I've been delighted to find out the shortest path from A to B. Two clicks, through ASCII. So it's not a straight line, as people try to make us believe...
Obviously, it doesn't. But the point is that you CAN produce a CD for 800$. Which could not be done 10 years ago. The skill still has to be there, just as 10 years ago. But the basic tools can be purchased for much less, giving you way more tools than what was available a while ago.
A good sound engineer will give you more quality with a cheap Rode mic, a cheap m-audio interface Garageband and a few plugins, than with a 4 track tape recorder, a Neumann U87 and an actual plate reverb. And it will cost you 1/1000 of the original price.
Well, in my opinion, the big difference is that when the Windows ME was released (2000), Apple was just coming out of their crisis, and Linux was too far behind in ease of use for the general public. Now, Apple is a real competitor, eating marketshare fast, and Linux is more than ready to be an option for anybody. So now there are real alternatives, and then there were none.
Nope, they are not skipping it. For those who have ads blocked, you are missing it, but I think the ad about "quality russian dating service" is not fully serious.
More proof that competing companies are good for consumers. I just hope that toshiba and samsung have enough strength to come up with something that takes the lead from intel.
I happen to live just beside the LGV Est, and I have been working on the Spanish Madrid-Valladolid line. These are two amazing pieces of engineering, the new spanish line makes Madrid to Valladolid (211 km driving) in less than one hour, with one stop. The big advantages over flying are:
- You don't have to be there more than 15 minutes in advance. - The train takes you to the center of the city. - You can have a train every 5 or 6 minutes, if there are a lot of passengers. - Much more fuel efficient. CO2 emissions are about 10-20% of what you have when using a plane. - Fuel efficiency will be improved when improving the national power grid efficiency, you can get an almost zero emissions train.
The key part is the time saving. If you compare the flight with the train, the time is similar, but if you include being at the airport 2 hours in advance, plus going to the airport (usually far from the city), plus going to your final destination from the airport, you save a lot of time.
A NY-LA train is stupid, because the time wasted at the airports, etc, is little compared to the total travel time. But in distances from 200 km to 1000 km the high speed train is king.
But it does not come cheap. The Madrid-Valladolid line includes a 25 km tunnel, plus another 9 km tunnel, and it costed around 4bn EUR. That is about 20 million EUR per km. The cost of the works is not recovered with the fares, but it is a project that makes sense economically, but not financially. There is a lot of saved time, a lot of saved costs in planes and cars, and it opens the possibility of commuting between those two cities. You can do a cost benefit analysis, and it is definitely worth it.
I also find it amazing how american people (or should I say american governments) manage to complicate things enormously. As I understand it, there should be TWO ID cards:
1) Passport. To leave the country. That's its use. 2) National ID card. For identification purposes inside the US. It must only contain data that does not compromise your identity, just name, age, a picture and a number. With this number and a national database, all your data is there.
How can you use the driver's licence as ID, what if I don't drive? I'm not entitled to have a photo ID then? Driver's licence should be used just for that: to prove that you can drive.
Being almost european (spanish, which is almost as being from north africa), I can't understand how a country as the USA is not able to manage some things right. Even in Europe, speaking different languages and having different legal systems, we manage to use the national ID all across the EU, without a problem.
I know it and love it, but what got me to Purcell's Catches was the Deller Consort, and I still love Alfred Deller. Makes me enormously happy that there are other Early Music nerds around in/., computers are not everything in the world.
The annoying tune was actually stolen from a relatively famous late 19th century spanish composer and guitar player, Francisco Tarrega. It's part of the Gran Vals. Afterwards Nokia claimed it as a sound trademark...
It was a shock to find out, while being in an auditorium, listening to a beautiful classic guitar concert, and suddenly a phone rang from the guitar... or so it seemed.
Phil and Kaja Foglio were two of my favourite illustrators for Magic: The Gathering cards! (particularly Phil had some great illustrations, with a great sense of humour). I did not know they had a web comic. I took a look and it looks lovely. I might end up buying the hardcover... Seems this business model works, after all.
Thing is, if it does not happen, countries will end up having their own ICANN equivalents, and therefore, the role now played by ICANN would be played by some kind of group or comitee, formed by every ICANN equivalent in the world... and you'll end up with a UN equivalent, and getting as good performance as with the UN.
TCP/IP stack was completely rewritten, but copied line by line from the previous version. I've heard it took them hours...
Great news!!
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
... I think. Are these great news? It's hard to know in which direction will big companies move. But if Sun keeps it's current track, I would say these are great news.
