It has TECHNOLOGY! The technology will solve all out problems! Next we can add encryption to the technology so that it will be even more technological! And because Americans can't even wrap their heads around evolution, there's no way this nation of idiots will figure out what a load of BS this is and demand that politicians stop wasting resources on pork like this and actually get something done!
Yeah, but only because Doctor Who is admittedly cheesy, if not downright bad. You can get away with doing the same thing forever when you mock yourself - SG-1 takes itself way too seriously for that.
"What ebay needs is for people to stop selling stuff on it as if it was their own store."
Agreed. ebay was a hell of a lot better before every bored retailer in America realized he could sit around all day dumping merchandise onto ebay instead of watching TV. There needs to be a filter to show/not show/only show regular retail price sellers, and there needs to be a harsh punishment for retailers who try to skirt the system.
"Ten seasons and 215 episodes is an astounding, Guinness World Record-setting accomplishment."
At least the Star Trek producers had the decency to stop running the same old plots into the ground after seven seasons of their shows. SG-1 has been running the same story into the ground, over and over, for far too long. Here's hoping that they're clearing the way for something better - or at least another Galatica, which had the decency to reuse old ideas that had been on the shelf for a couple decades.
What does it say about a society whose journalists shamelessly portray civil discourse about software licensing as "open war?" I find that headline insulting and disgusting - insulting because it assumes readers are stupid enough to be excited by such excessive hyperbole, and disgusted that in a great age of communication, people still pay attention to "journalists" who would stoop so low.
This is another great reason to go to nuclear power. How long will it take before people realize that biodiesel is just another crackpot energy scheme cooked up by people looking to get rich?
So now people too cheap to pay for books, movies, cable TV, music, and software no longer have to pay to keep their 350 watt power supplies running all day either? What's the chance someone that cheap would actually pay for the router?
Anyone want to start a pool on what CSS/javascript features get broken or removed in future releases of IE7 as Microsoft tries to kill Writely and Google Spreadsheets?
"...why would I use an office suite that requires me to (in effect) give a copy of all of my documents to another corporation, when I have a perfectly good alternative that only costs a few hundred bucks per seat?"
Any business with a competent IT staff is already putting all its documents in the hands of another corporation on a regular basis in the form of off-site backups. This just automates the process:)
Given the way the American legal system works, it's far more likely that we'll all just get coupons toward extra phone services we don't have now, the phone companies will run some public service advertisements about communications, and the lawyers will rake in piles of cash.
So if this report is true it means that computer security professionals are grandstanding and misstating the facts to get attention and advance their own personal agendas. I am shocked that such a thing could happen! If we can't trust computer security nerds when they present at Black Hat, how can we trust them when they release proof-of-concept code, call it virus in the wild, and then try to sell us antivirus tools to remove it? How can we trust their products for *nix operating systems?
My God - what if the computer security folks are often just full of shit?
"We did, however, find that employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct, which limits normal workweeks to 60 hours and requires at least one day off each week."
A "normal" workweek maxes out at six days and sixty hours? That's nasty. Things like this remind me how lucky I was to be born in the US.
"It talks about the chance of depressurization as opposed to the destruction of the plane."
It references a flight that was ripped open and depressurized shortly after takeoff, which was then able to quickly return to the airport and land. That's not going to happen if the plane is halfway across the Atlantic, 2-3 hours away from any runway.
Mixing the explosives on the plane might not be easy, but it's certainly possible, especially since one doesn't need much of an explosion to take down a transoceanic flight. Just enough to burst a few windows (13 atmos for most contemporary planes IIRC) is all that's needed - at that point the cabin depressurizes and the pilots either pass out or freeze up, the plane ends up in the ocean, and the chance of survivors from a plane landing in the ocean is somewhere around nonexistant.
Seems like another good reason to institute those heavy locking doors pilots were asking for after 9/11.
"Does it mean that any arrests and prosecutions made as a result of information gained from these wire-tappings are deemed unconstitutional and their respective cases dropped and verdicts overturned?"
Maybe - but if they're being held in secret outside of the USA and denied legal counsel, it doesn't really matter.
"There isn't any limit on how many people can be involved (the more the better, in fact) as long as they can be useful. Could this be the way of the future?"
It's not too likely. One reason that corporations in the US and similar economies operate the way they do is that the law structures companies to operate that way at least shareholder held companies - companies that are owned by an individual can operate in all sorts of ways. Of course, you always have the option of forming one of these theoretical "open-source businesses" in a nation that's more friendly to what you propose - France, Italy, or any of the socialist nations of Northern Europe.
