...and like the GP32, which could already play DivX movies when the Gameboy Advance was new, the GP2X will only be known to a handful of people. Regular people won't shell out 200 bucks for a portable and serious gamers will buy a PSP instead (because that' where all the big brand games are)... It's not likely that the GP* will ever be big in the West. Quite sad, I always thought that Gamepark's offerings were exciting, although prohibitively expensive (at least for a student).
Prepaid is also great for people who just don't use their phone often but still need to be able to do so on the go. I pay 15 EUR a year - because the prepaid card is limited to twelve months, then you have to purchase a refresh, the cheapest version of which is 15 bucks. If I had a contract I would get a new mobile every one or two years (which I don't need or want, I like my 6210), but I would pay more in two months than I pay in a year now.
Of course I could just tell them to send me the most expensive mobile they offer and sell the thing on eBay. With the ridiculous prices of feature-rich mobiles I might even make more money than I pay for the contract...
The problem with Firefly is: How would they fit the movie into canon? Wash and Shepherd are dead and I don't think that replacing them or working without them would work well. Going Dallas and declaring the movie a dream would be excessively lame. Having the new series play before the film would make all kinds of problems, as well.
I think that the movie was intended to wrap up Firefly, to finish the thing. It included things that would have happened over the course of several seasons if the series would have continued. A new series would probably suffer from the fact that the big character development can't happen because it happens in the movie.
It's sad, but I do think that Firefly is dead. (BTW, over here in.de, Firefly never came on TV, but there's a German DVD set which I'm currently renting. Just watched Jaynestown.)
No problem at all, chummer. Artificial muscles have a maximum level of 4, cost one point of essence per level and don't count against your reaction; the deal's not that good. Once boosted reflexes or move-by-wire come out, though...
1.) Make a site with spiffy CSS2+ effects
2.) Write a stylesheet that displays the site in a usable state, even if it doesn't look that good
3.) <!--[if IE]> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iestyle.css"> <![endif]-->
4.) <!--[if IE]> Because of technical limitations of Microsoft(R) Internet Explorer(TM) this site is displayed using a fallback stylesheet. If you really want to see the regular version of the site we're afraid to tell you that you'd have to use a different browser, as the Internt Explorer(TM) doesn't yet support the corresponding W3C standards. <![endif]-->
You can also leave out step 4, especially if you can emulate the regular CSS' behavior by using broken CSS in iestyle.css. If you can't you can at least have the page degrade gracefully when IE is present.
Seriously, conditional comments are the IE's greatest feature.
Seriously, good music hasn't died out. Just listen to PRESS PLAY ON TAPE's free stuff. And then buy their CDs.
I'm currently listening to Polysics (link to WP because their site ain't that great), who make quite nice music and quite strange videos. Another nice Asian band is YMCK, who make bleepy, cutesy bitpop. (Whoa, they've released their second album? Let's hope that their extrajapanese distributor gets it in stock soon.) And of course there's Machinae Supremacy, the ultimate Swedish SID Metal band. Return to Snake Mountain, anyone?
There's a lood of great bands out there. You just have to find them.
> The new DVDs aren't big enough to make an impact on the backup market (where > you need 100s of GB per disk to even be considered), and they are (and will > remain) far more costly than ordinary CD/DVD-RW media. They have some > attractiveness for PC and console gaming, but even there, without a huge > amount of in-game video, current DVD capacity will suffice for years for the > vast majority of games.
Just wait until the new.NET Generation Secure Gaming Framework comes out! All executables will be stored as Secure Managed Code, which means that the executable comes with 12 MiB of executable code, 25 MiB of security certificates and 120 MiB of Trusted Computing interface code. All videos will be stored via a proprietary XML extension (the.NET Generation Secure Media Framework Professional Edition)...
Hm, that's true. But that's probably because Ruby, C# et al. are currently the trendy languages. Everyone's talking about it so Slashdot's talking about it. Slashdot is a newsblog, after all, and the editors have to have news in order to have a story (except for non-news stories, which happen about twice a year).
Also, C++ isn't relevant for web development and that's what the Development section seems to specialize in lately. Probably because web apps are the new Dotcom and currently everyone is excited about turning their office suite, cron daemon and web browser into a web app. Preferably with AJAX, Ruby on Rails and rounded corners...
