$7.50--the cost of a single movie ticket at the theater!
Or, at least around here, quite a bit below the cost of a movie ticket at the theater! At my local theater, they just raised the prices to an even $10 USD.
Personally, I'm waiting until I can easily rent HD media at the local video store, although I know Netflix is already/currently supporting both formats. Plus, I need to buy an HDTV first.. which I think is the other big hold-back. Slashdot might be surprised, but most people outside silicon valley do *NOT* have a high-def TV.
Seems you're not alone! Enlightenment a light window manager? Sheesh! Next thing they will tell us is that it ships with a lightweight word-processor called Emacs.
Then again, in those days, we thought Netscape Communicator 4.x was bloated... although, despite living in the age of dial-up, it was at least 17MB, the same size that Firefox is currently!
Here in the United States, practically everyone has a car, and somewhere over 99% of those have obtained a license ostensibly proving that they've been educated in their use. And yet the road is still full of people acting like idiots and jeopardizing both their own lives as well as those around them
Where are your statistics coming from? Nationally, 13% of fatal accidents are caused by unlicensed drivers. This is why illegal aliens should be given a way to obtain a driver's license without the fear of deportation. Second, who said that a the license is ostensibly proving that they've been educated in the operation of a motor vehicle? Compared to some other nations, the licensing requirements in the USA are very low. The by-product of a culture that practically requires every resident to operate a vehicle.
This culture guarantees that people that would prefer not to drive, or feel uncomfortable driving, must get behind the wheel anyway.
Is this like and adult open source version of lego mindstorm? I remember loving that as a kid, never really figured out how to make it do anything, though....
They weren't even released until 1998. You either weren't a kid, or I have good reason to feel old.
When I read that they administered 3000 times the amount of a human dose to an elephant, it got me curious.
The question is... compared to the normal dose -when-? The typical human dose of LSD has changed over the decades. A dosage in the 90's would be about 10 times less than one would have taken in the 60's. Thus, if they calculated the elephant's original dosage by 1960's standards, it would be significantly higher than one would calculate on a modern scale. So the question is, is the 3000 times the human dose according to modern, or 1960's dosage patterns?
Here is what wikipedia has to say, with specific numbers:
Generally, the dosage that will produce a threshold psychotropic effect in humans is considered to be 20 to 30g.[17][16] According to Glass and Henderson's review, black-market LSD is largely lterated though sometimes contaminated by manufacturing by-products. Typical doses in the 1960s ranged from 200 to 1000g while street samples of the 1970s contained 30 to 300g. By the 1980s, the amount had reduced to between 100 to 125 g, lowering more in the 1990s to the 20-80 g range. (Lower doses, Glass and Henderson found, generally produce fewer bad trips.)[15] Dosages by frequent users can reach up to 1,200 g (1.2 mg), although such a high dosage may precipitate severe physical and psychological effects.
I agree on Time Machine.... It's very cool, overall, but needs a little more work. (For example, Apple's solution to incompatibilities with their Aperture application is to exclude Aperture's photo database from your backups. Great... so if I'm a pro photographer, Time Machine can't even back up the most important data on my whole system for me?) It also needs a fix (supposedly coming soon) to allow using a shared disk off an Apple Airport Extreme router.
There are hacks to get TimeMachine-over-the-network working, I'm expecting someone will have this automated before too long.
Bad example.. ENIAC was not a binary system like those of today, it was decimal -- thats right, it was base 10. Its memory, then, would've been calculated as powers of 10, not 2. For the ENIAC, a kilobit would really have been 1000 bits, not 1024 -- not that the original ENIAC had nearly that amount of storage, it only had 15 decimal-bit "storage" in the form of painted lightbulbs. However, being decimal, that allowed for calculations up to pow(10,15).
The reality is that this is not preventing him from being in the presidential race necessarily, just from running as a Democrat. Unfortunately, in the modern-day USA, you can only realistically run as a Republican or Democrat.
