I think the real problem with humans on Mars will turn out to be the effects of space on the human body, as we are starting to learn with ISS. Even with good solar-ion engines to speed up the trip, we may still need centrifugal crew quarters.
I think that "around the same price as an economy airline ticket" would be foolish. Concorde proved that people will pay extra for that extra speed. Or at least they did back in the '90s before the internet became big and enabled teleconferencing. But this would be faster enough to still be worth more than going by regular jet plane.
And that is one of the reasons Radio Shack died, they seemed completely unaware of what their real competition was, even in the market niche (cell phones) that they cared about the most.
The thing is that most people wouldn't buy things used, not so much because of the social stigma of going to a place like a pawn shop, but because they don't even know such a possibility exists. Or even if they do know, it is so out of their normal activity that it never comes to mind when they need something, or maybe they don't know where to find such places. Or just don't want to take the time to find something "good enough" and prefer to go somewhere they can be sure of walking out with something. Either way, more money than sense because they don't know how to shop.
I think a big problem is when a local place treats a customer like that, who doesn't complain loudly, but simply doesn't come back. Especially when the customer does say something, just without yelling their ears off. I know I've gotten tired of complaining about things like that, it's just not worth it when they won't care anyhow.
Circuit City deserved it more, and has been out of business for years. So sometimes things do work out right. I've barely stepped in a Best Buy in years, anyhow, but that was because I lived near a Fry's. I've since moved to the next big city over, but there's also Tar-jay, and they're slightly easier to get to from where I live. I just don't buy as much new stuff in general.
I blame Wal-Mart for the death of Radio Shack. In second and third place I blame Radio Shack, then maybe Amazon. If you go down the aisles of the electronics department in Wal-Mart these days, you find it to have pretty much everything that average people would go to Radio Shack for. (Average people didn't want resistors and transistors.) Low price, and right away, it's hard to beat that. I use Amazon for stuff that's too weird for normal retailers to stock.
I blame RS themselves in second place because they were so focused on cell phone contracts (and you can get prepaid phones at Wal-Mart!) that they put everything else on cruise control. The number of $35 HDMI cables on the shelves during the Radio Shack final clearance was shocking. Ten years ago they might have been worth $35, but now even $15 is a lot.
I sort of got the idea that Seth pitched it as "Fart Trek" so that Fox would green-light it, if the promo was any indication. Sure, it's snarky, tropey, and irreverent, but it actually does a good job of presenting a mid-tier Star Trek type plot, but with a dysfunctional crew. Seth could have gone full-on "Married With Crew" (well this is Fox ya know), but kept the divorce thing down to just inter-character tension and a source of snarks.
The third episode sort of inverted current political correctness about gender in a way that I'm sure triggers the hell out of SJWs. And then it subverted the usual Star Trek ending by having it happen anyhow.
Also, I'm impressed that they don't have transporters, that technology is just a bit too magic, and Star Trek always had to come up with plot points to keep them from working.
Fortunately, while Fox ran the first two episodes of The Orville on Sunday night in the "overtime death slot", they wisely moved it to Thursday nights. And yes, this Sunday's episode was 45 minutes late because of handegg. At least about a year or so they got a clue about their Sunday night regular (mostly) animation block and started running sacrificial reruns in the first time slot, JIPping them if sports ran overtime, so DVRs can properly get all the new episodes.
Meanwhile, I missed quite a few episodes of Elementary because sports ran over and shifted their entire Sunday night schedule, sometimes by as much as an hour. I had started recording the local news afterward just so I would have a chance of seeing an entire episode. Sunday nights on CBS aren't just a sports overtime death slot, they're an entire overtime death night.
Needless to say, I set this to end 31 minutes late. I just want to see how much of a train wreck it's going to be while I continue to enjoy The Orville, aka "Snark Trek". If we're really lucky, it might even break the Fox sci-fi curse and get renewed, it's that good.
Just to check, I muted the audio and tried watching it while playing Yakkety Sax (the other famous comedy music) in my head. It was just too fast for the video. I tried speeding up the video to 2x but it didn't help much.
That 13" model was just a base model, specifically made for people who still needed an optical drive. I remember when that happened, because I was unhappy that the 17" model line died when Retina came out, especially since 2012 was when USB 3.0 finally got supported. I am still using a 17" that I got in 2012, currently on its second trackpad, GPU, and keyboard. (At least I can use an ExpressCard USB 3.0 adapter, but they stick out the side.)
But even that wasn't the first time that they made a "long term support" model. Apple sold a legacy version of the G4 "Windtunnel" PowerMac for a while. I think it was when Intel happened, when there were some important professional apps which still required the Classic OS9 environment. I seem to remember that QuarkXPress was the primary offender, because I joked that it should be called Quark9Press since it wouldn't run natively under OS X.
