I think you are being unduly harsh on the microwave oven. Not only are they inexpensive, they are also very good at heating water FAST and with surprising efficiency. If you don't want to use one or you don't like to use them, that's fine with me, but don't assume the appliance is useless. In fact one of the greatest things that you can do with a microwave oven is to combine it with a traditional oven or convection oven to reduce cooking time and save energy without having to sacrifice anything about the end product. I also don't know where I'd be if I couldn't defrost things with a microwave. Somehow it just seems "better" in many ways to me do defrost a steak in the microwave for 5 minutes than have to leave it sitting out on the counter for 12 hours...
Yes but XP Pro can only export the entire desktop via RDP; not individual applications. And I'm not sure that any RDP client that MS produces can display in a rootless mode either. The functionality is there internally in Windows Server 2003 and is used by Citrix MetaFrame to do application sharing like the post I originally replied to described. You can double click an icon and a window (or however many windows the program opens) will come up on your desktop and behave like the application is running locally.. IE when you minimize the window it goes to your own taskbar, etc. It remains to be seen whether or not the common RDP server code shared across all versions of windows would support this or not -- somehow I doubt it would.
This could easily be done in theory using a rootless RDP client. The server side capability is built into Windows Server 2003, so MS would probalby have to make it available for lower-end versions of windows (if it's not actually already there).
I don't think it's right to suggest that Apple should give away the.mac service for free -- after all it does cost them money. Bundling a year or more of subscription time into the cost of new machines is ridiculous too -- you only need one.mac account if you have 3 computers, plus what about the people that don't want it? You can't have a product that you force-sell to people (even those who don't want it) and expect them to be content with it. Other bundled software like iLife is different because there is not a huge unit cost for apple associated with bundling it as there would be with.mac.
However, they should SET.mac free by selling the server side as an installable package for OS X server (and other typical server platforms too).. I mean.mac backup is nice, but what if I have 100GB of data to back up?, what if I have 2GB of email? What if I don't care anything about having a.mac email address and just want to continue to use the one I have had for years? Sell me the server software and I'll buy it. I probably wont be buying.mac.
At least give me the option to turn.mac off.. Every time I go to the connect menu or use iSync I'm reminded in a not so subtle manner how nice this computer works with a service I don't want. If Microsoft tried that they'd be raked over the coals.
The Do-Not-Call list and the Junk Fax laws could be considered a mild success. At least they resulted in a noticeable reduction of junk getting through to me.
The CAN-SPAM debacle, however, has done absolutely nothing. I still get over TWO THOUSAND spam messages per day to my mail account. The FTC can jump in and "regulate" all it wants but it won't get anywhere because unlike with Do-Not-Call it can't govern foreign communications in the same way. There is no reason to waste time and money on this.
Well I wasnt talking about necessarily building a big spinning ring inside the space shuttle.. just a compartment big enough for one person to sit in and experience 1G. You only need to lift the counterweight of one person or maybe less depending on how big you can really get it. The gravity difference between your feet and head would indeed be large enough to make it non-feasable but it still might work.
As far as the counterweight/ouside the shuttle idea.. Again I was not talking about faking gravity aboard the whole shuttle.. Just build a little pod and a counterweight for it that you can deploy out of the cargo bay and then spin them both around the shuttle at a distance... You would need some sort of bearing that goes around the outside of the shuttle. In any case you would probably need an equal setup spinning the other direction or else you are not going to be able to properly accelerate the contraption without just spinning the shuttle itself.
Now, where exactly would they find something of sufficent mass and density to simulate 1G on something the size of the space shuttle? They wouldn't, and actually be able to move it.:)
1G is a measure of acceleration. It is trivial to simulate 1G. Ever heard of a centrifuge? You need only lift a counterweight (which doesn't even be the same mass as the end with your fake 'gravity'), and you could probably even build a small one within the confines of the shuttle or build a pod of some sort that rings around outside the shuttle. (You would need two, actually, but that is beside the point.)
It is not, as you probably meant, likely that we could achieve 1G of gravitational force without at least putting someone down on an object with roughly the same mass as the earth (the necessary mass would depend on the size and density distribution of course).
