It's like the old joke: Windows 95, all the innovations of Apple 1987!
In the late 80s-early90s, I'd spend an hour doing something on the PCs at school, go home, do the exact same task in under a minute on the mac... If I told people who didn't know much about the machine, they would call me a zealot I might be wrong, but I don't believe that the Mac had pre-emptive multitasking in 1987. That was one of the major improvements in Windows 95, and something that the Amiga range had been able to do since 1985. Expensive machines? Not by the late-1980s. By the early 1990s, the Amigas were no longer cutting edge, nor expensive, and their CPUs were nowhere near as powerful as those of the PCs which were killing them off. And yet the PCs were still crippled with piss-poor, third rate multitasking.
Having the whole Windows 3.1 desktop freeze when Telnet couldn't connect (but wouldn't hand control of the co-operative multitasking back to the OS) was a joke even in those days.
Then again, I'd used a Mac Classic the previous year (which was admittedly the bottom of the Mac range), and it didn't seem any more powerful. Better interface than Windows 3.1, but from my limited experience and hazy memory, I remember it still only ran one main app at a time.
In that sense, Windows 95 was more like "Amiga 85" than "Mac 87".
An ounce of common sense would have shown you that the GP was very clearly being tongue-in-cheek; the giveaway was "earrings are a given in my non-conformist world."
The fact that you know their salaries should tell you something about the quality of your friends. No, the fact that you think (or imply to others that they should think) that this reflects badly on them probably says more about you and your self-interest (as someone involved in "hiring").
I agree that it's rare, and that being able to get high 5 / low 6 figures easily is ludicrous, and I'd not call 75K "high 5 / low 6 figures".
But 75K is the right ballpark for new bachelor's degree grads, fresh out of school, at MS or Google. Well.... no shit Sherlock- he'd already said as much! "Expecting 75K+ straight out of college is ludicrous unless you have some sort of proven track record that shows you aren't just another college graduate."
As you yourself imply, that's *exactly* what you'd need to get into Google or Yahoo(!)
Some are even computer renders rather than real photos. Yeah, but doesn't the "cheap plasticky" appearance of the rendered product shots give it away? Oh, hang on....
a lot of the stuff sold in Argos ....scrap that question. In Argos' case, I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference!;-)
I agree to an extent, but Intel does have to be given some credit for the Core 2 Duo's. Until my most recent custom-build PC all of my boxes have been powerful but noisy. Then the Core 2 Duo came along and promised up to 40% better performance than comparably clocked chips from AMD/Intel's older lines, and they also ran much cooler. This is because the "Core" architecture (*) is derived from the energy-efficient Pentium M (i.e. mobile) design, rather than the power-guzzling P4 "Netburst" architecture.
I remember reading articles (before the Core-based chips came out) suggesting that the "mobile" Pentium M was actually a good choice for a low-power, low-noise *desktop* PC. In fact, I seriously considered building my next PC around one. I guess Intel figured the same thing.
The most surprising thing is that the Pentium M itself (and hence its derivative, the Core architecture) was actually based upon the older Pentium-II/III core, and not the (then-current) P4-Netburst. Essentially, this means that the much-hyped P4/Netburst was a dead-end, designwise.
I believe that Intel were facing problems with power consumption when trying to scale up Netburst, and this (combined, I assume, with the surprisingly impressive performance of the Pentium-M) was what led to them abandoning it.
(*) Found in the "Core 2" family onwards but, perversely, not the original "Core" chips (i.e. Core 1)
Oi. Garfield is still hilarious - if you remove the eponymous cat... Encyclopedia Dramatica's page on Garfield
(especially the gallery of Garfield reworkings) has more stuff in that vein. Some of it is crap (Jon f****s his cat, yawn), some of it is good.... much of it is very strange. (Oddly, some of the strangest stuff is also the funniest- or maybe that's just my sense of humour. Especially the running gag about the "eyes".... WTF?!)
It says a lot that this stuff is more interesting than the actual cartoon strip has been for at least 15 years.
Spectrum turned up with colour graphics and became the standard machine for a generation of gamers and hackers Yep; although the C64 was quite popular here, the Spectrum was the clear leader. Although (slower processor aside), the C64 was clearly the better machine, it was also more expensive.
The Spectrum probably did better for a couple of reasons- firstly, the C64 was sold in the US at an almost unsustainably low price (one reason it did so well there), but I don't think it was ever that cheap in the UK. Second, people in the UK (particularly back then) had less disposable income than those in the US.
