It's been a long while since I last checked my gmail, and I don't recall having an easy way to use the html only version from Mozilla/IE, if it actually existed when I tried.
"This is a 30 second exposure, shot by moonlight at 2:37 in the morning"
I don't see any other non-Canon cameras in the same price range matching that. My eyes definitely are crap in comparison;).
Nowadays I see no reason to buy Sony for anything. Most of the stuff they make is subpar in quality compared to stuff other vendors make. The Dell etc battery fiasco is just a symptom of the main problem - they are just making crap, slapping a Sony sticker on and charging high prices.
The good old days of the famous Sony Trinitron monitors, etc are long gone.
That said, I don't think you should spend too much time trying to talk people out of buying a Sony. Just recommend against it with reasons etc. Any more and you might just be annoying a potential customer.
Yahoo mail has been pretty decent - you can still use it without javascript enabled, unlike gmail which AFAIK requires it (I haven't bothered logging in for a long while), the Yahoo removes their "plain old version" might be the day I switch to something else. I see no reason why javascript should be required just to check and read email.
In contrast, Hotmail is pretty crappy, and Yahoo Messenger has been more reliable than MSN Messenger.
That said, might not be such a great thing to just let someone out after many decades when they are 70+ years old with near zero savings in a country with not much welfare, without helping to take care of them.
It's only a similar thing if they quote.002 cents/kB and then they charge.001/kB
I usually give back the extra if I'm undercharged, but if the clerk insists that he/she is right, then I'm not going to kick up a fuss about it.
But in this case it's about quoted prices. If the representatives of a company insist that the price is.002 cents/kB, then why should you assume it's.002 dollars/kB?
But if what you say is true, if you try to remember AND relive a Deja Vu experience and succeed, wouldn't you forget that Deja Vu experience?
I can remember my last Deja Vu experience, I can't be bothered to trying to memorize them for long tho.
I'm guessing that if I ever try your suggestion and try to remember some random thingy during a Deja Vu experience, that act of remembering would end up being part of my Deja Vu experience too, and hours later I'll still remember it and the Deja Vu experience.
I figure Deja Vu is probably some "bug" in memory/familiarity, and maybe your bug allows you to forget stuff at will, but I'm not so sure it "breaks" the same way for everyone.
But anyway, I might try it the next time, IF I remember;).
The CPU power/watt wasn't really that much better compared to x86 stuff of that time.
It is now nearly 9 months from that, and AMD and Intel have improved significantly. Where is the T2000 or T1 now? Look at Intel - their latest CPUs now trash AMD's by about the same margin which AMD used to trash Intel's offerings.
As long as you skip the Intel P4 stuff, and the silly AMD FX stuff (esp the quad one), the recent x86 stuff is pretty decent.
Go do performance/watt stuff yourself. Sure the Sun wins in some niche situations and in situations when you can actually use the crypto engine, but for most cases the T2000 isn't worth the bother.
Sun doesn't even bother doing specint rate for the T2000/T1 (maybe you can guess why looking at Anandtech's benchmarks) - they only do it for their SPARC IV+ and that gets:
Sun Fire E25K (72 processor) 144 cores, 72 chips, 2 cores/chip: 1413, 1644 144 cores, how much money and watts to get a score of 1413?
In contrast Intel's CPU gets a score of 64 with just 2 cores.
Maybe AMD will have an answer next year, but whatever it is, AMD and Intel in their frenetic race with each other, have left Sun's CPUs behind in the dust.
If your app works much better with a single system image with 144 cores then I guess you could buy Sun, but if rest of us need the processing power of 144 SPARC IV+ cores we'd get about twenty-two single CPU x86 servers with a total of 44 cores (or eleven dual CPU x86 servers), and figure out a way to make do with such "restrictions", like having money left over for storage, UPS, backups, generators, party for everyone etc.
You can still run Solaris on a Sun x86 server y'know;).
Legally binding contracts, the promise of a steady stream of money, if they keep doing things the way they do it?
Their way of doing business could also be threatened if they are not careful - it's not as if they aren't making decent money now.
No more big screen films for them = more people doing other stuff instead = playing WoW, game consoles, watching movies/TV serials at home (downloaded?).
That said there were plenty of parents here that took their kiddies to watch Finding Nemo on big screen, so maybe ties could be looser and independent filmmakers could work direct with theater owners.
Maybe a copyright term of 5 years could help and have less negatives than positives, but I don't see any good justification for 120+ years. I feel even 50 is excessive nowadays.
"Gather a mob, shoot the bureaucrats between the eyes" "The world would be a better place if this happened more frequently."
Really? It already happens a bit too frequently, and the world is a worse place for it.
Typically it's the mob leaders who don't mind killing people who end up in power (because the "other options" end up dead - doh). And that's how people like Mao, Saddam Hussein, the leaders of Syria, Sudan, etc rise to the top - their opponents either get killed, jailed, or exiled. And that is why Karl Marx's Communism dreams tend to end up as nightmares - because he suggested violence as a means to communism.
