I keep hearing this troll, but nobody ever proves it, and several price matches with Dell disprove it. What is "overpriced" about Apple's hardware? I'm paying for lots more features, much higher quality, and a much smaller form factor.
True, if you feature match, Apple is competitive with Dell, Compaq and company. However, Dell doesn't make me buy all the features. You can strip a Dell to get a lower initial entry cost. Compare a Mac Mini ($499, no monitor) to the bottom of the line from Dell ($349, including a 17" CRT) and you'll see where the price premium comes from. Nobody argues that Apple's features are overpriced -- it's the computer that is. If you don't use all the bells and whistles, why should you expect to pay for them? If you don't care that the Dell is 5x the size and sounds like a wind tunnel, why are you expected to pay more for the silent and svelte Mac Mini?
OS X is icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned. Try an iMac sometime, it's the future of computer design today.
OSX is the reason I have a Mac. The hardware is overpriced for my needs -- I don't use all the features I've got (honestly, how many iMac users will actually use the built-in camera?) -- but that's why eBay is doing so well. The MacOS, on the other hand, gives me the stability and power I grew accustomed to with Linux, with usability and maintainability which I couldn't have dreamed of.
You play WC3 / DOTA on OSX. Do you ever have trouble quitting WC3? Both OSX machines I've used, when I'm in full screen mode, the program will hang either upon apple-Q or quitting through the menus. When I use either method under window mode I have a 50% chance of a proper quit. The program dies properly when "force quit".
BTW, dual-cores aren't only handy for rendering. They are handy for responsiveness, it's most obvious when a process hogs the CPU and makes everything else slow to a crawl - including but not only when trying to kill said process if it turns into a zombie. On a dual-core, that's not a problem.
I agree with you. When I had a dual 2GHz G5, I would periodically notice that the fans would slowly ramp up to full speed. I could open a terminal and notice that one of the processes had gone postal and was at 100% on one of the processors. All the other processes landed on the other processor, and my responsiveness remained quite good -- honestly the fans were the indicator, not a decrease in responsiveness. I could then kill the offending process and get confirmation as the fans ramped down again. That beast of a machine really acted like a workhorse.
The slow ramp up / ramp down of the fans made the machine feel massive, huge, like those dump trucks taller than my house. Of course, they were governed by the thermal profile of the chips which didn't change instantaneously, but the feel was easy to misunderstand. I digress.
Dual cores are there for a variety of reasons -- rendering, multithreaded video games, any process that wants to eat an entire processor, etc. Honestly, when there are twice as many cores to accept my mouse and keyboard interrupts, the whole machine feels snappier. And it's not just for one of those, all the benefits are always there. The dual 2GHz G5 was the most responsive machine I had since my IBM R6k quad 200MHz 604.
Now if a modern OS could provide disc drive priorities, I'd be very happy. I'd like to be able to renice my virus scanner so it only gets to read a sector when the hard drive is already there because an interactive process requested it. As is, it gets the same priority as things I need to use to get my job done.
In college, I ended up doing a little drink mixing (non-alcoholic drinks only to my current chagrin). Let me save you some trouble.
Coffee + soda (Coke or Mountain Dew). Terrible idea. Kill it now.
Juice + soda (Coke or Mountain Dew). With small amounts of juice, can be very good. I actually repeated grape Kool-Aid + Mountain Dew several times (different from Pitch Black, but that gets you started). Stay away from limes and lemons. Maraschino cherry juice in Mountain Dew predicted Code Red accurately.
Chocolate syrup + black coffee. There's a reason they usually put loads of cream in coffe when adding chocolate.
Chocolate syrup + soda. Terrible idea. The syrup doesn't mix well, and when it does, the flavors in your mouth are horrid.
In short, there's a reason sodas have been made with fruit juices (imitation and real) for 100 years, and not coffee or other substances.
Also, Oreos (at least the generic equivalent where you get 4x the cookies for half the price) go very well with Mountain Dew, possibly better than the historical milk.
From someone in Japan, 360 is not popular
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360 Launches In Japan
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I was in Tokyo over Thanksgiving. I saw several 360 displays, all of them were completely empty. My daughter was frustrated that she couldn't play with the DS, but she had to console herself with playing with the vacant 360 display.
I was in Toys R Us in Nagasaki yesterday and there were probably a half dozen of the empty boxes you take up to the register in order to get your gear.
Nobody is talking about the 360 outside of a few neighborhoods in Tokyo -- and those seem to care only after 3pm until midnight (which gives us a clue about the very small demographic they have attracted).
I used a Squeezeebox v2 on MacOSX (Panther) for 6-7 months. The server was a dual 2GHz G5. Performance was horrible, the music kept cutting out, etc. I was convinced the Squeezebox was trash. Then one day, it would work flawlessly, seemingly without any change. A week later, the dumpster again seemed like its proper home.
I ended up finding out what my problem was. I was running a few (2-3) Torrents, using Bram's stock BitTorrent software. The number of simultaneous network connections was pretty high. In this situation, the Squeezebox couldn't open connections, or keep open ones open, and it would skip, studder, or seemingly just disappear. Web traffic never seemed to suffer, only the Squeezebox. Today, I've found that my Mac is much happier running the (sometimes laggy on a 1GHz Powerbook) Azureus and limiting simultaneous network connections to 80-100. I believe there is an undocumented issue with Panther not handling large numbers of simultaneous open connections well.