You're right about Nintendo; one key difference between the UK and US was that the 8-bit consoles never dominated in the way that the NES did in the US; they did reasonable business, but the market remained home-computer driven (*) until the 16-bit Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES arrived in the early 1990s and took over the low end gaming market.
(*) And even then, the NES wasn't the biggest-selling 8-bit console... it was outsold by the Sega Master System (considered a flop in the US and Japan) thanks to better marketing and (I'm guessing) Nintendo's indifference towards Europe.
Just like pens, never buy a pen, just ignore the tacky logo. Well, chances are the bank's biros aren't particularly expensive ones- so if wherever you live is anything like the UK, you can probably buy some comparable ones in a pack of 30 or so for literally pennies each.
IMHO, free or not, it's not worth my time faffing about collecting individual pens at the bank (I doubt they'd let you grab the boxful) when I can get them in packs at negligible cost. If you're already there, fair enough, pick them up anyway, but really.... it's an awful lot of work for "free" otherwise:)
Of all the mammals being slaughtered, cows have one of the worst public relations representatives (after rats). Anyway, whales are very well represented I think there's a legimate reason for the double standard when you consider that cows aren't remotely an endangered species- quite the opposite.
Sorry, you're mistaken. Sorry, you're mistaken if you think that a relatively uncited Wikipedia article constitutes authoritative and infallible proof of anything.
What "official" backing (in any sense of the word) do those definitions have? They're not cited, so beyond the fact that there is at best *perhaps* some consensus (possibly temporary)- or perhaps none- between the most recent WP editors on that article (who might just be ill-informed nerds with too much time on their hands), this doesn't mean anything.
Really, I like WP, and some of the more referenced (and less controversy-plagued) articles are really good. Even uncited articles can be pretty useful so long as you use common sense when judging their reliability.
However, your implication that just because something is on WP means *in itself* that it's correct is plain wrong.
*WOOSH*
Google "Man Bear Pig", it's a South Park thing. So he didn't spot a tedious pop-culture reference from South Park. Big fucking deal.
Not everyone on Slashdot gives a toss about- let alone watches and has an in-depth knowledge of- that vastly overrated show, and nor is the latter a universal indicator of geekism, despite what the its tedious anal-retentive fanboys might like to think.
Japanese like eating whales. If you read the replies to this suggestion, you'll see that they're having to push people into eating whale meat- which they otherwise don't like- for political reasons.
It would be a terrific thing for Japan if they could make cows that tasted like whales. Actually, since the Japanese seem to have no problem with beef, it'd make more sense to have whales that tasted like beef.
Except that this wouldn't happen, since they'd prefer to continue hunting the endangered ones for political... sorry, "scientific" reasons anyway.
What if, they could grow whale meat on land? There wouldn't be any point. As this story explains, it's not like the Japanese really like whale meat anyway- the driving forces behind it are political and related to fishing and Japanese sovereignty.
That's why their government is pursuing whaling, trying to get people to eat the stuff and exaggerating the extent to which whaling and whale-meat consumption is a traditional part of Japanese culture.
Personally, the whole thing disgusts me, as does the intelligence-insulting excuse that this has anything to do with science. That includes these bullshit "experiments", which are laughable but (under the circumstances) not particularly funny.
I'd still have a Nokia 3310 if it wasn't about as cheap to buy a 3510 as it was to get a replacement battery for the 3310 I think I paid around a tenner for a battery that had approx. 3 times the capacity of the Nokia original. Granted, it was a third-party one, and will probably explode and kill me sometime (though I've had it 2 1/2 years now). That 3310 is coming up for 7 years old now(!)
Will a lot of people even know that hd-dvd is dead? They will just see how cheap it is. The majority of people who know enough about it to know why they want it (and why it's better than "ordinary" DVD) will know why it's so cheap.
If at the right time they could resurect it and keep the prices way below blu-ray they could make a comeback. Unlikely- the format has been publicly disowned, and this has been accepted (and even pushed by) the industry across the board (including retailers, hardware manufacturers and film studios). Even if HD-DVD becomes briefly popular because of Lemming-like selling-off, it's not going to come back to life. The studios aren't going to shift back their multi-billion dollar commitments simply because of a brief price-driven surge.
People will *know* that the reason HD-DVD is cheap is because it's dead. That's not a good long-term plan. At best, some studios might release a few more films in HD-DVD format than they might have otherwise.
