No Triganic Pu? For shame /.

They just didn't want to deal in fiddling small change.

I've got some Flanian Pobble Beads here. If you also happen to have some Flanian Pobble Beads, we could probably work something out.

Given the current state of internet-focused writing, with the brutal drive to churn out as much clickbait 'content' as possible as fast as possible, with a side of SEO fuckery, I suspect that adding analytics capabilities to books will... perhaps not... be the most helpful development in literature.

ONE CLEVER TRICK TO SHOW HOW SHALL I LOVE THEE, NEW PARADIGM; LET ME COUNT THE 5 WAYS

1. I can think of no way in which this could possibly compromise the quality of the TITS literary experience.
2. Let us not forget that we are at the forefront BREASTS of a new publishing paradigm.
3. Electronic distribution promises to free BOOBS authors from the shackles of the traditional publishing industry.
4. It's an agile and disruptive way of making JUGS money through the process of creative destruction.

(below the jump)

5. The end.

It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.

The distance between paranoia and reality has narrowed considerably.

Where's +1 Sad when you need it?

Trust the Computer. Happiness is mandatory. You are happy, aren't you, Citizen?

You joke, but it's really incentive for future artists more than former. When they see people working a few years in their youth and then earning royalties into retirement, that's quite the incentive to get into music.

Just ask any musician. They'll tell you they got in it for the money.

Appropriate Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention link: We're Only In It for the Money

I'm just curious why sticking with XP would be desirable. I know that Vista/7/8 have higher system resource requirements, but is perhaps the driver being that it is easier to pirate a copy of XP?

The basis for my statement there is simply because I know that XP only asks for a product key and I don't recall in recent history the activation mechanism being particularly strict. Vista/7 seems to start disabling itself after a while without a properly activated key and 8 seems to want an email address to tie your license to (from the one time I played with it out of curiosity). I'm figuring the Vista/7/8 mechanism is just tighter?

er, that's why they are getting ISPs to block the routes to the sites, rather than taking the sites down.

They already forced ISPs to do it for child porn, then the courts enforced blocks on "pirate" sites because the child porn filters proved that it was technically possible, next step (previously announced, due to come in soon) they are forcing every UK ISP to implement porn (_legal_ porn) filters.

And now it's "block stuff that isn't porn/child-porn/illegal-under-copyright-law, but we don't like it anyway". No surprise.

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169254&cid=14107454

And the punchline is we're still surprised every time the ratchet turns tighter. Every. Fucking. Time.

I don't have any problem with 4K. It looks fantastic. And after I upgrade a camcorder or two to 4K, after the industry speaks on the delivery formats, etc. I will probably buy a 4K television. I upgraded from a 71" DLP to a 70" LCD/LED last Spring, with "passive" stereoscopic display (aka "3D"). It's a great TV... and this kind of illustrates why 4K might not win. After all, I'm one of the few customers who understands this (as are many here, I'm sure) and knows it's something I want and can use. Though I'd probably want 80-85" in my current media room. That'll fit just dandy, but the only 4K model I saw at 85" ran about $25,000.

As in many things, "good enough" is the enemy of excellent. It's been pretty well established that most consumers don't give a damn about better-then-CD quality audio. Both DVD-Audio and SACD failed to deliver anything but niche products and media. No, the format war didn't help. Blu-ray Audio could eventually do better, but mostly by not being anything fundamentally different than regular Blu-ray.. both earlier formats required new players to really deliver the promised improvements. And the simple fact was that most consumers didn't have good enough audio systems for CD. Meanwhile, the lower-than-CD-quality MP3 player took off like nothing else before.

Here's the problem with the TV industry... television had one major change from its introduction until HDTV... it went to color. That didn't force anyone to upgrade, though eventually folks did; tube TVs didn't last forever. And sure, there were tweaks to the technology, but regular consumers didn't know they now had active comb filters or whatever... SDTV was still just SDTV.

Then HDTV came along. Many didn't buy a first generation HDTV, but I did. A big, expensive, 3-CRT back projection model, $4K+ and 600lbs, analog inputs only. Of course, HDTV came along at the same time everyone realized the CRT was leaving us but not settled on the successor. Most of the early-adopter types upgraded from their analog HDTVs to all-digital HDTVs at more or less the same time the general population was upgrading. That's when I got my 71" DLP... it was the winner in a price-performance shootout with a Pioneer Plasma and a Sony LCOS display... your main choices for large screens in 2005-2006. So this second round did great things for the TV makers... rather than get upgrades as the old devices failed, they had people upgrading after 5-7 years. Pretty sweet.

So naturally, they sought to keep that momentum going. What could do that? Stereo! Or as they dubbed it, 3D. Blame "Avatar", maybe, but they model from Samsung one year after my DLP came with a 3D sync output, the idea being support of 3D games, much as folks like nVidia were already playing around with on PCs. Why? That output cost them all of $0.50 to implement (eg, routing a known signal to the outside world, and that price is assuming a buffer). Mature 3DTV was nearly as cheap. The active systems added virtually no cost to the display, some LED or Bluetooth circuit for frame sync, rather than the RCA jack, but not substantial, under $2.00. The glasses were certainly more, but they're getting $100 retail for replacements, and at one point got substantially more for the television. The passive system needs an accurately registered alternate-line circular polarizer, but that's just replacing the usual LCD polarizer, so maybe a little more expensive, but not even an extra part. And the glasses are much the same as the "throw away" RealD glasses you get at the movies... essentially, they're sunglasses. These all commanded a higher profit margin in a very competitive industry (Samsung's sales in CE is about half of their sales in Mobile; the profits in CE are tiny compared to Mobile, and Samsung's the world's largest TV maker). For awhile.. today, the price is settled where CE prices always settle... cheap. 3D is just another expected feature on higher-end TVs, just as Blu-ray has become an expected feature of any DVD player over $50.

