Personally, I would love to see spaceballs become more popular in the desktop world. Since input devices like this are a precursor to 3d desktops, why not get them out in the wild so power users can play with new desktop designs.
Not to mention the advantage it would give you playing 3d games. A mouse can move your line of sight with a keyboard moving your character (in FPS games), a space ball can move your line of sight AND your character, freeing up your keyboard for other things.
As for ergonomics, I dont know what would be easier on the wrists. Maybe some engineers can chyme in.
Re:rmcclanahanfan saw this comming 6 years ago....
on
MST3K is Back, Sort Of
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You don't think it can get worse? You don't think it would get worse if there weren't people crying foul at the current comparisons?
No, I dont think it will get much worse because companies will say as much as they can, just shy of getting sued. Whats the point in being number 2 in any market? You have to make the customer think your product is the best purchase out there, no matter what reality is.
You can use legitimate comparisons to tout a product, you don't have to unfairly match them.
Only true if you have something better then the other guy. What if you dont? Then you either make stuff up or go say to your investors "Sorry folks, but we just got beat. Oh by the way, can we have some more money?". Not likely.
Its easy for car companies to say various things are better then the other guy because there are 1000+ different points to consider when buying a car. But were talking about two CPUs that pretty much do the exact same thing. Either it outperforms at a better cost or it doesnt. And if it doesnt who the hell would put money on it? (besides the fanboys).
Skewed benchmarks just make the company look inept and leave knowledgeable consumers feeling like AMD is insulting their intelligence.
Companies only look inept to knowledgeable consumers. If you consider that a dying breed, then their only insulting a small number of people. Their playing the margins, and most consumers probably buy into it.
If we don't point out every time they use blatantly unfair product comparisons, the amount of disinformation coming out of vendors will only increase
Or the amount of crap product comparisons will continue to be the same no matter how much its pointed out.
Companies will continue to tout themselves as top dogs, regardless of the facts. And it never ceases to amaze me how far they go to stretch the truth in order to make themselves look good.
How else could salesmen go into a room and pitch their product? Or how can manufacturers sell their AMD products when competitors are pushing Intel? And vice versa? Its capitalism at its best.
Wipe the flash. Force a reload on the firmware etc etc etc etc. You can not secure a device when the theif has physical access to it. Anyone that has worked with ATM's knows this. I think an encrypted filesystem is what the parent was talking about. Such as this: http://arg0.net/encfs
I guess i'm saying, if they go to the trouble of building the app for linux with a bootable linux distro, why not just build the app for linux instead of re-invent the OS wheel. Saves the extra cost of developing your own custom distro.
And, while bootable liveCD's do get you to X, i'm not seeing a distro that has hardware exceleration for multiple video hardware.
And while true, you could use a thumbdrive, picking where to put gamestate on an already existing hardrive with OS would be overly difficult. Not to mention dangerous, if you have to write to NTFS.
I'm surprised that game publishers haven't taken to releasing games on bootable discs with their own OS.
While this idea does sound interesting, I think the logistics easily keep it from ever happening. They would have to have thier own video drivers, sound drivers, network drivers (when needed), various mainboard chipsets to deal with, AGP/PCI/PCI-e, and so on and so on. Not to mention, where are they going to save gamestate?
Building a simple game on top of an existing OS is likely going to be the cheapest way to bring a product to market.
What does software have to do with a hardware waranty?
Who cares, if it doesnt match HP's supported configuration why do they need to support it. They can just claim "We have no idea if linux could or could not cause this problem, we dont have the technical expertise to deal with this situation".
I work with Dell, HP, Sun, and IBM hardware contracts, and they are all the same. They are looking for ways to save money, and if they can eliminate a large number of returns due to a support contract loophole, I doubt any company in the biz would pass up that opportunity.
