Besides, I generally prefer BP; I remember when 60 Minutes did a story on MTBE, the BP CEO was the only one with the balls to go on record and say that MTBE was a major health risk that they were forced to put into gasoline.
Way back when, Legos were all about imagination and unlimited possibilities.
I looked at Legos this past Christmas for my kids... got to say, I didn't think any of the sets I saw were too appealing. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and various sets that look like they're all about the licensing and very little about imagination. And there's almost no "replay value" when you buy a Harry Potter box and you only have enough pieces to build what you see on the box.
MindStorms is a little different, and I think it's a cool concept; but, somewhere along the line, Lego let all the niche products overtake the brand.
Time to get back to the basics; great big tubs of blocks that you can use to build houses, planes, spaceships, boats, or whatever captures a childs' fancy.
Yeah, but how is this any different? Apple makes money on the enormous markup on the iPods, same as they do on Mac systems. I'm sure HP will add some refinements to distinguish it in the market, so that it's not just an iPod with an HP logo on it instead of an Apple.
Seriously... Jobs may be testing the waters here for another Mac clone market.
This is a copy of a post on the Adobe forum, which is now slashdotted: --- Markus G. Kuhn - 03:45am Jan 8, 2004 Pacific(#106 of 110)
How it works:
For those of you curious about how this algorithm detects a banknote, here is a slide of a short talk that I gave to our local research group soon after I discovered the "EURion Constellation" two years ago while experimenting with a new Xerox color photocopier and a 10 euro note:
The algorithm looks in the blue channel of a color image for little circles and most likely examines the distance distribution encountered. I have discovered a small constellation of just five circles (a bit like Orion with the belt starts merged) that will be rejected by a Xerox color photocopier installed next door from here as a banknote. Black on white circles do not work.
These little yellow, green or orange 1 mm large circles have been on European banknotes for many years. I found them on German marks, British pounds and the euro notes. In the US, they showed up only very recently on the new 20$ bill. On some notes like the euro, the circles are blatantly obvious, whereas on others the artists carefully integrated them into their design. On the 20 pound note, they appear as "notes" in an unlikely short music score, in the old German 50 mark note, they are neatly embedded into the background pattern, and in the new 20 dollar bill, they are used as the 0 of all the yellow 20 number printed across the note. The constellation are probably detected by the fact that the squares of the distances of the circles are integer multiples of the smallest one.
I have later been told that this scheme was invented by Omron and that the circle patter also encodes the issuing bank.
No Wonder Photoshop CS Seems Slow - It's Analiyzing Images For Content!
Brian NoSpam - 10:02am Jan 7, 2004 Pacific
We received a TIFF image from a customer, of a $20 bill. The image does *not* violate any laws regarding reproduction of currency (it's not even close to actual-size, and it's not a "flat" portrayal - it's wavy, as if it's fluttering in the wind. Nor is it real-color.
However, Photoshop CS refuses to open the image, and provides an error message regarding the (il)legality of currency reproduction and an "information" button that takes you to the web. (Photoshop 7, of course, has no such qualms).
What the hell is this? In my book this is completely unacceptable - Photoshop is an image editor, not a censor, government policy enforcer or anything else.
So, if you gotta play everything, the Mac isn't for you. If you want to enjoy the best of the games in a year, it's a sure bet it'll be ported soon.
Well, two problems with that statement.
One, there are still a lot of A-list games that never make it to the Mac. Battlefield 1942 and Serious Sam are two of my favorites.
Two, by the time the Mac port comes out, the PC version is usually in the bargain bin, so Mac players are paying $50 for what PC users are now paying $20 for. And if you're like me, I never buy a new release when I know it's going to be half price in 6 months.
I've been a Mac user since 1984, so believe me, I know the Mac gamer's anguish... hope, pray, sign petitions, send emails, etc. Things have gotten SIGNIFICANTLY better in the past few years... I mean, LucasArts actually released Jedi Knight II for Mac! Wonders never cease. But the situation is a far cry from being "satisfactory".
