Excuse me if I missed it, but no where in the translation did I see if these models were going to be available in the US.
Are they going to be like the C700, only release in Japan, but re-sold through companies like Dynamism?
--Jon
If you do a little digging you will see that Michael Powell and his family own a lot of shares of AOL/Time Warner which is why he supports this change in media ownership as well as why he opposed any regulation to force interoperable instant messaging.
There is an interesting bit of information on this in the first chapter of Michael Moore's book, "Stupid White Men." Ignore the irony of the title considering Powell is not white.
The Back to the Future trilogy Widescreen DVD set is an insult. Even worse is that Paramount said they would fix it and they still haven't.
For those of you that don't know, the "widescreen" Back to the Future trilogy DVD set is actually even worse viewable area than pan and scan. Somehow or another the transfer got messed up. Read the reviews.
Let's hope that Lucas' stickler for quality attitude makes this set a good one.
It must be nice to live life with blinders on. Are you totally ignorant of what is going on?
Patriot Act made it so that in many cases law enforcement does not have to go to a judge to get a search order. There is an article in the Constitution against illegal search and seizure. This is one right being trampled.
How about the AMERICAN citizens being held in connection with terrorism and not being told what they are being charged with and not being allowed to contact lawyer or family? That is another right being trampled.
There are many other examples, but it is just too depressing to get into it.
The terrorists have won. The goal of terrorism isn't death or property destruction. That is collateral damage. The MAIN goal of terrorism is to inflict FEAR and POLICY CHANGE. Now we have the media and the war-mongering Bush administration keeping everyone afraid as they slowly strip away our liberties.
The problem is that EMI can cause problems for a modern plane's navigational equipment. As portable devices become more and more pervasive, they are going to need to somehow shield the cabin from the cockpit.
I was just looking for another article, but can't seem to find it - it was an article about a Compact Disc player in a first class cabin causing a plane's navigation equipment to go haywire. Every time the passenger played a song the equipment went nuts. When he stopped it all was fine. The crew determined it was indeed the CD player and then asked him to keep it off. They speculated that the rotational spin of the disc was actually generating a stronger-than-normal magnetic field and being that he was up in first class, he was close enough to the cockpit to cause problems.
Hopefully if Apple is updating the iPod line they will add Ogg Vorbis support to the decoder. The sound quality is so much better. A 64kbps Ogg file will blow away a 128kbps MP3 and best of all it is a patent-free technology:)
Princeton University discourages filesharing but students will always find ways to share files. There is a LOT of misinformation about Phind though. While I do not believe in sharing copyrighted works as someone who has is trying to make a living producing commercial software, Phind is NOT a peer-to-peer file sharing service as the RIAA has described. All it is is a search service that searches all SMB (Windows/Samba) file shares campus-wide and indexes the files it finds. It is up to you as a user to locate that machine on the network, make the connection, and grab the files. In fact, there are a lot of files on there that have nothing to do with copyrights. People share their papers, research, vacation photos, etc. on their workstations and Phind will index them if they are public shares.
Just like anything else, there are legit uses as well as legitimate uses. Shutting down a service and depriving people from it's legitimate use is not the answer.
--Jon
Judging by the text of the memo from Office Depot suppliers, I am thinking that companies like Palm may be hurt the worst. In the memo it says:
Please be aware that Office Depot is immediately requiring all products that connect to a Personal Computer and Notebook Computer must pass these Designed for Windows XP logo requirements to be considered for retail distribution through our stores.
Well, Palm and most other PDA's do connect to the PC. I wonder if this is also Microsoft's way of cutting in at Palm?
Ok, the inspectors can't find weapons of mass destruction. The US accuses Saddam of hiding them. Now in early phases of the war special ops have been going on to find and disable weapons of mass destruction. If we truly knew where they were, why the hell did we not share the intelligence with the inspectors?
And another thought - Mutually Assured Destruction. Has everyone forgotten about the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction? I brought this up to some folks the other day and they told me Saddam was crazy and does not care about his life. Yeah, I agree he is crazy, but come on, the guy moves from place to place to avoid being detected. He has body doubles, food tasters, a plethora of bodyguards. Does that sound like someone who is is not afraid to die?
The fact of the matter, above all Saddam desires power. There is not much power if your country gets incinerated off of the face of the Earth...
Just my $.02 as an American who is displeased with the actions of his government.
