an abusive monopoly. No other company can just throw this kind of money away in this market. The only reason why people are not saying something is because Sony is actually beating Microsoft's stupidity.
I'm not at all suprised that they are willing to throw all this money. The real question remains, however. How in the world are they going to be able to get the cost of the Xbox down such that they can ever compete with Sony? I think I've heard that Sony is actually making a sliver of a profit on the PS2 per box. I see that as the fundamental flaw in Microsoft's attempt.
MiniDisc? There really isn't issue here. Sony has always tried to release products that they reserve the right to control and then the public ignores enough for Sony drop it and try again. I think Sony keeps trying it because it appears that the Japanese are always willing to rebuy products. I guess they figure if they try enough, Americans will go along with it.
What ever happened to basic chemistry class, folks? Glass is known as an amorphic solid, a solid with no crystal structure.
Here's a good link: http://www2.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/octob er2000/ posts/157145.shtm
I've gotten to play with early stages of this..
on
Virtual 1930s Harlem
·
· Score: 1
It's interesting to see a/. article to which I can personally relate. A friend of mine would invite me over to campus because UMC has this HUGE screen down a bottom computer lab to watch Star Trek. Since he was part of the computer crew, he had access to all the cool equipment and programs. I've played with the simulator. What gave it a different feel educationally is that you had the perspective of town to wonder around. As you got closer to characters or events, you would begin to hear them calling, talking, singing, etc. At the time, they didn't have a lot of people in it, but I still remember walking around and seeing all the people. Unless they've really splashed it up, it wasn't anything like seeing 3D characters walking and moving. The people were all 2d sprites. But, it gave a new definition to the term hi-res. I think they were rendering it off of a video card with 1 gig of memory. It left an impression on me and I think it would for anyone to get some since to feel what it was like back then. Oh, that and the 3D, VR, simulated helicopter with three-foot tall motion pad. That thing was fun as hell to play on. It had a five-point harness because that thing could take you for a ride. If you hit the ground and you knew it..:)
I'm sorry, but this is logistically impossible. Let's take this apart:
What we need is a genuinely trustable, cheap, well-designed, rugged, sexy, accessible computer system that is owned, manufactured and operated for, well, Global Civil Society.
What is trustable? If the computer is trusted by the owner then that means the owner must have full control in order to guarantee no shoddy behavior is going on. However, this is the exact antithesis of what RIAA wants because it wants full control to do the exact same thing-- to guarantee no shoddy behavior is going on. In system's design, all of the above terms are meaningless. Everyone has different opinions on exactly what these terms mean which is why I have learned to steer well clear of them. To me, sexy is code that is well documented, simple, and broken into intelligent behavioral pieces. I also know people who think sexy is that all sections of code larger than 50 lines must be broken into a separate procedure. To me, that's a maintenance nightmare and hardly sexy.
The real issue, something that I've been arguing for a long time is that piracy is the natural balance to capitalism. When the demand for a product outweighs what the public feels as fair for the product, then fewer people feel bound to honoring a purchase. Unfortunately, there is a law of numbers in capitalism and the number of people who do not have the expertise to make a wise decision when purchasing technical goods versus those who do are far greater in number. Thus, regardless of the number of better alternatives out there, people will buy in the way they are used to, which currently is Microsoft. The only way to prevent what is going to happen is to educate enough of the public to make Microsoft believe it would not be financially wise to attempt to go that route. The advent of XP being rent-able was foiled when enough consumer backlashes were heard. But, in some form, XP was going to sell because they are the megacorp. And, as long as we allow megacorps, they are going to do whatever it is that will give the most dollars. They are always going to attempt to strive for that perfect goal of performing no effort and collecting money for it. Microsoft figured this out a long time back. They just want to make sure for every transaction that occurs, they get paid to allow it to happen. And, we all put them there because we, as a whole, have always voted by buying the cheapest. Now, the cost is always going to be the threat of being finally utterly controlled by one of those megacorps.
IANAL, but my understand is that is against the law to attempt to legal prevent recourse. NDAs are legal because you are signing away a personal right (freedom of speech) for some desired benefit. However, you cannot ever sign away your right to fall back on the legal system. So, any EULA that says that you wave your right to some form of trial or that you must sue the company in some peticular county is bogus. EULA cannot superceede estiblished law.
