My own experience has been that I played a number of VR short films, worked on a number of them, and then eventually set up a Vive at home (when the price of a used Vive dropped to within my budget -- I already had the fast GPU for other work). At the VR post facility at which I freelanced, I don't recall hearing of anyone (man, woman, child) getting sick while using a headset –and we had every variety of headset on hand. I used them all, no mop no limit.
There were a few general rules that seemed to help make VR videos that didn't cause unease -- it's ok for cameras to dolly forward or fly the camera forward on a drone but flying backward tends to give some people the willies. Not a lot of fast cuts, etc. My favorite shorts often disregarded these rules.
At home I've played VR games for hours (Holopoint, Echo Arena, Rec Room), and have also spent lots of time in Quill. The only thing that's given me any uneasy sensations was Google Earth when flying around (and even then, it wasn't that bad). As others have stated, as long as movement is connected to your body movement, the brain seems to have little issues just going with it. Even Echo Arena, in which you do a lot of floating around in large chambers, you initiate those movements with fairly realistic pull and throw motions and it all feels physically-based.
I've put many people in the headset to look at shorts, play games, and sketch in Quill --of all genders and from age 8 to 72 and have never had anyone get sick. I left my Dad in the headset perusing Google Earth for hours.
I find this strict 20-minute limit, in 2018, very hard to believe. How does anyone in the lab get any work done? Maybe they're doing some super-advanced experimental stuff that blows minds and has no connection to head movement. Or maybe this is all about applications that include movement of the camera but are viewed on headsets that don't support room-scale? There's gotta be something making the VR mentioned in this article much worse on people than average, as it does not sound at all like a realistic appraisal of the experience I've seen people have in VR.
Figuring out how to make all of those connections, swap SD cards, etc -- that all sounds very educational to me. Not every computing device has to be as simple to use as an iPad. Let the tots learn to try things and make mistakes, and feel rewarded by something as simple as a flashing LED or "hello world" showing up on a connected screen after hours of figuratively banging their heads into a wall.
For what it's worth, my 5s is noticeably snappier with iOS 8 than it was with 7. So at least iOS 8 doesn't make that slightly-older phone slow and dysfunctional. I can't speak for other models.
That first graph isn't without its critics, it looks as though both the scale and the points in time that are labelled have been chosen to smooth over changes in tax revenue over time. Setting the scale at 100% does allow one to fit both a marginal tax rate of 90% and 28% within the same chart, but it does obscure significant-looking swings between 15 and 21% in revenue. Whether these changes in revenue were directly related to the marginal tax rate I don't know, though this author thinks they are: http://www.newrepublic.com/blo...
There is a disconnect in many (possibly most) people between their level of intelligence and what they believe as a matter of faith. It may seem paradoxical, but whether the specific beliefs* that are part of Judaism are stupid or not stupid has absolutely nothing to do with whether the Ashkenazi Jewish population as a whole produces more people who score highly on standardized tests and other measurements used to quantify intelligence.
As a corrollary, I do think there is a connection between one's intelligence and how much intellectual effort they can put towards rationalizing their beliefs. But that's not the issue at hand.
-----
* and I'd argue that it is a drastic oversimplification to selectively interpret some portions of the Hebrew bible very literally (ignoring other, contrary portions) and not pause to consider the amount of rabbinic interpretation and debate (including some nice rationalization and explanation) that make up much of Jewish religious teaching. Judaism is also pretty anarchic and personal, and if you ask 3 practicing Jews about their thoughts on god you'll find there's plenty of differences in the specifics of their beliefs. How Jews have related to the text over time is not something that can be easily gleaned from a literal read of these ancient texts.
The researchers have noticed an interesting correlation between Ashkenazi Jews, some measures of "intelligence", and genetic diseases, but based on the article their conclusion is not an obvious one. I can come up with alternative explanations that seem to me to be slightly more plausible than occupation-related selection pressures acting over a few hundred years.
