This is unfortunately wasted effort. The lawyers keep the g-forces in check. What roller coaster manufacturer will make a coaster that will kill people? It's obviously in their best interest to do plenty of research and testing on their rides to make sure people don't get harmed. The odds are also statistically insignificant -- one in 100 million riders dies? Please. I wish lawmakers would spend their time on more pressing issues, such as allocating funding to help with the thousands of people who die every year from smoking, car wrecks, and terminal illnesses.
This kind of legislation just makes me sick. The entertainment industry will take care of itself -- noone will ride a ride that is known to hurt people!
With all due respect, she is wrong in some respects: it is possible to create a fully-verified electronic system. Start with completely open code and thoroughly examined hardware, create an audited system for installing the code on the hardware, and make it tamper-evident so that you know the same code is still there when the machine reaches the voting booths. Bootable, hologrammed, serial-numbered CD-ROMs with individual private keys would do the trick. Mercuri is thinking in terms of vendors selling proprietary "solutions", where she's absolutely right: there's no way to verify that what people punch in is what is actually recorded.
Is it possible? Then why hasn't it been done before? At least in the PC industry, I can't think of a single example of an uncrackable software package... Basically, to develop an immune system would require something on the order of mil-spec hardware and a goverment contract with a single vendor and the mountains of paperwork associated with it. In other words, if the feds aren't going to organize and standardize this project, it will quickly get out of hand.
The main problem here is that people are using a complicated solution to a very very simple problem: counting! I imagine a compromise system: have a computerized voting thingie that simply prints out the completed ballot for you in an OCR (or MICR) compatible format when you're done voting. Then you have a legal record, no more chads, and the results are verifiable by traditional methods. If the government were to standardize this form of computerized paper ballot, that would allot vendors to create systems at their will, since security is no longer an issue. It's much easier to prevent tampering to pieces of paper as opposed to securing bits and bytes here and tere. Also, the public would be more accepting of such a system, and it eliminates human error from the process, and it keeps the nerds happy.
If you subscribe to New Architect, this guy wrote a followup article to this one after receiving a boat load of mail pointing out the he was in fact running an open relay. He admitted to being behind the times, etc, said he was sorry. He still doesn't take back the fact he's mad at the vigilantes out there. Sorry, there's no link yet, I think NA has a lag between the print and web editions.
Point being, if they can forge a header to get on your computer, a spammer can very easily do the same thing. An interesting thing on my campus is the technology department regularly scans and tries to hack into FTP sites running on campus, and sends an e-mail to the admins if they're successful. Some students got mad, but the moral of the story is, better to have someone trustworthy find your weakness rather than someone who's going to exploit it. This seems to be a new effective form of security that's emerging, since we can't depend everyone to stay up to date with the latest security issues, such as the Mr. Faussett in the article. I think vigilante is the wrong term, these blacklist ops are doing everyone a favor by helping to clean up insecure sites, which in the end saves everyone money. I propose we call them "Freelance Security Advisors" or something like that.:-)
Let's not jump the gun and call it the worst advice of all time. As a college student, For PERSONAL use, I will never print enough pages to make a large printer pay off, much less have the room to store one. I go through less than a ream of paper a month, so my $60 investment (plus a $15 pad replacement kit makes it work like new), with a yearly toner expense of $20-40 in refurbished cartridges, I enjoy laser-quality text at a speed faster than most inkjets for a combined yearly cost of $100 or less. Let's not forget the thread is about inexpensive printing solutions (and mislabling of boxes but we seem to have strayed from that).
I make purchasing decsions for the business I work for, and I sure as hell don't have a fleet of 6L's doing our printing. They're not reliable enough and with 500-1000 pages a day, they are, as you point out, way too expensive in per-page costs. I'm well aware of the economies of scale with these machines, and for that reason we put the money up for some nice printers that go through 4-5 reams a DAY with next to zero problems and cheaper toner (HP 5SIMX's and 8000's).