You do realize that Cinco de Mayo is roughly the Mexican equivalent of St. Patrick's day, right? The difference is they drove out the French rather than snakes. It's a big day for parties and drinking beer. Diez y Seis is the Mexican independence day.
At least if you're going to complain about something, complain about the right something, like cities renaming streets in honor of liberal heartthrob Cesar Chavez, because they think of him as the black MLK.
The only reason I even knew about it was from checking the schedule on my MythTV. I figured if it was on multiple networks at the same time and I had no idea what was (like a speech, disaster coverage, etc.), it would be trash. Seems I was right.
SciAm turned to crap in the early '00s, when they went full-force with the "climate change" memes. And by that I mean it seemed like they went out of their way to push it every opportunity they could. A few years later, after I had already ditched it, I saw an interview on PBS with the editor, who basically admitted that they were doing that intentionally.
And while I didn't have a subscription to it to cancel, it seems like National Geographic these days is pushing social meme crap about gender and other things that (ahem) have nothing to do with geography.
Byte only went as far to make me not care, SciAm went much farther by going out of their way to push a left-wing agenda. I get more than enough politicized science on the internets, I don't need it delivered to my mailbox on dead trees. I can't be the only one who dropped all magazine subscriptions over ten years ago, if they want to make themselves irrelevant faster, they can go right ahead.
Back in '87, the tax laws were changing so that you couldn't deduct magazine subscriptions as a business expense. That didn't matter to me, but they made a special offer of a six-year subscription for $99. By the time that ran out in '93, Byte had gotten... boring. It seemed like it was nothing but reviews, and stuff that would mostly be of interest to IT department types. Except for one thing, Jerry's column. That was the only reason left for me to care about Byte, and it wasn't enough to get me to renew again.
It was good to read about the various problems he would encounter and overcome, and it was also good to know that someone else cared about keyboard layouts. Back around that time, lots of crap was being done to keyboard layouts, obviously by people who had never learned to touch-type. The worst were the broken backspace key (usually a backslash between +/= and a tiny backspace key) making the right pinky have to go too far, something between Z and left shift making the left pinky have to go too far (hey, if the Europeans do it, it must be good!), and big return keys, usually resulting in the \| key pushing something else around. But I've been a Mac guy since 1985, and Apple managed to avoid such annoyances in their keyboards. Fortunately, a sane layout won, at least in the US.
I still have a couple of old Northgate keyboards, and a stack of Model Ms that I acquired over the years, and I hope to get around to replacing their guts with a "bluepill" board running my own USB code. But it won't do me a lot of good, since most of my typing these days is done on a laptop, where there just isn't room for a good mechanical keyboard.
Anyhow, I tried to see if I could look at his most recent Chaos Manor postings, but it appears that the database behind it has overloaded. At least the page linked in TFS seems to have been made static.
I find the payphone dig unfair criticism. For one, it was hard to know then if airwaves could carry all the signals needed for consumer cell-phones. It took a while to perfect signal compression and other issues.
Old mobile phones only had about 50 or so channels available for a whole city because they used "regular" long-distance radio communication. There was really one main innovation that made cell phones possible, and that was the cell tower. Someone had to think of a whole new way to use the broadcast bandwidth for cell phones to become possible.
Having little computers (inside what was originally a big bag) to make sure the switching happened was important, but not nearly as important as breaking up the band into small low-power areas. Smaller coverage areas also meant that the devices themselves needed less power, because they didn't need to transmit as far.
People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants
I have a big problem with how Gravity completely ignored the hard reality of orbital mechanics, flitting between orbits as whimsically as walking to the corner convenience-store. And they used not only not impossible but current space hardware. I hope I am right to think there's a difference there! Maybe if they had done it with cartoony space ships (a space version of Cars?), I would be more okay with it. But I still wouldn't watch it.
I don't watch movies for CGI wank-fests (or mushy "kids" movies which are really aimed at the preconceptions of parents). The only one in at least a decade that I have any interest in now is Ready Player One. Because, ya know, there's an actual written story behind it. Hollywood can't write anymore because it gets in the way of the China and other global market. (Less dialogue means less controversial subjects and less dubbing, so you can argue that they even want it this way.)
Well, ya know, the patents on NTFS are surely running out by now, and Linux knows NTFS inside and out too. MS just doesn't feel comfortable without some kind of lock-in.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the real problem with humans on Mars will turn out to be the effects of space on the human body, as we are starting to learn with ISS. Even with good solar-ion engines to speed up the trip, we may still need centrifugal crew quarters.
A plan for that has already been written.
