As a French speaker, I can guarantee that most programmers here understand little more than the basic programming terms. Most of the specs have been translated into French, so that's not a problem.
Vincent: And you know what they call a ClassCastException in France?
Jules: They don't call it a ClassCastException?
Vincent: No man, they got the socialist system. They wouldn't know what the f*** a "class" is.
Jules: Then what do they call it?
Vincent: They call it a RoyaleWithCheeseException.
Jules: A RoyaleWithCheeseException. What do they call a NullPointerException?
Vincent: Well, a NullPointerException's a NullPointerException, but they call it un NullPointerException.
Jules: Un NullPointerException. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call the spaceship operator?
Vincent: I dunno, I didn't do any Perl programming over there.
I was staying at someone's house, and after a few cups of instant coffee I remember realising that I wasn't anywhere near as uptight as I'd normally feel having drunk that many.
It was only *after* this that I noticed it was a jar of decaffeinated coffee (and the possibility hadn't occurred to me beforehand, as I never normally drink the stuff).
For a time, between about 1997 and 2003 they were quite popular, at least in Europe.
They did enjoy a brief period of increased (but still relatively moderate and short-lived) popularity here at the turn of the millennium; i.e. the immediate pre-iPod era, when the only MP3 players were impractical, overpriced geek toys.
But even that "peak" was only an improvement relative to their almost nonexistent sales prior to that point- they never came remotely close to the popularity of CDs and cassettes, and quickly faded when the iPod came along.
(Having wondered what had caused that blip of popularity after years of doing nothing, I guessed that it primarily had to do with price reductions making them affordable to teens and twentysomethings. The BBC article seems to confirm this, stating that they slashed them to a third of the cost).
Addendum; it looks like they did try marketing it as a data storage device in the early days, but played silly buggers with compatibility and managed to kill it off.
Maybe so, but it doesn't change or excuse previous behaviour. Jobs died and (unlike Gates) didn't get the chance to "redeem" and paint over his previous asshole-ishness.
Your second sentence is in violation of the first. Jobs could never redeem himself if his previous behaviour is not excused.
Not at all. Note the intentional use of quotes around "redeem" to express my scepticism and indicate that's how I believe others may perceive it, not necessarily how I do.
As for your second paragraph, I think you're taking it too far. People who got rich being dicks aren't entitled to have their previous dickishness ignored by giving away some of their money. That's not to say they can't make up for it to some extent, but no-one gets to buy their way entirely out of it that easily.
Squandering the potential of MiniDisc through over-zealous DRM, self-interest (and conflict of interest) as well as Sony's general arrogance seems to be its story in a nutshell.
The underlying technology of even the original MiniDiscs had the potential to be *way* more flexible and powerful than it was ever allowed to be. By the standards of the early-1990s it had masses of storage and random access, leading to the possibility of file-like transfer of music tracks. Granted, back then- years before MP3s rose to prominence- people didn't consume music as "files" nor have computers powerful enough to do anything with them anyway, and veering too far from the familiar paradigm probably would have confused and scared Joe Public.
However, the potential to handle and transfer tracks in a file-like way *would* have been something people would have liked- if marketed correctly- even then. Instead, they forced people to dub things in real-time and restricted digital copying.
And they could still have marketed it as a data format once established and provided they kept things clear. Had they done that, it may well have replaced the 1.44MB floppy. To be honest, Sony had the *technology* (and storage space) to do some of what MP3 players did almost a decade later, but they forced it into being little more than a digital audio cassette with random access.
Even when they did improve the format and allow some data use, they forced users to play silly buggers with their crappy software and restrictions.
And let's not get into how, when MP3 *did* come along, their self-interest, NIH and arrogance led them to drag their heels to such an extent that a personal computer company (which is what Apple had been up until that point) steal the market for portable audio from the company that had invented the Walkman and led it for 20 years. It's easy to forget how ludicrous that would have sounded in the mid-to-late-90s, but the market was Sony's to lose- they had the technology and the name- but they totally squandered it. They lost that market, and it was no-one's fault but their own.
Microsoft is not Bill Gates, and Microsoft can operate independant of his philanthropy.
Gates was in charge of MS at the time of their Apple "rescue", and this was long before his philanthropy.