You could challenge that. The scores are fact. Factual information cannot be copyrighted. What CAN be copyrighted is the method of compilation or presentation of said fact. Check this out for more information.
--Jon
Mr. Cranky gave it three bombs! It can't be that bad then:) If it was really bad it would have gotten mushroom cloud - "Proof that Jesus died in vein":)
http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/startreknemesis.h tm l
PS - he apparently doesn't like Will Wheaton much:) LOL
Not to criticize or defend this review system, I think I have come up with what could be a reasonable explanation for many of the reviews being on the same day - a batch queue. Amazon does not allow you to post reviews in realtime. You post a review, and they review the review, and then post it. The way I imagine it would work is that someone reads through hundreds and hundreds of reviews in a month and then clicks on a button to force them live from a queue. One reason I know they do in fact review the reviews is that sometimes you will see somewhere where someone posts a price or a URL in the review, but Amazon brackets it out like [removed] or something like that.
If they are going to go after 802.11b because of easy access, why not go after all the bell operators for pay phones since they could be used to plot terrorism? Why not go after all the radio shacks because equipment they sell can be used to make bombs?
This may sound like irrational conspiracy theory, but I actually think that this isn't about terrorism. It is a "foot in the water" test to slowly start regulating the net, and with it free speech.
This is not a good turn of events for anyone who buys hard drives from Sun. At Princeton University, every time I order a hard drive for my Sun servers, it is actually a re-badged Fujitsu as of this past summer. Prior to Fujitsu all Sun drives were actually Seagate, and they were very reliable.
Though I find this news disturbing, I have to say I have personally not had a failure of any of my Sun/Fujitsu drives yet. Knock on wood...
Perhaps this problem is not in the higher-end 10k RPM SCSI drives?
I have for the most part been on the side in this issue. People I knew who downloaded free music I used to encourage to buy the music they really like so that the artists get their cut.
Not anymore. I have a CD collection of well over 300 CDs I have bought over the past ten years. I am no longer going to buy ANY pre-recorded music until the industry stops treating good, responsible consumers like myself as criminals.
I am going to catalog my CD collection and put it on eBay. I will donate the proceeds to the EFF.
That is actually pretty far from the truth. New Jersey lies smack dab between the largest television market, New York, and the fourth largest, Philadelphia. That gives us some of the best choice of programming in the United States.
This is NOT MSN Messenger. It is MS messenger - a service built into windows. It basically is like the wall daemon in UNIX. Someone can send a broadcast message on the network and all other hosts get it. What has happened here is that some lowlife spammer has discovered that they can use this feature to annoy people. To make matters worse, they are doing it over port 135 as opposed to the standard 139 NetBIOS port which most people have blocked.
I don't mind companies selling censored content as long as it meets one stipulation: that the content clearly states that it is censored. Often times content is not labeled as such and in many places in the Midwest where Walmart is the only place to buy CD's, videos, etc, the people there often don't realize that the content they are experiencing is not what the artist/writer/etc. intended. I also think there should be a central registry where we can see what companies sell censored and what don't so we as consumers can make the appropriate decisions for ourselves. I would definitely only buy the uncensored versions.:)
In some markets Comcast already blocks VPN which for those who use it to work from home, it really sucks. Their reasoning for blocking a legitimate service? They want people to pay double for a "Pro" account of some sort.
Broadband might be the only service I receive that not only has been going up in price, but has been becoming more and more restrictive with less features.
I am just glad I moved. In the town where my brother-in-law lives Comcast has already begun routing all port 80 traffic through proxy servers. I hope they don't do that in my town.
This device appears to be a fake - seems very contradictiva of what Palm has been saying.
First off, they pretty much told everyone that new product releases would slow to a crawl for a bit. Two reasons for this. One is that they have a LOT of inventory they want to discount and move. Sitting on inventory is bad. The other reason is that PalmOS 5 just got out of beta and released to licensees on June 10th. Don't forget that PalmOS and Palm Hardware operate as seperate entities, therefore the hardware group gets treated just like any other licensee.
I seriously doubt that Palm would release another device using the older OS as long as they are sitting on product.
I think you have the wrong impression of Metallica. While they did ruffle a lot of feathers with the way they proceeded, their argument somehow got lost in all the hoopla. Their stance was do not share their studio albums, but share bootlegs etc. to your heart's content.