The main point I'm making here is that laser quality hasn't progressed much at all over the years (not much room for improvement!). With the exception of "1200" dpi on some printers now, and true 1200 on others, the major improvements are in speed and maybe newer versions of Postscript support. For printing term papers and class notes, this makes little difference to a cash-strapped college student like me. It is not a bad investment to buy a year or two old printer for personal use--it is already fully depreciated, and since all the high-failure parts get changed with every toner cartridge, surprisingly reliable in the low-volume sense. In a high volume business environment, all the rules change of course, and it pays to buy HP's new 55PPM monster.
Still, it's the same old trick that HP's been using for years with their personal lasers -- they obsolete the printers after a 6 or 12-month cycle, change the box, streamline the case so it holds up better in high winds, fix a few bugs, bump the model number up by a few hundred, call it a new printer, and they sell it all over again to the same suckers who bought almost the same printer last year. The 5L/6L is a good example of this, the major difference being a single page-per-minute print speed! Otherwise, they use a majority of the same parts.
Buy a reliable printer with good software (HP leaves something to be desired in this department), stick to it, and you're good to go.
I run a business that entails printing about 20,000 sheets of paper a week. At that rate, we're swapping toner carts almost weekly. I spent a fair amount of time analyzing which printer could deliver the best image at the lowest price and the two HP laser printers came in ahead of Lexmark and Xerox. Inkjets were way out of the picture due to the cost of the ink cartridges and the fact that they're slower. I don't recall what Xerox's deal-breaker was but Lexmark has a very subtle one. Though the printer's toner and initial prices are quite reasonable, the Lexmark hits you for $250+ at 100,000 copies when the drum needs replacing. The HP's drums go out at around 200,000 copies and cost about the same.
Just to nitpick... You get a new drum every time you change the cartridge, it's the fuser (part that gets hot) that craps out after 200k pages. Not bad for printing on a small sized forest...
Hate to be a whiner here, but you get what you pay for. If you pay $200 for a printer, you're not getting a 24ppm anything, period. My personal experience has been the higher end printers are more loyal to their specs. I've worked for a company that owns several laserjet 5siMxs (HP's workhorse from a few years ago), and those things nailed 24ppm on the dot after the first page was out on most jobs. The newer 8000 had a faster processor which got the first page out quicker. Point being, if you want a fast printer, pony up the money and pay for it. Otherwise, be content with your slower inkjet and/or laser. The best deal by far are the old Laserjet 5L and 6Ls on ebay for around 50-100 bucks that reliably churn out 3-5 pages a minute. With recycled cartridges, they are by far the most economical printing solution (under 3 cents a page), and their prints look just as good as the new printers. Save your money, buy used printers.
I'd like to see OGG go head-to-head with a high-quality Vinyl disc/player combo. For years I've heard audio enthusaists claim Vinyl was better than CDs, and on a clean professional setup, it usually is. I'd like to see them take a vinyl, encode it using studio quality A/D equipment, and test from there. Should be a more interesting result.
Could this technology be used with other SCSI devices like Scanners and optical drives? For me, on more than one occasion, it would have been nice to share a scanner over the network.
Every package has a unique identifier, a weight and a destination. If a robot dies, its packages are lost.
Ah, that explains what happened to all those UPS pacakges that seem to randomly disapear.
I bet UPS is secretely sponsoring this competition so it can replace drivers with robots. The competing robots are FedEx drivers, so UPS robots can push the FedEx drivers into fatal squares. Perfect!
When your son gets to college on their fast network, he's far more likely to go and "evaluate" a copy from a dorm buddy or KaZaa. Not to mention that most professors these days seem to prefer Office as a standard (next to PDF files).
They chanced the little taskbar icons so the Mail and the Browser have different icons. Yay! No more hunting around for 20 minutes for my e-mail window (since I habitually keep about 20-30 windows open on occasion. Guess tabbed browsing hasn't changed my habits yet).