Perhaps the reviewer could verify that Torrents are not in play while the Squeezebox is being tested. If they are, perhaps simultaneous network connections can be throttled. I am interested in a V3 product, but only if it will continue to function on my Mac.
I've seen many responses, including webpages which may be helpful, or other programs which may be up to date. Personally, I prefer netstat. It's not "user friendly", but it's always up to date. If you're smart enough to keep your computer updated, you're smart enough to start recognizing stuff and feeding Google what you don't understand.
netstat -a Active Internet connections Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state) tcp4 0 0 192.168.2.156.52756 www.example.com.http ESTABLISHED tcp4 0 0 192.168.2.156.52738 mailhost.example.com.imaps ESTABLISHED
Basically, http traffic is likely web. Hopefully you recognize websites you're visiting. Imap and pop, mail. You get the idea. There may be a few you don't recognize, on ports that netstat can't translate. Feed the host to Google and see what you can find out. If your computer is idle and you can't figure out what's going on, netstat will give you a momentary snapshot. A coworker was afraid his computer was overtaken, I looked at it, pointed to the only host I didn't recognize and he said, "Oh, I forgot about my automated backup!"
You asked how to cool your laptop. There are any number of laptop stands with fans built in. The ones I've seen run off of USB power. I just bought my wife one from Fry's which was $25. Amazon has one here. Just do a simple search for "latop stand fan" or something.
If your brand new PC overheats and causes problems, maybe you should be returning it or getting some warranty service performed.
Is it really a valid expectation to automatically get a salary increase? What happened to earning it? I feel pretty confident in saying that 69% of all workers didn't perform above average, so why should they be expecting a reward?
I heard, a long time ago, that 79% of all drivers believed they were better than average. That's truly educational. By definition, half the drivers are "better than average" and the other half are "worse than average".
I don't see how 69% of the workers can realistically perform above average. If you take half a company's output and then try to account for the fewest possible people to produce that output, then you might come up with a number less than 50%, but I think that's only because of support personel who are not directly related to output, but to enabling others.
When I started working for a company, I started with the expectation that I was earning my salary (why else would they hire me?). I continued, under the understanding that I was learning and therefore increasing my value. If I continue to learn for 10 years, continue to do my job better every single year, doesn't my value increase? How, therefore, is it not valid to expect a raise above the cost of living?
If I start working for a company, and over the course of 10 years, never gain any experience at all and never become more efficient, then I should be fired (from a company with a growth objective) because they can hire someone else who will add value to the company and allow it to grow.
Face it, if you're working for a modern tech company with a growth objective, and you've talked yourself out of expecting a raise, you're either: 1) Lieing to yourself so you feel better about your apathy or 2) Convinced yourself that you'll get enough of a raise to make up for it later or 3) Convinced that you can't earn your salary at a different company which can compensate you fairly (which may or may not be true depending on the market and your skillset marketability).
Re:hats off to Bram, Bill Joy, and ATT
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Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 1
Editor faceoffs. I've won several of those with vi on my belt. When we get to use the whole toolkit, I'll often whip out some temp files and use awk a bit (for column processing). I've got two questions for someone out there with better vi skills than I.
How would a vi pro do CSV test processing? How would you take the text between the second and third commas and replace it with arbitrary text?
Ignoring CSV for a minute, if you'd like to replace all text from the 20th through 23rd characters of arbitrary text with the string "abcd", how would you do it? vi is very straightforward, so I assume I'll be able to understand only replacing "wxyz" in the 20th through 23rd column with "abcd".
In text processing, the workload determines the ability of a "ve" user (internal IBM tool) to surpass my vi efficiency. Typically, it's when the ve user mouse selects a column and then does replaces on it. I'd like to mimic this behavior using only my qwerty pad and some newly aquired vi skills.
That's pretty cute, the use of "obstructing" in the summary. Usually when I hear the word obstructing it is in phrases like "obstructing justice." Obstructing is usually something the criminals do. The word has picked up a pretty negative connotation.
But here, we have HBO obstructing the downloading of their copyrighted material. HBO is obstructing copyright violation. Would you say that a lock obstructs breaking and entering? Or that self defense obstructs assault? Perhaps good server administration obstructs the stealing of private data. Of course you wouldn't say that. It sounds silly. So why is HBO obstructing downloads?
You pose an interesting set of arguments and rhetorical questions. I'll pose another.
Does a copyright have any inherent value, or is its value in the ends it accomplishes?
Personally, I value copyrights and patents as the means to an end -- the furthering of art or the betterment of man or society. The US Constitution establishes the US Congress' right to establish a copyright protection as long as it furthers the arts and sciences. Should we change the definition?
How does HBO, refusing to offer legal downloads of their shows, refusing to accept cash from those of us willing to pay, better art or science? Obviously the copyright is there to protect the show creators and HBO as the distributor -- but offering legal, paid downloads would compensate everyone properly, thus furthering the arts of cinema and television, while furthering the science of computers and networks.
Clearly the RIAA got it. Theft was eating into their profits so they offered an iTunes way out. Those willing to pay were offered a way to put up (the cash) or shut up (and be sued). Fairtunes even offers you a way to exercise your fair use rights (let's see a court case against someone who usees Fairtunes to complete a class project-- not piracy-- and see how the DMCA holds up against the Constitution). Why won't the MPAA and TV companies realize that there is literally a torrent of people willing to pay money for their merchandise, but nobody willing to accept it?
