What do you suggest I heat my house with? Solar? Yeah, that's going to work just *great* in the winter when I get six hours of sunlight.
Actually, sure. Why not? Read up on Passive Annual Solar Heating. Basically, it's an earth berm that stores the heat during the summer and releases it during the winter... keeping your house at a comfortable temperature all year 'round, without those pesky power bills. I know of a guy out in the midwest that does this, and his power bill is in the teens...
On the other hand, you could use a different system (I can't recall the name), that essentially consists of a big sheet of glass in front of a dark-colored wall, with vents at the top and bottom that can be used to either exhaust warm air from or cycle warm air into the area being climate-controlled.
Ideally, you could utilize some combination of the myriad solar heating/cooling systems available, after looking into which one(s) would be most suitable for your climate/terrain.
Leaving the stickers on makes it easier to tell the system specs at a glance, even if the machine is off.
I would guess that 90% of consumers never upgrade their systems, which means that what it says on the box is usually what's inside. The ones who do upgrade their systems are quick to tell you about it, because they turned their three-year-old $1200 system into a brand new computer, simply by spending $300 on new insides.
It's fun to tell them that for $600, they could have built a brand new one that really is brand new, and would be three times as fast as their upgraded system for only twice what they spent... especially when their $300 upgrade didn't get them any faster than buying a $300 system at walmart would have...
Not that I'm condoning their behavior (far from it, I hate spammers), but... where do we draw the line? Is it now ok to hack anyone who has broken the law?
Which of you hasn't gotten a traffic ticket, owns no mp3s, has never pirated a movie, video, music, ebook, *something*?
You've never even *accidentally* viewed questionable content?
Jaywalking? Loitering? ("Honestly, I'm waiting for my friend to pick me up, officer...") Overdue library books?
Make a service that makes it easy to find and enjoy the media you want. Add a good recommendation engine on top of it. Price it competitively with cableTV+Rhapsody. Watch the money roll in.
You pretty much just described Pandora's business model. They have a free internet radio service that works something like this: You tell them what kind of music you want to hear, they let you listen to it (and things like it, thanks to their "music genome project"), they link everything to Amazon and iTunes so you can buy it if you like it, and POOF! They make money. Adding their "pay us and you can stop getting ads with your music" service just ices their cake.
Disclaimer: I don't have any affiliation with pandora.com, I'm just an avid listener and paying subscriber.
Personally, I'd like to see our military and NASA budgets switched. I would have said the same thing 30 years ago, and had it been done, we'd have anti-gravity and flying cars by now.
Well, we do actually have the flying car now, at least...
Because they're charging for stuff that used to be free. That's why.
This does not replace regular Hulu. Go read up on this before you fly off the handle.
Au contrair, the stuff they're now charging for access to started quietly slipping off of the site months ago... Whereas you used to be able to watch entire seasons of programming on Hulu, now only the most recent several episodes are available. Any "flying off the handle" is justified; my own Hulu viewing has been severely curtailed by this development.
It may not be replacing "regular" Hulu, but that's only because "regular" Hulu has been getting stripped down for the past several months... apparently in preparation for this step.
If you have multiple tabs open, and you center-click a link to open it in a new tab, Chrome opens the new tab immediately after the current tab(rather than opening it at the very end of the tab bar, as FF and Konqueror do).
My experience seems to differ from yours. Both Firefox and IE seem to have adopted the "open in the next tab to the right" strategy, as well. Then again, it could just be a Windows thing, or perhaps ctrl-clicking a link acts differently from a middle-click.
Ye flipping gods, I wish you had logged in and/or I had mod points. I don't often see AC posts that are worthy, but this one, in my opinion, is.
I'm no Google fanboi, although I do use many of their products (phone, search engine, mail...), but I must say that this paragraph pretty much says it all:
I'm not going to say Google isn't evil, because I don't know enough about their internal workings. But you've got to admit it's pretty damned refreshing to see a company getting big by competing. If there's an evil at Google, it's an evil that can be killed by its betters, rather than the kind of evil we used to have, where we had to wait for it to kill itself.
I can walk up to you in the street and call you an idiot, but I suspect that neither of us would endorse or condone that kind of behaviour just because it happens not to be illegal.
