You realize that to the game it doesn't matter if your twirling an analog stick, mashing a d-pad, or pressing the "Y" button. To the game its just input signals. Choosing to have a player pass the ball in Madden via moving the Wii controller instead of pressing a button is roughly the same amazing inovation on the games part as having the player pass via pulling one of the triggers instead of pussing a button. Nintendo had a lot of work to do getting the controller to work, but for the game developers its just deciding which input signal will trigger which events. About as exciting an innovation as if they changed an event from being triggered via the "Y" button to now use the "X" button.
Nope hells still plenty warm. They are just re-releasing the same games still. Just now you can play Madden 20XX on PS2, XBox, Wii, PS3, XBox 360..... No new games or innovation here, just tossing the same old games on one extra box.
...when companies "invent" some home brewn encryption
You do realize BitLocker isn't about some "home brewn" encryption algorithm right? It uses standard encryption algorithms (256 bit AES for example). The "invent" part here is how this standard encryption is used. From hardware, boot process, drive access, etc. Here is a good place to start for a basic overview.
offer $100,000 or so to anyone who can crack it
Didn't see that in the articles.
When noone does the company calls his product uncrackable. These events and claims are without credibility, security doesn't get manufactured this way.
True. If ANY company says ANY product is uncrackable, they are full of it and/or marketing is having too much of a say in thier message. However, again I'm not seeing any claims like that in any of the links. Am I missing something?
The real problem for MS here is going to be OpenOffice. OpenOffice has already broken from the ODF spec to accomplish some things. If MS follows the ODF spec people will scream about it not working 100% with OpenOffice. If They break from the spec to support ODF, people will scream about "embrace and extend". Its pretty much lose-lose, but to you original point its OpenOffice that did the embrace and extend in this case and now MS has to decide how to deal with it.
OK, I used to love Groklaw and still do find some interesting things there. However, is it just me or is that site turning into a bit of the Rush Limbaugh of the FOSS movement?;-)
The strangest aspect to me is the Open Document Foundation says they have a similar plug-in, but are very secretive about it and won't really give any details. Then MS just tosses on up on SourceForge for all to see. A bit of a role-reversal, but good for MS!
This is great marketing here! He doesn't say the 360 isn't powerful enough or anything like that just "by virtue of their design and hardware demands, simply couldn't work on Xbox 360.". So they've designed our games to run on cell processors.. the 360 doesn't have a cell processor... so it just won't work on a 360. And the way they say it makes one assume the 360 doesn't have the power the PS3 does even though he said no such thing.
Here's my version;-) The original Pong, by virtue of its design and hardware demands, simply couldn't work on a PS3.
Cambridge would leap off that cliff as well by helping China to further block any ways for citizens to bypass the firewall and obtain information about "sensitive" topics. It really bothers me that so many in the U.S. who claim to value freedom so much (who are out blowing up fireworks today to celebrate such - fireworks mostly bought from China I might add), will help a country who values freedom so little.
Everyone knows you don't get x-ray vision from being in a comma and having your brain rewire itself. You become a physchic who can see the past and present simply by touching people or objects.
But in any case, the initial cost of acquisition is not the most important thing (although it is important - and as I said Ubuntu laptop was less expensive for me as compared to equivalent OS-X based machine), the more important thing is ongoing support and availability of applications.
Not to be snarky, but it sounds like WinXP would be ideal for you based on your priorities.
Saying that programs which use ODF don't currently have accessiblity functionality for the handicapped on par with Office is what he should have said and that is the issue some have with the change. Unless there is an ODF using program I'm not aware of (I'm sure there are enough small ones its certainly possible), the ones I've used do have an issue here and it is a real concern that needs to be addressed.
You say you need a dedicated hosting, but can only find shared and dedicated hosting. Isn't the second of those what you want? Seems everywhere I look offers what you are looking for unless I'm misunderstanding something. GoDaddy.com offers ASP/ASP.NET hosting as either shared, dedicated, or even dedicated virtual servers. I'm confused I guess on what your looking for.