I think you are underestimating Bluetooth because you don't have any experience with it. Perhaps if you did actually own a device you could pull it out when you are out somewhere in public, do a device discovery, and see that Bluetooth is not so uncommon as you might think. Tens of millions of cell phones have bluetooth radios, as does almost every modern PDA. Almost all laptops at least offer it as an option if it doesn't come standard. Heck, most automakers offer bluetooth options in their cars. Many inventory systems use bluetooth connected scanners.
Coupled with its increasing ubiquity, it's also important in that it standardizes communication between devices. IE your bluetooth headset is going to work with your future bluetooth cell phones -- you don't have to worry so much about upgrading all of your accessories when you upgrade your phone / computer / headphones / whatever. Also contrary to your assertion, bluetooth use is not falling off. I'm not sure what you mean by "Still used in some situations," but at last count they just added some new profiles (ie new situations) in the 1.2 revision such as high quality stereo audio (A2DP) and EDR to triple the data rate (Internet access via 3G phones and the like)..
I have bought from them; they are indeed as good as everyone says. I know plenty of pros that purchase a heck of a lot of stuff through them too -- when you are buying a $9,000 camera, the sales tax savings alone are enough to send you looking online, and it's B&H that gets their business most of the time. B&H gets stock of new products on time, the stock shown on their website is accurate, and they wont call you about your sale unless there really is a problem.
Congrats on your grey market camera with no warranty (despite any claim to the contrary by either the seller or literature in the box). It's also not unlikely that you were shorted on the accessories, too such as getting a non-canon battery or a smaller capacity battery than the S70 normally comes with, no bundled software on the cd, no flash card (the real US retail boxed version comes with a memory card), maybe no strap, no usb cable -- that kind of thing is typical, but people generally don't notice.
But one thing is for sure, you got an S70; it's probably new and it takes pictures as well as any other S70, so if you are happy saving a few bucks, I guess you're happy. If you don't believe me about the grey market deal, call Canon's customer service and try to verify your product warranty. Hope that puppy doesn't break on you (but it probably won't.. it's a decent camera)!
Anyway, it's uninformed customers like you who contribute greatly to this problem here. Even the store in the article probably made more than a handful of people extremely happy with their low prices. It's fine if you want to buy stuff like this, but to just pass it off as the greatest deal in the world without stopping to inform people of WHY the prices are so low.
If you want to buy camera equipment online, there really are some good vendors with competitive pricing. B&H Photo and Video is top notch and they will do a lot of things to help you save money such as giving you the option to buy third-party warranties instead of manufacturer's warranties (which can be both less expensive and longer term), etc.
There is a fairly simple solution to this ridiculousness. Simply err on the side of caution and start rating as many games as possible AO. Heck, re-rate the existing games AO. All of them. Retailers say they won't stock it, but when 90% or more of the titles are suddenly rated AO, I'd bet they would have a change of heart.
This has the side effect of course that it effecitvely eliminates any value the ratings system might have ever had, but hey if everything is rated AO the responsibility is back on the parents again and neither the stores nor the ESRB have trouble defending themselves against the lawsuits when some fool commits infantcide after playing Muppet Babies Rape and Pillage III. After all, it was rated AO in the first place!
Errr... Wrong about what? I never said these wouldn't save money even considering the cost of upgrading the electric service. However, there are plenty of units that do ~3gpm that take a heck of a lot more than 80A 240V. And there are a lot of homes that don't have 150A service either, particularly in places where most appliances use gas (I have 100A service for instance.) If gas prices stay this high, I am going to seriously consider an on-demand electric heater, but it's going to cost me a heck of a lot more than it cost you. Even if I do all the plumbing and whatnot, there's no way that I am fooling with rewiring my main breakers.
This reeks of some marketing crap. There are plenty of on-demand electric heaters with very high flow rates. Yes they require massive amounts of electricity, but I don't know that a microwave based unit would require that much less. Since they don't quote any power rates or even seem to acknowledge their competition's existing and time tested products it leads me to believe that this is a bunch of marketing hoopla to drum up business for their products.
If you want to heat 2-3 gallons of water per minute from say 50F to 130F using electricity you need a SERIOUS load. These on demand electric heaters often require 100 or 200 amp breakers BY THEMSELVES which most often means that in order to use them you have to upgrade your home's entire main breaker panel AND you may have to pay the utility company to give you this type of service as they typically do not have not installed equipment and lines capable of providing this amount of power to a home.
I do se a bit of an advantage in that it's possible that an on demand microwave heater, although ideally less efficient than ceramic/resistance based heaters, could provide both a size and a maintenance advantage over a conventional heater.