I'm fairly sure a sizeable part of CD sales in the past were based on impulse buys, going from personal experience. When people have a song in their head, whether it's actually any good or not (think Chumbawumba here), they want to get a copy of the music quickly. In the past, that would mean grabbing the CD on your way to work or whatever. Now, it's much quicker to fill that impulse with a snappy MP3 download, which then gives you time to realize "What the hell was I thinking" and promptly avoid ridicule from your friends for buying a cheesy CD. However, I also believe that similar declines would be seen if people were allowed to return CDs to the store for a full refund after being opened. Face it, people are now simply making more intelligent buying decisions, and the market itself was overvalued in the first place. Perhaps now with this new competitor technology to level the playing field, we are seeing the levels of sales drop to what they're ACTUALLY worth to consumers.
The whole idea of "paperless" is a sham... I read some statistic a while ago that since e-mail has been introduced into offices, paper use has gone UP, since a lot of people would print out their e-mails. I don't know about everyone else, but whenever I get a lengthy reading assignment online in one of my classes, first thing I do is print it up on my laser printer and find a quiet spot to read. If I'm on my computer, I generally don't have enough discipline to shut down instant messenger, my mp3 player, and all the other apps I run as distractions in the background.
Another problem with the whole iPaq thing: battery life. If you're reading a book that takes more than a few hours to finish, you've got a problem! (Especially if you've got a wireless card or some power-sucker plugged in). From my own observations, a lot of people don't read near outlets all the time.
Surf for web pages (Cant' do that on a small screen!)
Play games (what controls on that thing?)
Write papers (again, can't do that well on a small screen)
Talk online (might as well have a laptop as opposed to lugging a keyboard around)
desktop publishing (screen again)
Email (a possibility)
My ToDo list/calendar, which is synced to my palm anyway, which is better than carrying around this very expensive version which only lasts two hours as opposed to TWO MONTHS on a set of batteries on the Palm.
Watch movies (again, screen issue)
Play Mp3s. (okay, this could probably do that pretty well).
I'm having difficulty in seeing what niche this will fill in the market. Right now, just seems like an iPod with a pretty screen. For this little guy to gain significant market share, there has to be a revolution in battery technology -- 2 hours just doesn't cut it.
The one application that this would probably be great in is as an embedded system in, say a vehicle or other industrial project. That's if the reliability is up to spec...
They actually tried something sort of like this -- the Pinball 2000 system relesed right before Williams canned the Pinball division had a semi-reflective playfield glass, and the top half of the playfield reflected images from a monitor above. It was an interesting idea, since you could draw whatever on there, and they had some ramps and bumpers and whatnot darkend underneath it so it seemed like you hitting the images. Pretty cool, and it was a bid to keep up with the video game industry, but fell short. (On another note, they also started using x86 based hardware in those machines to cut development costs). Star Wars Episode 1 was the very last machine produced by williams, and it used this system: http://www.pinball.com/games/starwars/
The toy industry has had these cars on the market for years. You just put the track together, preselect the speed with a piece of duct tape on the trigger, and bam, autonomous race cars! At least until your cat steps on the track...
ASCII art? ANSI was much better...
on
Google Art Creator
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· Score: 3, Insightful
IMO, the best thing from the BBS days was the top-notch ANSI art -- the stuff that took baseline ASCII and added ANSI color and extended characters to make some really cool stuff. Some of those guys could create some amazing images (anyone remember iCE, ACiD, and all those groups?). Actually, iCE is still around and cranking out some top-quality ANSI -- www.ice.org. Check 'em out, pretty impressive.
Ouchies. Broadband in the US is *expensive*, apparently... I have a 2Mbit down/400Kbit up ADSL line here and it costs me $40 Cdn$... about $25 US$ per month.
Apparently you've never attended college. I pay $1200/month for my 10 Mbit/sec connection.:-) Granted, it's blazing!
As I was watching Attack of the Clones, I was struck with how fake everything looked. All of the setting seemed unreal (particularly the droid factory planet). I would imagine they were all created digitally. Contrast that with the beautiful and (IMO) realistic settings in LOTR and you can see that CGI effects, while nice, still aren't there entirely, yet.
