Most people I know who have bought iMacs have done so because they were the cheapest desktop Macs available (and they wanted both a desktop and OS X). When the Mac Mini was introduced, this was still often the case if they didn't already have a display to use. It's also fairly popular with the 'we can afford to by Macs for our secretaries' demographic for machines in visible positions, but it never seemed like a particularly practical form factor. Other companies have launched all-in-one machines before, but none has been a commercial success, and I'd have expected it to be if there were a real demand for them.
Marketing this as the self-build crowd seems especially weird, as self-builders tend to either want expandability or something that they can't get from an OEM, and this form factor is weak in both. There are already a lot of nice Mini ITX HTPC cases, and they let you upgrade the monitor separately from the rest of the machine, if you want to...
Seriously? Check my posting history and you'll have to try very hard to find something complementary that I've said about Microsoft. I've had this account for almost 10 years, so unless I sold it there's very little chance that it was created to shill (and, let's face it, even very low UID Slashdot accounts don't sell for enough to make it worthwhile selling them). I do, however, get tired of people repeating one company's FUD and then calling anyone who calls them out on it a shill. Microsoft, Apple, and Google all spread FUD about each other. Stop repeating it and do some actual fact checking. Bing copies Google is up there with Macs don't get viruses and Get The Facts.
A cynic would say that they may be collecting it, but judging from their recent share price they're not as good at exploiting what they've recorded. A more pragmatic person would argue that it's better to have two (or, ideally, more) companies with partial tracking information about the population than one with a complete database.
Oh, FFS, that's the second time this crap has been repeated in this thread. Bing does not use Google Search, but it does use the results from the Bing Toolbar. Some 'clever' Google engineers sent some pages containing links to nonsensical search terms to Bing via the Bing Toolbar and then, amazingly, these became the Bing results for these search terms. The Google Toolbar does the same thing, and you could no doubt use it to produce some choice search results on Google for nonsense terms too.
You can be more subtle than that. For example, buy a load of followers / friends for a Republican candidate that spend most of their time posting Hitler quotes, or for a Democrat candidate that spend most of their time posting Stalin quotes. Then use the same 'look what crazy people support this candidate' technique that worked so well on the Tea Party and OWS.
That's the point of the intelligence test. They need to be sufficiently stupid that they can't replace you, but sufficiently intelligent that they realise this. Alternatively, you can go for Hitler's strategy and give overlapping areas of responsibility to different groups with guns, so that they're too busy with infighting that they don't get around to deposing you.
A final-year student here produced an implementation of the NES (sadly, except for the sound chip) in Bluespec last year. It runs on an Altera FPGA and is cycle-accurate including the CPU, input, and video. Even with all of the documentation available, this was not a trivial project, and for the SNES or N64 it's even harder. I'm hoping that someone will take the project to implement the sound support this year - it's almost as hard as the whole of the rest of the project, but could be fun...
It's an affirmative defence. That means that you can still be taken to court for it, but you will win if you show that that what you are doing is covered by fair use.
It does for me. Apparently there's a bell curve, with some outliers experiencing symptoms not far off heroin withdrawal (thankfully I'm not that bad) and others experiencing nothing. Most people just experience mild lethargy for a bit.
Faulty logic. You're comparing their readership to the entire population (including babies). Instead try comparing it to other newspapers. The Sun's circulation is around 50% greater than its nearest rival, and the only papers with a circulation over 1 million are The Sun, The Mail and The Mirror.
That depends on your jurisdiction. In the US, that's permissible infringement, as it's covered under fair use. In the UK, it's technically illegal to format shift, but it's not enforced.
Let's say you target OpenGL. For vaguely recent things, you probably want to target OpenGL 3.0. Maybe 4.0. But you can get better performance if you use some extensions. Some are nVidia extensions and some are AMD extensions, so you need different code paths for them. Your target GPU will probably have 256M-3GB of VRAM, which gives you a massive range in the amount of vertex and texture data you can use before you start hitting performance problems. Your GPUs, even within the same family, vary in number of execution units by a factor of 4. You need to test both extremes.
Or you can target a console. Even if the console uses OpenGL to expose the GPU, you're targeting a single model, with known performance characteristics, and a fixed amount of RAM. This was more or less the point of Microsoft's reorganisation of the DirectX model around version 10: to give a baseline for game developers. A GPU would either meet these requirements, or it wouldn't. If you produced a DirectX 10 game, it would run on any DirectX 10 GPU, or it would not run. In theory, anyway: the practice turned out to be a bit different...
