Sure thing - unless cables are actually broken then there's basically never an issue on signal wires. Heavy-duty cables to speakers need better cable, yes, but not signal levels (and for speakers, Monster aren't worth it either).
I'd also like to mention an ethical reason why not to buy Monster. Monster Cables have been methodically sueing every business in the US that uses the word "Monster". Since Monster Cables are large, and most businesses are mom-and-pop operations, the small guys get screwed over bcos they can't fight back.
They'll try it with anyone as well - they actually tried to get money off Disney for making the film "Monsters Inc"! Disney told them where to shove it though, and they had the clout to make it stick. But most people can't afford to.
For more info, search Google for "monster cable lawsuit". I originally heard about it in the Denver Post, but it's all over the place now.
Yep, mine went the same way, and so did a large number of my classmates'. This was about 1987/88 - nothing new in medical science for vaccinating teenagers then!:-/ IIRC, we got our TB jabs in Jan/Feb, and mine hadn't healed until the following September. As I remember, about a third of people were OK within a month, another third were OK by summer break, and the rest of us still had a pus-filled hole by the next academic year.
They probably get better fuel efficiency than a car running at the same engine load. The difference is that you simply *don't* see bikers cruising at 70 - the biker theory apparently is that they have to go fast enough so speed cameras can't capture them due to red-shift. I always do 80 on the motorway and it's been a long time since I passed a bike. In fact, the only times I've ever passed a bike, it's always been big Harleys or similar, and they have so little aerodynamics that the wind at anything over about 60 is practically like running into a brick wall.
Compression is a standard audio term, not an MS invention. Good description of what it does though. A compressor effects pedal is often used by guitarists because "turning up the volume" as the note decays away basically makes the note go on for ever (which is good for atmospheric guitar effects).
For the benefit of the original poster, if you want quiet relaxing classical music, try picking quiet relaxing pieces. If you're looking for a low-volume piece of music, why not just put in Metallica "Creeping Death" and turn the volume way down? Answer: cos it doesn't sound anything like how it's supposed to. So why not treat classical music the same, and listen to the music as it really sounds instead of in some distorted copy?
If you're having problems finding mellow classical music, buy more and you'll find plenty. Classical CDs are dirt cheap, so no reason not to. Deutsch Grammophon box sets are a good idea, incidentally. If you're still having trouble, much string quartet and chamber music has a fairly constant volume throughout.
Indeed. As my original post said, Brits would generally rather pay for higher quality broadcasting.
Do you consider British Idol or Are you being Served high quality?
Idol, no - not now. The original was innovative, but they're riding a decreasing-returns thing now. And I believe this is one of the commercial channels anyway. Re "Are you being served", it beats the hell out of any US sitcom such as Friends, Roseanne, Married with Children, Home Improvements, etc. The Simpsons is better though, but the writers of The Simpsons do irony, which most American writers don't bcos many Americans don't grok irony.:-/
the downside is that the BBC is state run and thus has a much easier time being censored. True ad based TV can be censored to but there seems something antidemocratic about state run media.
You might want to have a look at the BBC's history for that - in particular the David Kelly enquiry where the politicians ripped into the BBC for reporting something the government didn't want known. The BBC really *isn't* censored to any extent. In part this is because there are too many layers between the broadcasters on the ground and the politicians.
Compare and contrast to the corporately-owned US media. If Rupert Murdoch doesn't want it said, or if any of his powerful friends don't want it said, it doesn't get said. Politicians and government-appointed people are accountable to the electorate, and if they apply pressure then the BBC are in a prime position to make that known. Corporate bosses are accountable to no-one, and if they suppress a story then there's no-one else to pass it on. In a truly independent media this wouldn't be a problem, but the paid-for media is under the control of few enough people that it can't really be regarded as independent.
Re "privacy", this uses radio DF technique. None of this is anything that would ever have required someone to get a warrant to enter your house, any more than the power company would need a warrant to see that power was being tapped off their lines somewhere in your neighbourhood. The only privacy concern I have is that stores take my details and send them on elsewhere.
As for the "right" to receive a signal, you're assuming that you do have a right to do so. America simply doesn't have the concept of public-service broadcasting (or of public services at all, in general) so this may be why you don't get it. We get the "right" to receive a signal in exchange for money, the same way you would with cable or satellite. Because America has always had broadcasting supported by gratuitously-extensive advertising, you've got used to it. Europeans wouldn't put up with it though - if you tried putting ads more frequently than maybe 1 minute every 10, you'd get lynched by the viewers (or more accurately, by your bosses when the viewers go elsewhere).