On-demand water heaters have been around a very long time and it seems in the last year or two they have come back in vogue again. They work OK. They can save you money. But most people can also save money with a much less substantial outlay by upgrading their old water heater to a newer model that is better insulated and more thermal efficient. There are even dual gas/electric heaters that let you change fuels to suit whatever is currently cheaper. In many areas such as the one I live in electricity is much less expensive in the winter than in the summer and gas is the opposite.
WTF are you even talking about? The camera captures a 4D light field. I would imagine that the image data is absolutely immense which is why the resolution of the prototype is so small. If you need to generate a 3MP 2D result you'd be capturing something on the order of 25 terabytes of raw data according to some simple back of the napkin calculations. It has no comparison to JPG or any other image format, though I suspect that if this technique wants to becomes commonplace in consumer cameras someone will develop a lossy compression format that severely reduces the storage requirments. The data, after all, ought to be highly suited to compression.
If you think about how this type of camera records an image you will see that depth of field is actually just a byproduct of the current photographic process and f-stop is a method of controlling that byproduct. So in answer to your question, yes, you can adjust depth of field in post processing by changing the focus curves.
I agree with this sentiment. I am absolutely freaking sick of waiting for the ability to buy or watch anything on demand in HD. In my mind there is absolutely no excuse for not being able to buy the latest movie releases in HD from SOMEWHRE. The problem with DRM is not necessarily that studios want to protect their content but that they can't agree on an implementation long enough to start any kind of product development. So the consumers have to sit on their haunches for 5 years staring at their giant $5000 TV's before they can buy anything to watch on them. That is 5 years of sales down the toilet. How come nobody in the movie industry is recognizing this?
At some point, someone's got to realize that no matter how secure a scheme is, someone is going to have a way to circumvent it and all it takes is that one person to create an unencumbered copy. It's useless to seek the holy grail of perfect unbreakable DRM -- in part that is what the ridiculous and evil DMCA was designed to prevent -- it doesnt matter what level of protection you stack on top of something, it still makes it illegal to circumvent it. Just encrypt HD movies with a XOR algorithm or something and start selling it already!
I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that if someone came along and started offering $1-3 downloadable HD "rentals" that would play for up to 24 hours, I'd buy the hell out of them, DRM or not -- so long as I could easily play them on my equipment without having to fork over another metric ton of paper money. Of course if I were going to buy something to really "own" it I'd much prefer no DRM to the extent that I would very much consider not purchasing it. For example, I did not really start buying DVD's until CSS was broken.
I think it'd be vitally important for the Walk of Game people to put the early pioneers of the industry down lest the current generation of people voting on who goes down forget about them.
How about let's see some Pac Man and PONG and Eugene Jarvis on the voting list next time, huh?
It's not slashdot per se but they do tend to pick up on a lot of these news stories that aren't really news to anyone that actually works with things like this on a daily basis but suddenly get a lot of public hype because of how the media picks up stories like this. In this particular case, the scheme would fit in very well to a CSI plot. Really I think CSI writiers tend to pick up on the hype more than anything. CSI Miami centered an entire episode around the fictitious fad of 'Toothing'. By the time it got through writing and production but before the episode aired it had all been debunked as a hoax to artificially create a bunch of hype around a fake fad -- not only was the fad itself fake, but the mechanism by which it was supposed to work was not even possible.
A lot of pay-for-content sites like NYT and others automatically grant the google crawler special exemptions to index content that is normally accessible to the general (non-paying) public but disable the cache via the mechanisms Google has provided. Sometimes you can get to restricted content on websites simply by impersonating the Googlebot UA. I personally believe that this is an abuse of Google's web search mechanism, but really the authors are making the same argument (but on the other side of the fence this time). Pot; kettle; black and whatnot.
I will see your print design and audio engineering workforce and raise you video producers, web developers, software engineers, nearly the entire biomedical research industry, HPC engineers, and all mac system administrators or users who have ever had to use or manage an XServe or a mac network in recent years. Why do you think that Apple bothers to ship both X11 (Yes we know it's a GUI), XCode and all these other commandline tools standard if there exists no userbase for them? My powerbook has Terminal.app going 100% of the time and it seems that among the mac users that I affiliate with it's quite normal.