I find it interesting that people bitch and moan that Windows is a monopoly, but turn around and get uninterested because there's variants of Linux. This means two important things: 1) Linux is strong and has more support, especially since this will cause whole companies to rally their technology together. 2) This gives everyone more competition. If I remember correctly, SUSE or Mandrake was THE Linux distro to get. Red Hat came along and pushed the bar. Whether or not you like Red Hat or not, they have made a major impact in the Linux world.
Personally, if what they saw is true about making a business distro holds true, I want to see what they produce. Here is the simple truth, I was once a tech. I loved learning all the arcane commands and symbols, but I don't have time for that anymore. I need stuff that helps me work faster, better and *simpler*. That is what Windows *does* have in its favor currently. Most things are just a few dialog boxes away and I'm done. I'm waiting for that in Linux and I hope with a decree that they are going after business that they will realize that business isn't interested in the arcane. They want simple, fast solutions to common tasks.
SCSI is a very reliable system and is capable of handling high load from multiple requests. Never had the original CD-R writting issues that IDE had because the system was designed to handle constant through put. But like all things with price, IDE's affordability has won out over technical achievement and has slowly worked its way up, if you buy the right hardware. This is no different than from USB. Originally, it was pale compared to firewire. But, cheap gave it the edge to become a dominant standard. With USB 2.0, Firewire will be religated to niche before dying quietly. After all, for the price of a SCSI drive, I can easily buy three IDE's. It makes more sense to just mirror the data. However, where performance is the last word, SCSI will stay for now. At my work place, the amount of volume of data we process is staggering. There just isn't IDE hardware that handle the number of disks we need to have online.
Before anyone gets their panties in a bind, remember that they have the right offer it and we have the right to not buy it. Since companies only stay in business when people by products, products that don't sell don't stay.
to the IBM PC version of Mac OS. It seems it would be the best of both worlds. Even if it's closed source, the GUI is very nice. And, with a full BSD unix underneath, a damn stable and usable OS. So, what happened?
There is no identifiable difference between what I telecommute to do and what I do for home use except that what I do for home use requires a tremendously larger amout of bandwitch. I don't browse newsgroups at work. I don't pull ads off of Adcritic at work. I don't browse around to see what neat and new things are out there. In short, my business use ties up a hell of a lot of bandwidth than my play use does. The original reason for business class phone lines was to pay for the extra quality of service that should you have a problem with your phone line, they would attempt to fix it faster than anyone else's residential line. However, the quality of cable does not change for the increase in price. As an Excite@Home customer, the way I have been treated is just ridiculous. To think that I would pay more for no change in service is stupid, at best. This is why I think that DSL is going to win in the end, which I didn't think until recently. Cable has totally overloaded itself.
There lies, damn lies and benchmarks. The very fact that they wrote the video drivers to specifical key to a piece of software can mean a two things. First, they are Eee-VIL (little pinky to mouth). They obviously value one piece of software over all others and saw fit to garner that piece of software with higher performance because of the bribe they got. Perhaps it was money. Perhaps it was the chance to sleep with John and his damn cute girlfriend. (Did they ever get married or split up?) Second, it could be that they optimized the drivers with a few hacks may not work reliably with other games. Because they knew the Quake software was stable with them, they got a higher frame rate on a very popular game. Now, which does it sound like to all of you? The simple truth is that anyone who relies on benchmarks gets what they deserve. Evaluate the product across a whole range of activities that you plan to perform, not one. The best benchmark is the IT community, as a whole, not one piece of software. If I hear a lot of people being disgruntled with the card, I won't buy it. If I hear a lot of people praise it for what I want it to do, I would.
Simple, obscurity encourages behavior to program even more shoddy work because they know it is less likely to be caught and proven their fault. Obscurity as a form of protection, in itself, is not a form of security. It is a way to pass the buck. It has been proven time and time again that given obscurity as the protection system lends people into believe they are secure when they are not. After all, the company had said there is a fault, have they? But, the bad guys still know.
I can't vouche for the quality compared to other products, but I own a Linksys router with wireless built in. The product is simple to administer and has worked flawlessly. Their homepage has all the manuals in PDF format available. I was able to read before buying one that it would do anything I planned to do plus has enough features and flexibility to offer growth into things I would like to do in the future. I've been very happy with how it has performed. I had it installed an up and running in minutes. On a side note, an awesome distro for a simple to configure and use for basic home services on a PC is e-smith ( http://www.e-smith.com and http://www.e-smith.org ). It's a no nonsense install of Linux that is quick to set up and administer. It's been handling my home web, file and print services flawlessly. It's very, very plug and play.
