Well I can only assume Sony didn't sign any sort of exclusivity agreement for Cell, and in the corporate world "hey that's kind of unfair!" isn't exactly a grounds for suit.
Sony can't do much about this now, anyway, it's way too late in the game to switch processors, and IBM probably has enough patents on the thing to prevent anyone from making an equivalent too soon.
Somehow I don't think this is going to hurt Sony though. True blue Geek Buzz generates the right kind of attention to a new product. If people think that cool hacks will be coming out for the PS3, then they'll be more likely to hold off and not buy an XBox 360 (this is certainly changing MY opinion, and while my main reason for buying a PS3 might be to hack around, I'll still get some games -- it's been a while since I've played anything up to date, and I'm certainly never going to drop the crazy money it takes to get a PC up to respectable gaming speed)
Sony is generally a lot more hacker friendly that major competitors Apple and Microsoft. I think they'll be smart enough to see that this a) only affects a very small market segment and b) will generate good press.
Film is a unique art because doing even basic work requires more money than any non-wealthy individual can supply themselves.
20 minute long senior projects by film students routinely cost in excess of $50,000 and that is with the dramatic cost-reduction of digital film, and the benefit of near-free student labor.
In hollywood earning the right to fail means you never have to worry about having a project greenlighted, and failing to make a profit doesn't keep you from making your next project.
Stephen Spielberg has earned the right to fail. He's going to get to make whatever he wants for the rest of his life. Terry Gilliam has not earned that right, studios still give him shit, and every project he takes might be the end of his career.
And while I'd love to see Lucas do something worthwhile again, I hate to say it, but Gilliam is still doing work worthy of his output from 25 years ago, and Spielberg for the most part isn't.
I don't see how this program is going to prevent anyone from getting commercial broadband. Also having a cable connection at home doesn't let you check your email when you're out at lunch.
And your experience with commercial broadband seems to be the opposite of mine. When the first cable internet provider started here it was $25 / month and it wasn't uncommon to see 1 Mb - 3 Mb / second transfers, and uploads were capped at something absurd like 500 Kb / sec. Now we've got 2 cable and 2 DSL providers in the area, the cheapest one is $35, both cable providers are terrible, and DSL is unreasonably expensive if you don't have land line phone service already set up (really, who needs it?)
It seems like they set their service standards high to get a quick early adopter crowd to recoup their investment, then as dumber and dumber consumers switched over, all they had to do was keep things marginally better than dialup and they wouldn't lose customers. Since broadband is typically purchased as a package with TV or phone, most customers are getting it as an extra service, not as something they're actively comparing for quality. I'm sure most of them think the slow access and frequent service outages are problems with their computers.
I really want to like free markets, but other consumers keep making them a royal pain in my ass. With government services, at least I have a vote, and at the municipal level (where more services SHOULD be handled), I can show up to council meetings and actually be heard by people who care. The telcos can burn in hell.
The single button mouse is a GREAT design. Just try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use a two button mouse. It also forces intelligent design on software developers. Very few applications have (or should have) the level of feature complexity that would require contextual menus for basic functionality, and multiple mouse buttons should rightly be viewed as an optional enhancement rather than an interface essential.
If you don't like it, do what I did, and get a $10 logitech wheelmouse. OS X supports it just fine.
The only way that Linux is "risky" right now is the possibility that free software might be made illegal by idiotic security and copyright protection law. This won't happen. There is far too much money riding on the Linux + Apache platform alone, more money than even the combined resources of the entertainment industries and closed-source software publishers. Then consider the number of governments that have based their IT platforms on free software. Even if OSS gets killed in the US, it will still thrive in the rest of the world.
From a technology standpoint, Linux stopped being risky for small to medium backend tasks a long time ago. Scalability and desktop are improving by leaps and bounds and don't show any signs of losing momentum.
The only risk involved in migrating to open source is the cost associated with migrating any large installed system. It takes lots of man-hours for IT staff and lots of retraining. But for any organization just getting off the ground, free software is about as low-risk as you can get.
A long time ago I read a statistic stating that the average CD is listened to 5 times.
That seems to be more or less true, for every CD in my collection like _Revolver_ or _London Calling_ that I've put on countless times, there's a bunch that I bought because I heard it at a friend's house or I liked the single, but then never really got into. I'm sure I have a few that I never even listened to all the way through.
And these days the music industry is trying hard to get the price of CDs a good bit over $15.
Ok, now who's going to cough up some money to save Arrested Development? In my mind it's tied with the Simpsons' best 3 or 4 seasons as being the funniest show ever to be on television.
