If you have a screwy laptop, pack it up and drive to the nearest Apple store (Assuming one is nearby.) and see if you can get some bored sales nerd to fix it.
1. Most people, even with the help of a telephone support technician, can't handle configuring X. They certainly aren't going to pull off 3D support for a nice Nvidia or ATI card. 2. Have you ever found a preconfigured Linux PC from a reputable manufacturer at Best Buy, Circuit City, or Costco? 3. Macs cost too much for most consumers, although the Mac Mini may change this for consumers who have no interest in playing games. 4. The US Government requires most of its contractors to submit documents in MS Office format, and as a result of said requirement, most of those contractors require the same from any company they do business with. MS Office doesn't run on Windows, and OpenOffice can't keep up with all of the crazy formatting used in recent versions of Word and Excel. 5. Most recently released games will not run at all on OS X, and will only run on Linux under WineX.
How many closed-source software companies are accountable for the quality of their code? Microsoft certainly isn't and neither are most other closed-source vendors who have teams of lawyers paid to do nothing other than write airtight EULAs with sections that absolve the software manufacturer from any responsibility for problems the result from buggy software.
Microsoft has no leg to stand on here, and won't until they write a EULA that specifically gives users the right to sue Microsoft for damages as a result of all those IE bugs.
1. People would rather read PSP hype because it fills them with anticipation, even if they aren't going to buy one. All of the people who were excited about the DS and didn't buy one are over it.
2. The DS isn't worth writing about right now due to a lack of interesting games. How many screenshots of Metroid Hunters do people really want to see? Until Nintendo and third party developers start pumping out software don't expect much more than "ho-hum, Mario 64 is just as cool as it was in 1996, BFD."
3. Adult gamers got burned with the Game Boy Advance software lineup being almost entirely of horribly designed, unplayable children's games with TV and movie tie-ins. Because of this, most game magazines relegated Game Boy news to the back of the magazines. EGM even gave Seanbaby a column to mock all those crappy Game Boy Advance Games. Readers have responded well, so why wouldn't the press be fine assuming that reader's don't really care about the DS?
Actually Sony HAS sold 800,000 units. PSP's are not shipped out for free - retailers pay for them and then the retailers resell to the consumers. So everyone DOES have the right headline.
IRC is sort of like Usenet. If you're willing to put up with all of the horrible problems, you're either a *nix geek, addicted to porn/warez, or looking for anonymous sex hookups. For anything else it's better to pay more for some other method of communicating.
Why should manufacturers devote resources to sharing product specs with the miniscule number of people out there who have nothing better to do than hack a digital camera? Has it occured to you how unlikely it is that more than a few-dozen people worldwide have any intention of doing this, and that of those people, most are hobbyist programmers who would probably only do it with old cameras that can be bought cheap?
There is just no sensible business reason for spending money to do this. And before some smartass claims linux-compatibility as a reason, grow a brain, Linux zealots are not on any major corporation's list of new customers to target.
"all may not be lost: Rick Berman said today he's working on a new Trek feature film that will have "a larger scope and budget" than ever."
If another terrible Star Trek movie defecated onto the screen by Rick Berman is something to hope fore, than all was lost a long time ago. Maybe it's just time to let the dream of another good trek series/movie die.
Joke all you want, anyone who has used a 12" G4 Powerbook knows that you probably could cook on the palmrests. I went to a store to buy one, but tried it out a little on the advice of a sales nerd, and I'm glad he convinced me to rethink the decision - it was painfully hot.
Shortly after I moved in, I noticed a wireless network named "Glenn" running totally open and unencrypted. I joined it, hit http://192.168.0.1, and sure enough the login and password were "admin" and "1234" respectively. Eight months later, that network is still named "Glenn-please-secure-me."
One thing that really bugged me about Doom III was that everything appears to be wrapped in plastic. Be it metal, skin, paper or stone, everything was shiny. When I look at the Quake IV shots I see the same thing. I don't see this in games like Farcry, Painkiller, or UT 2004 (Or the next-gen UT engine demos) so I'm assuming that it's just got something to do with Doom III's lighting engine.
It's open-source. If he doesn't want certain people re-using the code, well, then he shouldn't release his code under the GPL. Trying to restrict use of open-source code because he has a personal grudge with a project he split off of is the real unethical behavior.
If he wants to do this and not share with everyone, he needs to start over with his own commercial implementation from scratch. Until he does, just tell him to suck down a nice big mug of STFU.
"There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding."