I remember when PC games were $20-$30. Test Drive (and Test Drive II: The Duel), Starflight (and Starflight II), flight simulators from various vendors were fantastic finds. Many of the older classics, like King's Quest, were in that price range too. There were small teams, 1-5 people mostly with very little marketing costs. Those games were worth the money. Today's games eventually make it down to those prices, and it turns out that I'm pretty happy waiting for them. By that time, my computer can handle them with pretty little effort, and all the patches are stable.
I have a hard time imagining why some of these games are so expensive. Doom III, for example, started out over $60. If they had a design team of 8 people, take 8*75,000/$60 and cut out half for marketing, and it seems like they can sell 20,000 copies and do pretty well-- before licensing the engine to everybody. Maybe those rock stars are demanding salaries twice that (40k copies), and maybe profits are half that -- benefits anyone? (80k copies?).
I can reconcile how games aren't as cheap to make anymore. They have things called "artists", because the hardware can keep up with more than 160x100 in 16 colors. But $60 is more than that kind of entertainment is worth to me. I'm a casual gamer --at best. Starcraft appears to be the apex of entertainment for. Relatively short games, very varied in game play, multiplayer aware, pretty (but not overly so) graphics and not unnecessarily burdensome on hardware.
Starflight II cost me $30 and provided hundreds of hours of entertainment. I can't find that kind of value these days. I've put $120 into Starcraft at this point (two copies each of Starcraft and Brood War, one for my PC and the other for my Mac) and Starcraft has proven itself to me to be worth its cost far more than any first person shooter could by providing hundreds of hours of entertainment per year.
Why is it that Penny Arcade gets all the attention around here? There are tons of good comics out there with a geeky slant - I'm a big fan of Sluggy Freelance, for example...
I read Sluggy every day, so I'll take your example. Pete often complains about a lack of time. He's got a life and places to be. The strip often gets neglected. Filler strips disrupt story lines and punish those who expect the strip to be his day job. A little drama and suspense is okay, but we're not talking about cliffhangers here, Pete outright drops the entire thing for days at a time. And he's always got excuses too-- there for us to read. His material isn't that current, so he may as well build a buffer of a week and take advantage of those great days and not so great days. "Gone Fishing"? If this were his real job, he'd have something prepared to fill the space. Despite all behavior to the contrary, Pete depends on Sluggy for his living.
Penny-Arcade, on the other hand, also has off days. Filler happens with conferences. Rough uncolored sketches, however, fit in a strip that abhors plot and continuity. They set the expectations to be a random series of one shots and by and large deliver. There are complaints and updates are regularly a few hours late, but the strip is there. Penny-Arcade has held a few PAXs at this point (clearly the gamer / geek crowd appeal) and Child's Play, quite a charity that's done some impressive things.
Um hello. You need to block out more than that. Most remaining numbers are part#s but there are several that are likely unique identifiers for the part. Anything not easily identified as a general part # needs to be removed.
Agreed. It is easy to imagine a database that tracks all the serial numbers together. Query against just one of those and you have the rest. Once you have the box's serial number, look up who got the machine and assess the need to punish the developer for violating the NDA.
I'd bet these machines were not cheap to Microsoft. Hardware before launch is exceptionally valuable, certainly more valuable than the cost to develop simply because your factories aren't up to speed yet. One developer, as pictured, decided to take Microsoft's investment offline, away from game development and take some pictures. Maybe it's a 2 hour expedition that's to be done "off-hours" by employees on personal time so no project was impacted, but more likely the effects will last into development time-- it took longer than expected or something broke. Either way, it's an unnecessary pile of risks that tells Microsoft how much they value the machine and the NDA they signed.
I'm in a similar position. Compute power isn't important, but power consumption and noise are. I used an old 486 IBM Thinkpad for 2 years in such a server role, and that worked great. It was a little slow with the apt-gets, but that was my only complaint. Since then, I took it up to a PowerMac 7600 and although I didn't get out the power meter, it seemed to fit the bill nicely and the price was right (honestly only really wanted more RAM).
My next computer for this role may well be an old Powerbook (either with a stock drive, 2 or 4 GB CompactFlash to IDE bridge or an external fanless firewire drive. Or it could be a Mac Mini, which are less than $400 on eBay if you're not looking for a lot of bling bling. Maybe you're willing to go the PC ATX route and follow the Cyrix / Duron / Celeron stuff all the way with underclocking, but my home server will not receive that kind of research. I'll put in the minimal amount of effort to get it going and then toss on Debian who keeps tabs on security very well. Used Apple hardware fits that so well that it's like it was designed for it. I think there's a reason used Apple hardware keeps its value so well (except for some of the Mac Minis bought by PC enthusiasts who changed their minds back).
I don't see any posters at this time who have recognized Zonk's post for what it is -- an attempt for Slashdot to be more than just a blog. The last major push for that backfired, nobody liked what Jon Katz had to say. Since day 1, Slashdot has been an approval system for links that we the readership submit. The editors have made some attempts to editorialize and have occasionally been flamed for it, but the editorials have been very light and Slashdot's readership has been flat for over a year.
Slashdot can continue to mature and grow readership by doing a little research. Dig up some links from the past and make a comment. Zonk could have taken a small step in either direction by posting how well (or not) the DS has done to continue to refute Sony's stance (or show that the issue is still unresolved).