HTML is a pretty niche language with limited power. Everything it does can easily be accomplished by other means (TeX, OpenDocument...). How about paying more attention to more 'bread and butter' languages like RTF, BibTeX, and plain text?
Seriously, PHP is quite good at what it's intended for. Sure, it doesn't have pointers and templates, but then again it's mainly intended for web development. You don't need pointers to generate a website. You don'd need absolut performance to generate site usage statistics. You need a language that is easy to use, versatile and powerful, in that order.
You know, there's a reason why PHP is big and most people haven't even heard about CGI/C++ or CGI/Scheme.
Well, PHP is useful for general purpose scripting. I went from web scripting to shell scripting and I'm much more proficient at PHP than I am at Python or sh, so when I have to write shell scripts I usually go with PHP. Yes, I know that sh is faster. Yes, I know that Perl has better PR. But I can just crank out a PHP script in half the time it takes me to read awk's manpage or whatever I need to get that sh script going.
It might not be the cleanest language around, but it allows for fairly rapid script development when you're familiar with it. Also, it has the most useful documentation of any scripting language I have ever seen, even more useful than Java's API documentation.
Maybe you get one movie like that per generation, but certainly more than one thing. For example, in 1994 Marathon came out. A decade later people are still speculationg about the plot. I'm pretty sure that there are a couple more gems like this one spread across the media.
No, DRM really does prevent casual piracy, and studies have proven this. However, freeloaders have gotten much more proactive in breaking copy protection and distributing the content to as many other freeloaders as they can.
Because they know that regular people can't/don't care to circumvent the pretection. This is not new. Did you ever hear of terms like "Commodore 64" and "BBS"? The old art form called "cracktros" got its name from the very fact that the stuff was put into the available free space on cracked game disks. Cracking-and-distributing is by no means a recent thing.
There won't BE any money if nobody pays them.
Unlikely. Yes, saled will diminish, because people now get stuff they don't really like for free. But a lot of people still go to the movies or buy that CD-like storeage medium or a DVD. Many people still pay for stuff if they really like it. Filesharing is not going to destroy the entertainment industry, the same as radio and cassette recorders didn't destroy it.
Ah, the "RIAA abuses artists" tact. Except that artists willingly sign their contracts.
Yup, 'cause that's the only way to get to the top. However, some artists are already using non-traditional means of distributing their stuff - and hey, even if the RIAA dies the independent artists will still get paid for their works. Seems like the death of entertainment becomes less and less likely. The Internet does take some of the incentive for a contract away, nowadays you can reach the whole world with nothing more than a website for twenty bucks a month.
It does prevent casual piracy, and it makes sure there are dollars to begin with to pay those content creators. Pirates don't want to pay anybody as they consume other people's work. It's the antithesis of both capitalism and the Open Source philosophy.
It also makes sure some people don't want to pay for what they consider otherwise a great product. When I consider buying a music CD I first take a look at whether it's from a major label or independent. If it's the former I check whether there is any kind of copy protection. If there is I just download the thing off the Internet. I don't want to destroy capitalism or the artist's careers. I merely won't buy a copy protected CD.
I should take a look at iTMS, though. If there's some way of removing the DRM from AAC files without quality loss.
This is a "vote with your bucks" thing. I don't have a problem with the quality of the product but with the way in which the product is presented. That's why I'm not boycotting the product but the medium on which it comes.
You obviously have not used Windows XP before Creative released XP drivers. The Win2k drivers worked but tended to cause BSODs... Early Windows XP either ran without sound or with a mean time between crashes similar to that of Windows 98.
And that's exactly why TLDs were a bad idea. Seriously, if there only was one registrar, who do you think would be rolling in the dough right now, laughing like a madman on happy pills? I mean, we'd probably be on happy pills 24/7; it's not like we couldn't afford it.
It's really a shame, this TLD thing.
Sincerely,
Jesus Underline Triplesix
Chief Customer Screwage Officer, VeriSign, Inc.
Political reasons. I'm not implying that there are such reasons now (there might be but I don't know), but if some problems with the USA should crop up that would be a good reason to ignore the JSF even if it suits their need best.