Anyone who has gone to a Metallica show knows that they ENCOURAGE recording of their shows fror your own enjoyment. In fact I have even heard instances of them letting people jack recording gear into their console at the show should you happen to be close enough.
Their argument, whether you agree with it or not, was that artists should have final say on what is shared and what is not. On this point I would have to agree with them. It shouldn't be the fan's or the label's decision. The decision should be the artists that created the work. If they want to selectively allow some works to be shared and others not, it should be their perogative.
All examples of companies that have become large and powerful by being deceptive. What does the US government do about it? Not a damn thing. Why? Because they are all big spenders and heavily linked to the political status quo.
If you want to read a really enlightening book, check out Stupid White Men - I kid you not, this book will open your eyes.
We are at a point in the world where there is a new aristocracy - the corporate powers - and it is only getting worse. You think they control the government now? Give them another 6 years of this administration and we will all miss the days of individual freedom...
Sorry if I come across as a downer - things just don't seem that good these days...
I am so glad to see this story. For years I have been telling people that the old games were better. They may not have been as graphically beautiful as today's games or have the audio fidelity, but they were more fun. Think of how many countless hours you spent playing the original Legend of Zelda. Back then most of us didn't have the Internet (or even knew what it was) so solving parts of the game was even more challenging. No web sites to go to for a hint, no people on AIM/IRC to ask. It was a big deal when you learned you could blow a whistle to open the lake to expose stairs to the seventh dungeon.
I actually lucked out and found a guy on eBay selling newly-built 72-pin connectors for the original NES and it worked like magic. Spent days playing Kung Fu, Contra, Gauntlet, Double Dragon, Bionic Commanod, MegaMan, Ikari Warriors, etc.
I think another thing people overlook is that due to the constraints of these older console systems, game developers had to be as optimal as possible and they did everything in assembly. Zelda and Metroid, as complex as they were for games, they took up like 700k worth of code each. Far cry from that 1.6 gigs of drive space Diablo 2 takes up:)
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me if I missed it, but no where in the translation did I see if these models were going to be available in the US. Are they going to be like the C700, only release in Japan, but re-sold through companies like Dynamism? --Jon
If you do a little digging you will see that Michael Powell and his family own a lot of shares of AOL/Time Warner which is why he supports this change in media ownership as well as why he opposed any regulation to force interoperable instant messaging.
There is an interesting bit of information on this in the first chapter of Michael Moore's book, "Stupid White Men." Ignore the irony of the title considering Powell is not white.
The Back to the Future trilogy Widescreen DVD set is an insult. Even worse is that Paramount said they would fix it and they still haven't.
For those of you that don't know, the "widescreen" Back to the Future trilogy DVD set is actually even worse viewable area than pan and scan. Somehow or another the transfer got messed up. Read the reviews.
Let's hope that Lucas' stickler for quality attitude makes this set a good one.
--Jon
It must be nice to live life with blinders on. Are you totally ignorant of what is going on?
Patriot Act made it so that in many cases law enforcement does not have to go to a judge to get a search order. There is an article in the Constitution against illegal search and seizure. This is one right being trampled.
How about the AMERICAN citizens being held in connection with terrorism and not being told what they are being charged with and not being allowed to contact lawyer or family? That is another right being trampled.
There are many other examples, but it is just too depressing to get into it.
The terrorists have won. The goal of terrorism isn't death or property destruction. That is collateral damage. The MAIN goal of terrorism is to inflict FEAR and POLICY CHANGE. Now we have the media and the war-mongering Bush administration keeping everyone afraid as they slowly strip away our liberties.
The problem is that EMI can cause problems for a modern plane's navigational equipment. As portable devices become more and more pervasive, they are going to need to somehow shield the cabin from the cockpit.
I was just looking for another article, but can't seem to find it - it was an article about a Compact Disc player in a first class cabin causing a plane's navigation equipment to go haywire. Every time the passenger played a song the equipment went nuts. When he stopped it all was fine. The crew determined it was indeed the CD player and then asked him to keep it off. They speculated that the rotational spin of the disc was actually generating a stronger-than-normal magnetic field and being that he was up in first class, he was close enough to the cockpit to cause problems.
Definitely a scary situation...
