But I have to ask, while AMD were on top with the Athlon for several years - were they just sitting on their laurels? Maybe. I think that it's a little more likely that intel finally realized there weren't enough marketing gimmicks in the world to beat a better product at a better price, and shifted some dollars back over to killer engineering. Then along came Core Duo...
An unbiased observer might wonder about an agenda of slowing the OLPC project and the spread of open source in general.
No, an unbiased observer would probably see this as an extension of student discount programs Microsoft already offers or an attempt to make a little extra money from markets that currently bring in none. Only a tinfoil-hat-wearing free software zealot would wonder about an agenda of slowing the OLPC project and the spread of open source in general.
Gaming was really pretty horrid before the 32-bit days. First, games were buggy as hell. I can't tell you how many screwy NES game bugs I ran into, but it was a lot. Second, the games were short, but most of them were way too hard for the kids playing them, so few people ever beat many of them. Third, if you think tie-in games, sequels, and knockoffs are bad now, go back and look at all the crap from the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. Long-dead TV shows had games, and any game that sold well was turned into a crap knockoff.
Sure there were some bright moments, but I could write them all down on one side of sheet of paper. The other ten-thousand plus games were utter turds that today's worst publishers would be ashamed to release. I may not like every game that comes out now, not even the really hot popular ones, but there are still enough great games for me coming out every year that I don't have time to play them all. That sure as hell never happened in the Atari/NES/SuperNES eras.
Blocking Wikipedia is a pretty stupid move. While Wikipedia's articles are usually poorly written and sometimes of questionable accuracy, it can still be a great starting point for research, or a great way to get a quick bit of information on a subject in more detail than most dictionaries provide. Wikipedia also covers a great deal more topics than paper encyclopedias, including a lot of topics that are not interesting enough, or just too weird, for printed encyclopedias.
What a school should not do, however, is require students to use multiple sources other than Wikipedia entries. A minimum number of other sources should be required so that students learn to do old-fashioned research and so that they learn just how bad many Wikipedia articles really are. Setting a limit on Wikipedia citations won't work; that just leads to students using it and not citing it. It would also be a good idea to use Wikipedia to teach children how to not write non-fiction; most Wikipedia entries are great examples of what not to do, and rewriting them would be a great project in and of itself.
If anyone really wants to piss off Sony, start a PS3 Linux project to build a PS3-based supercomputer that can be used to crack all of the Blu-Ray keys.
Using biofuels is NOT a significant effort for the environment. Burning biofuels pumps out huge quantities of carbon just like burning petroleum products does. Significant efforts would be switching to electric cars powered by nuclear, solar, or wind energy.
School is definitely the best way to go. Best Buy tech support departments across America are packed with young men who graduated high school and expected to become a network engineer or sysadmin by taking night classes and passing some certification exams. Sure those things used to happen, but those days are over, and the people in IT remember what it was like to put up with a bunch of guys too young to drink who thought having a few certs made them professionals.
Hmmm, sounds like somebody at Dell got The Phone Call. Either that or Dell is hoping this will get Ballmer to cave and further discount Dell's OEM Windows licenses.
Go back to vim/gcc -- or whatever, there are certainly some saner options for you.
I think it's a safe bet that a developer looking for a laptop with more than four gigs of RAM would find more efficient tools if that were an option. But vim/gcc? Anyone doing stuff complex enough to need that much RAM would be lost if he had to do everything with just vim and gcc, unless he's some sort of savant.
I don't get this. Chances are anyone with a huge library of PS2 games will still have the PS2 they played them on. Is it really that necessary to "consolidate" your consoles? Consoles don't last forever, not everyone has space for them, input switches only get so big, and for people with small incomes, it's nice to just sell the old one.
What's to prevent you from purchasing a US version? Yes, you will most likely be restricted to purchasing games and movies from the US... The issue here is backwards compatibility with PS2 games. Chances are that most Brits don't have large collections of American PS2 games that would makes buying an American PS3 worthwhile.
XM and Sirius have never been profitable.... So what good is a merger? Merging will allows the companies to combine a lot of operating costs by eliminating redundant employees. It will also allow the new company to provide a better service to customers, as the two systems can be combined to provide new channels, at least to anyone interested in buying new hardware.