The above said, I really wonder if maybe a bit more of an "enterprise" solution might be nice (I alway like to over complicate things;-). Would be you need to be able to generate this reports historically? If so the above solution will really only work with what data is currently in the Access, Excel, etc files (obviously). It may be worth looking into something that retains a full history of this so they can pull reports of any past jobs as well.
For that you could do much the same as above, but just a bit of enhancement. Create a little app (or just you DTS jobs) to load all your misc data sources into one central DB. This would allow to keep a full historical record of all the data. Then build the same type of app as above, but instead of that app referencing all the misc data files it just references the central DB. "But I said the laptops aren't connected so cannot access the central DB". Well, not a problem;-) With the latest.NET and SQL Server (yes I'm whoring for MS sorry), its REALLY easy to build an app with off-line capabilities where each laptop basically has its own version of the DB (MSDE) and whenever the laptops do connect to the network all the latest central DB changes can basically replicated to the local version pretty easily.
Now this solution is will obviously take a lot more work, but could be a fun little project if business needs call for it.
Yes,.NET could do this well. ADO.NET can accept Excel and Access files as data sources. 2005 versions ship with a nice little reporting component (based on same technology as SQL Reporting Services). All that can be free with the Express verions (I'm pretty sure the Express versions ship with the reporting components, but not sure you'd have to verify that).
Though I never really use them (do more big projects where I prefer custom business objects for the most part) this sounds like a great little app for using.NET datasets. Use ADO.NET to populate the datasets (just a few lines of code) then build the relationships between your datasets and BAM you've basically got a little in-memory relational database consisting of data from your multiple misc data sources (be they Excel, Access, or whatever). You can then use this data to get what you need and display via databinding to grids, feeding the reporting component, or whatever makes the most sense to you.
Come on! Give the guy a break. He's a politian who actually got an issue related to technology correct. Thats something you don't see every day! Sure his terminology was a little off, but I'm sure most of the/. crowd could easily mess up political terminology like contribution, kick-back, bribe, soft money, etc. We cannnot all be experts in everything. I at least have to give him credit for this issue with the change being correct (at least for now) even if he did make a small slip in terminology which I've even seen made here.
Perhaps you mean that most browser makers don't shoot for acid test compliance
I cannot claim to know exactly what the GP meant, but my reading of it thought he was refering to some peoples view that ACID2 is biased against MS. The issue was basically some of the authors of the original ACID test (and other outside parties) have accused the ACID2 of basically being used as a marketing tool against MS. Thier view on this is basically the original ACID test was built by asking "what are the most important features needed" and was then a tool to help all browser companies work toward compliance by meeting that test. They claim ACID2 was basically built by asking "what features is IE worst at and will have the most trouble implementing".
Now I have no idea about any of this but thats what I'm guessing he was talking about. That it was supposedly built more as a challenge to MS than to help ALL browsers work toward a common goal. How true any of this is, I got no idea. Just stuff I've ran across on the web. Here is one reference I was able to quickly find.
is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail.
So in an article about the success of Google products, the only way they gauge the success of Gmail is if someone also maintains an account with a competing service? What about Gmail users who use it exclusively (like me)?
I can see how you could read it that way, but I don't think thats the way it is meant. They are trying to say Google only has about 1/4 the total users of MSN or Yahoo. If you have an account with more than one, you'd be counted for each system you have an account with. Now I have no idea if those numbers are for active users or all accounts, but by one measure or the other apparently Google only has 1/4 the users.
The big question is, do the investors / licensees get anything out of IV other than avoiding a lawsuit?
That is the question and we'll probably just have to wait and see before pronouncing them trolls. On the face of it, it seems like it could be a good idea. Kind of modeling after the university research model where they do the research come up with some innovation and just license it to other companies to produce rather than producing it themselves. Where they are more of a think-tank specializing in coming up with new ideas and leaving the manufacturing, marketing, etc to others who can specialize in that stuff. Doesn't sound like a bad idea at least in the abstract, but in todays envrionment of soo many patent suits, patent troll, etc, etc the sound does also tend to make one a bit uneasy.