I read an article on AOTC, and was not too surprised to find out that every single clone ever shown in the movie was computer animated. They never made a costume for them. Yes, even the scene where the clone rushes to help the princess, that was also computer animated.
On another note, I was surprised to hear a quote from the Men In Black (I think) directors that was something along the lines of, if they ever have the option between a CG shot and a regular live-action charicter (be it a puppet or human), they almost always go with the live action. They made a good point of the fact you can't really improv with CG at all.
Not sure what you're talking about. Netscape mail was the first mail client I used years back, and now that I've returned to it, I don't know why I left. The one feature that got me to switch back from eudora: Threading. Eudora didn't have it, and that hurt. The client works seamlessly with IMAP, which is nice since I consistently switch between several computers throughout the day, not to mention I have at least 3-4 accounts to be checked regularly (and can't combine them). I can't speak for POP users (which in its own right sucks), but IMAP, everything happens in realtime so you don't have to worry about messages not being sent or your mailbox filling up and you not knowing about it. If they got a spell checker bundled (I know it's available, just too lazy to install it), that'd make it great, but that's only a minor annoyance.
There's also something about the web page editor that I've always liked, just that fact that it's simple, lightweight, and always there for me. While it doesn't take advantage of that latest greatest web technologies, when I have to hack a page together really quickly or touch up a page, Composer does a great job and beats hacking out HTML by hand.
When a student finds a l33t piece of software and sits down to learn to use it, that's another user who, once they enter the marketplace, knows that software. It is NOT a lost sale for a company, for the student would have never been able to afford the software in the first place. However, now that the student knows the software, it increases the value of said tool by a little bit, because someone else can use it and the company he ends up working for will probably buy the tool. This is why you rarely hear of the BSA cracking down on pirate software at universities, because it's bad business to cut down your prospective user base like that. It also weakens the value of the software.
Tons of students out there already know Photoshop/Pagemaker/Illustrator thanks to piracy, but I'll bet not a single one paid for it. Yet, their knowledge of these tools make both the tools and the students that much more valuable. It's a win-win situation in the education system. While it would be a bad precident to publicly endorse it, I have a feeling most software makers look the other way as it is and concentrate their efforts on people who may be turning profits from their tools.
Normally I'm flat out against government regulation, but it's definitely looking like Instant Messenging is becoming the next telephone system. Perhaps we need to step in and make all the networks talk to each other to guarantee communication with others. Think about it, it is no different from telephones -- last time I checked, Bell South customers have no problems calling Alltel customers, thanks to government regulation. Obviously this is an overly broad idea that doesn't take into account any of the fine details (how to pay for it, international issues, copyright, etc) but it should be considered if instant messenging is to flourish as a communication standard. AOL already has mostly a monopoly on the protocol, and I know many people have come to depend on it somehow (myself included). I know, free market, blah blah, pick whatever one is best, but face it, the public isn't like the tech savvy people who just from app to app looking for the right one.
Just an idea.
If these boxes become mandatory, and they will, you will not be allowed to withhold the evidence anymore than you can keep the police from examining the rest of your vehicle.
What keeps cops from examining skid marks in a collision? What about the broken glass found 100 feet away from your car? Clues are clues, the more, the better for everyone. Face it, the only time you wouldn't want this information is if you were at fault. I dunno about you, but I'm tired of cheaters screwing this system over. Not only will this greatly expediate many accident investigations, it will ultimately (idealistically speaking) save everyone a little money.
If the device were reliable, that might be right. But you can't read the box yourself so you can never verify it, can you? In fact, you have no idea what the evil little thing is collecting or how accurate it is, do you? When you get a letter from your insurace company informing you that your risk category has been changed how will you be able to defend yourself? You can't, you will simply suck it up and pay.
