I'm not certain you should put stock in those rankings when it comes to technical fields. Caltech and MIT are probably the USA's premier technical schools, along with probably what, carnegie mellon? I'd bet that Yale's classics studies or world impact studies are better, but I'd bet MIT's math is better than Yale's.
And the simple answer is socialize bulk data transfer. Build a government telco-hut in every city in America with 30,000 or more people. Run huge-ass fiber pipes everywhere, in star topology radiating from all the major cities, bigger pipes in larger cities. Put hubs in NYC, Boston, Washington DC, Atlanta, Tampa, Dallas, Memphis, Chicago, Denver, Vegas, LA, and San Jose, with leafs out from there. Peer with MAE-East and MAE-West. Make it government-owned, and charge everyone the same rate, regardless of the size of their company. Also have everyone sign an agreement saying that by buying access to this superexpresshighway, you agree to route traffic according to BGP rules for anyone on your end of the network.
Problem solved, and we can finally get that 100Mbps internet for $10/month like the Swedes have had for several years now.
The one thing that I did miss in the movies that wasn't there from the books was the sense of joy and mirth that the elves can have. I mean, it was much more prevalent in the Hobbit than it was in LOTR, but it was still very much out of character in the movies. The elves were always sad and somber, never happy and singing, and they were constantly singing in the books. They moved and walked and talked slowly and deliberate, whereas in the book they were whooping and hollering and asking Bilbo for a 2nd reading of his poems, etc.
Today's amazing world of new discovery is the internet, man.
As a child of the 80's, I couldn't imagine living in a world where I didn't have instant access to infinite information, as well as interaction with people of all classes, races, and nationality. The internet is today's final frontier, it is the great equalizer, it is the breaker of barriers and opener of doors - and eyes. This is where social progress is being made. If you want to talk scientific progress as well, the modern day Einstein, Bell, and Tesla are now (in no particular order) Bram Cohen, Shawn Fanning, and Justin Frankel.
The internet is the most important thing humankind has produced, adapted, and adopted in the past quarter century. It is capable of breaking corporate monopolies as well as building massive revenue streams; capable of watching all the citizens, as well as watching all the watchers; capable of providing a channel for infinite entertainment, as well as many many jobs; capable of bringing all the peoples of the world together. Believe it; the internet is humankind's most valuable resource going into the 21st century.
Don't bother, dude, I've had that guy red-flagged in my slashdot zoo for several years now, because I'd had one too many of his hyperbolic insane religious right-wing nut comments. A couple of years back, he tried to convince me I was going to burn in hell for saying that if I ever had a daughter, I wouldn't mind if she had sex before she got married.
This SSH client comes with bot the standard terminal program for SSHing and getting a shell, but it also comes with an SCP component. It looks like most FTP clients I've seen - Click a button to open a connection, in the resulting dialogue box, put in the server to connect to and the username to use to connect, click connect, type in password when prompted, and then Voila', you're given on the Left-hand side of the program, a list of your local files, and on the right side of the program, a list of the remote computer's files. To upload or download, drag and drop (from either inside the program from the left to right or right to left; or drag and drop works from the Windows explorer).
See? Encrypted (it's ssh). FTP-like. Keeps security in mind without jailing users, at the same time that it keeps their passwords safe, at the expense of a little speed.
The thing I remember about XP was that networking XP machines together (as in, windows networking / samba / workgroups / whatever you want to call it) was significantly easier in XP than even in 2000. XP tends to find other computers and printers without much effort.
That was what made me eventually upgrade. Setting up windows workgroups got tedious in 2000 once I realized it didn't require effort in XP.
Except "incremental improvements" don't generally require a lot of additional support. What do you do when Joe Blow has pretty much figured out how to use Windows? What do you charge for then?
Hardware.
Seriously, I am not a fan of Microsoft-The-Software-Company. But, despite a recent switch to Logitech (G5 Mouse / G11 Keyboard), I'm a huge fan of Microsoft hardware, especially mice, and also steering wheels, joysticks, keyboards, etc.
Why can't the OS be at least as good as the mouse? I'd buy that. The intellimouse explorer isn't perfect, but it sure was pretty good.
But it's being bundled with home computers, and your average Joe is NOT going to know about the problems. If he's lucky, he may have a friend who recommends staying with XP for now. But for many, many people, they'll just buy 'the whole thing' from PC World and be running Vista.
