I live in Chicago. I take the bus or train to work every day. My usual commute is about 30-45 minutes each way.
Speaking purely for myself, the new iPods are a wonderful thing. I very rarely have an opportunity to catch a show when it airs. And I hate all the commercial interruptions. And I don't like tivo or other recorders because, because, in general, that is a little *too* much homage to the shrine of televison for my tastes.
But I do like some shows, and I would *love* to be able to watch them during otherwise "dead" time in my day. If this means on the bus/train when I'm heading to the office, wonderful. If this means watching while having lunch, wonderful.
I don't care if it is high definition, I don't care if it's a huge screen so I can obsess over every detail. What I care about is that it's reasonably clear, of a size big enough to see, and on a device that can be easily carried around and isn't too bulky to be convenient to watch on a bus or train.
In short, I am exactly the kind of person this device is targeted to, and there are lots of people like me.
People who care about the resolution of the screen are all over the place on/., but they represent a vanishingly small number of people who are relevant to Apple's market for this device.
Laptops are huge - desktop markets have plateaued, but the number of laptops sold, and their portion of the entire market for personal computers, is growing constantly.
Saying that AMD has overtaken Intel in a declining market is not saying much. While Intel certainly hasn't given up on the desktop market, they do know that desktops are the past and laptops are the future.
Further, as has been said, the lack of direct sales data is pretty weak. That's like saying "More computers are sold with OSX installed than Windows, if we ignore every market channel other than the Apple.com store!" Well, okay, it's not THAT bad, but it's leaving out a huge chunk of the market.
I want an engine that'll let me choose how things get rendered, much as can be done with various products like Max or Poser or whatever.
If I want to cel-render everything so it looks like a cartoon, let me do that. If I want things to look hyper-realistic, let me do that. If I want things to look as if they are made of stained glass, let me do that.
Give me a palette of variables and let me experiment. Let me export those variables so that I can share my settings with other people, and they with me.
A perfect example of a game that could really benefit from on-the-fly changes to the rendering would be City of Heroes. I would *love* to see the game done in a XIII/Zelda: Wind Walker style - but, alas, the developers chose to present it in that "pseudo-reality" style that's become boring to me. There have also been a number of games that I think I might have otherwise enjoyed, but I was just bored to death with the visuals.
Video games are interactive. So let me interact with the renderer.
In one of the screenshots it clearly shows that the guy only has 2 gigs of RAM. Isn't Vista supposed to require 2TB of Carbon-Nanotube RAM and a Quantum processor?
My sister and I have long email chains going via gmail, and in them we attempt to salt the discussion with "red herring" words and phrases to see what pops up as contextual.
Usually, the ads we get are more or less relevant to the conversation (and in once case resulted in me purchasing a food dehydrator - fun with dessicating fruit!) and when they aren't, they tend to be very funny. For instance, at one point we were discussing a local political figure who had been taken out of office and jailed, and the ads that came up were for adult incontinence products. It seemed appropriate that talking about the legal problems of an asshole would trigger ads for a product designed to trap shit and keep it from being a problem.
My mom is not a subscriber to any pay channels, however her cable provider often gives her a free week of HBO or Showtime in order to let her get a sample - whet her appetite as it were.
I also believe that, in the case of Rome, HBO is sending people DVDs of the first episode in the mail - and, also, giving them away at places like Best Buy.
So HBO is letting people sample them, just as you suggest. But they are doing it on their terms - just as the supermarkets do with their samples. HBO is saying "Here, try this" and handing out specific packages for that purpose. The people trying to get torrents wouldn't be akin to people taking a free sample offered by a supermarket, they'd be like people who open up a bag of chips and nosh on it for a bit, and then put the open bag back on a shelf.
