and thus can't be easily comprehended by our brains.
The truth about walmart (and every other thing) is it is neither evil nor good. Some of the people are evil, some of the policies are evil, some are good, some of the people are good. I worked for walmart after college during a hard time in my industry... I met all those people, good, bad, evil, and the majority just people trying to feed their families. Most aren't even capable of understanding the damage walmart as a hole does to the country (wage depression which leads to manufacturing outsourcing which leads to more wage depression)
Broadcom has a building in Irvine, or Anaheim I think. I don't recall where exactly, but I know i've seen it... Somewhere in orange county (CA). If its really that bad, there have to be enough geeks in the area to go down to the building and protest for a few hours. This is America god damnit.
I think someone from slashdot needs to step up and confess to this murder. ReiserFS is a hell of a filesystem... I would do it myself but I have an alibi. So who wants to be our patsy?
I do agree that each platform has its problems. I also agree with everything you said but "PalmOS... somehow it's still the only thing out there that delivers a seamless *USER* experience."
If by seamless you mean every app is based on the same horrible GUI, is equally likely to crash and experience strange pauses, then yes it is seamless. My treo crashes several times a week no matter what I'm doing, and I'm a fairly light user. When I was living on it and traveling a lot, it crashed twice a day.
Um yes. This is utter bullshit:) I have owned *EVERY* major palm since the original Pilot 1000, and I am a software engineer and I work at a company that develops software for CE. Let me give you a little insight into palm programming.
The original palm was made possible by the Motorola Dragonball processor which IIRC was a 16mhz 68k variant with and LCD driver and memory controller, it was one of the first SOC's (System on a Chip) that I can recall. Programming these things was hideous. It was all C/C++ and the API sucked hardcore.
Flash forward 10 years, Palms now have 300 - 400 mhz ARM processors, WHICH THEY USE TO EMULATE THAT ORIGINAL DRAGONBALL PROCESSOR! If you want access to the ARM processor you can write an "applet" which runs directly on the real hardware. These are *VERY* difficult to get right and stable. This programming model is simply wrong.
Compare this to WinCE 5 which gives you a stripped down CLR, or CE6 which gives you almost a full CLR. You can write code that works on both a PC and CE with a few #defines here and there. The CE OS is that modern.
Compare that to BlackBerry which has J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) which is also a very decent programming model.
So long story short -- Palm sucks because their dev tools suck. They have been talking about this Palm OS 6 for a few years now that is supposed to correct all this stuff, but it never seems to come out, and frankly I don't think Palm has the engineers to pull it off. They've shown only the ability to produce sub-standard buggy software. My Treo is definitely the last palm I care to own.
Slashdot Mirror
I drive a car with 287hp. It does 0-60 in 5.8 seconds, and a quarter mile in 14 seconds, at 99.3 mph. My quick maneuverable car has gotten me out of *MANY* potential accidents. There's no way I'd drive a car that took 12 seconds to get to 60, let alone 20.
I know they can't license these films, but MST3k is *so* much better when the movie is reasonably modern. I'd love to see them take on some recent stinkers like I Robot.
I have been thinking about this problem for a long time. Since the studios will never license their content to be made fun of ... Perhaps a special DVD player ciould be made that overlay's the MST3k silhouette on top of a standard DVD (this would be legal, right?), and splices in the interstitial bits. Or a PC application which does the same and outputs a new DVD or encodes for an Apple TV box. They could partner with Amazon to offer the physical DVDs at a severe discount.
Yes, I have been thinking about this too much. BTW if any MST3k guys would like to discuss these ideas I'm an accomplished SW engineer :)
I hate MS, I own a MAC, I helped found a linux distribution. Mac software cannot be nearly as profitable as PC software for simple economic reasons. Assume the dev costs are the same for Office for Mac and Office for Windows (in fact they are probably much higher for mac -- but assume with me). Development is a fixed cost. Curiously enough, software has almost zero marginal cost (it doesn't cost very much to make x+1 units, if you're already making x units). Point being, at what 6 or 7% of the marketshare -- Mac software incurs the SAME expenses as word but has an order of magnitude less avenues for sales. It *HAS* to be less profitable.
As a counterpoint ... Vista is nearly unusable under parallels on a mac. XP was decent.
That being said MS hasn't tried to lock people out -- virtualization is standard sw testing procedure now, breaking that would would be disruptive. I have vista installed under Parallels, it works fine. (well, its fucking slow as a dog and memory hoggish -- but it runs)
Cringley's MO is to come up with some sky is falling scenario. Plausible or not it is discussed ad infinitum and therefore he is more well read.