Again, I think we have to take a wait and see approach here as it could be either really good or really bad.
is more significant than VHS to DVD. A full 1080p picture has around 10 times more pixels per square inch than a normal DVD (which is 480p).
While true, thats also pretty meaningless to your average user. Allow me a few bad analogies:
1) You are playing a PC game and are only getting 10fps. You buy an upgrade for $100 to get you 100 fps. Call this upgrade VHS to DVD. Now you also have the option to spend $1000 and get 500 fps. Call this upgrade DVD to HDDVD (Blu-ray or HD-DVD). Between 10 fps and 100 fps, the user will see a huge difference. However, between 100 fps and 500 fps even though there IS a more significant change, very few people would notice it all.
2) You scan a black and white document using a document scanner. You scan it at the following resolutions: 100 dpi, 300 dpi, 1,200 dpi. 100 dpi may do a decent job, but it will be a bit fuzzy and perhaps not always 100% readable. However, in exchange for that it only takes up 10k on your harddrive. The 300 dpi scan is very clear and completely readable and takes 100k of space. The 1,200 dpi scan is also completely readable but not noticably more so than the 300 dpi but it takes 10 MB of space. Which do you want?
The point is with human eye sight there is always going to be a VERY sharp dimminishing returns once you pass a certain resolution because humans just cannot detect the difference. While by the specs the move from DVD to HD could be far more impressive then the move from VHS to DVD, the fact is to the human eye VHS to DVD is a far more significant change because we are able to actually see the difference. While humans can see the difference between DVD and HD, unless we are talking some amazingly large screen the difference between DVD and HD just isn't all that impressive when compared to the VHS to DVD change.
While I agree and hate patents, its worth mentioning that almost everytime anyone here on/. asks what makes the iPod any better than other players, they always rave about how easy and smooth the control interface is and because of that Apple is the one who "really gets it", etc, etc. If it turns out Creative had and patented this first, it is certainly at least of value. I still would think its a stupid patent, but most iPod fans I know when asked why always rave about the "innovative" control interface and how easy it make things. Of course, now those same people will say its simple and no big deal. Go figure.
According to this article, more than 1,000,000,000 watched the last Super Bowl.
ah.... no it doesn't. First off, that article was written BEFORE the last Super Bowl was even played! So unless they can see into the future, I'd really question the acuracy;-)
Second, that article is about the techology being used for the broadcast. It seems no effort was made at all to bother with facts about number of viewers. For number from people who actually track such things just Google "super bowl tv world viewers" and pick any link in the first say ten pages of results to get some more realistic numbers. I don't think ones ever even gotten very close to 200 million. If memory serves the high was around 140 million while the average is more like 80.
Third, besides the fact it was written before the event, apparently made no effort of accuracy with the given stats, they STILL didn't say more than 1,000,000 watched the Super Bowl. In case you didn't bother to read the article you posted, here it is again:
more than 130 million viewers in the United States and perhaps 1 billion viewers worldwide
Hey, I'm going out to dinner with 4 friends tomorrow night and perhaps 1 billion people around the world will be thinking about having dinner with me;-)
Ah... no I don't. I live in the Cayman Islands where I am a senior systems architect for an off-shore hedge fund administration company. If you are ever down here enjoying the sun and beaches, I'd be happy to give you a tour of my place and show it all to you in action (may want to hold off a bit though and hurricane season just started and even though no major storm, it is just miserable and rainy today and has been for about a week).
