Great, now you can take a 200 dollar, 800 MHZ machine with a 10 GB Hard Drive, a DVD drive, and no floppy, and (after spending days configuring and futzing) get it to run the same software as a 200 dollar, 800 mhz machine with a 10 GB Hard Drive, a CD drive, and no floppy from wallmart.com.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be down on the project. But having the nasty green box as a cheap computer just isn't as compelling a reason as it used to be, and Microsoft is getting closer and closer to making a profit off of each one sold. Now, if we could find some way to run unsigned games on the raw system, thus creating a tremendous distribution platform, that would be compelling. If we could find some easy way to translate computer games, that would be compelling. If we could DDoS microsoft.com...
I love the sense of irony these system hackers have and can't wait for the next exciting episode. But somehow anything that might make a Microsoft product more popular in a non-entrenched market just doesn't sit right with me.
Ok... Why RAID? Justify yourself. What are you going to be serving that won't fit on a cheap 80 gig drive, and why the redundancy?
Let me see if I can distill what you want. You want a cheap, low-power, stable, Open Source home web server, and you don't want to pay much for it.
From a system architecture standpoint, the low-power, low-cost Via C3 is the chip you are looking for, and wallmart's C3-based systems sound perfect.
Really, with the needs you describe, ANY computer from a P2 on will suffice. Unless you have symetrical DSL, your server won't be processing a lot of requests at once. Unless you have metal shavings in the case, or have removed all of the fans, any computer will be as stable as its operating system from a home web server standpoint. And given the right configuration, any system can spin down your hard drive.
My girlfriend and I keep three computers on all of the time, and have noticed no significant increase in our utility bill. The power to keep RAM alive, CPU cycling blanks, and fans blowing is negligable compared to the power it takes to microwave dinner. Just keep your moniter turned off and you won't notice the bill.
Go forth young man, install Debian on the computer you are using RIGHT NOW, and make a dual server / surfer. Whatever it is, I'm sure it is strong enough.
-Chris
Re:I personally only care about sub $100 market
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New MP3 Portables
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I consider "doodad" to be synonymous with "gadget". A television, VCR, or receiver is an "appliance".
You're still not defining your terms. Is it a gadget because it is small? Portable? Is a playstation a gadget and a VCR an appliance because the playstation hasn't reached cultural acceptability? Is a receiver an appliance because it is so expensive, but an MP3 appliance a gadget because it can be had for cheap?
If you need something that is durable, a CD MP3 player will never satisfy you. For things like mountain biking, only flash-based MP3 players will do. They are also by far the lightest and smallest of the players.
AIWA pipephones are still available though getting rare, and that should cover any audio quality you need in a portable.
>>If I want a complete concert experience I'll need some kind of extensive sound system tuned to a room. Headphones don't cut it because they're not directional enough>A CD-based mp3 player (which buffers the MP3 data and not the decompressed audio) is ideal because CD media is cheap and sizable. Sure a jukebox player gives you more online storage but you can hold six albums on one CD at a good bitrate. Also, they're cheap as hell (around $100, often less now) so if you destroy one or it gets stolen you're not out too much money.
CD media is cheap, but not having media is cheaper and easier. Instead of remembering to burn CD's of the MP3's on your hard drive, you can rip directly to your MP3 player and cut out the middle man (and the burning man). At 200 dollars, you only need to replace one cheap CD MP3 player to equal the cost. And all you have to carry around is the player, not the player and 50 burned CD's.
To each his own. I usually optimize for money too... you should see the guts of my computer. But when it comes to audio, I can't help but optimize for available size.
"Microsoft is in a leadership position here where we've got an opportunity to help Hollywood feel comfortable with digital distribution and to help them develop (digital rights management) solutions so consumers can have content everywhere," she said. "We have two relationships we have to balance here: the consumer who wants the content and Hollywood so they feel comfortable with that process and don't clamp down and make that impossible."
It's still my computer. If you don't trust me with your movies, then don't put the f***ing things on my computer. I'll still rent the DVD's, you will still make money.
Most people would rather own their computer and rent at blockbuster than simply having a licence for their computer and lots of pretty movies to slowly, slowly download. Since when is this any sort of *compromise* when the terms are dictated from above?
I don't think the report is quite accurate. They say that the internet isn't providing compelling enough uses to warrant $50 per month. They site online music and gaming as uses that spread throughout other companies.
However, we still have tens of thousands of music channels at our fingertips online... legally. Go to www.live365.com if you don't believe me. There are still many, many short film sites up and running. And Broadband gaming is as accessible in this country as it is in the others, with games such as Evercrack, AC, and the upcoming Star Wars Galaxies just waiting to suck up every moment of your life.
What we don't have is a technically savy population that knows these things exist. We don't have a population that bothers to ask what options come with their cell phone plan, let alone what protocol the company is using. We don't have a population that is interested in the latest water-cooled notebooks. We don't have a population that competes with eachother based on the size of their PDA. And, sadly, we don't have a population that was first exposed to the available uses of the internet at communal high-speed net cafes.
If we did, we would realize that speeding up regular web access is bloody satisfying enough to warrant the output, let alone actually having a phone again. And if that wasn't enough, we would realize that such things as multiple 24 hour Tango channels, independent films on demand, etc. etc were available and desirable. For that matter, we would put more stock in independent music and film, rather than just seeking out the rehashed trash hollywood keeps programming us to want then getting upset when we find our own ways of getting it.
High-speed (actually, it's just adequate speed) access IS worth it... the problem isn't a lack of programming but a lack of knowledge on the part of the people. If you really expose people to broadband, and show them all of the wonderful legal uses, they really won't go back.
The artistic vision of films should be pure and untouched by human hands.
That having been said, the copyright system was set up to ensure the original authors of works were justly compensated for their effort in an effort to generate more works. I fail to see a part of copyright law that explicitly covers artistic vision. Of course, if I remember my legal course correctly there does remain untransferrable works for hire rights, such as the right to have their works represented in a way that doesn't defame the author or oppose the author's original intent. This appears to do neither.
And as hollywood releases thousands of edited-for-TV movies every year, apparently they aren't opposed either.
Would I personally use such a service? Not a chance. But then again, I don't have kids, and I do have enough time to research the movies I plan on watching. I would be deeply annoyed if I accidently rented such a movie: I just finished watching a broadcast version of "Coming to America," and the edited New Yorker's language just didn't seem realistic.
The companies that do this aren't reselling movies. They are editing original copies and renting the cuts, keeping the originals as backups. The argument is not whether tiny, 5 person companies have the right to profit off of giant companie's profit engines, but rather whether the consumer has the right to decide what they want to see even if that disagrees with the original author's stated position.
In this case, the consumer should be given the right. If the violence, sex, and language are pivotal to the plot (such as in Memento), then the meaning of the scenes will continue. If it is integral (such as Boogie Nights), then the movie won't be rented anyway. Either way, this is not an FCC mandate doing this, but what the people want. I personally want the option to turn off the cheezy patriotism in Spiderman, and Jar-Jar in episode one. To me, both of these movies would be better without them. To others, that one movie would be better without that unnecessary sex scene between the main character guy and the spunky girl just before she gets captured. If they have the right to fast forward through them (and yes, Valenti, they have the right to fast forward through them) doesn't that mean they have the right to not see them at all? Can't they transfer that right to a trusted 3rd party?
Censorship is about taking away control. Editing movies in the way that a select group of people want for the benefit of that select group of people is about giving control. We may not agree with their choice of cuts but that just means we should start our own editing services.
Don't fool yourself into thinking most directors have final rights over editing... Sony, AOL Time Warner, and Disney get the final call. Sometimes they are good calls, like the addition of the "Singing in the rain" sequence to the above titled movie. And sometimes they are horrible, such as the narration added to Blade Runner or the missing 6 hours of Dune. It isn't a precise science: they are put together by people, for people. Shouldn't people be the ones with the rights?
Re:I personally only care about sub $100 market
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New MP3 Portables
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· Score: 2
I try not to buy "doodads" which cost more than $100. This includes but is not limited to console video game systems, PC peripherals, portable audio devices, and the like. It does not include complete systems.
Obviously, then, you don't buy console video game systems. Or VCR's, Televisions, Recievers, Speakers, Kensington trackballs, Amps, Component CD players, Diamond rings, or many other of life's pleasures.
Of course, you do not define "doodad," which I can only assume you mean to be those things in life which you don't find important enough to spend 100 dollars on.
But for many people, music is an integral part of living. It is a flow of culture, it is a tribal link to our heritage, it is an expression of the rage, love, hate, passion, suffering, reflection and otherwise that we feel inside. Some people dance, some people paint, some people write, and some people fill themselves with music to soothe the very human urge to burn the world down and build it back up again.
For those, a week's pay is money well spent to be filled with an adequate supply of music. 10 gigs isn't all the music they could want: an artist would never be satisfied by just the Gugenheim in LA. But 6.9 days worth of music (several concerts or one burning man) is a much better start than a paultry hour long CD.