Oh, but I'm typing this into a site called slashdot.org, how amazing. It seems that slashdot.com redirects the user to slashdot.org so I'm thinking that a similar function might work for the.sex sites.
Yeah, a tech site that tries to abide by the rules of the internet. Great example.
Actually, isn't.org primarily for no-profits and not-for-profits? So, even Slashdot is using the wrong TLD.
And the reason that many porn sites would adopt the.sex name is that it would place the burden of preventing minors from accessing them onto the parents or other person letting them use the computer.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Just like porn spammers are soooooo worried that their emails might inadvertently wind up in the inboxes of children.
Get real, dude.
So, if a minor hits a porn site using a.com address, that site can be sued for sending porn to a minor. This results in cash inflow for the people doing the suing and cash outflow for the porn site.
It's not happening now with porn spam, so why would it happen with a.sex TLD?
And, the sheer volume of porn sites out there makes this a questionable task as well. Who would you go after? There's no one site that you could sue that would cause the rest to crumble.
And many of these are fly-by-night operations, anyway, so what do they care if they get hit by a lawsuit? Shut down one company, relaunch another company. Back in business while the plaintiffs exhaust their funds trying to hit moving targets.
Sure, some sites will move off-shore, but then they'll have to share that pipe to the US with every other person in that country. That means slower connection speeds and the legit porn sites will move to.sex in the US and have fast connection speeds.
Gee, I haven't noticed any problem downloading large files from overseas web hosts.
And if you want to talk about "economics in action," then more traffic will mean more money which will mean upgraded networks. Consumer demand doesn't deplete such resources, it increases it.
My point was that the Mac is still a carrier, whether or not it is affected.
I've been in a situation where Mac Word would get infected by a macro virus, and the unknowing user would then pass Word files onto their PC using clients, and all hell would break loose.
Infecting your clients is not a good situation to be in, and is just as much of a concern (if not more so) than having your own machine affected.
What document viruses? OS X does not have VBA support needed for these things to work. You fail to understand just how poor Windows security has become and hoe well off other platforms are actually having learned and applied lessons on security.
Mac OS X DOES have one big gaping security hole... it's called Microsoft Office. Granted, that's not Apple's fault, but since Office is one of the most purchased apps for the Mac, it's worthy of notice.
The Mac can propigate Word and Excel macro viruses just as well as Windows can... but not much else. Any attempt to access the hard drive fails when the script starts looking for "c:\". Generally, Macs are carriers but not itself afflicted by the macro viruses.
IBM has lots of patents on their microporocesor technology that they use in the manufacturing of PowerPC chips. Guess who they've licensed a lot of their technology to... Intel and AMD.
Apple licenses a lot of Intel technology.
It is VERY common in the tech community to license your technology to your competitors. These tech companies will take the revenue streams where ever they can find them.
A lot of the existing sites would still keep their current address because their current customers use it, and they would sign up for a.sex address. But new sites would, in my opinion, opt for the.sex instead of the.com or.net or.org addresses because that's where the customers will be going.
Actually, I think that there's already a ton of evidence to the contrary. People are so used to.com that the other TLD's have virtually been shunned, and businesses know it. I think.net has a third as many registrations,.org has a tenth as many, and I even see government sites using.com rather than.gov as their preferred TLD.
And if you think they're going to use.sex rather than.com simply because it's the right thing to do, then all you have to do is look at all the porn spam in your inbox to see that a lot of porn sites simply disregard the rules of responsible internet behavior..sex will be fine to differentiate the first wave of porn sites from the rest, but it will quickly reach saturation. The porn businesses will opt to have the most visibility possible, thus they will continue to use.com as their primary TLD and.sex as a secondary TLD at best.
There are a TON of porn sites out there that WANT you to stumble across them by accident, knowing that they can hook a lot of people just by flashing a bunch of body parts in their faces.
What would happen is that every sex site would get a.sex TLD, but would also keep their.com addresses, just in case. If the US passed a law that all sex sites must give up their.com TLD's, then the sites would just move to overseas web hosts.
