While I don't have sleep paralysis all that often (I only think I can remember one or two instances) I do occasionally have dreams where... Well, I'm not really aware that I'm dreaming but at the same time I can make a conscious choice to wake up. There's a bit of cognitive dissonance: I know I can do something that only makes sense in a dream yet I don't realize that this means I'm dreaming.
Usually I opt to wake up and then I can't go back to sleep for a while. Granted, I usually use this to escape from nightmarish dreams (my dreams tend to be incoherent and hard to qualify; when I have a "nightmare" there's rarely a perceivable threat or anything, the dream just feels bad).
Actually, from what I heard, you need to train yourself to check these things and expect failure. If you train yourself to look at the clock twice and and expect a similar time then in your dreams the clock will show similar times. If you train yourself to expect wildly different times or even completely nonsensical things then in your dreams you will see what you expect - which you know to be impossible.
Also, it's often recommended to use various such triggers as these things can fail. Look at your watch, read and reread text, look at mirrors. And always expect the impossible.
The trademark only applies to the Gucci label, though. You're perfectly fine if you rip off the same designs for your "Cucchi" brand. Replace all the Gs with Cs and you're set.
Actually, TFP (The Insert-Appropriate-F-Word Presentation) touches on this. Some shoe designers tried to get increased legal protection. The retailers lobbied the motion to hell.
Also, thre already are two markets with such protection for fashion designs. Japan decided that only completely novel designs applied (therefore a new kind of T-shirt wouldn't apply since the T-shirt concept isn't novel); the EU decided that just about anything applies, which apparently includes variations. Amusingly, most of the designs registered are Nike T-shirts; most other fashion companies simply don't bother.
The really important thing is that most of the fashion industry doesn't want IP protection because it would restrict the way they do business.
Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations support. (e.g. Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.
Note that the different syntax is actually the same syntax with a different vendor-specific prefix. This is how it's supposed to be as the border-radius attribute hasn't yet been finalized and it's not guaranteed that the syntax won't change in the final version. IE8... Well, it's Internet Explorer.
Yes, Flash offers more features than HTML + JavaScript but even with draft versions of HTML5 and CSS3 we can replicate the important parts on most browsers. Yes, we can't do everything Flash does but we can do what most people need. Once finalized, HTML5 and CSS3 will be good enough and Flash will be marginalized. That's actually good as Adobe isn't very good at supporting many platforms. I mean, Flash/OS X is still incapable of playing back any video at any resolution without occasional hanging frames and the only ARM implementation of Flash I know of is specifically for Nokia devices.
Companies can be fairly quick to kick out such veterans. In Germany, we recently saw the latest act of a fiasco where a woman was fired for pocketing a few leftover Maultaschen (a kind of food) which were explicitly going to be thrown away. The employer maintained that the fact that she caused zero to negative economic damage (ever so slightly lowering the amount of trash) doesn't change the fact that stealing is wrong - after all, after she stole what amounted to trash, how could they trust her to not steal more valuable things or embezzle funds?
Some people have a very simple definition of badness - either something is bad or it isn't; there are no nuances.
Or we just adapt it. Patents last until five years after they were granted or ten years after they were filed, whichever comes first. So yes, you can patent the video codec - but after five years you're expected to have properly monetized it and nobody can claim a patent on it ever again. Submarine patents don't work anymore. Neither does filing a patent and then juggling it in limbo in order to make it last longer. Patent trolling would become really expensive as you'd need to refresh your patent pool all the time.
The PSP has very limited homebrew support. Yes, there are some offerings but the GP2X community (which spawned the Pandora project) has much more in a device I don't have to keep at very specific firmware versions or my homebrew software stops working. Also, the Pandora is vastly superior to the PSP, having a better screen with touch functionality, a more powerful chipset, twin SDHC slots, USB ports...
As for UMPCs: Both of the ones you linked to look horrible to use (seriously, noncontiguous keyboards were never a good idea). Both have a faster CPU than the Pandora (although I don't know the relative per-clock performance) but are also vastly more expensive.
I paid 250 EUR for my Pandora while the Samsung Q1 retails at 500+ EUR and the Wibrain comes in at 300 EUR. Yes, I could theoretically snipe one on eBay for much less but by the same logic I could argue that the Core i7 is price-competitive with the Athlon 64.
And no, the iPhone is not a very good HTPC. It does make for a good HTPC remote but you're not going to get a proper media player/streaming frontend on there without having to worry about whether the next firmware update will render your unauthorized software inoperable.
The Pandora normally runs at 500 MHz (to conserve power) and is formally specced at 600 MHz. Each CPU is expected but not guaranteed to do 720 MHz and one prototype is known to run stable at 900 MHz.
