What battle? Internet appliances didn't work, consoles are becoming more PC like (see Xbox), and PCs have gained the ability to play movies and music. It seems to me that there has been a STRONG trend towards integration. As components get cheaper and smaller, it becomes so easy to integrate new features that even if they're not used by 99% of the population, it's still worth doing. The only "battle" seems to be that many buisness people seem to think that specialized devices are a good idea even though they're not (Forbes magazine was predicting a move to specialized devices)
As I recall, the ink it used was completely normal, it was the circuits under the skin that made it work. I think the LCD screen was just high contrast enough that you could see it through your skin (just like you can see blue veins and stuff). Given the difficulty involved in implanting artificial devices into people without getting rejection, it's not too surprising the we haven't seen anything practical come of it.
Re:Marketing mantra
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not, that's the point. DIY is time consuming, and may be more or less expensive depending on what you already have. The Tivo is premade, and again, sells for a set price.
Personally, I think it's an excellent idea. Sure, some of us geeks may still enjoy rolling our own, especially if we already have TV tuners or whatever, but for the majority of the population, it's good for Tivo to offer an entry level solution to start getting people used to the idea of a PVR.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has taken America's already stringent copyright, trademark, registration, and patent laws and forced them upon signing members in slightly revised format.The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has taken America's already stringent copyright, trademark, registration, and patent laws and forced them upon signing members in slightly revised format.
I think you mean "Europe's," not "America's." The most recent copyright extension was justified on the premise that we ought to bring America's copyright laws into harmony with Europe's. Indeed, Europe is the progenitor of this mess, America didn't even have copyrights until the late 1800's. It's just American corporations that have been most effective at exploiting the situation.
As I recall, the guy who made millions WAS a "low rent sleazebag" with a poor credit history. He's made lots from spamming, but if that job were taken away, most likely he'd crawl back into his hole.
Do they? Do you know what the ACLU's capabilities are? What percentage of their lawyers are busy with cases at the moment? Unless you actually know that the ACLU is more busy than usual, then even if you agree that Ashcroft is evil, it's simply offtopic Bush-bashing, appropriately labled as flamebait.
For that matter, I don't understand why they didn't put the capability in the DVD format to tell the TV when to pan, so that people could watch fullscreen or widescreen simply by zooming in on the picture.
It sounds more from your words that your girlfriend breaks her shit and you're both wanting Apple to pay it.
Why, because it breaks? Just because shit broke doesn't mean she was abusing it.
Regarding the power supply I've got one and it doesn't seem to have this problem.
Check the apple support boards. Her situation was far from unique, although most people had it happen after the warranty expire.
dozens of times?
Over 4 years, combining power and ethernet cable trips, by myself and others, yeah, probably between 12 and 24 times. If you think about it, that's really not that much, perhaps 3-6 times per year, of which perhaps 1/3rd to 1/2 were other people. Anyway, the point wasn't "we're clumsy," the point is "my Dell laptop has stood up to quite a bit of abuse." In contrast, my girlfriend has NOT tripped over her cables dozens of times, but it HAS stopped working.
Frankly, I think that things like this ought to be punishable in some way. Not necessarily a big punishment, because sometimes it's unclear if a clause in a contract is legal or not, but enough to prevent this sort of behavior. Aside from the fact that scaring the uninformed is inherently immoral, it would also help to limit contracts to a more readable length if people couldn't just stuff them full of "not responsible if this product blows up your house" crap.
Well, most of the time quality degradation is going to be because of damage to the tape itself, right? So I would think that playing it multiple times would still result in the same glitches each time. You might get a little bit of cleanup, but not a whole lot.
This is probably because OSX is attracting a lot of the people who read/. I went from Apple to PC about 8 years ago. This year, I started thinking about switching back. Read my last comment for information on why I decided against it (basically, my girlfriend's POS iBook kept breaking and costing hundreds of dollars to fix (with Apple refusing to honor their warranty)). She would switch to a PC, except she is computer illiterate enough that she doesn't think she'd be able to handle the change.
I can't explain it other than saying that there is a design quality and esthetic that is different in the Apple products.
If by "design quality," you mean "crappiness," then I agree with you. I was starting to become very tempted to try Apple products, until my girlfriend bought an iBook in September. Though she takes good care of it (at least, much better care than I take of my 4 year old Dell Latitude, which looks pretty beaten up but is still fully functional), two critical pieces have broken.
First of all, the power supply has broken twice, though once we were able to fix it with a pair of pliars. The connector is so poorly designed, I honestly can't imagine what they were thinking. It is easily bendable (which means it would be totally smashed if one were to step, or even sit on it), and one day the pin just broke off for no reason. Cost to fix? $80, not covered by warranty. For comparison, other companies will replace your laptop's power supply for $60, and have designed the connector in such a manner that it would take a sledgehammer to break one. When I had a power supply stop working on an IBM laptop some years back, they sent me out a new supply without even demanding to see the old one to determine if the damage was my fault or theirs.