Thanks, Zonk, for taking a small step in the right direction. We don't want a Slashdot newspaper, over-editorializing everything, but some light commentary would entice readers to get our feet wet in new subjects and make Slashdot an easier read for new visitors.
Then it's still legal. The Supreme Court has ruled in Eldred v. Ashcroft that it's Congress's job to decide what "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
So why is everyone discussing Roe Vs. Wade with John G. Roberts? I believe that the definition of "legal" is actually pretty flexible. You have to choose which laws are legal and ethical-- follow them -- and fight to change the others. If a little African-American girl had sat in the back of the bus like she was supposed to, then we'd all be better off, right? Or does the outcome sometimes justify breaking laws? Maybe the Declaration of Independence was written by terrorists and we should just go ask Tony what to do with ourselves.
Maybe "digital rights management" is a field that's of little consequence when compared to civil rights, abortion or the independence of some stupid little colonies. But maybe digital rights management is the beginning of 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 coming true. When nobody can access music or books made 5 or 10 years prior (or beyond a finally sane copyright period), will we believe that science and arts have been advanced? Do we stand on the shoulders of giants, or do we only advance by forgetting previous mistakes and constraints?
The end result is that when Windows Vista ships (and Apple's next OS), most people won't be able to watch protected HD content on their computers LEGALLY."
United States' copyright law comes straight to the consumer from the United States Constitution. If you believe that adding such DRM software to does in fact "promote the progress of science and useful arts", then the DRM software is illegal to circumvent. If, on the other hand, these companies exert their copyrights to hold back arts (smaller studios anyone?) or science (the internet is a gigantic billboard for these people, not the distribution method BitTorrent has proven it can be), then circumventing the DRM is not only legal but can be construed as the most ethical thing to do.
I'll M my own DRs, thank you. I don't need some studio telling me I can't fast forward through their ads for chick flicks when I want to watch an action movie.
Commit everything to memory, keep a cyanide pill close by and hope like hell that that crazy guy with the tinfoil hat is wrong.
Buddy, if you're keeping that cyanide pill close by, the guy with the tinfoil hat isn't the only crazy one. You might as well label yourself correctly and put your own tinfoil hat on.
You're having trouble managing all your projects. Take a project management class. Don't necessarily go for the certification. Then take a time management class. Get those fundamentals.
On the topic of an organizer, organized people can make just about anything work, disorganized and undisciplined people can't make the most simple and efficient system work. With that said, I enjoyed the Q4 (a Franklin Planner type of system) as long as I followed the system precisely. If started skipping steps, then I lost confidence in the system and the doubt slowed me down as I doublechecked everything.
As I started participating in Wikipedia (small contributions exclusively), I realized that I liked the system for automatically creating URLs. It seemed to be a great way to organize things. After evaluating a variety of personal wikis, I am currently trying out Moin Moin Desktop Edition. It's going well for me. I keep open three pages: ThingsToDo (running list of things to do), Expectations (running list of things that people are expected to get for me and when) and the current date. From there, I enclose anything I want to be able to track (people's names, important issues, etc.) in square brackets and double quotes. When I save the page, I then open a new tab for the uncreated pages (clearly marked with question mark links) and put in what I need to keep track of.
For me, all those features were really necessary. The paper system did it well, but the binding kept failing on me and I'm a better typer anyway. Next year, my calendar will be exceptionally important too, so I'm going to have to figure out if I can find a MoinMoin module to read Notes Calendars (if that's even the right way to attack the problem) or decide to manually track my meetings and appointments.
Yes, just like artificial sweeteners taste like the finest quality cane sugar or honey. Truly an age of marvels we live in.
If you're trying to replace steak or sushi, then artificial meats have a long way to go. Anything artificial would have to be incredibly believable (maybe not taste like cow steak, but something similar). On the other hand, there are a wide variety of places where artificial meats needn't be quite so close. Many people can't tell that Baco's are soy derived when they're on their salads. I've enjoyed "chicken nuggets" from Quorn. Some sharp cheddar, a good roll and a charcoal grill and some people can't tell they've ever had a Gardenburger (it helps if they like their burger at least medium-well).
The initial markets of growable meats will likely be vegetarians and vegans looking for more protein -- or those like me who would prefer to be vegetarian but who love the taste of meat (I love a good steak, a piece of bacon, pepperoni or italian sausage). There are lots of applications where the meat only needs to have approximately the right flavors and textures (in my case, bacon, pepperoni and italian sausage are very heavily seasoned, so the different texture is probably the biggest hurdle -- turkey pepperoni isn't close enough for me, by the way). Once artificial meats are mixed in with other things successfully, perhaps I Can't Believe It's Not Steak isn't too far off..
If it turns out that growable meats are any more efficient than growing grass to tend to a cow or chicken while maintaining similar protein values, then there will be great advantages to every society who can adopt them.
I tried out several encoders in 2001 when considering compressing my music library. I tried double blind tests on the best realistic equipment I'd be using (then a 10 year old amp and pretty new Bose 501 speakers -- both are now clearly 4 years older) using my PC sound card's RCA outputs. Not an audiophile setup by any means, but certainly a bit better than the PC's internal speaker.
In my tests, Ogg Vorbis at 192KBps, MP3 (LAME) at 256KBps and something else.. WMA? at 256KBps were not decipherable from the original CD to my ears. Interestingly enough, I favored Ogg Vorbis even more because when I backed it down to 128KBps the artifacs I could hear sounded better than MP3's at 168. My choice was made -- Ogg Vorbis at 192KBps would be my preferred codec.