A similar suggestion was made when HD-DVD was starting to seriously flounder, but before it was clear that it was going to be abandoned. Toshiba slashed the prices, and some thought it might kick-start things. Even that was clearly a desparate measure, but things were different then- the race was still going.
Now the HD-DVD horse is dead, the defibrilators have been packed away and the vets have gone home.
It's not going to happen.
Myself, I would buy an hd-dvd burner and media right now if the prices were really low, just for storage purposes. I wouldn't; even if the price is relatively cheap compared to writable Blu-Ray, I still doubt it's *that* cheap. As the price of BR falls, it'll pass it. Meanwhile, you'll have committed your existing data to a soon-to-be-obsolete format, you'll have to faff about with EBay to get another drive to read your discs if the first fails, and supplies of writable HD-DVD discs will likely dry up quite quickly and soon rise in price, since I can't see them being manufactured for very long now. (It's unlikely there's a critical mass of existing HD-DVD burner users who'd be worth keeping the HD-DVD-R factory lines going for).
I'm certainly no fan of George W. Bush (and I'm a Canadian to boot), but it always bugs me when people describe him as a moron. Judging him by his public appearances, it's understandable that people might come to that conclusion.
One theory I heard when Bush first became president was that he had a form of dyslexia. It struck me as plausible because at the time I had a flatmate who was also dyslexic and occasionally made similar odd mistakes with words. (OTOH, another(!) of my flatmates was dyslexic and didn't).
Personally, I think that he's either undiagnosed or is trying to cover it up.
Bush certainly isn't as stupid as his clumsiness with words would suggest. That doesn't change the fact that he's an overprivileged fratboy born with a silver spoon in his mouth (in both the financial and political senses) who still likes to portray himself as a no-nonsense man-of-the-people Southerner- another piece of fakery. Nor the fact that he's anti-intellectual and a facilitator of the type of snout-in-the-trough croneyism and corporatism that makes a mockery of "free" trade. Nor even that by general presidential standards he's mediocre to the point of being piss-poor.
But all that aside, most people are think about the Bush of mangled-speeches infamy, and I really don't think he's quite as stupid as those would suggest.
I used to have (still have, but the flatcable to the screen is dead) an Atari Portfolio. Not as powerful as your HP, but damn, did I do a lot on it! Did that include hacking ATMs?;-)
* xml
* java
* sql
* web 2.0
* kylix
* mcse
* access
* "visual programming" Uh, well... unless the people who invented Kylix were later responsible for fixing the 2000 U.S. presidential race, I daresay that shooting them would have *bugger all* effect on the history of computing. It's this one that convinced me that you're not entirely serious:)
Expecting customers to keep track of licenses (with paper and a filing cabinet, in some cases!) and all kinds of other stuff is completely ridiculous. A cynic would say that they *don't* expect customers to be able to keep track of licenses. That way they're more likely to buy more to replace ones they can't account for, or just to be on the safe side.
Seriously, when you don't know what the heck you're covered for, it's easier to be manipulated and railroaded into buying licenses you don't need, and they can still get you for something if they try hard enough. Reminds me of this story, BTW.
Why use mp3 in a situation where you might be in trouble over patents? There are plenty of other codecs out there, ogg for one. Most ripper programs hat I know of can rip to ogg, and there are conversion tools. It wouldn't be hard to set up a conversion system. Because regardless of its merits, Ogg's usage is extremely rare outside of geek circles. Even amongst Slashdot readers, I'd guess that although most of us are aware of it, only a small proportion actually encode their music using it.
It's the old critical mass chicken-and-egg thing, and I'm not convinced that Ogg Vorbis will ever reach that breakthrough point.
As for conversion... frankly, most people would ask *why* they should bother converting their music to another format just to listen to it on some (probably) non-notable player. They'd just buy a native MP3 player instead.
Even if the manufacturer could somehow make conversion automatic without having to pay the MP3 fees, it'd still be in the same boat as those stupid Sony non-MP3 ATRAC-based Walkmans that had to convert music files via some horrible flaky piece of software.
This is completely irrelevant. You don't need to be an expert in the English language to be able write a story. No, my point was that having a big pile of words doesn't in itself give you the skill to string them together to write a half-decent story.
If you believe this, then you have absolutely *NO* idea what the Amiga documentation consisted of. I programmed the Amiga in assembly (right off the bat), and the "Includes and Autodocs" were indispensible. To say that they "wouldn't be applicable" just shows that not only are have you never read them, but that you don't really know what you're spouting on about. First off, I never claimed that I'd read the Amiga documentation. Show me where I said I had.