Hopefully if Apple is updating the iPod line they will add Ogg Vorbis support to the decoder. The sound quality is so much better. A 64kbps Ogg file will blow away a 128kbps MP3 and best of all it is a patent-free technology :)
--Jon Niola
Princeton University discourages filesharing but students will always find ways to share files. There is a LOT of misinformation about Phind though. While I do not believe in sharing copyrighted works as someone who has is trying to make a living producing commercial software, Phind is NOT a peer-to-peer file sharing service as the RIAA has described. All it is is a search service that searches all SMB (Windows/Samba) file shares campus-wide and indexes the files it finds. It is up to you as a user to locate that machine on the network, make the connection, and grab the files. In fact, there are a lot of files on there that have nothing to do with copyrights. People share their papers, research, vacation photos, etc. on their workstations and Phind will index them if they are public shares.
Just like anything else, there are legit uses as well as legitimate uses. Shutting down a service and depriving people from it's legitimate use is not the answer. --Jon
Judging by the text of the memo from Office Depot suppliers, I am thinking that companies like Palm may be hurt the worst. In the memo it says:
Please be aware that Office Depot is immediately requiring all products that connect to a Personal Computer and Notebook Computer must pass these Designed for Windows XP logo requirements to be considered for retail distribution through our stores.
Well, Palm and most other PDA's do connect to the PC. I wonder if this is also Microsoft's way of cutting in at Palm?
--Jon
I worked for Prodigy in the early 90's and we used to run banner ads on our old proprietary service back as early as 1991.
If you google it, Prodigy is often regarded as the first.
--Jon
Ok, the inspectors can't find weapons of mass destruction. The US accuses Saddam of hiding them. Now in early phases of the war special ops have been going on to find and disable weapons of mass destruction. If we truly knew where they were, why the hell did we not share the intelligence with the inspectors?
And another thought - Mutually Assured Destruction. Has everyone forgotten about the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction? I brought this up to some folks the other day and they told me Saddam was crazy and does not care about his life. Yeah, I agree he is crazy, but come on, the guy moves from place to place to avoid being detected. He has body doubles, food tasters, a plethora of bodyguards. Does that sound like someone who is is not afraid to die?
The fact of the matter, above all Saddam desires power. There is not much power if your country gets incinerated off of the face of the Earth...
Just my $.02 as an American who is displeased with the actions of his government.
--Jon
You could challenge that. The scores are fact. Factual information cannot be copyrighted. What CAN be copyrighted is the method of compilation or presentation of said fact. Check this out for more information. --Jon
Mr. Cranky gave it three bombs! It can't be that bad then :) If it was really bad it would have gotten mushroom cloud - "Proof that Jesus died in vein" :)
h tm l
:) LOL
http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/startreknemesis.
PS - he apparently doesn't like Will Wheaton much
Not to criticize or defend this review system, I think I have come up with what could be a reasonable explanation for many of the reviews being on the same day - a batch queue. Amazon does not allow you to post reviews in realtime. You post a review, and they review the review, and then post it. The way I imagine it would work is that someone reads through hundreds and hundreds of reviews in a month and then clicks on a button to force them live from a queue. One reason I know they do in fact review the reviews is that sometimes you will see somewhere where someone posts a price or a URL in the review, but Amazon brackets it out like [removed] or something like that.
--Jon
If they are going to go after 802.11b because of easy access, why not go after all the bell operators for pay phones since they could be used to plot terrorism? Why not go after all the radio shacks because equipment they sell can be used to make bombs?
This may sound like irrational conspiracy theory, but I actually think that this isn't about terrorism. It is a "foot in the water" test to slowly start regulating the net, and with it free speech.
Just my $.02...
--Jon
This is not a good turn of events for anyone who buys hard drives from Sun. At Princeton University, every time I order a hard drive for my Sun servers, it is actually a re-badged Fujitsu as of this past summer. Prior to Fujitsu all Sun drives were actually Seagate, and they were very reliable.
Though I find this news disturbing, I have to say I have personally not had a failure of any of my Sun/Fujitsu drives yet. Knock on wood...
Perhaps this problem is not in the higher-end 10k RPM SCSI drives?
I have for the most part been on the side in this issue. People I knew who downloaded free music I used to encourage to buy the music they really like so that the artists get their cut.
/. when I am ready.
Not anymore. I have a CD collection of well over 300 CDs I have bought over the past ten years. I am no longer going to buy ANY pre-recorded music until the industry stops treating good, responsible consumers like myself as criminals.
I am going to catalog my CD collection and put it on eBay. I will donate the proceeds to the EFF.