For example, perhaps the Jewish belief system or values were themselves the selection force. Judaism has always been a very literate culture which stresses study, textual analysis, and interpretation. Maybe more people of a certain mind would join up or remain Jews. Data on Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews could help clarify this issue, since they would presumably have faced different selection pressures (in terms of being forced into a limited set of occupations) than the Jews of Europe.
sure. "Kerry wouldn't have done the same." You happy?
Kerry's campaign folk did not screen every attendee to his speeches to make sure they didn't support the other guy. But many Kerry supporters were screened and shut out of events Bush's campaign stops. Evidence points to the idea that no, Kerry didn't have the same problem with dissenters that plagues the current administration. I'd venture it's a good bet that "Kerry wouldn't have done the same".
In any case, why are we talking about Kerry at all? Let's concentrate on the matter at hand, which appears to be an administration that exhibits severe tunnel-vision and squelches dissent.
It sounds like you were subjected to the LCD-glasses style of 3D Imax projection. You would probably have a much better time with the version that uses polarized lenses -- I know I prefer it greatly for similar reasons (no headache, no flicker), but for some reason the LCD shutter glasses method is much more common for projecting 3D.
FWIW, Percy Schmeiser denies deliberately planting Monsanto seed, and states that Monsanto is lying outright about the percentage of his crops that were contaminated:
I'm almost positive that the Microsoft MN-500 base station I purchased a while back did not ship with WEP enabled by default.
In fact, the documentation for this base station does not mention that WEP is enabled by default, and instead gives instructions for enabling WEP, and talks about the benefits of enabling WEP. For example (from page 13 of MN500_Base_Station_Configuration_Guide.pdf):
When you enable wireless access on your network, you should also enable wireless security (WEP) to prevent users of unauthorized wireless clients from joining your wireless network.
In any case, on my MN-500, I had to enable WEP, it didn't ship enabled. I don't know which Microsoft base station y'all bought. Do the other ones ship with WEP enabled?
I can hear the whines of monitors and televisions, and have been able to hear them my entire life (at least, as far back as I remember), but have never found them particularly distracting.
I wrote up the following screed, and then realized I should start right off the bat with the most pertinent point:
The iPod battery is user-replaceable for $49. See below for a link to one vendor.
The iPod was obviously designed for optimal simplicity, elegance, and small-size. Apple crammed a flat battery into the thing that is about the size of the entire back of the device, and thus managed to make the highest capacity/size ratio portable mp3 player available.
Adding an easily user-accessible battery door would (to my mind) break the seamlessness of the iPod's design and possibly require that it be larger as well (consider a door that's the size of practically the entire back of the device -- or whether the dimensions would change if some sort of snap-release tab-in-slot mechanism was added to the entire length and breadth of the current iPod back).
Given that the battery lasts at least 18-months, I'd prefer to have a seamless design, and then have a little fun with a screwdriver when the time comes (rarely) to change the battery. In addition, I wonder how long the tiny hard drive will last given the conditions in which it's used and the forces to which it's subjected -- it wouldn't surprise me if (had I an iPod) I'd only need to replace the battery once.
What's that, you didn't know the battery IS user-replaceable? See IpodBattery.com for details on the $49 ipod batteries they sell and to read the installation instructions. It doesn't look all that difficult for anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver.
People seem to like to pile on criticism of the fact that the iPod battery is not easily replaceable. But I haven't heard the same sort of griping about the non-easily-user-replaceable lithium-ion batteries built into most PDAs (Palm Tungstens, Sony Clies, RIM Blackberrys, Compaq Ipaq, etc). I doubt all these companies forgo providing easy access to the batteries as some conspiracy to force consumers to replace the devices or pay to have a new battery installed, but rather the devices are designed to be as small and tightly packed as possible, and given this concern less regard is rightly given to putting the battery in an easily accessible spot and adding a door.
It is worth griping a bit about Apple's previous battery replacement policy (they wanted $255 to replace the battery), but they've since changed their tune quite a bit and it'll now cost $99 to have them replace the battery for you. In addition, when buying an iPod, an additional $59 gets the warranty extended to two years.
