I hope I'm just missing the sarcasm in this post because if I'm not, you're blissfully unaware of the large number of Xbox 360 owners who did exactly this. Messages boards all over the net were flooded with people claiming their 360 was defective when in fact they did exactly what you say they will diligently not do; cramming it in small places, placing the unit and or power brick on the floor, etc... Plus all the "disk scratching issues" that were due to people moving the 360 from horizontal to vertical while a game was in use (while not directly related to your post, it shows that the common console owner is incapable of using reason with this new generation of consoles).
It has been noted many times by others that people are still used to the (S)NES/Genesis days when they can sprawl out on the floor, game console on the carpet, covered in piles of dirty clothing and still function properly.
If the PS3 has heat issues, this will absolutely be a large scale problem*
* Okay, maybe not that large however, people who are happy with their console purchase don't make much noise.
- Mike
P.S. No, I didn't include any links or references; I don't have the time... Mod me down or flame away if you must.
While that may be true, the owner could get the robot back, if the thief/friend were able to steal it in the first place. The reason is Law #2 and the way the laws are structured.
You see, a law is only acceptable only if it does not conflict with a previous law.
Take the law you mentioned for example. In accordance with Law #5, the robot must obey your command to follow you home.
That is, however, if it doesn't conflict with a previous law (Law #2 in this case.) There are at least two scenarios that I see happening.
The owner could have commanded that the robot to never leave its owners home. No robot sex for you!
Or, when the owner discovers its location (I assume robots of the future will have LoJack...) he could locate the robot and command it to follow him home. Not only do you miss out on the robot sex, you probably lost a friend in the process.
This exact point proves that Asimov had robot sex and jealous friends in mind when he created his laws...
The following sentence explains: "In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other."
That makes each cell a bit, not a byte. Each cell is either a 0 or a 1, according to the description of how it works. So, if it's 10M bits, it can only store 1.19 Megabytes.
There's so many errorneous statements in this article that it should be posted under "It's funny, laugh" not "Data Storage".
Now, I don't want to start a flame-war but I think that's a fairly jaded outlook. Just because a person is educated, does not mean they will not be a criminal. Nor does it mean that a person who is not educated will be a criminal. I don't have a high school or college degree, yet I'm no murdering thug. It's much more complicated than education, health-care and wages. You have to factor in culture, lifestyles, environment and many other elements of human existence.
In fact, I'd even argue that one of the biggest factors of crime is greed. People commit crimes because they want something, be it respect, money, power or many other things people tend to covet. And I'm sorry to say it but everyone is susceptible to greed no matter how well-off they are.
With that, I can say that the only thing that I think is truly inevitable is crime. There will always be crime - amongst the rich, the poor and the educated or not...
I also believe that some of the most educated, well paid people commit crimes just as often as their counterparts. Politicians (tell me there isn't a single corrupt politician who hasn't stolen money or maybe even had someone killed), Judges, Police Officers, even Presidents. They all commit crimes just as often as the poor, uneducated people you refer to - however, they probably get away with it more often than not.
I guess I'm rambling now but my point is simple: No matter what anybody does about it, there will always be crime and there will always be a need for technology like this.
Appearantly it runs in Visual Studio because upon execution I get prompted to open it up in a new instance of Visual Studio.NET 2003!
"An exception 'System.IO.FileNotFoundException' has occurred in MediaPortal.exe"
- Mike
If you read the summary correctly, you'd see that it's a PORT of Xbox Media Center, which does require a modded Xbox. Media Portal however, runs on Windows PC's.
You don't know what the song is called, nor who plays it!
How are you going to jump on ITMS and buy it if you don't know who it is?
You do bring up a good point however. What if it CAN'T identify the song? Do you still pay for the service? I would assume/hope that if it fails, you don't pay. But, what about false-positives? The service may very well believe that it identified a song correctly and charge the user accordingly. IMHO, this service only has a limited range of use anyway as I doubt it will identify the latest songs from Cradle of Filth, or say, Meshuguh.
I can see it now, I dial #ID into my snazzy little AT&T cell and play a some Tiamat into the mic and it comes back with: Britney Spears!
Why does everyone say perl syntax is so damned ugly? Appearantly, they haven't seen C code written by someone with a "I'm a C God - Complex". I agree with some of the other posts here, it's only ugly if you have never used the language before. Write yourself a script or two and you quickly catch on.