I think that "around the same price as an economy airline ticket" would be foolish. Concorde proved that people will pay extra for that extra speed. Or at least they did back in the '90s before the internet became big and enabled teleconferencing. But this would be faster enough to still be worth more than going by regular jet plane.
And that is one of the reasons Radio Shack died, they seemed completely unaware of what their real competition was, even in the market niche (cell phones) that they cared about the most.
The thing is that most people wouldn't buy things used, not so much because of the social stigma of going to a place like a pawn shop, but because they don't even know such a possibility exists. Or even if they do know, it is so out of their normal activity that it never comes to mind when they need something, or maybe they don't know where to find such places. Or just don't want to take the time to find something "good enough" and prefer to go somewhere they can be sure of walking out with something. Either way, more money than sense because they don't know how to shop.
I think a big problem is when a local place treats a customer like that, who doesn't complain loudly, but simply doesn't come back. Especially when the customer does say something, just without yelling their ears off. I know I've gotten tired of complaining about things like that, it's just not worth it when they won't care anyhow.
Circuit City deserved it more, and has been out of business for years. So sometimes things do work out right. I've barely stepped in a Best Buy in years, anyhow, but that was because I lived near a Fry's. I've since moved to the next big city over, but there's also Tar-jay, and they're slightly easier to get to from where I live. I just don't buy as much new stuff in general.
I blame Wal-Mart for the death of Radio Shack. In second and third place I blame Radio Shack, then maybe Amazon. If you go down the aisles of the electronics department in Wal-Mart these days, you find it to have pretty much everything that average people would go to Radio Shack for. (Average people didn't want resistors and transistors.) Low price, and right away, it's hard to beat that. I use Amazon for stuff that's too weird for normal retailers to stock.
I blame RS themselves in second place because they were so focused on cell phone contracts (and you can get prepaid phones at Wal-Mart!) that they put everything else on cruise control. The number of $35 HDMI cables on the shelves during the Radio Shack final clearance was shocking. Ten years ago they might have been worth $35, but now even $15 is a lot.
Is that part of the Commission for Urgent National Technology, or the Ministry of Advanced Technology Exploration?
I sort of got the idea that Seth pitched it as "Fart Trek" so that Fox would green-light it, if the promo was any indication. Sure, it's snarky, tropey, and irreverent, but it actually does a good job of presenting a mid-tier Star Trek type plot, but with a dysfunctional crew. Seth could have gone full-on "Married With Crew" (well this is Fox ya know), but kept the divorce thing down to just inter-character tension and a source of snarks.
The third episode sort of inverted current political correctness about gender in a way that I'm sure triggers the hell out of SJWs. And then it subverted the usual Star Trek ending by having it happen anyhow.
Also, I'm impressed that they don't have transporters, that technology is just a bit too magic, and Star Trek always had to come up with plot points to keep them from working.
Fortunately, while Fox ran the first two episodes of The Orville on Sunday night in the "overtime death slot", they wisely moved it to Thursday nights. And yes, this Sunday's episode was 45 minutes late because of handegg. At least about a year or so they got a clue about their Sunday night regular (mostly) animation block and started running sacrificial reruns in the first time slot, JIPping them if sports ran overtime, so DVRs can properly get all the new episodes.
Meanwhile, I missed quite a few episodes of Elementary because sports ran over and shifted their entire Sunday night schedule, sometimes by as much as an hour. I had started recording the local news afterward just so I would have a chance of seeing an entire episode. Sunday nights on CBS aren't just a sports overtime death slot, they're an entire overtime death night.
Needless to say, I set this to end 31 minutes late. I just want to see how much of a train wreck it's going to be while I continue to enjoy The Orville, aka "Snark Trek". If we're really lucky, it might even break the Fox sci-fi curse and get renewed, it's that good.
Fortunately, I practice "hostile-user design", and I already had the video player site manually blocked in ABP, for being a repeat offender.
Just to check, I muted the audio and tried watching it while playing Yakkety Sax (the other famous comedy music) in my head. It was just too fast for the video. I tried speeding up the video to 2x but it didn't help much.
That 13" model was just a base model, specifically made for people who still needed an optical drive. I remember when that happened, because I was unhappy that the 17" model line died when Retina came out, especially since 2012 was when USB 3.0 finally got supported. I am still using a 17" that I got in 2012, currently on its second trackpad, GPU, and keyboard. (At least I can use an ExpressCard USB 3.0 adapter, but they stick out the side.)
But even that wasn't the first time that they made a "long term support" model. Apple sold a legacy version of the G4 "Windtunnel" PowerMac for a while. I think it was when Intel happened, when there were some important professional apps which still required the Classic OS9 environment. I seem to remember that QuarkXPress was the primary offender, because I joked that it should be called Quark9Press since it wouldn't run natively under OS X.
(Perhaps you meant "love to hate"?)
