"Traffic-Power.com, which sells tools for boosting Web traffic, sued Aaron Wall, age 25, over statements posted in the comments section of Wall's search-engine-optimization blog, SEOBook.com" (emphasis mine)
Number one tool for boosting web traffic: publicity. Hence, lawsuit.
But, there's also some consideration as to whether designing around existing components can be more expensive. Sometimes a top-down design, even with limited production runs, can be cheaper to manufacture. Hopefully not in this case, if it was designed well.
"The Lunar Penguin, originally intended to land on the south pole of the moon to search for ice, is based on tactical weapons technologies, which should make it much more affordable, Raytheon said, without disclosing a price.
See how much great stuff comes out of military research? This is why all you tech-happy people should support increased military funding, instead of something so silly as direct funding of research.
Seriously, this is much more affordable only because we've already paid for the research. That's like a waiter saying, "Your meal will be 10% off, because you gave us the chicken we made it out of."
It's great that we can apply some of our military tech to space / lunar exploration. But don't say it's more affordable just because we already paid for it.
The government is taking your money with your permission.
You are represented in government, if you don't like their decisions, run for office, or communicate with your legislators.
If you really don't like it, move to another country. I won't stop you, and neither will the government.
You can complain all you want about your hard-earned dollars going elsewhere, but there are thousands of everyday benefits you reap from government spending. I'll bet you bitch loudly about gasoline prices -- which, if not for government subsidy, would be far, far higher than they are now.
Furthermore, the nation's economic regions are interdependent upon eachother. Without a workforce, a regional economy will collapse -- so where do you want the workers to live? Do you think they'll commute three hours for a minimum wage job? I'd stake my farm on the fact that the cost to rebuild is cheaper than the cost to the public of losing the economy of the region. I suggest you leave the decision-making on spending to people who have an understanding of how economies operate.
I'm not saying I DO know, I'm saying that we need to elect people who we can have the FAITH in to make educated decisions. And when they make decisions we disagree with, we have only ourselves to blame -- we elected them.
I'm not going to touch most of your points, since they are addressed elsewhere in the thread.
"If the changing climate is any indication we should expect more hurricanes"
Yes, global warming / climate change does play a factor here. But the AMDO (Atlantic Multi-Decade Oscillation) plays a larger part in hurricane intensity. There's a 60-70 year cycle for storm strength, that can be tied to surface and deep temperature variations in the North Atlantic. Current models predict that we are nearing the end of the upswing in storm strength and frequency, and can expect a slowdown to begin in the coming decade.
In the long run, does this information make a difference in rebuilding or relocating New Orleans? I hope not, I am a big fan of planning for the long term.
Go ahead, allow people to rebuild on the Gulf Coast, we need them there to exploit the resources in the area. But force them to build intelligently, and subsidize if need be.
"If you fail to attend public meetings where your congressional rep shows up to discuss all of the wonderfull things they have done in D.C. and BITCH TO THEM about patent laws, they you are contributing to the problem.
"
Absolutely. However, other forms of correspondence are also very, very important. A politician's office ranks correspondence according to the vehicle in which it is delivered. The rarer, and more time-intensive, the correspondence, the more it is valued.
The best way to get your Congressperson to take notice of you, other than face-to-face contact, is a handwritten letter. I know this may be tough for us/.ers, but one handwritten letter means more than five typed letters.
A telephone call to their office is also ranked highly.
Postcards are counted, but are weighted less than letters. Ditto for faxes. Emails are also counted, but are worth almost nothing.
If you really want patent law to change, have a letter-writing interlude at your next LAN party, or other get-together. Buy the stamps and envelopes ahead of time, sit down with paper and pen, and write it out. It sometimes helps if the best writer in the group writes a sample letter.
It works for the pro-censorship folks, for environmental groups, and for other interest groups -- it will help with patent laws if enough people do it.
1. It will take some time for developers to make games that wow us.
2. Some 360 games will have so much content that they won't fit on two discs!!11!one!
This "article" is a marketing tool, a disguised press release, and is not really denigrating the 360 at all. They are reminding us that 1st generation games never utilize anything close to the full potential of a system, and that there will be games with a massive amount of content.
Sure, a lot of people on Slashdot do not like Microsoft, many of them for good reasons.
When you read a blurb like this from Gamespot or anyone else, you have to read between the lines -- there is probably an ulterior motive to what is published.
Many developers consider the system's graphic capabilities 'double-edged.' The Xbox 360 can handle much better looking graphics than previous consoles, but it also requires a lot more effort in development."
This is why the capabilities of new consoles aren't fully explored until the 2nd or 3rd generation of games for that console.
I think that press releases like this (I don't really think it's anything but a press release) are intended to keep us from being underwhelmed when the 360 hits the market.