In fact, it's just like ANY other language (programming or spoken at that), it looks foriegn (go figure) until you put a little effort into it and figure it out.
TELEVISION commercials, in all their big, loud glory, are coming to the Web.
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.
"It's TV, without the television," said John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, a unit of PepsiCo.
Video advertisements from major marketers have dotted the online landscape sporadically in recent years, but the new ads differ from their precursors in one critical respect: until now, none have run at 30 frames a second, the speed of TV video. As a result, most multimedia ads are less sharp than TV images, even for people with fast connections.
The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page. The resulting ad is identical to TV, whether the user has a high- or low-speed connection. The company says the technology evades pop-up blockers, but the person can skip the ad by clicking a box.
Unlike TV viewers, Internet users will not be deluged with these ads, at least in the short term. According to Unicast, 100 million ads will be served to individual PC's beginning tomorrow through the end of February. That may sound like a lot, but publishers, who can track a user's repeat trips to a Web site, say they will generally limit a person's exposure to the ads to one a day.
Unicast says it hopes 50 million to 75 million people will view the ads. Pepsi plans to distribute two ads, which have run on TV in the last few months. In one, titled "Just Lunch," a dog steals its owner's sandwich and Pepsi, and replaces them with a cat. In the other, "Vacuum," a vacuum cleaner hunts a Pepsi drinker and eats his pants. At the end of each, users will be shown links to more ads, on the Pepsi Web site. (Those ads use so-called streaming video technology of an older vintage, and are less than TV quality.)
Mr. Vail, of Pepsi, said he would monitor online viewers' reactions through a tracking study conducted by the research firm Dynamic Logic, to determine how much use Pepsi will make of such ads in the future. "Yes, it's intrusive," he said. "But I think customers will like it, because it will be so far superior to anything they've seen online."
James Nail, an analyst with the technology consulting firm Forrester Research, agreed. "This is the best full-motion, full-video TV ad technology that I've seen," he said. "I expect big demand from advertisers for this."
Among other features, Mr. Nail says he appreciates the fact that the ads do not slow Web surfing. The commercials load into a computer's temporary memory, and only when a page is idle. If a user clicks to a new page within the site before the ad is fully loaded, the process is merely paused until the browser is again idle. The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers.
Mr. Nail predicts that Internet users will react well to the ads, both because they can click away if they choose and because the advertisers involved have brands that "people have positive reactions to," he said, adding, "So I think they'll get a little more leeway, at least initially."
If users are annoyed at this development, they can blame high-speed connections. Richard V. Hopple, Unicast's chief executive, said he decided to release the company's "video commercial" technology now because high-speed connections - known as broadband - have reached significant numbers. The number of United States households with broadband connections reached 49.5 million late last year, or 38 percent of all households, accordi
"The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
I was curious about this Full Screen Superstitial advertisement so I checked the Unicast website here http://www.unicast.com/gallery/gallery.asp and found that shockwave is required in order to display. Under firebird with no shockwave plugin installed (on Win2K no-less), all I get is a 'Get Plugin' page. Glad to see that this 'technology' is defunct from the start!
I know for a fact that there is. The iPrism Web Filtering Appliance (disclaimer: I am an employee of the company in question and NOT speaking as a representitive of the company or the product.) has had these 'features' for years (I don't know how long exactly so I won't quote numbers, but still, it's years). Day/Time based control of profiles and ACL's, filtering, blocking, logging, monitoring... It's all there, been done before and by many more than just us (8e6 and n2h2 just to name a couple.)
Bizzare, Live Performances, Membranes, Joysticks and... Hoto Graphs?
And the inventors name is what? Pete Casper?
I don't know, but this sounds pretty gay to me.
Seriously, were it any other company, I'd applaud their
actions. But this is Micro$oft, people. I'm starting to think that
poor security in Windows was by design, not due to lack of effort. Look at
it this way, to quote Mundie, he states:
"We'll continue to make
progress in the security area. New versions of many products will come
out," he said.
Emphasis mine of course. I think
there's another message in there, though. It seems to me that they're
really saying this:
"Since many of our products
have security vulnerabilities, we're going to re-release all of them, branded as
'Secure' and you, the consumer, will buy them because we're Microsoft, and you
don't have a choice."
Well sure, they have a choice, but honestly,
most companies are so tied into Microsoft, that they really don't. Now
will they switch, just keep shelling out gobs of dough for the latest and,
greatest (?) Microsoft products.