It would be the same old same old if the SP1 solved the most obvious flaws of the OS. But the thing is this SP will not solve the application compatibility issues, which in my opinion is one of the big reasons why people don't move to Vista. So, not bussiness as usual, but bussiness even worse than usual. Cool.
I do understand that evolution means simply change, and there is no forward or backward change. What I am saying is that some characteristics of individual that were a disadvantage a few thousands of years before, are now an advantage, so the change now happens in the opposite direction of the last few millenia. I'm not judging good and bad, I'm just saying that if conditions happen to move to "more agressive", due to a famine, a plague, or whatever, humankind will be less prepared than 3000 years ago, due to this "backwards evolution".
This is perfectly normal, as conditions have changed, so has humankind, and now humans are worse prepared for some conditions, although better for the ones we have now. Thing is, the conditions we have now are created by humans, and not neccesarily in accordance with the real changes outside civilised areas. Therefore, we have evolved, moved by the conditions we have created, so if we cannot maintain these conditions, we will suddenly be far worse off than if they had never been created.
It is some kind of artificial evolution, that is supported on changes made to the environment, which create more changes on the species, that change environment again. I think up until now, on evolution, environment has never been so much under control of the evolving species. I just don't know how good is that.
I don't know if what I wrote is understandable, I'm not too good with long explanations in english.
I certainly agree. I think that the last 50 years, humans have been evolving backwards, as many of the things that were good for survival some centuries ago, are now bad for aesthetics, or not close to the beauty canon. Now it's bad to get fat easily, it's better to be anorexic (which would have killed you a few centuries ago). We are certainly going backwards. But don't worry, as soon as we get a pandemic disease, all the weak thin people will die, and the fat and strong will rule the earth. MWAHAHAHAHAAAA!!
Well, Microsoft could continue selling and maintaining XP, and acknowledge that not everybody needs Vista, and keep XP as the cheap OS and Vista as the expensive one. But truth is this will never happen...
Slashdot Mirror
I've been delighted to find out the shortest path from A to B. Two clicks, through ASCII. So it's not a straight line, as people try to make us believe...
Hairy Hardon? C'mon, be serious, this is slashdot!
Obviously, it doesn't. But the point is that you CAN produce a CD for 800$. Which could not be done 10 years ago. The skill still has to be there, just as 10 years ago. But the basic tools can be purchased for much less, giving you way more tools than what was available a while ago. A good sound engineer will give you more quality with a cheap Rode mic, a cheap m-audio interface Garageband and a few plugins, than with a 4 track tape recorder, a Neumann U87 and an actual plate reverb. And it will cost you 1/1000 of the original price.
Well, in my opinion, the big difference is that when the Windows ME was released (2000), Apple was just coming out of their crisis, and Linux was too far behind in ease of use for the general public. Now, Apple is a real competitor, eating marketshare fast, and Linux is more than ready to be an option for anybody. So now there are real alternatives, and then there were none.
Nope, they are not skipping it. For those who have ads blocked, you are missing it, but I think the ad about "quality russian dating service" is not fully serious.
More proof that competing companies are good for consumers. I just hope that toshiba and samsung have enough strength to come up with something that takes the lead from intel.
I happen to live just beside the LGV Est, and I have been working on the Spanish Madrid-Valladolid line. These are two amazing pieces of engineering, the new spanish line makes Madrid to Valladolid (211 km driving) in less than one hour, with one stop. The big advantages over flying are:
- You don't have to be there more than 15 minutes in advance.
- The train takes you to the center of the city.
- You can have a train every 5 or 6 minutes, if there are a lot of passengers.
- Much more fuel efficient. CO2 emissions are about 10-20% of what you have when using a plane.
- Fuel efficiency will be improved when improving the national power grid efficiency, you can get an almost zero emissions train.
The key part is the time saving. If you compare the flight with the train, the time is similar, but if you include being at the airport 2 hours in advance, plus going to the airport (usually far from the city), plus going to your final destination from the airport, you save a lot of time.
A NY-LA train is stupid, because the time wasted at the airports, etc, is little compared to the total travel time. But in distances from 200 km to 1000 km the high speed train is king.
But it does not come cheap. The Madrid-Valladolid line includes a 25 km tunnel, plus another 9 km tunnel, and it costed around 4bn EUR. That is about 20 million EUR per km. The cost of the works is not recovered with the fares, but it is a project that makes sense economically, but not financially. There is a lot of saved time, a lot of saved costs in planes and cars, and it opens the possibility of commuting between those two cities. You can do a cost benefit analysis, and it is definitely worth it.