In all, a good review of the book. However, the focus on forensics is left out of the review -- just wanted to point out that the book is more than a text on file system management, search, and data recovery.
Although, of course, the book does a very good job of being that as well.
I'm getting extremely bothered about the lack of accuracy in Slashdot article summaries.
Go ahead, mod me down. But editors should not just be approving articles they think are interesting or appropriate, they should be (gasp!) editing the summary copy.
FTA: "Khoo told us that this year's convention had 7,000 attendees as of the end of Saturday, and he expected total attendence to hit around 8,500 or 9,000."
From the summary: "Gamespot has word that this year's PAX convention saw more than 9,000 attendees"
One quick check of the article would have revealed the contradiction. It's not such a big deal with this article, but factual misrepresentation is totally irresponsible.
08-05-05 Schedule Update and More!
A ton of shifts were made to the schedule, but we're happy to announce that NO MORE CHANGES WILL BE MADE. What you see on the events page is what's gonna happen." (Emphasis theirs)
08-22-05 FOUR DAYS LEFT
The Rainbow Six Lockdown Tourney has been changed to a Ghost Recon Summit Strike tourney. Sorry for the inconvenience, as we just heard ourselves. Even the official program won't reflect the changes.
I didn't say that I found the price unacceptable. My original post just pointed out that the price of the VIC20 at release was similar to the price of the XBox 360 at release, dollars adjusted.
The probe only needs to attain escape velocity of Earth's gravity to get out of orbit. It doesn't need to leave the system. It's quite possible for the probe to get captured by another planet, or by the Sun. At a certain point, the gravitational force exerted by Earth will be far less than that of closer and more massive planets such as Jupiter.
In truth, it is likely that the probe will never return to Earth, unless it has some means of propulsion and control to bring it back.
More likely to turn into a small comet or somesuch.
Mods, since when is anything that points to Wikipedia considered informative, even when it doesn't apply to the article?
MSRP and what it will actually cost you are two different things.
Yes, there is some FUD about retail price... but going from experience, there is no way I'll be able to get an XBox 360 at a retail store without buying a bundled package at release... which will probably cost me $600.
It's not MS that will be setting retail price, it's the retailers. And you can bet your sweet A that they'll be forcing bundles on us.
Nice troll. America is home to some of the best restaurants in the world. Sure, most of the culinary styles here are not unique -- but then again, most of our population is not indigenous.
I'll agree that a subset of the population doesn't have "developed" culinary tastes. The same is true for France, for Italy, for anywhere. Just because YOUR experience of American cuisine doesn't meet your standards, doesn't mean that others' experiences are not different.
I, for one, have a plethora of cuisines to choose from within walking distance of both my office and my house. From Azerbijani to Thai, from crappy to great, it's available -- and I take advantage of it often.
Could be. Processed turkey breast is notoriously loaded with bacteria and fungi, due to the way it is prepared.
However, blue dye is also used as a marker in a lot of butcher shops. If this was from a reputable butcher, it's more likely that you got an end piece of the meat that happened to absorb some of the dye from the packaging.
Humankind has been developing new ways of preparing foods for millenia.
So what if now we design foods from the ground up, instead of by trial and error?
Any great modern chef will understand the chemistry and physics behind their cooking. I know that yeast is only "happy" at a certain pH range, and adjust my bread recipes to account for this. Ditto for leavening agents such as baking soda and baking powder.
Great cooking is taking those same rules of physics and chemistry, and using them to create a mesh of sensations that the eater appreciates.
If it comes from Jacques Pepin or Bobby Flay or whoever, great. If it comes from Kraft labs, great.
But I'd be willing to bet that mass-produced foods will continue to fill their niche, and artisanal cooking will continue to fill its niche. Both will benefit from greater understanding of how ingredients become "food," and better implementation of that understanding.
Just look at Velveeta, for example (a Kraft trademark).
Velveeta was originally "invented" by a researcher at Rutgers College of Pharmacy. The research was attempting to find a good formula for a skin product that could be used for drug delivery.
Turns out, what is good for drug delivery is also good for coloring and flavorant delivery. A couple phone calls by an astute professor with a cheese fetish, and Kraft gives us Velveeta.
Slashdot Mirror
"Traffic-Power.com, which sells tools for boosting Web traffic, sued Aaron Wall, age 25, over statements posted in the comments section of Wall's search-engine-optimization blog, SEOBook.com" (emphasis mine)
Number one tool for boosting web traffic: publicity. Hence, lawsuit.
I stand corrected.
But, there's also some consideration as to whether designing around existing components can be more expensive. Sometimes a top-down design, even with limited production runs, can be cheaper to manufacture. Hopefully not in this case, if it was designed well.
Thanks for the info, and the clarification.
And you're right, there could never be anything cooler than a penguin with a mullet... unless it also had a cameltoe.