Also, the ethernet port broke. Though my girlfriend has no memory of this, I can only assume she must have tripped over the ethernet cord at some point. That shouldn't be any big deal, I've done it dozens of times. Indeed, I think a laptop ought to be designed such that the ethernet cable can be yanked out without any damage to the port (as with the PCMCIA ethernet card on my Dell does). Whatever the case, Apple has also declared that this damage is not covered by warranty, and would cost over $800 to fix! Even worse, the lack of even a single PCMCIA port on the iBook means that it would be impossible to add an additional ethernet jack oneself.
Apple has a lot going for it in terms of software design and asthetics. But for rugged hardware, cost, technical support and customizability, I'm going to stick with PCs.
Ain't no such thing, my friend. Divx compression is lossy anyway, so stop waiting and just grab the VHS transfers. The Star Wars trilogy is very high quality (though the idiot forgot that the VHS version has the subtitles in the black bars, so aliens are incomprehensible), as is Temple of Doom (2 CDs). Raiders and Last Crusade are both pan & scan, but Last Crusade is at least decent quality.
I personally think that Doom, in addition to going for gross-out factor, was trying to be multicultural.
Well they failed on that count! Ask any Indian what they thought of Temple of Doom, I'm sure you'll get a fairly strong reaction. A good friend of mine, of Indian descent, though generally down on political correctness, refuses to watch Temple of Doom just because of its depiction of India. Just because the Thuggee cult was part of historical fact doesn't make the depiction of Indian culture in the movie accureate.
Adding to Tackhead's little reply, remember that the Spanish Flu, the scourge of 1918, had a mortality rate of only 2.5%! By infecting 28% of the American population, Spanish Flu killed 640,000 Americans.
If SARS has a mortality rate of 5% (we'll give a conservative estimate) and infects 10% of the American population, that's 1.3 million deaths in America alone. And most likely, the mortality rate would rise as the hospitals are overwhelmed.
Two points: First, the Supreme Court found that the states could not decide for themselves to legalize pot for medical purposes. Federal anti-drug laws override state laws, so pot is illegal for all uses everywhere in America.
Second, it doesn't have anything to do with terrorism, really, except that it happened to be mentioned in the same article. I would imagine whoever was writing the State Department report probably just let himself wander a bit when discussing impediments to US-Canadian law enforcement cooperation.
I agree that pot should be legalized, but you have to recognize that so long as the majority of the US is against it, the US government is going to try very hard to keep Canada from doing it. If pot is legal in Canada, then we (the US; I'm American) are going to have to radically overhaul the way we monitor US-Canada border crossings. It would be an absolute nightmare (even more than it already is) for the US to have pot illegal and for Canada to have it legal.
The privacy/terrorist issue is similar in nature. It's not that the State Department believes Canada is actively harbouring terrorists, but if Canada is less vigilent (or, less kindly, intrusive) than the US, then the US government will have to make up for the difference with more strict border checks. A system is only as secure as its most vunerable part, and the State Department is worried that Canada will become that vunerable part.
As far as I can tell, the headline is simply the author's interpretation of the State Department's report, not the wording of the US government. In actual point of fact, the State Department seems mainly concerned with police funding (which has nothing to do with civil liberties), low penalties for marijuana possession (also not a civil liberty) and privacy laws. Privacy obviously is a fairly important civil liberty, and clearly the US government is going too far with its anti-terrorist legislation, but the headline is also a tad too alarmist. Indeed, the article does not even specify which privacy related laws the US objects to in particular.
I think he said something to the effect that he believes that we'll figure out most of the big questions about the nature of the universe within 10 years or so. That was about 15 years ago.
I have a video clip (from circa 2001) where he's being asked about this very issue. His reply is "in 1980, I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance we would find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years. Well, we didn't make it. However, my estimate is still that we will find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years, but the 20 years starts now."
So, he admits he was wrong, that the promising theories did not pan out, but he's still optimistic. *shrug* If you think that a complete unified theory will never be found, that's fine, you're welcome to ignore his predictions. He's obviously biased, because he believes that there is a complete unified theory out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered, and he wants to know what it is.
Still, I wouldn't totally dismiss his beliefs out of hand just because it seems contrary to the history of science. If you think of the universe as being like a murder mystery, just because you've found many clues, which first caused you to to suspect one person, then proved his innocence and led you to suspect another, doesn't mean it's impossible to find out who the culprit really is. The analogy may not be perfect, but it is dangerous sometimes to conclude that future progress is either inevitable or impossible because of the past.