Actually, it *is* illegal in many jurisdictions. It is called "verbal assault". In addition, if someone feels threatened by your actions (regardless of actual threat or intent), they are fully entitled to call the police and have you arrested (or maybe just harassed, depending on how "good ole' boy" your local police force is). Not necessarily a huge crime; but then neither is jaywalking...
But being "against the law", it is illegal by definition (in certain jurisdictions). This, of course, leads into an entire diatribe on how there are too many laws, common sense should dictate, victimless crime should not be criminal, etc, etc, but I shall spare you, my readers, from that noise... this time.
Say I want to develop an app for iPhone, Android and Symbian. Currently, I can just about write the main part of the app once and then branch it for the different APIs. However, if I want to add adverts to a trial version of this, I'm unlikely to want to set up accounts with multiple advertising programs, so I'm going to implement one across the board that sticks to Apple's rules (because they are the most strict and the platform I'm likely to sell the most apps on). Google loses out a potential customer on it's own platform because of rules in place on a rival's platform because of it's influence on developers.
This makes perfect sense; whether it's legal grounds for something is left as an exercise for the reader, but common sense seems to dictate that Apple is in the wrong in this situation.
What kind of productivity apps does the average office droid need, in your opinion? Which of these is absolutely unavailable through an alternative open-source or web-based solution?
Maybe its just me, but doing a VT100 terminal without a hardware keyboard is a PITA
Try the HTC incredible, next time you're in a Best Buy (or other phone portal that lets you play with Verizon's phones). The on-screen keyboard is nice, and the multi-touch feature makes it work more like you expect a "hardware" keyboard to. I was pleasantly surprised by its "tactile feedback", despite the fact that it's a virtual keyboard, instead of physical buttons.
Not sure, but would not be surprised to discover the HTC EVO incorporates the same features that make the keyboard on that phone so nice to work with.
Actually, you're thinking of the lower level Raise Dead. Resurrection only needs a piece of a body, like a fingernail. And SD cards lose a gigabyte each time they're resurrected, so it's usually not worth it. What? Oh, come on. I can't be the only person who reads Slashdot with a PHB within arm's reach?
... Many was the quest to recover some portion of a slain hero's body so that s/he could be resurrected. I think you have reversed those spells - unfortunately for your party, perhaps? Then again, my PHB (and all my other books from that RPG) are second edition. -- Rest well, G.G. - and thank you.
The problem with modern botnet malware is that the infecting agent can actually be more intelligent and reactive than the host it's infecting.
This is the absolute best place to start when fighting malware. Educate the user, even if it's just "stop letting your kids use LimeWire to download music/movies/apps/trojans/viruses". Most of the issues that Joe User experiences are completely explainable as PEBKAC. -- Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Abort, Retry, Explode?
But I won't pay to see it in 3-D. Ever. Biggest ripoff in cinema EVER--I go to see a movie to escape reality, not have shit 'flying' at me.
Didn't see Avatar, I take it? I've never been big on 3D, either, but in my opinion, Avatar is the first (and so far, only*) movie to have done 3D without shoving the 3D in your face. In other words, "they done it right".
* The new Clash of the Titans didn't shove it in your face, either, but then again, half the scenes in the 3D version were in 2D.
Are you all ready to have the same thing happen to your internet that happened to the fuel prices when they figured out that the government was in their pockets? It's coming and it's gonna hurt!
No, it's not. The internet routes around damage. If internet prices skyrocket (and the U.S.A. is already paying more and getting less than many other countries - go figure), people will just create their own network; either mesh networking, or simply wireless routers configured to bridge with other wireless routers - shouldn't be too hard to bounce the signal up the branch until you find a trunk.
I'm not too concerned about it, anyway; Internet communications are pretty much required to live nowadays. For instance, you can't get a job at a grocery or department store without internet access - they don't have paper applications anymore. The push for paperless has pushed networking onto the stack with the other "basic" utilities. People won't stand for yet another bootheel on the head of the commoners.
If you must use XP, I suggest you use a free anti-virus such as Avast, and use the free software I suggest above.
Unfortunately, Avast! Antivirus is only free for personal use, not commercial. Educational pricing seems to be available, but you will need to contact them for more details.