Actually, the team admits that the missed launch dates were largely caused by lack of experience (expecting Chinese factories to be punctual and completely fluent in English; completely underestimating the complexity of the project; not knowing that you can't take CC payments for something you don't ship shortly afterwards), although bad luck also figured in (a bank froze their assets for "suspicious transactions" (money from the preorders coming in); a subcontractor went bankrupt and they had to commission and pay for a crucial part again; the volcano eruption delayed parts shipments by a week).
They initially estimated about a year of development time, IIRC.
There can't be much of a community for a device that no one owns.
You're actually wrong on this one. The Pandora was developed by members of the GP2X community and the Pandora community is largely identical to the GP2X one. The Pandora essentially got its community for free.
The Evo 4g is also fairly useless for what the Pandora is supposed to do. There's no keyboard (a major selling point of the Pandora), no gaming controls (another major selling point of the Pandora)... not even USB host capabilities. Does HTC at least allow me to install arbitrary software right down to the bare metal if I want to?
So yeah, you're comparing an F-22 against the An-255, claiming superiority because the F-22 is the better air superiority fighter, completely missing the fact that the people in the market for the An-255 want a heavy-duty transport plane and not a fighter jet.
The Wiz is more powerful but the Dingoo offers more bang for he buck by virtue of being fairly cheap. Depending on what you want that may or may not be a deciding factor.
The problem with credit cards was mainly because the first batch was sold exclusively through preorders (in order to have money to develop the Pandora with). You can't use CCs to pay for somethign you don't receive within the next N months (N = 2, IIRC). Since development of the console took longer than that they couldn't take CC payments.
Future batches are more likely to be produced first and then sold, which circumvents the issue.
Er, no. It's doomed to failure if you measure success by how much money it makes the manufacturer. That's reasonable as this is the measure most manufacturers use - however, the Pandora was never designed as a money-maker but to scratch an itch the community had. Since the device is now becoming available and the developers are already busy cranking out softare it's reasonable to assume that the itch is in the process of being scratched.
People often make the mistake of assuming that OpenPandora Ltd. wants to be the next Nintendo. In fact, they merely aspire to be the next GamePark.
Wouldn't it be easier to add a keyboard and analog controls to an existing Android or iPhone device? This Pandora thing is about as geeky as they come. It's doomed to be a geek toy and not much more.
Given that that's what it was explicitly designed for I fail to see the problem. The design goal was not "let's make money" but rather "let's build the perfect homebew handheld". Breaking even is not even planned until the second batch.
The netbook also doesn't fit in my pocket, weighs much more and doesn't have built-in gaming controls. In other terms it doesn't occupy the same niche as the Pandora. (And, by the way, the Pandora also does Bluettoth.))
The Pandora serves three niches:
- Emulator and handheld homebrew lovers
- People who want a UMPC with a physical keyboard
- People who want a very small HTPC and are content with S-Video (yes, some of those have popped up in the forums)
Yes, these days netbooks offer more bang for the buck specs-wise but then again so did desktops even when the team started. It's obvious that desktops serve a different niche than notebooks and netbooks. However, so does the Pandora.
Remember, this is explicitly a niche device. The first batch was originally planned to encompass a grand total of 3,000 units, later expanded to 4,000. There will be a second batch but nobody knows if there will ever be more than 10,000 units in total. There is no intention to directly compete against Nintendo, Sony and netbook manufacturers. The main competition consists of the Gamepark Wiz and the Dingoo A320 (for the homebrew lovers) or is mostly nonexistent (for the UMPC lovers).
Doesn' that mean that any time you run proprietary software you're guilty of copyright infringement? After all you made a RAM copy of the software in question without having any right to make copies at all.
Why would they need to cut taxes? If the government gets additional income that means their budget is that much closer to being balanced, which means lesser additional debt which means lower future expenses. I don't need to directly get a slice of the fine in order to profit from it.
Would you take a position as Steve "Tyrant" Jobs' fashion consultant if it meant Apple would open up the app store?
Hell yes. Especially if I get paid for the job. After all, it entirely consists of me saying "just wear a black turtleneck and a pair of jeans" once a day.
Remember that many usernames are of the format . Julie was clearly using a non-Y2k-compliant algorithm to determine her username, which gave the result we see since Julie will be born in 2088. And I have to say that 100 - 93 = 3 is impressively close for someone who won't even be conceived for another 78 years.
Yeah, it sounds nice on paper but that's 0.6 Essence and 8,000 Nuyen you're looking at, chummer. Sure, if you rely on DocWagon to save your hide that display might just give them the time to do so but if you catch a bullet you don't need a chunk of cyberware to tell you you're bleeding. Well, unless you're a chrome junkie with a pain editor, in which case the 0.6 Essence ain't an issue anymore.
