Two caveats: one, I have an Eee so I'm biased that way, and two, I have only looked at the Elonex site for about thirty seconds. But that thing is ugly! Well, yeah, but it's just over half the price of the cheapest Eee PC (in the UK anyway), so it's hardly a fair comparison.
Yeah, I agree that it's not pretty, but for a hundred quid, you really *shouldn't* be expecting MacBook-shaming industrial design prettiness. It's aimed at kids, for ****'s sake!
Re: the CPU question.... I agree, I was going to say the same thing, but my connection is playing up.
I first heard of the Elonex ONE via Slashdot on a roundup of the Eee PC's rivals. It looked interesting, and I might have considered pre-ordering one, but there was bugger all concrete detail about the CPU.
Looking at the website now, it doesn't seem to give much (if any) more information than what was available back then. It states that they're using an "LNX [Elonex, geddit?!] Code 8 300MHz Mobile Processor", but that's meaningless because it's almost certainly someone else's rebadged CPU (*) So why all the secrecy when it's near launch?
I've heard rumours and suchlike, but nothing concrete, and nothing from the horse's mouth. They won't even state if it's an x86-compatible, or what that 300MHz speed is comparable to in practice. What have they got to hide?
(*) There's *no* way that a company the size of Elonex could- or would- create their own chip to rival those available from the major companies. Even if it was possible, it wouldn't be remotely cost-effective. In fact, IIRC the Elonex ONE is itself essentially a rebadged machine.
This article makes it seem like it is possible to use the GPUs as general purpose CPUs. Is that the case? As well as the issues that others have mentioned, there's also the problem of accuracy with GPUs.
AFAIK, in many (all?) ordinary consumer graphics cards, minor mistakes by the GPU are tolerated because they'll typically result in (at worst) minor or unnoticable glitches in the display. I assume that this is because, to get the best performance, designers push the hardware beyond levels that would be acceptable otherwise.
Clearly if you're using them for other mathematical operations, or to partly replace a standard CPU, such mistakes might *not* be acceptable.
Paypal doesn't support the use of Maestro or Solo credit cards (these UK ATM cards make your bank account appear like a credit card to sellers - so you can make purchases without going into debt - if you don't have the money you don't make the purchase). Yes, but if I remember correctly, they *aren't* credit cards and don't offer the same protection for purposes over GBP 100 as proper credit cards do. Given PayPal's questionable record as this sibling to your post suggests (and my general mistrust of them), I would definitely want to use a credit card. If there were any problems, I'd claim the money from the CC company, they'd get it from PayPal, who in turn would have to get the money or lose it.
And I wouldn't have an ounce of sympathy for them, because eBay/PayPal have shown that while they'll quite happily do **** all for or stiff innocent users of the services (particularly sellers) when it suits them, they're equally happy to do nothing about repeated use of the same services by blatant fraudsters.
But you've forgotten the cardinal rule of dialog boxes: Where did I mention (or even imply) that dialog boxes should be used for this? I certainly didn't.
I think that you were projecting your own limited assumptions about how this would be handled onto me. Actually, what I had (vaguely) in mind was a message that appears unobtrusively; either at the top of the screen (a la popup-blockers), or a new pseudo-page that contains the link. If the user *really* wants the file, it's easy to download it, but it doesn't get in the way when they don't.
If a dialog box comes up, people do not read it, and they automatically try to cancel. I think a better solution [..] if some script decides to dump a hundred little files in there, it's OK, or at least better than filling your desktop. No, that's only slightly less bad than the current situation. It still gives some remote computer the ability to fill your hard drive with crap and (as others suggested) leave that open for another exploited vulnerability to execute. There's no point in automatically downloading such files in the first place, since in the majority of cases, people wouldn't have wanted that anyway.
i wish people would stop saying false dichotomy, it makes me feel uncomfortable... a false set of mutually exclusive groups? how does that even work? Huh?! A false (or artificial) apple is something that appears to be an apple (or is presented as such), but isn't. A false dichotomy would be... you do the work. Sheesh!
(Then again, the fact that your sig is "I sense a grave disturbance in my pants" might explain a lot. I'm not sure that I even want to know about your user name!)
That's all this is about? Safari downloads some things instead of displaying them? Is that even a security bug? If my browser doesn't know how to display it, I think I'd rather it didn't try. Trying seems like it might be even more dangerous. Am I wrong? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you posted this in good faith. However, what you're essentially saying ("it's not perfect, but I'd rather it was done the way it's done now") implies a false dichotomy.
What's stopping the browser from saying "I can't handle this file/etc, but please click here if you wish to save it to your desktop"? In the majority of situations, most people wouldn't bother downloading it anyway.