So I went around looking for what could play it. Only a few pieces of software (winamp and xmms were the two I cared about) and zero hardware. I had aspirations of taking music with me, so that left all but MP3 out of the game at the time.
I currently use iTunes to store and organize my library of 400+ CDs and synchronize a subset to my 1st generation 5GB iPod. Now that I've put that much effort into a single program, either another organizer will need to beat iTunes by being more comprehensive, useful, intuitive and stable, or iTunes will have to support Ogg Vorbis for me to encode future CDs in a codec other than MP3. Once iTunes encodes and plays Ogg Vorbis files, then I'll see about an iPod or similar that will play them (these days I'm in the iPod Shuffle price range). Since iTunes is a free (as in beer.. but where's all this free beer people talk about?) encoder, I'm not willing to pay for the inconvenience of switching to a new program.
Slashdot Mirror
True, if you feature match, Apple is competitive with Dell, Compaq and company. However, Dell doesn't make me buy all the features. You can strip a Dell to get a lower initial entry cost. Compare a Mac Mini ($499, no monitor) to the bottom of the line from Dell ($349, including a 17" CRT) and you'll see where the price premium comes from. Nobody argues that Apple's features are overpriced -- it's the computer that is. If you don't use all the bells and whistles, why should you expect to pay for them? If you don't care that the Dell is 5x the size and sounds like a wind tunnel, why are you expected to pay more for the silent and svelte Mac Mini?
OSX is the reason I have a Mac. The hardware is overpriced for my needs -- I don't use all the features I've got (honestly, how many iMac users will actually use the built-in camera?) -- but that's why eBay is doing so well. The MacOS, on the other hand, gives me the stability and power I grew accustomed to with Linux, with usability and maintainability which I couldn't have dreamed of.
You play WC3 / DOTA on OSX. Do you ever have trouble quitting WC3? Both OSX machines I've used, when I'm in full screen mode, the program will hang either upon apple-Q or quitting through the menus. When I use either method under window mode I have a 50% chance of a proper quit. The program dies properly when "force quit".
I agree with you. When I had a dual 2GHz G5, I would periodically notice that the fans would slowly ramp up to full speed. I could open a terminal and notice that one of the processes had gone postal and was at 100% on one of the processors. All the other processes landed on the other processor, and my responsiveness remained quite good -- honestly the fans were the indicator, not a decrease in responsiveness. I could then kill the offending process and get confirmation as the fans ramped down again. That beast of a machine really acted like a workhorse.
The slow ramp up / ramp down of the fans made the machine feel massive, huge, like those dump trucks taller than my house. Of course, they were governed by the thermal profile of the chips which didn't change instantaneously, but the feel was easy to misunderstand. I digress.
Dual cores are there for a variety of reasons -- rendering, multithreaded video games, any process that wants to eat an entire processor, etc. Honestly, when there are twice as many cores to accept my mouse and keyboard interrupts, the whole machine feels snappier. And it's not just for one of those, all the benefits are always there. The dual 2GHz G5 was the most responsive machine I had since my IBM R6k quad 200MHz 604.
Now if a modern OS could provide disc drive priorities, I'd be very happy. I'd like to be able to renice my virus scanner so it only gets to read a sector when the hard drive is already there because an interactive process requested it. As is, it gets the same priority as things I need to use to get my job done.
Oooh! Good idea! "Lexinvent". Ex. "Please lexinvent responsibly."
In college, I ended up doing a little drink mixing (non-alcoholic drinks only to my current chagrin). Let me save you some trouble.
Coffee + soda (Coke or Mountain Dew). Terrible idea. Kill it now.
Juice + soda (Coke or Mountain Dew). With small amounts of juice, can be very good. I actually repeated grape Kool-Aid + Mountain Dew several times (different from Pitch Black, but that gets you started). Stay away from limes and lemons. Maraschino cherry juice in Mountain Dew predicted Code Red accurately.
Chocolate syrup + black coffee. There's a reason they usually put loads of cream in coffe when adding chocolate.
Chocolate syrup + soda. Terrible idea. The syrup doesn't mix well, and when it does, the flavors in your mouth are horrid.
In short, there's a reason sodas have been made with fruit juices (imitation and real) for 100 years, and not coffee or other substances.
Also, Oreos (at least the generic equivalent where you get 4x the cookies for half the price) go very well with Mountain Dew, possibly better than the historical milk.
I was in Tokyo over Thanksgiving. I saw several 360 displays, all of them were completely empty. My daughter was frustrated that she couldn't play with the DS, but she had to console herself with playing with the vacant 360 display.
I was in Toys R Us in Nagasaki yesterday and there were probably a half dozen of the empty boxes you take up to the register in order to get your gear.
Nobody is talking about the 360 outside of a few neighborhoods in Tokyo -- and those seem to care only after 3pm until midnight (which gives us a clue about the very small demographic they have attracted).
I used a Squeezeebox v2 on MacOSX (Panther) for 6-7 months. The server was a dual 2GHz G5. Performance was horrible, the music kept cutting out, etc. I was convinced the Squeezebox was trash. Then one day, it would work flawlessly, seemingly without any change. A week later, the dumpster again seemed like its proper home.