Even that aside, if your choices are a guy that donates billions to all manner of charities around the world, or a Jobs that tells everyone to go fuck themselves, I know which one I'd prefer to see.
Maybe so, but it doesn't change or excuse previous behaviour. Jobs died and (unlike Gates) didn't get the chance to "redeem" and paint over his previous asshole-ishness.
That sounds like an anti-Apple conclusion, in that it makes Apple look like a bunch of ungrateful backstabbing assholes. "Yeah, thanks for saving our bacon 20 years ago. If it weren't for you, we'd be dead by now. Now, kindly fuck off and die so we can get busy pissing on your grave."
Not to sound like I'm defending Apple (who I'm really not a fan of these days), but despite Gates' attempt to repaint himself as Mr. Charity Benefactor, MS were always a bunch of predatory, bullying, market-share-exploiting assholes who only did what was in their own self interest. In this case, it was in their interest to have a token (and very distant second-place) "competitor", without which they would have more obviously been a monopoly and at risk from regulatory action (and even a possible forced spit).
If it had been in their interest to do so, I'm entirely confident they would have let Apple go to the wall in a heartbeat.
yea innovation like new supermario world zelda quest 387
How many COD games are there again?
This is only relevant if one assumes the discussion is a fanboy/partisan pointscoring exercise where the "least worst" side wins.
In truth, the fact that there have been 234 Call of Duty games (or whatever) doesn't negate the fact that Nintendo's reliance on the 142nd Zelda game ("Zelda Gets Really Old"), or Super Mario Land 379 1/2 are exploiting the same old properties, and hardly "innovative".
(Yes, they *could* in theory do something innovative featuring Mario, but (e.g.) "New Super Mario Bros U" isn't, it's just another version of the sidescrolling, token-collecting, SNES-ish formula relying on the nostalgia of people now in their 30s who grew up with the NES and SNES).
You can also keep all your f*cking enormous debts from your crappy Scottish banks - that should burn thru a good few years of tax revenue...
We're fine with that (*), provided that Westminster returns every penny of revenue relating to North Sea oil and gas from Scottish waters (i.e. most of it) received, adjusted for inflation, since the 1970s- all the time they've been bleating about Scotland being unfairly subsidised and scaremongering about how the oil was about to run out.
So on balance, it looks like.... you're in the red. Never mind! You can deposit those billions in our Royal Bank of Scotland account.:-P
(*) So long as you're happy to deal with the problems caused by the English and English-derived parts of these "Scottish" banks:-)
You do know that the "Conservative" party is short for Conservative and Unionist right? It's nothing to do with the wealth scotland has.
The "Unionist" in the "Conservative and Unionist Party" refers to the fact they merged with the "Liberal Unionist Party" just over 100 years ago. The Liberal Unionists were formed in 1886 as a breakaway from the Liberal Party who were opposed to Irish home rule (which William Gladstone, the Liberal leader, came down in support of). That's essentially what it refers to.
Despite the fact that the modern-day Conservative Party is ostensibly unionist, the "Unionist" in the official party title is therefore a bit of a red herring.
Overly complex. You only need a screen-wide sponge under computer control, to erase it.
True, but I was thinking in terms of what would have to be done to modify an existing computer-controlled plotter with as little work as possible.
If it was one of those models that changed colour by grabbing a different pen from those stored at the side, you could (perhaps) replace the pen tip on one of those with erasing material instead. Your suggestion would obviously be better for large-scale erasing, but would also require a whole new mechanism and interfacing.
Use a white board and erasable marker plotter, computer controlled.
What you're describing sounds like a vertically-mounted computer plotter with a whiteboard instead of paper.
I guess the two issues are that plotters might not be designed to work vertically(?) and that one would also have to include an "erase" facility. The latter would probably just replace one of the pens with a piece of felt mounted onto a pen-holder that could be "drawn" in the correct order to erase previously-written text.
It occurs to me that one place you could possibly use E-Ink would be in an actual cars dash, well provided you could make a good way to see it at night anyway. [yadda yadda yadda]
This has nothing to do with the (first) post you were "replying" to. But I guess you realised that as a top-level post placed in its correct chronological position it would have appeared further down the page. And what *you* had to say was so much more important than everyone else that it justified cheating your way into a more prominent position near the top. Right?
