That was the first thing that stuck out to me as well. In the actual application, it references an example where the camera, mounted on an airplane, flying at a height of 7.5km, can do X. The writer at New Scientist should have been clearer. Obviously, satellites do not fly at 7.5km altitude -- 75km maybe.
The only way to get the watermarked images is to browse their catalog and click "save image" on the sample image. Any image you purchase does not have the watermark on it. They watermark the images in the catalog so people have to properly pay for them or their copyright infringement is blatantly obvious, such as this case.
I would appreciate it if clueless people (people who have never worked in publishing, design, or other fields where one uses stock photos/footage) would refrain from commenting on the legitimacy of the images. You know nothing of the subject matter and your comments only serve to confuse the issue.
As for Royalty-Free, it simply means you do not pay royalties on the use. You still need to license the image, you just don't need to pay for every instance where you use it. Kind of a buy-once, use-anytime image. With Rights-Managed images (the other type) you need to pay based on a number of factors, such as size of image in the final product, quantity of materials, every individual place it is used, and more.
I have purchased images for use on a web site where the previous idiot did what these guys did (used the catalog samples instead). In my case, the girl just cropped off the bottom of the image where the watermark was located. Sites like Corbis solve this problem by watermarking right across the middle.
I think the hypocrite label is totally appropriate in this instance.
Unfortunately, being "born to the right parents" is not exactly a skill to be learned. Yet it probably accounts for the majority of those 20 people (Sam Walton's kids, The sultan of Farkistan, etc.)
Take away the guns, and you will simply see more deaths by stabbing. Guns are not the problem. They are simply the most effective of many tools available.
Rather than Syndicate, I think Bullfrog's Populous was more influential. It ushered in the era of the 'god' sim. Most of the rest I can agree with, but I had never even heard of Another World, and I consider myself an avid Amiga gamer back in the day.
I think the author may have a bit of tunnel vision, insofar as the games are rather limited to a few publishers (Psygnosis & Sensible Software make up half the titles).
Notably missing are Blood Money, Arkanoid (maybe because it's a port), and Battle Squadron.
After weeks of playing Gran Turismo 2, especially the new Rally Modes, I was driving to work on a day where it had snowed 4-6". The road back to the industrial park had not been plowed (driven on, but not plowed). I started to intentionally spin out the back end of my FR 1990 325i to drive in a controlled sideways-slide, recover, then do it again the other way. (It was a straight, level road, so it was pretty safe) It was great fun until I neared the entrance to our lot.
About 50-100' before the lot entrance, the road slopes downhill a little. Then, our driveway into the lot goes back up at a slight slope. You could call it a 90 degree turn with the apex at the bottom of both downhill slopes. The (predictable?) result was, as I slowed down and started to turn, at one point, I stopped turning and started sliding. I rolled the car into a ditch onto its side at the lot entrance. I had to crawl out through the sun roof. The other guys from work got the car off its side and back upright, but I still had to get a tow truck to pull it out of the ditch.
Do racing games make me a more aggressive driver? I have to admit that they do. ^__^
Problem is, they're not here yet: Gran Turismo 5, and the new installments of GTA, Zone of Enders, Final Fantasy, Metal gear Solid, and other great PSX franchises. I have no interest in the 360, and while I think the Wii is fun as hell, it's the PS3 that will get all the good high-end Japanese games from Konami, Square/Enix, and the like.
In the meantime, I'm kicking back and enjoying Guitar Hero/GHII with occasional progress on completing Gran Turismo 4.
I have been a developer for the past ~10 years since dropping out of college, and in that time, I have had to use:
FORTRAN 90 C C++ Perl PHP Javascript C# (.NET) Visual Basic / VBScript (.NET)
Picking up the new languages is easy, as they all share fundamental concepts and data structures. Teach your students about scalars and arrays, pointers and sorting/navigating through arrays, conditional statements, iteration (do n, for loops), conditional iteration (while, do while), and some basic math.
The important thing is, once you have taught these basics, you need to make the students learn how to break down a problem's solution into a set of these steps. You need to get them to start THINKING in terms of conditionals, loops, etc. That is the real goal IMHO.
I believe the point of question was to explore the issues regarding the position the RIAA has taken on used CDs. The RIAA has claimed that people who buy a CD are not buying a physical object, but a license to listen to the music. If that is their position, then once I purchase a piece of music, I am purchasing the rights to listen to that piece of music, and if the media that my copy was distributed on is somehow lost due to theft or damage, that I STILL own the licence to listen to that music. Therefore, I should be able to reacquire the music through other channels without purchasing another license.