In my experience... show me one that does all of the terrible things that people describe here on Slashdot. I've never seen a DVD that I couldn't skip right to the menu. Sometimes you have to push the menu/title key a couple times, but I've never had to fast-forward.
I've always used the cheap DVD players. They're simply a lot better bang for the buck. They support more formats, features, and they come unlocked by default or are often easily unlocked if you live in a region where it isn't legal for them to ship unlocked units.
Wow, what a strawman. This isn't about your freedom.
However, I agree with some the arguments you make, if you view things from a purely American point of view. You describe an implementation and a system where public transportation has failed. However, one flawed implementation does not mean that the entire idea is bad.
Public transportation works in Europe. Granted, there are geographical differences as well as cultural differences. If you spent enough time in the right European cities, you would probably see systems where public transportation is working.
Here is one case study... I spent a year in Poznan, Poland (pop 567,882). In that city, there are 20 trams (streetcar) lines and 57 bus lines. The trams run center-city and through the more dense areas, with buses making up the difference. While some own vehicles, the public transportation system has high ridership, to the point that during rush-hour one must be careful not to be crushed... People are not living by loud trains, but they are more comfortable with walking and riding bikes, and there are sidewalks (something quite rare in the USA). It may be 1-2 kilometers to the nearest tram stop, and that is perfectly fine by the city inhabitants. In fact, I would drive to the mall a few kilometers away, I would get heckled by my wife's friends -- who would drive if it was only a 30 minute walk? That said, I lived right next to the tram on the 6th floor of a high-rise, and hardly noticed the tram. It wasn't much, if at all, worse than the traffic of an average suburban street in the USA.
The area in discussion is fairly low income, relative to the prices for gasoline and for automobiles themselves. While the salaries were magnitudes lower than those in the USA, gas prices were around $6/gallon. So, if gasoline was lower, or if salaries were higher, would public transportation falter? Perhaps slightly, but one must also remember that the streets in this particular city couldn't handle that much traffic. In fact, this is already a situation occurring in Poznan, as more become capable of affording the cost of an automobile. The streets are becoming crowded at rush hour, and many drivers are choosing to return to public transportation as it is simply a much faster method of travel. Why wait in a traffic jam, watching the tram go past?
In other cities I've visited where the cost of travel was not as much a concern, such as Germany, I found cities where public transportation was not popular, but on the other hand, good city planning had eliminated the need. Walking from one side of the city to the other was no more than an hour, and much less by bicycle. They simply built a number of smaller cities with great urban planning, and in the 20th century linked them with high speed light rail. Thus, if you would rather take a train for 40 minutes, rather than walking for 40 minutes, you could do that as well.
Either way, I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in Europe that spent more than 40 minutes getting to work. I only knew a small handful of people that used a car for work travel, and they were in sales, freelance photography, and real estate. All cases were they were constantly 'on the go' where a car made more sense. (and even then, they would often use public transportation)
In the US, the combination of suburban sprawl and law have created an environment where companies have pulled themselves out of the downtown environments. This amongst other practices has have undoubtedly lead to much success, raising profits, and has helped make us a rich nation. However, these are also the things that, if you want to bring freedom into this, have stripped us of freedom, such as the freedom to walk down the street without the fear of being run over -- something that Ray Bradbury certainly predicted with 451/451' vision.
Finally, my point isn't that you're wrong that there are challenges, I admit that there are. In the USA, city planning is simply not pedestrian and public-transportation friendly. To ch
It depends on where you're from. In Poland, it is hard to find a DVD player that is NOT region-free from the factory. The players go so far as to emblazon this on the packaging, right next to where it tells you that it will automatically load subtitles files for your DiVX and Xvid files. (there is a big scene in Poland for providing subtitles to imported and pirated films that haven't yet had a regional release)
> Well, that and the "window isn't active, and so ignores your mouse operation and simply > activates, instead" issue, but that's not strictly the Gimp's fault, or at least, that's my > impression. Lots of programs have that problem on the Mac.