I think I know why they're selling. It's the cost of maintaining that huge worldwide network of free, open wireless access points under the "Linksys" SSID...
Stop complaining about stores (those business owners aren't operating a store front because they like seeing you everyday) trying to maximize their profits, and take some responsibility for your own privacy!
We can do both. The fact that we should be looking after our privacy doesn't let the stores off the hook or excuse them from criticism of their behaviour. Nor does the fact that they're only in it for the money (duh)- that explains why they're doing it, it doesn't excuse it.
And to pre-empt another argument I can see coming from someone; no, the fact that we're free to shop or not shop at a particular shop *doesn't* change the fact that we're still entitled to criticise them as much as we like for that behaviour. (This one's a close relative of the flawed "don't like it, don't buy it" argument dismissal.)
The Amiga 500 (i.e. the first "affordable" Amiga and the one that people remember as the "classic" Amiga) came out in 1987, and I assume that's what you had.
I suspect that the original 1985 Amiga 1000 might not have come with a modulator. Then again, the list price for that was apparently $1300, and if you had the money (and inclination) for that, the $300 cost of the monitor probably wouldn't be an issue, especially as it was probably being bought by professionals and hobbyists who wouldn't spend $1300 on state-of-the-art media computer and compromise it by shoving the display through some crappy RF.:-)
Apparently Midway Games West (the renamed Atari Games) shut down completely in 2003 and only existed as a holding company after that. So even if they bought the "company", it would mean little more than IP and a name in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
As a French speaker, I can guarantee that most programmers here understand little more than the basic programming terms. Most of the specs have been translated into French, so that's not a problem.
Vincent: And you know what they call a ClassCastException in France?
Jules: They don't call it a ClassCastException?
Vincent: No man, they got the socialist system. They wouldn't know what the f*** a "class" is.
Jules: Then what do they call it?
Vincent: They call it a RoyaleWithCheeseException.
Jules: A RoyaleWithCheeseException. What do they call a NullPointerException?
Vincent: Well, a NullPointerException's a NullPointerException, but they call it un NullPointerException.
Jules: Un NullPointerException. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call the spaceship operator?
Vincent: I dunno, I didn't do any Perl programming over there.
I was staying at someone's house, and after a few cups of instant coffee I remember realising that I wasn't anywhere near as uptight as I'd normally feel having drunk that many.
It was only *after* this that I noticed it was a jar of decaffeinated coffee (and the possibility hadn't occurred to me beforehand, as I never normally drink the stuff).
For a time, between about 1997 and 2003 they were quite popular, at least in Europe.
They did enjoy a brief period of increased (but still relatively moderate and short-lived) popularity here at the turn of the millennium; i.e. the immediate pre-iPod era, when the only MP3 players were impractical, overpriced geek toys.
But even that "peak" was only an improvement relative to their almost nonexistent sales prior to that point- they never came remotely close to the popularity of CDs and cassettes, and quickly faded when the iPod came along.
(Having wondered what had caused that blip of popularity after years of doing nothing, I guessed that it primarily had to do with price reductions making them affordable to teens and twentysomethings. The BBC article seems to confirm this, stating that they slashed them to a third of the cost).
Addendum; it looks like they did try marketing it as a data storage device in the early days, but played silly buggers with compatibility and managed to kill it off.
Maybe so, but it doesn't change or excuse previous behaviour. Jobs died and (unlike Gates) didn't get the chance to "redeem" and paint over his previous asshole-ishness.
Your second sentence is in violation of the first. Jobs could never redeem himself if his previous behaviour is not excused.
Not at all. Note the intentional use of quotes around "redeem" to express my scepticism and indicate that's how I believe others may perceive it, not necessarily how I do.
As for your second paragraph, I think you're taking it too far. People who got rich being dicks aren't entitled to have their previous dickishness ignored by giving away some of their money. That's not to say they can't make up for it to some extent, but no-one gets to buy their way entirely out of it that easily.
Squandering the potential of MiniDisc through over-zealous DRM, self-interest (and conflict of interest) as well as Sony's general arrogance seems to be its story in a nutshell.