To give credit where credit is due, the parent poster ripped this from a show called Trigger Happy TV. It's a bit like Jackass, but with UK humor. This particular quote is from a skit where Dom Joly caries an loud and oversized cell phone around with him screeming into it. It is usually done in places such as movie theatres, plays, symphonies, etc... Pretty funny actually. Here's a still from the show.
Why do you reply to your own thread referring to yourself in the third person? Seems a little strange to me. The fact that you find yourself so 'hysterical' that you need to question the acts of the moderators in such a way shows that you've got quite an inferiority complex. That, or it's a bizarre coincidence that your name is asdfasdfasdfasdf while the parent of the thread is joejoejoejoe. Not to mention your user ID's show a difference of 26 users. Hmm...
You'd still be wrong, even if Sony made EQ in the first place.
The history of EQ is this:
Division X of Sony makes sports games Division X spins off and becomes 989 Studios Team Y at 989 Studios starts EverQuest Team Y spins off and becomes Verant Interactive. Sony sees the potential they let leave and buys both 989 Studios and Verant back.
So, Sony didn't even make EQ. And The Sims, Online, won't be made by Sony either. So, I don't think Sony will stand in the way, at all...
Personally, I don't think Maxis (The creators of The Sims), would keep people from customizing the game. Of course, they'd need the Hard Drive for the PS2. And if they don't have one, they don't get to customize. Simple as that.
"It doesn't take a genius (just a bit of open-mindedness) to figure out that in the vast reaches of just our own galaxy (not to mention the universe) the chances are good that additional systems similar to Sol were formed."
I totally agree with you, but with a broader vision. Who says that the other lifeforms out there require the same environment as we do?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope I'm just missing the sarcasm in this post because if I'm not, you're blissfully unaware of the large number of Xbox 360 owners who did exactly this. Messages boards all over the net were flooded with people claiming their 360 was defective when in fact they did exactly what you say they will diligently not do; cramming it in small places, placing the unit and or power brick on the floor, etc... Plus all the "disk scratching issues" that were due to people moving the 360 from horizontal to vertical while a game was in use (while not directly related to your post, it shows that the common console owner is incapable of using reason with this new generation of consoles).
It has been noted many times by others that people are still used to the (S)NES/Genesis days when they can sprawl out on the floor, game console on the carpet, covered in piles of dirty clothing and still function properly.
If the PS3 has heat issues, this will absolutely be a large scale problem*
* Okay, maybe not that large however, people who are happy with their console purchase don't make much noise.
- Mike
P.S. No, I didn't include any links or references; I don't have the time... Mod me down or flame away if you must.
Furthermore, the WiiSourceOnline article explicitly states:
"The interesting thing is, on the GameCube Link is still left-handed;"
- Mike
I can beat that:
#>
While that may be true, the owner could get the robot back, if the thief/friend were able to steal it in the first place. The reason is Law #2 and the way the laws are structured.
You see, a law is only acceptable only if it does not conflict with a previous law.
Take the law you mentioned for example. In accordance with Law #5, the robot must obey your command to follow you home.
That is, however, if it doesn't conflict with a previous law (Law #2 in this case.) There are at least two scenarios that I see happening.
The owner could have commanded that the robot to never leave its owners home. No robot sex for you!
Or, when the owner discovers its location (I assume robots of the future will have LoJack...) he could locate the robot and command it to follow him home. Not only do you miss out on the robot sex, you probably lost a friend in the process.
This exact point proves that Asimov had robot sex and jealous friends in mind when he created his laws...
- Mike
Actually, it's more like 1.19 Megabyte.
The following sentence explains: "In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other."
That makes each cell a bit, not a byte. Each cell is either a 0 or a 1, according to the description of how it works. So, if it's 10M bits, it can only store 1.19 Megabytes.
There's so many errorneous statements in this article that it should be posted under "It's funny, laugh" not "Data Storage".
- Mike
Now, I don't want to start a flame-war but I think that's a fairly jaded outlook. Just because a person is educated, does not mean they will not be a criminal. Nor does it mean that a person who is not educated will be a criminal. I don't have a high school or college degree, yet I'm no murdering thug. It's much more complicated than education, health-care and wages. You have to factor in culture, lifestyles, environment and many other elements of human existence.