Most people aren't willing to watch TV on a five minute delay while their computer queues up the encrypted data and attempts to determine the keys.... Depends what you're after; it might be annoying if you're channel-hopping or watching a live sports event. However, if you're just wanting to get vast amounts of entertainment which is already pre-recorded (and possibly years old) anyway, it might not be that big a deal- just leave it running in the background. That's not necessarily any worse than having to download it, which many people do quite happily.
Even if that weren't the case, don't Christians believe that all the Old Testament stuff (some of which is quite strange IIRC) is, uh, "deprecated" anyway?
So it's more likely that only the Jewish God would fry your ass with a thunderbolt, the Christian God would smile lovingly and say "ah, my poor misguided child", or was that Jesus, or Buddha.... ah, I'm not sure what I'm talking about now, dammit.
(At which point God strikes down Dogtanian with great vengeance for saying "damn" and points out that the Jews were right, and that he didn't authorise that sequel at all).)
No one has seen Superman 3 for years because it is such a bad movie. I'm going to back up the one other guy who disagrees with you on this. Superman III was never that bad- I quite like it, personally.
I think it's disproportionately slated because the kind of people most likely to discuss a Superman film are Superman fans. Being less focussed on Superman, missing Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, as well as being simply less serious, they probably see this as a lightweight sellout, and not what they want from a Superman film.
I can understand that, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. Yes, it's kind of cheesy (partly in retrospect) and maybe a bit silly for the fanboys' tastes- but then, isn't the whole Superman thing faintly silly anyway?! IMHO it's a fun film, the computer stuff is interesting, and the robot woman at the end was quite scary when you were like 7 years old.
I'd say that Superman II is better if you want a "proper" Superman film, but even the "Superman goes bad and fights himself" bit in III was good in this respect. Either way, I'll take it over the overrated first movie any day.
I have HTML from 1996 using IMG SRC=" " HTML allowing you to reference external content from an image. I think several thousand other sites have earlier artwork than mine. It is a bogus patent. No shit! My first thought was "Uh.... *when* was this issued? Is this some patent from *years* back?"
If it wasn't, then either the patent is being misrepresented and/or misinterpreted, or it was *blatantly* wrongly awarded.
I remember designing cheesy link graphics for my first web page in early 1995, and this was hardly an innovation- they'd been around for a while even then.
"Atari is claiming this?" No they aren't- read the article. Nolan Bushnell, an individual who founded the original Atari and left almost 30 years ago(!) is claiming this.
I see no indication from the article that Bushnell is speaking on behalf of- or indeed has *anything* whatsoever to do with the modern "Atari" (which has little to do with the now-defunct original anyway, being simply a division of Infogrames that got the rights to the name).
Regarding the title "PR department at Atari is having a heart attack"; not really!
Nolan Bushnell may have founded the *original* Atari, but he left in 1979 (having sold it to Warner Communications in 1976), and I see no indication that he has anything to do with the present-day company.
Besides which, the modern "Atari" is effectively just a brand purchased and used by Infogrames which has no real relationship or business continuity with the original Atari (which split into Atari Corp. and Atari Games in 1984- both streams are now effectively defunct).
The PR department at Atari probably couldn't give a toss!:)
they were coming up with games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man almost 30 years ago. By copying Space Wars, Defender, and the like, yes. Space Wars was certainly *not* the same as Space Invaders; beyond being set in space and involving shooting, the gameplay design was quite different.
Defender came out two years after Space Invaders.
And I don't see how either of your examples influenced Pac Man.
The Japanese hardly had a monopoly on arcade masterpieces. I didn't say or imply anything remotely like that.
What I *did* give were examples that demonstrated that the Japanese were just as capable of coming up with inventive arcade game ideas as the Americans.
Unless, that is, you're a typical Nintendo fanboy who doesn't realize that companies like Atari or Midway even existed, or that video games existed before Donkey Kong. Stupid (and incorrect) kneejerk assumption and ad hominem attack.
I could point out that I've owned an 8-bit Atari computer for over 20 years, or that the first Nintendo hardware I owned was a DS I bought in 2006- and that was only because I liked the change from the usual PS2-style games. Prior to that I had a hard-to-pin-down gut dislike of Nintendo that probably came down to the pseudo-Disney child-oriented vibe of their stuff (particularly Mario and friends- think the worst aspects of Disney and Barney the Dinosaur combined). Even now, my distaste for this aspect of Nintendo is such that I'd avoid buying anything that featured the Mario character- even for a game I'd otherwise like, such as Tetris DS.