Re:Soccer is a boring sport that kids play...
on
IT Meets the World Cup
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Kind of like the Super Bowl except more people watch a single World Cup than like every Super Bowl combined. Kind of like comparing the Super Bowl to a local youth championship in some sport.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that to the game it doesn't matter if your twirling an analog stick, mashing a d-pad, or pressing the "Y" button. To the game its just input signals. Choosing to have a player pass the ball in Madden via moving the Wii controller instead of pressing a button is roughly the same amazing inovation on the games part as having the player pass via pulling one of the triggers instead of pussing a button. Nintendo had a lot of work to do getting the controller to work, but for the game developers its just deciding which input signal will trigger which events. About as exciting an innovation as if they changed an event from being triggered via the "Y" button to now use the "X" button.
Nope hells still plenty warm. They are just re-releasing the same games still. Just now you can play Madden 20XX on PS2, XBox, Wii, PS3, XBox 360..... No new games or innovation here, just tossing the same old games on one extra box.
...when companies "invent" some home brewn encryption
You do realize BitLocker isn't about some "home brewn" encryption algorithm right? It uses standard encryption algorithms (256 bit AES for example). The "invent" part here is how this standard encryption is used. From hardware, boot process, drive access, etc. Here is a good place to start for a basic overview.
offer $100,000 or so to anyone who can crack it
Didn't see that in the articles.
When noone does the company calls his product uncrackable. These events and claims are without credibility, security doesn't get manufactured this way.
True. If ANY company says ANY product is uncrackable, they are full of it and/or marketing is having too much of a say in thier message. However, again I'm not seeing any claims like that in any of the links. Am I missing something?
The real problem for MS here is going to be OpenOffice. OpenOffice has already broken from the ODF spec to accomplish some things. If MS follows the ODF spec people will scream about it not working 100% with OpenOffice. If They break from the spec to support ODF, people will scream about "embrace and extend". Its pretty much lose-lose, but to you original point its OpenOffice that did the embrace and extend in this case and now MS has to decide how to deal with it.
OK, I used to love Groklaw and still do find some interesting things there. However, is it just me or is that site turning into a bit of the Rush Limbaugh of the FOSS movement? ;-)
The strangest aspect to me is the Open Document Foundation says they have a similar plug-in, but are very secretive about it and won't really give any details. Then MS just tosses on up on SourceForge for all to see. A bit of a role-reversal, but good for MS!
And why are the hardware demands so high
;-) The original Pong, by virtue of its design and hardware demands, simply couldn't work on a PS3.
This is great marketing here! He doesn't say the 360 isn't powerful enough or anything like that just "by virtue of their design and hardware demands, simply couldn't work on Xbox 360.". So they've designed our games to run on cell processors.. the 360 doesn't have a cell processor... so it just won't work on a 360. And the way they say it makes one assume the 360 doesn't have the power the PS3 does even though he said no such thing.
Here's my version
Cambridge would leap off that cliff as well by helping China to further block any ways for citizens to bypass the firewall and obtain information about "sensitive" topics. It really bothers me that so many in the U.S. who claim to value freedom so much (who are out blowing up fireworks today to celebrate such - fireworks mostly bought from China I might add), will help a country who values freedom so little.
FYI, Cambridge isn't a U.S. university.
Everyone knows you don't get x-ray vision from being in a comma and having your brain rewire itself. You become a physchic who can see the past and present simply by touching people or objects.
But in any case, the initial cost of acquisition is not the most important thing (although it is important - and as I said Ubuntu laptop was less expensive for me as compared to equivalent OS-X based machine), the more important thing is ongoing support and availability of applications.
Not to be snarky, but it sounds like WinXP would be ideal for you based on your priorities.
Saying that programs which use ODF don't currently have accessiblity functionality for the handicapped on par with Office is what he should have said and that is the issue some have with the change. Unless there is an ODF using program I'm not aware of (I'm sure there are enough small ones its certainly possible), the ones I've used do have an issue here and it is a real concern that needs to be addressed.
You say you need a dedicated hosting, but can only find shared and dedicated hosting. Isn't the second of those what you want? Seems everywhere I look offers what you are looking for unless I'm misunderstanding something. GoDaddy.com offers ASP/ASP.NET hosting as either shared, dedicated, or even dedicated virtual servers. I'm confused I guess on what your looking for.