Now, why Archos doesn't sell additional drives for their players, or larger 3.5 based players, is anyone's guess. They probably don't have more startup funds for new R and D. But either way, Jukebox players have done a great service to many, many music lovers. You can tell the difference between MP3's and CD's on nice, 5.1 surround systems. On good seinheiser headphones, they sound identical. And if what you are replaying is a stream of old tango records from the 1930's, you might as well just relax and enjoy. Archos and the rest have allowed us to get enough music to satisfy our beasts for a little while.
I'm glad the original poster knows what he / she wants in a player, but they seemed to echo a sentiment all too popular today: music is fluff, and isn't worth spending money on. You can spend more than 100 to hear Danny Patatuchi play base live in concert (35 per ticket for three people). You can also spend 5 dollars to be enveloped in a local jazz trio at a club near your house. If music isn't worth spending money on, then neither will happen. And sadly, one of the few pure expressions of culture will be completely lost to corporatism.
where is Martin Luther King when you need him?
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The DMCA, which was put in effect in 2000, was an attempt by the U.S. Government to bring copyright law into the cyber age. But many people -- including, oddly, Mark Ishikawa -- think the DMCA goes too far by making it illegal for me to even tell you how to circumvent encryption or copy protection technologies. It makes the very passing of knowledge against the law whether or not that knowledge is ever used.
"It's a very flawed piece of legislation," says Ishikawa, who predicts that the government will rewrite the copyright law again "in eight or nine years" to correct the mistakes in the DMCA. But until then, the DMCA is the law of the land, and Mark Ishikawa is the Internet's top cop.
Mark Ishikawa feels that the DMCA is flawed wrt the conveyance of encryption information. Yet his company helped put Dimitry behind bars for many months, keeping him from his family and threatening to put him away for the rest of his life.
If he didn't do it because he believes in the legislation, then Ishikawa's motivation for helping Skylarov arrested must have been purely money. Ishikawa took half of a year of a man's life for simple cash.
I was going to feel bad that this copyright-enforcer was recieving death threats, until I realized what he had done to a foreign family soley in the interest of money. Where is the heroism? Where is the spine? "Oh, that part will be fixed later, I'm sure." Nothing happens on it's own, buddy. You of all people are in the best position for a little... nonviolent protest.
Of course he won't do that: money and success are demanding mistresses. We just shouldn't feel bad for this person, whatever reprocussions his actions bring down upon him.
With Woody, the Debian people concentrated quite a bit on the install procedure. Except for being exhorbitantly long, (and not mentioning that agpgart is required for X to run... Jerks!), it installed without too much trouble.
The problem is that Debian isn't intended for the person who is replacing windows, but as a tool for the admin who needs to setup a server every few days and who knows exactly what he / she wants and what they are doing. Apt is a powerful way to remotely install software over a shell, without having to be present at the machine to search for FTP sites, etc. And it can keep you *reasonably* up-to-date with security patches.
Yes, that doesn't preclude having an easy installer... and by all accounts they should work on that. But if they have limited funding (which they do), they should use it in the way that is best for the people who use their system every day. They should keep their software updated, they should work on auto-detect routines, and they need less babysitting in the apt and installer procedures. They also could use a simple way of handling kernel modules. Debian is not about being 3133t, it's about doing your job as an admin as well as you can without having to be on site. If you know exactly how to use it, it's great. And if you kind of know what you are doing, Woody is great too.
And if you haven't touched Linux before, there is no reason not to instal Mandrake or Red Hat. I know a lot of sysadmins who put Mandrake on their desktops because it is just bloody easy. Why waste the time if you aren't going to use Apt? And why not with Mandrake's new Apt-clone?
-Chris
P.S. There is only one excuse for Gentoo: it is a very young distro. It is not intended for you, it is not intended for me. It is intended to show that software and computers can be faster if people take advantage of open sources and compile all of their software for their chosen platform. It is a proof-of-concept. At some point, it will probably be easy enough for anyone to use, or the concepts behind it will be integrated into other distros. In the meantime, not all distros are intended for you or me. Some of them don't fit our needs. I'm impressed when someone can install Gentoo, or for that matter linux from scratch, but there is no reason for me to want to.
How will the cancelation of one robot fighting series preclude the end of all mechanical combat sports? I think we can all agree that back-to-back-to-back-to-back battlebots episodes lead to an early death by overexposure, not a failure in the premise of the show.
I'm sure as long as monster trucks hold some sort of "rally" somewhere, and giant transforming tractors spit fire, there will be exhibition competitions of remote-controlled (and autonomous) creations dueling it out. Even if they aren't always televised, they will continue to exist.
And with the removal of the stagnant Battlebots from the running, maybe we will see some real innovation. Or at least someone will bring back the fun.
Actually, my 5300 was delayed while they sorted out the battery situation. So yes, I have had a powerbook. And no, it didn't explode. Whether or not they exploded in field testing (apple) or in the wild (dell) the fact remains that Lithium is one of the most reactive substances you are likely to put within inches of your sensitive bits, and to say that Hydrogen is a dangerous thing to use as a fuel source completely ignores that we already use an intermediary that gets added to grenades to make them particularly nasty.
In short, it was a funny political joke at apple's expense, for the purpose of cheap karma whoring. And it worked. Woo hoo.
And in case there is any doubt, I am an apple lover and an apple appologist... But there was no amount of appologies enough for the crap that was the 5300. I will always love OS 7-9 and OSX, and the SE, LC, Quadra, 601, 604, etc... just not the 5300 and below (and the performas: yeech!).
First of all, it costs 50 bucks to replace the ink cartridge in your Lexmark Z11. The Lexmark Z11s cost 50 dollars and come with ink. The Lexmark is totaled.
I sort of keep a running tab of alternative word processors, and quite frankly, the best ones (appleworks, Nissus, TexEdit, to name three) are only available on the macintosh.
Abiword, OpenOffice, and Star Office are all too bloated / buggy to be satisfying. KWord is nice, but will require KDE... which you really don't have the cpu for.
The most interesting possibility which has been mentioned several times is BeOS with Gobe Productive. Gobe Productive is available for demo on windows, if you want to test it out, and is by the Clarisworks / Appleworks people (the office suite I most respect).
And if all of this is too much, spend the 200 bucks to buy an eden from wallmart.com, and install mandrake. It will probably save you headaches in the long run.
No thanks, I'll stick to my shitty laptop with the one battery that lasts about two hours. Better to have a laptop that sucks down the battery than one that EXPLODES IN YOUR LAP.
You've obviously never had a Powerbook with a Lithium battery.
Your 17 year old son should be going outside, exploring the cities. He should be seeing America (or whatever contry he is in) with a group of friends he works and plays with. He should be growing and writing in a journal.
If you need to buy him something, buy him a digital camera. Give him some spending money. Buy the team nerf balls. Give him a guide to all ages clubs in your state / province. Give him rollerblades, frisbies, and waterguns. Give the coach specific instructions to not let him rot in his hotel room.
I love games. I haven't come across a game yet that I can't beat in 2 days, and my Maniac ERA continues to be a real crowdstopper. But they 're not everything. Your kid is 17, and is about to go on an oddessey. Would Homer sing of a developing young man staring at a slightly glowing fire and occasionally poking it with a stick?
It may be scary as a parent to think that your kid may be out in the real world, but he soon will be an adult and will have to make mature, adult decisions based on what he has experienced and shared with you. I'm sure if you have raised him well, he will do great. But don't love him so much that he isn't given those experiences until it is much to late for him to look to your guidance.
Part of your guidance should be to forbid him from taking his Playstation.
The article seems to brush across a major point of this dispute. Previously, if you had written down an idea on a napkin, flushed it out on toilet paper, or jotted notes in a notebook, the company had the copyright on, and trade secret protection for, the notebook.
The error of the court, and IANAL, is that there is no law defining ownership of ideas, only protection of expressions from copying and the protection of potentially useful or damaging secrets. In defiance of 200 years of patent law, the court claimed the ideas were property of Alcatel, and QED must be turned over.
We have the RIAA to thank for that incorrect interpretation of the wording of the contract. Now he is stealing the company's "Intellectual Property," as if he walked out of his office with a stapler, rather than the arguably correct interpretation.
What he did do, and the option which the courts have overlooked, is violate his contract. If he wrote down his idea, the company would have the copyright on the paper and, quite correctly, the court would award ownership of the medium to the company. But he didn't. He's required by the terms of his contract to disclose something to the company, and he hasn't. He is in breach of contract, not breach of property law.
Maybe it is just the Law.com article which is misframing the judgement as a property issue in order to goad slashdot. We would need to see the judgement directly to know whether the judges decided he should hand over the information in order to fulfill his contractual obligations, or because the ideas in his head weren't his property. Is any lawyer (or law student) present that knows what the difference in punishments would be if this were a property issue as opposed to fulfilling contractual obligations?