I used to think the same thing.
"Vista sucks, but it'll eventually be the standard, once everyone buys a new computer from dell/hp/whoever and it comes with vista."...That is until recently, when I purchased a new laptop for my wife and found that it comes with the option of Vista or XP when you order. And I also have heard of other manufacturers doing this - appearantly, people dislike Vista enough that it's becoming more and more common to offer XP as an alternative. I got it with Vista, so she could try it, but she really didn't like it. When I put XP on her laptop, I also had to go find drivers for it, but there were a multitude of pages on how to get XP working on a Dell 14xx laptop, since support.dell.com isn't providing all the XP drivers. It seems it's really common.
It will convert the current (decimal) answer into a fraction.
Consequently, it can also go the other way.
When you perform an operation on the TI-83 (or most of the other TI-8x) without specifying the input, it assumes the contents of the variable "Ans", which is stored. You can actually see this at work here, in interactive flash:
Looks like they get your credit card number when you sign up, promising not to charge you for the "free" service or something, and then later charge you because you forgot to cancel their subscription.
Probably when they tell you that "you only pay shipping and handling".
Yeah, creating a single-use card with $10 on it would be the way to get back at these tards.
I worked years ago in the Audio department at a best buy. I don't know the current state of home electronics, but I know what the mid-range state of electronics was about, oh, 8 years ago.
If Bose is not a quality audio solution, then who is? Are we back to Sony, Pioneer?
I'd rather have EITHER of those brands of speakers over bose. Any day. We also sold Cerwin Vega and JBL and yamaha, and I'd rather have any of those. The only brand that I'd buy bose over was "KLH", which was our generic house brand, and to be honest, I might still buy the KLH and save 75%, and just live with the cardboard speaker cones.
Commercial bose speakers suck. Period. Maybe their high end stuff is good, but if you walk into an electronics store, and you pick up bose bookshelfs (301's or 501's), you will be vastly dissapointed. Even more so, if you pick up the little cubes-and-subwoofer. Here's the clue, those cubes are like 2.5" drivers with very little dynamic range - they peak somewhere around 10kh and they don't go above or below it by more than a bit. Unless you buy the horribly expensive one (it was $1200 when I worked there, god knows how much it is now) the subwoofer will NOT BE POWERED. I mean, come on, wtf. Those speaker systems at the low end can't do 5.1 sound, because you're expected to run the speakers all to the bose sub first, then off to the cubes. The sub has a crossover where it takes out the mids and lows and sends the highs to the cubes. And on top of that, even if you get the powered sub, it's still only one or two 6.5" speakers. Good luck getting any quality bass out of that where anything below 140hz doesn't sound like a wet fart.*
And then there's the wave radio. Yes, what I wanted on my music was EXTRA post processing that adds reverb and stereo separation, and then I want the music to travel through long windy tubes in order to cancel out all the crisp highs. Oh, and if you could charge me $500 for a CD-clock radio, that'd be great.
Seriously, buy anything but bose. I like JBL speakers, and even though I wouldn't buy a Sony receiver, I own sony speakers.
*I'm looking at best buy's site now, and they're selling the Bose 6.1 system for... wait for it... $1300. And the bass module now has THREE 5 1/4" speakers. Maybe it really can do 6.1 now.
Whatever. Seriously, I'm no audiophile, but I know what sounds good and what doesn't, and after working in the audio department for months, and listening to the same songs on 6 different brands of speakers, I can tell you... bose is not good.
That said - insulation is a better investment in almost all houses, IF it's possible to add without reconstruction - and in some types/ages of house, it isn't.
's why some day I want to build a geodesic dome. Something like one of these. They're cheaper than a traditional house to build, they're MASSIVELY energy efficient, hurricane proof, have no internal load bearing walls, adaptable, and kinda cool, if you ask me.
I am a pretty environmentally concerned person, I lean left and I try to conserve. Without growing dreads, eating granola, and wearing hemp kilts, I'm pretty green oriented.
Which is why I endorse NUCLEAR ENERGY.