The above said, I really wonder if maybe a bit more of an "enterprise" solution might be nice (I alway like to over complicate things ;-). Would be you need to be able to generate this reports historically? If so the above solution will really only work with what data is currently in the Access, Excel, etc files (obviously). It may be worth looking into something that retains a full history of this so they can pull reports of any past jobs as well.
;-) With the latest .NET and SQL Server (yes I'm whoring for MS sorry), its REALLY easy to build an app with off-line capabilities where each laptop basically has its own version of the DB (MSDE) and whenever the laptops do connect to the network all the latest central DB changes can basically replicated to the local version pretty easily.
For that you could do much the same as above, but just a bit of enhancement. Create a little app (or just you DTS jobs) to load all your misc data sources into one central DB. This would allow to keep a full historical record of all the data. Then build the same type of app as above, but instead of that app referencing all the misc data files it just references the central DB. "But I said the laptops aren't connected so cannot access the central DB". Well, not a problem
Now this solution is will obviously take a lot more work, but could be a fun little project if business needs call for it.
Yes, .NET could do this well. ADO.NET can accept Excel and Access files as data sources. 2005 versions ship with a nice little reporting component (based on same technology as SQL Reporting Services). All that can be free with the Express verions (I'm pretty sure the Express versions ship with the reporting components, but not sure you'd have to verify that).
.NET datasets. Use ADO.NET to populate the datasets (just a few lines of code) then build the relationships between your datasets and BAM you've basically got a little in-memory relational database consisting of data from your multiple misc data sources (be they Excel, Access, or whatever). You can then use this data to get what you need and display via databinding to grids, feeding the reporting component, or whatever makes the most sense to you.
Though I never really use them (do more big projects where I prefer custom business objects for the most part) this sounds like a great little app for using
Come on! Give the guy a break. He's a politian who actually got an issue related to technology correct. Thats something you don't see every day! Sure his terminology was a little off, but I'm sure most of the /. crowd could easily mess up political terminology like contribution, kick-back, bribe, soft money, etc. We cannnot all be experts in everything. I at least have to give him credit for this issue with the change being correct (at least for now) even if he did make a small slip in terminology which I've even seen made here.
Perhaps you mean that most browser makers don't shoot for acid test compliance
I cannot claim to know exactly what the GP meant, but my reading of it thought he was refering to some peoples view that ACID2 is biased against MS. The issue was basically some of the authors of the original ACID test (and other outside parties) have accused the ACID2 of basically being used as a marketing tool against MS. Thier view on this is basically the original ACID test was built by asking "what are the most important features needed" and was then a tool to help all browser companies work toward compliance by meeting that test. They claim ACID2 was basically built by asking "what features is IE worst at and will have the most trouble implementing".
Now I have no idea about any of this but thats what I'm guessing he was talking about. That it was supposedly built more as a challenge to MS than to help ALL browsers work toward a common goal. How true any of this is, I got no idea. Just stuff I've ran across on the web. Here is one reference I was able to quickly find.
is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail.
So in an article about the success of Google products, the only way they gauge the success of Gmail is if someone also maintains an account with a competing service? What about Gmail users who use it exclusively (like me)?
I can see how you could read it that way, but I don't think thats the way it is meant. They are trying to say Google only has about 1/4 the total users of MSN or Yahoo. If you have an account with more than one, you'd be counted for each system you have an account with. Now I have no idea if those numbers are for active users or all accounts, but by one measure or the other apparently Google only has 1/4 the users.
The big question is, do the investors / licensees get anything out of IV other than avoiding a lawsuit?
That is the question and we'll probably just have to wait and see before pronouncing them trolls. On the face of it, it seems like it could be a good idea. Kind of modeling after the university research model where they do the research come up with some innovation and just license it to other companies to produce rather than producing it themselves. Where they are more of a think-tank specializing in coming up with new ideas and leaving the manufacturing, marketing, etc to others who can specialize in that stuff. Doesn't sound like a bad idea at least in the abstract, but in todays envrionment of soo many patent suits, patent troll, etc, etc the sound does also tend to make one a bit uneasy.