Go!zilla zilla clothing zilla design zilla sports zilla motor control trafficzilla a Japanese Zilla 10 base T hub bowlzilla 3d zilla
zilla is listed in dictionary.com as "a low, thorny, suffrutescent, crucifeous plant (Zilla myagroides)".
It also lists the origin as "Mosaic Killer / Godzilla?" which will make the case harder to argue.
I'd write something insightful about Lindows, and how Mozilla's trademark is in fact a T-Rex and has never been more Godzilla like than becoming firebreathing, a common feature of imaginary giant dinosaurs (which I find quite ironic to write from a copy of Opera). But I need to run to work, so you all are spared.
The server seems to be bearing the load, so I won't karmawhore and repost the thing.
However, just so much of this is bad news that a whole lot is coming back for this post.
Microsoft believes they have patent rights relating to the ARB_vertex_program extension. They did not contribute to the extension, but are trying to be upfront about it. They're offering to license their IP under reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms; will license rights to the extent necessary, provided a reciprocal license is granted to MS. Granted on 1:1 basis for OpenGL 1.3, 1.4, and earlier versions.
Who here wants to bet that Microsoft, who they admit didn't contribute to the extension, were the ones that used the term "reasonable and nondiscriminatory"? I find it surprisingly unprofessional of the transcriber that they kept the wording as fact. I also find it surprising that anyone can say with a straight face, "If you want to use this extension to shade the corners of your polygons, you must give us the right to use all of your software, and all of your old software, any way we see fit. It's 1:1." If it really was one to one they would walk away with a method of optimizing bump mapping, or some such.
IBM thinks it's premature to vote on this without seeing the MS license terms. NVIDIA wants to vote it in at this meeting. SGI thinks if we can't deal with IP claims, we might as well all go home.
Ah, IBM is wise in the ways of patent warfare. IBM, today being played by Suzy Deffeyes, knows all too well that if an opponent signs on the line before the contract is written, your terms will only seem "reasonable" as in the eyes of a conquering army. NVIDIA, Nick Triantos and Pat Brown, shame on you! You may be great engineers, but you are horrible lawyers.
Microsoft suggests that other bodies have licensing terms that are more effective in a corporate sense, and we should look at adopting some of those terms.
Microsoft is now suggesting the term "OpenGL" should mean open for business, and not Open doors. Notice this is a sudden attack on the very nature of OpenGL, not to mention it's ability to compete.
Technical issue - 3Dlabs doesn't find 1.4 all that compelling without vertex programming, but finds the vec4 architecture underlying ARB_vertex_program too hardware-specific to include into 1.4 except as an optional subset. Seems short-sighted to incorporate into the standard when this assembler-level functionality is likely to be quickly superseded by new silicon generations; but it serves a tactical purpose, to take advantage of current market conditions.
And so we see Microsoft's plan starting to take form... The fellowship is breaking.
Bill asked about Microsoft's IP position on just the program management framework; Dave was unable to comment at this point.
Forgive me for being so pessimistic, but when you run in and say you have a patent claim on part of the development spec for your project... Couldn't you have a little more background information available? At least for your own knowledge?
Suzy asked Microsoft to figure out their IP claims, if any, against just the program management stuff.
Once again, Suzy, I salute you.
However, I really have to question the purpose of having microsoft on board. They disagree with the business model, the offer a competing product which they have made every effort to set as the defacto standard, and they have a long history of joining competing projects in order to destroy them. Java anyone? Microsoft doesn't make graphics accelerators, chipsets, or computers like everyone else on that board does. They are the OS, but they are also a competitor to the group's mission. Why do you invite the wolf in to protect the sheep?
My god, it's been a long time since I hated microsoft this much. Thank you again, Slashdot, for reminding me what is important in life.
The TI-82 / 85 was required at my high school, and so my opinions on what this can do for kids will be hightly biased on what we did with our TI's.
First and formost, if you want your kids to get a leg up in life, teach them to program little games. You are teaching them to think systematically through layers of abstraction, and teaching them to bring a creative vision to life in such a way that their labors can be enjoyed by other students... Your math and art department will thank you.
2nd, give them a scavenger hunt with maps of your city (and phone numbers in case a group / group leader gets lost). You wouldn't believe how many high - school kids haven't ventured out further than a block or two away from home.
Have them jot notes at a city-council meeting, and ask the council members afterwards about their experience. Have them go to a meeting of the district school board and interview them. OK, this isn't directly related to the handspring, but removing the mistique from the way a city is run is important for developing citizens.
Of course, get a good graphing calculator application for the math courses... Just not too good of one. You want a calculator that will let kids visualize the look of a graph, but not one that will let them plug in equasions and have the calc solve calculus for them.
English / english, english / spanish dictionaries. This will really depend upon the kind of RAM you will have available, but dictionaries will really help out the ESL kids. And you should consider having an all-spanish day of some sort, to make the english kids' brains work in a way they may not be accustomed to.
There is also Avant-Go, which is a free service that may not be terribly educational but will let your kids download and read specific sites like news.bbc.co.uk from their palms. Reading is never a bad thing. Speaking of which, a quick search will net you thousands of free classic books... It might save your english department a little bit of money to download and beam a copy of Romeo and Juliette or The Scarlett Letter, rather than buying paperback versions... though with the added advantage of letting kids highlight the heck out of their books a cheap dover thrift edition might be educationally sound.
And if you have already read down this far, palm boulevard is reporting that eSchool News just voted the palm the best OS for teaching. While I can't get through to the site to confirm details, I bet you could find some great ideas there.
Whatever you choose, remember to get very hard, very durable covers for these things. My girlfriend and I have a wall devoted to our broken palm pilots... with five up there and climbing, and we're not going to be any near as hard on these things as your kids will be.
Good luck! I hope this helps.
-chris
Zform did a demonstration of this at a gathering in cambridge this past winter. The technology in person clearly demonstrates the differences between games designed for sighted play and the potential designes created by non-sighted people.
The most interesting thing was that the veteran non-sighted player would only rotate the character in 90 degree increments and relied heavily on linear strafing. This simplified navigation so much so that I wondered why the team hadn't removed the ability to rotate in non-fixed increments. Because of this fixed rotation pattern being more useful for the non-sighted, the game visually and logically resembles wolfenstein a lot more than it does quake. For instance, quake was capable of ramps and multiple height platforms, features that would impede non-sighted individuals. Likewise, the weapons used needed to be either melee weapons, or instant firing weapons (like the shotgun)... rocket launchers and anything involving distance and timing are right out.
The best part was the choice of noises. Basically everything gave off some sort of stereo-panned sound clue, with volume to judge distance and rising / falling tones to judge front / back. Passageways on the sides don't give off sound until you are nearly in a position to enter them, a feature that the blind player said made everything much easier. And to be very cute, when sitting still characters emit a "quacking" sound. Nothing here is particularly revolutionary... just some very simple techniques applied to a specially designed level of quake in order to prove that it is possible.
Overall the game looks promising. I can understand going for a web-based economic model for this system, as a quake-for-the-blind wouldn't sell many copies. However, the techniques used in the qfb are interesting, and if certain representational problems are overcome it could become quite fun.
Many people have pointed out that Lucas hasn't directed a star wars since the original, and was given some (much needed) writing assistance by several very talented people.
I wrote a long article detailing what happened to those people, but mozilla crashed. Damn debian using old binaries... When woody!? Dear god when!?
Oh, sorry. Yes, the writer of Empire and the director of Jedi are both dead, and the director of empire is pushing 76... Kasdan (working from memory, spelling may be wrong) would be an excellent choice to bring some reality back to the plate, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
There are several people in hollywood who are legendary directors. There are legendar writers. There are legendary producers. There are legendary effects people. There are no legendary director / writer / producer / effects people. That's like saying a good programmer should be able to design the computer, build it, program it, and draw the icons... It just ain't happening. Lucas needs to get it through his thick scull that he's a legendary effects / producer artist, and that he should rely on other geniuses when it comes to writing and directing.
How can we make Lucas realize that he isn't infalliable? Maybe a protest boycott on the opening night of episode 3?
Why do we not market sugar as "cancer-free sweetener?" Most sugar-free sweeteners are A: much less tasty than sugar and B: hideous chemical combinations designed to be unprocessable by your body. When I put something my VCR isn't designed to handle into the little slot in front, it generally voids the warantee. Why are we surprised when, say, Olestra / Olean gums up our little internal sewage systems?
It says quite a bit about this culture that we'd rather be dead than fat, and we'd rather get cancer than think about what we are eating.
Sugar only rots teeth if you eat it pure with a gum base and a coloring (AKA candy) and then don't clean them. Coke can dissolve a tooth overnight, a feat that sugar water can't replicate. How is Diet Coke supposed to protect your pearly whites? Even then viable replacements exist for people's teeth. I really don't know why everyone comes down on sugar these days (except for it's abusability as a cheap addition to many foods). It's natural, healthy in normal doses, and glucose / fructose is the basic ingredient for glycolysis, which is the body's ATP (a form of stored energy) production cycle. You can get fat from sugar because you are producing more energy than your body needs. In effect, your body will utilize the sugar given, and this is seen as bad. Nutrasweet isn't causing cancer in rats because it is too useful for them.