That is an issue with OSX's X11.app, specifically I believe with the window manager it ships with. It doesn't do that on Linux, and I don't believe on Windows either.
Re:Most important thing
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What exactly is wrong with the UI in the Gimp? I have always preferred the UI of the Gimp to Photoshop. I think the biggest complaint of users of Paintshop and Photoshop is that the Gimp does not use MDI. Yet, for many, this is an advantage as it works better with multiple monitors and allows for greater multitasking. (Linux and MacOS users tend not to maximize apps). Plus, if you really want MDI, just use a virtual desktop. Even Vista has them, and they offload the "window grouping" from the application to the OS, like it should be done.
Comcast just needs to set (and publish) transfer limits that are reasonable for the data plan. For instance, Comcast seems to have a 300-400GB transfer limit at the moment (although it can vary...) If Comcast raises their speeds to 200mbps but do not increase their transfer limits, customers could max out their monthly limit in only 4 hours.
This does have me thinking about the new 17/2mbps service that I signed up for with Comcast. Does having a higher data plan increase the secret limit, or do I just put myself at greater risk of hitting the secret ceiling?:(
> arrested in the US on DMCA charges when he'd come to present at a conference.
Something particularly notable since at the time, the DMCA was a very new law. It was, I believe, the first notable case putting the DMCA to test in court. Furthermore, the case was a particular rallying point amongst geeks, not only because of the potential consequences it had for US Citizens, but also for visitors to the US; Dmitry had at worst provided a presentation in the US. (he did not develop or design anything on US soil, nor was he a US citizen)
In the end, Elcomsoft was acquitted and fears were subsided. However, comments from the case indicate that foreign nationals developing software to circumvent DRM may not be advised to travel to the US. It appears that Elcomsoft was only acquitted based on their motives, not based on the legality of their actions, which jurors commented that they believed were in fact illegal.
This is the company with which Dmitry Sklyarov was employed at the time of his arrest by the FBI, back in 2001. Before his arrest, at a conference, Dmitry made a presentation on cracking Adobe's eBook DRM. The method used for this crack was utilized in Elcomsoft's Advanced eBook Processor software.
This was really big news back in 2001-2002, although I guess thats a bit too long ago for most slashdot readers, since I (surprisingly) haven't seen any other comments mentioning this.
> If it has gotten to the point that ads are expected and feel 'right' in a video game, then the > marketeers have won.
I'm not so sure that there was ever a battle to win. More of a 'bending over'.
Anyway, there are places where you *expect* to see ads, such as billboards on the side of a highway, oin a subway station, or on the side of a bus. Older games either missed this realism (come on, how many highways do you know without any billboards?) or had fake advertisements.
I guess for the game developers, having real ads is win-win.. they don't have to spend time on making graphics for fake ads, some more realism (since real life *does* have ads), and they get additional income.
> I find it very hard to believe that a Slashdot reader couldn't work out a simple web site.
Rather, I think this is a testament to how terrible their site is. I ordered (for $0), but found it very difficult to navigate their website and almost gave up myself.
I really don't believe it is a matter of stupidity. If grandmothers can shop on amazon, why can't they at radiohead's website?
This is my thought exactly... I bought it for "0" but, if I like it, I'll go back and "buy it again" for something around £2-4. Remember, I'm not getting a booklet, cd, or case... and I'm getting it in a lossy format. Personally though, I haven't really liked this album too much.
The way I see it, if they want to charge $12 retail for a CD, I should be able to pay $10 for a lossless copy and $8 for a lossy copy. I should note that $12 is my upper limit on a CD purchase, quite generous considering I've never spent more than $5 on a DVD.
I think its pretty bad when slashdot readers are confused by and have significant problems with using an order form.. . I agree that the website is terrible, absolutely confusing, and very unclear in the premise. It is simply really, really, really bad.