'Course, the iPod is out of my price range. I spent less than the cost of a $49 iPod battery on my teensy 128Mb USB-memory-stick-mp3-player-voice-recorder toy (Andus resound, flashed with some similar player's firmware to allow it to be mounted on Macs, Windows, and whatever-else as a real generic USB storage device), and find that this is a more than adequate amount of memory for a few hours of jogging. But if I were to buy an iPod, it would be because I appreciate things that are well designed and a joy to use, and the battery issue wouldn't even be on my radar.
Not to be cruel or whatever, but what has gotten into Americans/Japanese about this irrational fear of dying and the desire to keep their teeth in good condition as they age.
Yeah if you brush your teeth three times a day, maybe your teeth will stay with you until you're 90. So what? Are you going to bother to eat chocolates when your 80? Will it make you young enough for me to not tease you about your incontinence? No of course not.
The people in some other culture more wise than ours had old people too. And let me tell you, they were more natural about stuff and didn't have this fear of going to pot. They lost their teeth at 60 and died before 70. Those were the days.
Sheesh, back when I was in school, I didn't have that irrational fear of getting bad grades, so I didn't study and failed, just like we were meant to do.
On a more serious note, I can't understand how the poster to whom I'm responding could be serious in his/her criticisms of an invention that will allow old folk to have greater mobility and yes do more activities in their later years. This is about quality of life, not a life-extension.
I'm glad you are encouraging people to read the article before posting, but I think YOU have it backwards. The article I read stated that the SCO engineers were implementing a layer that would interpret Linux system calls so that SCO's Unix implementation could run Linux binaries. The anonymous source quoted in the article was one of the engineers assisting on this project, and s/he was surprised by how similar the "new" SCO code was to the pre-existing Linux code.
The SCO code in question was in the process of being written and could not yet have been copied into the Linux kernel unless someone on the Linux team had a time machine. I repeat, the article is about a SCO engineer encountering supposedly NEW SCO code that appeared to have been cribbed from already existing Linux code.
Please re-read the following quote from the article and evaluate how it fits with your interpretation of the article:
A source close to SCO, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told eWEEK that parts of the Linux kernel code were copied into the Unix System V source tree by former or current SCO employees.
This is not about old SCO code finding its way into Linux, this is about supposedly new SCO code written to implement Linux kernel functions that looked suspiciously like code taken straight out of existing versions of Linux.
Knowledge of the vagaries of alchemy is not the benchmark by which reasonable people judge the intellectual capacity of kids. Maybe publishing execs thought that American kids were too smart to waste their time memorizing allusions to medieval science. Not that any knowledge is a bad thing, but is there a point to looking down on anyone for ignorance what is to them a useless bit of trivia.
My childrens' book, George Costanza's Yo No Bi Project hasn't been selling all that well in Antarctica. Obviously those damn Antarcticans are just too stupid, lazy, and drunk to ever understand my brilliant allusion to concepts concerning Japanese art. Oh well, at least the kids in [name of country] can recite the names of all the Roman Emperors in order. Priorities priorities.
I've built many a system for waaaaay less than a Dell, Gateway, or the like (comparisons to the cost of a prebuilt LCD screen [purchased with stacked coupons and discounts] to a fictitious homebuilt large LCD screen is amusing but, um, I don't get it). It's laughable to think that I'd have been able to buy a AMD 1.4Ghz Dell with 40Gb hard drive, Radeon dual-monitor support, CDRW drive, DVD-Rom drive, and a half gig of ram 2 years ago for around $500 from Dell, Gateway, or any of the majors. But with parts bought from Fry's, Compgeeks, Newegg, and other vendors I was able to cobble together a nice little system for that price. I added a KVM switch and used the 19" LG 995 monitor, mouse, and keyboard from my Mac to complete the project. For someone lacking those parts they could have been purchased (sans KVM) for under $300 altogether. I'd guess that an equivalent system from Dell would've cost more than $800 before the addition of a 19" monitor.