However, the RIAA seems to take both sides on this argument simultaneously.
"Video games don't affect kids. I mean if Pac-man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching magic pills and listenining to repetitive electronic music."
Ever since I moved to the greater Philadelphia region a montho or two ago, I have been getting my groceries delivered. Both ACME (acmemarkets.com) and Genuardi's (genuardis.com) deliver to my address, and I couldn't be happier. They deliver produce, meat, frozen foods, everything. On top of that, Genuardi's has all their in-store card specials on the web as well, so I have gotten excellent discounts on most of the food I have bought. I have gotten free delivery every time as well, since I spent >$150 and they have coupons all the time in that regard.
I don;t need to wander through a store for an hour or two, shopping. I hit the web site, go through my shopping history and add the things I get regularly that I am low on. Then maybe I search for some new stuff and schedule the delivery for the next evening. I love it.
And the Amazon thing is not really new--I was searching for a certain brand of Japanese instant noodle soup and Amazon came up at the top of the results.
The real solution is already in place, and that is for the road company to BUILD MORE ROADS (fatter pipe). Smallville has to pay to have enough roads connected to it for all the traffic that wants to visit it.
Let's say I run a small web site. I probably host it on a provider with 100 other small web sites, and let's say that provider pays $100 in service fees for their internet connection. Google needs to service millions of customers, and as a result pays millions in service fees for a connection large enough to support them. They ALREADY pay for quality of service by buying enough bandwidth capacity to exceed demand.
Service providers have, in many cases, a monopoly on service in an area. They need to be regulated to some extent, or prices would constantly rise. Expanded basic cable in my area is like $50 a month now, and you can easily pay $75 or more for 'digital cable' with even more non-premium channels. And the sneaky bastards are moving more and more channels onto their digital tier.
If i had a choice of cable provider, I expect I would have more attractive options. As a result, I don't have cable TV.
C'mon, this game was fun to play, despite the sheer redneckness of it. Plus the sequel, SEGA Marine Fishing was no slouch either. I bought a fishing controller just to play these. They are the definition of console defining.
Other titles on DC that r eally defined its image:
Jet Grind Radio Space Channel 5 Soul Calibur Chu Chu Rocket Virtual On Oratorio Tangram (or whatever it was called) Power Stone Samba de Amigo
I got my DC when they went on clearance ($99) and found most of my games used or on closeout. I wanted the unique games, and I bought most of he games above. I also bothered me that the sequel to Star Gladiator was DC-only, and a disappointment. SG was a great fighting game on PSX, and the sequel was not an improvement.
Bought at the local SEARS, my first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, with a tape drive. My Dad bought a C=64 at the same time, for himself. Oddly, he used the VIC-20 a lot more than the 64 for a while (He and my mom played this game called Gridrunner for HOURS), then he found some friends with C=64 and our collection of pirated software grew to vast proportions.
After that, my progression:
Inherited C=64 from Dad, who had upgraded ot a C=128
Bought my own C=128
Bought Amiga 500
Bought Amiga 1200
Bought an Amiga CDTV to use as a CD-ROM drive
Sold A1200 in 1995 or so, went in with a roommate on a Pentium 90 (100s were tops at the time). I bought the 17" monitor ($650) and vid card (ATI 4MB for $250)
Added 2 32MB sticks of RAM to the P90 for ~$200 each after the first big RAM price drop (16MB sticks were $500 3 months earlier)
Built my own Cyrix P166 PC (with my scavenged RAM, vid card, and monitor)
Built my own Athlon XP 1800+ system about 4 years ago
I still play some C=64 games on emulator once in a while. My all-time faves are: M.U.L.E, Archon, Yie ar Kung Fu, Bruce Lee, 4th and Inches, Skate or Die, and Druid. I miss the old days. ^_^
5 years ago I went to a Best Buy near my parents' house while I was visiting them for Thanksgiving. Looking at the big screen TVs, one in particular looked far better than the others. It was much brighter and clearer, and was, of course, an HDTV set. Even when showing normal TV, its line-doubler and other features gave it a much nicer picture, and a much wider viewing angle than the standard big screen sets.
So, 4 years ago I bought a tunerless 55" Toshiba HDTV (4:3 aspect) set (55HX70) from crazyeddie.com for ~$2100. I do not have cable. I live in a small college town in the boonies. I have zero chance to view HD broadcasts, but I do use the Hi-def features for several things. Heck, I could use a 3rd set of progressive component inputs on my set.
First is my computer, which I primarily use as a Home Theater PC. I download anime and a few broadcast TV shows and watch them. The picture is FAR superior to standard def sets. Connection is progressive component.