I ended up finding out what my problem was. I was running a few (2-3) Torrents, using Bram's stock BitTorrent software. The number of simultaneous network connections was pretty high. In this situation, the Squeezebox couldn't open connections, or keep open ones open, and it would skip, studder, or seemingly just disappear. Web traffic never seemed to suffer, only the Squeezebox. Today, I've found that my Mac is much happier running the (sometimes laggy on a 1GHz Powerbook) Azureus and limiting simultaneous network connections to 80-100. I believe there is an undocumented issue with Panther not handling large numbers of simultaneous open connections well.
Perhaps the reviewer could verify that Torrents are not in play while the Squeezebox is being tested. If they are, perhaps simultaneous network connections can be throttled. I am interested in a V3 product, but only if it will continue to function on my Mac.
I've seen many responses, including webpages which may be helpful, or other programs which may be up to date. Personally, I prefer netstat. It's not "user friendly", but it's always up to date. If you're smart enough to keep your computer updated, you're smart enough to start recognizing stuff and feeding Google what you don't understand.
Basically, http traffic is likely web. Hopefully you recognize websites you're visiting. Imap and pop, mail. You get the idea. There may be a few you don't recognize, on ports that netstat can't translate. Feed the host to Google and see what you can find out. If your computer is idle and you can't figure out what's going on, netstat will give you a momentary snapshot. A coworker was afraid his computer was overtaken, I looked at it, pointed to the only host I didn't recognize and he said, "Oh, I forgot about my automated backup!"
I've read two relevant quotes.
"Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
"In communism, man exploits man. In capitalism, it's the other way around."
You asked how to cool your laptop. There are any number of laptop stands with fans built in. The ones I've seen run off of USB power. I just bought my wife one from Fry's which was $25. Amazon has one here. Just do a simple search for "latop stand fan" or something.
If your brand new PC overheats and causes problems, maybe you should be returning it or getting some warranty service performed.
I heard, a long time ago, that 79% of all drivers believed they were better than average. That's truly educational. By definition, half the drivers are "better than average" and the other half are "worse than average".
I don't see how 69% of the workers can realistically perform above average. If you take half a company's output and then try to account for the fewest possible people to produce that output, then you might come up with a number less than 50%, but I think that's only because of support personel who are not directly related to output, but to enabling others.
When I started working for a company, I started with the expectation that I was earning my salary (why else would they hire me?). I continued, under the understanding that I was learning and therefore increasing my value. If I continue to learn for 10 years, continue to do my job better every single year, doesn't my value increase? How, therefore, is it not valid to expect a raise above the cost of living?
If I start working for a company, and over the course of 10 years, never gain any experience at all and never become more efficient, then I should be fired (from a company with a growth objective) because they can hire someone else who will add value to the company and allow it to grow.
Face it, if you're working for a modern tech company with a growth objective, and you've talked yourself out of expecting a raise, you're either: 1) Lieing to yourself so you feel better about your apathy or 2) Convinced yourself that you'll get enough of a raise to make up for it later or 3) Convinced that you can't earn your salary at a different company which can compensate you fairly (which may or may not be true depending on the market and your skillset marketability).
Editor faceoffs. I've won several of those with vi on my belt. When we get to use the whole toolkit, I'll often whip out some temp files and use awk a bit (for column processing). I've got two questions for someone out there with better vi skills than I.
How would a vi pro do CSV test processing? How would you take the text between the second and third commas and replace it with arbitrary text?
Ignoring CSV for a minute, if you'd like to replace all text from the 20th through 23rd characters of arbitrary text with the string "abcd", how would you do it? vi is very straightforward, so I assume I'll be able to understand only replacing "wxyz" in the 20th through 23rd column with "abcd".
In text processing, the workload determines the ability of a "ve" user (internal IBM tool) to surpass my vi efficiency. Typically, it's when the ve user mouse selects a column and then does replaces on it. I'd like to mimic this behavior using only my qwerty pad and some newly aquired vi skills.
Too many people forget: "vi is power".
You pose an interesting set of arguments and rhetorical questions. I'll pose another.
Does a copyright have any inherent value, or is its value in the ends it accomplishes?
Personally, I value copyrights and patents as the means to an end -- the furthering of art or the betterment of man or society. The US Constitution establishes the US Congress' right to establish a copyright protection as long as it furthers the arts and sciences. Should we change the definition?
How does HBO, refusing to offer legal downloads of their shows, refusing to accept cash from those of us willing to pay, better art or science? Obviously the copyright is there to protect the show creators and HBO as the distributor -- but offering legal, paid downloads would compensate everyone properly, thus furthering the arts of cinema and television, while furthering the science of computers and networks.
Clearly the RIAA got it. Theft was eating into their profits so they offered an iTunes way out. Those willing to pay were offered a way to put up (the cash) or shut up (and be sued). Fairtunes even offers you a way to exercise your fair use rights (let's see a court case against someone who usees Fairtunes to complete a class project-- not piracy-- and see how the DMCA holds up against the Constitution). Why won't the MPAA and TV companies realize that there is literally a torrent of people willing to pay money for their merchandise, but nobody willing to accept it?
There were precisely two cool things about Hackers.
1. Angelina Jolie.
2. Airbrushed keyboards.
Sneakers, on the other hand, Hollywoodified an already absurd idea..