It's also worth noting that although I fail to see the point of your list of productive, worthwhile applications with a GUI (Holy cow! I'm using a GUI even NOW!!!), the only mac-only app you listed is Logic, not that it even really matters. "The right tool for the job!"
20 years ago he would (and probably did) have the same thing to say about Mac vs DOS. How many of today's windows users, journalists included, do you think could effectively deal with using DOS?
I might even go so far as to suggest that most people who use macs -- and I mean acutally USE them to do real work -- spend more time in their Terminal window than a windows user of the same caliber. Is it because of a failing of the "simplistic" UI that doesnt bother the user with 1000 options that will be used by almost nobody or is it because Windows lacks both the tools and organizational structure to actually manage anything on the commandline?
How can geeks be so smart and know nothing about tax law?
Just because a donation is made in his name doesn't mean that he made it. To take a deduction on a charitable gift you actually have to document that you gave a charitable organization some of your money or goods of a certain value and they received it from you. In this case, PA (depending on how the company is actually structured and where the money actually came from) will probably get to take a deduction.
The only case where a pure cash donation to charity can really be advantageous to your bottom line is if you are teetering on the edge and the deduction will drop your AGI into a lower bracket. You may also be able to help yourself if you can figure the donation in as an adjustment instead of a deduction (but this is not an easy set of rules to meet). You can also sometimes receive beneficial tax credits that when you donate in specific ways or to specific organizations such as with tsunami relief in 2004.
A handy deduction tip: Give your old stuff away to charity instead of having a garage sale. If you are already itemizing your deductions anyway (most homeowners are in this boat) the tax savings from the deduction at a reasonable declared value will bring you more than taking pennies on the dollar from spendthrifts at your sale. Plus, you dont have to pay taxes on the income from the garage sale (since there is no income).
I block ads to save the space on the screen. Unlike a lot of users I don't like to run my screen at eye bendingly low resolutions. I use 19" flat panels at 1280x1024 and typically browse the web on the same but in portrait mode. You would be suprised how many sites will not even fit in 1024 pixels of width any more! You'd also be suprised how much vertical space is wasted at the top of most websites. Add an extra inch or so for a giant ad banner and you always have to do some serious scrolling. Also consider the format that many sites are in now.. two or three column indices with content interspersed with ads.. I don't want to read through fifteen blocks of google ads to get to the bottom of a page! Furthermore, you can't print a page without gobbling up about 50% too much paper from printing all the ads. It's stupid. Browsing "regular" web pages on a handheld or a phone? It's impossible due to ads. Browsing on dialup or GPRS? You can't even do it without blocking ads!
I also block them because I'm not going to click them anyway. Although I can't say that I'm immune to 'mindshare' that ads have built in me over the course of a billion repeated exposures (ie word association -- you say wireless camera; I will say "X-10 and don't ever buy one"), I can say that I have never clicked on a web ad and purchased something. I might as well save everyone the bandwidth and the bother of showing me something that won't result in a sale.
I am also happy to say that I work for a company with a very successful website that has a very stringent no-advertisements policy. Sometimes it's hard to refuse that money, but our users really appreciate it and if nothing else it's proof that a website does not necessarily have to resort to advertising to rake in the dough.
Magazines? I have a thin metal straightedge that I use to completely tear out any page that is a full page ad front and back or part of an advertorial before I read the magazine. De-ad'ing a typical monthly magazine takes about 30 seconds and saves a heck of a lot more time than that when you sit down to read the thing.
Re:IP will give these no advantage at all.
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I don't know quite how much time difference you can have before you start having phase issues. I'm guessing that you have to be somewhat closer than twice the sample rate for it to really become a problem.. So 1/88,000th second. NTP has the capability to achieve this syncronocity over time, but somehow I doubt that the internal clocks in the devices have small enough drift to acutally ever quite 'get there'
Still, there are a couple of common clocks that we have not considered as possible sync sources:
1) Ethernet physical framing (Both speakers in the same room probably run off of the same switch) 2) AC power (This will be either in sync through the whole house or the two waves will be perfectly phase coupled enough to have a constant time delta)
I suspect that using one or both of these sources along with NTP you could sync speakers well enough to remove phase errors but I really have no idea how complicated the engineering required to do it would be. It does sound like a fun problem. Whether or not they have acutally done this with the product we are discussing is not really known. It would stand to reason that if they spent enough time figuring out it would appear on their marketing materials as it would be quite a feat.