If you keep doing that once in a while if you get lucky you get a benevolent dictator or a dictator who somehow thinks that democractic elections are a good idea.
But what are the odds? If you end up in such a scenario it may be better to just wait (leave or stay) and hope that the dictator picks successors who are less violent (which has a higher chance of happening, since the dictator will want to eliminate threats - e.g. others like him). Then when the time is right you make a move for mass civil disobedience - NOT violence and hope the soldiers will disobey as well.
In my country you can easily get DVD copies from unauthorized distributors at very low prices, from nice well lit air conditioned shops with catalogues etc.
But tons of people still queued up to watch the LoTR at the cinemas - legit. Even a month later if you didn't book tickets there was a high chance you wouldn't get a seat.
So, I daresay people won't skip theaters altogether if there weren't copyrights. And yes, with saner (less evil?) control over costs more films would be profitable, but the way the movie industry works the high costs appear to be part of the strategy to control and distribute the flow of money to the relevant parties - on the subject of LoTR, I believe Peter Jackson wasn't/isn't happy about the way it worked out;).
Even a copyright of 5 years is quite long- with increasing improvements in communications, technology and distribution, people would find out pretty soon whether you should be encouraged to produce more...
Actual creators (software, books etc) should work with direct donation sites that make it easy for them to get paid. Right now it is so hard to pay people (no I do not want to use Paypal).
Actually many popular movies already make money from box office takings (skip the Hollywood accounting crap). Any extras due to DVD is icing (and a lot of icing sometimes).
So even with the current overinflated costs, many existing movies would still be profitable with copyrights as short as 1 or 2 years.
All the 100+ year copyright stuff is just greed.
Re:I joke a lot on Slashdot, but serious question
on
The Math Behind PageRank
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"if you break Google's rules about displaying the same content to bots as to humans"
I notice many sites that do that and don't get slapped down - esp subscription sites. And seems Google doesn't cache those, so its probably collusion.
You see the keywords and paragraphs in the search, but click on it you get a login page.
They should have to pay a special rate be marked differently from the other search results. It's a waste of time otherwise.
They appear to be sending the same spam to thousands of people.
So what ISPs/mail providers can do is to set up decoy email addresses that nobody but spammers send email to.
If an email arrives at a decoy address and arrives at the mailboxes of 1000 other users, then it's likely to be spam, so increase the spam score of such emails.
Mailing lists can be whitelisted fairly easily - since the decoy email addresses wouldn't be subscribed to mailing lists.
After whitelisting mailing lists you might be able to use some unfortunate users who get tons of spams as "canaries", anything they get that's not mailing list, that's received by other similar users is likely to be spam;).
The problem with this approach is it could increase latency - you may have to wait a certain secret time period before you deliver. Of course you could also choose to not delay any emails at all, in this approach the marking happens once the threshold is hit, but some users could have downloaded their emails before the offending mail is marked.
Google probably does something like this. Yahoo might.
The other potential problem is false positives when friends/relatives/etc send those chain emails/jokes or hoaxes... That said, some might not see those as false positives;). A relative used to send a lot of that sort of junk, the signal-noise ratio got so low that I was tempted to add said relative to my blacklist.
Countermeasures: spammers could gradually identify such decoy/canary addresses and treat them specially. Counter-countermeasure - as long as the emails are not really unique per mailbox the ISP can still identify them. Unique per user captcha style images could be a problem.
The problem I see is many spammers could actually be making money from sending spam for people who think that paying people to send spam for them will make them money. As long as there is a supply of such "customers" the spammers will still send spam even if nobody actually reads the spam (due to the images and messages getting unreadable).
It's a recruitment tool. This is going to be used to recruit more "terrorists" etc.
Also, if it causes a net increase in trouble and violence I guess the _weapons_ companies are going to be a bit bothered about that aren't they?
1) Sell something to the US military that's supposed to make people pissed off with them "move away" by using something that will piss them off. 2)... 3) Profit!
There's actually plenty of info out there on how to actually reduce terrorism, win people to your side, lots of actual real life cases etc.
But it actually seems the people controlling the USA are not interested in reducing the threats to the USA. Just look at the US actions after 9/11 - many Islamic nations were on the US side immediately after 9/11, but what did the USA do instead?
It's not Iraq or Iran or North Korea that's the greatest threat to the USA or the world (it never was Saddam Hussein or even Osama), it's the people ruling the USA. And that's been true for many decades.
Funny the USA spends billions on weapons and wars, and can't even afford to make and use voting machines that work. Makes you wonder what the real priorities and motives are eh?
"If Blizzard decides that your sword is overpowered and nerfs it, you have no legal recompense for compensation."
Yeah, just like any US Dollar you have in your wallet.