Sorry to go on a rant, but it just p!$$es me off the kind of irresponsibly researched junk chemistry that is pushed upon the worlds population as "healthy." There is NOTHING healthy about Nutrasweet, Saccarine, Neotame, or the other laboratory sweeteners developed and patented with profit in mind. Many "healthy" and "diet" drinks consist of nothing but carbonated water, aspartame, and "natural flavors" (which consist of nothing but trace amounts of compounds developed from a base class of living ingredients but whose final output bares no resemblance to the source material). Maybe there should be an administration of some sort that would regulate companies producing the things we ingest... like food and... drugs? Geeze, I still have nights spent in the smallest room in the house thanks to the random unlabeled proliferation of Olestra into the foods we eat. Thanks FDA!
I would be proud to burn a few karma here if anyone knows how to mod a comment down as "bitter"
Sorry to hear about the condition. If I remember correctly, that IBM computer was a concept machine and not an actual production device
There are some reviews here. I've used the bulky but natural "virtual vision" goggles they mention, and yes, it's perfect for camcorders and mangles text. TekGear has some more modern displays, all of which look like your eyes are being attacked by a small piece of aluminum. They also carry the "best selling QUGA (?) monocule in the world" a one-eyed machine very close to what you describe except that the resolution is low and you look like a call center employee with the microphone stuck in your eye. There are also some in the Imac family, Bizrate has a list of several. Liteye puts out some sufficiently small displays of reasonable image integrity. Once again, still looks funky but in a funkytional sort of way. Plus, they are more of a parts supplier than a solutions provider. MicroOptical has several, with their tech briefly reviewed by about.com.
If you are looking to purchase one, the two buzzwords to use are head mounted display and wearable display. Hitachi even combined buzz and produced a wearable internet applicance, though only for the japanese and who knows if it was released.
I hope that gives you some ideas. I also hope some people post here who didn't just pick through google:).
GPS systems consist of a triangulation of radio frequencies to track the user's position, and generate a coordinate along a 2d location grid. It doesn't know where state boundaries are, only mapping software know what is California and what is nevada.
Likewise, as the rental company pointed out the original point of this is to keep track of cars for when they are stolen (like lojack), and that facility requires remote broadcasting of addresses. The fact that this is now being used to track cars as they pass through state boundaries shows this is not a passive system, but an always (or frequently) on / broadcasting system.
Now if this charge to, say, a Mastercard were to be disputed, said car company would have to offer evidence supporting them. In this case the only evidence available is logs of the user's positions. The courtcase will, I'm sure, involve the submission of these logs.
So we can logically conclude that this sytem is always or nearly always on, frequently broadcasting location information, and that at least the out-of-bounds information and last known position are logged, if not more.
Evidence would show it is at the very least logging some of your position information and can easily log all of it.
The rental companies probably don't plan to moniter the moral character of their customers... though I wouldn't be surprised to see coordinated promotional efforts between rental companies and the places their customers most often visit. But would you feel comfortable if they were to bug the car, record all of the conversations that happened inside, and promise not to use the tapes unless a law was broken? At the current stage, there don't appear to be any nefarious plans for these records. However, as these records are being taken without the knowledge or concent of the customers, there are many potential nefarious uses.
Yes, I know... substantial noninfringing... P2P, DeCss, and IP law is an entirely different beast, and it is unfair to compare the two. The MPAA/RIAA are trying to hold onto a revenue stream by setting up a legal framework to press criminal charges agaisnt any uses they choose for their product long after the point of purchase. The issue here is the undisclosed tracking and logging of user's information which may have substantial noninfringing uses, but so too might suspicious or incriminating but upon closer review legal, harmless, and or innocent activities of the driver. It is important to not jump the gun and say that any logging is going to lead to nazi-esque persecution... all business need to keep records of the transactions they make and that includes *certain* aspects of how a user interacts with their system. It is important for the functioning of the phone companies' businesses to record who called whom and when. It is potentially damaging to their customers when they start logging all of the calls without wiretap authority.
And your point is well taken, it would be much more benificial for this country if we took down the RIAA than if we dismantled Budget Rent-A-Car. That doesn't mean we have to agree with all of Budget's policies, or that we have to spend all of our time howling about the RIAA. I've been ranting about the MPAA for the past three years... people are starting to look at me funny.
"...there have always been those who wish to enlarge the powers of the General Government. There is but one safe rule...confine (it) within the sphere of its appropriate duties...Every attempt to exercise power beyond these limits should be promptly and firmly opposed." - Andrew Jackson.
This applies more and more to the activities of the companies we have to come to depend upon as surrogate governments. How many people here are comfortable knowing that Microsoft loggs all of your browsing when using WebTV?
One issue that a lot of posters here seem to be missing is that we do things in rental cars we don't want anyone to know about. We visit competitors for interviews in a big hat and a rented car. We visit extramarital lovers in rented cars. We go to gay bars in cities we happen to be driving through. People can find out who we are dating, who our friends are, what our interests are and what our political affiliation is by tracking where we drive. This is especially true on business and pleasure trips, where rental cars (and infidelity) are common. It is reasonable to assume that someone will look at the odometer, kick the tires, and inspect their property when you return a rental. It is not reasonable for them to expect a full log of your journey, let alone to simply extract one from the vehicle.
If the Green Party gets labeled a terrorist group (which some in the Bush administration already have), I don't want my driving history subponead.
On the other hand, yes these people signed a contract. Personally, I believe that any contract which doesn't involve the possibility of negotiation should not be given the full weight of law. The two parts of this issue where the Arizona based rental company failed were in notifying their customers that they would be tracked and failing to clarify that visiting beyond a neighboring state isn't a 1 dollar per mile additional charge but a fine for the total number of miles driven during the rental period including inside the agreed upon area and out. The "no harm, no foul" person is quite reasonable in assuming that he's not being tracked (The EULA doesn't forbid them from contacting your parents and asking about your sexual history, but some privacy should be expected). If he's not being explicitly tracked, then the "neighboring states" provision is intended to keep the user within a reasonable area. So if you drive within the radius of the popular destinations in the surrounding states, you are in a reasonable area, and will be happily keeping up your end of the bargain, if not technically the unenforcable contract.
Iowa and Kansas aren't technically neighbor states, but I doubt anyone will consider it out of bounds to drive a rental car from Des Moines to Topeka.
Quite frankly a 5000 dollar fine from an obviously confusing portion of the contract resting on evidence that has been thrown out of another court as invasive for driving 5% of their trip in one of the safer states in the union is simple exploitive gouging through and through.
There are a lot more than one thing that goes into user interface. There are more than three, but I think it breaks down nicely into three.
1. Self explanatory interface - this I personally think is what is often confused with Usability. Microsoft's wizards explain things in such annoying depth that it insults your intelligence. The little tool tip that pops up in Photoshop, Download mage, Word, etc gives you a suscinct summary of what the button will do. Part of this is intelligent design... The new version of Photoshop hides the paintbucket behind the gradiant tool... a highly illogical place to find it. Yet when you look for the polygon selection tool, it's right behind the lasso selection tool, exactly where you expect to find it.
2. Intelligently designed back-end. the system has to be designed in the cleanest, most logical way for the interface to make any sense. I can never find the "Envelopes" command in Word, because it is a feature that was tacked on after the fact and never really fit into the program. I always liked the fact that you never had to worry about breaking dependencies on the MAC by moving programs or folders around, because the file system was designed to expect users to want to. Likewise, changing icons and adding things to the apple menu are simple, because the system was designed to do those things. Dos was never intended to support icons, a start menu, multiple users... but it was jerrymandered into it. The back code is a mess, and so the front code is a mess.
3. Trust. My mother will still say things like "I want to check my e-mail. Should I press the green 'get e-mail' button?" But she grew up in an area where computer technology was more expensive than your house, and more valuable than a department full of graduate students. Touching ENIAC would be as blasphemous and dangerous as touching the arc of the covenant. She knows it says 'get e-mail,' which is what she wants to do. She even presses it unprompted when I'm not around. But she doesn't feel confident enough to try.
And quite frankly, once you have the hindsight to use a machine and discover what it does and how it works, it becomes quite clear that the whole bloody experience was designed by a committee and not by a person. My VCR remote has a second set of channel up / down and volume buttons, a "tape position" button, a "counter reset" button, a "speed" button, a "search" button, and a "CA / Zero" button, none of which have ever been pressed. But it doesn't have a "set clock" button or a "record a program" button. Those options are hidden behind a menu in the aptly labeled VCR+ button, which appears to be a suboption of the Fast Forward button but really isn't.