On a side note, using some form of Linux/Unix or OS X will result in fewer virus/exploit issues... which may or may not be an actual issue, if you're deploying with disk/OS images on a daily basis, or per-login (LTSP, anyone?)
Because it's for idiots that like to type sudo. Ubuntu is for bozos that type rm -rf/*.*
If you disagree, and think that "root" should be allowed to login interactively, it is simple to add a password to that account. Once the account has a password, it's unlocked for interactive login. Canonical/Ubuntu's take on the subject is actually the same one that groupthink has been screaming for years; "Normal users do not need superuser access."
If you want to log in as an admin, just run your Windows XP box and STFU. If you want to contribute to the discussion, RTFM first. Oh, and you might want to log in to slashdot, so that the rest of us know just whose kool-aid it is we're being offered.
...it might be kinda bothersome to have to avoid layovers in Philadelphia every time you fly somewhere on the east cost.(sic)
Not really... if you lived anywhere east of the Mississippi, you'd know that everything routes through Atlanta. No, really. Flying from New York, NY to Cincinnati, OH? 3-hour layover in Atlanta.
If you see sardines in a grocery, do you jump to the conclusion that it's operated by the Mafia?
Well, maybe not the Mafia, but spies are, theoretically, a potential factor, there... It seems that sardines are no longer made in the U.S.A. Perhaps our security consultant has a new possibility for manufactur^W finding information about spies?
That being said, it is still a truism that correlation != causation.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you suggest I heat my house with? Solar? Yeah, that's going to work just *great* in the winter when I get six hours of sunlight.
Actually, sure. Why not? Read up on Passive Annual Solar Heating. Basically, it's an earth berm that stores the heat during the summer and releases it during the winter... keeping your house at a comfortable temperature all year 'round, without those pesky power bills. I know of a guy out in the midwest that does this, and his power bill is in the teens...
On the other hand, you could use a different system (I can't recall the name), that essentially consists of a big sheet of glass in front of a dark-colored wall, with vents at the top and bottom that can be used to either exhaust warm air from or cycle warm air into the area being climate-controlled.
Ideally, you could utilize some combination of the myriad solar heating/cooling systems available, after looking into which one(s) would be most suitable for your climate/terrain.
Oh, and here's a link about a company that does it. I'm not advocating this company, but they have some cool pictures. Guess I should throw in the obligatory wiki link about Passive Solar, too. Want more info? Try this link.
Here's a hint - you don't get hybrid tractors, and if you did they mostly wouldn't make sense. Neither would electric ones.
Why not? Seems to me that tractors and other farm equipment would be an awesome use for electric motors, since they have a vastly different power curve than combustion engines... Why, exactly, do electric tractors not make sense?
TL;DR: Learn to research before opening your mouth; Stop shoving your foot until you taste kneecap.
1: if the oil supply is so critical, why were they burning the insanely huge leak in the gulf of mexico? GET A SPONGE!
2: looks like it might be an awesome time to get into alternative energy. SOLAR FTW!
The official android market is dependent on a sim card. Even a phone wont work unless it has a sim card in it.
Tell that to my EVO 4G, on Sprint.
Leaving the stickers on makes it easier to tell the system specs at a glance, even if the machine is off.
I would guess that 90% of consumers never upgrade their systems, which means that what it says on the box is usually what's inside. The ones who do upgrade their systems are quick to tell you about it, because they turned their three-year-old $1200 system into a brand new computer, simply by spending $300 on new insides.
It's fun to tell them that for $600, they could have built a brand new one that really is brand new, and would be three times as fast as their upgraded system for only twice what they spent... especially when their $300 upgrade didn't get them any faster than buying a $300 system at walmart would have...
Not that I'm condoning their behavior (far from it, I hate spammers), but... where do we draw the line? Is it now ok to hack anyone who has broken the law?
Which of you hasn't gotten a traffic ticket, owns no mp3s, has never pirated a movie, video, music, ebook, *something*?
You've never even *accidentally* viewed questionable content?
Jaywalking?
Loitering? ("Honestly, I'm waiting for my friend to pick me up, officer...")
Overdue library books?
Where do we draw the line?
Make a service that makes it easy to find and enjoy the media you want. Add a good recommendation engine on top of it. Price it competitively with cableTV+Rhapsody. Watch the money roll in.
