Who's buying the stock and why are they buying it? If it gets low enough, someone could snag it if for no other reason than to liquidate its assets. All of those desks, computer monitors, and coffee machines have got to be worth something. If it wasn't illegal, and if Darl hasn't smoked it all, they could sell off the remainder of SCO's massive pile of crack.
We just need to prove that Microsoft doesn't actually own the rights to Windows and that someone else actually does. [..] Of course, this party will become very rich very quickly so it will need to be someone that we can trust... I'd like to offer up myself for the job. (My emphasis)
Personally, I'd prefer that a master race of giant space ants owned the Windows copyright. Just so I could legitimately say that "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."
Hm, if milibits existed, what would they be? Tiny clues to discern whether the bit is 1 or 0? Like, milibit #1 says "1 if milibit 528 is 0, 0 otherwise" and only after collecting all 1000 milibits could you resolve whether the bit is 1 or 0?
I'll leave that to the Claude Shannons of the world... Great! You've turned a somewhat funny tongue-in-cheek joke at some minor mis-capitalisation into a potentially very interesting discussion. I was trying to figure out myself what a millibit would be; your suggestion is pretty neat.
If ever there was a justification for an offtopic sub-thread, this is it:-)
Robotech in the UK was shown with its original title of "Macross." I certainly don't remember it at all. Was that around the time it was originally produced in the 1980s, or later on? And was it on terrestrial TV or some obscure satellite channel?
Perhaps so, but it wasn't (AFAIK) shown in the UK. Back then (85, 86) most people only had the four terrestrial channels. (Before Sky launched in the UK in the late 80s, cable and satellite were extremely rare here). Kids TV was mainly concentrated in the afternoons on BBC1 and ITV for a couple of hours, with some in the mornings (breakfast TV on weekdays, lots more on weekends.) IIRC, Transformers was shown in the morning on breakfast TV. I remember the launch of breakfast TV in the UK. I even remember the launch of the fourth bloody channel, and that was a big deal when you only had three to start off with. Damn, I feel really old now!
But back to the point; it occurs to me that they just wouldn't have had the time/space to show all those cartoons, particularly as they were probably restricted on the amount of cheap imports they could show. So that's probably why it was never shown here.
As I said, I was 8 or 10 when Transformers mania was at its peak, and I was never aware of the 1986 animated movie at the time. I certainly don't recall it getting a cinematic release in the UK.
Voltron was very popular when I was a kid. It didn't reach Transformers levels, but I would say that it was at least as popular and well-known as Robotech in the area I grew up (near Seattle). As popular as Robotech? Is that a good or a bad thing?- I can't tell, given that they didn't show Robotech in the UK either:-)
Some days it pays it to slack on work and just hang out on/. Shit my boss is calling me... oh well, he'll understand when I tell him "it was Voltron!" Oddest response to "You're fired, you lazy sonofabitch!" ever...
It's big in Japan Yes, but so are lots of things; it doesn't mean that it's so big elsewhere
and in the English speaking fanbase. That just means that "amongst the English speakers who are fans of it, it has a major following". Pretty tautological, and not really enlightening. How big is awareness of it amongst the US population in general- or even just amongst the late-twenty/early-thirtysomethings?
I cant help but think it will be too bulky and restrictive for natural swimmers and divers. Better re-inventions of the flippers have already been done Meh, doesn't matter... it's only an excuse for furries, erm.. fishies to dress up like anthropomorphic dolphins;-)
Lame. Transformers got away with novelty. Voltron will tank. I don't think that I'd ever heard of Voltron before this. My first thoughts were "wasn't that the baddie's name from Battle of the Planets?" (Apparently that was "Zoltar", whatever...)
Going by the YouTube link to the 80s Voltron cartoon in the summary, it looks almost exactly like someone created carbon copies of the Transformers cartoon and Battle of the Planets and welded them together.
Transformers were massive in the UK when I was about 10, so it's obviously going to benefit from nostalgic parents and thirtysomething media types. By contrast, I don't know how big Voltron was in the US and Japan, but it's pretty unknown here, so I doubt it's going to get the same free pass. It can't even have been *that* big elsewhere, because I'm sure I'd have come across more about it on the net if it had been.
Just give everyone plus and minus buttons. It's just blind pretension to assume that the restricted moderation model is actually working any better. That's what happens on Digg and the moderation there is totally useless. I'm not exaggerating; it doesn't serve the stated purpose in the slightest. Moderation either appears entirely random, or in other cases it's clear that certain groups (I'm thinking particularly of Apple fanboys) kneejerk moderate certain types of comments up/down en masse. But even if you agree with a lot of the groupthink and want filtering on that basis, the overall effect is still of randomness that makes it totally worthless. I'm guessing that part of the problem is that with many viewpoints, a small but significant proportion of users feel strongly one way and vote it accordingly, but the vast majority who don't care aren't specifically bothered about the issue (or aren't aware of it) so don't mod the other way. As I said, if you can't guess the agenda behind the modding, you may as well treat it as random.