Which is a very good thing. You're expected to work until you're about sixty, but what if the company decides to replace you with a much cheaper engineer when you're fifty? You won't get another job. Not even with a verbal anilingus of a resume. Essentially you're forced into unemployment, because nobody wants to hire someone that old and going freelance only works in some cases.
This happened to my father: He was laid offf in his early to middle fifties from a well-paid position as truck fleet manager and chief of workplace safety (or however that would be called in English) when the business was restructured (essentially the entire upper to middle management was fired). On the job market there were no openings fitting his skills or he was overqualified or he was too old. He couldn't retire as he was too young and he couldn't stay unemployed either, because that way his pension would quickly diminish into nothing. In the end he did some qualification courses (because those don't count as unemployment, saving some of his pension) and made a deal with the employment office that they keep him listed as looking for work but don't actually send any offers. Still, this has taken a hefty bite out of our living standard.
In his case the thing was legally sound, due to the restructuring. But in other cases older employees have some protection against being fired and that's good those older employees would hit the social net, causing the state to lose money and they would be unproductive, causing even more damage.
The point was not "omg j00 stole land u r so evil!11", it was "you somehow obtained someone else's land and used that to build your nation on, just like Microsoft obtained someone else's source code and used tht to build its products on". The parallel between the USA and Microsoft is merely that both internalized external resources and used that as their foundation. The statement doesn't say that Microsoft stole that source code (they didn't) and it contains no judgement on how the USA were built.
Slashdot Mirror
...and like the GP32, which could already play DivX movies when the Gameboy Advance was new, the GP2X will only be known to a handful of people. Regular people won't shell out 200 bucks for a portable and serious gamers will buy a PSP instead (because that' where all the big brand games are)... It's not likely that the GP* will ever be big in the West. Quite sad, I always thought that Gamepark's offerings were exciting, although prohibitively expensive (at least for a student).
Prepaid is also great for people who just don't use their phone often but still need to be able to do so on the go. I pay 15 EUR a year - because the prepaid card is limited to twelve months, then you have to purchase a refresh, the cheapest version of which is 15 bucks. If I had a contract I would get a new mobile every one or two years (which I don't need or want, I like my 6210), but I would pay more in two months than I pay in a year now.
Of course I could just tell them to send me the most expensive mobile they offer and sell the thing on eBay. With the ridiculous prices of feature-rich mobiles I might even make more money than I pay for the contract...
The problem with Firefly is: How would they fit the movie into canon? Wash and Shepherd are dead and I don't think that replacing them or working without them would work well. Going Dallas and declaring the movie a dream would be excessively lame. Having the new series play before the film would make all kinds of problems, as well.
.de, Firefly never came on TV, but there's a German DVD set which I'm currently renting. Just watched Jaynestown.)
I think that the movie was intended to wrap up Firefly, to finish the thing. It included things that would have happened over the course of several seasons if the series would have continued. A new series would probably suffer from the fact that the big character development can't happen because it happens in the movie.
It's sad, but I do think that Firefly is dead. (BTW, over here in
No problem at all, chummer. Artificial muscles have a maximum level of 4, cost one point of essence per level and don't count against your reaction; the deal's not that good. Once boosted reflexes or move-by-wire come out, though...
That's not a browser... It's an operating system! - Obi Wan Stallman
1.) Make a site with spiffy CSS2+ effects
2.) Write a stylesheet that displays the site in a usable state, even if it doesn't look that good
3.) <!--[if IE]> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iestyle.css"> <![endif]-->
4.) <!--[if IE]> Because of technical limitations of Microsoft(R) Internet Explorer(TM) this site is displayed using a fallback stylesheet. If you really want to see the regular version of the site we're afraid to tell you that you'd have to use a different browser, as the Internt Explorer(TM) doesn't yet support the corresponding W3C standards. <![endif]-->
You can also leave out step 4, especially if you can emulate the regular CSS' behavior by using broken CSS in iestyle.css. If you can't you can at least have the page degrade gracefully when IE is present.
Seriously, conditional comments are the IE's greatest feature.
"It's funny 'cause it's true."
Very true, PPOT are great.
Seriously, good music hasn't died out. Just listen to PRESS PLAY ON TAPE's free stuff. And then buy their CDs.