You pretty much just described Pandora's business model. They have a free internet radio service that works something like this: You tell them what kind of music you want to hear, they let you listen to it (and things like it, thanks to their "music genome project"), they link everything to Amazon and iTunes so you can buy it if you like it, and POOF! They make money. Adding their "pay us and you can stop getting ads with your music" service just ices their cake.
Disclaimer: I don't have any affiliation with pandora.com, I'm just an avid listener and paying subscriber.
Personally, I'd like to see our military and NASA budgets switched. I would have said the same thing 30 years ago, and had it been done, we'd have anti-gravity and flying cars by now.
Well, we do actually have the flying car now, at least...
Because they're charging for stuff that used to be free. That's why.
This does not replace regular Hulu. Go read up on this before you fly off the handle.
Au contrair, the stuff they're now charging for access to started quietly slipping off of the site months ago... Whereas you used to be able to watch entire seasons of programming on Hulu, now only the most recent several episodes are available. Any "flying off the handle" is justified; my own Hulu viewing has been severely curtailed by this development.
It may not be replacing "regular" Hulu, but that's only because "regular" Hulu has been getting stripped down for the past several months... apparently in preparation for this step.
If you have multiple tabs open, and you center-click a link to open it in a new tab, Chrome opens the new tab immediately after the current tab(rather than opening it at the very end of the tab bar, as FF and Konqueror do).
My experience seems to differ from yours. Both Firefox and IE seem to have adopted the "open in the next tab to the right" strategy, as well. Then again, it could just be a Windows thing, or perhaps ctrl-clicking a link acts differently from a middle-click.
Ye flipping gods, I wish you had logged in and/or I had mod points.
I don't often see AC posts that are worthy, but this one, in my opinion, is.
I'm no Google fanboi, although I do use many of their products (phone, search engine, mail...), but I must say that this paragraph pretty much says it all:
I'm not going to say Google isn't evil, because I don't know enough about their internal workings. But you've got to admit it's pretty damned refreshing to see a company getting big by competing. If there's an evil at Google, it's an evil that can be killed by its betters, rather than the kind of evil we used to have, where we had to wait for it to kill itself.
I have nothing further to add.
I can walk up to you in the street and call you an idiot, but I suspect that neither of us would endorse or condone that kind of behaviour just because it happens not to be illegal.
Actually, it *is* illegal in many jurisdictions. It is called "verbal assault". In addition, if someone feels threatened by your actions (regardless of actual threat or intent), they are fully entitled to call the police and have you arrested (or maybe just harassed, depending on how "good ole' boy" your local police force is). Not necessarily a huge crime; but then neither is jaywalking...
But being "against the law", it is illegal by definition (in certain jurisdictions). This, of course, leads into an entire diatribe on how there are too many laws, common sense should dictate, victimless crime should not be criminal, etc, etc, but I shall spare you, my readers, from that noise... this time.
Say I want to develop an app for iPhone, Android and Symbian. Currently, I can just about write the main part of the app once and then branch it for the different APIs. However, if I want to add adverts to a trial version of this, I'm unlikely to want to set up accounts with multiple advertising programs, so I'm going to implement one across the board that sticks to Apple's rules (because they are the most strict and the platform I'm likely to sell the most apps on). Google loses out a potential customer on it's own platform because of rules in place on a rival's platform because of it's influence on developers.
This makes perfect sense; whether it's legal grounds for something is left as an exercise for the reader, but common sense seems to dictate that Apple is in the wrong in this situation.
What kind of productivity apps does the average office droid need, in your opinion?
Which of these is absolutely unavailable through an alternative open-source or web-based solution?
Google apps, for instance...
Maybe its just me, but doing a VT100 terminal without a hardware keyboard is a PITA
Try the HTC incredible, next time you're in a Best Buy (or other phone portal that lets you play with Verizon's phones). The on-screen keyboard is nice, and the multi-touch feature makes it work more like you expect a "hardware" keyboard to. I was pleasantly surprised by its "tactile feedback", despite the fact that it's a virtual keyboard, instead of physical buttons.
Not sure, but would not be surprised to discover the HTC EVO incorporates the same features that make the keyboard on that phone so nice to work with.
AC is right that the freezer isn't a good idea.
But I might try it in the above-freezing part of the fridge.