I remember when PC games were $20-$30. Test Drive (and Test Drive II: The Duel), Starflight (and Starflight II), flight simulators from various vendors were fantastic finds. Many of the older classics, like King's Quest, were in that price range too. There were small teams, 1-5 people mostly with very little marketing costs. Those games were worth the money. Today's games eventually make it down to those prices, and it turns out that I'm pretty happy waiting for them. By that time, my computer can handle them with pretty little effort, and all the patches are stable.
I have a hard time imagining why some of these games are so expensive. Doom III, for example, started out over $60. If they had a design team of 8 people, take 8*75,000/$60 and cut out half for marketing, and it seems like they can sell 20,000 copies and do pretty well-- before licensing the engine to everybody. Maybe those rock stars are demanding salaries twice that (40k copies), and maybe profits are half that -- benefits anyone? (80k copies?).
I can reconcile how games aren't as cheap to make anymore. They have things called "artists", because the hardware can keep up with more than 160x100 in 16 colors. But $60 is more than that kind of entertainment is worth to me. I'm a casual gamer --at best. Starcraft appears to be the apex of entertainment for. Relatively short games, very varied in game play, multiplayer aware, pretty (but not overly so) graphics and not unnecessarily burdensome on hardware.
Starflight II cost me $30 and provided hundreds of hours of entertainment. I can't find that kind of value these days. I've put $120 into Starcraft at this point (two copies each of Starcraft and Brood War, one for my PC and the other for my Mac) and Starcraft has proven itself to me to be worth its cost far more than any first person shooter could by providing hundreds of hours of entertainment per year.
I read Sluggy every day, so I'll take your example. Pete often complains about a lack of time. He's got a life and places to be. The strip often gets neglected. Filler strips disrupt story lines and punish those who expect the strip to be his day job. A little drama and suspense is okay, but we're not talking about cliffhangers here, Pete outright drops the entire thing for days at a time. And he's always got excuses too-- there for us to read. His material isn't that current, so he may as well build a buffer of a week and take advantage of those great days and not so great days. "Gone Fishing"? If this were his real job, he'd have something prepared to fill the space. Despite all behavior to the contrary, Pete depends on Sluggy for his living.
Penny-Arcade, on the other hand, also has off days. Filler happens with conferences. Rough uncolored sketches, however, fit in a strip that abhors plot and continuity. They set the expectations to be a random series of one shots and by and large deliver. There are complaints and updates are regularly a few hours late, but the strip is there. Penny-Arcade has held a few PAXs at this point (clearly the gamer / geek crowd appeal) and Child's Play, quite a charity that's done some impressive things.
Agreed. It is easy to imagine a database that tracks all the serial numbers together. Query against just one of those and you have the rest. Once you have the box's serial number, look up who got the machine and assess the need to punish the developer for violating the NDA.
I'd bet these machines were not cheap to Microsoft. Hardware before launch is exceptionally valuable, certainly more valuable than the cost to develop simply because your factories aren't up to speed yet. One developer, as pictured, decided to take Microsoft's investment offline, away from game development and take some pictures. Maybe it's a 2 hour expedition that's to be done "off-hours" by employees on personal time so no project was impacted, but more likely the effects will last into development time-- it took longer than expected or something broke. Either way, it's an unnecessary pile of risks that tells Microsoft how much they value the machine and the NDA they signed.
I'm in a similar position. Compute power isn't important, but power consumption and noise are. I used an old 486 IBM Thinkpad for 2 years in such a server role, and that worked great. It was a little slow with the apt-gets, but that was my only complaint. Since then, I took it up to a PowerMac 7600 and although I didn't get out the power meter, it seemed to fit the bill nicely and the price was right (honestly only really wanted more RAM).
My next computer for this role may well be an old Powerbook (either with a stock drive, 2 or 4 GB CompactFlash to IDE bridge or an external fanless firewire drive. Or it could be a Mac Mini, which are less than $400 on eBay if you're not looking for a lot of bling bling. Maybe you're willing to go the PC ATX route and follow the Cyrix / Duron / Celeron stuff all the way with underclocking, but my home server will not receive that kind of research. I'll put in the minimal amount of effort to get it going and then toss on Debian who keeps tabs on security very well. Used Apple hardware fits that so well that it's like it was designed for it. I think there's a reason used Apple hardware keeps its value so well (except for some of the Mac Minis bought by PC enthusiasts who changed their minds back).
I don't see any posters at this time who have recognized Zonk's post for what it is -- an attempt for Slashdot to be more than just a blog. The last major push for that backfired, nobody liked what Jon Katz had to say. Since day 1, Slashdot has been an approval system for links that we the readership submit. The editors have made some attempts to editorialize and have occasionally been flamed for it, but the editorials have been very light and Slashdot's readership has been flat for over a year.
Slashdot can continue to mature and grow readership by doing a little research. Dig up some links from the past and make a comment. Zonk could have taken a small step in either direction by posting how well (or not) the DS has done to continue to refute Sony's stance (or show that the issue is still unresolved).
Thanks, Zonk, for taking a small step in the right direction. We don't want a Slashdot newspaper, over-editorializing everything, but some light commentary would entice readers to get our feet wet in new subjects and make Slashdot an easier read for new visitors.
So why is everyone discussing Roe Vs. Wade with John G. Roberts? I believe that the definition of "legal" is actually pretty flexible. You have to choose which laws are legal and ethical-- follow them -- and fight to change the others. If a little African-American girl had sat in the back of the bus like she was supposed to, then we'd all be better off, right? Or does the outcome sometimes justify breaking laws? Maybe the Declaration of Independence was written by terrorists and we should just go ask Tony what to do with ourselves.