Do the "includes and Autodocs" constitute or describe an API (for assembly) in the conventional sense? *If* so, fair enough, I was wrong, but this suggests a blurring of the boundaries between assembly and higher level languages. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing if you know where the line is being drawn).
You may well be right that the Amiga architecture was easier to program than the 8-bit Atari's (with six years of documentation and experience) from day one, but I'm still sceptical. You say you were writing programs in assembly, but what does this constitute? For example, I've touched upon x86 assembly, but it was the equivalent of a child saying "Ma ma!" for the first time compared to Linux or Windows' "War and Peace".:-)
Yeah, that's true. I was really using it as a (technically misleading) shorthand for the generations, since the 16/32-bit lines tended to be (essentially) next generation computers relative to the 8-bits, with an accompanying increase in overall system complexity.
As for the x86 instruction set, I'm no expert on that, but I've seen enough that I can entirely understand why you hate it so much:/
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Having the whole Windows 3.1 desktop freeze when Telnet couldn't connect (but wouldn't hand control of the co-operative multitasking back to the OS) was a joke even in those days.
Then again, I'd used a Mac Classic the previous year (which was admittedly the bottom of the Mac range), and it didn't seem any more powerful. Better interface than Windows 3.1, but from my limited experience and hazy memory, I remember it still only ran one main app at a time.
In that sense, Windows 95 was more like "Amiga 85" than "Mac 87".
An ounce of common sense would have shown you that the GP was very clearly being tongue-in-cheek; the giveaway was "earrings are a given in my non-conformist world."
Sheesh.
Euh.... last bit should have read "Google or MS(!)" :-(
As you yourself imply, that's *exactly* what you'd need to get into Google or Yahoo(!)
I remember reading articles (before the Core-based chips came out) suggesting that the "mobile" Pentium M was actually a good choice for a low-power, low-noise *desktop* PC. In fact, I seriously considered building my next PC around one. I guess Intel figured the same thing.
The most surprising thing is that the Pentium M itself (and hence its derivative, the Core architecture) was actually based upon the older Pentium-II/III core, and not the (then-current) P4-Netburst. Essentially, this means that the much-hyped P4/Netburst was a dead-end, designwise.
I believe that Intel were facing problems with power consumption when trying to scale up Netburst, and this (combined, I assume, with the surprisingly impressive performance of the Pentium-M) was what led to them abandoning it.
(*) Found in the "Core 2" family onwards but, perversely, not the original "Core" chips (i.e. Core 1)
It says a lot that this stuff is more interesting than the actual cartoon strip has been for at least 15 years.
The Spectrum probably did better for a couple of reasons- firstly, the C64 was sold in the US at an almost unsustainably low price (one reason it did so well there), but I don't think it was ever that cheap in the UK. Second, people in the UK (particularly back then) had less disposable income than those in the US.
You're right about Nintendo; one key difference between the UK and US was that the 8-bit consoles never dominated in the way that the NES did in the US; they did reasonable business, but the market remained home-computer driven (*) until the 16-bit Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES arrived in the early 1990s and took over the low end gaming market.
(*) And even then, the NES wasn't the biggest-selling 8-bit console... it was outsold by the Sega Master System (considered a flop in the US and Japan) thanks to better marketing and (I'm guessing) Nintendo's indifference towards Europe.
IMHO, free or not, it's not worth my time faffing about collecting individual pens at the bank (I doubt they'd let you grab the boxful) when I can get them in packs at negligible cost. If you're already there, fair enough, pick them up anyway, but really.... it's an awful lot of work for "free" otherwise
That and the fact we don't normally pronounce "i" as "ee" too, of course(!)
What "official" backing (in any sense of the word) do those definitions have? They're not cited, so beyond the fact that there is at best *perhaps* some consensus (possibly temporary)- or perhaps none- between the most recent WP editors on that article (who might just be ill-informed nerds with too much time on their hands), this doesn't mean anything.
Really, I like WP, and some of the more referenced (and less controversy-plagued) articles are really good. Even uncited articles can be pretty useful so long as you use common sense when judging their reliability.
However, your implication that just because something is on WP means *in itself* that it's correct is plain wrong.
Not everyone on Slashdot gives a toss about- let alone watches and has an in-depth knowledge of- that vastly overrated show, and nor is the latter a universal indicator of geekism, despite what the its tedious anal-retentive fanboys might like to think.
Except that this wouldn't happen, since they'd prefer to continue hunting the endangered ones for political... sorry, "scientific" reasons anyway.