Having worked for two years on programming automotive networking systems for hybrid vehicles, I would trust an automotive computer's networking and information a thousand times over any PC or Linux box. The information that is available to be logged is pulled directly from the same information used by the vehicle's various computers (ABS system, Engine controller, even your damn radio is on that network). The accuracy of these signals is much higher than what shows up on your dashboard (which is another device on the network nowadays and displays the same information). If a sensor is broken, that is known immediately an error code is stored in memory. Things such as Engine RPM are accurate down to the single RPM and vehicle speed to at least the tenth of a mile an hour (more if you're talking about your anti-lock brake system). Face it, if this information was bad, you would know it because your car would be going haywire.
Scary enough, GM actually has access to your vehicle's systems through the built-in cell phones on vehicles equipped with the OnStar system. I believe the safeguard is that the call has to be initiated by the vehicle (this is only a guess, I'm not sure). I'm not sure what level they can access the devices on the network, but I know it's definitely possible because they can remotely unlock your doors, which can't be done without communicating on the vehicle's network. So watch out! Legally of course this would be a nightmare for GM, so it's probably nothing to worry about. If you're really paranoid, you could unplug the antenna going to the box that's usually located deep in the dash.
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Gotta run, I hear the karma police pullin up...
This is unfortunately wasted effort. The lawyers keep the g-forces in check. What roller coaster manufacturer will make a coaster that will kill people? It's obviously in their best interest to do plenty of research and testing on their rides to make sure people don't get harmed. The odds are also statistically insignificant -- one in 100 million riders dies? Please. I wish lawmakers would spend their time on more pressing issues, such as allocating funding to help with the thousands of people who die every year from smoking, car wrecks, and terminal illnesses.
This kind of legislation just makes me sick. The entertainment industry will take care of itself -- noone will ride a ride that is known to hurt people!
Is it possible? Then why hasn't it been done before? At least in the PC industry, I can't think of a single example of an uncrackable software package... Basically, to develop an immune system would require something on the order of mil-spec hardware and a goverment contract with a single vendor and the mountains of paperwork associated with it. In other words, if the feds aren't going to organize and standardize this project, it will quickly get out of hand.
The main problem here is that people are using a complicated solution to a very very simple problem: counting! I imagine a compromise system: have a computerized voting thingie that simply prints out the completed ballot for you in an OCR (or MICR) compatible format when you're done voting. Then you have a legal record, no more chads, and the results are verifiable by traditional methods. If the government were to standardize this form of computerized paper ballot, that would allot vendors to create systems at their will, since security is no longer an issue. It's much easier to prevent tampering to pieces of paper as opposed to securing bits and bytes here and tere. Also, the public would be more accepting of such a system, and it eliminates human error from the process, and it keeps the nerds happy.
If you subscribe to New Architect, this guy wrote a followup article to this one after receiving a boat load of mail pointing out the he was in fact running an open relay. He admitted to being behind the times, etc, said he was sorry. He still doesn't take back the fact he's mad at the vigilantes out there. Sorry, there's no link yet, I think NA has a lag between the print and web editions.
:-)
Point being, if they can forge a header to get on your computer, a spammer can very easily do the same thing. An interesting thing on my campus is the technology department regularly scans and tries to hack into FTP sites running on campus, and sends an e-mail to the admins if they're successful. Some students got mad, but the moral of the story is, better to have someone trustworthy find your weakness rather than someone who's going to exploit it. This seems to be a new effective form of security that's emerging, since we can't depend everyone to stay up to date with the latest security issues, such as the Mr. Faussett in the article. I think vigilante is the wrong term, these blacklist ops are doing everyone a favor by helping to clean up insecure sites, which in the end saves everyone money. I propose we call them "Freelance Security Advisors" or something like that.
Let's not jump the gun and call it the worst advice of all time. As a college student, For PERSONAL use, I will never print enough pages to make a large printer pay off, much less have the room to store one. I go through less than a ream of paper a month, so my $60 investment (plus a $15 pad replacement kit makes it work like new), with a yearly toner expense of $20-40 in refurbished cartridges, I enjoy laser-quality text at a speed faster than most inkjets for a combined yearly cost of $100 or less. Let's not forget the thread is about inexpensive printing solutions (and mislabling of boxes but we seem to have strayed from that).