There isn't a one-time "TV tax" when you buy it. What currently happens instead is that you pay for a yearly TV license.
Enforcement is traditionally carried out by TV detector vans with DF detection equipment (or hand-portable versions of the same) - the flyback transformer frequency is apparently pretty easy to detect and can be spotted from the road. You don't need to know what they're watching, just that they're watching *something*. Most houses have licenses, so I suspect they'll concentrate on houses that don't have licenses.
This is to a large extent helped by TV retailers, who take your address when you buy a TV. If you buy a TV and don't have a license, that fact will find its way to the relevant people, and I guess you're more likely to have a detector van coming round.
LCD and plasma TVs are kind of tricky for this, bcos they don't have the same hardware and so may not be detectable. PCs with TV cards are also not detectable, bcos a PC monitor runs at a different frequency, and also there's no way of proving a PC is being used to watch TV.
Technically you can get out of paying your license if you've modified your TV such that it can't receive signals from an aerial. There have been a few test cases for this. But the cost of modification is likely to be more than the cost of the license.:-)
In any case, TV licenses are one tax that Brits generally don't mind paying - what you get for your money is usually worth it. American TV shows what you get if you don't - 50 channels of dreck. There are certainly some good shows on American TV, but they tend to follow the Hollywood film formula rather than the TV series formula. And US TV uses advertising to a degree that Brits (and Europeans generally) wouldn't consider acceptable.
Absolutely right, man. You're *part* of the environment - if you just carry on like a good German then you're complicit in it.
And laying it on the line like that is about the best test of whether a company's worth sticking with. If it doesn't work out, it will give you a massive incentive to get the hell out. And if it does work out, you've just made massive kudos from being the person who turned it around. If the place is really that bad then chances are you're preparing to go anyway, so it doesn't make a big difference.
Show me a house and garden that's ever "finished"...
If you regard something like Windows as a single project, then no, it's never finished - in the same way that a house is never finished bcos it gets redecorated/refitted every few years. It's more accurate to think in terms of multiple successive releases. And on those terms, a house and a piece of software are identical - you keep working on it until it's a good enough quality to sell.
A description of a house doesn't have to be complete, down to the size of screws used. But it does have to say what the house is going to look like and how it works (ie. structurally sound, and electrics and plumbing meet specs).
Same with software. If your requirements are "dude, we need a really *fast* tool to convert from this format to that format, and there might be a bunch of new fields you need to invent some values for", you're utterly screwed.
All the requirements do *not* necessarily have to be in place at the start. When building a house, the builders will likely walk the clients through when the floors are in, to fix the locations of pipes and electrical points. Similarly in software, you'll refine your requirements as you go along. The key thing in *both* is that you record what your requirements are, and check when you're done that your product is meeting those requirements. If you don't, chances are that your clients will be unhappy at the end, and you don't get paid (or don't get further contracts).
I also note that your examples all involve off-the-shelf desktop software. In this field you have to invent requirements beforehand, to try and predict what your customer's requirements are. This is not the case for most software projects - the majority of software developers are working on projects for customers who have some real requirement that needs filling. Even if they can't articulate it precisely, if what you give them doesn't do what they wanted, you don't get paid. And if it comes to court, you need to be able to show that you *did* produce what they asked for, otherwise it's your ass on the line.
But then someone decides OOGLE needs to handle male and female bodies. Et voila, we have the Generic Object Oriented Graphics Leering Engine. Time to get us a website to put this on. Oh damn...
Alert - getting patents and getting a reputation for stuff your lab does do not mean you're so damn hot. In fact, it doesn't even mean you invented it - witness the *many* times Edison ripped stuff straight off other people. Nor does it mean the inventions are any damn good - Edison was quite happy to use publicity, lawsuits and outright lies to promote his stuff and crap on other people's stuff.
So a lot like Billy Gates and his organisation, in fact...
My first contact with Macs was at uni, and they were pretty old. They were the ones where the power-off and floppy-eject commands were done by software - the box physically had no power switch or disk eject button. (I think they were Macs, unless they were some pre-Mac Apple.)
Trouble was, the damn things were flaky as hell. No-one used them, partly bcos everyone was more familiar with DOS and Win3.11, but also bcos they simply wouldn't stay up long enough to get anything done!
