They can trademark cyber-dork, use it in place of his name in every legal document he's involved in, and sue him for trademark infringement if he tries to use it in a defamation suit to get them to stop using it.
You missed the point. The overlay is 2-dimensional, which means it will be a number of pixels wide and high. He's saying that the only clear pixel will be the one in the center. The rest of them will always be in your peripheral vision, and they will always be blurry. If you try to look up to read something on the top, the whole overlay will move up with your eye, so you still won't be able to see it well.
You think these things are going to be the size of laptop batteries? They're going to be the size of a gas tank, or larger. Or if they are small, there will be a few hundred of them plugged together. Either way, it will not be easy to swap them out.
I don't know about that. They're making money explicitly off the Ford name/products, which I'm sure is prohibited somehow. As it's being described as "Copyright Insanity", it sounds to me like copyright laws apply here as well as trademark. Your argument is similar to someone taking a picture of Mickey Mouse, printing it onto a calendar or T-shirt, and then selling it without giving Disney a cut. You don't believe that Disney could successfully sue for that? They've been doing it for decades.
Version 1.0 is never the best, but you have to start somewhere. The OLPC has already driven development for a number of other ultra-cheap computers, which is not a bad thing. And perhaps the next version of it really will be $100. As far as people not using it in the way it's promoted, it'll take time to find the best uses to put it to.
It sounds like it. I've read that the moon rover left there is a bit smaller than 1 pixel in size the at Hubble's current resolution. With 90x more power, it should cover enough pixels to be recognizable.
He's not just trying to hurt the company he works for, he's trying to hurt the millions of people impacted by the data loss. How much time and money would clients of this company waste trying to rebuild it? How many people may suffer, or perhaps even die, because they can't fill their prescriptions? Seriously, if there's a chance anyone could've died from it, they should've brought extra charges up for that, too.
I'm not confusing free with open source. I'm simply stating that a high starting cost discourages developers from playing around with it in their spare time, which slows adoption of a language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Moonlight sounds like it will be free.
The main problem with Flash is that the compiler is too expensive for people who just want to give it a try. I see a project called MTASC out there now, but I couldn't find anything last year when I wanted to give Flash a try (at home in my spare time). Plus all the Flash training docs I found seemed to revolve around using the Macromedia IDE, which I don't have. So without a compiler and without useful docs, I couldn't even get started.
If Silverlight works as well and is free to start developing with, I can see it overtaking Flash. And if there is a fully open-source implementation of it, I can also see it overtaking Flash in platform independence.
Exactly. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already posted.;-) Although it's not usually a bigger gun. It's usually someone who gets 20+ of his friends together with guns to come kill you, rape your wife and/or kids, and take your stuff. People who think you can eliminate the need for police (or military) by having everyone buy a gun are morons. I blame things like cowboy movies, and perhaps the state of Texas (which seems to perpetuate the "cowboy" mentality), for making people think this would be a good thing. I can't imagine these gun-toting individuals picturing themselves in any other way, unless they really want to be "dogs" but are scared of going to prison.
...there will be dogs trying to steal it from you and parasites trying to bleed it from you. It is a very sad fact of life, and probably the primary reason the Libertarian party exists. I'm not Libertarian, but it's easy to see why they can't stand the government taking so much money in taxes to be stolen or pissed away. Some see it as a necessary evil (so we can have roads, bridges, public schools, a military), while others see it as not so necessary.
Either way, we should've clipped Bush's wings before he invaded Iraq by forcing him to adhere to the balanced budget amendment. This deficit spending is going to destroy the US.
You got me there. I don't have an HD-DVD or BluRay drive on any of my systems, and I don't have enough free disk space to be downloading HD content. Although it might be better to write shaders to help with the decoding and just use OpenGL than to use something specialized (because then the same will work on nVidia, and hopefully on any DX10-level integrated chipsets that come out.
In one of the weirdest coincidences I've been involved in recently, I happen to be in the middle of writing GLSL shaders to help decode JPEG 2000 files as I type this (so don't tell me it's not possible to do it using shaders).
P.S. - If you think I'm full of it, check out my web site. This kind of thing is right up my alley.