Your last line, about a "free sample at [your] convenience" is, in my opinion, somewhat unreasonable. What is a "sample"? Is it the first episode? Well, they are letting people get that. What is "convenience"? Is it being able to watch that sample when you want? Well, if you get one of those free DVDs, you can watch that first episode to your heart's content, whenever you want. If by "sample" and "convenience" you mean "free downloads of every episode that has ever aired of the show" then I'm afraid you have a rather more generous idea of "sample" than most.
The problem is, MS isn't IBM. MS is very good at turning around when they've fucked up.
Remember all of those "Oh my god, Microsoft totally missed the boat with the Internet!!! Netscape will eat them for lunch!"
Where is Netscape now? Where is Microsoft now?
The key to Microsoft's success in turning around is... and this may sound funny... a lack of arrogance. They have no problem at all looking at what someone else did and saying "ME TOO!" and throwing all their considerable weight into changing course and then stomping the shit out of the competition. IBM, on the other hand, was arrogant. They didn't just miss the boat, they missed the boat and then attempted to insist that nobody would ever need to use a boat, and that boats were not, in fact, anything but glorified toys for children.
Unless and until Microsoft starts believing their own shit (and I have no reason to think they do) they are in no danger of becoming IBM. What they say and do publicly and what they do inside - two entirely different things. I would absolutely not be shocked if they had a Windows branded Linuxish product and an Office version that works just fine on Linux, as well as a number of other such things, waiting in the wings.
It's the same thing as "Ladies Night" at a bar or those ads for phone chat-rooms that says "women join free" etc.
A translation of those terms:
Ladies Night: Lots of horny guys getting their hopes dashed when the one "lady" that does show up is a chain-smoking 63-year old who's got open herpes sores on her face. And she still gets some play - never underestimate the Barney Gumbel factor.
Did it also limit the person's choice of race to human? Only give them skin color choices that were within a reasonable "suntan/cave dweller" variation? Make them submit a physical fitness profile, IQ test and personality inventory to determine stats? Limit their class to some variation of "unskilled peon" unless they submitted documents certifying that they had skills relevant to game-play? Limit their economic potential in game to some reasonable analogue of their real-life finances? Limit their location to their home city?
It's amazing to me how much something as absolutely irrelevant as the gender of another player in an MMO seems to matter to people. I've never heard a single argument as to *why* who is on the other end of the keyboard matters. Am I fun to play with? Do we get along? Well then, what possible difference can it make whether I'm a pointer or a setter?
Games are games. Tough shit that some people have issues with guys pretending to be girls or girls pretending to be guys, or any other variation you can think of. People play games because they *aren't* the real world, and they aren't limited by real-world conditions and situations.
The only possible situation in which someone's "real" gender is even remotely relevant to me is if I am about to have sex with them. Period. And hell, close to closing time... I'm not sure I'd care too much.:p
I hope we do see another version, if it were done right.
If it didn't require extra equipment or any kind of "call home" and if the disks were environmentally friendly (or, easier - had a deposit to encourage people to recycle them properly) and the price were right, yes, I'd like to see that.
Why? Because I don't like having to remember to return things and I don't like feeling like I'm under any time pressure at all (even if it is something "gentle" like "Keep it as long as you want") to watch recreational stuff. I had a NetFlix subscription, but I always felt like I was "wasting" it - and, really, for me, watching a movie is an impulse thing. I'm in the mood for whatever *right now,* not 2 days from now.
I could, however, easily see picking up a stack of 1-shot DVDs for $3-5 or whatever (and whenever - they'd be an impulse thing when I happened to pass by and saw a film that I want to watch "some day") and having them sitting on my shelf. When the urge to watch a movie strikes, I root through them, pick one I want to see at the moment, and pop it in. When I'm done, I put the used disk aside, and, at *MY* convenience (a day or a year later, shouldn't matter) I take the disks in for recycling and get my deposit back or give 'em to some homeless guy so he can get the cash for it.
In direct response to the parent, I think 1-shot DVDs failed because of the stupid hoops users had to jump through to use them. Lots of things failed the first time out - sometimes it's because they were just a bad idea in general, but many times it's because it was an awful incarnation of an OK idea.