I'm currently listening to Polysics (link to WP because their site ain't that great), who make quite nice music and quite strange videos. Another nice Asian band is YMCK, who make bleepy, cutesy bitpop. (Whoa, they've released their second album? Let's hope that their extrajapanese distributor gets it in stock soon.) And of course there's Machinae Supremacy, the ultimate Swedish SID Metal band. Return to Snake Mountain, anyone?
There's a lood of great bands out there. You just have to find them.
> The new DVDs aren't big enough to make an impact on the backup market (where
.NET Generation Secure Gaming Framework comes out! All executables will be stored as Secure Managed Code, which means that the executable comes with 12 MiB of executable code, 25 MiB of security certificates and 120 MiB of Trusted Computing interface code. All videos will be stored via a proprietary XML extension (the .NET Generation Secure Media Framework Professional Edition)...
3 4:432242342:ABAD5}"4 B3343E32:EEFEEF3434:AB3A}">0 01001110:123456ABC:ABBA}">
...
> you need 100s of GB per disk to even be considered), and they are (and will
> remain) far more costly than ordinary CD/DVD-RW media. They have some
> attractiveness for PC and console gaming, but even there, without a huge
> amount of in-game video, current DVD capacity will suffice for years for the
> vast majority of games.
Just wait until the new
<bytestream type="video/mpeg" drm-clsid="{1435:543236:EF32EF:AB543634E:3565363B
checksum="14758f1AFD44C09B7992073CCf00B43D">
<byte drm-clsid="{435:AA564:CC922329:32323244AB34:A5465
0x15
</byte>
<byte drm-clsid="{ABC123:F00BAA:CAFEBABE:DEADBEEF:10001
0x15
</byte>
...which will ensure that no one in their right mind would ever want to copy that three-second cutscene. Not if it's 500 MiB big.
It is true. I haven't seen perldoc yet.
Hm, that's true. But that's probably because Ruby, C# et al. are currently the trendy languages. Everyone's talking about it so Slashdot's talking about it. Slashdot is a newsblog, after all, and the editors have to have news in order to have a story (except for non-news stories, which happen about twice a year).
Also, C++ isn't relevant for web development and that's what the Development section seems to specialize in lately. Probably because web apps are the new Dotcom and currently everyone is excited about turning their office suite, cron daemon and web browser into a web app. Preferably with AJAX, Ruby on Rails and rounded corners...
It's trivial to identify eBay sellers who stole Windows. Just look for someone sellling CD masters or power auctions with several thousand copies.
HTML is a pretty niche language with limited power. Everything it does can easily be accomplished by other means (TeX, OpenDocument...). How about paying more attention to more 'bread and butter' languages like RTF, BibTeX, and plain text?
Seriously, PHP is quite good at what it's intended for. Sure, it doesn't have pointers and templates, but then again it's mainly intended for web development. You don't need pointers to generate a website. You don'd need absolut performance to generate site usage statistics. You need a language that is easy to use, versatile and powerful, in that order.
You know, there's a reason why PHP is big and most people haven't even heard about CGI/C++ or CGI/Scheme.
Well, PHP is useful for general purpose scripting. I went from web scripting to shell scripting and I'm much more proficient at PHP than I am at Python or sh, so when I have to write shell scripts I usually go with PHP. Yes, I know that sh is faster. Yes, I know that Perl has better PR. But I can just crank out a PHP script in half the time it takes me to read awk's manpage or whatever I need to get that sh script going.
It might not be the cleanest language around, but it allows for fairly rapid script development when you're familiar with it. Also, it has the most useful documentation of any scripting language I have ever seen, even more useful than Java's API documentation.
Maybe you get one movie like that per generation, but certainly more than one thing. For example, in 1994 Marathon came out. A decade later people are still speculationg about the plot. I'm pretty sure that there are a couple more gems like this one spread across the media.
No, DRM really does prevent casual piracy, and studies have proven this. However, freeloaders have gotten much more proactive in breaking copy protection and distributing the content to as many other freeloaders as they can.
Because they know that regular people can't/don't care to circumvent the pretection. This is not new. Did you ever hear of terms like "Commodore 64" and "BBS"? The old art form called "cracktros" got its name from the very fact that the stuff was put into the available free space on cracked game disks. Cracking-and-distributing is by no means a recent thing.
