Britannica is authored by an entity which takes responsibility for its errors and has a long history of accuracy. Its content is "vetted", meaning that there is a measure of academic validity to what was written.
Some Wikipedia entries are far more detailed and far more accurate than Britannica's - however, that doesn't change the fact that the content was written by unknown persons with unknown source material for their entries.
Has anyone noticed that this smells a lot like the perpetual motion machines widely purported (but never actually seen working) from the late 19th century? There's been plenty of coverage of the subject, and this just sounds like yet another variation on "harnessing gravity's power" and getting "free energy".:/
Sony has it all wrong. I don't want to pay a per-download fee. I want to pay a monthly fee, like I do for my satellite, internet, and Netflix subscription.
With my Netflix sub, I pay a flat fee, and I can basically have any movie I'd like to watch practically the day after tomorrow. This flattens the revenue stream for the company, which I'm sure pleases them immensely. I can get my copy of LOTR from Netflix, invite my friends over, watch it on my projector, and have a ball - there's no "per use" fee, no extra money because I had friends over, no "oversize image" charge.
It continually blows me away how clueless and out of touch Big Media is. Look, here's what we want: movies, on demand, on a subscription basis. The revenue potential is immense. We want to watch our first run movies in the theatre, with the option of watching them at home a week or two later. We want them at full DVD quality or better, and we want to be able to save them to our hard drives for convenient watching at a later date.
It's bloatware, and they're setting aside one evil format and taking up another (PDF). I'm all for open software, but it's a mistake to use Adobe's format. At the company I work for, we use it, and it's a terrible piece of software in both its feature set and its software footprint on each system. Add to that the fact that if anyone wants to generate content, they have to either get Acrobat (a $400 license), use Adobe Distiller (a $5000 server product!) or some third-party tool to convert to PDF.
Personally, I'd wait for the MS Word XML format to become a reality.
This is just plain scary. This is *Google* we're talking about here. Imagine a search engine where you can search on someone's name, and get not only a valid email address but a valid phone number too!
I love Google as much as the next guy but please - privacy!
Once you're past that, and throw their networking implementation out of the way, it's a fairly useful OS. Keep in mind that the core of the OS was designed in an age where people were still thinking about these newfangled 3.5" floppies, had never heard of Ethernet, and were more interested in running MSPaint than Doom, which didn't exist yet.
Ask yourself this: If Microsoft fixed multi-user permissions and made security on the network side job #1, would you a) consider Windows a "real" OS or b) hold the past against Microsoft and continue to rag on Bill Gates.
If you answered A, great, you have a broad mind, and are willing to consider all options. If you answered B, you're deciding based on emotion, not empirical evidence.
For the past two or three years, the state of Ohio has been including a line item on their tax returns to fill in how much money you'd spent online.
Until now, I never had to keep track of anything I purchased via phone or mail order. Now the State wants to track my online purchases? What if I'm purchasing things I don't necessarily want the State to know about, like a RealDoll(TM) or my 1000 rights-for-gay-marriage buttons?
Some may argue the State only wants to collect taxes. This is certainly true, but in this age of information-collecting, we have to fight tooth and nail to avoid giving corporations the leverage they need to force decisions on us we wouldn't normally have to make.
I used to run a web page devoted to FF and haptics called Force One, back in the day. I've been out to visit with both SensAble and Immersion; they both make very advanced and very different products.
The article mentioned goes into better detail, but in short, Immersion is in the retail and medical space, while SensAble is in the industrial and design spaces.
It's interesting to see what's happened in the consumer space in the past few years; there was a strong push in the very beginning from companies like Logitech and Microsoft (amongst others) to put FF on the map in gaming. As it's turned out, there's no longer a big focus on it; graphics have remained the dominant force (sorry, bad pun!) in gaming. Even sound is falling off the map; FF is far down the list of developer's priorities.
This has always bothered me; while graphics have had a huge focus, and therefore have progressed at a breakneck pace, haptics and other sensory channels have been largely ignored. At one point there was a researcher working with technology that would stimulate your vestibular nerves externally with an electric field. This nerve controls your sense of balance and motion; he'd put together an API that would interface with 3D graphics. So you'd wear this device that had metal contacts that go behind your ears, and you'd "feel" the motion in a first-person game. (He claimed no one ever got motion sick in testing. I call BS.)
I hope they continue moving forward with some of this stuff.
This isn't about companies and artists being "stolen" from. It's about corporate entities finally having the kind of leverage to exert full control over content distribution from inception to consumption.
If a company can control the distribution of its "intellectual property" - e.g. a song - from the moment it's recorded until it hits your ears - then there's additional opportunities for a revenue stream at any point in that line. For instance, you can purchase a song from iTunes. Or you can pay XM $10 a month for the privilege of listening to that same song on their satellite service. Or you could go to the record store and purchase a disc you can put in your CD player and play.
But the act of copying said content, and giving it to a friend - that's completely outside the revenue stream, and the content companies seek to stop this type of action. Even if the creator of the content - the artist - would see benefit from this action. (An example: a friend recently made a copy of the Secret Machines album for me. I bought a copy for my brother, and then a copy for myself. How is this bad for the artist?)