So at what point should we really be concerned about this? I think it's difficult to deny that the past 4 years have seen the most radical transformation of the federal government since the New Deal, if not since the end of the Civil War. I think this is of far greater concerns than any tax policy or even any inidividual war, but there has been little to no public questioning of the vast changes in the way our government operates.
So when does this stop being something bad just in concept? When should I start thinking about getting myself and my family out of here?
I'm a leftist too, however I was pointing out that vulgarity in political speach is going to castrate political discourse, since vulgarity is most often used in arguments for base ad-hominem attacks (quick quiz, if television news networks could use the f-word, which one would use it the most? Here's a hint, it's another f-word)
Vulgarity has a place in political commentary, it's fine for blogs and cartoons where people are expressing an emotional response to politics, but I don't think it does much service to political discourse.
and leave heavy duty string in the conduit, that way when the time comes to add cable, just tie one end of the cable (and a new string!) to the string, and pull it through the other end, easy!
Blockbuster is very good at using mind games to give extra time to return movies in ways that insure they'll be getting more late fees.
A while back they added an extra 1/2 day to all their rental periods, no extra cost. Great right?
Well... except this means you've gotta return it by noon on the day that it's due, and as anyone who has a life with more obligations that renting and returning videos can tell you, that's just not always going to happen. Of course you could still get it in the night before like you used to, but the due date sticks in your head, "It's due Thursday at noon" and so you're just thinking "Thursday."
Of course this isn't really *dishonest* but they know what they're doing. If people aren't losing a dollar a day with late fees, they aren't going to be worrying over getting the movie back in time. If your kid moves the box under the table or something, it'll be really easy to forget. I bet they're "selling" a whole lot of movies with this new policy.
It's bad that they aren't being upfront about the new system, but even if they were, I doubt very much they're going to be losing money they've made on fees.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I can only assume Sony didn't sign any sort of exclusivity agreement for Cell, and in the corporate world "hey that's kind of unfair!" isn't exactly a grounds for suit.
Sony can't do much about this now, anyway, it's way too late in the game to switch processors, and IBM probably has enough patents on the thing to prevent anyone from making an equivalent too soon.
Somehow I don't think this is going to hurt Sony though. True blue Geek Buzz generates the right kind of attention to a new product. If people think that cool hacks will be coming out for the PS3, then they'll be more likely to hold off and not buy an XBox 360 (this is certainly changing MY opinion, and while my main reason for buying a PS3 might be to hack around, I'll still get some games -- it's been a while since I've played anything up to date, and I'm certainly never going to drop the crazy money it takes to get a PC up to respectable gaming speed)
Sony is generally a lot more hacker friendly that major competitors Apple and Microsoft. I think they'll be smart enough to see that this a) only affects a very small market segment and b) will generate good press.
Film is a unique art because doing even basic work requires more money than any non-wealthy individual can supply themselves.
20 minute long senior projects by film students routinely cost in excess of $50,000 and that is with the dramatic cost-reduction of digital film, and the benefit of near-free student labor.
In hollywood earning the right to fail means you never have to worry about having a project greenlighted, and failing to make a profit doesn't keep you from making your next project.
Stephen Spielberg has earned the right to fail. He's going to get to make whatever he wants for the rest of his life. Terry Gilliam has not earned that right, studios still give him shit, and every project he takes might be the end of his career.
And while I'd love to see Lucas do something worthwhile again, I hate to say it, but Gilliam is still doing work worthy of his output from 25 years ago, and Spielberg for the most part isn't.
re: X800
When there aren't any post-2003 *games* available for a system, it doesn't make much sense to have a post-2003 graphics card on it, does it?
Given Opera's business model, shouldn't he have tied this stunt to sales rather than downloads?
You've never been inside a prison, have you?
I don't see how this program is going to prevent anyone from getting commercial broadband. Also having a cable connection at home doesn't let you check your email when you're out at lunch.
And your experience with commercial broadband seems to be the opposite of mine. When the first cable internet provider started here it was $25 / month and it wasn't uncommon to see 1 Mb - 3 Mb / second transfers, and uploads were capped at something absurd like 500 Kb / sec. Now we've got 2 cable and 2 DSL providers in the area, the cheapest one is $35, both cable providers are terrible, and DSL is unreasonably expensive if you don't have land line phone service already set up (really, who needs it?)
It seems like they set their service standards high to get a quick early adopter crowd to recoup their investment, then as dumber and dumber consumers switched over, all they had to do was keep things marginally better than dialup and they wouldn't lose customers. Since broadband is typically purchased as a package with TV or phone, most customers are getting it as an extra service, not as something they're actively comparing for quality. I'm sure most of them think the slow access and frequent service outages are problems with their computers.