Perfectly legal for me to dump the 4gb hard disk image in my actual xbox and run it on an emulator for interoperability purposes
Legal? Probably. Easy? Hell no. Especially as the platform becomes less common. This is why Amiga and Mac emulators sucked for so long - you needed to track down the original machine to dump the ROMs (or grab them illegally, of course), and if you were willing to do that then you may as well use the real machine. The situation improved for Macs when Apple made MacOS 7.5 a free download and when someone noticed that they provided a ROM update for an old machine that you could grab the ROM image from, so you could just grab everything you needed legally from Apple, but it's still a bit of a pain.
No, copyright covers, wait for it... copying. It is entirely possible to infringe copyright without distribution. The trick would be someone proving damages and not getting the case tossed out of court if they tried to prosecute.
Tea contains tanin, which blocks the absorption of caffeine. This typically means that you get an immediate caffeine kick from coffee, which then wears off, while tea gives you a slower release of a smaller amount over a period of a few hours. Add to that, after regular consumption you build up a tolerance for caffeine and so won't experience any effects (other than withdrawal if you stop having any), but if you regularly drink tea then you won't be used to the sudden jump in caffeine levels. Oh, and much of the effect of caffeine is psychological. A study a few years ago found that people who unknowingly drink decaf also exhibit the symptoms that they expect from coffee, right up until the point that withdrawal kicks in (and, in some people, the withdrawal is so mild that they don't notice).
It's also a matter of timing. NeXT was doing pretty much everything that the first OS X Macs did - in some cases better - up to a decade earlier. But back when NeXT was doing it you couldn't sell the machines at a profit for anything under $5000, $10000 for a decent one. A bit later, Apple was selling more powerful machines around the $1000 mark.
The same thing happened with portable media players. The 1.8" hard drives made mass-market ones possible. Earlier ones had used 2.5" laptop drives (too bulky) or flash (64-128MB - enough for one or two albums) and weren't that appealing. The iPod would have been a disaster if it had been released any earlier, because the technology just wasn't there. If it had been released later, then it's possible that the Nomad would already have had enough mindshare that it would have been hard to compete. Apple entered the market at exactly the right time and advertised the hell out of their product so everyone knew about the iPod, whereas only people who read geek news knew about the Nomad.
Their phones and tablets are a similar story. It's not surprising that everything looks like an iPhone now - the availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens make finger-based touch interfaces popular. We're around the 20th anniversary of Microsoft's first entry into the tablet market, but these machines were huge (remember the size of a battery on a 386 laptop?) and needed a stylus. Being able to interact with the system with your finger - or fingers - is a big shift. Apple jumped in right at the right moment, when a new technology made a new market possible. And, once again, they threw huge amounts of advertising money so people think iPhone-like phone instead of phone-with-capacitive-touchscreen.
This app needs to be killed and the Dems probably should have a modest lawsuit payout for violating privacy rights.
Why? If the information is already public then that is the problem, not the fact that it's now public and easy to use. Someone else could easily create a new app that shows everyone's party registration. The correct fix isn't to go after the first to draw attention to the fact that the registration is public, it's to stop it from being public.
The difference is that party membership in the UK is just as private as being a member of any other group - for good reason, the early members of the labour movement were harassed and arrested. Making the membership records public makes any number of abuses easy. There was a lot of furore last year when the BNP membership list was made public, for example. Membership lists are also now covered by EU and UK data protection legislation, so the party must ensure that they are not shared with other companies without explicit permission of the individual. The 'usually accessed only by political campaigns and companies that sell consumer data' bit of the summary would be completely illegal in the UK.
Things like rice and lentils? They're very cheap: that's the main reason why so many people eat them. I've known a lot of people who were almost completely, if not completely, vegetarian while they were students because it was much cheaper to eat good (and healthy) vegetarian food than meat.
So you post a password reset code to her house. Or you charge her $1 on the credit card that she used to pay for the phone for the reset. Or you send it to another email address that she entered when she created it.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people I know who have bought iMacs have done so because they were the cheapest desktop Macs available (and they wanted both a desktop and OS X). When the Mac Mini was introduced, this was still often the case if they didn't already have a display to use. It's also fairly popular with the 'we can afford to by Macs for our secretaries' demographic for machines in visible positions, but it never seemed like a particularly practical form factor. Other companies have launched all-in-one machines before, but none has been a commercial success, and I'd have expected it to be if there were a real demand for them.