Hey, I'm not denying that the GNU tools are not critically important or very well made. I'm just saying that there's plenty of other shit that's also critically important to my use of Linux. If you would be perfectly happy using Linux without a webbrowser, or without a GUI, then that's great. But for me, and for many others, the lack of certain apps would be just as crippling as no glibc.
Yes, but MIThril is never going to be a commercial product. Unless you want to build it yourself, the progress MIThril is making is totally irrelevant to wether or not we'll be able to use them.
Yeah, when I first made it off the initial island, I was in, what was that one with the ship stuck in a rock? Yeah, anyway, I made it there at around 11 pm (I was probably about 12 years old, so it was fairly late already), and spent the next 2 hours scared shitless exploring the brothers' bedrooms for the first time. Even though I knew it was hypercard based, and nothing could jump out at me, I was still convinced that if I clicked the wrong part, I'd die.
Slashdot Mirror
What battle? Internet appliances didn't work, consoles are becoming more PC like (see Xbox), and PCs have gained the ability to play movies and music. It seems to me that there has been a STRONG trend towards integration. As components get cheaper and smaller, it becomes so easy to integrate new features that even if they're not used by 99% of the population, it's still worth doing. The only "battle" seems to be that many buisness people seem to think that specialized devices are a good idea even though they're not (Forbes magazine was predicting a move to specialized devices)
As I recall, the ink it used was completely normal, it was the circuits under the skin that made it work. I think the LCD screen was just high contrast enough that you could see it through your skin (just like you can see blue veins and stuff). Given the difficulty involved in implanting artificial devices into people without getting rejection, it's not too surprising the we haven't seen anything practical come of it.
Personally, I think it's an excellent idea. Sure, some of us geeks may still enjoy rolling our own, especially if we already have TV tuners or whatever, but for the majority of the population, it's good for Tivo to offer an entry level solution to start getting people used to the idea of a PVR.
I think you mean "Europe's," not "America's." The most recent copyright extension was justified on the premise that we ought to bring America's copyright laws into harmony with Europe's. Indeed, Europe is the progenitor of this mess, America didn't even have copyrights until the late 1800's. It's just American corporations that have been most effective at exploiting the situation.
As I recall, the guy who made millions WAS a "low rent sleazebag" with a poor credit history. He's made lots from spamming, but if that job were taken away, most likely he'd crawl back into his hole.
Do they? Do you know what the ACLU's capabilities are? What percentage of their lawyers are busy with cases at the moment? Unless you actually know that the ACLU is more busy than usual, then even if you agree that Ashcroft is evil, it's simply offtopic Bush-bashing, appropriately labled as flamebait.
For that matter, I don't understand why they didn't put the capability in the DVD format to tell the TV when to pan, so that people could watch fullscreen or widescreen simply by zooming in on the picture.
You mean like on the Back to the Future DVDs? I'm still damn curious how that big of a fuckup managed to happen...
No, that is not accurate. In fact, he does a great Apu immitation.
Why, because it breaks? Just because shit broke doesn't mean she was abusing it.
Regarding the power supply I've got one and it doesn't seem to have this problem.
Check the apple support boards. Her situation was far from unique, although most people had it happen after the warranty expire.
dozens of times?
Over 4 years, combining power and ethernet cable trips, by myself and others, yeah, probably between 12 and 24 times. If you think about it, that's really not that much, perhaps 3-6 times per year, of which perhaps 1/3rd to 1/2 were other people. Anyway, the point wasn't "we're clumsy," the point is "my Dell laptop has stood up to quite a bit of abuse." In contrast, my girlfriend has NOT tripped over her cables dozens of times, but it HAS stopped working.
We did. No one makes a USB ethernet dongle for apple computers.
Frankly, I think that things like this ought to be punishable in some way. Not necessarily a big punishment, because sometimes it's unclear if a clause in a contract is legal or not, but enough to prevent this sort of behavior. Aside from the fact that scaring the uninformed is inherently immoral, it would also help to limit contracts to a more readable length if people couldn't just stuff them full of "not responsible if this product blows up your house" crap.
Well, most of the time quality degradation is going to be because of damage to the tape itself, right? So I would think that playing it multiple times would still result in the same glitches each time. You might get a little bit of cleanup, but not a whole lot.
This is probably because OSX is attracting a lot of the people who read /. I went from Apple to PC about 8 years ago. This year, I started thinking about switching back. Read my last comment for information on why I decided against it (basically, my girlfriend's POS iBook kept breaking and costing hundreds of dollars to fix (with Apple refusing to honor their warranty)). She would switch to a PC, except she is computer illiterate enough that she doesn't think she'd be able to handle the change.
If by "design quality," you mean "crappiness," then I agree with you. I was starting to become very tempted to try Apple products, until my girlfriend bought an iBook in September. Though she takes good care of it (at least, much better care than I take of my 4 year old Dell Latitude, which looks pretty beaten up but is still fully functional), two critical pieces have broken.