The reason that would happen is the "minimum of 4 turns per advance" rule. For some stupid reason, they chose to punish players who are able to really ramp up their tech production by making a hard cap at 4 turns.
What I do is go into the editor and make the minimum 1 turn. The difference between 1 turn a 4 turn minimums is rather huge over the course of the game - just finished one on Prince level (makes for fun, fast games without requiring too much thinking) where I had managed to get Modern Armor, while the closest computer Civ was still trying to figure out what Oil was for.
The thing that pisses me off about Civ is the diplomacy issue. What's the point of making any kind of alliance when your allies will just stop fighting after 2-3 turns, or fight very VERY poorly, or break the alliance with you. Honestly, Civ has *always* felt like a "Me against all of them" game, rather than "Our team vs. them."
There may still be argument over this as the wheel was invented about 3000 B.C. However, Egypt was supposedly quite late in getting wheel technology.
Really? I always play as the Zulus, and those bastards always seem to be a few steps ahead of me, tech-wise. You must play on Chieftan.
AI in gaming
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Turn Based games seem to always have "cheating" AI in order to pose a challenge to a human player - the Civilization games are notorious for some of this.
What are your thoughts on this? Is it all about the gaming experience so, ultimately, "cheating" AI is perfectly OK so long as it provides a fun and challenging experience? Or would you ultimately want to see AI that could actually play by the same rules as the humans, and play well?
Side question: Just as we have video cards optimized to provide better graphics, could you see AI cards in production to enhance the AI of various games? Is AI even really relevant, past the point where the "average" gamer is presented with a challenge?
Designing a device that can detect chemical traces - not *that* hard. Designing a device that can detect chemical traces, seek out the source of those traces and destroy it - rather a bit difficult.
This is not, in my opinion a prequel to some sort of hunter/killer medical nanotech. It is, however, a HUGE step towards "curing" cancer: The survival rate for most cancers is much greater with early detection - this would allow MUCH earlier detection than we currently have - it could be part of a routine check-up, or even eventually a monthly/weekly test for whatever kind of like how diabetics check their sugar.
So, if this works as well as it could, we might not actually need that active nano-defense: just catching it really early might let more conventional techniques do the job.
We know we exist, and we advance. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to think that it is possible that other species, like us, exist, and are just more advanced.
However, we've absolutely no reason what-so-ever to believe in god. We don't see little gods, running around, creating things out of thin air, so what possible reason for extrapolating to a bigger/more advanced god is there?
So, Perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for. is now considered insightful?
Even though it gets said about anything MSFT does or has done for years?
Bill Gates is said to be suffering from a bout of constipation after a recent cheese tasting - perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!
I heard Steve B. had difficulty perfofming for his wife - perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!
The other day, this friend of mine saw a rat on her floor, and she screamed "Aieeeeee!" as she beat the crap out of it with a broom! "Aieeeee!" sounds like "IE" and that must mean that Internet Explorer is in trouble - perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!
They have an epic mountain of cash. They manage to avoid any significant fallout after being sued by the government. I'm pretty much convinced Bill Gates could rape a baby on the Today show and other than being admonished by Matt Laurer, nothing would come of it.
When they regularly stop making a profit, when their cash reserves dip below 20ish billion, when the average person recognizes that MSFT *isn't* actually the only player in the game, then maybe we can start talking about chinks in their armor.
But for right now? Yeah - they've got crust built up inside 'em. And people bitch publically about how much it sucks to work there (though, to be honest, most of the complaints seem to me as if MSFT is now "just like anywhere else" rather than being in some kind of death spiral). It's a high profile company that lots of people love to hate, but come on.
Here is the only time where I'll say "Perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!": Mac OSX has 25% of the desktop market, Linux distros have 10% and OpenOffice has at least 30% of the business apps package. That would mean they are weak in their core - their cash cows would be running dry.