So anyway, your computer crashes. No worries, reboot it. Then you find that there isn't a reset button. Or a power-off button. And you can't get your disk back bcos that's under software control and the software is dead. So you have to play the trace-the-power-cable game, and of course the power sockets are on the floor under the table. And when two dozen power cables drop through one hole in the desk, and other people are working on machines on that desk and don't want their power cable accidentally pulled out, this exercise becomes non-trivial.
Up to then, Apple had been some mythical "great company" to me. Then I found that not only was their user interface tricky to get the hang of, but their hardware was shit. That kind of turned me off Apple. PCs straight along the line for me since then.
It uses facts that are carefully hand-picked to support the theory, and ignores the equally large body of facts which disprove the theory. So "pseudoscience".
Unfortunately Borders haven't got a "pseudoscience" section for homeopathy, crystal healing and "Blink!" so it'll probably end up in the "popular science" section - thereby pissing off those of us who believe that books about science should bear some resemblance to the real world and use reasonably scientific methods.
Grab.
Re:maybe...
on
Whereables?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For a short answer, that's basically it.:-)
For a long answer:- * Batteries still don't last long enough and are still too heavy. * Chording keyboards are still immature, expensive, clunky and not widely available. * There still isn't a suitable viewing mechanism - all current ones suffer from one or more of: not enough resolution; can't support colour; produces eye-strain; too heavy; too clunky; too expensive; too fragile; requires too much power drain.
So if you want a wearable, you're stuck with a low-powered processor, a heavy battery pack, a clunky chording keyboard, and an ugly (and heavy) headset that'll only do 640x480 in grey-scale. And it'll cost a fortune.
Who gave the average citizen the "right" to free travel? Was this some gift that the state gave? This is an intrinsic quality of being a human being. This right does not depend on the good graces or even the laws of the state.
So a convict has the right to travel wherever they want, whenever they want?! Try again - that one won't ever fly!
I'll just quote that without a response so you can see for yourself how moronic you sound.
Good call - insults instead of reasoning.
What if you are wrongfully convicted? Then do you lose your rights?
Yes, during your sentence. That's the reason why, when exonerated, you can sue for compensation - because you've been deprived of your rights for the period of time you were wrongfully sent to jail.
And let's be clear about this - your rights are rescinded for the duration of your punishment ONLY. The Western legal system is utterly clear that incarceration, a fine, or whatever other punishment is full and final settlement for whatever crime you committed. After that punishment is over, you continue to have full rights.
You can lose your freedom. You can not lose your RIGHT to freedom.
So the state *always* violates your rights by locking you up as punishment for a crime? Here's an exercise for you - rob a store at gunpoint, wait for the cops to arrive, and then tell the judge that he can't jail you because you have a right to freedom. See where that gets you...
Why NOT track people even before they are charged with a crime?
Because they've not committed a crime, dummy!
If the convicts rights can be taken away by a mere law then surely anyone's rights can be taken away.
A "mere law"?! So you don't believe in the rule of law, or that the state has the right to punish transgressors of your state's laws? Yes, a convict's rights can be taken away by a "mere law" - the commandment that says "thou shalt not steal", codified into written law under whatever name your legal system happens to call it (burglary, robbery with violence, whatever) with an explicit range of penalties listed for punishing those who commit that crime.
Open hardware standards brought massive reductions in computer prices, and PCs kicked the butt of all the proprietary-hardware vendors on price. Apple were, and still are, proprietary-hardware vendors. The only reason they kept going was that DTP was so standardised on Apple-based software - basically no-one else was buying them. Today, Apples are still more expensive than PCs for the same power, and there is simply no Apple equivalent to the $400 PC. And since they're proprietary hardware, no-one else can fill in those price gaps.
Had PCs not been around and Apple and their like were still the leaders, we might just about be looking at 1GHz in 10 years time. And graphics? well, maybe we'd just about be able to play Quake1 by now. Open hardware is what brought about all of that, because without open hardware there's no incentive to improve significantly.
Oh, and without PCs you could forget about reading files on different systems too.
Apple may have better *software* that's more reliable and prettier, but it's the hardware that brought the improvements. Unfortunately MS bulled their way into the software. Other possibilities like OS/2 might have been better, but sadly they didn't get the support from businesses who all bought WinNT and Win95, and from that point MS were unassailable.
As an alternative to being locked in a cage with a 20-stone homosexual rapist, I can't see too many convicts arguing. "Oh, you don't like it? Well, get back in your cell with Bubba then."
Sure you can. Just one example: tThe average citizen enjoys the right to free travel; a convict doesn't (which is why they're a convict - duh!).