That's it, folks. We need nuclear energy. Period. It's the only energy source which can generate enough energy to stabilize the energy needs of this planet. But you never hear the environmental nuts talk about opening more nuclear energy. What we need is more pragmatic environmental nuts, like me. I'm not trying to preserve the environment so that the little squirrels can be happy; I'm trying to preserve it so humans can continue to live here. I'm sorry, I love squirrels, but when it comes to my kids versus squirrels... fuck the squirrels. Or, in the case of nuclear power, cold-water lake fish.
Nuclear power is safe, and while it has a massive impact on the ecosystem, I think that we can find enough cold water to act as a heat sink for the heat output of the nuclear plant. Either that, or find more efficient ways to use the heat output. It's also less polution-emitting than, say, coal or oil, and probably less hazardous than a plant that produces those cadmium-filled solar panels (and far more efficient, both monetarily and space efficient)
But, no. The leftie tree-hugging hippie liberals won't vote for more nuclear power, because the environmentalists are all running around in their homespun dresses and their hemp sandals, screaming about hugging your children with nuclear arms, and the rightie fascist corporate monkeys won't listen to proposals for nuclear power because it takes away money from the big energy companies.
Nuclear power is the only viable savior of the human race. The sooner people realize this, the better.
i mean wow... pulling 49 amps over the 12 v rail... you might as well sell them with a dc generator and solid copper power rails.
seriously add in liquid cooling and cold cathodes and a 52" HDTV and youre talking over 3 killowatts of power draw...
Well, yeah, maybe, sort of. Since the AC power comes out of the wall at 120V (and someone jump in and correct me if I'm wrong), the 12v 49a is the downconversion of 4.9a and 120v. 4.9a pulling at the outlet is a lot for a computer, it's true, but I mean, most houses these days are wired with 15a circuits. A 15a circuit will be able to hold three of these 12v rails (so, probably 2 computers once you add in the 3v and I think there's a 5v rail on the atx power connector), or to put it in perspective, slightly less than two modern waffle irons.
4.9a is a lot of power for a computer. It's not a lot of power for any modern power tool or small kitchen appliance. The wow factor isn't that this computer uses that much power; it's that up until now, the rest of the computers haven't used this much power.
You're not happy with the direction of the project?
Fork it. It's LGPL'd. Take the code, release it under your new project, and make improvements that "the community", whatever the heck that means to you, will approve of.
Sheesh, as a previous poster said, tough crowd. Sun can't do anything right in the eyes of slashdot smitties.
There's also the retailer's cut. Retailers taking 60% of the final price is not unheard of.
I usually stop reading when I see "iSuppli."
While I'm not disagreeing with you that iSuppli's numbers seem to be lacking in several sunk costs, often in the case of the AppleTM iPod, the distributer is apple.
And now I see that the files have DRM and whatever-else included with them, and they're not MP3's at all.
Nothing to see here.
"Random file format that is not industry standard doesn't play on device designed for industry standard files". Next thing you know, they'll be telling you your petrol car won't run on diesel.
MP3 is a clearly defined standard. These files either are, or they aren't, mp3's. If they are, iPods will play them. If they aren't, then they shouldn't be sold as MP3's.
I'd buy a mac laptop if the integrated touchpad had two mouse buttons.
Seriously. I like OSX, and even if I didn't, I can bootcamp it up now with XP. I love all the little touches - the feel of the laptop case is solid, the keyboard feels very responsive, the power connector that's magnetic - why has no one else done that? Why does every laptop on the planet not have a slot load CD drive? The LCD looks fantastic. I like the port layout. In EVERY respect, it's a fantastic piece of hardware.
Except that they need two mouse buttons.
Seriously, apple, wtf? I know you're doing stuff for the sake of "being different" and "standing out", but to me, one mouse button isn't being different, it's ignorant and to be honest, insulting to your customers. And it ain't like OSX isn't set up for it - I just set up four powermacs at work, and their mice have two buttons from the factory, you just have to set up OSX to recognize it. Two button mice have been the standard for at least 12-13 years now. Hell, on my desktop, my mouse has 7 buttons and a scroll/tilt wheel, and I use all of them. The mouse button is a deal breaker. Let's get with the times, and you might even sell more hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain you should put stock in those rankings when it comes to technical fields. Caltech and MIT are probably the USA's premier technical schools, along with probably what, carnegie mellon? I'd bet that Yale's classics studies or world impact studies are better, but I'd bet MIT's math is better than Yale's.