Marketing this as the self-build crowd seems especially weird, as self-builders tend to either want expandability or something that they can't get from an OEM, and this form factor is weak in both. There are already a lot of nice Mini ITX HTPC cases, and they let you upgrade the monitor separately from the rest of the machine, if you want to...
Seriously? Check my posting history and you'll have to try very hard to find something complementary that I've said about Microsoft. I've had this account for almost 10 years, so unless I sold it there's very little chance that it was created to shill (and, let's face it, even very low UID Slashdot accounts don't sell for enough to make it worthwhile selling them). I do, however, get tired of people repeating one company's FUD and then calling anyone who calls them out on it a shill. Microsoft, Apple, and Google all spread FUD about each other. Stop repeating it and do some actual fact checking. Bing copies Google is up there with Macs don't get viruses and Get The Facts.
A cynic would say that they may be collecting it, but judging from their recent share price they're not as good at exploiting what they've recorded. A more pragmatic person would argue that it's better to have two (or, ideally, more) companies with partial tracking information about the population than one with a complete database.
Oh, FFS, that's the second time this crap has been repeated in this thread. Bing does not use Google Search, but it does use the results from the Bing Toolbar. Some 'clever' Google engineers sent some pages containing links to nonsensical search terms to Bing via the Bing Toolbar and then, amazingly, these became the Bing results for these search terms. The Google Toolbar does the same thing, and you could no doubt use it to produce some choice search results on Google for nonsense terms too.
You can be more subtle than that. For example, buy a load of followers / friends for a Republican candidate that spend most of their time posting Hitler quotes, or for a Democrat candidate that spend most of their time posting Stalin quotes. Then use the same 'look what crazy people support this candidate' technique that worked so well on the Tea Party and OWS.
That's the point of the intelligence test. They need to be sufficiently stupid that they can't replace you, but sufficiently intelligent that they realise this. Alternatively, you can go for Hitler's strategy and give overlapping areas of responsibility to different groups with guns, so that they're too busy with infighting that they don't get around to deposing you.
A final-year student here produced an implementation of the NES (sadly, except for the sound chip) in Bluespec last year. It runs on an Altera FPGA and is cycle-accurate including the CPU, input, and video. Even with all of the documentation available, this was not a trivial project, and for the SNES or N64 it's even harder. I'm hoping that someone will take the project to implement the sound support this year - it's almost as hard as the whole of the rest of the project, but could be fun...
It's an affirmative defence. That means that you can still be taken to court for it, but you will win if you show that that what you are doing is covered by fair use.
It does for me. Apparently there's a bell curve, with some outliers experiencing symptoms not far off heroin withdrawal (thankfully I'm not that bad) and others experiencing nothing. Most people just experience mild lethargy for a bit.
Faulty logic. You're comparing their readership to the entire population (including babies). Instead try comparing it to other newspapers. The Sun's circulation is around 50% greater than its nearest rival, and the only papers with a circulation over 1 million are The Sun, The Mail and The Mirror.
That depends on your jurisdiction. In the US, that's permissible infringement, as it's covered under fair use. In the UK, it's technically illegal to format shift, but it's not enforced.
Let's say you target OpenGL. For vaguely recent things, you probably want to target OpenGL 3.0. Maybe 4.0. But you can get better performance if you use some extensions. Some are nVidia extensions and some are AMD extensions, so you need different code paths for them. Your target GPU will probably have 256M-3GB of VRAM, which gives you a massive range in the amount of vertex and texture data you can use before you start hitting performance problems. Your GPUs, even within the same family, vary in number of execution units by a factor of 4. You need to test both extremes.
Or you can target a console. Even if the console uses OpenGL to expose the GPU, you're targeting a single model, with known performance characteristics, and a fixed amount of RAM. This was more or less the point of Microsoft's reorganisation of the DirectX model around version 10: to give a baseline for game developers. A GPU would either meet these requirements, or it wouldn't. If you produced a DirectX 10 game, it would run on any DirectX 10 GPU, or it would not run. In theory, anyway: the practice turned out to be a bit different...