Without a way to regulate content on the internet internationally,.sex would just be a wasted effort.
In my DVD-R world, every new Mac ships with a DVD-R.
AFAIK, it's the only platform that is actually giving away the software to create your own multimedia DVD's, and with considerable ease at that.
And as others have pointed out, it's not that big a deal. Just as CD writers eventually embraced both CD-R and CD-RW in the same unit, and modems embrace 56k and X2 in the same unit, the manufacturer(s) that will win out will be the ones to embrace DVD-R and DVD+R together.
As a TIVO/ReplayTV virgin, how does the commercial skipping operate? Does it skip a certain amount of time ahead?
Basically, it involves the folding of time and space; each 30 second skip acutally moves you forward in time 30 seconds. The time is then reclaimed at 2 am while you are sleeping, so you are basically unaware that you are 30 seconds ahead of everyone else (except that, if you talk on the phone to someone outside of your home, you can answer questions before they've been asked).
Unfortunately, you can't skip ahead more than 5 minutes per day or you risk a rupture in the matter/anitmatter containment field in the unit.
It's all very high-tech stuff, and I can't go into any more detail than that, otherwise, I'd have to kill your dog.
Slashdot Mirror
They're just overpriced.
Besides, I generally prefer BP; I remember when 60 Minutes did a story on MTBE, the BP CEO was the only one with the balls to go on record and say that MTBE was a major health risk that they were forced to put into gasoline.
Dell is always talking trash about the competition... as long as you pick up on their hostility, then making sense is not a requirement.
Way back when, Legos were all about imagination and unlimited possibilities.
I looked at Legos this past Christmas for my kids... got to say, I didn't think any of the sets I saw were too appealing. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and various sets that look like they're all about the licensing and very little about imagination. And there's almost no "replay value" when you buy a Harry Potter box and you only have enough pieces to build what you see on the box.
MindStorms is a little different, and I think it's a cool concept; but, somewhere along the line, Lego let all the niche products overtake the brand.
Time to get back to the basics; great big tubs of blocks that you can use to build houses, planes, spaceships, boats, or whatever captures a childs' fancy.
Yeah, but how is this any different? Apple makes money on the enormous markup on the iPods, same as they do on Mac systems. I'm sure HP will add some refinements to distinguish it in the market, so that it's not just an iPod with an HP logo on it instead of an Apple.
Seriously... Jobs may be testing the waters here for another Mac clone market.
Wow, Jobs licensing out music hardware and software to HP... could a Mac clone be far behind?
This is a copy of a post on the Adobe forum, which is now slashdotted:
---
Markus G. Kuhn - 03:45am Jan 8, 2004 Pacific(#106 of 110)
How it works:
For those of you curious about how this algorithm detects a banknote, here is a slide of a short talk that I gave to our local research group soon after I discovered the "EURion Constellation" two years ago while experimenting with a new Xerox color photocopier and a 10 euro note:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf
The algorithm looks in the blue channel of a color image for little circles and most likely examines the distance distribution encountered. I have discovered a small constellation of just five circles (a bit like Orion with the belt starts merged) that will be rejected by a Xerox color photocopier installed next door from here as a banknote. Black on white circles do not work.
These little yellow, green or orange 1 mm large circles have been on European banknotes for many years. I found them on German marks, British pounds and the euro notes. In the US, they showed up only very recently on the new 20$ bill. On some notes like the euro, the circles are blatantly obvious, whereas on others the artists carefully integrated them into their design. On the 20 pound note, they appear as "notes" in an unlikely short music score, in the old German 50 mark note, they are neatly embedded into the background pattern, and in the new 20 dollar bill, they are used as the 0 of all the yellow 20 number printed across the note. The constellation are probably detected by the fact that the squares of the distances of the circles are integer multiples of the smallest one.
I have later been told that this scheme was invented by Omron and that the circle patter also encodes the issuing bank.
No Wonder Photoshop CS Seems Slow - It's Analiyzing Images For Content!