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While I don't have sleep paralysis all that often (I only think I can remember one or two instances) I do occasionally have dreams where... Well, I'm not really aware that I'm dreaming but at the same time I can make a conscious choice to wake up. There's a bit of cognitive dissonance: I know I can do something that only makes sense in a dream yet I don't realize that this means I'm dreaming.
Usually I opt to wake up and then I can't go back to sleep for a while. Granted, I usually use this to escape from nightmarish dreams (my dreams tend to be incoherent and hard to qualify; when I have a "nightmare" there's rarely a perceivable threat or anything, the dream just feels bad).
Actually, from what I heard, you need to train yourself to check these things and expect failure. If you train yourself to look at the clock twice and and expect a similar time then in your dreams the clock will show similar times. If you train yourself to expect wildly different times or even completely nonsensical things then in your dreams you will see what you expect - which you know to be impossible.
Also, it's often recommended to use various such triggers as these things can fail. Look at your watch, read and reread text, look at mirrors. And always expect the impossible.
The trademark only applies to the Gucci label, though. You're perfectly fine if you rip off the same designs for your "Cucchi" brand. Replace all the Gs with Cs and you're set.
Actually, TFP (The Insert-Appropriate-F-Word Presentation) touches on this. Some shoe designers tried to get increased legal protection. The retailers lobbied the motion to hell.
Also, thre already are two markets with such protection for fashion designs. Japan decided that only completely novel designs applied (therefore a new kind of T-shirt wouldn't apply since the T-shirt concept isn't novel); the EU decided that just about anything applies, which apparently includes variations. Amusingly, most of the designs registered are Nike T-shirts; most other fashion companies simply don't bother.
The really important thing is that most of the fashion industry doesn't want IP protection because it would restrict the way they do business.
Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations support. (e.g. Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.
Note that the different syntax is actually the same syntax with a different vendor-specific prefix. This is how it's supposed to be as the border-radius attribute hasn't yet been finalized and it's not guaranteed that the syntax won't change in the final version. IE8... Well, it's Internet Explorer.
Yes, Flash offers more features than HTML + JavaScript but even with draft versions of HTML5 and CSS3 we can replicate the important parts on most browsers. Yes, we can't do everything Flash does but we can do what most people need. Once finalized, HTML5 and CSS3 will be good enough and Flash will be marginalized. That's actually good as Adobe isn't very good at supporting many platforms. I mean, Flash/OS X is still incapable of playing back any video at any resolution without occasional hanging frames and the only ARM implementation of Flash I know of is specifically for Nokia devices.
Companies can be fairly quick to kick out such veterans. In Germany, we recently saw the latest act of a fiasco where a woman was fired for pocketing a few leftover Maultaschen (a kind of food) which were explicitly going to be thrown away. The employer maintained that the fact that she caused zero to negative economic damage (ever so slightly lowering the amount of trash) doesn't change the fact that stealing is wrong - after all, after she stole what amounted to trash, how could they trust her to not steal more valuable things or embezzle funds?
Some people have a very simple definition of badness - either something is bad or it isn't; there are no nuances.
Great. Nero draws aggro, Google goes DOT and the EFF is on healing duty. Sounds like this raid is going well.
Or we just adapt it. Patents last until five years after they were granted or ten years after they were filed, whichever comes first. So yes, you can patent the video codec - but after five years you're expected to have properly monetized it and nobody can claim a patent on it ever again. Submarine patents don't work anymore. Neither does filing a patent and then juggling it in limbo in order to make it last longer. Patent trolling would become really expensive as you'd need to refresh your patent pool all the time.
The PSP has very limited homebrew support. Yes, there are some offerings but the GP2X community (which spawned the Pandora project) has much more in a device I don't have to keep at very specific firmware versions or my homebrew software stops working. Also, the Pandora is vastly superior to the PSP, having a better screen with touch functionality, a more powerful chipset, twin SDHC slots, USB ports...
As for UMPCs: Both of the ones you linked to look horrible to use (seriously, noncontiguous keyboards were never a good idea). Both have a faster CPU than the Pandora (although I don't know the relative per-clock performance) but are also vastly more expensive.
I paid 250 EUR for my Pandora while the Samsung Q1 retails at 500+ EUR and the Wibrain comes in at 300 EUR. Yes, I could theoretically snipe one on eBay for much less but by the same logic I could argue that the Core i7 is price-competitive with the Athlon 64.
And no, the iPhone is not a very good HTPC. It does make for a good HTPC remote but you're not going to get a proper media player/streaming frontend on there without having to worry about whether the next firmware update will render your unauthorized software inoperable.
The Pandora normally runs at 500 MHz (to conserve power) and is formally specced at 600 MHz. Each CPU is expected but not guaranteed to do 720 MHz and one prototype is known to run stable at 900 MHz.