Absolutely - the "why" is because it's fairly clear so far that Nintendo is the only one coming out with something that isn't more of the same.
The specs really don't mean anything to me - what do I care if it's 1ghz or 10ghz, as long as things play well? The price is, I assume, going to be reasonable. And the games, well, Nintendo has always had some of the more interesting games.
Or is it just that, with source fully available for people to examine (and a community of die-hards willing to spend a Saturday evening actually looking at same), flaws can be more easily found?
I don't know if that really would make much of a difference, but then again, we can't really know for sure since the IE source code isn't available to make it a fair test.
Anyone out there who does seek out flaws care to shed some insight on how you go about doing it? I imagine some is like with old school video game hacking - you notice strange behavior and experiment - but I'd also imagine some is looking at source and saying "Hm, this seems off..." and then trying something without actually noticing "off" behavior.
I've always looked at Nintendo as the Apple of gaming companies.
They come out with neat stuff and sometimes it's just fan-fucking-tastic: Look at your current controller and think for a second about what company brought those out first. Look at your current handheld game: If it isn't a DS or GameBoy variant, it is likely inspired by the GB.
They come out with neat stuff and sometimes it just tanks: Virtual Boy, power glove, power mat and the like.
If I'm interested in consoles that take chances and try to do new things, I'll go with a Nintendo. If I just want a console that is just more of the same, but faster then I'll go with a PS or XBox.
I like Nintendo because I think that, despite not having the most impressive specs, they do more to push *gaming* forward - gaming as an experience - than anyone else. Sony and MSFT might have faster stuff or prettier pictures, but there's nothing really different about their systems.
Personally, I hope the Revolution lives up to its name. I, for one, will be getting one upon release, while I will almost certainly be waiting at least a year for an XBox 360 or PS3.
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
·
· Score: 1
Computer software isn't a "car", "fridge" or "toilet". Name any one of those things that doubles in power every 18 months. Oh yeah - you can't.
There's a joke in here somewhere about power and toilets. Maybe if we add in spicy curry or mexican food?
It isn't a matter of burning bridges. It's a matter of ESR being (for better or worse, to whatever degree) a public voice for the OS community.
He is putting himself forward as an evangelist, a mouthpiece, and he should know better than to behave like a whack-job.
I can very easily see ways that companies such as MS could spin this to make the OS community look like a bunch of loons. "Do you really want to trust your business to a guy who goes off like (hands out letter) this to something like a form letter from a recruiter? He can't control himself - and he's the best they've got!" (Not true, but how many suits know that?)
In short, if you want to claim to be a leader of something, then you give up the right to act like an asshole unless it is strategically beneficial to those you claim to represent. This was not. This was pure ego on ERS's part.
You mean people too dumb to realize that the email was a template sent from a headhunter who is contracted to, but doesn't actually work as an employee of Microsoft?
Or do you mean people who are so absolutely lacking in sense and diplomacy that they go off like a loon on something like this, giving their "enemies" perfect ammunition in the form of "Gee, you're really thinking of open source stuff, huh? Well, you know... This guy (hands out a copy of this rant) is one of the key people behind that whole thing, and he doesn't exactly come off as stable, you know? Do you really want to trust your business to that guy? Or would you rather trust it to a company like us, with a long history and billions of dollars that isn't going anywhere?"
Or perhaps you mean people who are so self-absorbed that they dismiss the work of the entire OS community and take credit for their work?
Or maybe you meant someone who is so freaking delusional that he thinks he singlehandedly talked the Fortune 500 into examining open source?
I'm no MS fangirl, but jesus, if this is an example of a FOSS evangelist... There's a rather serious image issue, dontcha think? "Starving" the FOSS movement of resources like ESR might not be a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Chicago. I take the bus or train to work every day. My usual commute is about 30-45 minutes each way.
/., but they represent a vanishingly small number of people who are relevant to Apple's market for this device.