So yeah.... obviously I'm a Nintendo-loving fanboy who knows nothing about Atari...... *cough*Fuckwit!*cough*!
I don't think it is every useful to presume abilities based on race. I was not "presuming abilities based on race"; that's something you read into it.
If I presumed anything (and I would argue that what I said was reflecting and to some extent arguing *against* others' views anyway), it was on the basis of national *culture*, not race.
And yes, that's a generalisation of people in all societies to some extent, but it does exist, and it does have an effect on the large scale of things.
Yep; thanks for saving me the hassle. After posting, I realised that I'd originally meant to say "...detracts from the very real [or similar] damages to civil liberties that are happening in the UK.". However, I still think that the meaning was clear enough.
I haven't noticed any lack of creativity. [..] but don't let that fool you the way it fooled the American automotive industry I agree with you that any alleged Japanese "lack of creativity" is a myth that should be thoroughly discredited by now; they were coming up with games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man almost 30 years ago.
However, if the situation in the US is remotely like that in the UK, I doubt that it was this "creativity" that let them take over the car industry. While they may have released some interesting cars over the years, the ones that brought them success in the UK were hardly radical or interesting.
No, let me rephrase that; they *were* radical in that (unlike most British cars of the 1970s) they included nice stuff like car radios as standard, were good value for money, and most notably were reliable. (Okay, so the early ones rusted badly in the UK climate, but so did a lot of cars at that time, and they seemed to get round that quite quickly).
But interesting in terms of design and appearance mass-market Japanese cars of the 1970s-1990s certainly weren't. In fact, I daresay that it's many of those cars that gave them a reliable-but-unimaginative reputation.
Well your pedo argument really doesn't mean much as cameras are still no problem apparently. I guess this means they have to wait till they get home to upload it to their pedo pals? I really don't get your point. *My* point was that even the usual "OMG!!! Our children must be protected from pedos" reason (which I was genuinely expecting to be the scaremongering overreaction behind Alton Towers' actions) *WASN'T* being used in this case.
At least you got an opportunity to bring up the relation of pedophiles Only insofar as they're used as an excuse for many of the infringements on our civil liberties. (Ignoring the fact that in the majority of sexual abuse cases the perpetrator is known to the victim).
and a persons ability to walk around with what they want. Again, I don't understand what you're getting at here.
Having a 'policy' doesn't allow you to confiscate someone's personal property. Really? Are you *absolutely* about that or just repeating something you believe to be true? How do you know this anyway?
(Also wondering if you've made a common-but-wrong assumption here).
They always have the option of declining to abide by the rules and leave the premises. They always have the option of not going in the first place!
...but stepping up and taking away someone's personal property is nothing but thuggery. property, privacy, rights, entitlements, money, etc... welcome to.uk. Enjoy your stay Oh, fuck off. Seriously, this is the kind of kneejerk reaction that detracts from the damages to civil liberties that are happening in the UK.
It's a minor story about a crap gimmick Alton Towers are using to get some publicity, and it's being presented here as an "OMG!!!!! They're taking away our rights!!!!!!!!11111" story.
Aside from the fact it's a private amusement park (not a pseudo-public space like a shopping centre), it's not even being done for the usual surveillance-state bullshit "pedos might take photos of our children" type reasons. (*)
You don't like it? Don't go to fucking Alton Towers! I wouldn't...
(*) Given the popularity of using pedos to justify every ludicrous measure, if this isn't the reason being given in public, then it sure as hell isn't the true reason either.
When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine.
If I'd been setting several new records by skydiving from the edge of space, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in history and risking death in several interesting and horrible ways
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four.
The only other occasion I can think of off the top of my head where something like this happened is when the World Wrestling Federation tried to lawyer the (much older) World Wildlife Fund out of its right to use "WWF". What is it they call the giant men who grope each other these days? I can't recall, but it certainly doesn't have an "F" at the end of it. I dunno, I always thought that when two large men were having fun groping each other, they usually intended having an "F" at the end of it...
I guess if J&J had won, there would have been some Germans that would have their war crime convictions overturned (at least, the family name) because the red cross would have just been another merchant ship. That would have been fine. That's a stupid, pointless and downright illogical thing to say.
Are you seriously implying that J&J winning a trademark case in 2008 has any relevance to what happened 60 years ago when (as the other reply states) all those involved knew exactly what the symbol was meant to represent at that time?!
Where do you live? I'm in the UK, and I've never seen the red cross on a Johnson and Johnson product here (perhaps the Red Cross *do* have the clearly-established trademark rights in this country), but I'm familiar with the "No More Tears" thing on their baby shampoo.