Bottom line - when convicted of a crime, you lose many of your rights until you've served your time. If they were proposing to track people *after* they'd served their time, that would be violation of rights. But to track people as an alternative to jail, during which time they *have* no right to expect any freedom of movement at all, that's a damn fine thing.
Grab.
Re:The problem with WH and 40k
on
NYT on Warhammer
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· Score: 4, Interesting
"Quick fix?" It's GW who deliberately elected to be in that position.
I played at school and briefly after, from about 13 to about 20. That's the time when it started going all cartoony. To start with it was very much the "dark future" approach - a great gothic atmosphere to all the games. Then when I was about 16-17 it went right downhill. The Orks/Orcs became comic relief, the rules were dumbed down, everything became "heroic", and suddenly it was bright cartoon colours everywhere! Quite simply, GW deliberately aimed for the young-teen market, altering all their games and introducing new figure lines to do so.
And since they were aiming at kids, they chose not to charge pocket-money prices (like TSR did). No, prices started at £1 a figure (when TSR figures were about 50-60p) and had reached £3 when I jacked out. The intention was clearly to target adults buying these for kids as presents. If you wanted to buy them out of your own money, well, tough.
It's an interesting comparison against TSR (or whatever they're called today). TSR deliberately kept it adult, and as a result still have a zillion adult roleplayers and games. GW consciously went kiddie, and as a result have cut off all their adult audience, who left to other fantasy games or historical gaming. They made their bed, so they can't bitch about having to lie in it.
It's well documented that RMS came up with that philosophy because he ran into a closed-source printer driver that had a bug. Not that it didn't meet every conceivable need, but that it simply was faulty and didn't meet the specific need it was created for.
No, I can't tell you what the userbase is for Hurd - because it doesn't have one. Nor will it ever get one (beyond its developers), unless it can demonstrate such an overwhelming improvement over Linux that it'll supersede it as a kernel.
It seems you don't understand my point either. Free software is nice in theory, but if it doesn't work then what use is it? Suppose I'd bought a PC 5 years ago to run HURD on, and refused to use it unless it ran HURD out of GNU principles (after all, Linux is open source, not free software, per Linus's own opinions). How much work would I have got done? Zero. Zip. Nada. So how much use is it to have freedom to run software if there ISN'T any frigging software to run???
Again, this is the "Ivory Tower" thing. The principle of GNU is "software developed by software developers for software developers". The very GNU philosophy (which you quoted) makes that assumption. But the principle of open-source is "software developed for everyone to use" - open-source acknowledges that the user will generally *not* be a developer, nor should that assumption be made. Once you get out of the trap of thinking of yourself as the only target audience, you can consider non-developers having a stake in your code, which means you don't crap on them from a great height. Which is what HURD developers did to their fledgling userbase all those years ago.
The art community may regard that as art, but they have a vested interest in expanding the definition of the word "art". The rest of us are likely to disagree.
To use a metaphor that'll work well here, consider the MS Office word processor. Some bits everyone agrees are essential in a word processor - the ability to enter text, for instance. Some bits most people agree are useful in a word processor - auto-correct of typos, for instance. Some bits you'll find most people don't think belong in a word processor - say, the "track changes" feature. And some bits are almost universally condemned by users - "It looks like you're writing a letter"... The bottom line is that although MS is the one producing this stuff, it's the users who pass judgement on the quality of the features.
Now rethink your art example. MS are the artists, and the users are the viewing public. At one end of the scale you've got representational art which everyone agrees is art; and at the "it looks like you're writing a letter" end there's Duchamp's urinal, or the "performance artists" who rely on a gimmick such as nakedness or self-harm, or artists who rely on a personal reputation rather than product. Other artists ABSOLUTELY CANNOT make the judgement as to whether it's art or not - that judgement MUST rest with the viewing public, otherwise the whole process becomes too incestuous. It's only the viewing public that can distinguish between "edgy" and "pretentious rubbish".
This worked reasonably well when artists were funded by commission - if you produced something crap then you didn't get paid. And it wasn't all just pretty pictures either - the most highly-paid artists were incredibly cutting-edge for their day. The trouble today is that artists (often mediocre or retired) have taken over the commissioning process and get unquestioned grants from government or other bodies. The Turner prize is the best-known example in Britain, but there are too many others to count.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure thing - unless cables are actually broken then there's basically never an issue on signal wires. Heavy-duty cables to speakers need better cable, yes, but not signal levels (and for speakers, Monster aren't worth it either).