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I think you are being unduly harsh on the microwave oven. Not only are they inexpensive, they are also very good at heating water FAST and with surprising efficiency. If you don't want to use one or you don't like to use them, that's fine with me, but don't assume the appliance is useless. In fact one of the greatest things that you can do with a microwave oven is to combine it with a traditional oven or convection oven to reduce cooking time and save energy without having to sacrifice anything about the end product. I also don't know where I'd be if I couldn't defrost things with a microwave. Somehow it just seems "better" in many ways to me do defrost a steak in the microwave for 5 minutes than have to leave it sitting out on the counter for 12 hours...
Yes but XP Pro can only export the entire desktop via RDP; not individual applications. And I'm not sure that any RDP client that MS produces can display in a rootless mode either. The functionality is there internally in Windows Server 2003 and is used by Citrix MetaFrame to do application sharing like the post I originally replied to described. You can double click an icon and a window (or however many windows the program opens) will come up on your desktop and behave like the application is running locally .. IE when you minimize the window it goes to your own taskbar, etc. It remains to be seen whether or not the common RDP server code shared across all versions of windows would support this or not -- somehow I doubt it would.
This could easily be done in theory using a rootless RDP client. The server side capability is built into Windows Server 2003, so MS would probalby have to make it available for lower-end versions of windows (if it's not actually already there).
I don't think it's right to suggest that Apple should give away the .mac service for free -- after all it does cost them money. Bundling a year or more of subscription time into the cost of new machines is ridiculous too -- you only need one .mac account if you have 3 computers, plus what about the people that don't want it? You can't have a product that you force-sell to people (even those who don't want it) and expect them to be content with it. Other bundled software like iLife is different because there is not a huge unit cost for apple associated with bundling it as there would be with .mac.
.mac free by selling the server side as an installable package for OS X server (and other typical server platforms too) .. I mean .mac backup is nice, but what if I have 100GB of data to back up?, what if I have 2GB of email? What if I don't care anything about having a .mac email address and just want to continue to use the one I have had for years? Sell me the server software and I'll buy it. I probably wont be buying .mac.
.mac off.. Every time I go to the connect menu or use iSync I'm reminded in a not so subtle manner how nice this computer works with a service I don't want. If Microsoft tried that they'd be raked over the coals.
However, they should SET
At least give me the option to turn
This is pretty much BS.
The Do-Not-Call list and the Junk Fax laws could be considered a mild success. At least they resulted in a noticeable reduction of junk getting through to me.
The CAN-SPAM debacle, however, has done absolutely nothing. I still get over TWO THOUSAND spam messages per day to my mail account. The FTC can jump in and "regulate" all it wants but it won't get anywhere because unlike with Do-Not-Call it can't govern foreign communications in the same way. There is no reason to waste time and money on this.
Well I wasnt talking about necessarily building a big spinning ring inside the space shuttle.. just a compartment big enough for one person to sit in and experience 1G. You only need to lift the counterweight of one person or maybe less depending on how big you can really get it. The gravity difference between your feet and head would indeed be large enough to make it non-feasable but it still might work.
As far as the counterweight/ouside the shuttle idea.. Again I was not talking about faking gravity aboard the whole shuttle.. Just build a little pod and a counterweight for it that you can deploy out of the cargo bay and then spin them both around the shuttle at a distance... You would need some sort of bearing that goes around the outside of the shuttle. In any case you would probably need an equal setup spinning the other direction or else you are not going to be able to properly accelerate the contraption without just spinning the shuttle itself.
Now, where exactly would they find something of sufficent mass and density to simulate 1G on something the size of the space shuttle? They wouldn't, and actually be able to move it. :)
1G is a measure of acceleration. It is trivial to simulate 1G. Ever heard of a centrifuge? You need only lift a counterweight (which doesn't even be the same mass as the end with your fake 'gravity'), and you could probably even build a small one within the confines of the shuttle or build a pod of some sort that rings around outside the shuttle. (You would need two, actually, but that is beside the point.)
It is not, as you probably meant, likely that we could achieve 1G of gravitational force without at least putting someone down on an object with roughly the same mass as the earth (the necessary mass would depend on the size and density distribution of course).