Maybe "digital rights management" is a field that's of little consequence when compared to civil rights, abortion or the independence of some stupid little colonies. But maybe digital rights management is the beginning of 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 coming true. When nobody can access music or books made 5 or 10 years prior (or beyond a finally sane copyright period), will we believe that science and arts have been advanced? Do we stand on the shoulders of giants, or do we only advance by forgetting previous mistakes and constraints?
United States' copyright law comes straight to the consumer from the United States Constitution. If you believe that adding such DRM software to does in fact "promote the progress of science and useful arts", then the DRM software is illegal to circumvent. If, on the other hand, these companies exert their copyrights to hold back arts (smaller studios anyone?) or science (the internet is a gigantic billboard for these people, not the distribution method BitTorrent has proven it can be), then circumventing the DRM is not only legal but can be construed as the most ethical thing to do.
I'll M my own DRs, thank you. I don't need some studio telling me I can't fast forward through their ads for chick flicks when I want to watch an action movie.
Buddy, if you're keeping that cyanide pill close by, the guy with the tinfoil hat isn't the only crazy one. You might as well label yourself correctly and put your own tinfoil hat on.
You're having trouble managing all your projects. Take a project management class. Don't necessarily go for the certification. Then take a time management class. Get those fundamentals.
On the topic of an organizer, organized people can make just about anything work, disorganized and undisciplined people can't make the most simple and efficient system work. With that said, I enjoyed the Q4 (a Franklin Planner type of system) as long as I followed the system precisely. If started skipping steps, then I lost confidence in the system and the doubt slowed me down as I doublechecked everything.
As I started participating in Wikipedia (small contributions exclusively), I realized that I liked the system for automatically creating URLs. It seemed to be a great way to organize things. After evaluating a variety of personal wikis, I am currently trying out Moin Moin Desktop Edition. It's going well for me. I keep open three pages: ThingsToDo (running list of things to do), Expectations (running list of things that people are expected to get for me and when) and the current date. From there, I enclose anything I want to be able to track (people's names, important issues, etc.) in square brackets and double quotes. When I save the page, I then open a new tab for the uncreated pages (clearly marked with question mark links) and put in what I need to keep track of.
For me, all those features were really necessary. The paper system did it well, but the binding kept failing on me and I'm a better typer anyway. Next year, my calendar will be exceptionally important too, so I'm going to have to figure out if I can find a MoinMoin module to read Notes Calendars (if that's even the right way to attack the problem) or decide to manually track my meetings and appointments.
If you're trying to replace steak or sushi, then artificial meats have a long way to go. Anything artificial would have to be incredibly believable (maybe not taste like cow steak, but something similar). On the other hand, there are a wide variety of places where artificial meats needn't be quite so close. Many people can't tell that Baco's are soy derived when they're on their salads. I've enjoyed "chicken nuggets" from Quorn. Some sharp cheddar, a good roll and a charcoal grill and some people can't tell they've ever had a Gardenburger (it helps if they like their burger at least medium-well).
The initial markets of growable meats will likely be vegetarians and vegans looking for more protein -- or those like me who would prefer to be vegetarian but who love the taste of meat (I love a good steak, a piece of bacon, pepperoni or italian sausage). There are lots of applications where the meat only needs to have approximately the right flavors and textures (in my case, bacon, pepperoni and italian sausage are very heavily seasoned, so the different texture is probably the biggest hurdle -- turkey pepperoni isn't close enough for me, by the way). Once artificial meats are mixed in with other things successfully, perhaps I Can't Believe It's Not Steak isn't too far off..
If it turns out that growable meats are any more efficient than growing grass to tend to a cow or chicken while maintaining similar protein values, then there will be great advantages to every society who can adopt them.
I tried out several encoders in 2001 when considering compressing my music library. I tried double blind tests on the best realistic equipment I'd be using (then a 10 year old amp and pretty new Bose 501 speakers -- both are now clearly 4 years older) using my PC sound card's RCA outputs. Not an audiophile setup by any means, but certainly a bit better than the PC's internal speaker.
In my tests, Ogg Vorbis at 192KBps, MP3 (LAME) at 256KBps and something else.. WMA? at 256KBps were not decipherable from the original CD to my ears. Interestingly enough, I favored Ogg Vorbis even more because when I backed it down to 128KBps the artifacs I could hear sounded better than MP3's at 168. My choice was made -- Ogg Vorbis at 192KBps would be my preferred codec.
So I went around looking for what could play it. Only a few pieces of software (winamp and xmms were the two I cared about) and zero hardware. I had aspirations of taking music with me, so that left all but MP3 out of the game at the time.
I currently use iTunes to store and organize my library of 400+ CDs and synchronize a subset to my 1st generation 5GB iPod. Now that I've put that much effort into a single program, either another organizer will need to beat iTunes by being more comprehensive, useful, intuitive and stable, or iTunes will have to support Ogg Vorbis for me to encode future CDs in a codec other than MP3. Once iTunes encodes and plays Ogg Vorbis files, then I'll see about an iPod or similar that will play them (these days I'm in the iPod Shuffle price range). Since iTunes is a free (as in beer.. but where's all this free beer people talk about?) encoder, I'm not willing to pay for the inconvenience of switching to a new program.