I make purchasing decsions for the business I work for, and I sure as hell don't have a fleet of 6L's doing our printing. They're not reliable enough and with 500-1000 pages a day, they are, as you point out, way too expensive in per-page costs. I'm well aware of the economies of scale with these machines, and for that reason we put the money up for some nice printers that go through 4-5 reams a DAY with next to zero problems and cheaper toner (HP 5SIMX's and 8000's).
The main point I'm making here is that laser quality hasn't progressed much at all over the years (not much room for improvement!). With the exception of "1200" dpi on some printers now, and true 1200 on others, the major improvements are in speed and maybe newer versions of Postscript support. For printing term papers and class notes, this makes little difference to a cash-strapped college student like me. It is not a bad investment to buy a year or two old printer for personal use--it is already fully depreciated, and since all the high-failure parts get changed with every toner cartridge, surprisingly reliable in the low-volume sense. In a high volume business environment, all the rules change of course, and it pays to buy HP's new 55PPM monster.
Still, it's the same old trick that HP's been using for years with their personal lasers -- they obsolete the printers after a 6 or 12-month cycle, change the box, streamline the case so it holds up better in high winds, fix a few bugs, bump the model number up by a few hundred, call it a new printer, and they sell it all over again to the same suckers who bought almost the same printer last year. The 5L/6L is a good example of this, the major difference being a single page-per-minute print speed! Otherwise, they use a majority of the same parts.
Buy a reliable printer with good software (HP leaves something to be desired in this department), stick to it, and you're good to go.
Hate to be a whiner here, but you get what you pay for. If you pay $200 for a printer, you're not getting a 24ppm anything, period. My personal experience has been the higher end printers are more loyal to their specs. I've worked for a company that owns several laserjet 5siMxs (HP's workhorse from a few years ago), and those things nailed 24ppm on the dot after the first page was out on most jobs. The newer 8000 had a faster processor which got the first page out quicker. Point being, if you want a fast printer, pony up the money and pay for it. Otherwise, be content with your slower inkjet and/or laser. The best deal by far are the old Laserjet 5L and 6Ls on ebay for around 50-100 bucks that reliably churn out 3-5 pages a minute. With recycled cartridges, they are by far the most economical printing solution (under 3 cents a page), and their prints look just as good as the new printers. Save your money, buy used printers.
I'd like to see OGG go head-to-head with a high-quality Vinyl disc/player combo. For years I've heard audio enthusaists claim Vinyl was better than CDs, and on a clean professional setup, it usually is. I'd like to see them take a vinyl, encode it using studio quality A/D equipment, and test from there. Should be a more interesting result.
Could this technology be used with other SCSI devices like Scanners and optical drives? For me, on more than one occasion, it would have been nice to share a scanner over the network.
I bet UPS is secretely sponsoring this competition so it can replace drivers with robots. The competing robots are FedEx drivers, so UPS robots can push the FedEx drivers into fatal squares. Perfect!
When your son gets to college on their fast network, he's far more likely to go and "evaluate" a copy from a dorm buddy or KaZaa. Not to mention that most professors these days seem to prefer Office as a standard (next to PDF files).
They chanced the little taskbar icons so the Mail and the Browser have different icons. Yay! No more hunting around for 20 minutes for my e-mail window (since I habitually keep about 20-30 windows open on occasion. Guess tabbed browsing hasn't changed my habits yet).
I'm fairly sure a sizeable part of CD sales in the past were based on impulse buys, going from personal experience. When people have a song in their head, whether it's actually any good or not (think Chumbawumba here), they want to get a copy of the music quickly. In the past, that would mean grabbing the CD on your way to work or whatever. Now, it's much quicker to fill that impulse with a snappy MP3 download, which then gives you time to realize "What the hell was I thinking" and promptly avoid ridicule from your friends for buying a cheesy CD. However, I also believe that similar declines would be seen if people were allowed to return CDs to the store for a full refund after being opened. Face it, people are now simply making more intelligent buying decisions, and the market itself was overvalued in the first place. Perhaps now with this new competitor technology to level the playing field, we are seeing the levels of sales drop to what they're ACTUALLY worth to consumers.