I believe strongly that people are too lazy to do any research and read the fscking manual. It's unfortunate that this society has raised us to believe we don't have to study anything to get things right. But really, why does the yamaha amp here have five lines in with five buttons and five audio out streams, but two of those buttons only work in conjuncture with two other buttons (and eachother) even though they completely override the signal? Why is the menu button on the TV only available on the remote control? Why do USB cables come with three different ends? None of these things make any sense. Most of them happened because someone tried to, say, hack on a submenu onto an existing television, or setup a new feature without adequately explaining what it does in the context of what the user is experiencing.
Like the good Perl says, "make the common things easy and the uncommon things possible." That doesn't mean you can get away without studying how to program, but it does mean that your device has to be layed out wholistically around how people will use the device.
And quite honestly, most devices are so painfully simple in function that there isn't any good reason to need to read the manual.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, now you can take a 200 dollar, 800 MHZ machine with a 10 GB Hard Drive, a DVD drive, and no floppy, and (after spending days configuring and futzing) get it to run the same software as a 200 dollar, 800 mhz machine with a 10 GB Hard Drive, a CD drive, and no floppy from wallmart.com.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be down on the project. But having the nasty green box as a cheap computer just isn't as compelling a reason as it used to be, and Microsoft is getting closer and closer to making a profit off of each one sold. Now, if we could find some way to run unsigned games on the raw system, thus creating a tremendous distribution platform, that would be compelling. If we could find some easy way to translate computer games, that would be compelling. If we could DDoS microsoft.com...
I love the sense of irony these system hackers have and can't wait for the next exciting episode. But somehow anything that might make a Microsoft product more popular in a non-entrenched market just doesn't sit right with me.
Ok... Why RAID? Justify yourself. What are you going to be serving that won't fit on a cheap 80 gig drive, and why the redundancy?
Let me see if I can distill what you want. You want a cheap, low-power, stable, Open Source home web server, and you don't want to pay much for it.
From a system architecture standpoint, the low-power, low-cost Via C3 is the chip you are looking for, and wallmart's C3-based systems sound perfect.
Really, with the needs you describe, ANY computer from a P2 on will suffice. Unless you have symetrical DSL, your server won't be processing a lot of requests at once. Unless you have metal shavings in the case, or have removed all of the fans, any computer will be as stable as its operating system from a home web server standpoint. And given the right configuration, any system can spin down your hard drive.
My girlfriend and I keep three computers on all of the time, and have noticed no significant increase in our utility bill. The power to keep RAM alive, CPU cycling blanks, and fans blowing is negligable compared to the power it takes to microwave dinner. Just keep your moniter turned off and you won't notice the bill.
Go forth young man, install Debian on the computer you are using RIGHT NOW, and make a dual server / surfer. Whatever it is, I'm sure it is strong enough.
-Chris
I consider "doodad" to be synonymous with "gadget". A television, VCR, or receiver is an "appliance".
You're still not defining your terms. Is it a gadget because it is small? Portable? Is a playstation a gadget and a VCR an appliance because the playstation hasn't reached cultural acceptability? Is a receiver an appliance because it is so expensive, but an MP3 appliance a gadget because it can be had for cheap?
If you need something that is durable, a CD MP3 player will never satisfy you. For things like mountain biking, only flash-based MP3 players will do. They are also by far the lightest and smallest of the players.
AIWA pipephones are still available though getting rare, and that should cover any audio quality you need in a portable.
>>If I want a complete concert experience I'll need some kind of extensive sound system tuned to a room. Headphones don't cut it because they're not directional enough>A CD-based mp3 player (which buffers the MP3 data and not the decompressed audio) is ideal because CD media is cheap and sizable. Sure a jukebox player gives you more online storage but you can hold six albums on one CD at a good bitrate. Also, they're cheap as hell (around $100, often less now) so if you destroy one or it gets stolen you're not out too much money.
CD media is cheap, but not having media is cheaper and easier. Instead of remembering to burn CD's of the MP3's on your hard drive, you can rip directly to your MP3 player and cut out the middle man (and the burning man). At 200 dollars, you only need to replace one cheap CD MP3 player to equal the cost. And all you have to carry around is the player, not the player and 50 burned CD's.
To each his own. I usually optimize for money too... you should see the guts of my computer. But when it comes to audio, I can't help but optimize for available size.
Your mileage may vary.
It's still my computer. If you don't trust me with your movies, then don't put the f***ing things on my computer. I'll still rent the DVD's, you will still make money.
Most people would rather own their computer and rent at blockbuster than simply having a licence for their computer and lots of pretty movies to slowly, slowly download. Since when is this any sort of *compromise* when the terms are dictated from above?
I don't think the report is quite accurate. They say that the internet isn't providing compelling enough uses to warrant $50 per month. They site online music and gaming as uses that spread throughout other companies.
However, we still have tens of thousands of music channels at our fingertips online... legally. Go to www.live365.com if you don't believe me. There are still many, many short film sites up and running. And Broadband gaming is as accessible in this country as it is in the others, with games such as Evercrack, AC, and the upcoming Star Wars Galaxies just waiting to suck up every moment of your life.
What we don't have is a technically savy population that knows these things exist. We don't have a population that bothers to ask what options come with their cell phone plan, let alone what protocol the company is using. We don't have a population that is interested in the latest water-cooled notebooks. We don't have a population that competes with eachother based on the size of their PDA. And, sadly, we don't have a population that was first exposed to the available uses of the internet at communal high-speed net cafes.
If we did, we would realize that speeding up regular web access is bloody satisfying enough to warrant the output, let alone actually having a phone again. And if that wasn't enough, we would realize that such things as multiple 24 hour Tango channels, independent films on demand, etc. etc were available and desirable. For that matter, we would put more stock in independent music and film, rather than just seeking out the rehashed trash hollywood keeps programming us to want then getting upset when we find our own ways of getting it.
High-speed (actually, it's just adequate speed) access IS worth it... the problem isn't a lack of programming but a lack of knowledge on the part of the people. If you really expose people to broadband, and show them all of the wonderful legal uses, they really won't go back.
The artistic vision of films should be pure and untouched by human hands.
That having been said, the copyright system was set up to ensure the original authors of works were justly compensated for their effort in an effort to generate more works. I fail to see a part of copyright law that explicitly covers artistic vision. Of course, if I remember my legal course correctly there does remain untransferrable works for hire rights, such as the right to have their works represented in a way that doesn't defame the author or oppose the author's original intent. This appears to do neither.
And as hollywood releases thousands of edited-for-TV movies every year, apparently they aren't opposed either.
Would I personally use such a service? Not a chance. But then again, I don't have kids, and I do have enough time to research the movies I plan on watching. I would be deeply annoyed if I accidently rented such a movie: I just finished watching a broadcast version of "Coming to America," and the edited New Yorker's language just didn't seem realistic.
The companies that do this aren't reselling movies. They are editing original copies and renting the cuts, keeping the originals as backups. The argument is not whether tiny, 5 person companies have the right to profit off of giant companie's profit engines, but rather whether the consumer has the right to decide what they want to see even if that disagrees with the original author's stated position.
In this case, the consumer should be given the right. If the violence, sex, and language are pivotal to the plot (such as in Memento), then the meaning of the scenes will continue. If it is integral (such as Boogie Nights), then the movie won't be rented anyway. Either way, this is not an FCC mandate doing this, but what the people want. I personally want the option to turn off the cheezy patriotism in Spiderman, and Jar-Jar in episode one. To me, both of these movies would be better without them. To others, that one movie would be better without that unnecessary sex scene between the main character guy and the spunky girl just before she gets captured. If they have the right to fast forward through them (and yes, Valenti, they have the right to fast forward through them) doesn't that mean they have the right to not see them at all? Can't they transfer that right to a trusted 3rd party?
Censorship is about taking away control. Editing movies in the way that a select group of people want for the benefit of that select group of people is about giving control. We may not agree with their choice of cuts but that just means we should start our own editing services.
Don't fool yourself into thinking most directors have final rights over editing... Sony, AOL Time Warner, and Disney get the final call. Sometimes they are good calls, like the addition of the "Singing in the rain" sequence to the above titled movie. And sometimes they are horrible, such as the narration added to Blade Runner or the missing 6 hours of Dune. It isn't a precise science: they are put together by people, for people. Shouldn't people be the ones with the rights?
Obviously, then, you don't buy console video game systems. Or VCR's, Televisions, Recievers, Speakers, Kensington trackballs, Amps, Component CD players, Diamond rings, or many other of life's pleasures.
Of course, you do not define "doodad," which I can only assume you mean to be those things in life which you don't find important enough to spend 100 dollars on.
But for many people, music is an integral part of living. It is a flow of culture, it is a tribal link to our heritage, it is an expression of the rage, love, hate, passion, suffering, reflection and otherwise that we feel inside. Some people dance, some people paint, some people write, and some people fill themselves with music to soothe the very human urge to burn the world down and build it back up again.
For those, a week's pay is money well spent to be filled with an adequate supply of music. 10 gigs isn't all the music they could want: an artist would never be satisfied by just the Gugenheim in LA. But 6.9 days worth of music (several concerts or one burning man) is a much better start than a paultry hour long CD.