First of all, the power supply has broken twice, though once we were able to fix it with a pair of pliars. The connector is so poorly designed, I honestly can't imagine what they were thinking. It is easily bendable (which means it would be totally smashed if one were to step, or even sit on it), and one day the pin just broke off for no reason. Cost to fix? $80, not covered by warranty. For comparison, other companies will replace your laptop's power supply for $60, and have designed the connector in such a manner that it would take a sledgehammer to break one. When I had a power supply stop working on an IBM laptop some years back, they sent me out a new supply without even demanding to see the old one to determine if the damage was my fault or theirs.
Also, the ethernet port broke. Though my girlfriend has no memory of this, I can only assume she must have tripped over the ethernet cord at some point. That shouldn't be any big deal, I've done it dozens of times. Indeed, I think a laptop ought to be designed such that the ethernet cable can be yanked out without any damage to the port (as with the PCMCIA ethernet card on my Dell does). Whatever the case, Apple has also declared that this damage is not covered by warranty, and would cost over $800 to fix! Even worse, the lack of even a single PCMCIA port on the iBook means that it would be impossible to add an additional ethernet jack oneself.
Apple has a lot going for it in terms of software design and asthetics. But for rugged hardware, cost, technical support and customizability, I'm going to stick with PCs.
Ain't no such thing, my friend. Divx compression is lossy anyway, so stop waiting and just grab the VHS transfers. The Star Wars trilogy is very high quality (though the idiot forgot that the VHS version has the subtitles in the black bars, so aliens are incomprehensible), as is Temple of Doom (2 CDs). Raiders and Last Crusade are both pan & scan, but Last Crusade is at least decent quality.
Well they failed on that count! Ask any Indian what they thought of Temple of Doom, I'm sure you'll get a fairly strong reaction. A good friend of mine, of Indian descent, though generally down on political correctness, refuses to watch Temple of Doom just because of its depiction of India. Just because the Thuggee cult was part of historical fact doesn't make the depiction of Indian culture in the movie accureate.
If SARS has a mortality rate of 5% (we'll give a conservative estimate) and infects 10% of the American population, that's 1.3 million deaths in America alone. And most likely, the mortality rate would rise as the hospitals are overwhelmed.
Second, it doesn't have anything to do with terrorism, really, except that it happened to be mentioned in the same article. I would imagine whoever was writing the State Department report probably just let himself wander a bit when discussing impediments to US-Canadian law enforcement cooperation.
The privacy/terrorist issue is similar in nature. It's not that the State Department believes Canada is actively harbouring terrorists, but if Canada is less vigilent (or, less kindly, intrusive) than the US, then the US government will have to make up for the difference with more strict border checks. A system is only as secure as its most vunerable part, and the State Department is worried that Canada will become that vunerable part.
As far as I can tell, the headline is simply the author's interpretation of the State Department's report, not the wording of the US government. In actual point of fact, the State Department seems mainly concerned with police funding (which has nothing to do with civil liberties), low penalties for marijuana possession (also not a civil liberty) and privacy laws. Privacy obviously is a fairly important civil liberty, and clearly the US government is going too far with its anti-terrorist legislation, but the headline is also a tad too alarmist. Indeed, the article does not even specify which privacy related laws the US objects to in particular.
I have a video clip (from circa 2001) where he's being asked about this very issue. His reply is "in 1980, I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance we would find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years. Well, we didn't make it. However, my estimate is still that we will find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years, but the 20 years starts now."
So, he admits he was wrong, that the promising theories did not pan out, but he's still optimistic. *shrug* If you think that a complete unified theory will never be found, that's fine, you're welcome to ignore his predictions. He's obviously biased, because he believes that there is a complete unified theory out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered, and he wants to know what it is.
Still, I wouldn't totally dismiss his beliefs out of hand just because it seems contrary to the history of science. If you think of the universe as being like a murder mystery, just because you've found many clues, which first caused you to to suspect one person, then proved his innocence and led you to suspect another, doesn't mean it's impossible to find out who the culprit really is. The analogy may not be perfect, but it is dangerous sometimes to conclude that future progress is either inevitable or impossible because of the past.
Hey, I'm not denying that the GNU tools are not critically important or very well made. I'm just saying that there's plenty of other shit that's also critically important to my use of Linux. If you would be perfectly happy using Linux without a webbrowser, or without a GUI, then that's great. But for me, and for many others, the lack of certain apps would be just as crippling as no glibc.
Yes, but MIThril is never going to be a commercial product. Unless you want to build it yourself, the progress MIThril is making is totally irrelevant to wether or not we'll be able to use them.
Man, that was an unbelievable game.