Speaking purely for myself, the new iPods are a wonderful thing. I very rarely have an opportunity to catch a show when it airs. And I hate all the commercial interruptions. And I don't like tivo or other recorders because, because, in general, that is a little *too* much homage to the shrine of televison for my tastes.
But I do like some shows, and I would *love* to be able to watch them during otherwise "dead" time in my day. If this means on the bus/train when I'm heading to the office, wonderful. If this means watching while having lunch, wonderful.
I don't care if it is high definition, I don't care if it's a huge screen so I can obsess over every detail. What I care about is that it's reasonably clear, of a size big enough to see, and on a device that can be easily carried around and isn't too bulky to be convenient to watch on a bus or train.
In short, I am exactly the kind of person this device is targeted to, and there are lots of people like me.
People who care about the resolution of the screen are all over the place on
Laptops are huge - desktop markets have plateaued, but the number of laptops sold, and their portion of the entire market for personal computers, is growing constantly.
Saying that AMD has overtaken Intel in a declining market is not saying much. While Intel certainly hasn't given up on the desktop market, they do know that desktops are the past and laptops are the future.
Further, as has been said, the lack of direct sales data is pretty weak. That's like saying "More computers are sold with OSX installed than Windows, if we ignore every market channel other than the Apple.com store!" Well, okay, it's not THAT bad, but it's leaving out a huge chunk of the market.
I want an engine that'll let me choose how things get rendered, much as can be done with various products like Max or Poser or whatever.
If I want to cel-render everything so it looks like a cartoon, let me do that. If I want things to look hyper-realistic, let me do that. If I want things to look as if they are made of stained glass, let me do that.
Give me a palette of variables and let me experiment. Let me export those variables so that I can share my settings with other people, and they with me.
A perfect example of a game that could really benefit from on-the-fly changes to the rendering would be City of Heroes. I would *love* to see the game done in a XIII/Zelda: Wind Walker style - but, alas, the developers chose to present it in that "pseudo-reality" style that's become boring to me. There have also been a number of games that I think I might have otherwise enjoyed, but I was just bored to death with the visuals.
Video games are interactive. So let me interact with the renderer.
In one of the screenshots it clearly shows that the guy only has 2 gigs of RAM. Isn't Vista supposed to require 2TB of Carbon-Nanotube RAM and a Quantum processor?
Clearly these are fakes.
My sister and I have long email chains going via gmail, and in them we attempt to salt the discussion with "red herring" words and phrases to see what pops up as contextual.
Usually, the ads we get are more or less relevant to the conversation (and in once case resulted in me purchasing a food dehydrator - fun with dessicating fruit!) and when they aren't, they tend to be very funny. For instance, at one point we were discussing a local political figure who had been taken out of office and jailed, and the ads that came up were for adult incontinence products. It seemed appropriate that talking about the legal problems of an asshole would trigger ads for a product designed to trap shit and keep it from being a problem.
My mom is not a subscriber to any pay channels, however her cable provider often gives her a free week of HBO or Showtime in order to let her get a sample - whet her appetite as it were.
I also believe that, in the case of Rome, HBO is sending people DVDs of the first episode in the mail - and, also, giving them away at places like Best Buy.
So HBO is letting people sample them, just as you suggest. But they are doing it on their terms - just as the supermarkets do with their samples. HBO is saying "Here, try this" and handing out specific packages for that purpose. The people trying to get torrents wouldn't be akin to people taking a free sample offered by a supermarket, they'd be like people who open up a bag of chips and nosh on it for a bit, and then put the open bag back on a shelf.
Your last line, about a "free sample at [your] convenience" is, in my opinion, somewhat unreasonable. What is a "sample"? Is it the first episode? Well, they are letting people get that. What is "convenience"? Is it being able to watch that sample when you want? Well, if you get one of those free DVDs, you can watch that first episode to your heart's content, whenever you want. If by "sample" and "convenience" you mean "free downloads of every episode that has ever aired of the show" then I'm afraid you have a rather more generous idea of "sample" than most.