Music, video, and other entertainment content is *not* intellectual property. Trade secrets, manufacturing methods, software - that's IP. But music in specific is undergoing a transformation. Content control is not natural in the broad scope - it's an artificial control mechanism put in place to generate revenue.
25mbps converts to around 3.1Mb (megabytes) per second. So the press release, for tards like me, would be "1.8 to 3.1 megabytes of pirated movies per second!"
Not that I actually download pirated movies./scared/
This is a very hot technical issue in gaming right now. The last 5 years have netted us decent techniques for doing network communications for low-latency gaming; with those in place now, we turn again to graphics.
Tribes and Tribes 2 were some of the first games to take on outdoor environments and do them well. Now, we have Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry leading the pack with gloriously realistic outdoor playspaces.
It's only a matter of time before next generation gaming engines like these turn to non-linear gameplay such as what's in GTA 3 and we wind up with a world simulation that has a level of realism approaching reality.
And why does he have his own Olympics? Are we that short of media-blitz sporting events? Does this have something to do with our esteemed site admin CmdrTaco?
Seriously, when I read the headline, I thought it was Rob Olympics. Geek --:(
It's pretty simple when you think about it. Rather than braking rapidly and just pitching the rider off the front, it would be fairly easy to put together an algorithm to keep the rider physically planted over the CG of the wheel by leaning her or him backwards.
So when the rider slams on the brakes, the ABS system takes over and also leans the rider backward to counter the deceleration.
I use a couple of better-than-Bic pens. One's a fountain Parker, which is okay, but it ruined my shirt a couple of weeks ago when it dribbled ink. Boy, was I bummed.
Now I use a Sensa pen. They run about $50, but they write well, take most any cartridge insert, and they have this squishy grip that's super comfortable. I don't do a *lot* of writing, but when I do, I like to do so comfortably. The Sensa gets the job done, and it's entertaining and all, too.
I used to run Tribes 1/2 servers, and this rekindled my interest in the game. Legends is a lot of fun, has great graphics, and has the smooth, fluid physics of the original (as opposed to the molasses-fest that was Tribes 2).
Slashdot Mirror
Britannica is authored by an entity which takes responsibility for its errors and has a long history of accuracy. Its content is "vetted", meaning that there is a measure of academic validity to what was written.
Some Wikipedia entries are far more detailed and far more accurate than Britannica's - however, that doesn't change the fact that the content was written by unknown persons with unknown source material for their entries.
Has anyone noticed that this smells a lot like the perpetual motion machines widely purported (but never actually seen working) from the late 19th century? There's been plenty of coverage of the subject, and this just sounds like yet another variation on "harnessing gravity's power" and getting "free energy". :/
Sony has it all wrong. I don't want to pay a per-download fee. I want to pay a monthly fee, like I do for my satellite, internet, and Netflix subscription.
With my Netflix sub, I pay a flat fee, and I can basically have any movie I'd like to watch practically the day after tomorrow. This flattens the revenue stream for the company, which I'm sure pleases them immensely. I can get my copy of LOTR from Netflix, invite my friends over, watch it on my projector, and have a ball - there's no "per use" fee, no extra money because I had friends over, no "oversize image" charge.
It continually blows me away how clueless and out of touch Big Media is. Look, here's what we want: movies, on demand, on a subscription basis. The revenue potential is immense. We want to watch our first run movies in the theatre, with the option of watching them at home a week or two later. We want them at full DVD quality or better, and we want to be able to save them to our hard drives for convenient watching at a later date.
It's bloatware, and they're setting aside one evil format and taking up another (PDF). I'm all for open software, but it's a mistake to use Adobe's format. At the company I work for, we use it, and it's a terrible piece of software in both its feature set and its software footprint on each system. Add to that the fact that if anyone wants to generate content, they have to either get Acrobat (a $400 license), use Adobe Distiller (a $5000 server product!) or some third-party tool to convert to PDF.
Personally, I'd wait for the MS Word XML format to become a reality.
This is just plain scary. This is *Google* we're talking about here. Imagine a search engine where you can search on someone's name, and get not only a valid email address but a valid phone number too!
I love Google as much as the next guy but please - privacy!
Once you're past that, and throw their networking implementation out of the way, it's a fairly useful OS. Keep in mind that the core of the OS was designed in an age where people were still thinking about these newfangled 3.5" floppies, had never heard of Ethernet, and were more interested in running MSPaint than Doom, which didn't exist yet.
Ask yourself this: If Microsoft fixed multi-user permissions and made security on the network side job #1, would you a) consider Windows a "real" OS or b) hold the past against Microsoft and continue to rag on Bill Gates.
If you answered A, great, you have a broad mind, and are willing to consider all options. If you answered B, you're deciding based on emotion, not empirical evidence.
Suuuuure it's for research.
While I understand the scale's a bit different, how can you mention a structure like this without mentioning Ringworld?
Kids these days...
For the past two or three years, the state of Ohio has been including a line item on their tax returns to fill in how much money you'd spent online.
Until now, I never had to keep track of anything I purchased via phone or mail order. Now the State wants to track my online purchases? What if I'm purchasing things I don't necessarily want the State to know about, like a RealDoll(TM) or my 1000 rights-for-gay-marriage buttons?
