I have noticed how everyone becomes an expert as soon as the topic of "melt downs" or "nuclear power" comes up. Their fields of instant expertise vary from nuclear physics to statistics to medicine to environmental engineering to genetics.
As a nuclear physicist, statistician, medical doctor, environmental engineer, and geneticist, I too share your outrage.
This might seem a little trite, but the name for this fork is really awful. Names are important because they relate to how a product or service registers in the minds of its users, and I think the namer here really dropped the ball. "Citizendium" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Plus, the word "citizen" looks shoehorned into the name as a kind of clumsy contrivance designed to evoke this false sense of community involvement, even though the article suggests that the new project will be run by "experts"--which suggests less overall involvement by laymen. Hell, even "Wikipedia" is better, and that's really saying something. If Mr. Sanger wants people to use this new 'pedia instead of leave them tonguetied and confused, then he should rename the project before it's too late. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to found my own free knowledge project--"FreedomWeboHyperpediadium."
Hey, great post. You pointed out that this is probably yet another Windows-centric exploit, and also how utterly great the new kpdf is (seriously--the new version is the best pdf reader I've used! Get it--get it NOW!:) The one thing we shouldn't forget, though, is that even when you're running free software, you can still accidentally pass the infected file(s) along to people who aren't.
P.S. I do the uber-paranoid thing. On the rare occasion that I boot into XP for games, the Windows I'm booting into hasn't even had any internet drivers installed. Since I'm only using the OS for one specific thing, and a net connection isn't necessary, I find it more convenient than pulling out a cat-5 cable or two, or messing around with the router so it blocks all traffic.
can be seen on a 4th season episode of "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" You can hear and see the inventor sum up his invention in his own words, accompanied by Penn's chiding commentary. If it's not enough for you to just *read* about artificial pet testicles, and you're more the type who wants to *see* them, then feel free to get ahold of the episode. It's episode 406 from season 4, entitled "Pet Love". You can probably get it right now using your favorite p2p program.
And no, I am not Penn Gillette, nor do I have some kind of vested interest in selling you a pair of fake doggie balls.:) Although it would be pretty awesome to make some kind of "not only the president, I'm also a client remark" and whip out a second "supplemental" pair as proof positive of my commitment to the product.
That's a pretty fascinating statistic. IAAL, not a doctor, so I really have nothing to go on here, but isn't it true that cancer can be linked to stress, as well as many other lifestyle factors? Isn't it possible that by enjoying a good relationship with the God they believe in, and that by engaging in relaxing, almost meditative prayer sessions, priests are also lowering their risk of cancer?
Plus, it looks like that study assumes complete celebacy on the part of the priests (i.e. no ejaculations except night emissions), and as the altar boy scandals have taught us, there are no guarantees with that anymore. Google hasn't been too helpful so far, but if anybody can find more information on this that would be great.
I really wonder where I said or even intimated that a teenager would need a computer to masturbate. It's really mysterious that you say that, especially considering that I said "some sort of sexual stimulus should be enough." Magazines, VHS tapes, or whatever else certainly fit that category. Since there's absolutely no correlation between what I wrote and what you claim that I wrote, the only thing that I can conclude is that you're trying to scold me for having an opinion, like I'm some sort of petulant child, just as the moderators have done by modding my post down to a troll.
As far as your claim that teenagers had healthy sexual imaginations (a telltale sign of healthy sexual development) long before the internet and Playboy, I just don't even know how to respond to that. Surely you realize that it is the *lack* of sexual imagination and development from the men of those storied generations that gave them such a negative attitude towards women? And you realize that we feel the echo of that stunted sexual development in many of the problems we have with sexism even today? I mean Christ, it was only in the last century that the U.S. had sufferage...oh but are you going back even further? Like when women used to be banished from the village while they were having their period for fear that they would bewitch others? Those must have been some exciting, pre-internet times, filled with sexually mature, fully-realized men, no?
Oh and thank you for sharing with all of us how much fun you have had touching yourself in the dark. That was precious.
Locating PC's only in family areas of the house will maximize the "Surprise!" factor when you accidentally walk in on your son engaged in an act of self-intimacy. He thought the house was deserted for the afternoon, and then there you are, accidentally shaming him. If you're really interested in his welfare, you would provide an environment where he could experiment with himself sexually. Nobody's talking about whips and strap-ons here--a door that can be shut in a room containing some sort of sexual stimulus should be enough.