I will send the link into
--Jon
That is actually pretty far from the truth. New Jersey lies smack dab between the largest television market, New York, and the fourth largest, Philadelphia. That gives us some of the best choice of programming in the United States.
This is NOT MSN Messenger. It is MS messenger - a service built into windows. It basically is like the wall daemon in UNIX. Someone can send a broadcast message on the network and all other hosts get it. What has happened here is that some lowlife spammer has discovered that they can use this feature to annoy people. To make matters worse, they are doing it over port 135 as opposed to the standard 139 NetBIOS port which most people have blocked.
I don't mind companies selling censored content as long as it meets one stipulation: that the content clearly states that it is censored. Often times content is not labeled as such and in many places in the Midwest where Walmart is the only place to buy CD's, videos, etc, the people there often don't realize that the content they are experiencing is not what the artist/writer/etc. intended. I also think there should be a central registry where we can see what companies sell censored and what don't so we as consumers can make the appropriate decisions for ourselves. I would definitely only buy the uncensored versions. :)
--Jon
In some markets Comcast already blocks VPN which for those who use it to work from home, it really sucks. Their reasoning for blocking a legitimate service? They want people to pay double for a "Pro" account of some sort.
Broadband might be the only service I receive that not only has been going up in price, but has been becoming more and more restrictive with less features.
I am just glad I moved. In the town where my brother-in-law lives Comcast has already begun routing all port 80 traffic through proxy servers. I hope they don't do that in my town.
--Jon
This device appears to be a fake - seems very contradictiva of what Palm has been saying.
First off, they pretty much told everyone that new product releases would slow to a crawl for a bit. Two reasons for this. One is that they have a LOT of inventory they want to discount and move. Sitting on inventory is bad. The other reason is that PalmOS 5 just got out of beta and released to licensees on June 10th. Don't forget that PalmOS and Palm Hardware operate as seperate entities, therefore the hardware group gets treated just like any other licensee.
I seriously doubt that Palm would release another device using the older OS as long as they are sitting on product.
Just my $.02...
--Jon
I think you have the wrong impression of Metallica. While they did ruffle a lot of feathers with the way they proceeded, their argument somehow got lost in all the hoopla. Their stance was do not share their studio albums, but share bootlegs etc. to your heart's content.
Anyone who has gone to a Metallica show knows that they ENCOURAGE recording of their shows fror your own enjoyment. In fact I have even heard instances of them letting people jack recording gear into their console at the show should you happen to be close enough.
Their argument, whether you agree with it or not, was that artists should have final say on what is shared and what is not. On this point I would have to agree with them. It shouldn't be the fan's or the label's decision. The decision should be the artists that created the work. If they want to selectively allow some works to be shared and others not, it should be their perogative.
--Jon
Enron, Tyco, ImClone, Worldcom...
All examples of companies that have become large and powerful by being deceptive. What does the US government do about it? Not a damn thing. Why? Because they are all big spenders and heavily linked to the political status quo.
If you want to read a really enlightening book, check out Stupid White Men - I kid you not, this book will open your eyes.
We are at a point in the world where there is a new aristocracy - the corporate powers - and it is only getting worse. You think they control the government now? Give them another 6 years of this administration and we will all miss the days of individual freedom...
Sorry if I come across as a downer - things just don't seem that good these days...
Just my $.002
--Jon
Heh, I was just looking for this article because I remembered this artcile from Slashdot, but this site has a pretty shitty search engine :)
--Jon
I am so glad to see this story. For years I have been telling people that the old games were better. They may not have been as graphically beautiful as today's games or have the audio fidelity, but they were more fun. Think of how many countless hours you spent playing the original Legend of Zelda. Back then most of us didn't have the Internet (or even knew what it was) so solving parts of the game was even more challenging. No web sites to go to for a hint, no people on AIM/IRC to ask. It was a big deal when you learned you could blow a whistle to open the lake to expose stairs to the seventh dungeon.
:)
I actually lucked out and found a guy on eBay selling newly-built 72-pin connectors for the original NES and it worked like magic. Spent days playing Kung Fu, Contra, Gauntlet, Double Dragon, Bionic Commanod, MegaMan, Ikari Warriors, etc.
I think another thing people overlook is that due to the constraints of these older console systems, game developers had to be as optimal as possible and they did everything in assembly. Zelda and Metroid, as complex as they were for games, they took up like 700k worth of code each. Far cry from that 1.6 gigs of drive space Diablo 2 takes up
--Jon