That's why their government is pursuing whaling, trying to get people to eat the stuff and exaggerating the extent to which whaling and whale-meat consumption is a traditional part of Japanese culture.
Personally, the whole thing disgusts me, as does the intelligence-insulting excuse that this has anything to do with science. That includes these bullshit "experiments", which are laughable but (under the circumstances) not particularly funny.
People will *know* that the reason HD-DVD is cheap is because it's dead. That's not a good long-term plan. At best, some studios might release a few more films in HD-DVD format than they might have otherwise.
A similar suggestion was made when HD-DVD was starting to seriously flounder, but before it was clear that it was going to be abandoned. Toshiba slashed the prices, and some thought it might kick-start things. Even that was clearly a desparate measure, but things were different then- the race was still going.
Now the HD-DVD horse is dead, the defibrilators have been packed away and the vets have gone home.
It's not going to happen. Myself, I would buy an hd-dvd burner and media right now if the prices were really low, just for storage purposes. I wouldn't; even if the price is relatively cheap compared to writable Blu-Ray, I still doubt it's *that* cheap. As the price of BR falls, it'll pass it. Meanwhile, you'll have committed your existing data to a soon-to-be-obsolete format, you'll have to faff about with EBay to get another drive to read your discs if the first fails, and supplies of writable HD-DVD discs will likely dry up quite quickly and soon rise in price, since I can't see them being manufactured for very long now. (It's unlikely there's a critical mass of existing HD-DVD burner users who'd be worth keeping the HD-DVD-R factory lines going for).
One theory I heard when Bush first became president was that he had a form of dyslexia. It struck me as plausible because at the time I had a flatmate who was also dyslexic and occasionally made similar odd mistakes with words. (OTOH, another(!) of my flatmates was dyslexic and didn't).
Personally, I think that he's either undiagnosed or is trying to cover it up.
Bush certainly isn't as stupid as his clumsiness with words would suggest. That doesn't change the fact that he's an overprivileged fratboy born with a silver spoon in his mouth (in both the financial and political senses) who still likes to portray himself as a no-nonsense man-of-the-people Southerner- another piece of fakery. Nor the fact that he's anti-intellectual and a facilitator of the type of snout-in-the-trough croneyism and corporatism that makes a mockery of "free" trade. Nor even that by general presidential standards he's mediocre to the point of being piss-poor.
But all that aside, most people are think about the Bush of mangled-speeches infamy, and I really don't think he's quite as stupid as those would suggest.
* java
* sql
* web 2.0
* kylix
* mcse
* access
* "visual programming" Uh, well... unless the people who invented Kylix were later responsible for fixing the 2000 U.S. presidential race, I daresay that shooting them would have *bugger all* effect on the history of computing. It's this one that convinced me that you're not entirely serious
Kylix.... damn, I'd forgotten about that.
Seriously, when you don't know what the heck you're covered for, it's easier to be manipulated and railroaded into buying licenses you don't need, and they can still get you for something if they try hard enough. Reminds me of this story, BTW.
It's the old critical mass chicken-and-egg thing, and I'm not convinced that Ogg Vorbis will ever reach that breakthrough point.
As for conversion... frankly, most people would ask *why* they should bother converting their music to another format just to listen to it on some (probably) non-notable player. They'd just buy a native MP3 player instead.
Even if the manufacturer could somehow make conversion automatic without having to pay the MP3 fees, it'd still be in the same boat as those stupid Sony non-MP3 ATRAC-based Walkmans that had to convert music files via some horrible flaky piece of software.
Do the "includes and Autodocs" constitute or describe an API (for assembly) in the conventional sense? *If* so, fair enough, I was wrong, but this suggests a blurring of the boundaries between assembly and higher level languages. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing if you know where the line is being drawn).
You may well be right that the Amiga architecture was easier to program than the 8-bit Atari's (with six years of documentation and experience) from day one, but I'm still sceptical. You say you were writing programs in assembly, but what does this constitute? For example, I've touched upon x86 assembly, but it was the equivalent of a child saying "Ma ma!" for the first time compared to Linux or Windows' "War and Peace".
Yeah, that's true. I was really using it as a (technically misleading) shorthand for the generations, since the 16/32-bit lines tended to be (essentially) next generation computers relative to the 8-bits, with an accompanying increase in overall system complexity.
:/
As for the x86 instruction set, I'm no expert on that, but I've seen enough that I can entirely understand why you hate it so much