In fact, I'd even argue that one of the biggest factors of crime is greed. People commit crimes because they want something, be it respect, money, power or many other things people tend to covet. And I'm sorry to say it but everyone is susceptible to greed no matter how well-off they are.
With that, I can say that the only thing that I think is truly inevitable is crime. There will always be crime - amongst the rich, the poor and the educated or not...
I also believe that some of the most educated, well paid people commit crimes just as often as their counterparts. Politicians (tell me there isn't a single corrupt politician who hasn't stolen money or maybe even had someone killed), Judges, Police Officers, even Presidents. They all commit crimes just as often as the poor, uneducated people you refer to - however, they probably get away with it more often than not.
I guess I'm rambling now but my point is simple: No matter what anybody does about it, there will always be crime and there will always be a need for technology like this.
- Mike
Appearantly it runs in Visual Studio because upon execution I get prompted to open it up in a new instance of Visual Studio .NET 2003!
"An exception 'System.IO.FileNotFoundException' has occurred in MediaPortal.exe"
- Mike
If you read the summary correctly, you'd see that it's a PORT of Xbox Media Center, which does require a modded Xbox. Media Portal however, runs on Windows PC's.
- Mike
You're right except for one factor:
You don't know what the song is called, nor who plays it!
How are you going to jump on ITMS and buy it if you don't know who it is?
You do bring up a good point however. What if it CAN'T identify the song? Do you still pay for the service? I would assume/hope that if it fails, you don't pay. But, what about false-positives? The service may very well believe that it identified a song correctly and charge the user accordingly. IMHO, this service only has a limited range of use anyway as I doubt it will identify the latest songs from Cradle of Filth, or say, Meshuguh.
I can see it now, I dial #ID into my snazzy little AT&T cell and play a some Tiamat into the mic and it comes back with: Britney Spears!
Doomed to fail horribly in my opinion.
- Mike
Why does everyone say perl syntax is so damned ugly? Appearantly, they haven't seen C code written by someone with a "I'm a C God - Complex". I agree with some of the other posts here, it's only ugly if you have never used the language before. Write yourself a script or two and you quickly catch on.
In fact, it's just like ANY other language (programming or spoken at that), it looks foriegn (go figure) until you put a little effort into it and figure it out.
JM2C
- Mike
Well, I'd suggest that posting as an annonymous coward isn't helping you in regards to respect.... :)
By BOB TEDESCHI
Published: January 19, 2004
TELEVISION commercials, in all their big, loud glory, are coming to the Web.
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.
"It's TV, without the television," said John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, a unit of PepsiCo.
Video advertisements from major marketers have dotted the online landscape sporadically in recent years, but the new ads differ from their precursors in one critical respect: until now, none have run at 30 frames a second, the speed of TV video. As a result, most multimedia ads are less sharp than TV images, even for people with fast connections.
The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page. The resulting ad is identical to TV, whether the user has a high- or low-speed connection. The company says the technology evades pop-up blockers, but the person can skip the ad by clicking a box.
Unlike TV viewers, Internet users will not be deluged with these ads, at least in the short term. According to Unicast, 100 million ads will be served to individual PC's beginning tomorrow through the end of February. That may sound like a lot, but publishers, who can track a user's repeat trips to a Web site, say they will generally limit a person's exposure to the ads to one a day.
Unicast says it hopes 50 million to 75 million people will view the ads. Pepsi plans to distribute two ads, which have run on TV in the last few months. In one, titled "Just Lunch," a dog steals its owner's sandwich and Pepsi, and replaces them with a cat. In the other, "Vacuum," a vacuum cleaner hunts a Pepsi drinker and eats his pants. At the end of each, users will be shown links to more ads, on the Pepsi Web site. (Those ads use so-called streaming video technology of an older vintage, and are less than TV quality.)
Mr. Vail, of Pepsi, said he would monitor online viewers' reactions through a tracking study conducted by the research firm Dynamic Logic, to determine how much use Pepsi will make of such ads in the future. "Yes, it's intrusive," he said. "But I think customers will like it, because it will be so far superior to anything they've seen online."
James Nail, an analyst with the technology consulting firm Forrester Research, agreed. "This is the best full-motion, full-video TV ad technology that I've seen," he said. "I expect big demand from advertisers for this."
Among other features, Mr. Nail says he appreciates the fact that the ads do not slow Web surfing. The commercials load into a computer's temporary memory, and only when a page is idle. If a user clicks to a new page within the site before the ad is fully loaded, the process is merely paused until the browser is again idle. The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers.