In general, you can buy all the parts and spend an hour putting it all together for at least a few hundred dollars less than a prebuilt system. You can also save extra by using equivalent but less costly parts, and by skimping on parts that aren't important to you. Find a local or online computer parts store that's reputable and has good prices, and there's no way the parts will cost as much as the total of the parts included in a prebuilt system from Dell or whoever.
The value of buying a prebuilt is not that you're getting any of the benefit of Dell's bulk orders of computer hardware (they keep that benefit in the form of profits), but that you get support and a single warranty provider rather than having to deal with all the different manufacturers when encountering a problem. You're not just paying for the brand name, although that's part of it.
Since I can build and support my own, none of my computer's parts were defective, and I don't think it's that big a deal to work with manufacturer's warranties, I will probably never pay extra for Dell brand equity and support. For my Grandma I'd probably recommend she buy from one of the majors, I'd advise her to go with Apple but she already bought herself a Gateway.
As for building my own 19" LCD monitor, I suppose that might be a worthwhile endeavor if the cost of LCD monitors were high enough to justify the millions of dollars of R&D I'd need to spend before manufacturing one.
Or, rather than replace all the hardware in your Mac SE (if it's an SE 30), you could install NetBSD. That's right, a modern unix OS running on your piece of ancient Apple hardware. Neato!
A previous slashdotter wrote "Don't use Gimp, Linux, or Macs", which I suppose is good advice unless you want to be a back-alley little production house like Dreamworks eh? Or working on one of those chintzy low-budget films like Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, and Stuart Little. Granted, most of the better graphic design and animation tools are not available for Linux, but there are some good ones (Maya, Blender, Gimp) that are nothing to sneeze at.
The recommendation to avoid Macs is particularly bizarre considering that Macs are widely used in the graphic design and animation industries and that the most common programs used for computer illustration, photo-manipulation, and editing, are available with identical feature sets for both Mac and PC (All the adobe apps especially).
The recommendation to avoid Linux is strange since many of the high-end graphics houses that do work for film are heading towards using Linux and other free Unix-like systems, and not just for the render farm. Familiarity with Unix systems will not hurt anyone who wants to work in computer-graphics for film, it's definitely a proficiency to place prominently on the CV.
The Gimp may not be optimal for use in print design due to the lack of cmyk and lab color models (due to patent issues?), but it's been great for those doing film and web work for some time. The ease with which gimp can be scripted using perl and other programming/scripting languages is amazing.
That's my two cents. My dollar is that artistry and graphic design sense exist independent of platform and application choices. Work with what you've got. The first episode of South Park was made with construction paper, Paul Rand and Saul Bass were doing amazing designs (of the sort programs like Adobe Illustrator are often used to make) long before the personal computer existed. Use actualy physical tools or choose a platform that lets you concentrate on the art and not on futzing with the operating system. If that means Windows, Mac, or Linux to you, go for it.
Was that a typo about slide films having wide exposure latitude? It's provably wrong. Slide films record a much smaller range of values than negative film, and probably have less exposure latitude than the CCDs in these newest digital cameras. Slide films are notoriously terribly at capturing highlight details -- most pros underexpose their slides to compensate for this and to increase color saturation. Don't believe me? Ask Kodak.
There are plenty of reasons to shoot slide film, but a supposed wide exposure latitude isn't one of them. The wide exposure latitude of negative film may still have an advantage for the moment, but digital imaging technology is rapidly closing the gap with its analog counterparts in terms of exposure latitude, and I expect film's latitude to be exceeded by consumer quality CCDs within a few years. It's already happening in the digital video arena, Sony claims that their DVW-700 camera has 11-stops of exposure latitude (on par with the best negative stock), and directors of photography have managed to get at least 7-stops from the latest professional video equipment.
I'm not planning on selling my Canon pro 35mm gear in the next few years, but I bet in 5 or 6 years there'll be no good reason left to bother with film, and I'm talking about both cost and quality.
The FDA's lack on influence in this realm is not due to the lack of "huge pharmaceutical company lobbying", but because it was hamstrung by an act of Congress in 1994. details.