And the simple answer is socialize bulk data transfer. Build a government telco-hut in every city in America with 30,000 or more people. Run huge-ass fiber pipes everywhere, in star topology radiating from all the major cities, bigger pipes in larger cities. Put hubs in NYC, Boston, Washington DC, Atlanta, Tampa, Dallas, Memphis, Chicago, Denver, Vegas, LA, and San Jose, with leafs out from there. Peer with MAE-East and MAE-West. Make it government-owned, and charge everyone the same rate, regardless of the size of their company. Also have everyone sign an agreement saying that by buying access to this superexpresshighway, you agree to route traffic according to BGP rules for anyone on your end of the network.
Problem solved, and we can finally get that 100Mbps internet for $10/month like the Swedes have had for several years now.
~Wx
The one thing that I did miss in the movies that wasn't there from the books was the sense of joy and mirth that the elves can have. I mean, it was much more prevalent in the Hobbit than it was in LOTR, but it was still very much out of character in the movies. The elves were always sad and somber, never happy and singing, and they were constantly singing in the books. They moved and walked and talked slowly and deliberate, whereas in the book they were whooping and hollering and asking Bilbo for a 2nd reading of his poems, etc.
How about "Light all four rockets, THEN release whatever mechanism is keeping it earth-bound".
Today's amazing world of new discovery is the internet, man.
As a child of the 80's, I couldn't imagine living in a world where I didn't have instant access to infinite information, as well as interaction with people of all classes, races, and nationality. The internet is today's final frontier, it is the great equalizer, it is the breaker of barriers and opener of doors - and eyes. This is where social progress is being made. If you want to talk scientific progress as well, the modern day Einstein, Bell, and Tesla are now (in no particular order) Bram Cohen, Shawn Fanning, and Justin Frankel.
The internet is the most important thing humankind has produced, adapted, and adopted in the past quarter century. It is capable of breaking corporate monopolies as well as building massive revenue streams; capable of watching all the citizens, as well as watching all the watchers; capable of providing a channel for infinite entertainment, as well as many many jobs; capable of bringing all the peoples of the world together. Believe it; the internet is humankind's most valuable resource going into the 21st century.
~Wx
Don't bother, dude, I've had that guy red-flagged in my slashdot zoo for several years now, because I'd had one too many of his hyperbolic insane religious right-wing nut comments. A couple of years back, he tried to convince me I was going to burn in hell for saying that if I ever had a daughter, I wouldn't mind if she had sex before she got married.
Just forget him.
~Wx
http://www.ssh.com/support/downloads/secureshellwks/non-commercial.html
This is the answer to your problems.
This SSH client comes with bot the standard terminal program for SSHing and getting a shell, but it also comes with an SCP component. It looks like most FTP clients I've seen - Click a button to open a connection, in the resulting dialogue box, put in the server to connect to and the username to use to connect, click connect, type in password when prompted, and then Voila', you're given on the Left-hand side of the program, a list of your local files, and on the right side of the program, a list of the remote computer's files. To upload or download, drag and drop (from either inside the program from the left to right or right to left; or drag and drop works from the Windows explorer).
See? Encrypted (it's ssh). FTP-like. Keeps security in mind without jailing users, at the same time that it keeps their passwords safe, at the expense of a little speed.
~Wx
The thing I remember about XP was that networking XP machines together (as in, windows networking / samba / workgroups / whatever you want to call it) was significantly easier in XP than even in 2000. XP tends to find other computers and printers without much effort.
That was what made me eventually upgrade. Setting up windows workgroups got tedious in 2000 once I realized it didn't require effort in XP.
~Wx
Except "incremental improvements" don't generally require a lot of additional support. What do you do when Joe Blow has pretty much figured out how to use Windows? What do you charge for then?
Hardware.
Seriously, I am not a fan of Microsoft-The-Software-Company. But, despite a recent switch to Logitech (G5 Mouse / G11 Keyboard), I'm a huge fan of Microsoft hardware, especially mice, and also steering wheels, joysticks, keyboards, etc.
Why can't the OS be at least as good as the mouse? I'd buy that. The intellimouse explorer isn't perfect, but it sure was pretty good.