It may be different in the US, where this case relates to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I agree that it's not pretty, but for a hundred quid, you really *shouldn't* be expecting MacBook-shaming industrial design prettiness. It's aimed at kids, for ****'s sake!
Re: the CPU question.... I agree, I was going to say the same thing, but my connection is playing up.
I first heard of the Elonex ONE via Slashdot on a roundup of the Eee PC's rivals. It looked interesting, and I might have considered pre-ordering one, but there was bugger all concrete detail about the CPU.
Looking at the website now, it doesn't seem to give much (if any) more information than what was available back then. It states that they're using an "LNX [Elonex, geddit?!] Code 8 300MHz Mobile Processor", but that's meaningless because it's almost certainly someone else's rebadged CPU (*) So why all the secrecy when it's near launch?
I've heard rumours and suchlike, but nothing concrete, and nothing from the horse's mouth. They won't even state if it's an x86-compatible, or what that 300MHz speed is comparable to in practice. What have they got to hide?
(*) There's *no* way that a company the size of Elonex could- or would- create their own chip to rival those available from the major companies. Even if it was possible, it wouldn't be remotely cost-effective. In fact, IIRC the Elonex ONE is itself essentially a rebadged machine.
AFAIK, in many (all?) ordinary consumer graphics cards, minor mistakes by the GPU are tolerated because they'll typically result in (at worst) minor or unnoticable glitches in the display. I assume that this is because, to get the best performance, designers push the hardware beyond levels that would be acceptable otherwise.
Clearly if you're using them for other mathematical operations, or to partly replace a standard CPU, such mistakes might *not* be acceptable.
And I wouldn't have an ounce of sympathy for them, because eBay/PayPal have shown that while they'll quite happily do **** all for or stiff innocent users of the services (particularly sellers) when it suits them, they're equally happy to do nothing about repeated use of the same services by blatant fraudsters.
I think that you were projecting your own limited assumptions about how this would be handled onto me. Actually, what I had (vaguely) in mind was a message that appears unobtrusively; either at the top of the screen (a la popup-blockers), or a new pseudo-page that contains the link. If the user *really* wants the file, it's easy to download it, but it doesn't get in the way when they don't. If a dialog box comes up, people do not read it, and they automatically try to cancel. I think a better solution [..] if some script decides to dump a hundred little files in there, it's OK, or at least better than filling your desktop. No, that's only slightly less bad than the current situation. It still gives some remote computer the ability to fill your hard drive with crap and (as others suggested) leave that open for another exploited vulnerability to execute. There's no point in automatically downloading such files in the first place, since in the majority of cases, people wouldn't have wanted that anyway.
(Then again, the fact that your sig is "I sense a grave disturbance in my pants" might explain a lot. I'm not sure that I even want to know about your user name!)
What's stopping the browser from saying "I can't handle this file/etc, but please click here if you wish to save it to your desktop"? In the majority of situations, most people wouldn't bother downloading it anyway.
Even if that weren't the case, don't Christians believe that all the Old Testament stuff (some of which is quite strange IIRC) is, uh, "deprecated" anyway?
So it's more likely that only the Jewish God would fry your ass with a thunderbolt, the Christian God would smile lovingly and say "ah, my poor misguided child", or was that Jesus, or Buddha.... ah, I'm not sure what I'm talking about now, dammit.
(At which point God strikes down Dogtanian with great vengeance for saying "damn" and points out that the Jews were right, and that he didn't authorise that sequel at all).)
I think it's disproportionately slated because the kind of people most likely to discuss a Superman film are Superman fans. Being less focussed on Superman, missing Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, as well as being simply less serious, they probably see this as a lightweight sellout, and not what they want from a Superman film.
I can understand that, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. Yes, it's kind of cheesy (partly in retrospect) and maybe a bit silly for the fanboys' tastes- but then, isn't the whole Superman thing faintly silly anyway?! IMHO it's a fun film, the computer stuff is interesting, and the robot woman at the end was quite scary when you were like 7 years old.
I'd say that Superman II is better if you want a "proper" Superman film, but even the "Superman goes bad and fights himself" bit in III was good in this respect. Either way, I'll take it over the overrated first movie any day.
Superman IV *was* toss on toast, though
If it wasn't, then either the patent is being misrepresented and/or misinterpreted, or it was *blatantly* wrongly awarded.
I remember designing cheesy link graphics for my first web page in early 1995, and this was hardly an innovation- they'd been around for a while even then.
I see no indication from the article that Bushnell is speaking on behalf of- or indeed has *anything* whatsoever to do with the modern "Atari" (which has little to do with the now-defunct original anyway, being simply a division of Infogrames that got the rights to the name).