Jocelyn Elders was mocked and fired when she endorsed masturbation, but oh how right she actually was. Masturbation is a necessary component to human sexuality, and to frustrate your son's efforts could lead to other problems.
Not really. All you did was echo my own sentiments and summarize my comment, and you got modded higher. I guess it's not too late for me to patent a./ moderation system that works.
It is logically untenable to state that building upon existing technologies to create new technologies makes those existing technologies more obvious for the purpose of undermining a patent. Our collective comfort level and familiarity with technologies as time goes on is something different entirely.
I am too ignorant of science and history to cite really cutting examples of how ludicrous that would be, but here goes anyway: "Larry Wall invents Perl using an 8086-based IBM PC, thus invalidating Intel's patents on the 8086 microchip. The inventor of the CRT could not be reached for comment. Also, the inventor of the candle is still displeased with Edison's bold new room-lighting ideas."
Of course you're going to see (more?) patents for technologies that are based on other technologies, other ideas. Almost everything new that was ever created was made using tools or technologies that already existed, because that is the very nature of innovation. When inventions stray so far from known applications and prove themselves overwhelmingly useful (cotton gin, light bulb, automobile, movable type) then we often name entire historical Ages after them. If you're lamenting the time between symbolic light bulb inventions, join the club.
IAAL, but not a patent lawyer. What I do know is that what you're suggesting would effectively dismantle the U.S. patent system. Trademarks just identify goods and services and protect what usually amounts to name recognition and consumer goodwill.
But patents are completely different. A patent is a property right granted to an inventor that gives the inventor a reasonable period of time to profit from their invention without fear of infringement. Whether or not the inventor has profited from the patent is completely irrelevant. All it does is estop others from doing so. You can probably already see how a legal, government-granted right to prevent others from doing something would be incompatible with some constructive right to steal granted after a certain period of time. At the very least, the law is far more protective of innovation than it is of someone's right to sell an already-invented product under a particular name.
The other thing is that patents are by no means secretive--in fact, the process of applying for a patent involves revealing in intricate detail the "guts" of what it is you're trying to patent. Once granted, patents become public records and can be easily searched for at little cost. Therefore, if somebody is infringing on a patent, they really should have known better and their defense to what they're doing tends to be pretty weak.
The problem is that as computer technology matures, what looked like innovative and patentable products and processes years back can later look increasingly generic and onerous. There are other industries that suffer from this problem as well, but it's most prevalent in the computer industry, where a few years of innovation becomes an eternity (once the personal computer and software to run it and network it were invented, how do you really innovate from there?). The places where innovation can occur become increasingly smaller.
My personal opinion is that a certain amount of infringement and stealing is not just a symptom of the U.S. patent system, but *necessary* for further innovation in a field crowded with disparate technologies. But that's another story. And be prepared to be laughed out of court if you try to use that as a legal argument.;)
It was my understanding that filtering alcohol in this manner basically ruins the filter in just 1-2 passes. Is that what you were accounting for in your estimates of the cost of filtering vs. just going out and buying some slightly better stuff?
That's a great question. I can't really help you, because I'm a lawyer in America and not in Germany. Plus, it looks like everyone who has replied to your question has tried to forge some kind of bizarre, hackneyed connection between a property seizure in Germany, from Germans, by Germans, to what little they know about American jurisprudence (as if the U.S. Constitution has anything to do with this whatsoever). It's shameful that American xenophobia after 9/11 has grown to the extent that most can't even fathom that other countries might be governed by different laws. But hey, they're getting modded way up for it, so I guess now it's acceptable to post things that are way, way off-topic? The only thing I can think of is that David Hasselhoff is somehow involved. I have it on good authority that Germans love him, and as an American of German anscestry, he might very well provide the necessary causal link.
So anyways, you're really on your own here. What you need is input from someone in Germany who has more than a passing familiarity with German law. What won't help you are rants by Scalia or Breyer groupies, respectively, who have used your innocent question as pretext to drag out the same old tired arguments over how to interpret U.S. law.