Second is my PS2, which looks stunning using the component out. Some games even run in HD mode, like Gran Turismo 4 (I play in 1080i) which looks stunning compared to "normal" mode.
Last is my Progressive scan DVD player. I actually run this off s-video ATM since it is the least-used of the 3.
So I don't know how they count their 50%, and whether I would qualify or not, but I am certainly getting more out of this set than I would from a normal one.
Several years ago I fleshed out a business case to replace schoolboks with one "e-book" student appliance, similar to the goals of this $100 laptop. Combine many textbooks into one unit, with annual updates to course material, allow for useful tools like email, IM, mp3 audio playback (and possibly video). Tie it in with supplementary teaching materials for video projection and stuff in-class. Plus, the students could do their homework on the thing and have it auto-submitted when they come to school. All units would log in to the school's Wi-Fi network when on campus.
In the end, I decided there were several major hurdles to implementing such an idea. First and foremost is the governmental and political blocks to getting coursework material on various states' approved lists. And of course, there was the technological issues.
I believe the best form-factor is something of a large PDA, essentially a tablet PC. So first we need to develop a large, PDA-like touch-sensitive screen. Then comes the question of battery life. Running in a constantly-networked environment and being used by children, battery life is of utmost importance. Ideally, the thing would have 12-24 hours of battery life form a single charge. Lastly, it would need to be made very rugged. Additional features such as custom colors (like cell phone faceplates) and such would be nice, and make recycling units somewhat easier (if a shell is cracked, replace the shell, not the unit).
Software is easy. You can write software to do anything, and the demands of such a unit are not very high. Many of the intended features (IM, email, 'push' information delivery, e-books) are well-established. It's the hardware end, especially display and battery technology, which needs to advance before the project could happen. I have been waiting for the "e-paper" display tech to mature before I look into it again. e-paper is low-power-consumption, and relatively rugged compared to LCD, so it could possibly solve both major technological hurdles.
Slashdot Mirror
How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?
50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it?
Damn, I was going to ask the same thing. I thought Twitter was a high end stereo store... ^_-
If they don't want to carry MH2, don't give them GTA4 (or any GTA titles) either.
That was the first thing that stuck out to me as well. In the actual application, it references an example where the camera, mounted on an airplane, flying at a height of 7.5km, can do X. The writer at New Scientist should have been clearer. Obviously, satellites do not fly at 7.5km altitude -- 75km maybe.
Insightful? o_0
The only way to get the watermarked images is to browse their catalog and click "save image" on the sample image. Any image you purchase does not have the watermark on it. They watermark the images in the catalog so people have to properly pay for them or their copyright infringement is blatantly obvious, such as this case.
I would appreciate it if clueless people (people who have never worked in publishing, design, or other fields where one uses stock photos/footage) would refrain from commenting on the legitimacy of the images. You know nothing of the subject matter and your comments only serve to confuse the issue.
As for Royalty-Free, it simply means you do not pay royalties on the use. You still need to license the image, you just don't need to pay for every instance where you use it. Kind of a buy-once, use-anytime image. With Rights-Managed images (the other type) you need to pay based on a number of factors, such as size of image in the final product, quantity of materials, every individual place it is used, and more.
I have purchased images for use on a web site where the previous idiot did what these guys did (used the catalog samples instead). In my case, the girl just cropped off the bottom of the image where the watermark was located. Sites like Corbis solve this problem by watermarking right across the middle.
I think the hypocrite label is totally appropriate in this instance.
Unfortunately, being "born to the right parents" is not exactly a skill to be learned. Yet it probably accounts for the majority of those 20 people (Sam Walton's kids, The sultan of Farkistan, etc.)
Supportive of the insurgency in the British colonies?
Take away the guns, and you will simply see more deaths by stabbing. Guns are not the problem. They are simply the most effective of many tools available.
Rather than Syndicate, I think Bullfrog's Populous was more influential. It ushered in the era of the 'god' sim. Most of the rest I can agree with, but I had never even heard of Another World, and I consider myself an avid Amiga gamer back in the day.
I think the author may have a bit of tunnel vision, insofar as the games are rather limited to a few publishers (Psygnosis & Sensible Software make up half the titles).
Notably missing are Blood Money, Arkanoid (maybe because it's a port), and Battle Squadron.
After weeks of playing Gran Turismo 2, especially the new Rally Modes, I was driving to work on a day where it had snowed 4-6". The road back to the industrial park had not been plowed (driven on, but not plowed). I started to intentionally spin out the back end of my FR 1990 325i to drive in a controlled sideways-slide, recover, then do it again the other way. (It was a straight, level road, so it was pretty safe) It was great fun until I neared the entrance to our lot.