What makes you think that Americans were behind the arrests? Has it occurred to you that maybe Japanse animation companies are sick of their work being ripped off by people too cheap to buy it on DVD? Or all of the Indian movie companies? What about all of the software companies in Europe who want people to PAY for commercial software?
While the MPAA and RIAA are the big names in the war on IP piracy, there are plenty of companies all over the world with a big interest in shutting down torrent aggregators. The big difference is that, unlike the MPAA and RIAA, other groups don't issue a press release and advertising every time they ask the cops to crack down or file a lawsuit.
Would someone with a clue mind pointing out a decent access point running WAP that can keep me covered for another year? Because when I look around, I usually end up with the following dilemma:
- If it runs WAP, it's probably been rushed to market and has plenty of serious security issues that will give up my keys, admin access, whatever, making the whole thing a moot point. - If it's been on the market long enough that I can fix the really heinous flaws with firmware updates, it runs WEP.
What's wrong with letting people on my LAN? How about what happens when a local bootlegger uses my connection to grab 0-day torrents of the latest CDs/DVDs and the RIAA/MPAA sue ME when my ISP reports that I had the IP address he was sharing the torrent from? Or worse, some pervert starts trading kiddie porn from my home and the FBI shows up at the door? Perhaps a psychotic neighbor uses my LAN to harrass politicians and then the secret service stops by?
Open wireless points might work for people living on a farm in Kansas, but in any urban area or even a decent suburb, it's just a bad idea.
Agreed. If I walked into a language school and the staff started showing me all of the great computers, I'd just leave and find one that put the time and money into instructors. Having a wifi point around might be a good idea if the school have a lot of customers who will need to check email during breaks, but otherwise, having a bunch of computers around is sort of moronic.
Nice to see another person pointing out that Doom 3 was a hit sleeper -- it was a huge hit that put us all to sleep. Too bad he didn't also point out all the shining reviews given to id Software's latest over-hyped tech demo.
And on the topic of FPS games with issues, how could he have forgotten all of the copyright stupidity surrounding Half-Life 2, the game that required online authentication, the CD/DVD to be in the drive, and to top it off, the authentication servers weren't built to handle the number of games that actually shipped at launch! Now THAT is a fiasco!
GPU is not a marketing term, it's a technical term. Just because Nvidia came up with the term that ATI doesn't use doesn't make it any less technical a label than using RAM to describe random-access memory and ROM to describe read only-memory.
3DFX died not because of SLI, but because they put all the R&D funding toward anti-aliasing low resolution (640x480, 800x600) graphics. By the time they had it working well, Nvidia was producing chips that ran the same games just fine at 1024x768 and up with better texture filtering, which looked much better than anti-aliased low-res graphics.
The idea of slapping multiple chips on a card, or using multiple cards is still a good one, as long as the cards come out before someone else does something better with one chip.
What the hell were you expecting from a network called "Spike" that features crappy shows like "Stripperella" and "Most extreme elimination challenge?" You have not right being dissapointed by anything you see on a crap network like that, although I'm dissapointed that people stupid enough to watch that crap are still allowed to use the internet.
While it is easy to write this off as a typical Sony product launch - the PS 1 and PS 2 both had horrible problems with drive motors and lasers - I also wonder, could this be a sign that Sony is very scared of the Nintendo DS stomping the PSP into obscurity? Is Sony trying to get these things on the street so fast that the units are packed and shipped without any testing at the factory?
I'm voting for a little of both - rushed to market, bad design, crummy components, crappy factories, and no testing.
I have owned numerous Sony products throughout my life - mostly gifts - and aside from my Wega television and Cybershot Cameras, they have all been poorly made junk. Most of the gadget junkies I know feel the same way about their Sony stuff - there are a few things Sony makes well, but for the most part one can expect Sony stuff to wear out or break faster then Korean knockoffs sold for half the price.
"...will ALL the flavor of these books really be captured, in the same way that it would be to read them?"
For the vast majority of the people who will ever use the tool, that won't matter. Most of the world's libraries don't hold onto old scholarly stuff indefinately, assuming that they ever bought a lot of the obscure stuff. It seems likely that because this will be limited to public domain works, most of them will be old and hard to find, so anyone looking at them will quite likely have had no way to access them previously.
Even if something is lost in the conversion, the users will still be getting access to things they never would have had access to previously.
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If you have a screwy laptop, pack it up and drive to the nearest Apple store (Assuming one is nearby.) and see if you can get some bored sales nerd to fix it.