Brian NoSpam - 10:02am Jan 7, 2004 Pacific
We received a TIFF image from a customer, of a $20 bill. The image does
*not* violate any laws regarding reproduction of currency (it's not even
close to actual-size, and it's not a "flat" portrayal - it's wavy, as if
it's fluttering in the wind. Nor is it real-color.
However, Photoshop CS refuses to open the image, and provides an error
message regarding the (il)legality of currency reproduction and an
"information" button that takes you to the web. (Photoshop 7, of course,
has no such qualms).
What the hell is this? In my book this is completely unacceptable -
Photoshop is an image editor, not a censor, government policy enforcer
or anything else.
Adobe, you've got some explaining to do.
Brian
So, if you gotta play everything, the Mac isn't for you. If you want to enjoy the best of the games in a year, it's a sure bet it'll be ported soon.
Well, two problems with that statement.
One, there are still a lot of A-list games that never make it to the Mac. Battlefield 1942 and Serious Sam are two of my favorites.
Two, by the time the Mac port comes out, the PC version is usually in the bargain bin, so Mac players are paying $50 for what PC users are now paying $20 for. And if you're like me, I never buy a new release when I know it's going to be half price in 6 months.
I've been a Mac user since 1984, so believe me, I know the Mac gamer's anguish... hope, pray, sign petitions, send emails, etc. Things have gotten SIGNIFICANTLY better in the past few years... I mean, LucasArts actually released Jedi Knight II for Mac! Wonders never cease. But the situation is a far cry from being "satisfactory".
First this link (from the summary) says that one station needed to pay $200,000 to switch to digital equipment.
According to iBiquity's website, the average cost to the radio stations will only be $75,000.
I wasn't sure what a lakh was, but something about 1.5 engineers didn't sound so impressive.
"You American engineers are so smug! Me and my half-carcass here will take all of you on!"
Take any email whose subject has an excessive amount of punctuation and high ASCII characters, and assign it a higher probability of being spam.
Oh, I see... just because you don't have an answer, then you want to leave it out of the discussion.
Yeah, you're a real intellectual.
Spam is one avenue of marketing, just as registering a particular TLD is another avenue, and is very germain to the discussion.
Oh, but I'm typing this into a site called slashdot.org, how amazing. It seems that slashdot.com redirects the user to slashdot.org so I'm thinking that a similar function might work for the .sex sites.
.org primarily for no-profits and not-for-profits? So, even Slashdot is using the wrong TLD.
.sex name is that it would place the burden of preventing minors from accessing them onto the parents or other person letting them use the computer.
.com address, that site can be sued for sending porn to a minor. This results in cash inflow for the people doing the suing and cash outflow for the porn site.
.sex TLD?
.sex in the US and have fast connection speeds.
Yeah, a tech site that tries to abide by the rules of the internet. Great example.
Actually, isn't
And the reason that many porn sites would adopt the
Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Just like porn spammers are soooooo worried that their emails might inadvertently wind up in the inboxes of children.
Get real, dude.
So, if a minor hits a porn site using a
It's not happening now with porn spam, so why would it happen with a
And, the sheer volume of porn sites out there makes this a questionable task as well. Who would you go after? There's no one site that you could sue that would cause the rest to crumble.
And many of these are fly-by-night operations, anyway, so what do they care if they get hit by a lawsuit? Shut down one company, relaunch another company. Back in business while the plaintiffs exhaust their funds trying to hit moving targets.
Sure, some sites will move off-shore, but then they'll have to share that pipe to the US with every other person in that country. That means slower connection speeds and the legit porn sites will move to
Gee, I haven't noticed any problem downloading large files from overseas web hosts.
And if you want to talk about "economics in action," then more traffic will mean more money which will mean upgraded networks. Consumer demand doesn't deplete such resources, it increases it.
THAT'S "economics in action".
My point was that the Mac is still a carrier, whether or not it is affected.
I've been in a situation where Mac Word would get infected by a macro virus, and the unknowing user would then pass Word files onto their PC using clients, and all hell would break loose.