"If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!"
This kind of crap is why I still don't own and HDTV, and doubt I ever will. Given all the fighting over media formats and DRM systems, I doubt that HDTV will make it as a standard. By the time the manufacturers and content creators get all this crap worked out, something new will have come along, the porn industry will be on board, and HDTV will go quietly into the night, with old sets serving as a reminder of why manufacturers need to stop bickering over control and just get the damned formats done up front.
"So you're saying that the best hope Sony has is for Nintendo to churn out a bunch of sucky DS games?"
I'm saying that Sony's isn't offering consumers the products that they want, and Nintendo is. Extrapolating from that, it would appear Sony's best hope is to alter the direction of PSP game development.
"This 99% of games suck bullshit has just about got to stop. Have you bought a game in the last 6 months? There are many fine games for the console now, even if they weren't there at launch."
There are many fine games for the PSP if your idea of a fine game is a sequel to a PSX/PS2 game . The problem for many PSP owners seems to be that if they want those games, they alreadyt bought them, and aren't interested in just buying the PSP versions. PSP developers might be able to get away with just dumping out low-poly versions of their big games for the PSP if Nintendo hadn't moved away from the same model for its handheld systems, but the PSP cannot catch up to the DS as long as PSP owners look at DS owners and seem them getting a endless stream of innovative, engaging games that cost less.
So let me get this straight... E3 is getting slashed down to almost nothing because the game companies were sick of spending lots of time and money getting ready to preview products at a massive convention, or at least that's what I took out of the news stories circulating last week. So now the Gen Con organizers want to relocate the show to the LA convention center and try selling the extra space to video companies that have already made it clear they don't want to do conventions? Someone over at Gen Con isn't thinking this one through...
Wireless stuff is nice - especially when it comes to network connections - but there are still a lot of places where I prefer my wires. It's going to be long time, possibly never, before we have wireless transfer speeds fast enough for me to connect a hard disk, my iPod, or my various small storage devices. The same goes for digital cameras - just as fast as transfer speeds are rising, my pictures get much, much, larger, and I'd hate to try and unload a few gigs of photos via Bluetooth. I can't really get into wireless keyboards and mice, either, mostly because I consider dealing with a charger to be more bother than just using wires - although I'm sure wireless power will negate that issue sometime soon.
What I really want to see are good, inexpensive wireless speakers. Klipsch revolutionized home audio when it released low-cost THX systems for computer users - within a few years the price of good surround sound had dropped several-hundred percent. If someone can do the same thing for high end wireless speakers, that would eliminate a lot of wiring hassle from my life.
Or they'll just pirate it like crazy. Looking Glass and Black Isle Studios created some of the most respected games of their respective genres (ie System Shock 2 and Planescape Torment). They've been incredible influential, are often cited in both fan and industry publications for being so great, and seem to have been played by just about every-hard core gamer out there. Unfortunately, both companies experienced such low sales numbers on these incredibly popular games that they went under. So if the millions of people who have played these games over the years weren't buying them, how were they getting them?
Piracy. It's bad for the game industry, and widespread adoption of broadband combined with popular torrent aggregators being used as 0-day dump sites by warez groups, any PC gaming company that isn't planning to verify players over the net is in trouble. Go back and look at the news from the day Doom 3 hit the torrent sites - over 50,000 people were downloading the game from Suprnova.org before it ever hit stores. If I was running a game company and saw that many people downloading a game before it was even available in retail, I'd never do another PC title.
"Here's an example. Konami's Castlevania had interesting monsters, catchy music, and a great gimmick: a guy with a whip. But if you went back and played it today, chances are you wouldn't bother playing past the second level."
Is this guy brain dead? Does he think that the millions of people running ROMS or buying re-releases of old games are doing it for a quick nostalgia trip and then tossing them right back into the back of the closet after fifteen minutes? Gaming nostalgia just keeps getting while new games just keep getting worse, and it isn't because gamers want a quick trip down memory lane - it's because we don't like today's games, they aren't as much fun as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, and we're happy to just go play the old stuff again and blow off an industry that's obsessed with lame ideas. This is why some many people are so excited about Nintendo's Wii - Nintendo has made it clear that, just like with the Game Boy and DS systems, the focus should be on fun games - not ultra-violent games, not pornographic games, not ultra-hard games, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
hey DAG Ventures, 1999 called, they want their stupid investors back!
"What's the point?"