The underlying technology of even the original MiniDiscs had the potential to be *way* more flexible and powerful than it was ever allowed to be. By the standards of the early-1990s it had masses of storage and random access, leading to the possibility of file-like transfer of music tracks. Granted, back then- years before MP3s rose to prominence- people didn't consume music as "files" nor have computers powerful enough to do anything with them anyway, and veering too far from the familiar paradigm probably would have confused and scared Joe Public.
However, the potential to handle and transfer tracks in a file-like way *would* have been something people would have liked- if marketed correctly- even then. Instead, they forced people to dub things in real-time and restricted digital copying.
And they could still have marketed it as a data format once established and provided they kept things clear. Had they done that, it may well have replaced the 1.44MB floppy. To be honest, Sony had the *technology* (and storage space) to do some of what MP3 players did almost a decade later, but they forced it into being little more than a digital audio cassette with random access.
Even when they did improve the format and allow some data use, they forced users to play silly buggers with their crappy software and restrictions.
And let's not get into how, when MP3 *did* come along, their self-interest, NIH and arrogance led them to drag their heels to such an extent that a personal computer company (which is what Apple had been up until that point) steal the market for portable audio from the company that had invented the Walkman and led it for 20 years. It's easy to forget how ludicrous that would have sounded in the mid-to-late-90s, but the market was Sony's to lose- they had the technology and the name- but they totally squandered it. They lost that market, and it was no-one's fault but their own.
Microsoft is not Bill Gates, and Microsoft can operate independant of his philanthropy.
Gates was in charge of MS at the time of their Apple "rescue", and this was long before his philanthropy.
Even that aside, if your choices are a guy that donates billions to all manner of charities around the world, or a Jobs that tells everyone to go fuck themselves, I know which one I'd prefer to see.
Maybe so, but it doesn't change or excuse previous behaviour. Jobs died and (unlike Gates) didn't get the chance to "redeem" and paint over his previous asshole-ishness.
That sounds like an anti-Apple conclusion, in that it makes Apple look like a bunch of ungrateful backstabbing assholes. "Yeah, thanks for saving our bacon 20 years ago. If it weren't for you, we'd be dead by now. Now, kindly fuck off and die so we can get busy pissing on your grave."
Not to sound like I'm defending Apple (who I'm really not a fan of these days), but despite Gates' attempt to repaint himself as Mr. Charity Benefactor, MS were always a bunch of predatory, bullying, market-share-exploiting assholes who only did what was in their own self interest. In this case, it was in their interest to have a token (and very distant second-place) "competitor", without which they would have more obviously been a monopoly and at risk from regulatory action (and even a possible forced spit).
If it had been in their interest to do so, I'm entirely confident they would have let Apple go to the wall in a heartbeat.
It's a PS2 with a tablet forcibly inserted.
"Tablet forcibly inserted" makes it sound like it's been given a suppository.
yea innovation like new supermario world zelda quest 387
How many COD games are there again?
This is only relevant if one assumes the discussion is a fanboy/partisan pointscoring exercise where the "least worst" side wins.
In truth, the fact that there have been 234 Call of Duty games (or whatever) doesn't negate the fact that Nintendo's reliance on the 142nd Zelda game ("Zelda Gets Really Old"), or Super Mario Land 379 1/2 are exploiting the same old properties, and hardly "innovative".
(Yes, they *could* in theory do something innovative featuring Mario, but (e.g.) "New Super Mario Bros U" isn't, it's just another version of the sidescrolling, token-collecting, SNES-ish formula relying on the nostalgia of people now in their 30s who grew up with the NES and SNES).
How much stuff have we seen already - absolutely ludicrous - yet it sells?
Indeed.
You should get a load of my "additive eraser."
do you mean a pencil, perchance?
I think he means Tippex or Liquid Paper.
When using the voice part of the Nintendo DS e.g. on Brain Training, I have to put on a faux-American accent to get the bloody thing to work! :/
Shouldn't be too hard, you west-coasters are all obsessed with American culture anyway! :-)
You can also keep all your f*cking enormous debts from your crappy Scottish banks - that should burn thru a good few years of tax revenue...