And the article explains why it is named the penguin, and that the name does not come from the physical appearance of it.
Sheesh,
Sharks get lasers strapped on their heads.
Penguins get missiles strapped to their backs.
Let's not confuse our movie villains.
Please RTFA.
It's only called the Penguin because it was originally designed to explore the south pole of the moon to search for ice.
Penguins are native only to the Antarctic region (near the South Pole) here on Earth.
I don't know where they are native to on other planets.
"The Lunar Penguin, originally intended to land on the south pole of the moon to search for ice, is based on tactical weapons technologies, which should make it much more affordable, Raytheon said, without disclosing a price.
See how much great stuff comes out of military research? This is why all you tech-happy people should support increased military funding, instead of something so silly as direct funding of research.
Seriously, this is much more affordable only because we've already paid for the research. That's like a waiter saying, "Your meal will be 10% off, because you gave us the chicken we made it out of."
It's great that we can apply some of our military tech to space / lunar exploration. But don't say it's more affordable just because we already paid for it.
Nice conservative rant. But, it's misfounded.
The government is taking your money with your permission.
You are represented in government, if you don't like their decisions, run for office, or communicate with your legislators.
If you really don't like it, move to another country. I won't stop you, and neither will the government.
You can complain all you want about your hard-earned dollars going elsewhere, but there are thousands of everyday benefits you reap from government spending. I'll bet you bitch loudly about gasoline prices -- which, if not for government subsidy, would be far, far higher than they are now.
Furthermore, the nation's economic regions are interdependent upon eachother. Without a workforce, a regional economy will collapse -- so where do you want the workers to live? Do you think they'll commute three hours for a minimum wage job? I'd stake my farm on the fact that the cost to rebuild is cheaper than the cost to the public of losing the economy of the region. I suggest you leave the decision-making on spending to people who have an understanding of how economies operate.
I'm not saying I DO know, I'm saying that we need to elect people who we can have the FAITH in to make educated decisions. And when they make decisions we disagree with, we have only ourselves to blame -- we elected them.
"We all know why this is happening to us.
Yep, because terrorists hate our freedom."
No, because Emeril got his just desserts when His Noodly Appendage descended to "kick things up a notch" -- BAM!
I'm not going to touch most of your points, since they are addressed elsewhere in the thread.
"If the changing climate is any indication we should expect more hurricanes"
Yes, global warming / climate change does play a factor here. But the AMDO (Atlantic Multi-Decade Oscillation) plays a larger part in hurricane intensity. There's a 60-70 year cycle for storm strength, that can be tied to surface and deep temperature variations in the North Atlantic. Current models predict that we are nearing the end of the upswing in storm strength and frequency, and can expect a slowdown to begin in the coming decade.
In the long run, does this information make a difference in rebuilding or relocating New Orleans? I hope not, I am a big fan of planning for the long term.
Go ahead, allow people to rebuild on the Gulf Coast, we need them there to exploit the resources in the area. But force them to build intelligently, and subsidize if need be.
Absolutely. However, other forms of correspondence are also very, very important. A politician's office ranks correspondence according to the vehicle in which it is delivered. The rarer, and more time-intensive, the correspondence, the more it is valued.
/.ers, but one handwritten letter means more than five typed letters.
The best way to get your Congressperson to take notice of you, other than face-to-face contact, is a handwritten letter. I know this may be tough for us
A telephone call to their office is also ranked highly.
Postcards are counted, but are weighted less than letters. Ditto for faxes. Emails are also counted, but are worth almost nothing.
If you really want patent law to change, have a letter-writing interlude at your next LAN party, or other get-together. Buy the stamps and envelopes ahead of time, sit down with paper and pen, and write it out. It sometimes helps if the best writer in the group writes a sample letter.
It works for the pro-censorship folks, for environmental groups, and for other interest groups -- it will help with patent laws if enough people do it.
Here's a useful database of phone, fax, email, and physical addresses of Congresspeople: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
Nice rant.
You're missing the points of the "article":
1. It will take some time for developers to make games that wow us.
2. Some 360 games will have so much content that they won't fit on two discs!!11!one!
This "article" is a marketing tool, a disguised press release, and is not really denigrating the 360 at all. They are reminding us that 1st generation games never utilize anything close to the full potential of a system, and that there will be games with a massive amount of content.
Sure, a lot of people on Slashdot do not like Microsoft, many of them for good reasons.
When you read a blurb like this from Gamespot or anyone else, you have to read between the lines -- there is probably an ulterior motive to what is published.
Many developers consider the system's graphic capabilities 'double-edged.' The Xbox 360 can handle much better looking graphics than previous consoles, but it also requires a lot more effort in development."
This is why the capabilities of new consoles aren't fully explored until the 2nd or 3rd generation of games for that console.