Hmm... got a laptop? Might try attempting to recover the data *in* the fridge.
The spell requires one dead body.
Actually, you're thinking of the lower level Raise Dead. Resurrection only needs a piece of a body, like a fingernail. And SD cards lose a gigabyte each time they're resurrected, so it's usually not worth it.
What? Oh, come on. I can't be the only person who reads Slashdot with a PHB within arm's reach?
... Many was the quest to recover some portion of a slain hero's body so that s/he could be resurrected. I think you have reversed those spells - unfortunately for your party, perhaps?
Then again, my PHB (and all my other books from that RPG) are second edition.
--
Rest well, G.G. - and thank you.
"I just shove such drives into a soda can, crush the can under my boot, and put it out with other cans to be recycled."
... thereby introducing toxins to the aluminum recycling industry, and incrementally poisoning soda drinkers (including yourself). Good job!
The problem with modern botnet malware is that the infecting agent can actually be more intelligent and reactive than the host it's infecting.
This is the absolute best place to start when fighting malware. Educate the user, even if it's just "stop letting your kids use LimeWire to download music/movies/apps/trojans/viruses".
Most of the issues that Joe User experiences are completely explainable as PEBKAC.
--
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Abort, Retry, Explode?
But I won't pay to see it in 3-D. Ever. Biggest ripoff in cinema EVER--I go to see a movie to escape reality, not have shit 'flying' at me.
Didn't see Avatar, I take it? I've never been big on 3D, either, but in my opinion, Avatar is the first (and so far, only*) movie to have done 3D without shoving the 3D in your face. In other words, "they done it right".
* The new Clash of the Titans didn't shove it in your face, either, but then again, half the scenes in the 3D version were in 2D.
Are you all ready to have the same thing happen to your internet that happened to the fuel prices when they figured out that the government was in their pockets? It's coming and it's gonna hurt!
No, it's not. The internet routes around damage. If internet prices skyrocket (and the U.S.A. is already paying more and getting less than many other countries - go figure), people will just create their own network; either mesh networking, or simply wireless routers configured to bridge with other wireless routers - shouldn't be too hard to bounce the signal up the branch until you find a trunk.
I'm not too concerned about it, anyway; Internet communications are pretty much required to live nowadays. For instance, you can't get a job at a grocery or department store without internet access - they don't have paper applications anymore. The push for paperless has pushed networking onto the stack with the other "basic" utilities. People won't stand for yet another bootheel on the head of the commoners.
If you must use XP, I suggest you use a free anti-virus such as Avast, and use the free software I suggest above.
Unfortunately, Avast! Antivirus is only free for personal use, not commercial. Educational pricing seems to be available, but you will need to contact them for more details.
On a side note, using some form of Linux/Unix or OS X will result in fewer virus/exploit issues... which may or may not be an actual issue, if you're deploying with disk/OS images on a daily basis, or per-login (LTSP, anyone?)
Because it's for idiots that like to type sudo. /*.*
Ubuntu is for bozos that type rm -rf
If you disagree, and think that "root" should be allowed to login interactively, it is simple to add a password to that account. Once the account has a password, it's unlocked for interactive login. Canonical/Ubuntu's take on the subject is actually the same one that groupthink has been screaming for years; "Normal users do not need superuser access."
If you want to log in as an admin, just run your Windows XP box and STFU. If you want to contribute to the discussion, RTFM first. Oh, and you might want to log in to slashdot, so that the rest of us know just whose kool-aid it is we're being offered.
...it might be kinda bothersome to have to avoid layovers in Philadelphia every time you fly somewhere on the east cost.(sic)
Not really... if you lived anywhere east of the Mississippi, you'd know that everything routes through Atlanta. No, really. Flying from New York, NY to Cincinnati, OH? 3-hour layover in Atlanta.
If you see sardines in a grocery, do you jump to the conclusion that it's operated by the Mafia?
Well, maybe not the Mafia, but spies are, theoretically, a potential factor, there... It seems that sardines are no longer made in the U.S.A. Perhaps our security consultant has a new possibility for manufactur^W finding information about spies?
That being said, it is still a truism that correlation != causation.
...with my DVR I can record/watch three shows simultaneously...
Perhaps you just need more video inputs on your DIY PVR?