Slashdot's system is abused and has a number of serious flaws, but it is at least partly functional. OTOH, the problem with Digg could be their demographic too, but I wouldn't want to take the chance.
My first thought when I saw this story was that *maybe* Google had set it all up deliberately so it could go down in flames at this point - becoming, as you say, a concrete example of the evils of DRM.
It just might be true... Sure. Google might just do something that is more likely to damage their own reputation than DRM in general, because they're martyrs and *so* good that any damage to their multi-billion company is worth it to expose the evils of DRM even by the most miniscule amount.
Or it might be complete bollocks. I know which one has a 99.999999999% of being true.
You know how much stuff I saw that said Made in China on it? Very little, at that it was usually cheap crap like stuffed toys. Most everything I saw in that country was made in Japan. [..] Oh how I wish the general populous of the US cared about either. Stuff usually cost at max 10% extra. Is all that true? I have a Japanese friend, and she was apparently quite shocked (and annoyed) when she found out that her Nintendo DS was made in China.
Personally, I assumed she just hadn't been paying attention to how much stuff was made in China these days (we have a lot of it in the UK), but maybe what you say is right.
When the Mac first came out, it was dismissed as "a game machine". Literally? I don't recall the Mac ever having that reputation. It may have had a toyish image, but games machine? Never heard that one. At most, I suspect this was just a cheap jibe by some PC-centric journalists (and possibly users).
I see same attitude on OS X only users, instead of pushing Apple to fix their issues they go and actually purchase Windows XP to run via boot camp. More ammo to Windows/DirectX monopoly which effects everything. Perhaps; but you typed this in response to my post which discussed hardcore games players currently using Windows being encouraged to switch to the iMac. They don't have the same loyalty, and in all honesty unless they're already Mac fans, I don't see why they should.
I don't understand why this argument still comes up. Because the arguments I made still apply.
surely the range of mac games is ALL games, If you mean that Macs can run Windows games via bootcamp, it misses the point I was replying to. They said "Seriously.. the new iMac is fun to use an you can put behind Microsoft's psychotic mood swings on its standards forever.". Well, you still need to run Windows to play Windows games. Even if it's on an x86 Mac.
or is the current iMac's limitation of 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme and ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256MB GDDR3 just too bad to be of any use? Again, this misses the point. It's not whether it's "good enough" for Joe Average to play new games. Since we were discussing DirectX 10 cards (i.e. expensive leading edge ones), it's whether the off-the-shelf iMac graphics gives performance comparable to *them* and whether the hardcore fanboys who buy them would be happy with the iMac instead. Personally, I don't think that's likely.
I don't know, it's been years since I've followed "hardcore" games and specs. any good benchmarks would be appreciated. I'm don't consider myself a gamer either. However, given that this is an "off-the-shelf" configuration for a mainstream Mac, a range of computers that have never been focussed on games, it seems highly improbable that it's going to compete with a very expensive, cutting-edge graphics card.
I'm assuming that even if (in general) it's possible to connect PC graphics cards to an Intel Mac, that this wouldn't be possible in an iMac due to lack of internal space/expansion, so that's not an option- even if you were prepared to buy an iMac just to have it running Windows 80% of the time (which seems kind of pointless).
Seriously.. the new iMac is fun to use an you can put behind Microsoft's psychotic mood swings on its standards forever. Well, you entirely missed the point... DirectX is primarily a games-oriented technology, and the graphics cards this issue affects will be mostly expensive, leading-edge ones. The type that will be mainly purchased by "hardcore" gamers.
Macs may be nice machines in many respects, but let's be honest- the range and quality of Mac games is poor in comparison with that available for Windows PCs. And then to imagine that hardcore gamers are going to replace their massively-powered PCs and $600 graphics cards with an off-the-shelf iMac and be happy with its performance...?
Seriously, get real. Nice computers, but no-one ever bought a Mac as a games machine.
When will it be technically over, and when will there be no more to slog through? Reports are that Montserrat Caballé has been seen in the courtroom, warming up for her rendition of "You're crap and you know it".
And as we all know, it ain't over until... then.
Re:Kicking their own asses...
on
SCO Loses
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· Score: 1
I paid $699 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. If that's what you have to show for your $699, you're still one t-shirt better off than everyone else...:-)
Unless it has a photograph of Darl McBride on it, of course! Although in that case, you could still sell it to a bunch of angry nerds so they could tie it to a pole, gather as an angry mob and set it on fire and stamp on it all the time shouting "Death to the great Satan!" in some Middle Eastern tongue.
What I would point out is that x86 processors are incredibly crude, crufty and rather antiquated, They may contain loads of cruft, but I'd dispute that they were "crude".
retaining, even in the 64 bit implementations, features that were used in the lowly 8088/8086. I don't know too much about the latest x64 designs in general, but since the new Core chips are derived from the Pentium M, which is largely based upon the P-III, which is similar in design to the Pentium II/Pentium Pro, we can assume that they are RISC-based chips using microcode to translate the CISC x86 instructions into its native format.