1. Most people, even with the help of a telephone support technician, can't handle configuring X. They certainly aren't going to pull off 3D support for a nice Nvidia or ATI card.
2. Have you ever found a preconfigured Linux PC from a reputable manufacturer at Best Buy, Circuit City, or Costco?
3. Macs cost too much for most consumers, although the Mac Mini may change this for consumers who have no interest in playing games.
4. The US Government requires most of its contractors to submit documents in MS Office format, and as a result of said requirement, most of those contractors require the same from any company they do business with. MS Office doesn't run on Windows, and OpenOffice can't keep up with all of the crazy formatting used in recent versions of Word and Excel.
5. Most recently released games will not run at all on OS X, and will only run on Linux under WineX.
How many closed-source software companies are accountable for the quality of their code? Microsoft certainly isn't and neither are most other closed-source vendors who have teams of lawyers paid to do nothing other than write airtight EULAs with sections that absolve the software manufacturer from any responsibility for problems the result from buggy software.
Microsoft has no leg to stand on here, and won't until they write a EULA that specifically gives users the right to sue Microsoft for damages as a result of all those IE bugs.
1. People would rather read PSP hype because it fills them with anticipation, even if they aren't going to buy one. All of the people who were excited about the DS and didn't buy one are over it.
2. The DS isn't worth writing about right now due to a lack of interesting games. How many screenshots of Metroid Hunters do people really want to see? Until Nintendo and third party developers start pumping out software don't expect much more than "ho-hum, Mario 64 is just as cool as it was in 1996, BFD."
3. Adult gamers got burned with the Game Boy Advance software lineup being almost entirely of horribly designed, unplayable children's games with TV and movie tie-ins. Because of this, most game magazines relegated Game Boy news to the back of the magazines. EGM even gave Seanbaby a column to mock all those crappy Game Boy Advance Games. Readers have responded well, so why wouldn't the press be fine assuming that reader's don't really care about the DS?
Actually Sony HAS sold 800,000 units. PSP's are not shipped out for free - retailers pay for them and then the retailers resell to the consumers. So everyone DOES have the right headline.
IRC is sort of like Usenet. If you're willing to put up with all of the horrible problems, you're either a *nix geek, addicted to porn/warez, or looking for anonymous sex hookups. For anything else it's better to pay more for some other method of communicating.
Why should manufacturers devote resources to sharing product specs with the miniscule number of people out there who have nothing better to do than hack a digital camera? Has it occured to you how unlikely it is that more than a few-dozen people worldwide have any intention of doing this, and that of those people, most are hobbyist programmers who would probably only do it with old cameras that can be bought cheap?
There is just no sensible business reason for spending money to do this. And before some smartass claims linux-compatibility as a reason, grow a brain, Linux zealots are not on any major corporation's list of new customers to target.
"all may not be lost: Rick Berman said today he's working on a new Trek feature film that will have "a larger scope and budget" than ever."
If another terrible Star Trek movie defecated onto the screen by Rick Berman is something to hope fore, than all was lost a long time ago. Maybe it's just time to let the dream of another good trek series/movie die.
Joke all you want, anyone who has used a 12" G4 Powerbook knows that you probably could cook on the palmrests. I went to a store to buy one, but tried it out a little on the advice of a sales nerd, and I'm glad he convinced me to rethink the decision - it was painfully hot.
Shortly after I moved in, I noticed a wireless network named "Glenn" running totally open and unencrypted. I joined it, hit http://192.168.0.1, and sure enough the login and password were "admin" and "1234" respectively. Eight months later, that network is still named "Glenn-please-secure-me."
ATI has announced that Infinium will cancel the product and declare bankruptcy at the ATI booth the day later.
Have you ever actually looked at the stuff people offer up on freecycle? Most of it DOES belong in a dumpster.
One thing that really bugged me about Doom III was that everything appears to be wrapped in plastic. Be it metal, skin, paper or stone, everything was shiny. When I look at the Quake IV shots I see the same thing. I don't see this in games like Farcry, Painkiller, or UT 2004 (Or the next-gen UT engine demos) so I'm assuming that it's just got something to do with Doom III's lighting engine.
Does this bug anyone else.
It's open-source. If he doesn't want certain people re-using the code, well, then he shouldn't release his code under the GPL. Trying to restrict use of open-source code because he has a personal grudge with a project he split off of is the real unethical behavior.
