So does a buy back program mean that msft is buying shares in msft? This seems a bit odd as it creates a circular loop in the owenership. I own 0.0001% of msft, but that 0.0001% of msft owns 0.00000001% of msft.
I understand that this is mainly to drive up stock prices, but could a company theoretically own itself. This stuff's confused me for a while.
I was surprised that they wern't already doing it.
The Virgin Superstore here in SF has listening posts that are controlled by scanning the CD's UPC barcode. I was thinking that they could mail people the barcodes and they'd have to come in to hear it. Band postcards could have codes printed on them too.
I made this to play my mp3's.
Description from the site:
There's two main parts.
A set of business-card-sized cards that represent the music album collection.
A webcam in a harness that the card can be slotted into.
Each card is printed sideways with album cover art, artist, title and track
listing. A barcode on both sides of the card uniquely identifies it. When inserted
the PC analyzes the image to pick out the barcode. The barcode is linked to
a playlist, which is played when the card is inserted.
I've been going the other way, but only because I'm lazy.
I made this webcam and barcode printed on card based, lego built, printed CD card music player (follow the link, it'll make sense then). As the music organised by CD and next/prev currenly means a trip to the PC, I've redicovered the joy of albums. I enjoy music differentlty when the urge to fiddle every 5-10 seconds is denied.
I say lazy because if I got my act in gear and finished the hardware I'm hacking I'd have full control.
Having said that, I'm quite enjoying the whole album thing. Hearing lots of other tracks from real bands where I'd only checked out one or two before.
PS Quite proud I've mentioned a card based system and have avoided a shuffle based pun!
I looked at this after my gf chose a verizon phone for me (I'm quite happy with pay as you go, I like being in touch but have no desire to shoot the sh*t for hours).
Basically you have to join the program, pay qualcomm to unlock your phone and then pay around $1000 per phone to have your app tested.
They're unlikely to let you in because people are paying $$'s for games that are poorer than open source equivalents. The $$'s go to subsidise the cost of handsets.
I got discouraged, but feel free to poke around the brew websites + user forums for more info. As much as it screws homebrew development brew seems fairly popular (read profitable).
OK, so one guy can paint a shed, but to paint the side of a tower block, you need scaffolds or a lift and time. Lots of money.
With this thing you just need a longer piece of rope and two mount points. Bigger building? longer rope. Switch the paint nozzle by radio. Even bigger building, just a longer rope.
If your name and buisness are associated with coming up with usability enhancements, it's not such a big surprise that you think such things are novel and deserve protection. It's protecting how you make a living.
The reason this logic doesn't follow for many software engineers and software patents, is that the stuff that gets patented is sometimes simple, and a horrible waste of cycles and time happens globally as people work around the patents. Also if you get a patent, it usually doesn't nessacerily(sp?) protect your opportunity to earn, just your companies bottom line.
I'm not sure that the points that it makes sense to scratch audio at are appropriate for video wobbling at the same place. Most of the cool (coldcut etc.) previous stuff that people are mentioning, was small bits of video triggered rather than wobbling.
Woudln't mind a play though;).
I'm interested to see if they come out with a mixer to support it.
I remember reading an article about Gods by the Bitmap Brothers where they had helper triggers for people that had been stuck for a few minutes. They called it a shandyometer, after shandy drinkers obviously.
X-Com had a shandyometer, my old housemate used to send men who were very poor and irritating out, let them get slaughtered, then send in his main team and the game would have made it easier.
(For the non-Brits, Shandy's a mix of lager and lemonade (as in 7up/sprite), the old lore is that its drinkers are somehow unable to handle real beer)
Lets say there's a 2% chance of this whole SCO thing working. This means there's a 98% chance that SCO's worth $0.28, and a 2% chance its worth an obscene amount.
But surely they needed to do work to get it to do this?
I can understand that someone somewhere (maybe in a kiosk-type situation) may want to intercept these keys but why bother when you could just leave well alone and the system would do something sensible?