~Wx
But it's being bundled with home computers, and your average Joe is NOT going to know about the problems. If he's lucky, he may have a friend who recommends staying with XP for now. But for many, many people, they'll just buy 'the whole thing' from PC World and be running Vista.
I used to think the same thing.
"Vista sucks, but it'll eventually be the standard, once everyone buys a new computer from dell/hp/whoever and it comes with vista."
~Wx
Hit MATH
Hit 1
It will convert the current (decimal) answer into a fraction.
Consequently, it can also go the other way.
When you perform an operation on the TI-83 (or most of the other TI-8x) without specifying the input, it assumes the contents of the variable "Ans", which is stored. You can actually see this at work here, in interactive flash:
http://oit.southernct.edu/acc/miscellanea/ti83demo/ti83/fraction.swf
(I love my TI-85. All the other kids didn't get why my 85 was so much better than their 81's)
~Wx
Looks like they get your credit card number when you sign up, promising not to charge you for the "free" service or something, and then later charge you because you forgot to cancel their subscription.
Probably when they tell you that "you only pay shipping and handling".
Yeah, creating a single-use card with $10 on it would be the way to get back at these tards.
~Will
We don't have time for a handjob right now, Joe.
Ok, I'll bite.
I worked years ago in the Audio department at a best buy. I don't know the current state of home electronics, but I know what the mid-range state of electronics was about, oh, 8 years ago.
If Bose is not a quality audio solution, then who is? Are we back to Sony, Pioneer?
I'd rather have EITHER of those brands of speakers over bose. Any day. We also sold Cerwin Vega and JBL and yamaha, and I'd rather have any of those. The only brand that I'd buy bose over was "KLH", which was our generic house brand, and to be honest, I might still buy the KLH and save 75%, and just live with the cardboard speaker cones.
Commercial bose speakers suck. Period. Maybe their high end stuff is good, but if you walk into an electronics store, and you pick up bose bookshelfs (301's or 501's), you will be vastly dissapointed. Even more so, if you pick up the little cubes-and-subwoofer. Here's the clue, those cubes are like 2.5" drivers with very little dynamic range - they peak somewhere around 10kh and they don't go above or below it by more than a bit. Unless you buy the horribly expensive one (it was $1200 when I worked there, god knows how much it is now) the subwoofer will NOT BE POWERED. I mean, come on, wtf. Those speaker systems at the low end can't do 5.1 sound, because you're expected to run the speakers all to the bose sub first, then off to the cubes. The sub has a crossover where it takes out the mids and lows and sends the highs to the cubes. And on top of that, even if you get the powered sub, it's still only one or two 6.5" speakers. Good luck getting any quality bass out of that where anything below 140hz doesn't sound like a wet fart.*
And then there's the wave radio. Yes, what I wanted on my music was EXTRA post processing that adds reverb and stereo separation, and then I want the music to travel through long windy tubes in order to cancel out all the crisp highs. Oh, and if you could charge me $500 for a CD-clock radio, that'd be great.
Seriously, buy anything but bose. I like JBL speakers, and even though I wouldn't buy a Sony receiver, I own sony speakers.
*I'm looking at best buy's site now, and they're selling the Bose 6.1 system for
Whatever. Seriously, I'm no audiophile, but I know what sounds good and what doesn't, and after working in the audio department for months, and listening to the same songs on 6 different brands of speakers, I can tell you... bose is not good.
~Wx
That said - insulation is a better investment in almost all houses, IF it's possible to add without reconstruction - and in some types/ages of house, it isn't.
's why some day I want to build a geodesic dome. Something like one of these. They're cheaper than a traditional house to build, they're MASSIVELY energy efficient, hurricane proof, have no internal load bearing walls, adaptable, and kinda cool, if you ask me.
~Wx
Both of them are not the solution.
We know what the solution is.
I am a pretty environmentally concerned person, I lean left and I try to conserve. Without growing dreads, eating granola, and wearing hemp kilts, I'm pretty green oriented.
Which is why I endorse NUCLEAR ENERGY.
That's it, folks. We need nuclear energy. Period. It's the only energy source which can generate enough energy to stabilize the energy needs of this planet. But you never hear the environmental nuts talk about opening more nuclear energy. What we need is more pragmatic environmental nuts, like me. I'm not trying to preserve the environment so that the little squirrels can be happy; I'm trying to preserve it so humans can continue to live here. I'm sorry, I love squirrels, but when it comes to my kids versus squirrels... fuck the squirrels. Or, in the case of nuclear power, cold-water lake fish.