It has TECHNOLOGY! The technology will solve all out problems! Next we can add encryption to the technology so that it will be even more technological! And because Americans can't even wrap their heads around evolution, there's no way this nation of idiots will figure out what a load of BS this is and demand that politicians stop wasting resources on pork like this and actually get something done!
Yeah, but only because Doctor Who is admittedly cheesy, if not downright bad. You can get away with doing the same thing forever when you mock yourself - SG-1 takes itself way too seriously for that.
Now if they would just go the Xena route...
"What ebay needs is for people to stop selling stuff on it as if it was their own store."
Agreed. ebay was a hell of a lot better before every bored retailer in America realized he could sit around all day dumping merchandise onto ebay instead of watching TV. There needs to be a filter to show/not show/only show regular retail price sellers, and there needs to be a harsh punishment for retailers who try to skirt the system.
"Ten seasons and 215 episodes is an astounding, Guinness World Record-setting accomplishment."
At least the Star Trek producers had the decency to stop running the same old plots into the ground after seven seasons of their shows. SG-1 has been running the same story into the ground, over and over, for far too long. Here's hoping that they're clearing the way for something better - or at least another Galatica, which had the decency to reuse old ideas that had been on the shelf for a couple decades.
What does it say about a society whose journalists shamelessly portray civil discourse about software licensing as "open war?" I find that headline insulting and disgusting - insulting because it assumes readers are stupid enough to be excited by such excessive hyperbole, and disgusted that in a great age of communication, people still pay attention to "journalists" who would stoop so low.
This is another great reason to go to nuclear power. How long will it take before people realize that biodiesel is just another crackpot energy scheme cooked up by people looking to get rich?
So now people too cheap to pay for books, movies, cable TV, music, and software no longer have to pay to keep their 350 watt power supplies running all day either? What's the chance someone that cheap would actually pay for the router?
Anyone want to start a pool on what CSS/javascript features get broken or removed in future releases of IE7 as Microsoft tries to kill Writely and Google Spreadsheets?
"...why would I use an office suite that requires me to (in effect) give a copy of all of my documents to another corporation, when I have a perfectly good alternative that only costs a few hundred bucks per seat?"
:)
Any business with a competent IT staff is already putting all its documents in the hands of another corporation on a regular basis in the form of off-site backups. This just automates the process
Given the way the American legal system works, it's far more likely that we'll all just get coupons toward extra phone services we don't have now, the phone companies will run some public service advertisements about communications, and the lawyers will rake in piles of cash.
So if this report is true it means that computer security professionals are grandstanding and misstating the facts to get attention and advance their own personal agendas. I am shocked that such a thing could happen! If we can't trust computer security nerds when they present at Black Hat, how can we trust them when they release proof-of-concept code, call it virus in the wild, and then try to sell us antivirus tools to remove it? How can we trust their products for *nix operating systems?
My God - what if the computer security folks are often just full of shit?
"We did, however, find that employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct, which limits normal workweeks to 60 hours and requires at least one day off each week."
A "normal" workweek maxes out at six days and sixty hours? That's nasty. Things like this remind me how lucky I was to be born in the US.
"It talks about the chance of depressurization as opposed to the destruction of the plane."
It references a flight that was ripped open and depressurized shortly after takeoff, which was then able to quickly return to the airport and land. That's not going to happen if the plane is halfway across the Atlantic, 2-3 hours away from any runway.
Mixing the explosives on the plane might not be easy, but it's certainly possible, especially since one doesn't need much of an explosion to take down a transoceanic flight. Just enough to burst a few windows (13 atmos for most contemporary planes IIRC) is all that's needed - at that point the cabin depressurizes and the pilots either pass out or freeze up, the plane ends up in the ocean, and the chance of survivors from a plane landing in the ocean is somewhere around nonexistant.
Seems like another good reason to institute those heavy locking doors pilots were asking for after 9/11.
"Does it mean that any arrests and prosecutions made as a result of information gained from these wire-tappings are deemed unconstitutional and their respective cases dropped and verdicts overturned?"
Maybe - but if they're being held in secret outside of the USA and denied legal counsel, it doesn't really matter.
OpenSolaris has always been a lame marketing gimmick - and people with a serious interest in F/OSS don't need IBM to tell them that.
It's interesting to see IBM taking jabs at Sun, though. Perhaps those new Niagara CPUs have some PowerPC salesmen worried.
"There isn't any limit on how many people can be involved (the more the better, in fact) as long as they can be useful. Could this be the way of the future?"