I don't know how "tied" the RISC core's design has to be tailored to allow it to handle x86 instructions well, but I'd assume that there is a lot more flexibility than with CPUs whose hardware directly processes x86 CISC code (i.e. the original Pentium and its predecessors).
Therefore, is there any reason why the "legacy" instructions, which likely won't be used much by modern software, should impact much upon performance? Simply design the processor to work best with the instructions most modern software uses, and don't worry about the performance of the old ones. They can be handled by microcode. Since most old software will have been written with much slower processors in mind anyway, even if the modern CPU's handling of them is relatively slow, most people won't mind.
I'm for replacing the current Slashdot moderation options with hilarious Engrish ones: Oh yeah, "It is strange funny".... that was one I loved. (I've been "reading" Slashdot Japan through Babelfish for quite a while now- that's where my sig comes from).
However, it's misleading to call these "Engrish", as that normally refers to the use of bad English (or even pseudo-English) by the Japanese.
By contrast, this is a quaint auto-translation of correctly-written Japanese. Okay, so the "cute" tone is probably down to the differences between Japanese language and culture as well... but it's still not Engrish per se.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'd prefer that a master race of giant space ants owned the Windows copyright. Just so I could legitimately say that "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."
Sorry
If ever there was a justification for an offtopic sub-thread, this is it
Perhaps so, but it wasn't (AFAIK) shown in the UK. Back then (85, 86) most people only had the four terrestrial channels. (Before Sky launched in the UK in the late 80s, cable and satellite were extremely rare here). Kids TV was mainly concentrated in the afternoons on BBC1 and ITV for a couple of hours, with some in the mornings (breakfast TV on weekdays, lots more on weekends.) IIRC, Transformers was shown in the morning on breakfast TV. I remember the launch of breakfast TV in the UK. I even remember the launch of the fourth bloody channel, and that was a big deal when you only had three to start off with. Damn, I feel really old now!
But back to the point; it occurs to me that they just wouldn't have had the time/space to show all those cartoons, particularly as they were probably restricted on the amount of cheap imports they could show. So that's probably why it was never shown here.
As I said, I was 8 or 10 when Transformers mania was at its peak, and I was never aware of the 1986 animated movie at the time. I certainly don't recall it getting a cinematic release in the UK.
Going by the YouTube link to the 80s Voltron cartoon in the summary, it looks almost exactly like someone created carbon copies of the Transformers cartoon and Battle of the Planets and welded them together.
Transformers were massive in the UK when I was about 10, so it's obviously going to benefit from nostalgic parents and thirtysomething media types. By contrast, I don't know how big Voltron was in the US and Japan, but it's pretty unknown here, so I doubt it's going to get the same free pass. It can't even have been *that* big elsewhere, because I'm sure I'd have come across more about it on the net if it had been.
Slashdot's system is abused and has a number of serious flaws, but it is at least partly functional. OTOH, the problem with Digg could be their demographic too, but I wouldn't want to take the chance.
Or it might be complete bollocks. I know which one has a 99.999999999% of being true.
Personally, I assumed she just hadn't been paying attention to how much stuff was made in China these days (we have a lot of it in the UK), but maybe what you say is right.
I'm assuming that even if (in general) it's possible to connect PC graphics cards to an Intel Mac, that this wouldn't be possible in an iMac due to lack of internal space/expansion, so that's not an option- even if you were prepared to buy an iMac just to have it running Windows 80% of the time (which seems kind of pointless).
Macs may be nice machines in many respects, but let's be honest- the range and quality of Mac games is poor in comparison with that available for Windows PCs. And then to imagine that hardcore gamers are going to replace their massively-powered PCs and $600 graphics cards with an off-the-shelf iMac and be happy with its performance...?
Seriously, get real. Nice computers, but no-one ever bought a Mac as a games machine.
I'm posting an overused image
macro on a text-only site!
And as we all know, it ain't over until... then.
Unless it has a photograph of Darl McBride on it, of course! Although in that case, you could still sell it to a bunch of angry nerds so they could tie it to a pole, gather as an angry mob and set it on fire and stamp on it all the time shouting "Death to the great Satan!" in some Middle Eastern tongue.
I don't know how "tied" the RISC core's design has to be tailored to allow it to handle x86 instructions well, but I'd assume that there is a lot more flexibility than with CPUs whose hardware directly processes x86 CISC code (i.e. the original Pentium and its predecessors).
Therefore, is there any reason why the "legacy" instructions, which likely won't be used much by modern software, should impact much upon performance? Simply design the processor to work best with the instructions most modern software uses, and don't worry about the performance of the old ones. They can be handled by microcode. Since most old software will have been written with much slower processors in mind anyway, even if the modern CPU's handling of them is relatively slow, most people won't mind.
However, it's misleading to call these "Engrish", as that normally refers to the use of bad English (or even pseudo-English) by the Japanese.
By contrast, this is a quaint auto-translation of correctly-written Japanese. Okay, so the "cute" tone is probably down to the differences between Japanese language and culture as well... but it's still not Engrish per se.