"Natural" drugs are huge business. There is a lot of money involved, almost $17 billion in the year 2000 according to supplementinfo.org, and the huge pharmaceutical companies (Bayer, American Home Products, Johnson and Johnson and Boeheringer-Ingelheim) are getting into the act.
Here in the US, it is illegal for doctors to receive kickbacks. I do not know if the same or similar laws apply to alternative health practitioners. I've overheard discussion of a friend of a friend whose family was sent on free trips every year by the manufacturer of a herb that he prescribed, but I don't know any details. A quick search of the net revealed this(search in that page for the word "kickbacks"). It should be noted that not all doctor's orders involve drugs, and they don't receive any financial incentive for prescribing exercise, or drinking fluids. All the doctors I know are people who take their hippocratic oath quite seriously, maybe I just haven't met the evil ones who caused your cynicism.
There are a couple of Japanese domain names I've thought of purchasing, but would rather use the CORE registrar joker.com than register.com due to the difference in price (joker.com is around $8-11 per year, depending on the exchange rate of the Euro). I was sad to see that I'd have to use register.com and spend $20 for a Japanese domain name.
But now what's to stop me from looking through the RFC, figuring out how to encode my domain name using RACE, and then registering it using joker.com as a domain name that begins with "bq-"?
I certainly hope that this is meant as parody. "stepping stone words" leading to harder language?! Get real.
Words are not now and have never been a problem. If a kid has trouble detecting what form of speech is appropriate for a particular time and place, that kid needs some educating. Knowing how to say the word 'fuck' will not lead kids down the dark path to liberalism, nor will it turn them into democrats.
Slashdot Mirror
My own experience has been that I played a number of VR short films, worked on a number of them, and then eventually set up a Vive at home (when the price of a used Vive dropped to within my budget -- I already had the fast GPU for other work). At the VR post facility at which I freelanced, I don't recall hearing of anyone (man, woman, child) getting sick while using a headset –and we had every variety of headset on hand. I used them all, no mop no limit.
There were a few general rules that seemed to help make VR videos that didn't cause unease -- it's ok for cameras to dolly forward or fly the camera forward on a drone but flying backward tends to give some people the willies. Not a lot of fast cuts, etc. My favorite shorts often disregarded these rules.
At home I've played VR games for hours (Holopoint, Echo Arena, Rec Room), and have also spent lots of time in Quill. The only thing that's given me any uneasy sensations was Google Earth when flying around (and even then, it wasn't that bad). As others have stated, as long as movement is connected to your body movement, the brain seems to have little issues just going with it. Even Echo Arena, in which you do a lot of floating around in large chambers, you initiate those movements with fairly realistic pull and throw motions and it all feels physically-based.
I've put many people in the headset to look at shorts, play games, and sketch in Quill --of all genders and from age 8 to 72 and have never had anyone get sick. I left my Dad in the headset perusing Google Earth for hours.
I find this strict 20-minute limit, in 2018, very hard to believe. How does anyone in the lab get any work done? Maybe they're doing some super-advanced experimental stuff that blows minds and has no connection to head movement. Or maybe this is all about applications that include movement of the camera but are viewed on headsets that don't support room-scale? There's gotta be something making the VR mentioned in this article much worse on people than average, as it does not sound at all like a realistic appraisal of the experience I've seen people have in VR.
Figuring out how to make all of those connections, swap SD cards, etc -- that all sounds very educational to me. Not every computing device has to be as simple to use as an iPad. Let the tots learn to try things and make mistakes, and feel rewarded by something as simple as a flashing LED or "hello world" showing up on a connected screen after hours of figuratively banging their heads into a wall.
For what it's worth, my 5s is noticeably snappier with iOS 8 than it was with 7. So at least iOS 8 doesn't make that slightly-older phone slow and dysfunctional. I can't speak for other models.
Are you referring to this discredited rumor, or something else?
http://www.snopes.com/politics...
