Will they be fined for fraud? they charged their costumers not so much less as the price of a track on a CD for mp3s with an amazingly limited lifespan. For ripping of their costumers they risk what? Nothing. Whereas people getting their music from other online sources are being threatened with jailtime and god-knows-what. Russia was more or less not allowed to join Nato because the perfectly legal and costumer-friendly allofmp3.com.
Microsoft research is doing some very cool stuff, I didn't know they also got into hardware research, and this is almost going to fundamental research. No reason to be bashing here, at least it's money spent that isn't going to buy out competition just to smack them, or to pay lawsuits. And if it makes you feel better, most of the innovations from microsoft research don't make it into microsoft products anyway.
Didn't you get the memo? Trolling has gotten all sophisticated now, you lump or chunk (especially of earth or clay) lacking in sensitivity to the feelings or circumstances of others.
I've been looking into this a bit, and the amazon option seemed the best. The problem of most (I'd say 90%) "cloud" computing systems is that you have no control over the software. Packages are precompiled and all. That sounds easy, but if part of your web solution is based on a specific version of, say, python, you might not be able to use it. And what happens when you change your software at a later point, requiring a different combination of versions than you were using before? Or what if the "cloud" computing provider switches versions at some point. All in all, it doesn't seem a good solution because you need to adjust yourself to your computing solution, instead of having a solution adjusting itself to you.
The idea of putting your own image on a "cloud" computer is very appealing for anyone who wants to be in control of the software. Also it decreases the time you need to spent on getting and remainging your compatible installs.
I think stuff that limits options has a good place in about half of the websites on the internet. Think about the immense amount of small businesses. They don't want to hire a developer, but still might want an online shop. There are now many places where the whole template including secure payment system is provided by the host, and you just do the layout part. In such and similar cases, limited options are a blessing for all involved. The shop doesn't need to invest time, and you as a shopper are faced with a professional site that works.
Then there is the other half of the internet, doing fancy web 2.0 stuff etc. There the problem of the limited options is that at some point you will need to start to make workarounds, and the whole "clean" software becomes a huge mess. Actually, I just yesterday tried to apply online at a company, but their SAP-Web-Service Registration package was such a mess of different login procedures that I couldn't finish the registration, or even log in again. Or get my password again. Since we are talking multinational company here, I am really amazed why they used such a limiting package for this. And a bad one at that. Message to them and others: If you want to do fancy stuff, please do it yourself with decent, flexible, relatively low-level tools, where it is clear exactly that it is doing what you programmed it to do.
Perl-wise: I wrote my own SQL-based CMS site from scratch in perl, in about 3 days. This included testing several of the CPAN packages for SQL interaction and automated layout.
That's how I learned it. Moving a turtle around on the screen drawing lines in LOGO. Nothing wrong with starting with a limited subset of commands to get the idea what an algorithm is and how you can use it. From there on it goes fast enough.
I am not in the toy making business, but I find their production process pretty high tech. And they probably have a very high production quality control. They probably invest a lot to keep their product as perfect as possible. Do they have production facilities in low-wage countries?
Anyway, thanks to Gizmodo for making this amazing piece of fabrication history visible for us!!
Funny that you mention IKEA packaging, one of the main reasons for their success is their highly efficient transport of goods, you'll notice that hardly a single cubic cm of air is wasted in their packaging.
Exactly. The goal of patents and trademarks and such should be to support progress and innovation, not as a tool for the traditional giants to extort the ones that took a substantial risk, a lot of effort, and made a well-deserved gain of it.
In the case of social networking, one could claim that all were a copy of the first social networking site (friendster? maybe older ones, don't know), as there are only so many ways to do it. But to become successful depends not just on your site layout, it is a combination of correct timing, understanding the local markets, and usability of your product. There are still places where google is not the dominating search engine, just because they don't get the local needs correctly (mostly places with different character sets and grammar, so that the search engine just doesn't give efficient results). Should Google sue them? Hell, even Google just copied the idea of making a search engine: their layout contains a search box with a search button next to it, and the option to search in different categories. Not as if that was new.