I'd also like to mention an ethical reason why not to buy Monster. Monster Cables have been methodically sueing every business in the US that uses the word "Monster". Since Monster Cables are large, and most businesses are mom-and-pop operations, the small guys get screwed over bcos they can't fight back.
They'll try it with anyone as well - they actually tried to get money off Disney for making the film "Monsters Inc"! Disney told them where to shove it though, and they had the clout to make it stick. But most people can't afford to.
For more info, search Google for "monster cable lawsuit". I originally heard about it in the Denver Post, but it's all over the place now.
Grab.
Yep, mine went the same way, and so did a large number of my classmates'. This was about 1987/88 - nothing new in medical science for vaccinating teenagers then! :-/ IIRC, we got our TB jabs in Jan/Feb, and mine hadn't healed until the following September. As I remember, about a third of people were OK within a month, another third were OK by summer break, and the rest of us still had a pus-filled hole by the next academic year.
Grab.
They probably get better fuel efficiency than a car running at the same engine load. The difference is that you simply *don't* see bikers cruising at 70 - the biker theory apparently is that they have to go fast enough so speed cameras can't capture them due to red-shift. I always do 80 on the motorway and it's been a long time since I passed a bike. In fact, the only times I've ever passed a bike, it's always been big Harleys or similar, and they have so little aerodynamics that the wind at anything over about 60 is practically like running into a brick wall.
Grab.
Compression is a standard audio term, not an MS invention. Good description of what it does though. A compressor effects pedal is often used by guitarists because "turning up the volume" as the note decays away basically makes the note go on for ever (which is good for atmospheric guitar effects).
For the benefit of the original poster, if you want quiet relaxing classical music, try picking quiet relaxing pieces. If you're looking for a low-volume piece of music, why not just put in Metallica "Creeping Death" and turn the volume way down? Answer: cos it doesn't sound anything like how it's supposed to. So why not treat classical music the same, and listen to the music as it really sounds instead of in some distorted copy?
If you're having problems finding mellow classical music, buy more and you'll find plenty. Classical CDs are dirt cheap, so no reason not to. Deutsch Grammophon box sets are a good idea, incidentally. If you're still having trouble, much string quartet and chamber music has a fairly constant volume throughout.
Grab.
But thats what it takes to get it for free.
:-/
Indeed. As my original post said, Brits would generally rather pay for higher quality broadcasting.
Do you consider British Idol or Are you being Served high quality?
Idol, no - not now. The original was innovative, but they're riding a decreasing-returns thing now. And I believe this is one of the commercial channels anyway. Re "Are you being served", it beats the hell out of any US sitcom such as Friends, Roseanne, Married with Children, Home Improvements, etc. The Simpsons is better though, but the writers of The Simpsons do irony, which most American writers don't bcos many Americans don't grok irony.
the downside is that the BBC is state run and thus has a much easier time being censored. True ad based TV can be censored to but there seems something antidemocratic about state run media.
You might want to have a look at the BBC's history for that - in particular the David Kelly enquiry where the politicians ripped into the BBC for reporting something the government didn't want known. The BBC really *isn't* censored to any extent. In part this is because there are too many layers between the broadcasters on the ground and the politicians.
Compare and contrast to the corporately-owned US media. If Rupert Murdoch doesn't want it said, or if any of his powerful friends don't want it said, it doesn't get said. Politicians and government-appointed people are accountable to the electorate, and if they apply pressure then the BBC are in a prime position to make that known. Corporate bosses are accountable to no-one, and if they suppress a story then there's no-one else to pass it on. In a truly independent media this wouldn't be a problem, but the paid-for media is under the control of few enough people that it can't really be regarded as independent.
Grab.
Re "privacy", this uses radio DF technique. None of this is anything that would ever have required someone to get a warrant to enter your house, any more than the power company would need a warrant to see that power was being tapped off their lines somewhere in your neighbourhood. The only privacy concern I have is that stores take my details and send them on elsewhere.
As for the "right" to receive a signal, you're assuming that you do have a right to do so. America simply doesn't have the concept of public-service broadcasting (or of public services at all, in general) so this may be why you don't get it. We get the "right" to receive a signal in exchange for money, the same way you would with cable or satellite. Because America has always had broadcasting supported by gratuitously-extensive advertising, you've got used to it. Europeans wouldn't put up with it though - if you tried putting ads more frequently than maybe 1 minute every 10, you'd get lynched by the viewers (or more accurately, by your bosses when the viewers go elsewhere).
Grab.
There isn't a one-time "TV tax" when you buy it. What currently happens instead is that you pay for a yearly TV license.