Most importantly, merging allows the companies to stop worrying so much about beating each other and start focusing on the new juggernaut in the audio industry--digital music players. Portable digital music players weren't even an idea when XM and Sirius were founded, now they're becoming ubiquitous. Podcasting has created a huge amount of talk-radio like content that's largely free. iTunes combined with iPods has created thousands of new competitors for satellite radio. Beating digital music players is going to be a tough battle, and it doesn't seem likely that the companies could do so if they're also trying to compete with each other.
On top of the functionality issue, there's also the time and skill of the users to consider. People who can afford high-end laptops can usually deal with reformatting the hard disk and grabbing documents from a network share, the last thing poor children need to do is stop their lives to reformat their laptops.
IAMNAL, but this seems like one of those things that will only be settled in court. Since that has not--at least AFAIK--happened yet, it's hard to know what would count as evidence that someone released something under a CC license and then changed the license. Although given that the RIAA has got away with using screenshots as evidence there may be some precedent there.
Where's all these constitution loving guns nuts I'm always hearing about? How come no-one puts a bullet in people like this?
I've been thinking the same thing quite often lately. The NRA and it's members often claim that they are America's last line of defense against tyranny, so why are they so often standing behind monsters like Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales? If this sort of government is the freedom gun owners are protecting, we'd be better off with the second amendment overturned.
Makes me wonder if they're not motivated to undermine Apple, who fought tooth and nail to maintain $0.99/download against the industry's will.
It's certainly possible, but I doubt that's all there is to it. It could just be that iTunes customers are getting sick of the problems that a DRM system as "lite" as Fairplay causes, and the record companies think that they could sell more songs if consumers don't have to worry about common iPod defects that make playing iTunes songs impossible.
I think it is an absolutely horrid thing of current American society...
Well, as soon as you find the billions of dollars it would take to clean all of this old hardware up, package it, transport it to and American port, ship it to an African port, transport it to a new site in Africa, unpack it, set it up, and actually teach people how to use it, you should be able to convince all these horrible American businesses to do so. Don't forget about finding power and offices/data centers to use the computers in--after all, they aren't going to last long in dirty third-world hovels. And you'll also need to find food for all of the people you expect to use the computers, because most of those poor Africans are going to be subsistence farmers or war/AIDS orphans who need to spend their days trying to eat, not learning to use Windows 98 on old Pentium boxes.
Given that the patents on CDs have probably expired by now, two CDs probably cost less than a GD-ROM because no special facilities are needed and no fees would be paid to Yamaha.
There's no reason that ending production of GD-Roms will stop production of Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast is quite capable of playing games from CD with no modification of the console, people have been playing bootleg Dreamcast games this way for years. It does, however, limit the size of any further releases to around 800 megabytes.
Not everyone who lives in a rural are is a "backward hick", not even close. I like living where I sit outside and watch animals walk through my backyard, or where I can pop out the telescope and not have to worry about light pollution. How about being able to grow my own vegetables and not be tied to the supermarket. Sorry, but nature > man made civilization.
In short, STFU. What you say makes it clear that you are, in fact, quite backward. You reject civilization, mankind's greatest achievement, so that you can sit among animals, dig in the dirt, and stargaze. Such a life is quite backward.
With Verizon aggressively rolling out high-speed FiOS (FTTP) in its service area, what will happen to the consumers stuck with a smaller telco like those moving to FairPoint?
Our crooked semi-socialist government will do same thing for internet connectivity that was done for voice connectivity. Residents of rural America with cry and whinge about how it isn't fair that they don't get the same service everyone else gets, and demand that they get at the same price. Eventually one of their Congressmen will introduce a bill requiring phone companies to pool a portion of their profits and use it to supply broadband to needy people in rural areas. The phone companies will get their Congressmen to amend the bill to instead charge everyone in the country with internet access a monthly fee and that money will be used to provide broadband to the backward hicks who want to live in the middle of nowhere and still enjoy the comforts of civilization. And everyone in America will continue the slow grind towards our eventual slavery to the wants of others.