Except in the US, those are micro-sized. The smallest cars available in the US are the Mini Cooper, Toyota Yaris (3 door), Scion Hatchback (5 door), and the Honda Fit. The Smart ForTwo is expected to arrive in 08'.
My Yaris feels like a boat compared to most EU cars, and like the Titantic compared to the Maluch (Fiat 126p).
You can use the MTD driver on Linux to use a video card's memory as a block device. You can then test it with standard block device testing tools such as bonnie++ or through some custom (but relatively simple) tests via dd (read and write some patterns).
Slashdot Mirror
Or, at least around here, quite a bit below the cost of a movie ticket at the theater! At my local theater, they just raised the prices to an even $10 USD.
Personally, I'm waiting until I can easily rent HD media at the local video store, although I know Netflix is already/currently supporting both formats. Plus, I need to buy an HDTV first.. which I think is the other big hold-back. Slashdot might be surprised, but most people outside silicon valley do *NOT* have a high-def TV.
Seems you're not alone! Enlightenment a light window manager? Sheesh! Next thing they will tell us is that it ships with a lightweight word-processor called Emacs.
Then again, in those days, we thought Netscape Communicator 4.x was bloated... although, despite living in the age of dial-up, it was at least 17MB, the same size that Firefox is currently!
Where are your statistics coming from? Nationally, 13% of fatal accidents are caused by unlicensed drivers. This is why illegal aliens should be given a way to obtain a driver's license without the fear of deportation. Second, who said that a the license is ostensibly proving that they've been educated in the operation of a motor vehicle? Compared to some other nations, the licensing requirements in the USA are very low. The by-product of a culture that practically requires every resident to operate a vehicle.
This culture guarantees that people that would prefer not to drive, or feel uncomfortable driving, must get behind the wheel anyway.
They weren't even released until 1998. You either weren't a kid, or I have good reason to feel old.
as other have implied, the 'u' character before the 'g' disappeared when pasted into Slashdot.
The question is... compared to the normal dose -when-? The typical human dose of LSD has changed over the decades. A dosage in the 90's would be about 10 times less than one would have taken in the 60's. Thus, if they calculated the elephant's original dosage by 1960's standards, it would be significantly higher than one would calculate on a modern scale. So the question is, is the 3000 times the human dose according to modern, or 1960's dosage patterns?
Here is what wikipedia has to say, with specific numbers:
There are hacks to get TimeMachine-over-the-network working, I'm expecting someone will have this automated before too long.
Bad example.. ENIAC was not a binary system like those of today, it was decimal -- thats right, it was base 10. Its memory, then, would've been calculated as powers of 10, not 2. For the ENIAC, a kilobit would really have been 1000 bits, not 1024 -- not that the original ENIAC had nearly that amount of storage, it only had 15 decimal-bit "storage" in the form of painted lightbulbs. However, being decimal, that allowed for calculations up to pow(10,15).
The reality is that this is not preventing him from being in the presidential race necessarily, just from running as a Democrat. Unfortunately, in the modern-day USA, you can only realistically run as a Republican or Democrat.
In my experience... show me one that does all of the terrible things that people describe here on Slashdot. I've never seen a DVD that I couldn't skip right to the menu. Sometimes you have to push the menu/title key a couple times, but I've never had to fast-forward.
I've always used the cheap DVD players. They're simply a lot better bang for the buck. They support more formats, features, and they come unlocked by default or are often easily unlocked if you live in a region where it isn't legal for them to ship unlocked units.
Wow, what a strawman. This isn't about your freedom.
However, I agree with some the arguments you make, if you view things from a purely American point of view. You describe an implementation and a system where public transportation has failed. However, one flawed implementation does not mean that the entire idea is bad.
Public transportation works in Europe. Granted, there are geographical differences as well as cultural differences. If you spent enough time in the right European cities, you would probably see systems where public transportation is working.