The software volume control in iTunes will also introduce quantisation, something the mixer in the hardware shouldn't do?
Thanks for the reply, and apolgies for ranting and spraying spittle. Most uncouth of me.
I used to prefer the three or four liner that would make tones based on keys pressed. I seem to remember using a scancode gave a vaguely tonal scale across the keyboard.
The git at the store poke 1,0'ed the machine after I'd done it though. Obviously took the out-l33t-ing fairly badly.
poke 53280,4
I had to learn it all from a German book too. And load my assembler off cassette, not enough money for a disk drive.
I had a go it was kinda fun but not as amazing as people said. I no longer fear death was one quote from a wired article. I think deep breathing for long periods was starving their brains of oxygen.
Origami for geometrical constructions and a plug.
on
Origami and Math
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There's a page here that descsribes Origami folds as an alternative to straight edge and compass contructions. You can trisect the angle using folds, interesting stuff
Slashdot Mirror
arse.
that last line should have been:
I understand that this is mainly to drive up stock prices, but could a company theoretically own itself? This stuff's confused me for a while.
So does a buy back program mean that msft is buying shares in msft? This seems a bit odd as it creates a circular loop in the owenership. I own 0.0001% of msft, but that 0.0001% of msft owns 0.00000001% of msft.
I understand that this is mainly to drive up stock prices, but could a company theoretically own itself. This stuff's confused me for a while.
I was surprised that they wern't already doing it.
The Virgin Superstore here in SF has listening posts that are controlled by scanning the CD's UPC barcode. I was thinking that they could mail people the barcodes and they'd have to come in to hear it. Band postcards could have codes printed on them too.
There's two main parts.
Each card is printed sideways with album cover art, artist, title and track listing. A barcode on both sides of the card uniquely identifies it. When inserted the PC analyzes the image to pick out the barcode. The barcode is linked to a playlist, which is played when the card is inserted.
QR Codes:
This guy has got a phone that reads qr codes. More info here.
CueCat:
nuff said
My CD Player: (blatant self promotion)
Keep the camera still and move the cards.
Also I couldn't find any of the guestural/movement stuff you'd associate with a mouse. More like buttons you'd press with the camera.
I'm not sure if it's just because I'm interested, but there seems to be a lot of camera based code reading bits around recently.
Saying that a website where you could upload a gamboy sized image and have it produce a pdf encoding an image viewer would be very nice.
I made this webcam and barcode printed on card based, lego built, printed CD card music player (follow the link, it'll make sense then). As the music organised by CD and next/prev currenly means a trip to the PC, I've redicovered the joy of albums. I enjoy music differentlty when the urge to fiddle every 5-10 seconds is denied.
I say lazy because if I got my act in gear and finished the hardware I'm hacking I'd have full control.
Having said that, I'm quite enjoying the whole album thing. Hearing lots of other tracks from real bands where I'd only checked out one or two before.
PS Quite proud I've mentioned a card based system and have avoided a shuffle based pun!
You could play snakes at waterloo station over 3 years ago.
Apaarently up for 1.5 years.
Written by this dude: (only link I could find)
http://rugmd4.chem.rug.nl/hoesel/
I looked at this after my gf chose a verizon phone for me (I'm quite happy with pay as you go, I like being in touch but have no desire to shoot the sh*t for hours).
Basically you have to join the program, pay qualcomm to unlock your phone and then pay around $1000 per phone to have your app tested.
They're unlikely to let you in because people are paying $$'s for games that are poorer than open source equivalents. The $$'s go to subsidise the cost of handsets.
I got discouraged, but feel free to poke around the brew websites + user forums for more info. As much as it screws homebrew development brew seems fairly popular (read profitable).
OK, so one guy can paint a shed, but to paint the side of a tower block, you need scaffolds or a lift and time. Lots of money.