Sony needs to worry less about shipping PS3s and worry more about selling the ones that are already out there. If some really cool games don't ship this year the PS3 could just end up as another expensive game system nobody could justify buying.
In my mind the NRO is effectively a branch of the CIA.
The NRO operates under the Director of Central Intelligence, an office almost always held by the director of the CIA. But it is an autonomous agency run by a collection of former military offices and former defense contractors.
I was a civilian contractor to the NRO, with access to the NROs networks and facilities. It's a mess over there.
You mean the agency that helps my country keep an eye on what's going on with the rest of the planet? Yeah, that's real worthless to us. Say what you will about the war machine but you can never have enough good intel.
That's exactly the problem with the NRO--incompetence and mismanagement have led to multiple failures of critical projects which limits intelligence gathering. At the beginning of the current Iraq war it was rumored that the CIA was so fed up with NRO failures that it a new agency created with far less autonomy than the NRO has.
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An unbiased observer might wonder about an agenda of slowing the OLPC project and the spread of open source in general.
No, an unbiased observer would probably see this as an extension of student discount programs Microsoft already offers or an attempt to make a little extra money from markets that currently bring in none. Only a tinfoil-hat-wearing free software zealot would wonder about an agenda of slowing the OLPC project and the spread of open source in general.
Gaming was really pretty horrid before the 32-bit days. First, games were buggy as hell. I can't tell you how many screwy NES game bugs I ran into, but it was a lot. Second, the games were short, but most of them were way too hard for the kids playing them, so few people ever beat many of them. Third, if you think tie-in games, sequels, and knockoffs are bad now, go back and look at all the crap from the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. Long-dead TV shows had games, and any game that sold well was turned into a crap knockoff.
Sure there were some bright moments, but I could write them all down on one side of sheet of paper. The other ten-thousand plus games were utter turds that today's worst publishers would be ashamed to release. I may not like every game that comes out now, not even the really hot popular ones, but there are still enough great games for me coming out every year that I don't have time to play them all. That sure as hell never happened in the Atari/NES/SuperNES eras.
Blocking Wikipedia is a pretty stupid move. While Wikipedia's articles are usually poorly written and sometimes of questionable accuracy, it can still be a great starting point for research, or a great way to get a quick bit of information on a subject in more detail than most dictionaries provide. Wikipedia also covers a great deal more topics than paper encyclopedias, including a lot of topics that are not interesting enough, or just too weird, for printed encyclopedias.
What a school should not do, however, is require students to use multiple sources other than Wikipedia entries. A minimum number of other sources should be required so that students learn to do old-fashioned research and so that they learn just how bad many Wikipedia articles really are. Setting a limit on Wikipedia citations won't work; that just leads to students using it and not citing it. It would also be a good idea to use Wikipedia to teach children how to not write non-fiction; most Wikipedia entries are great examples of what not to do, and rewriting them would be a great project in and of itself.
If anyone really wants to piss off Sony, start a PS3 Linux project to build a PS3-based supercomputer that can be used to crack all of the Blu-Ray keys.
Using biofuels is NOT a significant effort for the environment. Burning biofuels pumps out huge quantities of carbon just like burning petroleum products does. Significant efforts would be switching to electric cars powered by nuclear, solar, or wind energy.
School is definitely the best way to go. Best Buy tech support departments across America are packed with young men who graduated high school and expected to become a network engineer or sysadmin by taking night classes and passing some certification exams. Sure those things used to happen, but those days are over, and the people in IT remember what it was like to put up with a bunch of guys too young to drink who thought having a few certs made them professionals.
Go back to vim/gcc -- or whatever, there are certainly some saner options for you.
I think it's a safe bet that a developer looking for a laptop with more than four gigs of RAM would find more efficient tools if that were an option. But vim/gcc? Anyone doing stuff complex enough to need that much RAM would be lost if he had to do everything with just vim and gcc, unless he's some sort of savant.