I really want to like free markets, but other consumers keep making them a royal pain in my ass. With government services, at least I have a vote, and at the municipal level (where more services SHOULD be handled), I can show up to council meetings and actually be heard by people who care. The telcos can burn in hell.
Could someone please find a mirror, or just log in through their grandmother's AOL account and post the text?
Yeah and what idiot would want to look at their photos on their portable media player?
The single button mouse is a GREAT design. Just try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use a two button mouse. It also forces intelligent design on software developers. Very few applications have (or should have) the level of feature complexity that would require contextual menus for basic functionality, and multiple mouse buttons should rightly be viewed as an optional enhancement rather than an interface essential.
If you don't like it, do what I did, and get a $10 logitech wheelmouse. OS X supports it just fine.
I assure you that mathematicians in Archimedes' day knew all about the properties of parabolas.
Now might be a good time to tell you just how positive my experience running Mandrake 10.1 on a G3 600 MHZ ibook with only 128 mb RAM has been.
Even KDE is quite usable with some of the sillier features turned off.
For the older machines, there's always debian & something thinner like IceWM or fvwm.
The only way that Linux is "risky" right now is the possibility that free software might be made illegal by idiotic security and copyright protection law. This won't happen. There is far too much money riding on the Linux + Apache platform alone, more money than even the combined resources of the entertainment industries and closed-source software publishers. Then consider the number of governments that have based their IT platforms on free software. Even if OSS gets killed in the US, it will still thrive in the rest of the world.
From a technology standpoint, Linux stopped being risky for small to medium backend tasks a long time ago. Scalability and desktop are improving by leaps and bounds and don't show any signs of losing momentum.
The only risk involved in migrating to open source is the cost associated with migrating any large installed system. It takes lots of man-hours for IT staff and lots of retraining. But for any organization just getting off the ground, free software is about as low-risk as you can get.
A long time ago I read a statistic stating that the average CD is listened to 5 times.
That seems to be more or less true, for every CD in my collection like _Revolver_ or _London Calling_ that I've put on countless times, there's a bunch that I bought because I heard it at a friend's house or I liked the single, but then never really got into. I'm sure I have a few that I never even listened to all the way through.
And these days the music industry is trying hard to get the price of CDs a good bit over $15.
I see by the first item in your list that you spend your time about as wisely as I spend mine :-)
I for one am NOT excited about having another $150 piece of my computer to keep current just to play some damn games.
Certainly better looking that Kasparov.
Wanna bet those private shuttles will be crewed by ex-NASA astronauts?
You could put them on a sticker and attach them to a cellphone.
Ok, now who's going to cough up some money to save Arrested Development? In my mind it's tied with the Simpsons' best 3 or 4 seasons as being the funniest show ever to be on television.
So at what point should we really be concerned about this? I think it's difficult to deny that the past 4 years have seen the most radical transformation of the federal government since the New Deal, if not since the end of the Civil War. I think this is of far greater concerns than any tax policy or even any inidividual war, but there has been little to no public questioning of the vast changes in the way our government operates.
So when does this stop being something bad just in concept? When should I start thinking about getting myself and my family out of here?
I'm a leftist too, however I was pointing out that vulgarity in political speach is going to castrate political discourse, since vulgarity is most often used in arguments for base ad-hominem attacks (quick quiz, if television news networks could use the f-word, which one would use it the most? Here's a hint, it's another f-word)
Vulgarity has a place in political commentary, it's fine for blogs and cartoons where people are expressing an emotional response to politics, but I don't think it does much service to political discourse.
Shut up you fucking commie prick.
We also aren't going to solve Go. We'll solve Chess first, and we aren't going to solve Chess either.
19x19 is exponentially more complicated than 5x5, and it's a really big exponent.
and leave heavy duty string in the conduit, that way when the time comes to add cable, just tie one end of the cable (and a new string!) to the string, and pull it through the other end, easy!
Blockbuster is very good at using mind games to give extra time to return movies in ways that insure they'll be getting more late fees.
A while back they added an extra 1/2 day to all their rental periods, no extra cost. Great right?
Well... except this means you've gotta return it by noon on the day that it's due, and as anyone who has a life with more obligations that renting and returning videos can tell you, that's just not always going to happen. Of course you could still get it in the night before like you used to, but the due date sticks in your head, "It's due Thursday at noon" and so you're just thinking "Thursday."
Of course this isn't really *dishonest* but they know what they're doing. If people aren't losing a dollar a day with late fees, they aren't going to be worrying over getting the movie back in time. If your kid moves the box under the table or something, it'll be really easy to forget. I bet they're "selling" a whole lot of movies with this new policy.
It's bad that they aren't being upfront about the new system, but even if they were, I doubt very much they're going to be losing money they've made on fees.