Here is one case study... I spent a year in Poznan, Poland (pop 567,882). In that city, there are 20 trams (streetcar) lines and 57 bus lines. The trams run center-city and through the more dense areas, with buses making up the difference. While some own vehicles, the public transportation system has high ridership, to the point that during rush-hour one must be careful not to be crushed... People are not living by loud trains, but they are more comfortable with walking and riding bikes, and there are sidewalks (something quite rare in the USA). It may be 1-2 kilometers to the nearest tram stop, and that is perfectly fine by the city inhabitants. In fact, I would drive to the mall a few kilometers away, I would get heckled by my wife's friends -- who would drive if it was only a 30 minute walk? That said, I lived right next to the tram on the 6th floor of a high-rise, and hardly noticed the tram. It wasn't much, if at all, worse than the traffic of an average suburban street in the USA.
The area in discussion is fairly low income, relative to the prices for gasoline and for automobiles themselves. While the salaries were magnitudes lower than those in the USA, gas prices were around $6/gallon. So, if gasoline was lower, or if salaries were higher, would public transportation falter? Perhaps slightly, but one must also remember that the streets in this particular city couldn't handle that much traffic. In fact, this is already a situation occurring in Poznan, as more become capable of affording the cost of an automobile. The streets are becoming crowded at rush hour, and many drivers are choosing to return to public transportation as it is simply a much faster method of travel. Why wait in a traffic jam, watching the tram go past?
In other cities I've visited where the cost of travel was not as much a concern, such as Germany, I found cities where public transportation was not popular, but on the other hand, good city planning had eliminated the need. Walking from one side of the city to the other was no more than an hour, and much less by bicycle. They simply built a number of smaller cities with great urban planning, and in the 20th century linked them with high speed light rail. Thus, if you would rather take a train for 40 minutes, rather than walking for 40 minutes, you could do that as well.
Either way, I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in Europe that spent more than 40 minutes getting to work. I only knew a small handful of people that used a car for work travel, and they were in sales, freelance photography, and real estate. All cases were they were constantly 'on the go' where a car made more sense. (and even then, they would often use public transportation)
In the US, the combination of suburban sprawl and law have created an environment where companies have pulled themselves out of the downtown environments. This amongst other practices has have undoubtedly lead to much success, raising profits, and has helped make us a rich nation. However, these are also the things that, if you want to bring freedom into this, have stripped us of freedom, such as the freedom to walk down the street without the fear of being run over -- something that Ray Bradbury certainly predicted with 451/451' vision.
Finally, my point isn't that you're wrong that there are challenges, I admit that there are. In the USA, city planning is simply not pedestrian and public-transportation friendly. To ch
It depends on where you're from. In Poland, it is hard to find a DVD player that is NOT region-free from the factory. The players go so far as to emblazon this on the packaging, right next to where it tells you that it will automatically load subtitles files for your DiVX and Xvid files. (there is a big scene in Poland for providing subtitles to imported and pirated films that haven't yet had a regional release)
> Well, that and the "window isn't active, and so ignores your mouse operation and simply
> activates, instead" issue, but that's not strictly the Gimp's fault, or at least, that's my
> impression. Lots of programs have that problem on the Mac.
That is an issue with OSX's X11.app, specifically I believe with the window manager it ships with. It doesn't do that on Linux, and I don't believe on Windows either.
What exactly is wrong with the UI in the Gimp? I have always preferred the UI of the Gimp to Photoshop. I think the biggest complaint of users of Paintshop and Photoshop is that the Gimp does not use MDI. Yet, for many, this is an advantage as it works better with multiple monitors and allows for greater multitasking. (Linux and MacOS users tend not to maximize apps). Plus, if you really want MDI, just use a virtual desktop. Even Vista has them, and they offload the "window grouping" from the application to the OS, like it should be done.