Copying the font is a non-argument, but at least in 2006 it really was almost a one to one copy. Then again, how many ways are there to make a social networking site look like.
Fact is, Facebook was late in opening up to the German market, and an abbreviation like StudiVZ is an excellent name to target abbreviation-loving German students. It reeks to me like the barbie-vs-bratz issue, where Mattel tries to sue only after it noticed that the success of the other was immense.
Same here. When I drive behind a car with LED taillights, the focussed light of the LED creates a memory effect in my eye and the spots remain visible even when I blink. This is very irritating, because natural instinct tells my eyes to focus on the bright spots, and it makes it difficult for me to focus on other traffic. I for one, hope that LED tail lights remain a luxury good for quite a while to come;)
The programming trick on a supercomputer is that you have a dedicated PhD-(student) work fully on parallelizing your single application. The program that is parallelized performs a lot of computations in a serial kind of way, and is built up out of blocks that can be calculated separately to an extent that allows the speed up of parallelization make up for your cost in bandwidth. The program has to be simple enough that the programmer can predict at which time, which data is needed at what processor, for a variable amount of processors of course. Most of your daily software is too segmented for this. I bet gaming and video decoding have good chances to be parallelized , though.
See, it's the combination of weight, price, form factor, design, ruggedness, and boot speed that makes a highly portable PC. Performance not so much. If I want to check the train schedules at the train station, I want to be online in a few seconds, not a few minutes. The netbooks with the SSD memory have at least the ruggedness, and it's a shame that many don't even provide anything else than an HDD. The design factor is what killed the Via-based alternatives. The Via cloudbook isn't much of a looker.
I'm not very happy of the idea of the OS being completely dependent on external drives. From the link it looks like the USB stick for the OS on that Gdium is a bit protected by the casing, because it fits in underneath the touchpad. I sure hope that is rugged enough, on my eee I am scared shit about a USB drive breaking. I got a Sony Micro Vault now, wich is a very flat small USB stick without the metal casing, but I wish it just was half as long and then double as high or something. The SD card would be a much better alternative, but many eees have a problem with overheating corrupting the data on the SD card, apparently the inside of an external SD reader was used, and that just doesn't tolerate the heat an internal SD reader has to suffer. Can you even boot from an SD card?
In a coup, the existing rulers are thrown over, aren't they. Does anyone have an idea what the existing rulers where then;) As you say, it's hard to tell the difference.
I read once that when Jeri Ellsworth developed the C64 direct-to-tv, she did acquire the licenses, but most of the original C64 software was either lost or not usable, and they had to use the cracked versions instead. DRM is bad for nostalgia. Imagine not being able to read any book from before 1990 because the publisher went bankrupt or changed their DRM server (microsoft plays-for-sure).
I side with that. I was running openbsd w blackbox on my pentium I 100 as a main computer until about 2003. It was doing most stuff pretty fast, I could have multiple desktops with no probs. What killed it for me was.... flash. You can of course turn off flash, but your browsing experience will be limited. As for installation: apart from assigning the partitions, where you have to be really careful (I ruined it once), installation is pretty smooth. I wonder how debian would do.
The best minimal but fast-booting PC you can have now is the EEE with Xandros. Every time I press the button I tend to do something else (got used to that over the years), and everytime I am surprised it is already booted up before I finished.
As a European who sees his (online) privacy and rights diminished by the day, I'd say: Let's keep those "artists" and their megalomaniac publishers away from the Cuban shore. As for the Pirate Bay: did you ever notice that there is considerable effort done by your free world leaders to stop perfectly legal incentives like TPB? Why not suggest sending Team America World Police over while you're at it.
quote youtube: "It seems that you have a google account, would you like to link it to your youtube account?". The real scary thing is that if they can see the overlap between gmail and youtube login at the same time/ip address, they have the link anyway.
Make your bash scripts output to the PC speaker and claim copyright on the output. You could put copyright on a piece of code anyway, but since that is not "art", none of the almighty *AAs will come to help you. Could someone please patent the tonal systems so we get rid of all music altogether. I'm getting sick and tired of this.