:-)
Enforcement is traditionally carried out by TV detector vans with DF detection equipment (or hand-portable versions of the same) - the flyback transformer frequency is apparently pretty easy to detect and can be spotted from the road. You don't need to know what they're watching, just that they're watching *something*. Most houses have licenses, so I suspect they'll concentrate on houses that don't have licenses.
This is to a large extent helped by TV retailers, who take your address when you buy a TV. If you buy a TV and don't have a license, that fact will find its way to the relevant people, and I guess you're more likely to have a detector van coming round.
LCD and plasma TVs are kind of tricky for this, bcos they don't have the same hardware and so may not be detectable. PCs with TV cards are also not detectable, bcos a PC monitor runs at a different frequency, and also there's no way of proving a PC is being used to watch TV.
Technically you can get out of paying your license if you've modified your TV such that it can't receive signals from an aerial. There have been a few test cases for this. But the cost of modification is likely to be more than the cost of the license.
In any case, TV licenses are one tax that Brits generally don't mind paying - what you get for your money is usually worth it. American TV shows what you get if you don't - 50 channels of dreck. There are certainly some good shows on American TV, but they tend to follow the Hollywood film formula rather than the TV series formula. And US TV uses advertising to a degree that Brits (and Europeans generally) wouldn't consider acceptable.
Grab.
Absolutely right, man. You're *part* of the environment - if you just carry on like a good German then you're complicit in it.
And laying it on the line like that is about the best test of whether a company's worth sticking with. If it doesn't work out, it will give you a massive incentive to get the hell out. And if it does work out, you've just made massive kudos from being the person who turned it around. If the place is really that bad then chances are you're preparing to go anyway, so it doesn't make a big difference.
Grab.
Show me a house and garden that's ever "finished"...
If you regard something like Windows as a single project, then no, it's never finished - in the same way that a house is never finished bcos it gets redecorated/refitted every few years. It's more accurate to think in terms of multiple successive releases. And on those terms, a house and a piece of software are identical - you keep working on it until it's a good enough quality to sell.
A description of a house doesn't have to be complete, down to the size of screws used. But it does have to say what the house is going to look like and how it works (ie. structurally sound, and electrics and plumbing meet specs).
Same with software. If your requirements are "dude, we need a really *fast* tool to convert from this format to that format, and there might be a bunch of new fields you need to invent some values for", you're utterly screwed.
All the requirements do *not* necessarily have to be in place at the start. When building a house, the builders will likely walk the clients through when the floors are in, to fix the locations of pipes and electrical points. Similarly in software, you'll refine your requirements as you go along. The key thing in *both* is that you record what your requirements are, and check when you're done that your product is meeting those requirements. If you don't, chances are that your clients will be unhappy at the end, and you don't get paid (or don't get further contracts).
I also note that your examples all involve off-the-shelf desktop software. In this field you have to invent requirements beforehand, to try and predict what your customer's requirements are. This is not the case for most software projects - the majority of software developers are working on projects for customers who have some real requirement that needs filling. Even if they can't articulate it precisely, if what you give them doesn't do what they wanted, you don't get paid. And if it comes to court, you need to be able to show that you *did* produce what they asked for, otherwise it's your ass on the line.
Grab.
But then someone decides OOGLE needs to handle male and female bodies. Et voila, we have the Generic Object Oriented Graphics Leering Engine. Time to get us a website to put this on. Oh damn...
Grab.
Alert - getting patents and getting a reputation for stuff your lab does do not mean you're so damn hot. In fact, it doesn't even mean you invented it - witness the *many* times Edison ripped stuff straight off other people. Nor does it mean the inventions are any damn good - Edison was quite happy to use publicity, lawsuits and outright lies to promote his stuff and crap on other people's stuff.
So a lot like Billy Gates and his organisation, in fact...
Grab.
My first contact with Macs was at uni, and they were pretty old. They were the ones where the power-off and floppy-eject commands were done by software - the box physically had no power switch or disk eject button. (I think they were Macs, unless they were some pre-Mac Apple.)
Trouble was, the damn things were flaky as hell. No-one used them, partly bcos everyone was more familiar with DOS and Win3.11, but also bcos they simply wouldn't stay up long enough to get anything done!
So anyway, your computer crashes. No worries, reboot it. Then you find that there isn't a reset button. Or a power-off button. And you can't get your disk back bcos that's under software control and the software is dead. So you have to play the trace-the-power-cable game, and of course the power sockets are on the floor under the table. And when two dozen power cables drop through one hole in the desk, and other people are working on machines on that desk and don't want their power cable accidentally pulled out, this exercise becomes non-trivial.