This sounds like kids complaining about dessert when they haven't even started the main course. While it would be nice to have hardware-accelerated video playback, video plays just fine on most Linux/BSD systems today. Linux/BSD needs accelerated 3D graphics much more. It's not easy to write a really good OpenGL driver for an advanced video card like that (actually, it's several video cards, which makes it even harder to write and test). Maybe AMD will change their minds in the couple of years it takes the open source community to write one. ATI's OpenGL drivers have always sucked anyway, so it wouldn't even help much if they released the source for that.;-)
Actually, I read that he stole a number of ideas for those from Tesla (including a number of his improvements for dynamos). He also spent an awful lot of time and energy denouncing Tesla and his idea of alternating current. Most of the recent things I've heard about Edison paint him as more of a businessman and a patent squatter than an inventor, much like Bill Gates in our time.
"all it takes is a mostly full disk, which has a high I/O load"
It is a relevant question, but this wouldn't kill your hard drive, it would simply reduce the amount of free disk space. And it's not difficult to imagine a file system smart enough to move files around when this happens. When a sector gets written to too many times, it can simply look for and move a really old file onto that sector to free up some of the rarely used sectors of the drive. With the increased performance of SSD, you probably wouldn't even notice it.
Aside from the re-write issue, flash memory drives should be WAY more reliable than a mechanical HD. It should never just completely die or start getting bad sectors so fast you don't have time to retrieve your data. It should also be a lot easier to replace when it starts to degrade. It shouldn't be as susceptible to damage when you drop it from a height of 3-5 feet, or due to heat, cold, vibration, dust, humidity, etc. I'm not sure whether a magnetic field could erase it like a hard drive, but if not, that's another plus for SSD. I imagine SSD's are more susceptible to static electricity, but so is almost everything else plugged into your motherboard, so I'm not sure if that could be considered a minus.
I'm sure if you ever tried an SSD on a laptop, you'd never want to go back to an old HD. The improved performance and battery life would make going back to an old laptop HD seem like going from broadband back to an old 56K modem.
I'll bet the extra backslash was a last minute change snuck in after the rest of the patch had been beta tested. I work in a development shop, and stuff like that happens every now and then.
Slashdot Mirror
They can trademark cyber-dork, use it in place of his name in every legal document he's involved in, and sue him for trademark infringement if he tries to use it in a defamation suit to get them to stop using it.
You missed the point. The overlay is 2-dimensional, which means it will be a number of pixels wide and high. He's saying that the only clear pixel will be the one in the center. The rest of them will always be in your peripheral vision, and they will always be blurry. If you try to look up to read something on the top, the whole overlay will move up with your eye, so you still won't be able to see it well.
Because, you know, that would be a little too creepy.
They taste like chicken.
It's a good thing that YANAL. ;-)
You think these things are going to be the size of laptop batteries? They're going to be the size of a gas tank, or larger. Or if they are small, there will be a few hundred of them plugged together. Either way, it will not be easy to swap them out.
I don't know about that. They're making money explicitly off the Ford name/products, which I'm sure is prohibited somehow. As it's being described as "Copyright Insanity", it sounds to me like copyright laws apply here as well as trademark. Your argument is similar to someone taking a picture of Mickey Mouse, printing it onto a calendar or T-shirt, and then selling it without giving Disney a cut. You don't believe that Disney could successfully sue for that? They've been doing it for decades.
Version 1.0 is never the best, but you have to start somewhere. The OLPC has already driven development for a number of other ultra-cheap computers, which is not a bad thing. And perhaps the next version of it really will be $100. As far as people not using it in the way it's promoted, it'll take time to find the best uses to put it to.
It sounds like it. I've read that the moon rover left there is a bit smaller than 1 pixel in size the at Hubble's current resolution. With 90x more power, it should cover enough pixels to be recognizable.
He's not just trying to hurt the company he works for, he's trying to hurt the millions of people impacted by the data loss. How much time and money would clients of this company waste trying to rebuild it? How many people may suffer, or perhaps even die, because they can't fill their prescriptions? Seriously, if there's a chance anyone could've died from it, they should've brought extra charges up for that, too.
He actually found a use for those tiny scissors that come with a Swiss Army Knife.
Can't wait to make one of these with a blu-ray laser. ;-)
http://lifehacker.com/software/diy/turn-a-flashlight-into-a-handheld-burning-laser-287252.php
I want to know what they plan to do about Apple's only real monopoly: movie trailers. God, I hate QuickTime.
I'm not confusing free with open source. I'm simply stating that a high starting cost discourages developers from playing around with it in their spare time, which slows adoption of a language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Moonlight sounds like it will be free.