So now everyone who might even consider 4K has a fairly newish HDTV they're fairly happy with. There is a Blu-ray committee working on a possible Profile for 4K on Blu-ray, but no news yet. There's HDMI 2.0, what you need for non-insane 4K connections (the current 4K televisions use 2 to 4 individual HDMI connections for 4K input). There's HEVC and BD-XL, in place, depending on which place they'd like to put 4K... or the proprietary eyeIO CODEC, which is claimed to be pretty good for 4K at today's Blu-ray rates, if HEVC can't cut it. So, all the piece in place... for a real introduction, maybe, in 4-6 years. There's an ATSC 3.0 committee planning to consider 4K broadcast... for rollout next decade. Some streaming outlets Netflix claim they'll do 4K, but Netflix is claiming 15Mb/s, and even a sustained 15Mb/s will require many if not most broadband users to upgrade to a faster system without monthly data caps.

4K itself may not be doomed, but this jump to 4K today is more premature than the jump to analog HDTV was in the late 1990s. Maybe it merges with the mainstream enough to ensure every higher-end TV is a 4K TV at some point... PC users could push this, given that TV and computer panels are essentially the same thing. But it might also just flop. There's only so much consumer tolerance for such compressed upgrade cycles... even this time, I'm sticking it out for all the standards to be in place before I jump. Except maybe on that camera. 4K shooting would be useful even for 2K delivery.

The third annual Kong Off will run this Friday through Monday.

Lots of places to play even if you're not competing.

Denver, CO: The 1-Up (official Kong-off location)
New Hampshire: Funspot
Portland, OR: Ground Kontrol
Vegas: Pinball Hall of Fame (might not have Donkey Kong, but it sure is fun.)
SF Bay Area: Pacific Pinball and High Scores, and many more smaller spots.

Who's missing from this list? Where's your town's reboot of the vintage arcade?

Not so pointless. Yes, you do need a large TV for 4K to be worthwhile. My current HDTV is 70", I'd benefit from an 85" 4K television in the same media room. But most people by 32-40" televisions... the format could certainly suffer the way high definition audio did, just not enough people interested to hit consumer saturation.

Steaming, or at least net-based downloading is certainly possible today. Red's Red-ray player is using some new CODEC (possibly eyeIOs or something home grown) at only 20 Mb/s. Sony's doing something similar with their HDD-based player. Netflix (certainly not a leader on picture quality) claims they're good with 4K at 15Mb/s. ISPs may render these problematic with monthly download caps, but the technology is certainly there. Yes, it'll look even better on disc. Disc looks better for HD than streaming, broadcast, or cable/satellite. That didn't make non-disc formats pointless.

I know that this isn't quite the same as what Citrix does with its Xen Desktop and Receiver bits, but for those who do remote access to work with a Citrix product and do this with a Mac, I'm a bit frustrated that the Mac client is always a step behind.

Specifically, the Windows client now has USB routing and HDX features and this seems to be absent from their Mac client offerings. With a lot of organizations using IP conferencing (read: Lync), this is becoming a bit of a problem.

I remember that. For whatever reason 3d0g would get me out of it. I was just a kid and had no idea what to do with the gibberish that the assembler would spit out at me. I just knew how to get out and back to my prompt.

CALL -151: Think "65536-151" - jump to $FF69, which was the monitor ROM entry point.

3D0G: 0x3D0, "Go": Run the code that DOS put at location $03D0. I believe it was a 4C BF 9D, as in, JMP $9DBF, which was the DOS 3.3 entry point/warm start routine.

Damn, I'm old. After a long and convoluted ride through the IT world, I got to retire early because I spent my early teenage years messing around with that sort of thing. It was pure luck that I got my hands on the right machine at the right time, developed a love of computing at a time when home computers were regarded as nothing more than means to store recipes (mom), do taxes (dad), or play games (kids).

Anyways. Thanks, Apple guyz, for putting a disassembler into ROM. It's only been in the past few years that I realized just how much of an impact that comparatively minor technical decision had on my life.

In my pre-caffienated state this morning and frankly not paying much attention to who is going to take over Microsoft, I couldn't help but to think Gill Bates when seeing that name.

If the guy is a suitable candidate to run the firm, it would almost be too perfect :-)

The Macintosh II line (and by this I assume we're talking II / IIfx-type, not the smaller ones like the IIci) were tanks. While I won't really argue that the iMac line is necessarily good or bad quality (the 2005 iMac G5 a family member owns seems pretty good when I opened it for a RAM upgrade), the Mac Pro line (especially the aluminum ones; G5->Intel) seem very solid and well engineered.