Here is a perfect example of how out of touch their """critics""" are. The critics score is at 17% now, but I saw it as low as 11% yesterday. (The episode aired a day and a half ago.)
We'll see Cinco de Mayo celebrated in the USA.
You do realize that Cinco de Mayo is roughly the Mexican equivalent of St. Patrick's day, right? The difference is they drove out the French rather than snakes. It's a big day for parties and drinking beer. Diez y Seis is the Mexican independence day.
At least if you're going to complain about something, complain about the right something, like cities renaming streets in honor of liberal heartthrob Cesar Chavez, because they think of him as the black MLK.
The only reason I even knew about it was from checking the schedule on my MythTV. I figured if it was on multiple networks at the same time and I had no idea what was (like a speech, disaster coverage, etc.), it would be trash. Seems I was right.
SciAm turned to crap in the early '00s, when they went full-force with the "climate change" memes. And by that I mean it seemed like they went out of their way to push it every opportunity they could. A few years later, after I had already ditched it, I saw an interview on PBS with the editor, who basically admitted that they were doing that intentionally.
And while I didn't have a subscription to it to cancel, it seems like National Geographic these days is pushing social meme crap about gender and other things that (ahem) have nothing to do with geography.
Byte only went as far to make me not care, SciAm went much farther by going out of their way to push a left-wing agenda. I get more than enough politicized science on the internets, I don't need it delivered to my mailbox on dead trees. I can't be the only one who dropped all magazine subscriptions over ten years ago, if they want to make themselves irrelevant faster, they can go right ahead.
Back in '87, the tax laws were changing so that you couldn't deduct magazine subscriptions as a business expense. That didn't matter to me, but they made a special offer of a six-year subscription for $99. By the time that ran out in '93, Byte had gotten... boring. It seemed like it was nothing but reviews, and stuff that would mostly be of interest to IT department types. Except for one thing, Jerry's column. That was the only reason left for me to care about Byte, and it wasn't enough to get me to renew again.
It was good to read about the various problems he would encounter and overcome, and it was also good to know that someone else cared about keyboard layouts. Back around that time, lots of crap was being done to keyboard layouts, obviously by people who had never learned to touch-type. The worst were the broken backspace key (usually a backslash between +/= and a tiny backspace key) making the right pinky have to go too far, something between Z and left shift making the left pinky have to go too far (hey, if the Europeans do it, it must be good!), and big return keys, usually resulting in the \| key pushing something else around. But I've been a Mac guy since 1985, and Apple managed to avoid such annoyances in their keyboards. Fortunately, a sane layout won, at least in the US.
I still have a couple of old Northgate keyboards, and a stack of Model Ms that I acquired over the years, and I hope to get around to replacing their guts with a "bluepill" board running my own USB code. But it won't do me a lot of good, since most of my typing these days is done on a laptop, where there just isn't room for a good mechanical keyboard.
Anyhow, I tried to see if I could look at his most recent Chaos Manor postings, but it appears that the database behind it has overloaded. At least the page linked in TFS seems to have been made static.
Did they take that picture with one of the damaged cameras?
I find the payphone dig unfair criticism. For one, it was hard to know then if airwaves could carry all the signals needed for consumer cell-phones. It took a while to perfect signal compression and other issues.
Old mobile phones only had about 50 or so channels available for a whole city because they used "regular" long-distance radio communication. There was really one main innovation that made cell phones possible, and that was the cell tower. Someone had to think of a whole new way to use the broadcast bandwidth for cell phones to become possible.
Having little computers (inside what was originally a big bag) to make sure the switching happened was important, but not nearly as important as breaking up the band into small low-power areas. Smaller coverage areas also meant that the devices themselves needed less power, because they didn't need to transmit as far.
Jar Jar Binks didn't turn off a lot of people because he was ugly.
People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants
I have a big problem with how Gravity completely ignored the hard reality of orbital mechanics, flitting between orbits as whimsically as walking to the corner convenience-store. And they used not only not impossible but current space hardware. I hope I am right to think there's a difference there! Maybe if they had done it with cartoony space ships (a space version of Cars?), I would be more okay with it. But I still wouldn't watch it.
I don't watch movies for CGI wank-fests (or mushy "kids" movies which are really aimed at the preconceptions of parents). The only one in at least a decade that I have any interest in now is Ready Player One. Because, ya know, there's an actual written story behind it. Hollywood can't write anymore because it gets in the way of the China and other global market. (Less dialogue means less controversial subjects and less dubbing, so you can argue that they even want it this way.)
CowboyNeal had me take the Voight-Kampff test
Well, ya know, the patents on NTFS are surely running out by now, and Linux knows NTFS inside and out too. MS just doesn't feel comfortable without some kind of lock-in.