Again, I think we have to take a wait and see approach here as it could be either really good or really bad.
is more significant than VHS to DVD. A full 1080p picture has around 10 times more pixels per square inch than a normal DVD (which is 480p).
While true, thats also pretty meaningless to your average user. Allow me a few bad analogies:
1) You are playing a PC game and are only getting 10fps. You buy an upgrade for $100 to get you 100 fps. Call this upgrade VHS to DVD. Now you also have the option to spend $1000 and get 500 fps. Call this upgrade DVD to HDDVD (Blu-ray or HD-DVD). Between 10 fps and 100 fps, the user will see a huge difference. However, between 100 fps and 500 fps even though there IS a more significant change, very few people would notice it all.
2) You scan a black and white document using a document scanner. You scan it at the following resolutions: 100 dpi, 300 dpi, 1,200 dpi. 100 dpi may do a decent job, but it will be a bit fuzzy and perhaps not always 100% readable. However, in exchange for that it only takes up 10k on your harddrive. The 300 dpi scan is very clear and completely readable and takes 100k of space. The 1,200 dpi scan is also completely readable but not noticably more so than the 300 dpi but it takes 10 MB of space. Which do you want?
The point is with human eye sight there is always going to be a VERY sharp dimminishing returns once you pass a certain resolution because humans just cannot detect the difference. While by the specs the move from DVD to HD could be far more impressive then the move from VHS to DVD, the fact is to the human eye VHS to DVD is a far more significant change because we are able to actually see the difference. While humans can see the difference between DVD and HD, unless we are talking some amazingly large screen the difference between DVD and HD just isn't all that impressive when compared to the VHS to DVD change.
while this fear of Sony's set top player being overpriced is relatively unfounded
While that depends on if you consider a set top player priced at a "mere" $1,000 to be overpriced or not.
While I agree and hate patents, its worth mentioning that almost everytime anyone here on /. asks what makes the iPod any better than other players, they always rave about how easy and smooth the control interface is and because of that Apple is the one who "really gets it", etc, etc. If it turns out Creative had and patented this first, it is certainly at least of value. I still would think its a stupid patent, but most iPod fans I know when asked why always rave about the "innovative" control interface and how easy it make things. Of course, now those same people will say its simple and no big deal. Go figure.
According to this article, more than 1,000,000,000 watched the last Super Bowl.
;-)
;-)
ah.... no it doesn't. First off, that article was written BEFORE the last Super Bowl was even played! So unless they can see into the future, I'd really question the acuracy
Second, that article is about the techology being used for the broadcast. It seems no effort was made at all to bother with facts about number of viewers. For number from people who actually track such things just Google "super bowl tv world viewers" and pick any link in the first say ten pages of results to get some more realistic numbers. I don't think ones ever even gotten very close to 200 million. If memory serves the high was around 140 million while the average is more like 80.
Third, besides the fact it was written before the event, apparently made no effort of accuracy with the given stats, they STILL didn't say more than 1,000,000 watched the Super Bowl. In case you didn't bother to read the article you posted, here it is again:
more than 130 million viewers in the United States and perhaps 1 billion viewers worldwide
Hey, I'm going out to dinner with 4 friends tomorrow night and perhaps 1 billion people around the world will be thinking about having dinner with me
Ah... no I don't. I live in the Cayman Islands where I am a senior systems architect for an off-shore hedge fund administration company. If you are ever down here enjoying the sun and beaches, I'd be happy to give you a tour of my place and show it all to you in action (may want to hold off a bit though and hurricane season just started and even though no major storm, it is just miserable and rainy today and has been for about a week).
Kind of like the Super Bowl except more people watch a single World Cup than like every Super Bowl combined. Kind of like comparing the Super Bowl to a local youth championship in some sport.
Took me a minute to get it. I orginally thought you were talking about this Rabbit. It keeps going.. and going..and going..