The problem is, MS isn't IBM. MS is very good at turning around when they've fucked up.
Remember all of those "Oh my god, Microsoft totally missed the boat with the Internet!!! Netscape will eat them for lunch!"
Where is Netscape now? Where is Microsoft now?
The key to Microsoft's success in turning around is... and this may sound funny... a lack of arrogance. They have no problem at all looking at what someone else did and saying "ME TOO!" and throwing all their considerable weight into changing course and then stomping the shit out of the competition. IBM, on the other hand, was arrogant. They didn't just miss the boat, they missed the boat and then attempted to insist that nobody would ever need to use a boat, and that boats were not, in fact, anything but glorified toys for children.
Unless and until Microsoft starts believing their own shit (and I have no reason to think they do) they are in no danger of becoming IBM. What they say and do publicly and what they do inside - two entirely different things. I would absolutely not be shocked if they had a Windows branded Linuxish product and an Office version that works just fine on Linux, as well as a number of other such things, waiting in the wings.
It's the same thing as "Ladies Night" at a bar or those ads for phone chat-rooms that says "women join free" etc.
A translation of those terms:
Ladies Night: Lots of horny guys getting their hopes dashed when the one "lady" that does show up is a chain-smoking 63-year old who's got open herpes sores on her face. And she still gets some play - never underestimate the Barney Gumbel factor.
Women Join Free: Women Join Never.
Did it also limit the person's choice of race to human? Only give them skin color choices that were within a reasonable "suntan/cave dweller" variation? Make them submit a physical fitness profile, IQ test and personality inventory to determine stats? Limit their class to some variation of "unskilled peon" unless they submitted documents certifying that they had skills relevant to game-play? Limit their economic potential in game to some reasonable analogue of their real-life finances? Limit their location to their home city?
:p
It's amazing to me how much something as absolutely irrelevant as the gender of another player in an MMO seems to matter to people. I've never heard a single argument as to *why* who is on the other end of the keyboard matters. Am I fun to play with? Do we get along? Well then, what possible difference can it make whether I'm a pointer or a setter?
Games are games. Tough shit that some people have issues with guys pretending to be girls or girls pretending to be guys, or any other variation you can think of. People play games because they *aren't* the real world, and they aren't limited by real-world conditions and situations.
The only possible situation in which someone's "real" gender is even remotely relevant to me is if I am about to have sex with them. Period. And hell, close to closing time... I'm not sure I'd care too much.
I hope we do see another version, if it were done right.
If it didn't require extra equipment or any kind of "call home" and if the disks were environmentally friendly (or, easier - had a deposit to encourage people to recycle them properly) and the price were right, yes, I'd like to see that.
Why? Because I don't like having to remember to return things and I don't like feeling like I'm under any time pressure at all (even if it is something "gentle" like "Keep it as long as you want") to watch recreational stuff. I had a NetFlix subscription, but I always felt like I was "wasting" it - and, really, for me, watching a movie is an impulse thing. I'm in the mood for whatever *right now,* not 2 days from now.
I could, however, easily see picking up a stack of 1-shot DVDs for $3-5 or whatever (and whenever - they'd be an impulse thing when I happened to pass by and saw a film that I want to watch "some day") and having them sitting on my shelf. When the urge to watch a movie strikes, I root through them, pick one I want to see at the moment, and pop it in. When I'm done, I put the used disk aside, and, at *MY* convenience (a day or a year later, shouldn't matter) I take the disks in for recycling and get my deposit back or give 'em to some homeless guy so he can get the cash for it.
In direct response to the parent, I think 1-shot DVDs failed because of the stupid hoops users had to jump through to use them. Lots of things failed the first time out - sometimes it's because they were just a bad idea in general, but many times it's because it was an awful incarnation of an OK idea.
The reason that would happen is the "minimum of 4 turns per advance" rule. For some stupid reason, they chose to punish players who are able to really ramp up their tech production by making a hard cap at 4 turns.