Why is it that everything good and full of art, thought and wit must make way for what is base and stupid and vulgar? I pine for charm and subtle humor, for fully developed characters, for well developed plots for the denouement... for story telling and all the other things forgotten.
Fuck it, I'm going to write a video game and show 'em how it's done.
Learn some neurology then. The brain looses its plasticity for languages after the age of about 14. It *IS* extremely difficult to acquire a language after that age -- and if you do it is actually stored in a physically different location in your brain than your primary language.
This is the same reason that people who don't learn to read after a certain age almost *NEVER* learn to read.
The human brain has windows during which it is most receptive to acquiring new abilities. After those windows expire it is very difficult and in some cases impossible to acquire those abilities.
So blame the American educational system. Most language courses are offered at the freshman level of high school -- about the age of 15.
My aunt was making 70k/yr in San Jose as a secretary. As I understand it, going out to dinner can cost 200$... I would believe that 14/hr would make you quite poor.
How about: iHateCingularMoreThaniLoveApple
You have just discovered Money=Freedom. Those who don't have money are not free. Those who have money are free in proportional to their wealth. This is the paradox of the capitalism.
Embolden is a perfectly cromulent word.
It is so rare that one solipsists meets another.
I generally buy large orders of cds, 50 or 100 at a time. I spend a lot of time on the road and a lot of time listening to music at work ... so if I buy a cd it might be months before I listen to it, and it is not going to be returnable at that time ;)
I have two copies of the album and to this day I have only heard it via an mp3 downloaded illegally. In this case they just prevented me from legal fair use and its the last sony album I'll every buy.
No, I don't ant to take on the task of correcting your world view. Your argument makes sense if you accept a handful of premises which aren't true. Your perception is flawed therefore your conclusions are flawed.
Is exploitation such as slave labor in China or child labor in Indonesia a consensual economic relationship? How can America compete on a world stage with forced labor?
Everything else you said is too stupid to warrant a response.
You forfeited the debate with the phrase "...sticking the gun to their head and telling them they are not allowed to purchase goods from people with different skin colors and religions." Which is an outrageous statement on all levels.
What wishful thinking. This process allows the ownership class (read: not you) to capture the wealth of the middle class. Any time you hear the term "globalization" or someone singing it's praises this is secret code for "capturing the wealth of the middle class."
When we give a name to something, an entity as large as walmart for instance, that allows us to sum up the hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions they take on behalf of walmart as one concept. But in reality, walmart is hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions.
Add this to a blurry concept of good and evil, and you've got a real mess that can't be summarized easily and thus can't be easily comprehended by our brains.
The truth about walmart (and every other thing) is it is neither evil nor good. Some of the people are evil, some of the policies are evil, some are good, some of the people are good. I worked for walmart after college during a hard time in my industry ... I met all those people, good, bad, evil, and the majority just people trying to feed their families. Most aren't even capable of understanding the damage walmart as a hole does to the country (wage depression which leads to manufacturing outsourcing which leads to more wage depression)
Just a thought.
I think someone from slashdot needs to step up and confess to this murder. ReiserFS is a hell of a filesystem ... I would do it myself but I have an alibi. So who wants to be our patsy?
Thanks for the attitude. My treo locks up more or less randomly, if it was connected to anything specific I wouldn't do that.
If by seamless you mean every app is based on the same horrible GUI, is equally likely to crash and experience strange pauses, then yes it is seamless. My treo crashes several times a week no matter what I'm doing, and I'm a fairly light user. When I was living on it and traveling a lot, it crashed twice a day.
The original palm was made possible by the Motorola Dragonball processor which IIRC was a 16mhz 68k variant with and LCD driver and memory controller, it was one of the first SOC's (System on a Chip) that I can recall. Programming these things was hideous. It was all C/C++ and the API sucked hardcore.
Flash forward 10 years, Palms now have 300 - 400 mhz ARM processors, WHICH THEY USE TO EMULATE THAT ORIGINAL DRAGONBALL PROCESSOR! If you want access to the ARM processor you can write an "applet" which runs directly on the real hardware. These are *VERY* difficult to get right and stable. This programming model is simply wrong.
Compare this to WinCE 5 which gives you a stripped down CLR, or CE6 which gives you almost a full CLR. You can write code that works on both a PC and CE with a few #defines here and there. The CE OS is that modern.
Compare that to BlackBerry which has J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) which is also a very decent programming model.
So long story short -- Palm sucks because their dev tools suck. They have been talking about this Palm OS 6 for a few years now that is supposed to correct all this stuff, but it never seems to come out, and frankly I don't think Palm has the engineers to pull it off. They've shown only the ability to produce sub-standard buggy software. My Treo is definitely the last palm I care to own.