That first graph isn't without its critics, it looks as though both the scale and the points in time that are labelled have been chosen to smooth over changes in tax revenue over time. Setting the scale at 100% does allow one to fit both a marginal tax rate of 90% and 28% within the same chart, but it does obscure significant-looking swings between 15 and 21% in revenue. Whether these changes in revenue were directly related to the marginal tax rate I don't know, though this author thinks they are:
http://www.newrepublic.com/blo...
As a corrollary, I do think there is a connection between one's intelligence and how much intellectual effort they can put towards rationalizing their beliefs. But that's not the issue at hand.
-----
* and I'd argue that it is a drastic oversimplification to selectively interpret some portions of the Hebrew bible very literally (ignoring other, contrary portions) and not pause to consider the amount of rabbinic interpretation and debate (including some nice rationalization and explanation) that make up much of Jewish religious teaching. Judaism is also pretty anarchic and personal, and if you ask 3 practicing Jews about their thoughts on god you'll find there's plenty of differences in the specifics of their beliefs. How Jews have related to the text over time is not something that can be easily gleaned from a literal read of these ancient texts.
Heh, serves me right for reading the article and not the paper before posting. The authors do address all of my issues in the paper.
For example, perhaps the Jewish belief system or values were themselves the selection force. Judaism has always been a very literate culture which stresses study, textual analysis, and interpretation. Maybe more people of a certain mind would join up or remain Jews. Data on Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews could help clarify this issue, since they would presumably have faced different selection pressures (in terms of being forced into a limited set of occupations) than the Jews of Europe.
sure. "Kerry wouldn't have done the same." You happy?
Kerry's campaign folk did not screen every attendee to his speeches to make sure they didn't support the other guy. But many Kerry supporters were screened and shut out of events Bush's campaign stops. Evidence points to the idea that no, Kerry didn't have the same problem with dissenters that plagues the current administration. I'd venture it's a good bet that "Kerry wouldn't have done the same".
In any case, why are we talking about Kerry at all? Let's concentrate on the matter at hand, which appears to be an administration that exhibits severe tunnel-vision and squelches dissent.
-Z
I'm curious about the content of the "utterly British" quote. Is the article reprinted somewhere or are y'all Fortune subscribers?
It sounds like you were subjected to the LCD-glasses style of 3D Imax projection. You would probably have a much better time with the version that uses polarized lenses -- I know I prefer it greatly for similar reasons (no headache, no flicker), but for some reason the LCD shutter glasses method is much more common for projecting 3D.
FWIW, Percy Schmeiser denies deliberately planting Monsanto seed, and states that Monsanto is lying outright about the percentage of his crops that were contaminated:
m
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/Monsanto%20Lying.ht
He said, she said?
In fact, the documentation for this base station does not mention that WEP is enabled by default, and instead gives instructions for enabling WEP, and talks about the benefits of enabling WEP. For example (from page 13 of MN500_Base_Station_Configuration_Guide.pdf):
In any case, on my MN-500, I had to enable WEP, it didn't ship enabled. I don't know which Microsoft base station y'all bought. Do the other ones ship with WEP enabled?
Interesting thought though.
-Z
Adding an easily user-accessible battery door would (to my mind) break the seamlessness of the iPod's design and possibly require that it be larger as well (consider a door that's the size of practically the entire back of the device -- or whether the dimensions would change if some sort of snap-release tab-in-slot mechanism was added to the entire length and breadth of the current iPod back).
Given that the battery lasts at least 18-months, I'd prefer to have a seamless design, and then have a little fun with a screwdriver when the time comes (rarely) to change the battery. In addition, I wonder how long the tiny hard drive will last given the conditions in which it's used and the forces to which it's subjected -- it wouldn't surprise me if (had I an iPod) I'd only need to replace the battery once.
What's that, you didn't know the battery IS user-replaceable? See IpodBattery.com for details on the $49 ipod batteries they sell and to read the installation instructions. It doesn't look all that difficult for anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver.