Regarding the title "PR department at Atari is having a heart attack"; not really!
:)
Nolan Bushnell may have founded the *original* Atari, but he left in 1979 (having sold it to Warner Communications in 1976), and I see no indication that he has anything to do with the present-day company.
Besides which, the modern "Atari" is effectively just a brand purchased and used by Infogrames which has no real relationship or business continuity with the original Atari (which split into Atari Corp. and Atari Games in 1984- both streams are now effectively defunct).
The PR department at Atari probably couldn't give a toss!
Defender came out two years after Space Invaders.
And I don't see how either of your examples influenced Pac Man. The Japanese hardly had a monopoly on arcade masterpieces. I didn't say or imply anything remotely like that.
What I *did* give were examples that demonstrated that the Japanese were just as capable of coming up with inventive arcade game ideas as the Americans. Unless, that is, you're a typical Nintendo fanboy who doesn't realize that companies like Atari or Midway even existed, or that video games existed before Donkey Kong. Stupid (and incorrect) kneejerk assumption and ad hominem attack.
I could point out that I've owned an 8-bit Atari computer for over 20 years, or that the first Nintendo hardware I owned was a DS I bought in 2006- and that was only because I liked the change from the usual PS2-style games. Prior to that I had a hard-to-pin-down gut dislike of Nintendo that probably came down to the pseudo-Disney child-oriented vibe of their stuff (particularly Mario and friends- think the worst aspects of Disney and Barney the Dinosaur combined). Even now, my distaste for this aspect of Nintendo is such that I'd avoid buying anything that featured the Mario character- even for a game I'd otherwise like, such as Tetris DS.
So yeah.... obviously I'm a Nintendo-loving fanboy who knows nothing about Atari...... *cough*Fuckwit!*cough*!
If I presumed anything (and I would argue that what I said was reflecting and to some extent arguing *against* others' views anyway), it was on the basis of national *culture*, not race.
And yes, that's a generalisation of people in all societies to some extent, but it does exist, and it does have an effect on the large scale of things.
Yep; thanks for saving me the hassle. After posting, I realised that I'd originally meant to say "...detracts from the very real [or similar] damages to civil liberties that are happening in the UK.". However, I still think that the meaning was clear enough.
However, if the situation in the US is remotely like that in the UK, I doubt that it was this "creativity" that let them take over the car industry. While they may have released some interesting cars over the years, the ones that brought them success in the UK were hardly radical or interesting.
No, let me rephrase that; they *were* radical in that (unlike most British cars of the 1970s) they included nice stuff like car radios as standard, were good value for money, and most notably were reliable. (Okay, so the early ones rusted badly in the UK climate, but so did a lot of cars at that time, and they seemed to get round that quite quickly).
But interesting in terms of design and appearance mass-market Japanese cars of the 1970s-1990s certainly weren't. In fact, I daresay that it's many of those cars that gave them a reliable-but-unimaginative reputation.
(Also wondering if you've made a common-but-wrong assumption here). They always have the option of declining to abide by the rules and leave the premises. They always have the option of not going in the first place!
...but stepping up and taking away someone's personal property is nothing but thuggery. property, privacy, rights, entitlements, money, etc... welcome toIt's a minor story about a crap gimmick Alton Towers are using to get some publicity, and it's being presented here as an "OMG!!!!! They're taking away our rights!!!!!!!!11111" story.
Aside from the fact it's a private amusement park (not a pseudo-public space like a shopping centre), it's not even being done for the usual surveillance-state bullshit "pedos might take photos of our children" type reasons. (*)
You don't like it? Don't go to fucking Alton Towers! I wouldn't...
(*) Given the popularity of using pedos to justify every ludicrous measure, if this isn't the reason being given in public, then it sure as hell isn't the true reason either.
When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine.
If I'd been setting several new records by skydiving from the edge of space, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in history and risking death in several interesting and horrible ways
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four.
I thought you were going to link to this video.
Good close-ups of an interesting floating windmill design at 1m21s and 2m36s. I'm not too sure how it works though...
Sorry.
Are you seriously implying that J&J winning a trademark case in 2008 has any relevance to what happened 60 years ago when (as the other reply states) all those involved knew exactly what the symbol was meant to represent at that time?!
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Where do you live? I'm in the UK, and I've never seen the red cross on a Johnson and Johnson product here (perhaps the Red Cross *do* have the clearly-established trademark rights in this country), but I'm familiar with the "No More Tears" thing on their baby shampoo.
It may be different in the US, where this case relates to.