What I do is go into the editor and make the minimum 1 turn. The difference between 1 turn a 4 turn minimums is rather huge over the course of the game - just finished one on Prince level (makes for fun, fast games without requiring too much thinking) where I had managed to get Modern Armor, while the closest computer Civ was still trying to figure out what Oil was for.
The thing that pisses me off about Civ is the diplomacy issue. What's the point of making any kind of alliance when your allies will just stop fighting after 2-3 turns, or fight very VERY poorly, or break the alliance with you. Honestly, Civ has *always* felt like a "Me against all of them" game, rather than "Our team vs. them."
There may still be argument over this as the wheel was invented about 3000 B.C. However, Egypt was supposedly quite late in getting wheel technology.
Really? I always play as the Zulus, and those bastards always seem to be a few steps ahead of me, tech-wise. You must play on Chieftan.
Turn Based games seem to always have "cheating" AI in order to pose a challenge to a human player - the Civilization games are notorious for some of this.
What are your thoughts on this? Is it all about the gaming experience so, ultimately, "cheating" AI is perfectly OK so long as it provides a fun and challenging experience? Or would you ultimately want to see AI that could actually play by the same rules as the humans, and play well?
Side question: Just as we have video cards optimized to provide better graphics, could you see AI cards in production to enhance the AI of various games? Is AI even really relevant, past the point where the "average" gamer is presented with a challenge?
Put ESR in charge - his ego would cushion him from any harm.
Designing a device that can detect chemical traces - not *that* hard.
Designing a device that can detect chemical traces, seek out the source of those traces and destroy it - rather a bit difficult.
This is not, in my opinion a prequel to some sort of hunter/killer medical nanotech. It is, however, a HUGE step towards "curing" cancer: The survival rate for most cancers is much greater with early detection - this would allow MUCH earlier detection than we currently have - it could be part of a routine check-up, or even eventually a monthly/weekly test for whatever kind of like how diabetics check their sugar.
So, if this works as well as it could, we might not actually need that active nano-defense: just catching it really early might let more conventional techniques do the job.
Yes, you're the luckiest "sandtiger" in the world.
Hey, it was either that or Picabo Street.
I was made privy to the time, place, and circumstances of my conception.
Hm... what is "Shit I did NOT FUCKING NEED TO KNOW"?
My parents were hippies. I'm just lucky I'm not named Brussel Sprout or some shit.
That's a fair statement, except for one thing:
We know we exist, and we advance. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to think that it is possible that other species, like us, exist, and are just more advanced.
However, we've absolutely no reason what-so-ever to believe in god. We don't see little gods, running around, creating things out of thin air, so what possible reason for extrapolating to a bigger/more advanced god is there?
So, Perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for. is now considered insightful?
Even though it gets said about anything MSFT does or has done for years?
Bill Gates is said to be suffering from a bout of constipation after a recent cheese tasting - perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!
I heard Steve B. had difficulty perfofming for his wife - perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!
The other day, this friend of mine saw a rat on her floor, and she screamed "Aieeeeee!" as she beat the crap out of it with a broom! "Aieeeee!" sounds like "IE" and that must mean that Internet Explorer is in trouble - perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!
They have an epic mountain of cash. They manage to avoid any significant fallout after being sued by the government. I'm pretty much convinced Bill Gates could rape a baby on the Today show and other than being admonished by Matt Laurer, nothing would come of it.
When they regularly stop making a profit, when their cash reserves dip below 20ish billion, when the average person recognizes that MSFT *isn't* actually the only player in the game, then maybe we can start talking about chinks in their armor.
But for right now? Yeah - they've got crust built up inside 'em. And people bitch publically about how much it sucks to work there (though, to be honest, most of the complaints seem to me as if MSFT is now "just like anywhere else" rather than being in some kind of death spiral). It's a high profile company that lots of people love to hate, but come on.