On the flip side of this, level 1 support doesnt really care. I did not RTA, but if it was a support call and i knew what my problem was, its not too hard to answer the questions as if windows were still installed. "Yes, i'm logged into windows now. Ok, i've opened notepad, and i press teh 'G' button, nope, nothing..." and on and on. Hell, i've told support one thing, been denied, and immediatly told them the opposite and they give me support.
Or, if they block port 25 for everybody, they now have to spend tech support dollars on helping the people who were using it legitimately and the people who had their mail clients misconfigured. And some of those might have spambots!
My ISP, at least, scans for and blocks open relays. How is this much different?
Ok, this has probably been suggested before, but lets say government start regulating that ISP's do something about infected computers. I mean, if my home, or car, or place of business is taken over by criminals and used against others, the local authorities are quick to step in and fix that right?
This doesnt have to be an all out disconnect, but if someone is identified as having been hijacked, simply disconnect outboud mail traffic, or all outboud traffic for that user. Notify the customer, and give them X number of days to remedy the situation. If not then start charging them a primium.
Now the customer is not only motivated to fix the problem, they have been blocked from doing damage. Worst case, they are prevented from sending spam, and they pay a small premium for service.
This could be a gold mine for ISPs (not like they need it, but at least its motivation to do something). Not only do they have authority to charge extra for a portion of thier customers, they could even offer extra PC services to dis-infect customer PCs.
So, what are the downsides to an approach like this?
I remember Slackware back in the day, apart from updated packages, has it got a decent official package manager yet?
If by decent you mean bloated and riddled with cyclic dependancy verification: then, no it does not.
However, the package management solution that comes with Slackware (and always has) is durable, functional, and flexible. It has versioning information, so you can upgrade by package name. You arent stuck with hunting down un-necessary prerequisites because the author says you need them. And they are very easy to create and maintain (using a standard tar/gz format).
Above that, Patrick does a wonderful job from release to release by specifying every package naming changes, obsoletion, and addition in order to make upgrading easy.
Now, true, with checkinstall package creation is much easier in redhat/debian. And debian/ubuntu release updates are super easy. However, you cant diss a tried and proven solution just because its not feature ritch. It will allow you to do what any package management solution is designed to do: install, upgrade, remove software packages. Enough said.
unreliable? works as well (if not better) than many commercial compilers.
While gcc is a fine product in itself, I would not use it in this example.
I cannot compare it with other x86 compilers, because I have no experience, however for Sparc, Sun Studio compiler makes much smaller and better optimized code. For AIX, IBM's xLc does the same. And, while only working for a breif time with HP, i'm sure its much the same for its C PA-RISC compiler.
Point is, people pay for better c compilers that dont have the same platform dependant issues that gcc does. One could argue this is the point Jonathon is making.
Slashdot Mirror
We apologize for any inconvenience. We still love Digg, even if our server disagrees. ;-)
Apparently they havnt heard of the "slashdot" affect!
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=200 count=1 | tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9!@$#%_'; echo
Damn, i keep getting the same password: "1+0 records in"
...but I found some here: http://goatse.cz/
Who wants to be a MILLIONA.... er... 60 thousand-doller-ionaire!
Personally, I would love to see spaceballs become more popular in the desktop world. Since input devices like this are a precursor to 3d desktops, why not get them out in the wild so power users can play with new desktop designs.
Not to mention the advantage it would give you playing 3d games. A mouse can move your line of sight with a keyboard moving your character (in FPS games), a space ball can move your line of sight AND your character, freeing up your keyboard for other things.
As for ergonomics, I dont know what would be easier on the wrists. Maybe some engineers can chyme in.
Sorry, URL got munged: imdb.com
Oh, and nuts to "thom walker" from the UK!!!
Only true if you have something better then the other guy. What if you dont? Then you either make stuff up or go say to your investors "Sorry folks, but we just got beat. Oh by the way, can we have some more money?". Not likely.