I also find it amazing how american people (or should I say american governments) manage to complicate things enormously. As I understand it, there should be TWO ID cards:
1) Passport. To leave the country. That's its use.
2) National ID card. For identification purposes inside the US. It must only contain data that does not compromise your identity, just name, age, a picture and a number. With this number and a national database, all your data is there.
How can you use the driver's licence as ID, what if I don't drive? I'm not entitled to have a photo ID then? Driver's licence should be used just for that: to prove that you can drive.
Being almost european (spanish, which is almost as being from north africa), I can't understand how a country as the USA is not able to manage some things right. Even in Europe, speaking different languages and having different legal systems, we manage to use the national ID all across the EU, without a problem.
And the 50000 page views are hard-coded on the article! That's soooo web 1.0...
Sorry I was a bit rude, I just found it funny, to provide a link to the most visited page on teh internets. Just in case. Not hard feelings?
I know it and love it, but what got me to Purcell's Catches was the Deller Consort, and I still love Alfred Deller. Makes me enormously happy that there are other Early Music nerds around in /., computers are not everything in the world.
The annoying tune was actually stolen from a relatively famous late 19th century spanish composer and guitar player, Francisco Tarrega. It's part of the Gran Vals. Afterwards Nokia claimed it as a sound trademark...
It was a shock to find out, while being in an auditorium, listening to a beautiful classic guitar concert, and suddenly a phone rang from the guitar... or so it seemed.
Did you really have to put a link to google? I guess most slashdotters here know how to get there, and are acquainted with the company itself...
Phil and Kaja Foglio were two of my favourite illustrators for Magic: The Gathering cards! (particularly Phil had some great illustrations, with a great sense of humour). I did not know they had a web comic. I took a look and it looks lovely. I might end up buying the hardcover... Seems this business model works, after all.
Thing is, if it does not happen, countries will end up having their own ICANN equivalents, and therefore, the role now played by ICANN would be played by some kind of group or comitee, formed by every ICANN equivalent in the world... and you'll end up with a UN equivalent, and getting as good performance as with the UN.
TCP/IP stack was completely rewritten, but copied line by line from the previous version. I've heard it took them hours...
... I think. Are these great news? It's hard to know in which direction will big companies move. But if Sun keeps it's current track, I would say these are great news.
Don't be so sure Hobbits are not good for this. They have small hands, but dwarfs have better welding skills...
It would be the same old same old if the SP1 solved the most obvious flaws of the OS. But the thing is this SP will not solve the application compatibility issues, which in my opinion is one of the big reasons why people don't move to Vista. So, not bussiness as usual, but bussiness even worse than usual. Cool.
I do understand that evolution means simply change, and there is no forward or backward change. What I am saying is that some characteristics of individual that were a disadvantage a few thousands of years before, are now an advantage, so the change now happens in the opposite direction of the last few millenia. I'm not judging good and bad, I'm just saying that if conditions happen to move to "more agressive", due to a famine, a plague, or whatever, humankind will be less prepared than 3000 years ago, due to this "backwards evolution".
This is perfectly normal, as conditions have changed, so has humankind, and now humans are worse prepared for some conditions, although better for the ones we have now. Thing is, the conditions we have now are created by humans, and not neccesarily in accordance with the real changes outside civilised areas. Therefore, we have evolved, moved by the conditions we have created, so if we cannot maintain these conditions, we will suddenly be far worse off than if they had never been created.
It is some kind of artificial evolution, that is supported on changes made to the environment, which create more changes on the species, that change environment again. I think up until now, on evolution, environment has never been so much under control of the evolving species. I just don't know how good is that.
I don't know if what I wrote is understandable, I'm not too good with long explanations in english.
I certainly agree. I think that the last 50 years, humans have been evolving backwards, as many of the things that were good for survival some centuries ago, are now bad for aesthetics, or not close to the beauty canon. Now it's bad to get fat easily, it's better to be anorexic (which would have killed you a few centuries ago). We are certainly going backwards. But don't worry, as soon as we get a pandemic disease, all the weak thin people will die, and the fat and strong will rule the earth. MWAHAHAHAHAAAA!!
Well, Microsoft could continue selling and maintaining XP, and acknowledge that not everybody needs Vista, and keep XP as the cheap OS and Vista as the expensive one. But truth is this will never happen...
I think you left it on OS X Leopard...
run linux, so 2008 is the year of the spaceship AND the year of linux on the desktop?
A dog's code doesn't need to be buggy, unless the dog has fleas...