Comcast just needs to set (and publish) transfer limits that are reasonable for the data plan. For instance, Comcast seems to have a 300-400GB transfer limit at the moment (although it can vary...) If Comcast raises their speeds to 200mbps but do not increase their transfer limits, customers could max out their monthly limit in only 4 hours.
:(
This does have me thinking about the new 17/2mbps service that I signed up for with Comcast. Does having a higher data plan increase the secret limit, or do I just put myself at greater risk of hitting the secret ceiling?
> arrested in the US on DMCA charges when he'd come to present at a conference.
Something particularly notable since at the time, the DMCA was a very new law. It was, I believe, the first notable case putting the DMCA to test in court. Furthermore, the case was a particular rallying point amongst geeks, not only because of the potential consequences it had for US Citizens, but also for visitors to the US; Dmitry had at worst provided a presentation in the US. (he did not develop or design anything on US soil, nor was he a US citizen)
In the end, Elcomsoft was acquitted and fears were subsided. However, comments from the case indicate that foreign nationals developing software to circumvent DRM may not be advised to travel to the US. It appears that Elcomsoft was only acquitted based on their motives, not based on the legality of their actions, which jurors commented that they believed were in fact illegal.
This is the company with which Dmitry Sklyarov was employed at the time of his arrest by the FBI, back in 2001. Before his arrest, at a conference, Dmitry made a presentation on cracking Adobe's eBook DRM. The method used for this crack was utilized in Elcomsoft's Advanced eBook Processor software.
This was really big news back in 2001-2002, although I guess thats a bit too long ago for most slashdot readers, since I (surprisingly) haven't seen any other comments mentioning this.
> If it has gotten to the point that ads are expected and feel 'right' in a video game, then the
> marketeers have won.
I'm not so sure that there was ever a battle to win. More of a 'bending over'.
Anyway, there are places where you *expect* to see ads, such as billboards on the side of a highway, oin a subway station, or on the side of a bus. Older games either missed this realism (come on, how many highways do you know without any billboards?) or had fake advertisements.
I guess for the game developers, having real ads is win-win.. they don't have to spend time on making graphics for fake ads, some more realism (since real life *does* have ads), and they get additional income.
> I find it very hard to believe that a Slashdot reader couldn't work out a simple web site.
Rather, I think this is a testament to how terrible their site is. I ordered (for $0), but found it very difficult to navigate their website and almost gave up myself.
I really don't believe it is a matter of stupidity. If grandmothers can shop on amazon, why can't they at radiohead's website?
This is my thought exactly... I bought it for "0" but, if I like it, I'll go back and "buy it again" for something around £2-4. Remember, I'm not getting a booklet, cd, or case... and I'm getting it in a lossy format. Personally though, I haven't really liked this album too much.
The way I see it, if they want to charge $12 retail for a CD, I should be able to pay $10 for a lossless copy and $8 for a lossy copy. I should note that $12 is my upper limit on a CD purchase, quite generous considering I've never spent more than $5 on a DVD.
I think its pretty bad when slashdot readers are confused by and have significant problems with using an order form.. . I agree that the website is terrible, absolutely confusing, and very unclear in the premise. It is simply really, really, really bad.
No wonder people are getting it on bittorrent.
Huh? This is old news, and hardly technical at all -- by my standards, anyway.
Now, whitepapers, the ACM, IEEE, RFCs, etc... those are technical.
Except in the US, those are micro-sized. The smallest cars available in the US are the Mini Cooper, Toyota Yaris (3 door), Scion Hatchback (5 door), and the Honda Fit. The Smart ForTwo is expected to arrive in 08'.
My Yaris feels like a boat compared to most EU cars, and like the Titantic compared to the Maluch (Fiat 126p).
It is a feature they've had for over a decade, so its hardly new, and it doesn't matter to "mom and pop"?
You can use the MTD driver on Linux to use a video card's memory as a block device. You can then test it with standard block device testing tools such as bonnie++ or through some custom (but relatively simple) tests via dd (read and write some patterns).