Nuclear power is safe, and while it has a massive impact on the ecosystem, I think that we can find enough cold water to act as a heat sink for the heat output of the nuclear plant. Either that, or find more efficient ways to use the heat output. It's also less polution-emitting than, say, coal or oil, and probably less hazardous than a plant that produces those cadmium-filled solar panels (and far more efficient, both monetarily and space efficient)
But, no. The leftie tree-hugging hippie liberals won't vote for more nuclear power, because the environmentalists are all running around in their homespun dresses and their hemp sandals, screaming about hugging your children with nuclear arms, and the rightie fascist corporate monkeys won't listen to proposals for nuclear power because it takes away money from the big energy companies.
Nuclear power is the only viable savior of the human race. The sooner people realize this, the better.
~Wx
i mean wow... pulling 49 amps over the 12 v rail... you might as well sell them with a dc generator and solid copper power rails.
seriously add in liquid cooling and cold cathodes and a 52" HDTV and youre talking over 3 killowatts of power draw...
Well, yeah, maybe, sort of. Since the AC power comes out of the wall at 120V (and someone jump in and correct me if I'm wrong), the 12v 49a is the downconversion of 4.9a and 120v. 4.9a pulling at the outlet is a lot for a computer, it's true, but I mean, most houses these days are wired with 15a circuits. A 15a circuit will be able to hold three of these 12v rails (so, probably 2 computers once you add in the 3v and I think there's a 5v rail on the atx power connector), or to put it in perspective, slightly less than two modern waffle irons.
4.9a is a lot of power for a computer. It's not a lot of power for any modern power tool or small kitchen appliance. The wow factor isn't that this computer uses that much power; it's that up until now, the rest of the computers haven't used this much power.
~wx
Only if she were naked and petrified.
<insert ascii art spam here>
I TOTALLY Agree! I'm a short, fat, balding, middle age, heavy drinker and smoker AND they won't even take ME! I mean WTF!
Dad?!?!?
For real.
You're not happy with the direction of the project?
Fork it. It's LGPL'd. Take the code, release it under your new project, and make improvements that "the community", whatever the heck that means to you, will approve of.
Sheesh, as a previous poster said, tough crowd. Sun can't do anything right in the eyes of slashdot smitties.
~X
There's also the retailer's cut. Retailers taking 60% of the final price is not unheard of.
I usually stop reading when I see "iSuppli."
While I'm not disagreeing with you that iSuppli's numbers seem to be lacking in several sunk costs, often in the case of the AppleTM iPod, the distributer is apple.
~Wx
And now I see that the files have DRM and whatever-else included with them, and they're not MP3's at all.
Nothing to see here.
"Random file format that is not industry standard doesn't play on device designed for industry standard files". Next thing you know, they'll be telling you your petrol car won't run on diesel.
~Wx
How can it not work on an iPod?
MP3 is a clearly defined standard. These files either are, or they aren't, mp3's. If they are, iPods will play them. If they aren't, then they shouldn't be sold as MP3's.
I'd buy a mac laptop if the integrated touchpad had two mouse buttons.
Seriously. I like OSX, and even if I didn't, I can bootcamp it up now with XP. I love all the little touches - the feel of the laptop case is solid, the keyboard feels very responsive, the power connector that's magnetic - why has no one else done that? Why does every laptop on the planet not have a slot load CD drive? The LCD looks fantastic. I like the port layout. In EVERY respect, it's a fantastic piece of hardware.
Except that they need two mouse buttons.
Seriously, apple, wtf? I know you're doing stuff for the sake of "being different" and "standing out", but to me, one mouse button isn't being different, it's ignorant and to be honest, insulting to your customers. And it ain't like OSX isn't set up for it - I just set up four powermacs at work, and their mice have two buttons from the factory, you just have to set up OSX to recognize it. Two button mice have been the standard for at least 12-13 years now. Hell, on my desktop, my mouse has 7 buttons and a scroll/tilt wheel, and I use all of them. The mouse button is a deal breaker. Let's get with the times, and you might even sell more hardware.