I think you are underestimating Bluetooth because you don't have any experience with it. Perhaps if you did actually own a device you could pull it out when you are out somewhere in public, do a device discovery, and see that Bluetooth is not so uncommon as you might think. Tens of millions of cell phones have bluetooth radios, as does almost every modern PDA. Almost all laptops at least offer it as an option if it doesn't come standard. Heck, most automakers offer bluetooth options in their cars. Many inventory systems use bluetooth connected scanners.
Coupled with its increasing ubiquity, it's also important in that it standardizes communication between devices. IE your bluetooth headset is going to work with your future bluetooth cell phones -- you don't have to worry so much about upgrading all of your accessories when you upgrade your phone / computer / headphones / whatever. Also contrary to your assertion, bluetooth use is not falling off. I'm not sure what you mean by "Still used in some situations," but at last count they just added some new profiles (ie new situations) in the 1.2 revision such as high quality stereo audio (A2DP) and EDR to triple the data rate (Internet access via 3G phones and the like)..
I have bought from them; they are indeed as good as everyone says. I know plenty of pros that purchase a heck of a lot of stuff through them too -- when you are buying a $9,000 camera, the sales tax savings alone are enough to send you looking online, and it's B&H that gets their business most of the time. B&H gets stock of new products on time, the stock shown on their website is accurate, and they wont call you about your sale unless there really is a problem.
Congrats on your grey market camera with no warranty (despite any claim to the contrary by either the seller or literature in the box). It's also not unlikely that you were shorted on the accessories, too such as getting a non-canon battery or a smaller capacity battery than the S70 normally comes with, no bundled software on the cd, no flash card (the real US retail boxed version comes with a memory card), maybe no strap, no usb cable -- that kind of thing is typical, but people generally don't notice.
But one thing is for sure, you got an S70; it's probably new and it takes pictures as well as any other S70, so if you are happy saving a few bucks, I guess you're happy. If you don't believe me about the grey market deal, call Canon's customer service and try to verify your product warranty. Hope that puppy doesn't break on you (but it probably won't.. it's a decent camera)!
Anyway, it's uninformed customers like you who contribute greatly to this problem here. Even the store in the article probably made more than a handful of people extremely happy with their low prices. It's fine if you want to buy stuff like this, but to just pass it off as the greatest deal in the world without stopping to inform people of WHY the prices are so low.
If you want to buy camera equipment online, there really are some good vendors with competitive pricing. B&H Photo and Video is top notch and they will do a lot of things to help you save money such as giving you the option to buy third-party warranties instead of manufacturer's warranties (which can be both less expensive and longer term), etc.
There is a fairly simple solution to this ridiculousness. Simply err on the side of caution and start rating as many games as possible AO. Heck, re-rate the existing games AO. All of them. Retailers say they won't stock it, but when 90% or more of the titles are suddenly rated AO, I'd bet they would have a change of heart.
This has the side effect of course that it effecitvely eliminates any value the ratings system might have ever had, but hey if everything is rated AO the responsibility is back on the parents again and neither the stores nor the ESRB have trouble defending themselves against the lawsuits when some fool commits infantcide after playing Muppet Babies Rape and Pillage III. After all, it was rated AO in the first place!
Errr... Wrong about what? I never said these wouldn't save money even considering the cost of upgrading the electric service. However, there are plenty of units that do ~3gpm that take a heck of a lot more than 80A 240V. And there are a lot of homes that don't have 150A service either, particularly in places where most appliances use gas (I have 100A service for instance.) If gas prices stay this high, I am going to seriously consider an on-demand electric heater, but it's going to cost me a heck of a lot more than it cost you. Even if I do all the plumbing and whatnot, there's no way that I am fooling with rewiring my main breakers.
This reeks of some marketing crap. There are plenty of on-demand electric heaters with very high flow rates. Yes they require massive amounts of electricity, but I don't know that a microwave based unit would require that much less. Since they don't quote any power rates or even seem to acknowledge their competition's existing and time tested products it leads me to believe that this is a bunch of marketing hoopla to drum up business for their products.
If you want to heat 2-3 gallons of water per minute from say 50F to 130F using electricity you need a SERIOUS load. These on demand electric heaters often require 100 or 200 amp breakers BY THEMSELVES which most often means that in order to use them you have to upgrade your home's entire main breaker panel AND you may have to pay the utility company to give you this type of service as they typically do not have not installed equipment and lines capable of providing this amount of power to a home.
I do se a bit of an advantage in that it's possible that an on demand microwave heater, although ideally less efficient than ceramic/resistance based heaters, could provide both a size and a maintenance advantage over a conventional heater.