So THAT's why I never got a reply! My self esteem was taking a pretty big hit there, what with my sending pictures of my erect penis to a complete stranger (which is a perfectly reasonable and intelligent thing to do, by the way), and then not getting back a reply. I'm just glad we live in a world where you can do such a thing with absolutely no repercussions, ever.
What is Mandrake's place these days? That's a tough question. It didn't used to be much of anything: Mandrake originally started as a file-by-file Red Hat clone that included KDE, back when Red Hat Linux in all it's RPM glory was the hottest thing on the block. Seriously. There were some misunderstandings with the old Qt licensing (that have since been resolved), and Red Hat made the logical choice of backing its own pony by putting Gnome in their distro instead. But there was a problem--people still liked their KDE. "Ah ha!" thought the Mandrake folks, and they included KDE. To sweeten the deal, the Mandrake people optimized their distro for modern CPU's.
That was ancient history. After that, Mandrake started to develop some really user friendly configuration tools to go along with their distro. The installer and UI were polished, the customer support was great, and all in all, Mandrake developed a great reputation as a good choice for new Linux users transitioning from Windows--the exact share of the market that Ubuntu now commands.
Then came the name change. Oh God, the name change. Whatever kind of goodwill and name recognition that Mandrake had developed in the Linux market was squandered in one fell swoop. I realize that sometimes a company has no choice with these things, but changing their name to something that sounds like a little-known part of the female anatomy was a poor business move.
"Mandriva" is still on the map, still doing what they've always been doing--making quality, user-friendly distros that people have now started to snub for whatever reason. But the important thing to remember is that the "hot" distro that everyone is using at the time changes every now and then, mostly based on the quality of their latest distro. The RPM-based distros had the most users for a while, and now the Debian-based folks are on a hot streak (somewhere, in a small, dark corner, the Slackware users are laughing their asses off;). The pendulum might swing the other way before we even realize it. I don't know if this latest release by Mandriva is enough to make that happen, but it looks like a great start.
There might be a better way of doing this, but the *old* way was to just use low level format software. The typical procedure is you
1. go to the hard drive manufacturer's website 2. download their "utilities" package 3. prepare a DOS-bootable floppy with the utilities on it 4. invoke the low-level format software (IMPORTANT: You want a LOW LEVEL format. Just typing "format" or something in DOS will not do the trick.)
This will work 100%. What it does is overwrite every byte on every sector to a blank ("00" I believe...). There's no file system footprint, no echo or memory of what was once on the drive. There is nothing to recover, because *everything* has been overwritten with a null value.
The downside? It takes a long time, especially if you're drive is well over the 100 gig variety. But it will get the job done. Cheers!
This will never get built. Let me explain: People near the Treasure Coast are retirees. And I don't mean in the "Oh, it's Florida...of COURSE there are retired people there" sense. I mean that many of its communities were planned and built specifically for bluehairs. Port St. Lucie, for example, is just such a community.
Now as impossible as it may seem, octogenarians are not really up on the newest technological advances. The moment you say the words "landfill trash" to these people, the NIMBY (not in my backyard) impulse will dominate, and granny and gramps will be making phone calls, changing zoning rules, voting down money, and generally just making Geoplasma's job as difficult as possible. They're retired. If you thought they didn't have the time or inclination to do these kinds of things, then you're mistaken.
I know it makes no logical sense to want to make use of modern garbage disposal technology, and yet not want it anywhere within a million miles of you, but trust me, that is the mentality. The article characterizes this as a county-wide effort. I bet not. I bet the people who are slated to have this trash burning marvel right next to them will soon be mad as hell in 3...2...1...
This is just what I'm talking about. I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but they're not even close to reality. I'll have to assume that you were referring to market conditions back when the Xbox was first released, as opposed to the state of things now (when it's relevant).
I'm no expert on console market share, but I do know what comes up on the first page of a Google search. Here, I've done the work for you:
That article tells us that Xbox had a 51 percent market share as early as 2004. In the U.S., Xbox has been outselling PS2 ever since.
Nevertheless, I could cut you some slack if you don't live in the U.S. Even though Americans put more money into consoles than the rest of the world combined, the console market in other parts of the world is not so Microsoft-friendly. If you go by global figures (where Microsoft is still the new kid on the block), then the picture changes. Here's something I pulled up about Sony's current console market share. It was published today, so you won't need to use your time machine when learning about market share:
"Not worried about the headstart that Microsoft has gained in the next-gen gaming space, Jayant Sharma, chairman and CEO, Milestone Interactive, engaged in marketing of digital devices, interactive games and media, points out that in the console market in India Sony has a 100 per cent market share and 70 percent globally."