It's not too likely. One reason that corporations in the US and similar economies operate the way they do is that the law structures companies to operate that way at least shareholder held companies - companies that are owned by an individual can operate in all sorts of ways. Of course, you always have the option of forming one of these theoretical "open-source businesses" in a nation that's more friendly to what you propose - France, Italy, or any of the socialist nations of Northern Europe.
"If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!"
This kind of crap is why I still don't own and HDTV, and doubt I ever will. Given all the fighting over media formats and DRM systems, I doubt that HDTV will make it as a standard. By the time the manufacturers and content creators get all this crap worked out, something new will have come along, the porn industry will be on board, and HDTV will go quietly into the night, with old sets serving as a reminder of why manufacturers need to stop bickering over control and just get the damned formats done up front.
"So you're saying that the best hope Sony has is for Nintendo to churn out a bunch of sucky DS games?"
I'm saying that Sony's isn't offering consumers the products that they want, and Nintendo is. Extrapolating from that, it would appear Sony's best hope is to alter the direction of PSP game development.
"This 99% of games suck bullshit has just about got to stop. Have you bought a game in the last 6 months? There are many fine games for the console now, even if they weren't there at launch."
There are many fine games for the PSP if your idea of a fine game is a sequel to a PSX/PS2 game . The problem for many PSP owners seems to be that if they want those games, they alreadyt bought them, and aren't interested in just buying the PSP versions. PSP developers might be able to get away with just dumping out low-poly versions of their big games for the PSP if Nintendo hadn't moved away from the same model for its handheld systems, but the PSP cannot catch up to the DS as long as PSP owners look at DS owners and seem them getting a endless stream of innovative, engaging games that cost less.
So let me get this straight... E3 is getting slashed down to almost nothing because the game companies were sick of spending lots of time and money getting ready to preview products at a massive convention, or at least that's what I took out of the news stories circulating last week. So now the Gen Con organizers want to relocate the show to the LA convention center and try selling the extra space to video companies that have already made it clear they don't want to do conventions? Someone over at Gen Con isn't thinking this one through...
Wireless stuff is nice - especially when it comes to network connections - but there are still a lot of places where I prefer my wires. It's going to be long time, possibly never, before we have wireless transfer speeds fast enough for me to connect a hard disk, my iPod, or my various small storage devices. The same goes for digital cameras - just as fast as transfer speeds are rising, my pictures get much, much, larger, and I'd hate to try and unload a few gigs of photos via Bluetooth. I can't really get into wireless keyboards and mice, either, mostly because I consider dealing with a charger to be more bother than just using wires - although I'm sure wireless power will negate that issue sometime soon.
What I really want to see are good, inexpensive wireless speakers. Klipsch revolutionized home audio when it released low-cost THX systems for computer users - within a few years the price of good surround sound had dropped several-hundred percent. If someone can do the same thing for high end wireless speakers, that would eliminate a lot of wiring hassle from my life.
"Make a good game, and people will buy it."
Or they'll just pirate it like crazy. Looking Glass and Black Isle Studios created some of the most respected games of their respective genres (ie System Shock 2 and Planescape Torment). They've been incredible influential, are often cited in both fan and industry publications for being so great, and seem to have been played by just about every-hard core gamer out there. Unfortunately, both companies experienced such low sales numbers on these incredibly popular games that they went under. So if the millions of people who have played these games over the years weren't buying them, how were they getting them?
Piracy. It's bad for the game industry, and widespread adoption of broadband combined with popular torrent aggregators being used as 0-day dump sites by warez groups, any PC gaming company that isn't planning to verify players over the net is in trouble. Go back and look at the news from the day Doom 3 hit the torrent sites - over 50,000 people were downloading the game from Suprnova.org before it ever hit stores. If I was running a game company and saw that many people downloading a game before it was even available in retail, I'd never do another PC title.
"Here's an example. Konami's Castlevania had interesting monsters, catchy music, and a great gimmick: a guy with a whip. But if you went back and played it today, chances are you wouldn't bother playing past the second level."
Is this guy brain dead? Does he think that the millions of people running ROMS or buying re-releases of old games are doing it for a quick nostalgia trip and then tossing them right back into the back of the closet after fifteen minutes? Gaming nostalgia just keeps getting while new games just keep getting worse, and it isn't because gamers want a quick trip down memory lane - it's because we don't like today's games, they aren't as much fun as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, and we're happy to just go play the old stuff again and blow off an industry that's obsessed with lame ideas. This is why some many people are so excited about Nintendo's Wii - Nintendo has made it clear that, just like with the Game Boy and DS systems, the focus should be on fun games - not ultra-violent games, not pornographic games, not ultra-hard games, and so on.