Up to then, Apple had been some mythical "great company" to me. Then I found that not only was their user interface tricky to get the hang of, but their hardware was shit. That kind of turned me off Apple. PCs straight along the line for me since then.
You're missing the "1". Full explanation is
...
+ (international dial)
00 (in some countries this is also international)
1 (US/Canada international code)
819 (area code)
Suspect your telco isn't handling area codes properly.
Nope, it's "popular pseudoscience".
It uses facts that are carefully hand-picked to support the theory, and ignores the equally large body of facts which disprove the theory. So "pseudoscience".
Unfortunately Borders haven't got a "pseudoscience" section for homeopathy, crystal healing and "Blink!" so it'll probably end up in the "popular science" section - thereby pissing off those of us who believe that books about science should bear some resemblance to the real world and use reasonably scientific methods.
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For a short answer, that's basically it. :-)
For a long answer:-
* Batteries still don't last long enough and are still too heavy.
* Chording keyboards are still immature, expensive, clunky and not widely available.
* There still isn't a suitable viewing mechanism - all current ones suffer from one or more of: not enough resolution; can't support colour; produces eye-strain; too heavy; too clunky; too expensive; too fragile; requires too much power drain.
So if you want a wearable, you're stuck with a low-powered processor, a heavy battery pack, a clunky chording keyboard, and an ugly (and heavy) headset that'll only do 640x480 in grey-scale. And it'll cost a fortune.
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serving web pages is so darn cheap
Tell that to the next poor sap who gets Slashdotted when he posts a story featuring his personal webpage...
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Who gave the average citizen the "right" to free travel? Was this some gift that the state gave? This is an intrinsic quality of being a human being. This right does not depend on the good graces or even the laws of the state.
So a convict has the right to travel wherever they want, whenever they want?! Try again - that one won't ever fly!
I'll just quote that without a response so you can see for yourself how moronic you sound.
Good call - insults instead of reasoning.
What if you are wrongfully convicted? Then do you lose your rights?
Yes, during your sentence. That's the reason why, when exonerated, you can sue for compensation - because you've been deprived of your rights for the period of time you were wrongfully sent to jail.
And let's be clear about this - your rights are rescinded for the duration of your punishment ONLY. The Western legal system is utterly clear that incarceration, a fine, or whatever other punishment is full and final settlement for whatever crime you committed. After that punishment is over, you continue to have full rights.
You can lose your freedom. You can not lose your RIGHT to freedom.
So the state *always* violates your rights by locking you up as punishment for a crime? Here's an exercise for you - rob a store at gunpoint, wait for the cops to arrive, and then tell the judge that he can't jail you because you have a right to freedom. See where that gets you...
Why NOT track people even before they are charged with a crime?
Because they've not committed a crime, dummy!
If the convicts rights can be taken away by a mere law then surely anyone's rights can be taken away.
A "mere law"?! So you don't believe in the rule of law, or that the state has the right to punish transgressors of your state's laws? Yes, a convict's rights can be taken away by a "mere law" - the commandment that says "thou shalt not steal", codified into written law under whatever name your legal system happens to call it (burglary, robbery with violence, whatever) with an explicit range of penalties listed for punishing those who commit that crime.
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"Icarus". Too relevant a name when a zillion web browsers melt the crap out of the server...
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What happened?
Open hardware standards brought massive reductions in computer prices, and PCs kicked the butt of all the proprietary-hardware vendors on price. Apple were, and still are, proprietary-hardware vendors. The only reason they kept going was that DTP was so standardised on Apple-based software - basically no-one else was buying them. Today, Apples are still more expensive than PCs for the same power, and there is simply no Apple equivalent to the $400 PC. And since they're proprietary hardware, no-one else can fill in those price gaps.
Had PCs not been around and Apple and their like were still the leaders, we might just about be looking at 1GHz in 10 years time. And graphics? well, maybe we'd just about be able to play Quake1 by now. Open hardware is what brought about all of that, because without open hardware there's no incentive to improve significantly.
Oh, and without PCs you could forget about reading files on different systems too.
Apple may have better *software* that's more reliable and prettier, but it's the hardware that brought the improvements. Unfortunately MS bulled their way into the software. Other possibilities like OS/2 might have been better, but sadly they didn't get the support from businesses who all bought WinNT and Win95, and from that point MS were unassailable.
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I find your lack of faith... *disturbing*...
What timespans does it permit?