100 percent in India?? 70 percent globally! I think in all the confusion, we all assumed that only Americans buy console games? It seems that Sony is already the Microsoft of the console world. Perhaps they might actually know what they're doing when it comes to releasing consoles. Cheers.
You raise some great points about how Sony at least knew enough to sandwich together some pretty interesting hardware for their upcoming console, but how in the world can you claim that the PS3 is being "killed" when it hasn't even been released yet? Rather than engage in endless debates about who will be king of the mountain after the PS3 arrives, the thing to do here is to just wait until the PS3 is out and the dust settles.
Trust me, there are plenty of ways to kill a console that don't involve unfounded PR moves and minor devkit problems. How about having *no* developers even making games for it? That was the case with the Sega Saturn, which I owned and loved. There was a time when it was the hottest thing on the block, too. But the Saturn soon turned into a kind of cautionary tale about how you really need to get some grassroots developer support before you even think about releasing a new machine. Sony has done that.
Will it be enough to topple Microsoft and Nintendo? Who can say?--I'm no fortune teller either. But what we shouldn't do is assume that because Sony has completely dropped the ball in other markets, that they will likewise fail in the console arena. Still skeptical? Look at Microsoft: Their operating systems range from mediocre to absolute garbage, their office suites are pretty nice, and their console systems are now wildly popular. If we had just considered Microsoft's past history with operating systems, could we have accurately predicted the success of the Xbox? It's doubtful. There was a time years back when./ ran almost nothing but anti-Microsoft stories, and a lot of that general enmity translated into some early Xbox-hating. Now, Sony is the new punching bag. Will we all make the same mistake again?
Slashdot Mirror
I have little doubt that the Wii will be region-unlocked (mod chip, anyone?) and running Linux within the first month of its release.
This might seem a little trite, but the name for this fork is really awful. Names are important because they relate to how a product or service registers in the minds of its users, and I think the namer here really dropped the ball. "Citizendium" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Plus, the word "citizen" looks shoehorned into the name as a kind of clumsy contrivance designed to evoke this false sense of community involvement, even though the article suggests that the new project will be run by "experts"--which suggests less overall involvement by laymen. Hell, even "Wikipedia" is better, and that's really saying something. If Mr. Sanger wants people to use this new 'pedia instead of leave them tonguetied and confused, then he should rename the project before it's too late. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to found my own free knowledge project--"FreedomWeboHyperpediadium."
FTA: "It's the only reason to ever use Internet Explorer."
Amen to that!
Hey, great post. You pointed out that this is probably yet another Windows-centric exploit, and also how utterly great the new kpdf is (seriously--the new version is the best pdf reader I've used! Get it--get it NOW! :) The one thing we shouldn't forget, though, is that even when you're running free software, you can still accidentally pass the infected file(s) along to people who aren't.
P.S. I do the uber-paranoid thing. On the rare occasion that I boot into XP for games, the Windows I'm booting into hasn't even had any internet drivers installed. Since I'm only using the OS for one specific thing, and a net connection isn't necessary, I find it more convenient than pulling out a cat-5 cable or two, or messing around with the router so it blocks all traffic.
can be seen on a 4th season episode of "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" You can hear and see the inventor sum up his invention in his own words, accompanied by Penn's chiding commentary. If it's not enough for you to just *read* about artificial pet testicles, and you're more the type who wants to *see* them, then feel free to get ahold of the episode. It's episode 406 from season 4, entitled "Pet Love". You can probably get it right now using your favorite p2p program.
:) Although it would be pretty awesome to make some kind of "not only the president, I'm also a client remark" and whip out a second "supplemental" pair as proof positive of my commitment to the product.
And no, I am not Penn Gillette, nor do I have some kind of vested interest in selling you a pair of fake doggie balls.
That's a pretty fascinating statistic. IAAL, not a doctor, so I really have nothing to go on here, but isn't it true that cancer can be linked to stress, as well as many other lifestyle factors? Isn't it possible that by enjoying a good relationship with the God they believe in, and that by engaging in relaxing, almost meditative prayer sessions, priests are also lowering their risk of cancer?