Now, why Archos doesn't sell additional drives for their players, or larger 3.5 based players, is anyone's guess. They probably don't have more startup funds for new R and D. But either way, Jukebox players have done a great service to many, many music lovers. You can tell the difference between MP3's and CD's on nice, 5.1 surround systems. On good seinheiser headphones, they sound identical. And if what you are replaying is a stream of old tango records from the 1930's, you might as well just relax and enjoy. Archos and the rest have allowed us to get enough music to satisfy our beasts for a little while.
I'm glad the original poster knows what he / she wants in a player, but they seemed to echo a sentiment all too popular today: music is fluff, and isn't worth spending money on. You can spend more than 100 to hear Danny Patatuchi play base live in concert (35 per ticket for three people). You can also spend 5 dollars to be enveloped in a local jazz trio at a club near your house. If music isn't worth spending money on, then neither will happen. And sadly, one of the few pure expressions of culture will be completely lost to corporatism.
"It's a very flawed piece of legislation," says Ishikawa, who predicts that the government will rewrite the copyright law again "in eight or nine years" to correct the mistakes in the DMCA. But until then, the DMCA is the law of the land, and Mark Ishikawa is the Internet's top cop.
Mark Ishikawa feels that the DMCA is flawed wrt the conveyance of encryption information. Yet his company helped put Dimitry behind bars for many months, keeping him from his family and threatening to put him away for the rest of his life.
If he didn't do it because he believes in the legislation, then Ishikawa's motivation for helping Skylarov arrested must have been purely money. Ishikawa took half of a year of a man's life for simple cash.
I was going to feel bad that this copyright-enforcer was recieving death threats, until I realized what he had done to a foreign family soley in the interest of money. Where is the heroism? Where is the spine? "Oh, that part will be fixed later, I'm sure." Nothing happens on it's own, buddy. You of all people are in the best position for a little... nonviolent protest.
Of course he won't do that: money and success are demanding mistresses. We just shouldn't feel bad for this person, whatever reprocussions his actions bring down upon him.
-C
With Woody, the Debian people concentrated quite a bit on the install procedure. Except for being exhorbitantly long, (and not mentioning that agpgart is required for X to run... Jerks!), it installed without too much trouble.
The problem is that Debian isn't intended for the person who is replacing windows, but as a tool for the admin who needs to setup a server every few days and who knows exactly what he / she wants and what they are doing. Apt is a powerful way to remotely install software over a shell, without having to be present at the machine to search for FTP sites, etc. And it can keep you *reasonably* up-to-date with security patches.
Yes, that doesn't preclude having an easy installer... and by all accounts they should work on that. But if they have limited funding (which they do), they should use it in the way that is best for the people who use their system every day. They should keep their software updated, they should work on auto-detect routines, and they need less babysitting in the apt and installer procedures. They also could use a simple way of handling kernel modules. Debian is not about being 3133t, it's about doing your job as an admin as well as you can without having to be on site. If you know exactly how to use it, it's great. And if you kind of know what you are doing, Woody is great too.
And if you haven't touched Linux before, there is no reason not to instal Mandrake or Red Hat. I know a lot of sysadmins who put Mandrake on their desktops because it is just bloody easy. Why waste the time if you aren't going to use Apt? And why not with Mandrake's new Apt-clone?
-Chris
P.S. There is only one excuse for Gentoo: it is a very young distro. It is not intended for you, it is not intended for me. It is intended to show that software and computers can be faster if people take advantage of open sources and compile all of their software for their chosen platform. It is a proof-of-concept. At some point, it will probably be easy enough for anyone to use, or the concepts behind it will be integrated into other distros. In the meantime, not all distros are intended for you or me. Some of them don't fit our needs. I'm impressed when someone can install Gentoo, or for that matter linux from scratch, but there is no reason for me to want to.
How will the cancelation of one robot fighting series preclude the end of all mechanical combat sports? I think we can all agree that back-to-back-to-back-to-back battlebots episodes lead to an early death by overexposure, not a failure in the premise of the show. I'm sure as long as monster trucks hold some sort of "rally" somewhere, and giant transforming tractors spit fire, there will be exhibition competitions of remote-controlled (and autonomous) creations dueling it out. Even if they aren't always televised, they will continue to exist. And with the removal of the stagnant Battlebots from the running, maybe we will see some real innovation. Or at least someone will bring back the fun.
Actually, my 5300 was delayed while they sorted out the battery situation. So yes, I have had a powerbook. And no, it didn't explode. Whether or not they exploded in field testing (apple) or in the wild (dell) the fact remains that Lithium is one of the most reactive substances you are likely to put within inches of your sensitive bits, and to say that Hydrogen is a dangerous thing to use as a fuel source completely ignores that we already use an intermediary that gets added to grenades to make them particularly nasty.
In short, it was a funny political joke at apple's expense, for the purpose of cheap karma whoring. And it worked. Woo hoo.
And in case there is any doubt, I am an apple lover and an apple appologist... But there was no amount of appologies enough for the crap that was the 5300. I will always love OS 7-9 and OSX, and the SE, LC, Quadra, 601, 604, etc... just not the 5300 and below (and the performas: yeech!).
First of all, it costs 50 bucks to replace the ink cartridge in your Lexmark Z11. The Lexmark Z11s cost 50 dollars and come with ink. The Lexmark is totaled. I sort of keep a running tab of alternative word processors, and quite frankly, the best ones (appleworks, Nissus, TexEdit, to name three) are only available on the macintosh. Abiword, OpenOffice, and Star Office are all too bloated / buggy to be satisfying. KWord is nice, but will require KDE... which you really don't have the cpu for. The most interesting possibility which has been mentioned several times is BeOS with Gobe Productive. Gobe Productive is available for demo on windows, if you want to test it out, and is by the Clarisworks / Appleworks people (the office suite I most respect). And if all of this is too much, spend the 200 bucks to buy an eden from wallmart.com, and install mandrake. It will probably save you headaches in the long run.
You've obviously never had a Powerbook with a Lithium battery.
Your 17 year old son should be going outside, exploring the cities. He should be seeing America (or whatever contry he is in) with a group of friends he works and plays with. He should be growing and writing in a journal.
If you need to buy him something, buy him a digital camera. Give him some spending money. Buy the team nerf balls. Give him a guide to all ages clubs in your state / province. Give him rollerblades, frisbies, and waterguns. Give the coach specific instructions to not let him rot in his hotel room.
I love games. I haven't come across a game yet that I can't beat in 2 days, and my Maniac ERA continues to be a real crowdstopper. But they 're not everything. Your kid is 17, and is about to go on an oddessey. Would Homer sing of a developing young man staring at a slightly glowing fire and occasionally poking it with a stick?
It may be scary as a parent to think that your kid may be out in the real world, but he soon will be an adult and will have to make mature, adult decisions based on what he has experienced and shared with you. I'm sure if you have raised him well, he will do great. But don't love him so much that he isn't given those experiences until it is much to late for him to look to your guidance.
Part of your guidance should be to forbid him from taking his Playstation.
-Chris
The article seems to brush across a major point of this dispute. Previously, if you had written down an idea on a napkin, flushed it out on toilet paper, or jotted notes in a notebook, the company had the copyright on, and trade secret protection for, the notebook.
The error of the court, and IANAL, is that there is no law defining ownership of ideas, only protection of expressions from copying and the protection of potentially useful or damaging secrets. In defiance of 200 years of patent law, the court claimed the ideas were property of Alcatel, and QED must be turned over.
We have the RIAA to thank for that incorrect interpretation of the wording of the contract. Now he is stealing the company's "Intellectual Property," as if he walked out of his office with a stapler, rather than the arguably correct interpretation.
What he did do, and the option which the courts have overlooked, is violate his contract. If he wrote down his idea, the company would have the copyright on the paper and, quite correctly, the court would award ownership of the medium to the company. But he didn't. He's required by the terms of his contract to disclose something to the company, and he hasn't. He is in breach of contract, not breach of property law.
Maybe it is just the Law.com article which is misframing the judgement as a property issue in order to goad slashdot. We would need to see the judgement directly to know whether the judges decided he should hand over the information in order to fulfill his contractual obligations, or because the ideas in his head weren't his property. Is any lawyer (or law student) present that knows what the difference in punishments would be if this were a property issue as opposed to fulfilling contractual obligations?
-Chris
A cursory glance through google reveals
Go!zilla
zilla clothing
zilla design
zilla sports
zilla motor control
trafficzilla
a Japanese Zilla 10 base T hub
bowlzilla
3d zilla
zilla is listed in dictionary.com as "a low, thorny, suffrutescent, crucifeous plant (Zilla myagroides)".
It also lists the origin as "Mosaic Killer / Godzilla?" which will make the case harder to argue.
I'd write something insightful about Lindows, and how Mozilla's trademark is in fact a T-Rex and has never been more Godzilla like than becoming firebreathing, a common feature of imaginary giant dinosaurs (which I find quite ironic to write from a copy of Opera). But I need to run to work, so you all are spared.