If he wants to do this and not share with everyone, he needs to start over with his own commercial implementation from scratch. Until he does, just tell him to suck down a nice big mug of STFU.
"There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding."
What makes you think that Americans were behind the arrests? Has it occurred to you that maybe Japanse animation companies are sick of their work being ripped off by people too cheap to buy it on DVD? Or all of the Indian movie companies? What about all of the software companies in Europe who want people to PAY for commercial software?
While the MPAA and RIAA are the big names in the war on IP piracy, there are plenty of companies all over the world with a big interest in shutting down torrent aggregators. The big difference is that, unlike the MPAA and RIAA, other groups don't issue a press release and advertising every time they ask the cops to crack down or file a lawsuit.
Would someone with a clue mind pointing out a decent access point running WAP that can keep me covered for another year? Because when I look around, I usually end up with the following dilemma:
- If it runs WAP, it's probably been rushed to market and has plenty of serious security issues that will give up my keys, admin access, whatever, making the whole thing a moot point.
- If it's been on the market long enough that I can fix the really heinous flaws with firmware updates, it runs WEP.
What's wrong with letting people on my LAN? How about what happens when a local bootlegger uses my connection to grab 0-day torrents of the latest CDs/DVDs and the RIAA/MPAA sue ME when my ISP reports that I had the IP address he was sharing the torrent from? Or worse, some pervert starts trading kiddie porn from my home and the FBI shows up at the door? Perhaps a psychotic neighbor uses my LAN to harrass politicians and then the secret service stops by?
Open wireless points might work for people living on a farm in Kansas, but in any urban area or even a decent suburb, it's just a bad idea.
Agreed. If I walked into a language school and the staff started showing me all of the great computers, I'd just leave and find one that put the time and money into instructors. Having a wifi point around might be a good idea if the school have a lot of customers who will need to check email during breaks, but otherwise, having a bunch of computers around is sort of moronic.
Nice to see another person pointing out that Doom 3 was a hit sleeper -- it was a huge hit that put us all to sleep. Too bad he didn't also point out all the shining reviews given to id Software's latest over-hyped tech demo.
And on the topic of FPS games with issues, how could he have forgotten all of the copyright stupidity surrounding Half-Life 2, the game that required online authentication, the CD/DVD to be in the drive, and to top it off, the authentication servers weren't built to handle the number of games that actually shipped at launch! Now THAT is a fiasco!
GPU is not a marketing term, it's a technical term. Just because Nvidia came up with the term that ATI doesn't use doesn't make it any less technical a label than using RAM to describe random-access memory and ROM to describe read only-memory.
3DFX died not because of SLI, but because they put all the R&D funding toward anti-aliasing low resolution (640x480, 800x600) graphics. By the time they had it working well, Nvidia was producing chips that ran the same games just fine at 1024x768 and up with better texture filtering, which looked much better than anti-aliased low-res graphics.
The idea of slapping multiple chips on a card, or using multiple cards is still a good one, as long as the cards come out before someone else does something better with one chip.
What the hell were you expecting from a network called "Spike" that features crappy shows like "Stripperella" and "Most extreme elimination challenge?" You have not right being dissapointed by anything you see on a crap network like that, although I'm dissapointed that people stupid enough to watch that crap are still allowed to use the internet.
While it is easy to write this off as a typical Sony product launch - the PS 1 and PS 2 both had horrible problems with drive motors and lasers - I also wonder, could this be a sign that Sony is very scared of the Nintendo DS stomping the PSP into obscurity? Is Sony trying to get these things on the street so fast that the units are packed and shipped without any testing at the factory?
I'm voting for a little of both - rushed to market, bad design, crummy components, crappy factories, and no testing.
I have owned numerous Sony products throughout my life - mostly gifts - and aside from my Wega television and Cybershot Cameras, they have all been poorly made junk. Most of the gadget junkies I know feel the same way about their Sony stuff - there are a few things Sony makes well, but for the most part one can expect Sony stuff to wear out or break faster then Korean knockoffs sold for half the price.
"...will ALL the flavor of these books really be captured, in the same way that it would be to read them?"
For the vast majority of the people who will ever use the tool, that won't matter. Most of the world's libraries don't hold onto old scholarly stuff indefinately, assuming that they ever bought a lot of the obscure stuff. It seems likely that because this will be limited to public domain works, most of them will be old and hard to find, so anyone looking at them will quite likely have had no way to access them previously.
Even if something is lost in the conversion, the users will still be getting access to things they never would have had access to previously.