Perfectly legal for me to dump the 4gb hard disk image in my actual xbox and run it on an emulator for interoperability purposes
Legal? Probably. Easy? Hell no. Especially as the platform becomes less common. This is why Amiga and Mac emulators sucked for so long - you needed to track down the original machine to dump the ROMs (or grab them illegally, of course), and if you were willing to do that then you may as well use the real machine. The situation improved for Macs when Apple made MacOS 7.5 a free download and when someone noticed that they provided a ROM update for an old machine that you could grab the ROM image from, so you could just grab everything you needed legally from Apple, but it's still a bit of a pain.
No, copyright covers, wait for it... copying. It is entirely possible to infringe copyright without distribution. The trick would be someone proving damages and not getting the case tossed out of court if they tried to prosecute.
Unlike the proprietary software world, where when someone reports a problem it's fixed immediately and a patch pushed out, free of charge?
Tea contains tanin, which blocks the absorption of caffeine. This typically means that you get an immediate caffeine kick from coffee, which then wears off, while tea gives you a slower release of a smaller amount over a period of a few hours. Add to that, after regular consumption you build up a tolerance for caffeine and so won't experience any effects (other than withdrawal if you stop having any), but if you regularly drink tea then you won't be used to the sudden jump in caffeine levels. Oh, and much of the effect of caffeine is psychological. A study a few years ago found that people who unknowingly drink decaf also exhibit the symptoms that they expect from coffee, right up until the point that withdrawal kicks in (and, in some people, the withdrawal is so mild that they don't notice).
Seriously that's quite a claim and needs a bit of backing up. UK folk aren't all dribbling TV-addicts whose idea of literature is The Sun "newspaper".
Given the circulation figures of The Sun, I think you're not doing a great job of disproving the grandparent's assertion.
For my own part, I'm a reader with a voracious appetite for new material.
If you put down your book for a minute and go and wander around for a bit then you might discover that you are not part of the majority.
It's also a matter of timing. NeXT was doing pretty much everything that the first OS X Macs did - in some cases better - up to a decade earlier. But back when NeXT was doing it you couldn't sell the machines at a profit for anything under $5000, $10000 for a decent one. A bit later, Apple was selling more powerful machines around the $1000 mark.
The same thing happened with portable media players. The 1.8" hard drives made mass-market ones possible. Earlier ones had used 2.5" laptop drives (too bulky) or flash (64-128MB - enough for one or two albums) and weren't that appealing. The iPod would have been a disaster if it had been released any earlier, because the technology just wasn't there. If it had been released later, then it's possible that the Nomad would already have had enough mindshare that it would have been hard to compete. Apple entered the market at exactly the right time and advertised the hell out of their product so everyone knew about the iPod, whereas only people who read geek news knew about the Nomad.
Their phones and tablets are a similar story. It's not surprising that everything looks like an iPhone now - the availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens make finger-based touch interfaces popular. We're around the 20th anniversary of Microsoft's first entry into the tablet market, but these machines were huge (remember the size of a battery on a 386 laptop?) and needed a stylus. Being able to interact with the system with your finger - or fingers - is a big shift. Apple jumped in right at the right moment, when a new technology made a new market possible. And, once again, they threw huge amounts of advertising money so people think iPhone-like phone instead of phone-with-capacitive-touchscreen.
This app needs to be killed and the Dems probably should have a modest lawsuit payout for violating privacy rights.
Why? If the information is already public then that is the problem, not the fact that it's now public and easy to use. Someone else could easily create a new app that shows everyone's party registration. The correct fix isn't to go after the first to draw attention to the fact that the registration is public, it's to stop it from being public.
Meh, that was on the web. This is entirely different, it's a mobile app! Now excuse me while I pop to the patent office...
The difference is that party membership in the UK is just as private as being a member of any other group - for good reason, the early members of the labour movement were harassed and arrested. Making the membership records public makes any number of abuses easy. There was a lot of furore last year when the BNP membership list was made public, for example. Membership lists are also now covered by EU and UK data protection legislation, so the party must ensure that they are not shared with other companies without explicit permission of the individual. The 'usually accessed only by political campaigns and companies that sell consumer data' bit of the summary would be completely illegal in the UK.
Yes. That's what I get for posting before coffee...
Things like rice and lentils? They're very cheap: that's the main reason why so many people eat them. I've known a lot of people who were almost completely, if not completely, vegetarian while they were students because it was much cheaper to eat good (and healthy) vegetarian food than meat.
So you post a password reset code to her house. Or you charge her $1 on the credit card that she used to pay for the phone for the reset. Or you send it to another email address that she entered when she created it.
Some time around 1998, why do you ask?