Most importantly, merging allows the companies to stop worrying so much about beating each other and start focusing on the new juggernaut in the audio industry--digital music players. Portable digital music players weren't even an idea when XM and Sirius were founded, now they're becoming ubiquitous. Podcasting has created a huge amount of talk-radio like content that's largely free. iTunes combined with iPods has created thousands of new competitors for satellite radio. Beating digital music players is going to be a tough battle, and it doesn't seem likely that the companies could do so if they're also trying to compete with each other.
On top of the functionality issue, there's also the time and skill of the users to consider. People who can afford high-end laptops can usually deal with reformatting the hard disk and grabbing documents from a network share, the last thing poor children need to do is stop their lives to reformat their laptops.
IAMNAL, but this seems like one of those things that will only be settled in court. Since that has not--at least AFAIK--happened yet, it's hard to know what would count as evidence that someone released something under a CC license and then changed the license. Although given that the RIAA has got away with using screenshots as evidence there may be some precedent there.
I've been thinking the same thing quite often lately. The NRA and it's members often claim that they are America's last line of defense against tyranny, so why are they so often standing behind monsters like Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales? If this sort of government is the freedom gun owners are protecting, we'd be better off with the second amendment overturned.
It's certainly possible, but I doubt that's all there is to it. It could just be that iTunes customers are getting sick of the problems that a DRM system as "lite" as Fairplay causes, and the record companies think that they could sell more songs if consumers don't have to worry about common iPod defects that make playing iTunes songs impossible.
Well, as soon as you find the billions of dollars it would take to clean all of this old hardware up, package it, transport it to and American port, ship it to an African port, transport it to a new site in Africa, unpack it, set it up, and actually teach people how to use it, you should be able to convince all these horrible American businesses to do so. Don't forget about finding power and offices/data centers to use the computers in--after all, they aren't going to last long in dirty third-world hovels. And you'll also need to find food for all of the people you expect to use the computers, because most of those poor Africans are going to be subsistence farmers or war/AIDS orphans who need to spend their days trying to eat, not learning to use Windows 98 on old Pentium boxes.
Given that the patents on CDs have probably expired by now, two CDs probably cost less than a GD-ROM because no special facilities are needed and no fees would be paid to Yamaha.
There's no reason that ending production of GD-Roms will stop production of Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast is quite capable of playing games from CD with no modification of the console, people have been playing bootleg Dreamcast games this way for years. It does, however, limit the size of any further releases to around 800 megabytes.
In short, STFU. What you say makes it clear that you are, in fact, quite backward. You reject civilization, mankind's greatest achievement, so that you can sit among animals, dig in the dirt, and stargaze. Such a life is quite backward.
Our crooked semi-socialist government will do same thing for internet connectivity that was done for voice connectivity. Residents of rural America with cry and whinge about how it isn't fair that they don't get the same service everyone else gets, and demand that they get at the same price. Eventually one of their Congressmen will introduce a bill requiring phone companies to pool a portion of their profits and use it to supply broadband to needy people in rural areas. The phone companies will get their Congressmen to amend the bill to instead charge everyone in the country with internet access a monthly fee and that money will be used to provide broadband to the backward hicks who want to live in the middle of nowhere and still enjoy the comforts of civilization. And everyone in America will continue the slow grind towards our eventual slavery to the wants of others.
Sony needs to worry less about shipping PS3s and worry more about selling the ones that are already out there. If some really cool games don't ship this year the PS3 could just end up as another expensive game system nobody could justify buying.
If someone gets started on a tagging standard right now, it might see a little use before the whole silly idea goes out of style next year.
In my mind the NRO is effectively a branch of the CIA.
The NRO operates under the Director of Central Intelligence, an office almost always held by the director of the CIA. But it is an autonomous agency run by a collection of former military offices and former defense contractors.
Riiiiight. And you know this how?
I was a civilian contractor to the NRO, with access to the NROs networks and facilities. It's a mess over there.
You mean the agency that helps my country keep an eye on what's going on with the rest of the planet? Yeah, that's real worthless to us. Say what you will about the war machine but you can never have enough good intel.
That's exactly the problem with the NRO--incompetence and mismanagement have led to multiple failures of critical projects which limits intelligence gathering. At the beginning of the current Iraq war it was rumored that the CIA was so fed up with NRO failures that it a new agency created with far less autonomy than the NRO has.