-Chris
However, just so much of this is bad news that a whole lot is coming back for this post.
Microsoft believes they have patent rights relating to the ARB_vertex_program extension. They did not contribute to the extension, but are trying to be upfront about it. They're offering to license their IP under reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms; will license rights to the extent necessary, provided a reciprocal license is granted to MS. Granted on 1:1 basis for OpenGL 1.3, 1.4, and earlier versions.
Who here wants to bet that Microsoft, who they admit didn't contribute to the extension, were the ones that used the term "reasonable and nondiscriminatory"? I find it surprisingly unprofessional of the transcriber that they kept the wording as fact. I also find it surprising that anyone can say with a straight face, "If you want to use this extension to shade the corners of your polygons, you must give us the right to use all of your software, and all of your old software, any way we see fit. It's 1:1." If it really was one to one they would walk away with a method of optimizing bump mapping, or some such.
IBM thinks it's premature to vote on this without seeing the MS license terms. NVIDIA wants to vote it in at this meeting. SGI thinks if we can't deal with IP claims, we might as well all go home.
Ah, IBM is wise in the ways of patent warfare. IBM, today being played by Suzy Deffeyes, knows all too well that if an opponent signs on the line before the contract is written, your terms will only seem "reasonable" as in the eyes of a conquering army. NVIDIA, Nick Triantos and Pat Brown, shame on you! You may be great engineers, but you are horrible lawyers.
Microsoft suggests that other bodies have licensing terms that are more effective in a corporate sense, and we should look at adopting some of those terms.
Microsoft is now suggesting the term "OpenGL" should mean open for business, and not Open doors. Notice this is a sudden attack on the very nature of OpenGL, not to mention it's ability to compete.
Technical issue - 3Dlabs doesn't find 1.4 all that compelling without vertex programming, but finds the vec4 architecture underlying ARB_vertex_program too hardware-specific to include into 1.4 except as an optional subset. Seems short-sighted to incorporate into the standard when this assembler-level functionality is likely to be quickly superseded by new silicon generations; but it serves a tactical purpose, to take advantage of current market conditions.
And so we see Microsoft's plan starting to take form... The fellowship is breaking.
Bill asked about Microsoft's IP position on just the program management framework; Dave was unable to comment at this point.
Forgive me for being so pessimistic, but when you run in and say you have a patent claim on part of the development spec for your project... Couldn't you have a little more background information available? At least for your own knowledge?
Suzy asked Microsoft to figure out their IP claims, if any, against just the program management stuff.
Once again, Suzy, I salute you.
However, I really have to question the purpose of having microsoft on board. They disagree with the business model, the offer a competing product which they have made every effort to set as the defacto standard, and they have a long history of joining competing projects in order to destroy them. Java anyone? Microsoft doesn't make graphics accelerators, chipsets, or computers like everyone else on that board does. They are the OS, but they are also a competitor to the group's mission. Why do you invite the wolf in to protect the sheep?
My god, it's been a long time since I hated microsoft this much. Thank you again, Slashdot, for reminding me what is important in life.
(Sigh, time to go punch the Microsoft butterflies again. The stuffed ones, not the foolish ones.
First and formost, if you want your kids to get a leg up in life, teach them to program little games. You are teaching them to think systematically through layers of abstraction, and teaching them to bring a creative vision to life in such a way that their labors can be enjoyed by other students... Your math and art department will thank you.
2nd, give them a scavenger hunt with maps of your city (and phone numbers in case a group / group leader gets lost). You wouldn't believe how many high - school kids haven't ventured out further than a block or two away from home.
Have them jot notes at a city-council meeting, and ask the council members afterwards about their experience. Have them go to a meeting of the district school board and interview them. OK, this isn't directly related to the handspring, but removing the mistique from the way a city is run is important for developing citizens.
Of course, get a good graphing calculator application for the math courses... Just not too good of one. You want a calculator that will let kids visualize the look of a graph, but not one that will let them plug in equasions and have the calc solve calculus for them.
English / english, english / spanish dictionaries. This will really depend upon the kind of RAM you will have available, but dictionaries will really help out the ESL kids. And you should consider having an all-spanish day of some sort, to make the english kids' brains work in a way they may not be accustomed to.
There is also Avant-Go, which is a free service that may not be terribly educational but will let your kids download and read specific sites like news.bbc.co.uk from their palms. Reading is never a bad thing. Speaking of which, a quick search will net you thousands of free classic books... It might save your english department a little bit of money to download and beam a copy of Romeo and Juliette or The Scarlett Letter, rather than buying paperback versions... though with the added advantage of letting kids highlight the heck out of their books a cheap dover thrift edition might be educationally sound.
And if you have already read down this far, palm boulevard is reporting that eSchool News just voted the palm the best OS for teaching. While I can't get through to the site to confirm details, I bet you could find some great ideas there.
Whatever you choose, remember to get very hard, very durable covers for these things. My girlfriend and I have a wall devoted to our broken palm pilots... with five up there and climbing, and we're not going to be any near as hard on these things as your kids will be. Good luck! I hope this helps. -chris
Zform did a demonstration of this at a gathering in cambridge this past winter. The technology in person clearly demonstrates the differences between games designed for sighted play and the potential designes created by non-sighted people.
The most interesting thing was that the veteran non-sighted player would only rotate the character in 90 degree increments and relied heavily on linear strafing. This simplified navigation so much so that I wondered why the team hadn't removed the ability to rotate in non-fixed increments. Because of this fixed rotation pattern being more useful for the non-sighted, the game visually and logically resembles wolfenstein a lot more than it does quake. For instance, quake was capable of ramps and multiple height platforms, features that would impede non-sighted individuals. Likewise, the weapons used needed to be either melee weapons, or instant firing weapons (like the shotgun)... rocket launchers and anything involving distance and timing are right out.
The best part was the choice of noises. Basically everything gave off some sort of stereo-panned sound clue, with volume to judge distance and rising / falling tones to judge front / back. Passageways on the sides don't give off sound until you are nearly in a position to enter them, a feature that the blind player said made everything much easier. And to be very cute, when sitting still characters emit a "quacking" sound. Nothing here is particularly revolutionary... just some very simple techniques applied to a specially designed level of quake in order to prove that it is possible.
Overall the game looks promising. I can understand going for a web-based economic model for this system, as a quake-for-the-blind wouldn't sell many copies. However, the techniques used in the qfb are interesting, and if certain representational problems are overcome it could become quite fun.
Many people have pointed out that Lucas hasn't directed a star wars since the original, and was given some (much needed) writing assistance by several very talented people.
I wrote a long article detailing what happened to those people, but mozilla crashed. Damn debian using old binaries... When woody!? Dear god when!?
Oh, sorry. Yes, the writer of Empire and the director of Jedi are both dead, and the director of empire is pushing 76... Kasdan (working from memory, spelling may be wrong) would be an excellent choice to bring some reality back to the plate, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
There are several people in hollywood who are legendary directors. There are legendar writers. There are legendary producers. There are legendary effects people. There are no legendary director / writer / producer / effects people. That's like saying a good programmer should be able to design the computer, build it, program it, and draw the icons... It just ain't happening. Lucas needs to get it through his thick scull that he's a legendary effects / producer artist, and that he should rely on other geniuses when it comes to writing and directing.
How can we make Lucas realize that he isn't infalliable? Maybe a protest boycott on the opening night of episode 3?
Why do we not market sugar as "cancer-free sweetener?" Most sugar-free sweeteners are A: much less tasty than sugar and B: hideous chemical combinations designed to be unprocessable by your body. When I put something my VCR isn't designed to handle into the little slot in front, it generally voids the warantee. Why are we surprised when, say, Olestra / Olean gums up our little internal sewage systems?
It says quite a bit about this culture that we'd rather be dead than fat, and we'd rather get cancer than think about what we are eating.
Sugar only rots teeth if you eat it pure with a gum base and a coloring (AKA candy) and then don't clean them. Coke can dissolve a tooth overnight, a feat that sugar water can't replicate. How is Diet Coke supposed to protect your pearly whites? Even then viable replacements exist for people's teeth. I really don't know why everyone comes down on sugar these days (except for it's abusability as a cheap addition to many foods). It's natural, healthy in normal doses, and glucose / fructose is the basic ingredient for glycolysis, which is the body's ATP (a form of stored energy) production cycle. You can get fat from sugar because you are producing more energy than your body needs. In effect, your body will utilize the sugar given, and this is seen as bad. Nutrasweet isn't causing cancer in rats because it is too useful for them.