Plus, it looks like that study assumes complete celebacy on the part of the priests (i.e. no ejaculations except night emissions), and as the altar boy scandals have taught us, there are no guarantees with that anymore. Google hasn't been too helpful so far, but if anybody can find more information on this that would be great.
I really wonder where I said or even intimated that a teenager would need a computer to masturbate. It's really mysterious that you say that, especially considering that I said "some sort of sexual stimulus should be enough." Magazines, VHS tapes, or whatever else certainly fit that category. Since there's absolutely no correlation between what I wrote and what you claim that I wrote, the only thing that I can conclude is that you're trying to scold me for having an opinion, like I'm some sort of petulant child, just as the moderators have done by modding my post down to a troll.
As far as your claim that teenagers had healthy sexual imaginations (a telltale sign of healthy sexual development) long before the internet and Playboy, I just don't even know how to respond to that. Surely you realize that it is the *lack* of sexual imagination and development from the men of those storied generations that gave them such a negative attitude towards women? And you realize that we feel the echo of that stunted sexual development in many of the problems we have with sexism even today? I mean Christ, it was only in the last century that the U.S. had sufferage...oh but are you going back even further? Like when women used to be banished from the village while they were having their period for fear that they would bewitch others? Those must have been some exciting, pre-internet times, filled with sexually mature, fully-realized men, no?
Oh and thank you for sharing with all of us how much fun you have had touching yourself in the dark. That was precious.
Locating PC's only in family areas of the house will maximize the "Surprise!" factor when you accidentally walk in on your son engaged in an act of self-intimacy. He thought the house was deserted for the afternoon, and then there you are, accidentally shaming him. If you're really interested in his welfare, you would provide an environment where he could experiment with himself sexually. Nobody's talking about whips and strap-ons here--a door that can be shut in a room containing some sort of sexual stimulus should be enough.
Jocelyn Elders was mocked and fired when she endorsed masturbation, but oh how right she actually was. Masturbation is a necessary component to human sexuality, and to frustrate your son's efforts could lead to other problems.
Not really. All you did was echo my own sentiments and summarize my comment, and you got modded higher. I guess it's not too late for me to patent a ./ moderation system that works.
It is logically untenable to state that building upon existing technologies to create new technologies makes those existing technologies more obvious for the purpose of undermining a patent. Our collective comfort level and familiarity with technologies as time goes on is something different entirely.
I am too ignorant of science and history to cite really cutting examples of how ludicrous that would be, but here goes anyway: "Larry Wall invents Perl using an 8086-based IBM PC, thus invalidating Intel's patents on the 8086 microchip. The inventor of the CRT could not be reached for comment. Also, the inventor of the candle is still displeased with Edison's bold new room-lighting ideas."
Of course you're going to see (more?) patents for technologies that are based on other technologies, other ideas. Almost everything new that was ever created was made using tools or technologies that already existed, because that is the very nature of innovation. When inventions stray so far from known applications and prove themselves overwhelmingly useful (cotton gin, light bulb, automobile, movable type) then we often name entire historical Ages after them. If you're lamenting the time between symbolic light bulb inventions, join the club.
IAAL, but not a patent lawyer. What I do know is that what you're suggesting would effectively dismantle the U.S. patent system. Trademarks just identify goods and services and protect what usually amounts to name recognition and consumer goodwill.
;)
But patents are completely different. A patent is a property right granted to an inventor that gives the inventor a reasonable period of time to profit from their invention without fear of infringement. Whether or not the inventor has profited from the patent is completely irrelevant. All it does is estop others from doing so. You can probably already see how a legal, government-granted right to prevent others from doing something would be incompatible with some constructive right to steal granted after a certain period of time. At the very least, the law is far more protective of innovation than it is of someone's right to sell an already-invented product under a particular name.
The other thing is that patents are by no means secretive--in fact, the process of applying for a patent involves revealing in intricate detail the "guts" of what it is you're trying to patent. Once granted, patents become public records and can be easily searched for at little cost. Therefore, if somebody is infringing on a patent, they really should have known better and their defense to what they're doing tends to be pretty weak.