Its easy for car companies to say various things are better then the other guy because there are 1000+ different points to consider when buying a car. But were talking about two CPUs that pretty much do the exact same thing. Either it outperforms at a better cost or it doesnt. And if it doesnt who the hell would put money on it? (besides the fanboys).
Companies only look inept to knowledgeable consumers. If you consider that a dying breed, then their only insulting a small number of people. Their playing the margins, and most consumers probably buy into it.
Companies will continue to tout themselves as top dogs, regardless of the facts. And it never ceases to amaze me how far they go to stretch the truth in order to make themselves look good.
How else could salesmen go into a room and pitch their product? Or how can manufacturers sell their AMD products when competitors are pushing Intel? And vice versa? Its capitalism at its best.
I guess i'm saying, if they go to the trouble of building the app for linux with a bootable linux distro, why not just build the app for linux instead of re-invent the OS wheel. Saves the extra cost of developing your own custom distro.
And, while bootable liveCD's do get you to X, i'm not seeing a distro that has hardware exceleration for multiple video hardware.
And while true, you could use a thumbdrive, picking where to put gamestate on an already existing hardrive with OS would be overly difficult. Not to mention dangerous, if you have to write to NTFS.
Building a simple game on top of an existing OS is likely going to be the cheapest way to bring a product to market.
I work with Dell, HP, Sun, and IBM hardware contracts, and they are all the same. They are looking for ways to save money, and if they can eliminate a large number of returns due to a support contract loophole, I doubt any company in the biz would pass up that opportunity.
On the flip side of this, level 1 support doesnt really care. I did not RTA, but if it was a support call and i knew what my problem was, its not too hard to answer the questions as if windows were still installed. "Yes, i'm logged into windows now. Ok, i've opened notepad, and i press teh 'G' button, nope, nothing..." and on and on. Hell, i've told support one thing, been denied, and immediatly told them the opposite and they give me support.
I mean, come on folks, this technology has been around for decades: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thum b/1/14/High_power_torch.jpg/250px-High_power_torch .jpg
Ok, this has probably been suggested before, but lets say government start regulating that ISP's do something about infected computers. I mean, if my home, or car, or place of business is taken over by criminals and used against others, the local authorities are quick to step in and fix that right?
This doesnt have to be an all out disconnect, but if someone is identified as having been hijacked, simply disconnect outboud mail traffic, or all outboud traffic for that user. Notify the customer, and give them X number of days to remedy the situation. If not then start charging them a primium.
Now the customer is not only motivated to fix the problem, they have been blocked from doing damage. Worst case, they are prevented from sending spam, and they pay a small premium for service.
This could be a gold mine for ISPs (not like they need it, but at least its motivation to do something). Not only do they have authority to charge extra for a portion of thier customers, they could even offer extra PC services to dis-infect customer PCs.
So, what are the downsides to an approach like this?
However, the package management solution that comes with Slackware (and always has) is durable, functional, and flexible. It has versioning information, so you can upgrade by package name. You arent stuck with hunting down un-necessary prerequisites because the author says you need them. And they are very easy to create and maintain (using a standard tar/gz format).
Above that, Patrick does a wonderful job from release to release by specifying every package naming changes, obsoletion, and addition in order to make upgrading easy.
Now, true, with checkinstall package creation is much easier in redhat/debian. And debian/ubuntu release updates are super easy. However, you cant diss a tried and proven solution just because its not feature ritch. It will allow you to do what any package management solution is designed to do: install, upgrade, remove software packages. Enough said.
10 PRINT DUP 20 GOTO 10
It was actually a short story by Isaac Asimov titled "The Last Question" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
. htm
You can also read it online: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question
I cannot compare it with other x86 compilers, because I have no experience, however for Sparc, Sun Studio compiler makes much smaller and better optimized code. For AIX, IBM's xLc does the same. And, while only working for a breif time with HP, i'm sure its much the same for its C PA-RISC compiler.
Point is, people pay for better c compilers that dont have the same platform dependant issues that gcc does. One could argue this is the point Jonathon is making.