On-demand water heaters have been around a very long time and it seems in the last year or two they have come back in vogue again. They work OK. They can save you money. But most people can also save money with a much less substantial outlay by upgrading their old water heater to a newer model that is better insulated and more thermal efficient. There are even dual gas/electric heaters that let you change fuels to suit whatever is currently cheaper. In many areas such as the one I live in electricity is much less expensive in the winter than in the summer and gas is the opposite.
WTF are you even talking about? The camera captures a 4D light field. I would imagine that the image data is absolutely immense which is why the resolution of the prototype is so small. If you need to generate a 3MP 2D result you'd be capturing something on the order of 25 terabytes of raw data according to some simple back of the napkin calculations. It has no comparison to JPG or any other image format, though I suspect that if this technique wants to becomes commonplace in consumer cameras someone will develop a lossy compression format that severely reduces the storage requirments. The data, after all, ought to be highly suited to compression.
If you think about how this type of camera records an image you will see that depth of field is actually just a byproduct of the current photographic process and f-stop is a method of controlling that byproduct. So in answer to your question, yes, you can adjust depth of field in post processing by changing the focus curves.
I agree with this sentiment. I am absolutely freaking sick of waiting for the ability to buy or watch anything on demand in HD. In my mind there is absolutely no excuse for not being able to buy the latest movie releases in HD from SOMEWHRE. The problem with DRM is not necessarily that studios want to protect their content but that they can't agree on an implementation long enough to start any kind of product development. So the consumers have to sit on their haunches for 5 years staring at their giant $5000 TV's before they can buy anything to watch on them. That is 5 years of sales down the toilet. How come nobody in the movie industry is recognizing this?
At some point, someone's got to realize that no matter how secure a scheme is, someone is going to have a way to circumvent it and all it takes is that one person to create an unencumbered copy. It's useless to seek the holy grail of perfect unbreakable DRM -- in part that is what the ridiculous and evil DMCA was designed to prevent -- it doesnt matter what level of protection you stack on top of something, it still makes it illegal to circumvent it. Just encrypt HD movies with a XOR algorithm or something and start selling it already!
I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that if someone came along and started offering $1-3 downloadable HD "rentals" that would play for up to 24 hours, I'd buy the hell out of them, DRM or not -- so long as I could easily play them on my equipment without having to fork over another metric ton of paper money. Of course if I were going to buy something to really "own" it I'd much prefer no DRM to the extent that I would very much consider not purchasing it. For example, I did not really start buying DVD's until CSS was broken.
I think it'd be vitally important for the Walk of Game people to put the early pioneers of the industry down lest the current generation of people voting on who goes down forget about them.
How about let's see some Pac Man and PONG and Eugene Jarvis on the voting list next time, huh?
It's not slashdot per se but they do tend to pick up on a lot of these news stories that aren't really news to anyone that actually works with things like this on a daily basis but suddenly get a lot of public hype because of how the media picks up stories like this. In this particular case, the scheme would fit in very well to a CSI plot. Really I think CSI writiers tend to pick up on the hype more than anything. CSI Miami centered an entire episode around the fictitious fad of 'Toothing'. By the time it got through writing and production but before the episode aired it had all been debunked as a hoax to artificially create a bunch of hype around a fake fad -- not only was the fad itself fake, but the mechanism by which it was supposed to work was not even possible.
I've got 20 bucks we see this on a CSI episode within a year.
A lot of pay-for-content sites like NYT and others automatically grant the google crawler special exemptions to index content that is normally accessible to the general (non-paying) public but disable the cache via the mechanisms Google has provided. Sometimes you can get to restricted content on websites simply by impersonating the Googlebot UA. I personally believe that this is an abuse of Google's web search mechanism, but really the authors are making the same argument (but on the other side of the fence this time). Pot; kettle; black and whatnot.
I will see your print design and audio engineering workforce and raise you video producers, web developers, software engineers, nearly the entire biomedical research industry, HPC engineers, and all mac system administrators or users who have ever had to use or manage an XServe or a mac network in recent years. Why do you think that Apple bothers to ship both X11 (Yes we know it's a GUI), XCode and all these other commandline tools standard if there exists no userbase for them? My powerbook has Terminal.app going 100% of the time and it seems that among the mac users that I affiliate with it's quite normal.