The problem is that as computer technology matures, what looked like innovative and patentable products and processes years back can later look increasingly generic and onerous. There are other industries that suffer from this problem as well, but it's most prevalent in the computer industry, where a few years of innovation becomes an eternity (once the personal computer and software to run it and network it were invented, how do you really innovate from there?). The places where innovation can occur become increasingly smaller.
My personal opinion is that a certain amount of infringement and stealing is not just a symptom of the U.S. patent system, but *necessary* for further innovation in a field crowded with disparate technologies. But that's another story. And be prepared to be laughed out of court if you try to use that as a legal argument.
It was my understanding that filtering alcohol in this manner basically ruins the filter in just 1-2 passes. Is that what you were accounting for in your estimates of the cost of filtering vs. just going out and buying some slightly better stuff?
I need to send this file!
That's a great question. I can't really help you, because I'm a lawyer in America and not in Germany. Plus, it looks like everyone who has replied to your question has tried to forge some kind of bizarre, hackneyed connection between a property seizure in Germany, from Germans, by Germans, to what little they know about American jurisprudence (as if the U.S. Constitution has anything to do with this whatsoever). It's shameful that American xenophobia after 9/11 has grown to the extent that most can't even fathom that other countries might be governed by different laws. But hey, they're getting modded way up for it, so I guess now it's acceptable to post things that are way, way off-topic? The only thing I can think of is that David Hasselhoff is somehow involved. I have it on good authority that Germans love him, and as an American of German anscestry, he might very well provide the necessary causal link.
So anyways, you're really on your own here. What you need is input from someone in Germany who has more than a passing familiarity with German law. What won't help you are rants by Scalia or Breyer groupies, respectively, who have used your innocent question as pretext to drag out the same old tired arguments over how to interpret U.S. law.
So THAT's why I never got a reply! My self esteem was taking a pretty big hit there, what with my sending pictures of my erect penis to a complete stranger (which is a perfectly reasonable and intelligent thing to do, by the way), and then not getting back a reply. I'm just glad we live in a world where you can do such a thing with absolutely no repercussions, ever.
What is Mandrake's place these days? That's a tough question. It didn't used to be much of anything: Mandrake originally started as a file-by-file Red Hat clone that included KDE, back when Red Hat Linux in all it's RPM glory was the hottest thing on the block. Seriously. There were some misunderstandings with the old Qt licensing (that have since been resolved), and Red Hat made the logical choice of backing its own pony by putting Gnome in their distro instead. But there was a problem--people still liked their KDE. "Ah ha!" thought the Mandrake folks, and they included KDE. To sweeten the deal, the Mandrake people optimized their distro for modern CPU's.
;). The pendulum might swing the other way before we even realize it. I don't know if this latest release by Mandriva is enough to make that happen, but it looks like a great start.
That was ancient history. After that, Mandrake started to develop some really user friendly configuration tools to go along with their distro. The installer and UI were polished, the customer support was great, and all in all, Mandrake developed a great reputation as a good choice for new Linux users transitioning from Windows--the exact share of the market that Ubuntu now commands.
Then came the name change. Oh God, the name change. Whatever kind of goodwill and name recognition that Mandrake had developed in the Linux market was squandered in one fell swoop. I realize that sometimes a company has no choice with these things, but changing their name to something that sounds like a little-known part of the female anatomy was a poor business move.
"Mandriva" is still on the map, still doing what they've always been doing--making quality, user-friendly distros that people have now started to snub for whatever reason. But the important thing to remember is that the "hot" distro that everyone is using at the time changes every now and then, mostly based on the quality of their latest distro. The RPM-based distros had the most users for a while, and now the Debian-based folks are on a hot streak (somewhere, in a small, dark corner, the Slackware users are laughing their asses off
I saw the words "losing its cool" and "burst" in the post, and immediately thought that Apple had switched to Dell batteries in the iPods.
That's kind of mean, considering that the words "OSS Community" appear in the title of the post. The original poster has a good point.
There might be a better way of doing this, but the *old* way was to just use low level format software. The typical procedure is you
1. go to the hard drive manufacturer's website
2. download their "utilities" package
3. prepare a DOS-bootable floppy with the utilities on it
4. invoke the low-level format software (IMPORTANT: You want a LOW LEVEL format. Just typing "format" or something in DOS will not do the trick.)