Some may argue the State only wants to collect taxes. This is certainly true, but in this age of information-collecting, we have to fight tooth and nail to avoid giving corporations the leverage they need to force decisions on us we wouldn't normally have to make.
I used to run a web page devoted to FF and haptics called Force One, back in the day. I've been out to visit with both SensAble and Immersion; they both make very advanced and very different products.
The article mentioned goes into better detail, but in short, Immersion is in the retail and medical space, while SensAble is in the industrial and design spaces.
It's interesting to see what's happened in the consumer space in the past few years; there was a strong push in the very beginning from companies like Logitech and Microsoft (amongst others) to put FF on the map in gaming. As it's turned out, there's no longer a big focus on it; graphics have remained the dominant force (sorry, bad pun!) in gaming. Even sound is falling off the map; FF is far down the list of developer's priorities.
This has always bothered me; while graphics have had a huge focus, and therefore have progressed at a breakneck pace, haptics and other sensory channels have been largely ignored. At one point there was a researcher working with technology that would stimulate your vestibular nerves externally with an electric field. This nerve controls your sense of balance and motion; he'd put together an API that would interface with 3D graphics. So you'd wear this device that had metal contacts that go behind your ears, and you'd "feel" the motion in a first-person game. (He claimed no one ever got motion sick in testing. I call BS.)
I hope they continue moving forward with some of this stuff.
This isn't about companies and artists being "stolen" from. It's about corporate entities finally having the kind of leverage to exert full control over content distribution from inception to consumption.
If a company can control the distribution of its "intellectual property" - e.g. a song - from the moment it's recorded until it hits your ears - then there's additional opportunities for a revenue stream at any point in that line. For instance, you can purchase a song from iTunes. Or you can pay XM $10 a month for the privilege of listening to that same song on their satellite service. Or you could go to the record store and purchase a disc you can put in your CD player and play.
But the act of copying said content, and giving it to a friend - that's completely outside the revenue stream, and the content companies seek to stop this type of action. Even if the creator of the content - the artist - would see benefit from this action. (An example: a friend recently made a copy of the Secret Machines album for me. I bought a copy for my brother, and then a copy for myself. How is this bad for the artist?)
Music, video, and other entertainment content is *not* intellectual property. Trade secrets, manufacturing methods, software - that's IP. But music in specific is undergoing a transformation. Content control is not natural in the broad scope - it's an artificial control mechanism put in place to generate revenue.
A little to the left.
No, a little to the right.
Okay, now forward.
Wait! Stop! Back up a little.
A little to the left....
Hell, we could teach 'em Logo and get more done.
....the next version came out. A new Linux kernel comes out, and you upgrade, right? I guess Carnivore 98(TM) is going off support.
...I admit it. It's me.
25mbps converts to around 3.1Mb (megabytes) per second. So the press release, for tards like me, would be "1.8 to 3.1 megabytes of pirated movies per second!"
/scared/
Not that I actually download pirated movies.
This is a very hot technical issue in gaming right now. The last 5 years have netted us decent techniques for doing network communications for low-latency gaming; with those in place now, we turn again to graphics.
Tribes and Tribes 2 were some of the first games to take on outdoor environments and do them well. Now, we have Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry leading the pack with gloriously realistic outdoor playspaces.
It's only a matter of time before next generation gaming engines like these turn to non-linear gameplay such as what's in GTA 3 and we wind up with a world simulation that has a level of realism approaching reality.
Tests completed through Mach 5, it seems. I thought this would go to Mach 7?
2:00 to launch....internal power checks, final airspeed and heading changes being completed.
They're getting ready to launch. Begin nailbiting. They're transferring to internal power now.
And why does he have his own Olympics? Are we that short of media-blitz sporting events? Does this have something to do with our esteemed site admin CmdrTaco?
:(
Seriously, when I read the headline, I thought it was Rob Olympics. Geek --
It's pretty simple when you think about it. Rather than braking rapidly and just pitching the rider off the front, it would be fairly easy to put together an algorithm to keep the rider physically planted over the CG of the wheel by leaning her or him backwards.
So when the rider slams on the brakes, the ABS system takes over and also leans the rider backward to counter the deceleration.
In celebration of my diminutive penis and impotence, I will now call myself "Microsoft", benefiting from name recognition.
...but I just thought it was the Reddi Whip gas I had snuck into the film to make up for lack of entertainment...
I use a couple of better-than-Bic pens. One's a fountain Parker, which is okay, but it ruined my shirt a couple of weeks ago when it dribbled ink. Boy, was I bummed.
Now I use a Sensa pen. They run about $50, but they write well, take most any cartridge insert, and they have this squishy grip that's super comfortable. I don't do a *lot* of writing, but when I do, I like to do so comfortably. The Sensa gets the job done, and it's entertaining and all, too.
I used to run Tribes 1/2 servers, and this rekindled my interest in the game. Legends is a lot of fun, has great graphics, and has the smooth, fluid physics of the original (as opposed to the molasses-fest that was Tribes 2).
I highly recommend this game.