About 50-100' before the lot entrance, the road slopes downhill a little. Then, our driveway into the lot goes back up at a slight slope. You could call it a 90 degree turn with the apex at the bottom of both downhill slopes. The (predictable?) result was, as I slowed down and started to turn, at one point, I stopped turning and started sliding. I rolled the car into a ditch onto its side at the lot entrance. I had to crawl out through the sun roof. The other guys from work got the car off its side and back upright, but I still had to get a tow truck to pull it out of the ditch.
Do racing games make me a more aggressive driver? I have to admit that they do. ^__^
Problem is, they're not here yet: Gran Turismo 5, and the new installments of GTA, Zone of Enders, Final Fantasy, Metal gear Solid, and other great PSX franchises. I have no interest in the 360, and while I think the Wii is fun as hell, it's the PS3 that will get all the good high-end Japanese games from Konami, Square/Enix, and the like.
In the meantime, I'm kicking back and enjoying Guitar Hero/GHII with occasional progress on completing Gran Turismo 4.
Certain minerals will spark under pressure. The sudden pressure of a bullet impact can cause this as well.
You have to change the way they think.
I have been a developer for the past ~10 years since dropping out of college, and in that time, I have had to use:
FORTRAN 90
C
C++
Perl
PHP
Javascript
C# (.NET)
Visual Basic / VBScript (.NET)
Picking up the new languages is easy, as they all share fundamental concepts and data structures. Teach your students about scalars and arrays, pointers and sorting/navigating through arrays, conditional statements, iteration (do n, for loops), conditional iteration (while, do while), and some basic math.
The important thing is, once you have taught these basics, you need to make the students learn how to break down a problem's solution into a set of these steps. You need to get them to start THINKING in terms of conditionals, loops, etc. That is the real goal IMHO.
Our Founding Fathers would be jailed as terrorists, and many citizens (militia) would be rounded up as "enemy combatants".
Unfortunately, his flag-waving and fearmongering go down well with the rural populace. We gotta git them ter'rists after all.
Ninjas also apparently insert random apostrophes in all their plural words.
And just how many executives do YOU know who are capable of remembering their passwords?
I believe the point of question was to explore the issues regarding the position the RIAA has taken on used CDs. The RIAA has claimed that people who buy a CD are not buying a physical object, but a license to listen to the music. If that is their position, then once I purchase a piece of music, I am purchasing the rights to listen to that piece of music, and if the media that my copy was distributed on is somehow lost due to theft or damage, that I STILL own the licence to listen to that music. Therefore, I should be able to reacquire the music through other channels without purchasing another license.
However, the RIAA seems to take both sides on this argument simultaneously.
It has to be said:
"Video games don't affect kids. I mean if Pac-man affected us as kids,
we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching magic pills and
listenining to repetitive electronic music."
Ever since I moved to the greater Philadelphia region a montho or two ago, I have been getting my groceries delivered. Both ACME (acmemarkets.com) and Genuardi's (genuardis.com) deliver to my address, and I couldn't be happier. They deliver produce, meat, frozen foods, everything. On top of that, Genuardi's has all their in-store card specials on the web as well, so I have gotten excellent discounts on most of the food I have bought. I have gotten free delivery every time as well, since I spent >$150 and they have coupons all the time in that regard.
I don;t need to wander through a store for an hour or two, shopping. I hit the web site, go through my shopping history and add the things I get regularly that I am low on. Then maybe I search for some new stuff and schedule the delivery for the next evening. I love it.
And the Amazon thing is not really new--I was searching for a certain brand of Japanese instant noodle soup and Amazon came up at the top of the results.
A-D-G is 2-3-4, not 1-2-3
The real solution is already in place, and that is for the road company to BUILD MORE ROADS (fatter pipe). Smallville has to pay to have enough roads connected to it for all the traffic that wants to visit it.
Let's say I run a small web site. I probably host it on a provider with 100 other small web sites, and let's say that provider pays $100 in service fees for their internet connection. Google needs to service millions of customers, and as a result pays millions in service fees for a connection large enough to support them. They ALREADY pay for quality of service by buying enough bandwidth capacity to exceed demand.
Service providers have, in many cases, a monopoly on service in an area. They need to be regulated to some extent, or prices would constantly rise. Expanded basic cable in my area is like $50 a month now, and you can easily pay $75 or more for 'digital cable' with even more non-premium channels. And the sneaky bastards are moving more and more channels onto their digital tier.