There won't BE any money if nobody pays them.
Unlikely. Yes, saled will diminish, because people now get stuff they don't really like for free. But a lot of people still go to the movies or buy that CD-like storeage medium or a DVD. Many people still pay for stuff if they really like it. Filesharing is not going to destroy the entertainment industry, the same as radio and cassette recorders didn't destroy it.
Ah, the "RIAA abuses artists" tact. Except that artists willingly sign their contracts.
Yup, 'cause that's the only way to get to the top. However, some artists are already using non-traditional means of distributing their stuff - and hey, even if the RIAA dies the independent artists will still get paid for their works. Seems like the death of entertainment becomes less and less likely. The Internet does take some of the incentive for a contract away, nowadays you can reach the whole world with nothing more than a website for twenty bucks a month.
It does prevent casual piracy, and it makes sure there are dollars to begin with to pay those content creators. Pirates don't want to pay anybody as they consume other people's work. It's the antithesis of both capitalism and the Open Source philosophy.
It also makes sure some people don't want to pay for what they consider otherwise a great product. When I consider buying a music CD I first take a look at whether it's from a major label or independent. If it's the former I check whether there is any kind of copy protection. If there is I just download the thing off the Internet. I don't want to destroy capitalism or the artist's careers. I merely won't buy a copy protected CD.
I should take a look at iTMS, though. If there's some way of removing the DRM from AAC files without quality loss.
This is a "vote with your bucks" thing. I don't have a problem with the quality of the product but with the way in which the product is presented. That's why I'm not boycotting the product but the medium on which it comes.
Hire him, then fire him. After a while he will buy Microsoft for a negative amount of money.
You obviously have not used Windows XP before Creative released XP drivers. The Win2k drivers worked but tended to cause BSODs... Early Windows XP either ran without sound or with a mean time between crashes similar to that of Windows 98.
And that's exactly why TLDs were a bad idea. Seriously, if there only was one registrar, who do you think would be rolling in the dough right now, laughing like a madman on happy pills? I mean, we'd probably be on happy pills 24/7; it's not like we couldn't afford it.
It's really a shame, this TLD thing.
Sincerely,
Jesus Underline Triplesix
Chief Customer Screwage Officer, VeriSign, Inc.
Political reasons. I'm not implying that there are such reasons now (there might be but I don't know), but if some problems with the USA should crop up that would be a good reason to ignore the JSF even if it suits their need best.
Apparently not, but there are plans for optional thrust vectoring, which might give the Eurofighters STOL support.
Sounds like narrativium at work. (Yes, I'm currently reading the latest Pratchett/Stewart/Cohen.)
Which is a very good thing. You're expected to work until you're about sixty, but what if the company decides to replace you with a much cheaper engineer when you're fifty? You won't get another job. Not even with a verbal anilingus of a resume. Essentially you're forced into unemployment, because nobody wants to hire someone that old and going freelance only works in some cases.
This happened to my father: He was laid offf in his early to middle fifties from a well-paid position as truck fleet manager and chief of workplace safety (or however that would be called in English) when the business was restructured (essentially the entire upper to middle management was fired). On the job market there were no openings fitting his skills or he was overqualified or he was too old. He couldn't retire as he was too young and he couldn't stay unemployed either, because that way his pension would quickly diminish into nothing. In the end he did some qualification courses (because those don't count as unemployment, saving some of his pension) and made a deal with the employment office that they keep him listed as looking for work but don't actually send any offers. Still, this has taken a hefty bite out of our living standard.
In his case the thing was legally sound, due to the restructuring. But in other cases older employees have some protection against being fired and that's good those older employees would hit the social net, causing the state to lose money and they would be unproductive, causing even more damage.
The point was not "omg j00 stole land u r so evil!11", it was "you somehow obtained someone else's land and used that to build your nation on, just like Microsoft obtained someone else's source code and used tht to build its products on". The parallel between the USA and Microsoft is merely that both internalized external resources and used that as their foundation. The statement doesn't say that Microsoft stole that source code (they didn't) and it contains no judgement on how the USA were built.