Actually, the team admits that the missed launch dates were largely caused by lack of experience (expecting Chinese factories to be punctual and completely fluent in English; completely underestimating the complexity of the project; not knowing that you can't take CC payments for something you don't ship shortly afterwards), although bad luck also figured in (a bank froze their assets for "suspicious transactions" (money from the preorders coming in); a subcontractor went bankrupt and they had to commission and pay for a crucial part again; the volcano eruption delayed parts shipments by a week).
They initially estimated about a year of development time, IIRC.
There can't be much of a community for a device that no one owns.
You're actually wrong on this one. The Pandora was developed by members of the GP2X community and the Pandora community is largely identical to the GP2X one. The Pandora essentially got its community for free.
The Evo 4g is also fairly useless for what the Pandora is supposed to do. There's no keyboard (a major selling point of the Pandora), no gaming controls (another major selling point of the Pandora)... not even USB host capabilities. Does HTC at least allow me to install arbitrary software right down to the bare metal if I want to?
So yeah, you're comparing an F-22 against the An-255, claiming superiority because the F-22 is the better air superiority fighter, completely missing the fact that the people in the market for the An-255 want a heavy-duty transport plane and not a fighter jet.
The Wiz is more powerful but the Dingoo offers more bang for he buck by virtue of being fairly cheap. Depending on what you want that may or may not be a deciding factor.
The problem with credit cards was mainly because the first batch was sold exclusively through preorders (in order to have money to develop the Pandora with). You can't use CCs to pay for somethign you don't receive within the next N months (N = 2, IIRC). Since development of the console took longer than that they couldn't take CC payments.
Future batches are more likely to be produced first and then sold, which circumvents the issue.
Er, no. It's doomed to failure if you measure success by how much money it makes the manufacturer. That's reasonable as this is the measure most manufacturers use - however, the Pandora was never designed as a money-maker but to scratch an itch the community had. Since the device is now becoming available and the developers are already busy cranking out softare it's reasonable to assume that the itch is in the process of being scratched.
People often make the mistake of assuming that OpenPandora Ltd. wants to be the next Nintendo. In fact, they merely aspire to be the next GamePark.
Wouldn't it be easier to add a keyboard and analog controls to an existing Android or iPhone device? This Pandora thing is about as geeky as they come. It's doomed to be a geek toy and not much more.
Given that that's what it was explicitly designed for I fail to see the problem. The design goal was not "let's make money" but rather "let's build the perfect homebew handheld". Breaking even is not even planned until the second batch.
The netbook also doesn't fit in my pocket, weighs much more and doesn't have built-in gaming controls. In other terms it doesn't occupy the same niche as the Pandora. (And, by the way, the Pandora also does Bluettoth.))
The Pandora serves three niches:
- Emulator and handheld homebrew lovers
- People who want a UMPC with a physical keyboard
- People who want a very small HTPC and are content with S-Video (yes, some of those have popped up in the forums)
Yes, these days netbooks offer more bang for the buck specs-wise but then again so did desktops even when the team started. It's obvious that desktops serve a different niche than notebooks and netbooks. However, so does the Pandora.
Remember, this is explicitly a niche device. The first batch was originally planned to encompass a grand total of 3,000 units, later expanded to 4,000. There will be a second batch but nobody knows if there will ever be more than 10,000 units in total. There is no intention to directly compete against Nintendo, Sony and netbook manufacturers. The main competition consists of the Gamepark Wiz and the Dingoo A320 (for the homebrew lovers) or is mostly nonexistent (for the UMPC lovers).
Become light metal bands?
Doesn' that mean that any time you run proprietary software you're guilty of copyright infringement? After all you made a RAM copy of the software in question without having any right to make copies at all.
Why would they need to cut taxes? If the government gets additional income that means their budget is that much closer to being balanced, which means lesser additional debt which means lower future expenses. I don't need to directly get a slice of the fine in order to profit from it.
Would you take a position as Steve "Tyrant" Jobs' fashion consultant if it meant Apple would open up the app store?
Hell yes. Especially if I get paid for the job. After all, it entirely consists of me saying "just wear a black turtleneck and a pair of jeans" once a day.
Remember that many usernames are of the format . Julie was clearly using a non-Y2k-compliant algorithm to determine her username, which gave the result we see since Julie will be born in 2088. And I have to say that 100 - 93 = 3 is impressively close for someone who won't even be conceived for another 78 years.
Either that or they will invent their own take on the automobile.
Yeah, it sounds nice on paper but that's 0.6 Essence and 8,000 Nuyen you're looking at, chummer. Sure, if you rely on DocWagon to save your hide that display might just give them the time to do so but if you catch a bullet you don't need a chunk of cyberware to tell you you're bleeding. Well, unless you're a chrome junkie with a pain editor, in which case the 0.6 Essence ain't an issue anymore.