I don't have a problem with large computers you carry from room to room with a built-in UPS.
With a laptop of that weight you need indeed someone from the United Parcel Service to carry it around for you:)
Disclaimer: proud EEE owner. Actually that was what I was hoping for, couldn't they make a netbook with a cell cpu. I'd buy it! Housewifes would, too! As a PS3 can already play movies, games, and do internet stuff, it is actually commodity hard and software.
The real reason it was shut down: the RIAA found out that the people at ground control were singing a clearly unlicensed version of "we are the robots" when playing around with the robot arm joystick.
I too have the idea that this positive news is just a way to tell that somewhere in the process, someone terribly messed up. Ideally, it shouldn't even *begin* with performing a task that could damage itself. Say it is given the command to lift a stone. What if it first would try to weigh it by measuring the force needed to lift it up just a little bit, and let go as soon as it measures that the weight is too much for the specifications of the arm.
Slashdot Mirror
oh shit. my bad :) Thanks for correcting me here ;)
Will they be fined for fraud? they charged their costumers not so much less as the price of a track on a CD for mp3s with an amazingly limited lifespan. For ripping of their costumers they risk what? Nothing. Whereas people getting their music from other online sources are being threatened with jailtime and god-knows-what. Russia was more or less not allowed to join Nato because the perfectly legal and costumer-friendly allofmp3.com.
Microsoft research is doing some very cool stuff, I didn't know they also got into hardware research, and this is almost going to fundamental research. No reason to be bashing here, at least it's money spent that isn't going to buy out competition just to smack them, or to pay lawsuits. And if it makes you feel better, most of the innovations from microsoft research don't make it into microsoft products anyway.
Didn't you get the memo? Trolling has gotten all sophisticated now, you lump or chunk (especially of earth or clay) lacking in sensitivity to the feelings or circumstances of others.
The idea of putting your own image on a "cloud" computer is very appealing for anyone who wants to be in control of the software. Also it decreases the time you need to spent on getting and remainging your compatible installs.
Then there is the other half of the internet, doing fancy web 2.0 stuff etc. There the problem of the limited options is that at some point you will need to start to make workarounds, and the whole "clean" software becomes a huge mess. Actually, I just yesterday tried to apply online at a company, but their SAP-Web-Service Registration package was such a mess of different login procedures that I couldn't finish the registration, or even log in again. Or get my password again. Since we are talking multinational company here, I am really amazed why they used such a limiting package for this. And a bad one at that. Message to them and others: If you want to do fancy stuff, please do it yourself with decent, flexible, relatively low-level tools, where it is clear exactly that it is doing what you programmed it to do.
Perl-wise: I wrote my own SQL-based CMS site from scratch in perl, in about 3 days. This included testing several of the CPAN packages for SQL interaction and automated layout.
That's how I learned it. Moving a turtle around on the screen drawing lines in LOGO. Nothing wrong with starting with a limited subset of commands to get the idea what an algorithm is and how you can use it. From there on it goes fast enough.
Anyway, thanks to Gizmodo for making this amazing piece of fabrication history visible for us!!
Funny that you mention IKEA packaging, one of the main reasons for their success is their highly efficient transport of goods, you'll notice that hardly a single cubic cm of air is wasted in their packaging.
In the case of social networking, one could claim that all were a copy of the first social networking site (friendster? maybe older ones, don't know), as there are only so many ways to do it. But to become successful depends not just on your site layout, it is a combination of correct timing, understanding the local markets, and usability of your product. There are still places where google is not the dominating search engine, just because they don't get the local needs correctly (mostly places with different character sets and grammar, so that the search engine just doesn't give efficient results). Should Google sue them? Hell, even Google just copied the idea of making a search engine: their layout contains a search box with a search button next to it, and the option to search in different categories. Not as if that was new.