It's also worth noting that although I fail to see the point of your list of productive, worthwhile applications with a GUI (Holy cow! I'm using a GUI even NOW!!!), the only mac-only app you listed is Logic, not that it even really matters. "The right tool for the job!"
20 years ago he would (and probably did) have the same thing to say about Mac vs DOS. How many of today's windows users, journalists included, do you think could effectively deal with using DOS?
I might even go so far as to suggest that most people who use macs -- and I mean acutally USE them to do real work -- spend more time in their Terminal window than a windows user of the same caliber. Is it because of a failing of the "simplistic" UI that doesnt bother the user with 1000 options that will be used by almost nobody or is it because Windows lacks both the tools and organizational structure to actually manage anything on the commandline?
How can geeks be so smart and know nothing about tax law?
Just because a donation is made in his name doesn't mean that he made it. To take a deduction on a charitable gift you actually have to document that you gave a charitable organization some of your money or goods of a certain value and they received it from you. In this case, PA (depending on how the company is actually structured and where the money actually came from) will probably get to take a deduction.
The only case where a pure cash donation to charity can really be advantageous to your bottom line is if you are teetering on the edge and the deduction will drop your AGI into a lower bracket. You may also be able to help yourself if you can figure the donation in as an adjustment instead of a deduction (but this is not an easy set of rules to meet). You can also sometimes receive beneficial tax credits that when you donate in specific ways or to specific organizations such as with tsunami relief in 2004.
A handy deduction tip: Give your old stuff away to charity instead of having a garage sale. If you are already itemizing your deductions anyway (most homeowners are in this boat) the tax savings from the deduction at a reasonable declared value will bring you more than taking pennies on the dollar from spendthrifts at your sale. Plus, you dont have to pay taxes on the income from the garage sale (since there is no income).
I block ads to save the space on the screen. Unlike a lot of users I don't like to run my screen at eye bendingly low resolutions. I use 19" flat panels at 1280x1024 and typically browse the web on the same but in portrait mode. You would be suprised how many sites will not even fit in 1024 pixels of width any more! You'd also be suprised how much vertical space is wasted at the top of most websites. Add an extra inch or so for a giant ad banner and you always have to do some serious scrolling. Also consider the format that many sites are in now.. two or three column indices with content interspersed with ads.. I don't want to read through fifteen blocks of google ads to get to the bottom of a page! Furthermore, you can't print a page without gobbling up about 50% too much paper from printing all the ads. It's stupid. Browsing "regular" web pages on a handheld or a phone? It's impossible due to ads. Browsing on dialup or GPRS? You can't even do it without blocking ads!
I also block them because I'm not going to click them anyway. Although I can't say that I'm immune to 'mindshare' that ads have built in me over the course of a billion repeated exposures (ie word association -- you say wireless camera; I will say "X-10 and don't ever buy one"), I can say that I have never clicked on a web ad and purchased something. I might as well save everyone the bandwidth and the bother of showing me something that won't result in a sale.
I am also happy to say that I work for a company with a very successful website that has a very stringent no-advertisements policy. Sometimes it's hard to refuse that money, but our users really appreciate it and if nothing else it's proof that a website does not necessarily have to resort to advertising to rake in the dough.
Magazines? I have a thin metal straightedge that I use to completely tear out any page that is a full page ad front and back or part of an advertorial before I read the magazine. De-ad'ing a typical monthly magazine takes about 30 seconds and saves a heck of a lot more time than that when you sit down to read the thing.
I don't know quite how much time difference you can have before you start having phase issues. I'm guessing that you have to be somewhat closer than twice the sample rate for it to really become a problem.. So 1/88,000th second. NTP has the capability to achieve this syncronocity over time, but somehow I doubt that the internal clocks in the devices have small enough drift to acutally ever quite 'get there'
Still, there are a couple of common clocks that we have not considered as possible sync sources:
1) Ethernet physical framing (Both speakers in the same room probably run off of the same switch)
2) AC power (This will be either in sync through the whole house or the two waves will be perfectly phase coupled enough to have a constant time delta)
I suspect that using one or both of these sources along with NTP you could sync speakers well enough to remove phase errors but I really have no idea how complicated the engineering required to do it would be. It does sound like a fun problem. Whether or not they have acutally done this with the product we are discussing is not really known. It would stand to reason that if they spent enough time figuring out it would appear on their marketing materials as it would be quite a feat.