The whole idea of "paperless" is a sham... I read some statistic a while ago that since e-mail has been introduced into offices, paper use has gone UP, since a lot of people would print out their e-mails. I don't know about everyone else, but whenever I get a lengthy reading assignment online in one of my classes, first thing I do is print it up on my laser printer and find a quiet spot to read. If I'm on my computer, I generally don't have enough discipline to shut down instant messenger, my mp3 player, and all the other apps I run as distractions in the background.
Another problem with the whole iPaq thing: battery life. If you're reading a book that takes more than a few hours to finish, you've got a problem! (Especially if you've got a wireless card or some power-sucker plugged in). From my own observations, a lot of people don't read near outlets all the time.
Let's see. On my laptop, I:
- Surf for web pages (Cant' do that on a small screen!)
- Play games (what controls on that thing?)
- Write papers (again, can't do that well on a small screen)
- Talk online (might as well have a laptop as opposed to lugging a keyboard around)
- desktop publishing (screen again)
- Email (a possibility)
- My ToDo list/calendar, which is synced to my palm anyway, which is better than carrying around this very expensive version which only lasts two hours as opposed to TWO MONTHS on a set of batteries on the Palm.
- Watch movies (again, screen issue)
- Play Mp3s. (okay, this could probably do that pretty well).
I'm having difficulty in seeing what niche this will fill in the market. Right now, just seems like an iPod with a pretty screen. For this little guy to gain significant market share, there has to be a revolution in battery technology -- 2 hours just doesn't cut it.The one application that this would probably be great in is as an embedded system in, say a vehicle or other industrial project. That's if the reliability is up to spec...
They actually tried something sort of like this -- the Pinball 2000 system relesed right before Williams canned the Pinball division had a semi-reflective playfield glass, and the top half of the playfield reflected images from a monitor above. It was an interesting idea, since you could draw whatever on there, and they had some ramps and bumpers and whatnot darkend underneath it so it seemed like you hitting the images. Pretty cool, and it was a bid to keep up with the video game industry, but fell short. (On another note, they also started using x86 based hardware in those machines to cut development costs). Star Wars Episode 1 was the very last machine produced by williams, and it used this system: http://www.pinball.com/games/starwars/
The toy industry has had these cars on the market for years. You just put the track together, preselect the speed with a piece of duct tape on the trigger, and bam, autonomous race cars! At least until your cat steps on the track...
IMO, the best thing from the BBS days was the top-notch ANSI art -- the stuff that took baseline ASCII and added ANSI color and extended characters to make some really cool stuff. Some of those guys could create some amazing images (anyone remember iCE, ACiD, and all those groups?). Actually, iCE is still around and cranking out some top-quality ANSI -- www.ice.org. Check 'em out, pretty impressive.
Will this make my toilet flush the other way now? Wow!
Apparently you've never attended college. I pay $1200/month for my 10 Mbit/sec connection. :-) Granted, it's blazing!
I read an article on AOTC, and was not too surprised to find out that every single clone ever shown in the movie was computer animated. They never made a costume for them. Yes, even the scene where the clone rushes to help the princess, that was also computer animated.
On another note, I was surprised to hear a quote from the Men In Black (I think) directors that was something along the lines of, if they ever have the option between a CG shot and a regular live-action charicter (be it a puppet or human), they almost always go with the live action. They made a good point of the fact you can't really improv with CG at all.
Not sure what you're talking about. Netscape mail was the first mail client I used years back, and now that I've returned to it, I don't know why I left. The one feature that got me to switch back from eudora: Threading. Eudora didn't have it, and that hurt. The client works seamlessly with IMAP, which is nice since I consistently switch between several computers throughout the day, not to mention I have at least 3-4 accounts to be checked regularly (and can't combine them). I can't speak for POP users (which in its own right sucks), but IMAP, everything happens in realtime so you don't have to worry about messages not being sent or your mailbox filling up and you not knowing about it. If they got a spell checker bundled (I know it's available, just too lazy to install it), that'd make it great, but that's only a minor annoyance.