Fact is, Facebook was late in opening up to the German market, and an abbreviation like StudiVZ is an excellent name to target abbreviation-loving German students. It reeks to me like the barbie-vs-bratz issue, where Mattel tries to sue only after it noticed that the success of the other was immense.
Same here. When I drive behind a car with LED taillights, the focussed light of the LED creates a memory effect in my eye and the spots remain visible even when I blink. This is very irritating, because natural instinct tells my eyes to focus on the bright spots, and it makes it difficult for me to focus on other traffic. I for one, hope that LED tail lights remain a luxury good for quite a while to come ;)
No kidding, my gf's non-native english professor at university actually corrected one of her essays like that.
The programming trick on a supercomputer is that you have a dedicated PhD-(student) work fully on parallelizing your single application. The program that is parallelized performs a lot of computations in a serial kind of way, and is built up out of blocks that can be calculated separately to an extent that allows the speed up of parallelization make up for your cost in bandwidth. The program has to be simple enough that the programmer can predict at which time, which data is needed at what processor, for a variable amount of processors of course. Most of your daily software is too segmented for this. I bet gaming and video decoding have good chances to be parallelized , though.
I'm not very happy of the idea of the OS being completely dependent on external drives. From the link it looks like the USB stick for the OS on that Gdium is a bit protected by the casing, because it fits in underneath the touchpad. I sure hope that is rugged enough, on my eee I am scared shit about a USB drive breaking. I got a Sony Micro Vault now, wich is a very flat small USB stick without the metal casing, but I wish it just was half as long and then double as high or something. The SD card would be a much better alternative, but many eees have a problem with overheating corrupting the data on the SD card, apparently the inside of an external SD reader was used, and that just doesn't tolerate the heat an internal SD reader has to suffer. Can you even boot from an SD card?
In a coup, the existing rulers are thrown over, aren't they. Does anyone have an idea what the existing rulers where then ;) As you say, it's hard to tell the difference.
I read once that when Jeri Ellsworth developed the C64 direct-to-tv, she did acquire the licenses, but most of the original C64 software was either lost or not usable, and they had to use the cracked versions instead. DRM is bad for nostalgia. Imagine not being able to read any book from before 1990 because the publisher went bankrupt or changed their DRM server (microsoft plays-for-sure).
The best minimal but fast-booting PC you can have now is the EEE with Xandros. Every time I press the button I tend to do something else (got used to that over the years), and everytime I am surprised it is already booted up before I finished.
As a European who sees his (online) privacy and rights diminished by the day, I'd say: Let's keep those "artists" and their megalomaniac publishers away from the Cuban shore. As for the Pirate Bay: did you ever notice that there is considerable effort done by your free world leaders to stop perfectly legal incentives like TPB? Why not suggest sending Team America World Police over while you're at it.
I bet you never had to get something done from a governmental employee.
quote youtube: "It seems that you have a google account, would you like to link it to your youtube account?". The real scary thing is that if they can see the overlap between gmail and youtube login at the same time/ip address, they have the link anyway.
Make your bash scripts output to the PC speaker and claim copyright on the output. You could put copyright on a piece of code anyway, but since that is not "art", none of the almighty *AAs will come to help you. Could someone please patent the tonal systems so we get rid of all music altogether. I'm getting sick and tired of this.
With a laptop of that weight you need indeed someone from the United Parcel Service to carry it around for you :)
Disclaimer: proud EEE owner. Actually that was what I was hoping for, couldn't they make a netbook with a cell cpu. I'd buy it! Housewifes would, too! As a PS3 can already play movies, games, and do internet stuff, it is actually commodity hard and software.
The real reason it was shut down: the RIAA found out that the people at ground control were singing a clearly unlicensed version of "we are the robots" when playing around with the robot arm joystick.
I too have the idea that this positive news is just a way to tell that somewhere in the process, someone terribly messed up. Ideally, it shouldn't even *begin* with performing a task that could damage itself. Say it is given the command to lift a stone. What if it first would try to weigh it by measuring the force needed to lift it up just a little bit, and let go as soon as it measures that the weight is too much for the specifications of the arm.