Mr. Nail predicts that Internet users will react well to the ads, both because they can click away if they choose and because the advertisers involved have brands that "people have positive reactions to," he said, adding, "So I think they'll get a little more leeway, at least initially."
If users are annoyed at this development, they can blame high-speed connections. Richard V. Hopple, Unicast's chief executive, said he decided to release the company's "video commercial" technology now because high-speed connections - known as broadband - have reached significant numbers. The number of United States households with broadband connections reached 49.5 million late last year, or 38 percent of all households, accordi
"The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
I was curious about this Full Screen Superstitial advertisement so I checked the Unicast website here http://www.unicast.com/gallery/gallery.asp and found that shockwave is required in order to display. Under firebird with no shockwave plugin installed (on Win2K no-less), all I get is a 'Get Plugin' page. Glad to see that this 'technology' is defunct from the start!
- mkaltner
I know for a fact that there is. The iPrism Web Filtering Appliance (disclaimer: I am an employee of the company in question and NOT speaking as a representitive of the company or the product.) has had these 'features' for years (I don't know how long exactly so I won't quote numbers, but still, it's years). Day/Time based control of profiles and ACL's, filtering, blocking, logging, monitoring... It's all there, been done before and by many more than just us (8e6 and n2h2 just to name a couple.)
- Mike
Looks like they already did, to me...
Bizzare, Live Performances, Membranes, Joysticks and ... Hoto Graphs?
And the inventors name is what? Pete Casper?
I don't know, but this sounds pretty gay to me.
A server admin with the name of zerocool.
I bet your password is 'god', isn't it?
"Mess with the best, die like the rest..."
LOL! Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Seriously, were it any other company, I'd applaud their actions. But this is Micro$oft, people. I'm starting to think that poor security in Windows was by design, not due to lack of effort. Look at it this way, to quote Mundie, he states:
"We'll continue to make progress in the security area. New versions of many products will come out," he said.
Emphasis mine of course. I think there's another message in there, though. It seems to me that they're really saying this:
"Since many of our products have security vulnerabilities, we're going to re-release all of them, branded as 'Secure' and you, the consumer, will buy them because we're Microsoft, and you don't have a choice."
Well sure, they have a choice, but honestly, most companies are so tied into Microsoft, that they really don't. Now will they switch, just keep shelling out gobs of dough for the latest and, greatest (?) Microsoft products.
I wouldn't put it past them, that's for sure.
- Mike
To give credit where credit is due, the parent poster ripped this from a show called Trigger Happy TV. It's a bit like Jackass, but with UK humor. This particular quote is from a skit where Dom Joly caries an loud and oversized cell phone around with him screeming into it. It is usually done in places such as movie theatres, plays, symphonies, etc... Pretty funny actually. Here's a still from the show.
Why do you reply to your own thread referring to yourself in the third person? Seems a little strange to me. The fact that you find yourself so 'hysterical' that you need to question the acts of the moderators in such a way shows that you've got quite an inferiority complex. That, or it's a bizarre coincidence that your name is asdfasdfasdfasdf while the parent of the thread is joejoejoejoe. Not to mention your user ID's show a difference of 26 users. Hmm...
- Mike
I hear that's also why you don't need girlfriends, either... LOL I just had to, sorry.
You'd still be wrong, even if Sony made EQ in the first place.
The history of EQ is this:
Division X of Sony makes sports games
Division X spins off and becomes 989 Studios
Team Y at 989 Studios starts EverQuest
Team Y spins off and becomes Verant Interactive.
Sony sees the potential they let leave and buys both 989 Studios and Verant back.
So, Sony didn't even make EQ.
And The Sims, Online, won't be made by Sony either. So, I don't think Sony will stand in the way, at all...
Personally, I don't think Maxis (The creators of The Sims), would keep people from customizing the game. Of course, they'd need the Hard Drive for the PS2. And if they don't have one, they don't get to customize. Simple as that.
Well, that's my opinion at least.
- Mike
"It doesn't take a genius (just a bit of open-mindedness) to figure out that in the vast reaches of just our own galaxy (not to mention the universe) the chances are good that additional systems similar to Sol were formed."
I totally agree with you, but with a broader vision. Who says that the other lifeforms out there require the same environment as we do?
You never know...
- Mike