There's also something about the web page editor that I've always liked, just that fact that it's simple, lightweight, and always there for me. While it doesn't take advantage of that latest greatest web technologies, when I have to hack a page together really quickly or touch up a page, Composer does a great job and beats hacking out HTML by hand.
When a student finds a l33t piece of software and sits down to learn to use it, that's another user who, once they enter the marketplace, knows that software. It is NOT a lost sale for a company, for the student would have never been able to afford the software in the first place. However, now that the student knows the software, it increases the value of said tool by a little bit, because someone else can use it and the company he ends up working for will probably buy the tool. This is why you rarely hear of the BSA cracking down on pirate software at universities, because it's bad business to cut down your prospective user base like that. It also weakens the value of the software.
Tons of students out there already know Photoshop/Pagemaker/Illustrator thanks to piracy, but I'll bet not a single one paid for it. Yet, their knowledge of these tools make both the tools and the students that much more valuable.
It's a win-win situation in the education system. While it would be a bad precident to publicly endorse it, I have a feeling most software makers look the other way as it is and concentrate their efforts on people who may be turning profits from their tools.
Normally I'm flat out against government regulation, but it's definitely looking like Instant Messenging is becoming the next telephone system. Perhaps we need to step in and make all the networks talk to each other to guarantee communication with others. Think about it, it is no different from telephones -- last time I checked, Bell South customers have no problems calling Alltel customers, thanks to government regulation. Obviously this is an overly broad idea that doesn't take into account any of the fine details (how to pay for it, international issues, copyright, etc) but it should be considered if instant messenging is to flourish as a communication standard. AOL already has mostly a monopoly on the protocol, and I know many people have come to depend on it somehow (myself included). I know, free market, blah blah, pick whatever one is best, but face it, the public isn't like the tech savvy people who just from app to app looking for the right one. Just an idea.
What keeps cops from examining skid marks in a collision? What about the broken glass found 100 feet away from your car? Clues are clues, the more, the better for everyone. Face it, the only time you wouldn't want this information is if you were at fault. I dunno about you, but I'm tired of cheaters screwing this system over. Not only will this greatly expediate many accident investigations, it will ultimately (idealistically speaking) save everyone a little money.
If the device were reliable, that might be right. But you can't read the box yourself so you can never verify it, can you? In fact, you have no idea what the evil little thing is collecting or how accurate it is, do you? When you get a letter from your insurace company informing you that your risk category has been changed how will you be able to defend yourself? You can't, you will simply suck it up and pay.
Having worked for two years on programming automotive networking systems for hybrid vehicles, I would trust an automotive computer's networking and information a thousand times over any PC or Linux box. The information that is available to be logged is pulled directly from the same information used by the vehicle's various computers (ABS system, Engine controller, even your damn radio is on that network). The accuracy of these signals is much higher than what shows up on your dashboard (which is another device on the network nowadays and displays the same information). If a sensor is broken, that is known immediately an error code is stored in memory. Things such as Engine RPM are accurate down to the single RPM and vehicle speed to at least the tenth of a mile an hour (more if you're talking about your anti-lock brake system). Face it, if this information was bad, you would know it because your car would be going haywire.
Scary enough, GM actually has access to your vehicle's systems through the built-in cell phones on vehicles equipped with the OnStar system. I believe the safeguard is that the call has to be initiated by the vehicle (this is only a guess, I'm not sure). I'm not sure what level they can access the devices on the network, but I know it's definitely possible because they can remotely unlock your doors, which can't be done without communicating on the vehicle's network. So watch out! Legally of course this would be a nightmare for GM, so it's probably nothing to worry about. If you're really paranoid, you could unplug the antenna going to the box that's usually located deep in the dash.