People seem to like to pile on criticism of the fact that the iPod battery is not easily replaceable. But I haven't heard the same sort of griping about the non-easily-user-replaceable lithium-ion batteries built into most PDAs (Palm Tungstens, Sony Clies, RIM Blackberrys, Compaq Ipaq, etc). I doubt all these companies forgo providing easy access to the batteries as some conspiracy to force consumers to replace the devices or pay to have a new battery installed, but rather the devices are designed to be as small and tightly packed as possible, and given this concern less regard is rightly given to putting the battery in an easily accessible spot and adding a door.
It is worth griping a bit about Apple's previous battery replacement policy (they wanted $255 to replace the battery), but they've since changed their tune quite a bit and it'll now cost $99 to have them replace the battery for you. In addition, when buying an iPod, an additional $59 gets the warranty extended to two years.
'Course, the iPod is out of my price range. I spent less than the cost of a $49 iPod battery on my teensy 128Mb USB-memory-stick-mp3-player-voice-recorder toy (Andus resound, flashed with some similar player's firmware to allow it to be mounted on Macs, Windows, and whatever-else as a real generic USB storage device), and find that this is a more than adequate amount of memory for a few hours of jogging. But if I were to buy an iPod, it would be because I appreciate things that are well designed and a joy to use, and the battery issue wouldn't even be on my radar.
Not to be cruel or whatever, but what has gotten into Americans/Japanese about this irrational fear of dying and the desire to keep their teeth in good condition as they age.
Yeah if you brush your teeth three times a day, maybe your teeth will stay with you until you're 90. So what? Are you going to bother to eat chocolates when your 80? Will it make you young enough for me to not tease you about your incontinence? No of course not.
The people in some other culture more wise than ours had old people too. And let me tell you, they were more natural about stuff and didn't have this fear of going to pot. They lost their teeth at 60 and died before 70. Those were the days.
Sheesh, back when I was in school, I didn't have that irrational fear of getting bad grades, so I didn't study and failed, just like we were meant to do.
On a more serious note, I can't understand how the poster to whom I'm responding could be serious in his/her criticisms of an invention that will allow old folk to have greater mobility and yes do more activities in their later years. This is about quality of life, not a life-extension.
The SCO code in question was in the process of being written and could not yet have been copied into the Linux kernel unless someone on the Linux team had a time machine. I repeat, the article is about a SCO engineer encountering supposedly NEW SCO code that appeared to have been cribbed from already existing Linux code.
Please re-read the following quote from the article and evaluate how it fits with your interpretation of the article:
This is not about old SCO code finding its way into Linux, this is about supposedly new SCO code written to implement Linux kernel functions that looked suspiciously like code taken straight out of existing versions of Linux.
Knowledge of the vagaries of alchemy is not the benchmark by which reasonable people judge the intellectual capacity of kids. Maybe publishing execs thought that American kids were too smart to waste their time memorizing allusions to medieval science. Not that any knowledge is a bad thing, but is there a point to looking down on anyone for ignorance what is to them a useless bit of trivia.
My childrens' book, George Costanza's Yo No Bi Project hasn't been selling all that well in Antarctica. Obviously those damn Antarcticans are just too stupid, lazy, and drunk to ever understand my brilliant allusion to concepts concerning Japanese art. Oh well, at least the kids in [name of country] can recite the names of all the Roman Emperors in order. Priorities priorities.
I've built many a system for waaaaay less than a Dell, Gateway, or the like (comparisons to the cost of a prebuilt LCD screen [purchased with stacked coupons and discounts] to a fictitious homebuilt large LCD screen is amusing but, um, I don't get it). It's laughable to think that I'd have been able to buy a AMD 1.4Ghz Dell with 40Gb hard drive, Radeon dual-monitor support, CDRW drive, DVD-Rom drive, and a half gig of ram 2 years ago for around $500 from Dell, Gateway, or any of the majors. But with parts bought from Fry's, Compgeeks, Newegg, and other vendors I was able to cobble together a nice little system for that price. I added a KVM switch and used the 19" LG 995 monitor, mouse, and keyboard from my Mac to complete the project. For someone lacking those parts they could have been purchased (sans KVM) for under $300 altogether. I'd guess that an equivalent system from Dell would've cost more than $800 before the addition of a 19" monitor.