I think that press releases like this (I don't really think it's anything but a press release) are intended to keep us from being underwhelmed when the 360 hits the market.
In all, a good review of the book. However, the focus on forensics is left out of the review -- just wanted to point out that the book is more than a text on file system management, search, and data recovery.
Although, of course, the book does a very good job of being that as well.
I'm getting extremely bothered about the lack of accuracy in Slashdot article summaries.
Go ahead, mod me down. But editors should not just be approving articles they think are interesting or appropriate, they should be (gasp!) editing the summary copy.
FTA: "Khoo told us that this year's convention had 7,000 attendees as of the end of Saturday, and he expected total attendence to hit around 8,500 or 9,000."
From the summary: "Gamespot has word that this year's PAX convention saw more than 9,000 attendees"
One quick check of the article would have revealed the contradiction. It's not such a big deal with this article, but factual misrepresentation is totally irresponsible.
From pennyarcadeexpo.com:
08-05-05 Schedule Update and More! A ton of shifts were made to the schedule, but we're happy to announce that NO MORE CHANGES WILL BE MADE. What you see on the events page is what's gonna happen." (Emphasis theirs)
08-22-05 FOUR DAYS LEFT The Rainbow Six Lockdown Tourney has been changed to a Ghost Recon Summit Strike tourney. Sorry for the inconvenience, as we just heard ourselves. Even the official program won't reflect the changes.
Just thought it kinda funny...
No fuel costs?
What does it run on, air?
It has a battery that needs to be recharged. You pay for the electricity.
Of course, it is much more energy efficient than an SUV...
I didn't say that I found the price unacceptable. My original post just pointed out that the price of the VIC20 at release was similar to the price of the XBox 360 at release, dollars adjusted.
Yes, of course, one sample battery life speaks for all iPod batteries.
One of the problems was that iPods had demonstrably shorter runtime than advertised.
Another problem was variability in the runtime.
I'm going to fix your last sentence for you:
"Anyone complaining about my iPod's battery life is misinformed."
The probe will not be in Earth orbit.
The probe only needs to attain escape velocity of Earth's gravity to get out of orbit. It doesn't need to leave the system. It's quite possible for the probe to get captured by another planet, or by the Sun. At a certain point, the gravitational force exerted by Earth will be far less than that of closer and more massive planets such as Jupiter.
In truth, it is likely that the probe will never return to Earth, unless it has some means of propulsion and control to bring it back.
More likely to turn into a small comet or somesuch.
Mods, since when is anything that points to Wikipedia considered informative, even when it doesn't apply to the article?
MSRP and what it will actually cost you are two different things.
Yes, there is some FUD about retail price... but going from experience, there is no way I'll be able to get an XBox 360 at a retail store without buying a bundled package at release... which will probably cost me $600.
It's not MS that will be setting retail price, it's the retailers. And you can bet your sweet A that they'll be forcing bundles on us.
Nice troll. America is home to some of the best restaurants in the world. Sure, most of the culinary styles here are not unique -- but then again, most of our population is not indigenous.
I'll agree that a subset of the population doesn't have "developed" culinary tastes. The same is true for France, for Italy, for anywhere. Just because YOUR experience of American cuisine doesn't meet your standards, doesn't mean that others' experiences are not different.
I, for one, have a plethora of cuisines to choose from within walking distance of both my office and my house. From Azerbijani to Thai, from crappy to great, it's available -- and I take advantage of it often.
Could be. Processed turkey breast is notoriously loaded with bacteria and fungi, due to the way it is prepared.
However, blue dye is also used as a marker in a lot of butcher shops. If this was from a reputable butcher, it's more likely that you got an end piece of the meat that happened to absorb some of the dye from the packaging.
Humankind has been developing new ways of preparing foods for millenia.
So what if now we design foods from the ground up, instead of by trial and error?
Any great modern chef will understand the chemistry and physics behind their cooking. I know that yeast is only "happy" at a certain pH range, and adjust my bread recipes to account for this. Ditto for leavening agents such as baking soda and baking powder.
Great cooking is taking those same rules of physics and chemistry, and using them to create a mesh of sensations that the eater appreciates.
If it comes from Jacques Pepin or Bobby Flay or whoever, great. If it comes from Kraft labs, great.
But I'd be willing to bet that mass-produced foods will continue to fill their niche, and artisanal cooking will continue to fill its niche. Both will benefit from greater understanding of how ingredients become "food," and better implementation of that understanding.
Just look at Velveeta, for example (a Kraft trademark).
Velveeta was originally "invented" by a researcher at Rutgers College of Pharmacy. The research was attempting to find a good formula for a skin product that could be used for drug delivery.
Turns out, what is good for drug delivery is also good for coloring and flavorant delivery. A couple phone calls by an astute professor with a cheese fetish, and Kraft gives us Velveeta.