Here is the only time where I'll say "Perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for!": Mac OSX has 25% of the desktop market, Linux distros have 10% and OpenOffice has at least 30% of the business apps package. That would mean they are weak in their core - their cash cows would be running dry.
Absolutely - the "why" is because it's fairly clear so far that Nintendo is the only one coming out with something that isn't more of the same.
The specs really don't mean anything to me - what do I care if it's 1ghz or 10ghz, as long as things play well? The price is, I assume, going to be reasonable. And the games, well, Nintendo has always had some of the more interesting games.
Or is it just that, with source fully available for people to examine (and a community of die-hards willing to spend a Saturday evening actually looking at same), flaws can be more easily found?
I don't know if that really would make much of a difference, but then again, we can't really know for sure since the IE source code isn't available to make it a fair test.
Anyone out there who does seek out flaws care to shed some insight on how you go about doing it? I imagine some is like with old school video game hacking - you notice strange behavior and experiment - but I'd also imagine some is looking at source and saying "Hm, this seems off..." and then trying something without actually noticing "off" behavior.
I've always looked at Nintendo as the Apple of gaming companies.
They come out with neat stuff and sometimes it's just fan-fucking-tastic: Look at your current controller and think for a second about what company brought those out first. Look at your current handheld game: If it isn't a DS or GameBoy variant, it is likely inspired by the GB.
They come out with neat stuff and sometimes it just tanks: Virtual Boy, power glove, power mat and the like.
If I'm interested in consoles that take chances and try to do new things, I'll go with a Nintendo. If I just want a console that is just more of the same, but faster then I'll go with a PS or XBox.
I like Nintendo because I think that, despite not having the most impressive specs, they do more to push *gaming* forward - gaming as an experience - than anyone else. Sony and MSFT might have faster stuff or prettier pictures, but there's nothing really different about their systems.
Personally, I hope the Revolution lives up to its name. I, for one, will be getting one upon release, while I will almost certainly be waiting at least a year for an XBox 360 or PS3.
Computer software isn't a "car", "fridge" or "toilet". Name any one of those things that doubles in power every 18 months. Oh yeah - you can't.
There's a joke in here somewhere about power and toilets. Maybe if we add in spicy curry or mexican food?
It isn't a matter of burning bridges. It's a matter of ESR being (for better or worse, to whatever degree) a public voice for the OS community.
He is putting himself forward as an evangelist, a mouthpiece, and he should know better than to behave like a whack-job.
I can very easily see ways that companies such as MS could spin this to make the OS community look like a bunch of loons. "Do you really want to trust your business to a guy who goes off like (hands out letter) this to something like a form letter from a recruiter? He can't control himself - and he's the best they've got!" (Not true, but how many suits know that?)
In short, if you want to claim to be a leader of something, then you give up the right to act like an asshole unless it is strategically beneficial to those you claim to represent. This was not. This was pure ego on ERS's part.
The people who are like ESR
You mean people too dumb to realize that the email was a template sent from a headhunter who is contracted to, but doesn't actually work as an employee of Microsoft?
Or do you mean people who are so absolutely lacking in sense and diplomacy that they go off like a loon on something like this, giving their "enemies" perfect ammunition in the form of "Gee, you're really thinking of open source stuff, huh? Well, you know... This guy (hands out a copy of this rant) is one of the key people behind that whole thing, and he doesn't exactly come off as stable, you know? Do you really want to trust your business to that guy? Or would you rather trust it to a company like us, with a long history and billions of dollars that isn't going anywhere?"
Or perhaps you mean people who are so self-absorbed that they dismiss the work of the entire OS community and take credit for their work?
Or maybe you meant someone who is so freaking delusional that he thinks he singlehandedly talked the Fortune 500 into examining open source?
I'm no MS fangirl, but jesus, if this is an example of a FOSS evangelist... There's a rather serious image issue, dontcha think? "Starving" the FOSS movement of resources like ESR might not be a bad idea.