In general, you can buy all the parts and spend an hour putting it all together for at least a few hundred dollars less than a prebuilt system. You can also save extra by using equivalent but less costly parts, and by skimping on parts that aren't important to you. Find a local or online computer parts store that's reputable and has good prices, and there's no way the parts will cost as much as the total of the parts included in a prebuilt system from Dell or whoever.
The value of buying a prebuilt is not that you're getting any of the benefit of Dell's bulk orders of computer hardware (they keep that benefit in the form of profits), but that you get support and a single warranty provider rather than having to deal with all the different manufacturers when encountering a problem. You're not just paying for the brand name, although that's part of it.
Since I can build and support my own, none of my computer's parts were defective, and I don't think it's that big a deal to work with manufacturer's warranties, I will probably never pay extra for Dell brand equity and support. For my Grandma I'd probably recommend she buy from one of the majors, I'd advise her to go with Apple but she already bought herself a Gateway.
As for building my own 19" LCD monitor, I suppose that might be a worthwhile endeavor if the cost of LCD monitors were high enough to justify the millions of dollars of R&D I'd need to spend before manufacturing one.
Or, rather than replace all the hardware in your Mac SE (if it's an SE 30), you could install NetBSD. That's right, a modern unix OS running on your piece of ancient Apple hardware. Neato!
The recommendation to avoid Macs is particularly bizarre considering that Macs are widely used in the graphic design and animation industries and that the most common programs used for computer illustration, photo-manipulation, and editing, are available with identical feature sets for both Mac and PC (All the adobe apps especially).
The recommendation to avoid Linux is strange since many of the high-end graphics houses that do work for film are heading towards using Linux and other free Unix-like systems, and not just for the render farm. Familiarity with Unix systems will not hurt anyone who wants to work in computer-graphics for film, it's definitely a proficiency to place prominently on the CV.
The Gimp may not be optimal for use in print design due to the lack of cmyk and lab color models (due to patent issues?), but it's been great for those doing film and web work for some time. The ease with which gimp can be scripted using perl and other programming/scripting languages is amazing.
That's my two cents. My dollar is that artistry and graphic design sense exist independent of platform and application choices. Work with what you've got. The first episode of South Park was made with construction paper, Paul Rand and Saul Bass were doing amazing designs (of the sort programs like Adobe Illustrator are often used to make) long before the personal computer existed. Use actualy physical tools or choose a platform that lets you concentrate on the art and not on futzing with the operating system. If that means Windows, Mac, or Linux to you, go for it.
There are plenty of reasons to shoot slide film, but a supposed wide exposure latitude isn't one of them. The wide exposure latitude of negative film may still have an advantage for the moment, but digital imaging technology is rapidly closing the gap with its analog counterparts in terms of exposure latitude, and I expect film's latitude to be exceeded by consumer quality CCDs within a few years. It's already happening in the digital video arena, Sony claims that their DVW-700 camera has 11-stops of exposure latitude (on par with the best negative stock), and directors of photography have managed to get at least 7-stops from the latest professional video equipment.
I'm not planning on selling my Canon pro 35mm gear in the next few years, but I bet in 5 or 6 years there'll be no good reason left to bother with film, and I'm talking about both cost and quality.
There are a couple of Japanese domain names I've thought of purchasing, but would rather use the CORE registrar joker.com than register.com due to the difference in price (joker.com is around $8-11 per year, depending on the exchange rate of the Euro). I was sad to see that I'd have to use register.com and spend $20 for a Japanese domain name.
But now what's to stop me from looking through the RFC, figuring out how to encode my domain name using RACE, and then registering it using joker.com as a domain name that begins with "bq-"?
I certainly hope that this is meant as parody. "stepping stone words" leading to harder language?! Get real.
Words are not now and have never been a problem. If a kid has trouble detecting what form of speech is appropriate for a particular time and place, that kid needs some educating. Knowing how to say the word 'fuck' will not lead kids down the dark path to liberalism, nor will it turn them into democrats.
Again, get real.