Infecting your clients is not a good situation to be in, and is just as much of a concern (if not more so) than having your own machine affected.
What document viruses? OS X does not have VBA support needed for these things to work. You fail to understand just how poor Windows security has become and hoe well off other platforms are actually having learned and applied lessons on security.
Mac OS X DOES have one big gaping security hole... it's called Microsoft Office. Granted, that's not Apple's fault, but since Office is one of the most purchased apps for the Mac, it's worthy of notice.
The Mac can propigate Word and Excel macro viruses just as well as Windows can... but not much else. Any attempt to access the hard drive fails when the script starts looking for "c:\". Generally, Macs are carriers but not itself afflicted by the macro viruses.
Doesn't mean a single thing, not in the least.
IBM has lots of patents on their microporocesor technology that they use in the manufacturing of PowerPC chips. Guess who they've licensed a lot of their technology to... Intel and AMD.
Apple licenses a lot of Intel technology.
It is VERY common in the tech community to license your technology to your competitors. These tech companies will take the revenue streams where ever they can find them.
A lot of the existing sites would still keep their current address because their current customers use it, and they would sign up for a .sex address. But new sites would, in my opinion, opt for the .sex instead of the .com or .net or .org addresses because that's where the customers will be going.
.com that the other TLD's have virtually been shunned, and businesses know it. I think .net has a third as many registrations, .org has a tenth as many, and I even see government sites using .com rather than .gov as their preferred TLD.
.sex rather than .com simply because it's the right thing to do, then all you have to do is look at all the porn spam in your inbox to see that a lot of porn sites simply disregard the rules of responsible internet behavior. .sex will be fine to differentiate the first wave of porn sites from the rest, but it will quickly reach saturation. The porn businesses will opt to have the most visibility possible, thus they will continue to use .com as their primary TLD and .sex as a secondary TLD at best.
Actually, I think that there's already a ton of evidence to the contrary. People are so used to
And if you think they're going to use
There are a TON of porn sites out there that WANT you to stumble across them by accident, knowing that they can hook a lot of people just by flashing a bunch of body parts in their faces.
.sex TLD, but would also keep their .com addresses, just in case. If the US passed a law that all sex sites must give up their .com TLD's, then the sites would just move to overseas web hosts.
.sex would just be a wasted effort.
What would happen is that every sex site would get a
Without a way to regulate content on the internet internationally,
enjoy living in your dvd-r world...
In my DVD-R world, every new Mac ships with a DVD-R.
AFAIK, it's the only platform that is actually giving away the software to create your own multimedia DVD's, and with considerable ease at that.
And as others have pointed out, it's not that big a deal. Just as CD writers eventually embraced both CD-R and CD-RW in the same unit, and modems embrace 56k and X2 in the same unit, the manufacturer(s) that will win out will be the ones to embrace DVD-R and DVD+R together.
More worried about losing his car than his laptop exploding and taking his manhood... sheesh.
If Pat Boone singing heavy metal didn't trigger it, then another Shatner album isn't going to hurt anybody (well, probably not permanently, anyway...)
As a TIVO/ReplayTV virgin, how does the commercial skipping operate? Does it skip a certain amount of time ahead?
Basically, it involves the folding of time and space; each 30 second skip acutally moves you forward in time 30 seconds. The time is then reclaimed at 2 am while you are sleeping, so you are basically unaware that you are 30 seconds ahead of everyone else (except that, if you talk on the phone to someone outside of your home, you can answer questions before they've been asked).
Unfortunately, you can't skip ahead more than 5 minutes per day or you risk a rupture in the matter/anitmatter containment field in the unit.
It's all very high-tech stuff, and I can't go into any more detail than that, otherwise, I'd have to kill your dog.
No, but he is expected to meet with Yassir Arafat to discuss how he can fund the Microsoft intifada.
Postal 2 was nominated to be one of the Most Embarrassing Games of the Year by GameSpot...
OTOH, it DOES have Gary Coleman in it!
This is news?