The main problem with Flash is that the compiler is too expensive for people who just want to give it a try. I see a project called MTASC out there now, but I couldn't find anything last year when I wanted to give Flash a try (at home in my spare time). Plus all the Flash training docs I found seemed to revolve around using the Macromedia IDE, which I don't have. So without a compiler and without useful docs, I couldn't even get started.
If Silverlight works as well and is free to start developing with, I can see it overtaking Flash. And if there is a fully open-source implementation of it, I can also see it overtaking Flash in platform independence.
You could try using this to fix it: http://www.ubcd4win.com/
Exactly. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already posted. ;-) Although it's not usually a bigger gun. It's usually someone who gets 20+ of his friends together with guns to come kill you, rape your wife and/or kids, and take your stuff. People who think you can eliminate the need for police (or military) by having everyone buy a gun are morons. I blame things like cowboy movies, and perhaps the state of Texas (which seems to perpetuate the "cowboy" mentality), for making people think this would be a good thing. I can't imagine these gun-toting individuals picturing themselves in any other way, unless they really want to be "dogs" but are scared of going to prison.
...there will be dogs trying to steal it from you and parasites trying to bleed it from you. It is a very sad fact of life, and probably the primary reason the Libertarian party exists. I'm not Libertarian, but it's easy to see why they can't stand the government taking so much money in taxes to be stolen or pissed away. Some see it as a necessary evil (so we can have roads, bridges, public schools, a military), while others see it as not so necessary.
Either way, we should've clipped Bush's wings before he invaded Iraq by forcing him to adhere to the balanced budget amendment. This deficit spending is going to destroy the US.
You got me there. I don't have an HD-DVD or BluRay drive on any of my systems, and I don't have enough free disk space to be downloading HD content. Although it might be better to write shaders to help with the decoding and just use OpenGL than to use something specialized (because then the same will work on nVidia, and hopefully on any DX10-level integrated chipsets that come out.
In one of the weirdest coincidences I've been involved in recently, I happen to be in the middle of writing GLSL shaders to help decode JPEG 2000 files as I type this (so don't tell me it's not possible to do it using shaders).
P.S. - If you think I'm full of it, check out my web site. This kind of thing is right up my alley.
This sounds like kids complaining about dessert when they haven't even started the main course. While it would be nice to have hardware-accelerated video playback, video plays just fine on most Linux/BSD systems today. Linux/BSD needs accelerated 3D graphics much more. It's not easy to write a really good OpenGL driver for an advanced video card like that (actually, it's several video cards, which makes it even harder to write and test). Maybe AMD will change their minds in the couple of years it takes the open source community to write one. ATI's OpenGL drivers have always sucked anyway, so it wouldn't even help much if they released the source for that. ;-)
Actually, I read that he stole a number of ideas for those from Tesla (including a number of his improvements for dynamos). He also spent an awful lot of time and energy denouncing Tesla and his idea of alternating current. Most of the recent things I've heard about Edison paint him as more of a businessman and a patent squatter than an inventor, much like Bill Gates in our time.
"all it takes is a mostly full disk, which has a high I/O load"
It is a relevant question, but this wouldn't kill your hard drive, it would simply reduce the amount of free disk space. And it's not difficult to imagine a file system smart enough to move files around when this happens. When a sector gets written to too many times, it can simply look for and move a really old file onto that sector to free up some of the rarely used sectors of the drive. With the increased performance of SSD, you probably wouldn't even notice it.
Aside from the re-write issue, flash memory drives should be WAY more reliable than a mechanical HD. It should never just completely die or start getting bad sectors so fast you don't have time to retrieve your data. It should also be a lot easier to replace when it starts to degrade. It shouldn't be as susceptible to damage when you drop it from a height of 3-5 feet, or due to heat, cold, vibration, dust, humidity, etc. I'm not sure whether a magnetic field could erase it like a hard drive, but if not, that's another plus for SSD. I imagine SSD's are more susceptible to static electricity, but so is almost everything else plugged into your motherboard, so I'm not sure if that could be considered a minus.
I'm sure if you ever tried an SSD on a laptop, you'd never want to go back to an old HD. The improved performance and battery life would make going back to an old laptop HD seem like going from broadband back to an old 56K modem.
All you need are Shrinky Dinks, a printer, and a toaster oven. ;-)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1940203&threshold=-1
I'll bet the extra backslash was a last minute change snuck in after the rest of the patch had been beta tested. I work in a development shop, and stuff like that happens every now and then.
I hear the FBI can make that happen remotely. ;-)