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an abusive monopoly. No other company can just throw this kind of money away in this market. The only reason why people are not saying something is because Sony is actually beating Microsoft's stupidity.
I'm not at all suprised that they are willing to throw all this money. The real question remains, however. How in the world are they going to be able to get the cost of the Xbox down such that they can ever compete with Sony? I think I've heard that Sony is actually making a sliver of a profit on the PS2 per box. I see that as the fundamental flaw in Microsoft's attempt.
You don't steal something like this unless you already *have* a buyer in line..
MiniDisc? There really isn't issue here. Sony has always tried to release products that they reserve the right to control and then the public ignores enough for Sony drop it and try again. I think Sony keeps trying it because it appears that the Japanese are always willing to rebuy products. I guess they figure if they try enough, Americans will go along with it.
What ever happened to basic chemistry class, folks? Glass is known as an amorphic solid, a solid with no crystal structure.
b er2000/ posts/157145.shtm
Here's a good link:
http://www2.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/octo
It's interesting to see a /. article to which I can personally relate. A friend of mine would invite me over to campus because UMC has this HUGE screen down a bottom computer lab to watch Star Trek. Since he was part of the computer crew, he had access to all the cool equipment and programs. I've played with the simulator. What gave it a different feel educationally is that you had the perspective of town to wonder around. As you got closer to characters or events, you would begin to hear them calling, talking, singing, etc. At the time, they didn't have a lot of people in it, but I still remember walking around and seeing all the people. Unless they've really splashed it up, it wasn't anything like seeing 3D characters walking and moving. The people were all 2d sprites. But, it gave a new definition to the term hi-res. I think they were rendering it off of a video card with 1 gig of memory. It left an impression on me and I think it would for anyone to get some since to feel what it was like back then. Oh, that and the 3D, VR, simulated helicopter with three-foot tall motion pad. That thing was fun as hell to play on. It had a five-point harness because that thing could take you for a ride. If you hit the ground and you knew it.. :)
I'm sorry, but this is logistically impossible. Let's take this apart:
What we need is a genuinely trustable, cheap, well-designed, rugged, sexy, accessible computer system that is owned, manufactured and operated for, well, Global Civil Society.
What is trustable? If the computer is trusted by the owner then that means the owner must have full control in order to guarantee no shoddy behavior is going on. However, this is the exact antithesis of what RIAA wants because it wants full control to do the exact same thing-- to guarantee no shoddy behavior is going on. In system's design, all of the above terms are meaningless. Everyone has different opinions on exactly what these terms mean which is why I have learned to steer well clear of them. To me, sexy is code that is well documented, simple, and broken into intelligent behavioral pieces. I also know people who think sexy is that all sections of code larger than 50 lines must be broken into a separate procedure. To me, that's a maintenance nightmare and hardly sexy.
The real issue, something that I've been arguing for a long time is that piracy is the natural balance to capitalism. When the demand for a product outweighs what the public feels as fair for the product, then fewer people feel bound to honoring a purchase. Unfortunately, there is a law of numbers in capitalism and the number of people who do not have the expertise to make a wise decision when purchasing technical goods versus those who do are far greater in number. Thus, regardless of the number of better alternatives out there, people will buy in the way they are used to, which currently is Microsoft. The only way to prevent what is going to happen is to educate enough of the public to make Microsoft believe it would not be financially wise to attempt to go that route. The advent of XP being rent-able was foiled when enough consumer backlashes were heard. But, in some form, XP was going to sell because they are the megacorp. And, as long as we allow megacorps, they are going to do whatever it is that will give the most dollars. They are always going to attempt to strive for that perfect goal of performing no effort and collecting money for it. Microsoft figured this out a long time back. They just want to make sure for every transaction that occurs, they get paid to allow it to happen. And, we all put them there because we, as a whole, have always voted by buying the cheapest. Now, the cost is always going to be the threat of being finally utterly controlled by one of those megacorps.
IANAL, but my understand is that is against the law to attempt to legal prevent recourse. NDAs are legal because you are signing away a personal right (freedom of speech) for some desired benefit. However, you cannot ever sign away your right to fall back on the legal system. So, any EULA that says that you wave your right to some form of trial or that you must sue the company in some peticular county is bogus. EULA cannot superceede estiblished law.
My two cents,
I find it interesting that people bitch and moan that Windows is a monopoly, but turn around and get uninterested because there's variants of Linux. This means two important things:
1) Linux is strong and has more support, especially since this will cause whole companies to rally their technology together.