Sorry to go on a rant, but it just p!$$es me off the kind of irresponsibly researched junk chemistry that is pushed upon the worlds population as "healthy." There is NOTHING healthy about Nutrasweet, Saccarine, Neotame, or the other laboratory sweeteners developed and patented with profit in mind. Many "healthy" and "diet" drinks consist of nothing but carbonated water, aspartame, and "natural flavors" (which consist of nothing but trace amounts of compounds developed from a base class of living ingredients but whose final output bares no resemblance to the source material). Maybe there should be an administration of some sort that would regulate companies producing the things we ingest... like food and... drugs? Geeze, I still have nights spent in the smallest room in the house thanks to the random unlabeled proliferation of Olestra into the foods we eat. Thanks FDA!
I would be proud to burn a few karma here if anyone knows how to mod a comment down as "bitter"
-Chris
There are some reviews here. I've used the bulky but natural "virtual vision" goggles they mention, and yes, it's perfect for camcorders and mangles text. TekGear has some more modern displays, all of which look like your eyes are being attacked by a small piece of aluminum. They also carry the "best selling QUGA (?) monocule in the world" a one-eyed machine very close to what you describe except that the resolution is low and you look like a call center employee with the microphone stuck in your eye. There are also some in the Imac family, Bizrate has a list of several. Liteye puts out some sufficiently small displays of reasonable image integrity. Once again, still looks funky but in a funkytional sort of way. Plus, they are more of a parts supplier than a solutions provider. MicroOptical has several, with their tech briefly reviewed by about.com.
If you are looking to purchase one, the two buzzwords to use are head mounted display and wearable display. Hitachi even combined buzz and produced a wearable internet applicance, though only for the japanese and who knows if it was released.
I hope that gives you some ideas. I also hope some people post here who didn't just pick through google :).
GPS systems consist of a triangulation of radio frequencies to track the user's position, and generate a coordinate along a 2d location grid. It doesn't know where state boundaries are, only mapping software know what is California and what is nevada.
Likewise, as the rental company pointed out the original point of this is to keep track of cars for when they are stolen (like lojack), and that facility requires remote broadcasting of addresses. The fact that this is now being used to track cars as they pass through state boundaries shows this is not a passive system, but an always (or frequently) on / broadcasting system.
Now if this charge to, say, a Mastercard were to be disputed, said car company would have to offer evidence supporting them. In this case the only evidence available is logs of the user's positions. The courtcase will, I'm sure, involve the submission of these logs.
So we can logically conclude that this sytem is always or nearly always on, frequently broadcasting location information, and that at least the out-of-bounds information and last known position are logged, if not more.
Evidence would show it is at the very least logging some of your position information and can easily log all of it.
The rental companies probably don't plan to moniter the moral character of their customers... though I wouldn't be surprised to see coordinated promotional efforts between rental companies and the places their customers most often visit. But would you feel comfortable if they were to bug the car, record all of the conversations that happened inside, and promise not to use the tapes unless a law was broken? At the current stage, there don't appear to be any nefarious plans for these records. However, as these records are being taken without the knowledge or concent of the customers, there are many potential nefarious uses.
Yes, I know... substantial noninfringing... P2P, DeCss, and IP law is an entirely different beast, and it is unfair to compare the two. The MPAA/RIAA are trying to hold onto a revenue stream by setting up a legal framework to press criminal charges agaisnt any uses they choose for their product long after the point of purchase. The issue here is the undisclosed tracking and logging of user's information which may have substantial noninfringing uses, but so too might suspicious or incriminating but upon closer review legal, harmless, and or innocent activities of the driver. It is important to not jump the gun and say that any logging is going to lead to nazi-esque persecution... all business need to keep records of the transactions they make and that includes *certain* aspects of how a user interacts with their system. It is important for the functioning of the phone companies' businesses to record who called whom and when. It is potentially damaging to their customers when they start logging all of the calls without wiretap authority.
And your point is well taken, it would be much more benificial for this country if we took down the RIAA than if we dismantled Budget Rent-A-Car. That doesn't mean we have to agree with all of Budget's policies, or that we have to spend all of our time howling about the RIAA. I've been ranting about the MPAA for the past three years... people are starting to look at me funny.
"...there have always been those who wish to enlarge the powers of the General Government. There is but one safe rule...confine (it) within the sphere of its appropriate duties...Every attempt to exercise power beyond these limits should be promptly and firmly opposed." - Andrew Jackson.
This applies more and more to the activities of the companies we have to come to depend upon as surrogate governments. How many people here are comfortable knowing that Microsoft loggs all of your browsing when using WebTV?
-Chris
One issue that a lot of posters here seem to be missing is that we do things in rental cars we don't want anyone to know about. We visit competitors for interviews in a big hat and a rented car. We visit extramarital lovers in rented cars. We go to gay bars in cities we happen to be driving through. People can find out who we are dating, who our friends are, what our interests are and what our political affiliation is by tracking where we drive. This is especially true on business and pleasure trips, where rental cars (and infidelity) are common. It is reasonable to assume that someone will look at the odometer, kick the tires, and inspect their property when you return a rental. It is not reasonable for them to expect a full log of your journey, let alone to simply extract one from the vehicle.
If the Green Party gets labeled a terrorist group (which some in the Bush administration already have), I don't want my driving history subponead.
On the other hand, yes these people signed a contract. Personally, I believe that any contract which doesn't involve the possibility of negotiation should not be given the full weight of law. The two parts of this issue where the Arizona based rental company failed were in notifying their customers that they would be tracked and failing to clarify that visiting beyond a neighboring state isn't a 1 dollar per mile additional charge but a fine for the total number of miles driven during the rental period including inside the agreed upon area and out. The "no harm, no foul" person is quite reasonable in assuming that he's not being tracked (The EULA doesn't forbid them from contacting your parents and asking about your sexual history, but some privacy should be expected). If he's not being explicitly tracked, then the "neighboring states" provision is intended to keep the user within a reasonable area. So if you drive within the radius of the popular destinations in the surrounding states, you are in a reasonable area, and will be happily keeping up your end of the bargain, if not technically the unenforcable contract.
Iowa and Kansas aren't technically neighbor states, but I doubt anyone will consider it out of bounds to drive a rental car from Des Moines to Topeka.
Quite frankly a 5000 dollar fine from an obviously confusing portion of the contract resting on evidence that has been thrown out of another court as invasive for driving 5% of their trip in one of the safer states in the union is simple exploitive gouging through and through.
There are a lot more than one thing that goes into user interface. There are more than three, but I think it breaks down nicely into three.
1. Self explanatory interface - this I personally think is what is often confused with Usability. Microsoft's wizards explain things in such annoying depth that it insults your intelligence. The little tool tip that pops up in Photoshop, Download mage, Word, etc gives you a suscinct summary of what the button will do. Part of this is intelligent design... The new version of Photoshop hides the paintbucket behind the gradiant tool... a highly illogical place to find it. Yet when you look for the polygon selection tool, it's right behind the lasso selection tool, exactly where you expect to find it.
2. Intelligently designed back-end. the system has to be designed in the cleanest, most logical way for the interface to make any sense. I can never find the "Envelopes" command in Word, because it is a feature that was tacked on after the fact and never really fit into the program. I always liked the fact that you never had to worry about breaking dependencies on the MAC by moving programs or folders around, because the file system was designed to expect users to want to. Likewise, changing icons and adding things to the apple menu are simple, because the system was designed to do those things. Dos was never intended to support icons, a start menu, multiple users... but it was jerrymandered into it. The back code is a mess, and so the front code is a mess.
3. Trust. My mother will still say things like "I want to check my e-mail. Should I press the green 'get e-mail' button?" But she grew up in an area where computer technology was more expensive than your house, and more valuable than a department full of graduate students. Touching ENIAC would be as blasphemous and dangerous as touching the arc of the covenant. She knows it says 'get e-mail,' which is what she wants to do. She even presses it unprompted when I'm not around. But she doesn't feel confident enough to try.
And quite frankly, once you have the hindsight to use a machine and discover what it does and how it works, it becomes quite clear that the whole bloody experience was designed by a committee and not by a person. My VCR remote has a second set of channel up / down and volume buttons, a "tape position" button, a "counter reset" button, a "speed" button, a "search" button, and a "CA / Zero" button, none of which have ever been pressed. But it doesn't have a "set clock" button or a "record a program" button. Those options are hidden behind a menu in the aptly labeled VCR+ button, which appears to be a suboption of the Fast Forward button but really isn't.
I believe strongly that people are too lazy to do any research and read the fscking manual. It's unfortunate that this society has raised us to believe we don't have to study anything to get things right. But really, why does the yamaha amp here have five lines in with five buttons and five audio out streams, but two of those buttons only work in conjuncture with two other buttons (and eachother) even though they completely override the signal? Why is the menu button on the TV only available on the remote control? Why do USB cables come with three different ends? None of these things make any sense. Most of them happened because someone tried to, say, hack on a submenu onto an existing television, or setup a new feature without adequately explaining what it does in the context of what the user is experiencing.
Like the good Perl says, "make the common things easy and the uncommon things possible." That doesn't mean you can get away without studying how to program, but it does mean that your device has to be layed out wholistically around how people will use the device.
And quite honestly, most devices are so painfully simple in function that there isn't any good reason to need to read the manual.