We're fine with that (*), provided that Westminster returns every penny of revenue relating to North Sea oil and gas from Scottish waters (i.e. most of it) received, adjusted for inflation, since the 1970s- all the time they've been bleating about Scotland being unfairly subsidised and scaremongering about how the oil was about to run out.
:-P
:-)
So on balance, it looks like.... you're in the red. Never mind! You can deposit those billions in our Royal Bank of Scotland account.
(*) So long as you're happy to deal with the problems caused by the English and English-derived parts of these "Scottish" banks
You do know that the "Conservative" party is short for Conservative and Unionist right? It's nothing to do with the wealth scotland has.
The "Unionist" in the "Conservative and Unionist Party" refers to the fact they merged with the "Liberal Unionist Party" just over 100 years ago. The Liberal Unionists were formed in 1886 as a breakaway from the Liberal Party who were opposed to Irish home rule (which William Gladstone, the Liberal leader, came down in support of). That's essentially what it refers to.
Despite the fact that the modern-day Conservative Party is ostensibly unionist, the "Unionist" in the official party title is therefore a bit of a red herring.
Plotters are designed to feed the substrate.
Some do, but not the flatbed types I had in mind. (Sorry, should have been more specific in the first place).
Overly complex. You only need a screen-wide sponge under computer control, to erase it.
True, but I was thinking in terms of what would have to be done to modify an existing computer-controlled plotter with as little work as possible.
If it was one of those models that changed colour by grabbing a different pen from those stored at the side, you could (perhaps) replace the pen tip on one of those with erasing material instead. Your suggestion would obviously be better for large-scale erasing, but would also require a whole new mechanism and interfacing.
Use a white board and erasable marker plotter, computer controlled.
What you're describing sounds like a vertically-mounted computer plotter with a whiteboard instead of paper.
I guess the two issues are that plotters might not be designed to work vertically(?) and that one would also have to include an "erase" facility. The latter would probably just replace one of the pens with a piece of felt mounted onto a pen-holder that could be "drawn" in the correct order to erase previously-written text.
It occurs to me that one place you could possibly use E-Ink would be in an actual cars dash, well provided you could make a good way to see it at night anyway. [yadda yadda yadda]
This has nothing to do with the (first) post you were "replying" to. But I guess you realised that as a top-level post placed in its correct chronological position it would have appeared further down the page. And what *you* had to say was so much more important than everyone else that it justified cheating your way into a more prominent position near the top. Right?
"WTF is that smell?"
"Excuse me, I'm receiving a FAX."
Essential communication from those guys in the Darmstadt office, perhaps?
Are you on your way to diffuse a bomb
Surely the bomb will "diffuse" itself when it explodes? ;-)
I think I know why they're selling. It's the cost of maintaining that huge worldwide network of free, open wireless access points under the "Linksys" SSID...
Stop complaining about stores (those business owners aren't operating a store front because they like seeing you everyday) trying to maximize their profits, and take some responsibility for your own privacy!
We can do both. The fact that we should be looking after our privacy doesn't let the stores off the hook or excuse them from criticism of their behaviour. Nor does the fact that they're only in it for the money (duh)- that explains why they're doing it, it doesn't excuse it.
And to pre-empt another argument I can see coming from someone; no, the fact that we're free to shop or not shop at a particular shop *doesn't* change the fact that we're still entitled to criticise them as much as we like for that behaviour. (This one's a close relative of the flawed "don't like it, don't buy it" argument dismissal.)
The Amiga 500 (i.e. the first "affordable" Amiga and the one that people remember as the "classic" Amiga) came out in 1987, and I assume that's what you had.
:-)
I suspect that the original 1985 Amiga 1000 might not have come with a modulator. Then again, the list price for that was apparently $1300, and if you had the money (and inclination) for that, the $300 cost of the monitor probably wouldn't be an issue, especially as it was probably being bought by professionals and hobbyists who wouldn't spend $1300 on state-of-the-art media computer and compromise it by shoving the display through some crappy RF.
Apparently Midway Games West (the renamed Atari Games) shut down completely in 2003 and only existed as a holding company after that. So even if they bought the "company", it would mean little more than IP and a name in practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games