The duration of your jail sentence.
As an alternative to being locked in a cage with a 20-stone homosexual rapist, I can't see too many convicts arguing. "Oh, you don't like it? Well, get back in your cell with Bubba then."
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Sure you can. Just one example: tThe average citizen enjoys the right to free travel; a convict doesn't (which is why they're a convict - duh!).
Bottom line - when convicted of a crime, you lose many of your rights until you've served your time. If they were proposing to track people *after* they'd served their time, that would be violation of rights. But to track people as an alternative to jail, during which time they *have* no right to expect any freedom of movement at all, that's a damn fine thing.
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"Quick fix?" It's GW who deliberately elected to be in that position.
I played at school and briefly after, from about 13 to about 20. That's the time when it started going all cartoony. To start with it was very much the "dark future" approach - a great gothic atmosphere to all the games. Then when I was about 16-17 it went right downhill. The Orks/Orcs became comic relief, the rules were dumbed down, everything became "heroic", and suddenly it was bright cartoon colours everywhere! Quite simply, GW deliberately aimed for the young-teen market, altering all their games and introducing new figure lines to do so.
And since they were aiming at kids, they chose not to charge pocket-money prices (like TSR did). No, prices started at £1 a figure (when TSR figures were about 50-60p) and had reached £3 when I jacked out. The intention was clearly to target adults buying these for kids as presents. If you wanted to buy them out of your own money, well, tough.
It's an interesting comparison against TSR (or whatever they're called today). TSR deliberately kept it adult, and as a result still have a zillion adult roleplayers and games. GW consciously went kiddie, and as a result have cut off all their adult audience, who left to other fantasy games or historical gaming. They made their bed, so they can't bitch about having to lie in it.
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It's well documented that RMS came up with that philosophy because he ran into a closed-source printer driver that had a bug. Not that it didn't meet every conceivable need, but that it simply was faulty and didn't meet the specific need it was created for.
No, I can't tell you what the userbase is for Hurd - because it doesn't have one. Nor will it ever get one (beyond its developers), unless it can demonstrate such an overwhelming improvement over Linux that it'll supersede it as a kernel.
It seems you don't understand my point either. Free software is nice in theory, but if it doesn't work then what use is it? Suppose I'd bought a PC 5 years ago to run HURD on, and refused to use it unless it ran HURD out of GNU principles (after all, Linux is open source, not free software, per Linus's own opinions). How much work would I have got done? Zero. Zip. Nada. So how much use is it to have freedom to run software if there ISN'T any frigging software to run???
Again, this is the "Ivory Tower" thing. The principle of GNU is "software developed by software developers for software developers". The very GNU philosophy (which you quoted) makes that assumption. But the principle of open-source is "software developed for everyone to use" - open-source acknowledges that the user will generally *not* be a developer, nor should that assumption be made. Once you get out of the trap of thinking of yourself as the only target audience, you can consider non-developers having a stake in your code, which means you don't crap on them from a great height. Which is what HURD developers did to their fledgling userbase all those years ago.
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The art community may regard that as art, but they have a vested interest in expanding the definition of the word "art". The rest of us are likely to disagree.
To use a metaphor that'll work well here, consider the MS Office word processor. Some bits everyone agrees are essential in a word processor - the ability to enter text, for instance. Some bits most people agree are useful in a word processor - auto-correct of typos, for instance. Some bits you'll find most people don't think belong in a word processor - say, the "track changes" feature. And some bits are almost universally condemned by users - "It looks like you're writing a letter"... The bottom line is that although MS is the one producing this stuff, it's the users who pass judgement on the quality of the features.
Now rethink your art example. MS are the artists, and the users are the viewing public. At one end of the scale you've got representational art which everyone agrees is art; and at the "it looks like you're writing a letter" end there's Duchamp's urinal, or the "performance artists" who rely on a gimmick such as nakedness or self-harm, or artists who rely on a personal reputation rather than product. Other artists ABSOLUTELY CANNOT make the judgement as to whether it's art or not - that judgement MUST rest with the viewing public, otherwise the whole process becomes too incestuous. It's only the viewing public that can distinguish between "edgy" and "pretentious rubbish".
This worked reasonably well when artists were funded by commission - if you produced something crap then you didn't get paid. And it wasn't all just pretty pictures either - the most highly-paid artists were incredibly cutting-edge for their day. The trouble today is that artists (often mediocre or retired) have taken over the commissioning process and get unquestioned grants from government or other bodies. The Turner prize is the best-known example in Britain, but there are too many others to count.
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