If i had a choice of cable provider, I expect I would have more attractive options. As a result, I don't have cable TV.
C'mon, this game was fun to play, despite the sheer redneckness of it. Plus the sequel, SEGA Marine Fishing was no slouch either. I bought a fishing controller just to play these. They are the definition of console defining.
Other titles on DC that r
eally defined its image:
Jet Grind Radio
Space Channel 5
Soul Calibur
Chu Chu Rocket
Virtual On Oratorio Tangram (or whatever it was called)
Power Stone
Samba de Amigo
I got my DC when they went on clearance ($99) and found most of my games used or on closeout. I wanted the unique games, and I bought most of he games above. I also bothered me that the sequel to Star Gladiator was DC-only, and a disappointment. SG was a great fighting game on PSX, and the sequel was not an improvement.
- Inherited C=64 from Dad, who had upgraded ot a C=128
- Bought my own C=128
- Bought Amiga 500
- Bought Amiga 1200
- Bought an Amiga CDTV to use as a CD-ROM drive
- Sold A1200 in 1995 or so, went in with a roommate on a Pentium 90 (100s were tops at the time). I bought the 17" monitor ($650) and vid card (ATI 4MB for $250)
- Added 2 32MB sticks of RAM to the P90 for ~$200 each after the first big RAM price drop (16MB sticks were $500 3 months earlier)
- Built my own Cyrix P166 PC (with my scavenged RAM, vid card, and monitor)
- Built my own Athlon XP 1800+ system about 4 years ago
I still play some C=64 games on emulator once in a while. My all-time faves are: M.U.L.E, Archon, Yie ar Kung Fu, Bruce Lee, 4th and Inches, Skate or Die, and Druid. I miss the old days. ^_^5 years ago I went to a Best Buy near my parents' house while I was visiting them for Thanksgiving. Looking at the big screen TVs, one in particular looked far better than the others. It was much brighter and clearer, and was, of course, an HDTV set. Even when showing normal TV, its line-doubler and other features gave it a much nicer picture, and a much wider viewing angle than the standard big screen sets.
So, 4 years ago I bought a tunerless 55" Toshiba HDTV (4:3 aspect) set (55HX70) from crazyeddie.com for ~$2100. I do not have cable. I live in a small college town in the boonies. I have zero chance to view HD broadcasts, but I do use the Hi-def features for several things. Heck, I could use a 3rd set of progressive component inputs on my set.
First is my computer, which I primarily use as a Home Theater PC. I download anime and a few broadcast TV shows and watch them. The picture is FAR superior to standard def sets. Connection is progressive component.
Second is my PS2, which looks stunning using the component out. Some games even run in HD mode, like Gran Turismo 4 (I play in 1080i) which looks stunning compared to "normal" mode.
Last is my Progressive scan DVD player. I actually run this off s-video ATM since it is the least-used of the 3.
So I don't know how they count their 50%, and whether I would qualify or not, but I am certainly getting more out of this set than I would from a normal one.
Several years ago I fleshed out a business case to replace schoolboks with one "e-book" student appliance, similar to the goals of this $100 laptop. Combine many textbooks into one unit, with annual updates to course material, allow for useful tools like email, IM, mp3 audio playback (and possibly video). Tie it in with supplementary teaching materials for video projection and stuff in-class. Plus, the students could do their homework on the thing and have it auto-submitted when they come to school. All units would log in to the school's Wi-Fi network when on campus.
In the end, I decided there were several major hurdles to implementing such an idea. First and foremost is the governmental and political blocks to getting coursework material on various states' approved lists. And of course, there was the technological issues.
I believe the best form-factor is something of a large PDA, essentially a tablet PC. So first we need to develop a large, PDA-like touch-sensitive screen. Then comes the question of battery life. Running in a constantly-networked environment and being used by children, battery life is of utmost importance. Ideally, the thing would have 12-24 hours of battery life form a single charge. Lastly, it would need to be made very rugged. Additional features such as custom colors (like cell phone faceplates) and such would be nice, and make recycling units somewhat easier (if a shell is cracked, replace the shell, not the unit).
Software is easy. You can write software to do anything, and the demands of such a unit are not very high. Many of the intended features (IM, email, 'push' information delivery, e-books) are well-established. It's the hardware end, especially display and battery technology, which needs to advance before the project could happen. I have been waiting for the "e-paper" display tech to mature before I look into it again. e-paper is low-power-consumption, and relatively rugged compared to LCD, so it could possibly solve both major technological hurdles.