This will work 100%. What it does is overwrite every byte on every sector to a blank ("00" I believe...). There's no file system footprint, no echo or memory of what was once on the drive. There is nothing to recover, because *everything* has been overwritten with a null value.
The downside? It takes a long time, especially if you're drive is well over the 100 gig variety. But it will get the job done. Cheers!
This will never get built. Let me explain: People near the Treasure Coast are retirees. And I don't mean in the "Oh, it's Florida...of COURSE there are retired people there" sense. I mean that many of its communities were planned and built specifically for bluehairs. Port St. Lucie, for example, is just such a community.
Now as impossible as it may seem, octogenarians are not really up on the newest technological advances. The moment you say the words "landfill trash" to these people, the NIMBY (not in my backyard) impulse will dominate, and granny and gramps will be making phone calls, changing zoning rules, voting down money, and generally just making Geoplasma's job as difficult as possible. They're retired. If you thought they didn't have the time or inclination to do these kinds of things, then you're mistaken.
I know it makes no logical sense to want to make use of modern garbage disposal technology, and yet not want it anywhere within a million miles of you, but trust me, that is the mentality. The article characterizes this as a county-wide effort. I bet not. I bet the people who are slated to have this trash burning marvel right next to them will soon be mad as hell in 3...2...1...
This is just what I'm talking about. I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but they're not even close to reality. I'll have to assume that you were referring to market conditions back when the Xbox was first released, as opposed to the state of things now (when it's relevant).
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I'm no expert on console market share, but I do know what comes up on the first page of a Google search. Here, I've done the work for you:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/05/26/news_6099
That article tells us that Xbox had a 51 percent market share as early as 2004. In the U.S., Xbox has been outselling PS2 ever since.
Nevertheless, I could cut you some slack if you don't live in the U.S. Even though Americans put more money into consoles than the rest of the world combined, the console market in other parts of the world is not so Microsoft-friendly. If you go by global figures (where Microsoft is still the new kid on the block), then the picture changes. Here's something I pulled up about Sony's current console market share. It was published today, so you won't need to use your time machine when learning about market share:
http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2006/sep/09game.ht
"Not worried about the headstart that Microsoft has gained in the next-gen gaming space, Jayant Sharma, chairman and CEO, Milestone Interactive, engaged in marketing of digital devices, interactive games and media, points out that in the console market in India Sony has a 100 per cent market share and 70 percent globally."
100 percent in India?? 70 percent globally! I think in all the confusion, we all assumed that only Americans buy console games? It seems that Sony is already the Microsoft of the console world. Perhaps they might actually know what they're doing when it comes to releasing consoles. Cheers.
You raise some great points about how Sony at least knew enough to sandwich together some pretty interesting hardware for their upcoming console, but how in the world can you claim that the PS3 is being "killed" when it hasn't even been released yet? Rather than engage in endless debates about who will be king of the mountain after the PS3 arrives, the thing to do here is to just wait until the PS3 is out and the dust settles.
./ ran almost nothing but anti-Microsoft stories, and a lot of that general enmity translated into some early Xbox-hating. Now, Sony is the new punching bag. Will we all make the same mistake again?
Trust me, there are plenty of ways to kill a console that don't involve unfounded PR moves and minor devkit problems. How about having *no* developers even making games for it? That was the case with the Sega Saturn, which I owned and loved. There was a time when it was the hottest thing on the block, too. But the Saturn soon turned into a kind of cautionary tale about how you really need to get some grassroots developer support before you even think about releasing a new machine. Sony has done that.
Will it be enough to topple Microsoft and Nintendo? Who can say?--I'm no fortune teller either. But what we shouldn't do is assume that because Sony has completely dropped the ball in other markets, that they will likewise fail in the console arena. Still skeptical? Look at Microsoft: Their operating systems range from mediocre to absolute garbage, their office suites are pretty nice, and their console systems are now wildly popular. If we had just considered Microsoft's past history with operating systems, could we have accurately predicted the success of the Xbox? It's doubtful. There was a time years back when
is to try to lose their virginity! ;-)
Yay for stereotypes!
It's a dark day when a man can't cut and paste a simple Roboquote off of some randomly googled fansite without fear of grammatical errors.
"Thank you, for you're cooperation."