2) This gives everyone more competition. If I remember correctly, SUSE or Mandrake was THE Linux distro to get. Red Hat came along and pushed the bar. Whether or not you like Red Hat or not, they have made a major impact in the Linux world.
Personally, if what they saw is true about making a business distro holds true, I want to see what they produce. Here is the simple truth, I was once a tech. I loved learning all the arcane commands and symbols, but I don't have time for that anymore. I need stuff that helps me work faster, better and *simpler*. That is what Windows *does* have in its favor currently. Most things are just a few dialog boxes away and I'm done. I'm waiting for that in Linux and I hope with a decree that they are going after business that they will realize that business isn't interested in the arcane. They want simple, fast solutions to common tasks.
My two cents,
SCSI is a very reliable system and is capable of handling high load from multiple requests. Never had the original CD-R writting issues that IDE had because the system was designed to handle constant through put. But like all things with price, IDE's affordability has won out over technical achievement and has slowly worked its way up, if you buy the right hardware. This is no different than from USB. Originally, it was pale compared to firewire. But, cheap gave it the edge to become a dominant standard. With USB 2.0, Firewire will be religated to niche before dying quietly. After all, for the price of a SCSI drive, I can easily buy three IDE's. It makes more sense to just mirror the data. However, where performance is the last word, SCSI will stay for now. At my work place, the amount of volume of data we process is staggering. There just isn't IDE hardware that handle the number of disks we need to have online.
My two cents,
DIVX? I knew you could..
Before anyone gets their panties in a bind, remember that they have the right offer it and we have the right to not buy it. Since companies only stay in business when people by products, products that don't sell don't stay.
to the IBM PC version of Mac OS. It seems it would be the best of both worlds. Even if it's closed source, the GUI is very nice. And, with a full BSD unix underneath, a damn stable and usable OS. So, what happened?
There is no identifiable difference between what I telecommute to do and what I do for home use except that what I do for home use requires a tremendously larger amout of bandwitch. I don't browse newsgroups at work. I don't pull ads off of Adcritic at work. I don't browse around to see what neat and new things are out there. In short, my business use ties up a hell of a lot of bandwidth than my play use does. The original reason for business class phone lines was to pay for the extra quality of service that should you have a problem with your phone line, they would attempt to fix it faster than anyone else's residential line. However, the quality of cable does not change for the increase in price. As an Excite@Home customer, the way I have been treated is just ridiculous. To think that I would pay more for no change in service is stupid, at best. This is why I think that DSL is going to win in the end, which I didn't think until recently. Cable has totally overloaded itself.
My two cents,
Chad
There lies, damn lies and benchmarks. The very fact that they wrote the video drivers to specifical key to a piece of software can mean a two things. First, they are Eee-VIL (little pinky to mouth). They obviously value one piece of software over all others and saw fit to garner that piece of software with higher performance because of the bribe they got. Perhaps it was money. Perhaps it was the chance to sleep with John and his damn cute girlfriend. (Did they ever get married or split up?) Second, it could be that they optimized the drivers with a few hacks may not work reliably with other games. Because they knew the Quake software was stable with them, they got a higher frame rate on a very popular game. Now, which does it sound like to all of you? The simple truth is that anyone who relies on benchmarks gets what they deserve. Evaluate the product across a whole range of activities that you plan to perform, not one. The best benchmark is the IT community, as a whole, not one piece of software. If I hear a lot of people being disgruntled with the card, I won't buy it. If I hear a lot of people praise it for what I want it to do, I would.
Bel, the mostly sane..
Simple, obscurity encourages behavior to program even more shoddy work because they know it is less likely to be caught and proven their fault. Obscurity as a form of protection, in itself, is not a form of security. It is a way to pass the buck. It has been proven time and time again that given obscurity as the protection system lends people into believe they are secure when they are not. After all, the company had said there is a fault, have they? But, the bad guys still know.
I can't vouche for the quality compared to other products, but I own a Linksys router with wireless built in. The product is simple to administer and has worked flawlessly. Their homepage has all the manuals in PDF format available. I was able to read before buying one that it would do anything I planned to do plus has enough features and flexibility to offer growth into things I would like to do in the future. I've been very happy with how it has performed. I had it installed an up and running in minutes. On a side note, an awesome distro for a simple to configure and use for basic home services on a PC is e-smith ( http://www.e-smith.com and http://www.e-smith.org ). It's a no nonsense install of Linux that is quick to set up and administer. It's been handling my home web, file and print services flawlessly. It's very, very plug and play.