With this thing you just need a longer piece of rope and two mount points. Bigger building? longer rope. Switch the paint nozzle by radio. Even bigger building, just a longer rope.
If your name and buisness are associated with coming up with usability enhancements, it's not such a big surprise that you think such things are novel and deserve protection. It's protecting how you make a living.
The reason this logic doesn't follow for many software engineers and software patents, is that the stuff that gets patented is sometimes simple, and a horrible waste of cycles and time happens globally as people work around the patents. Also if you get a patent, it usually doesn't nessacerily(sp?) protect your opportunity to earn, just your companies bottom line.
If you're a max fan Pure Data may be worth a look. Similar concepts and open-source.
True home page is here
I'm not sure that the points that it makes sense to scratch audio at are appropriate for video wobbling at the same place. Most of the cool (coldcut etc.) previous stuff that people are mentioning, was small bits of video triggered rather than wobbling.
;).
Woudln't mind a play though
I'm interested to see if they come out with a mixer to support it.
looks like it may be coming out for GBA!!
r e/ gods-gba/
http://www.bitmap-brothers.co.uk/our-games/futu
I remember reading about the technique in a magazine, over 10 years ago.
I remember reading an article about Gods by the Bitmap Brothers where they had helper triggers for people that had been stuck for a few minutes. They called it a shandyometer, after shandy drinkers obviously.
X-Com had a shandyometer, my old housemate used to send men who were very poor and irritating out, let them get slaughtered, then send in his main team and the game would have made it easier.
(For the non-Brits, Shandy's a mix of lager and lemonade (as in 7up/sprite), the old lore is that its drinkers are somehow unable to handle real beer)
Lets say there's a 2% chance of this whole SCO thing working. This means there's a 98% chance that SCO's worth $0.28, and a 2% chance its worth an obscene amount.
So the valuation should be:
(0.98 x $0.28) + (0.02 x an obscene amount)
which could still be a big number.
My server's going to die under the load, but I did this using Perl+Curl.
This page is used to source the data.
Is LWP the correct/new way to do this kind of stuff? I started with curl and hacked regex's to get the data.
if you haven't got one of the recent Gauntlet Updates, they're worth a look too.
But surely they needed to do work to get it to do this?
I can understand that someone somewhere (maybe in a kiosk-type situation) may want to intercept these keys but why bother when you could just leave well alone and the system would do something sensible?
The software volume control in iTunes will also introduce quantisation, something the mixer in the hardware shouldn't do?
Thanks for the reply, and apolgies for ranting and spraying spittle. Most uncouth of me.
No idea why iTunes does this but it takes over my laptop's volume control. They control iTunes' volume not the laptop.
Its a bit irritating because if the main volume was low there's no way to increase it _unless_ I alt-tab to another app, then they work as intended.
And it sucks up oodles of ram.
moan moan moan
I used to prefer the three or four liner that would make tones based on keys pressed. I seem to remember using a scancode gave a vaguely tonal scale across the keyboard.
The git at the store poke 1,0'ed the machine after I'd done it though. Obviously took the out-l33t-ing fairly badly.
poke 53280,4
I had to learn it all from a German book too. And load my assembler off cassette, not enough money for a disk drive.
Sounds like Osmose and old Silicon Graphics Sponsored art piece.
http://www.immersence.com/osmose/osmose.htm
I had a go it was kinda fun but not as amazing as people said. I no longer fear death was one quote from a wired article. I think deep breathing for long periods was starving their brains of oxygen.
There's a page here that descsribes Origami folds as an alternative to straight edge and compass contructions. You can trisect the angle using folds, interesting stuff
I should also plug hexaflexagon.sourceforge.net a little app that puts six pictures onto a foldable template
There's already car powered screen thingys fro the top of the cube.
Saw it in Fry's, much like the PSOne units
The Sega Dreamcast has liquid cooling.
It was seen as a major design flaw when first announced, but I've had no problems with mine.