If the US Federal Reserve Bank or GW Bush of the USA decides to nerf the US Dollar, too frigging bad.
It's all worth something because enough other people think it's worth something.
If someone thinks an Enchanted Sword of Dragon Slaying is worth USD300 and actually buys it for USD250 then that's what it is worth that day. It's just like shares in the stock market, some crazy CEO could change how much it is worth overnight.
However, Blizzard/NYSE would be extremely stupid if they do things to make their players get disgusted and go away.
There are competing MMORPG companies, if one of them has a clue they might gain some ground then.
To those who say "in hindsight everybody will say they could have thought of that", I disagree - the MASER was nonobvious when it was first thought of.
But the LASER is obvious to anyone knowing of the MASER.
As for in between - whether heatpipes were obvious or not I'm not sure. Let experts in that field decide.
Douglas Engelbart and team came up with plenty of things that were pretty innovative even though they built on stuff other people thought of.
I say that because it took 20 years before people reinvented _some_ of that stuff, AND even today the 1968 Demo remains impressive to "experts in the field".
The really nonobvious and innovative ideas take > $patent_expiry_period years for the masses to figure out that it's useful;).
Pity the caveman who thought of a steam powered automobile, after others invented fire and boiling water...
I heard the Red Delicious apples _used_ to taste good, when the breed first came out.
We get imported Red Delicious apples here in my country, and I thought calling them "Red Delicious" was a misnomer. It's just like eating sweetened water impregnated styrofoam with maybe a hint of apple flavouring.
But the worst culprits so far are the normal sized tomatoes. Tasteless tomatoes= yuck. Especially when you know how much flavour a good tomato can have (well maybe because I've never had a chance to have a really good tasty apple?).
As for saying a tasteless bitter apple is healthy, I think a tasty apple might actually be good for you in other ways. Millions of years of evolution shouldn't be too crap at correlating _naturally_ tasty stuff with stuff that is good for you.
The obesity problem in the USA is because of the stupid _USDA_ food pyramid and the huge servings of food AND sugar water (the fructose corn syrup and TFAs don't help either). Funny that the US people gets advice on what to eat from their Dept of _Agriculture_.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a long while since I last checked my gmail, and I don't recall having an easy way to use the html only version from Mozilla/IE, if it actually existed when I tried.
Whatever it is, all that DRM and antipiracy crap has made many a "pirate" happy and many people trying to be legit unhappy.
;). Because those are all region zero.
I had to install VLC on someone's notebook pc, just so he could play a legit DVD he bought (stupid DVD region issues).
He wouldn't have had any problems if it was a "pirate" DVD
I hear similar things from people trying to play games they bought...
Uh guys, argue all you want but I think most people aren't buying either.
And actually I recommend that people just don't buy either till the Industry gets their act together. Same goes for that HDCP crap.
If I need to buy a digital SLR camera now, I'd buy Canon. Their sensors have extremely low noise.
;).
Check this out: http://www.dansdata.com/images/20d/0237_1024.jpg
From: http://www.dansdata.com/20d_stre.htm
"This is a 30 second exposure, shot by moonlight at 2:37 in the morning"
I don't see any other non-Canon cameras in the same price range matching that. My eyes definitely are crap in comparison
Nowadays I see no reason to buy Sony for anything. Most of the stuff they make is subpar in quality compared to stuff other vendors make. The Dell etc battery fiasco is just a symptom of the main problem - they are just making crap, slapping a Sony sticker on and charging high prices.
The good old days of the famous Sony Trinitron monitors, etc are long gone.
That said, I don't think you should spend too much time trying to talk people out of buying a Sony. Just recommend against it with reasons etc. Any more and you might just be annoying a potential customer.
Yahoo mail has been pretty decent - you can still use it without javascript enabled, unlike gmail which AFAIK requires it (I haven't bothered logging in for a long while), the Yahoo removes their "plain old version" might be the day I switch to something else. I see no reason why javascript should be required just to check and read email.
In contrast, Hotmail is pretty crappy, and Yahoo Messenger has been more reliable than MSN Messenger.
That said, might not be such a great thing to just let someone out after many decades when they are 70+ years old with near zero savings in a country with not much welfare, without helping to take care of them.
Even if they have relatives.
That's a different scenario.
.002 cents/kB and then they charge .001/kB
.002 cents/kB, then why should you assume it's .002 dollars/kB?
It's only a similar thing if they quote
I usually give back the extra if I'm undercharged, but if the clerk insists that he/she is right, then I'm not going to kick up a fuss about it.
But in this case it's about quoted prices. If the representatives of a company insist that the price is
Maybe it's a new price or a one time offer etc.
But if what you say is true, if you try to remember AND relive a Deja Vu experience and succeed, wouldn't you forget that Deja Vu experience?
;).
I can remember my last Deja Vu experience, I can't be bothered to trying to memorize them for long tho.
I'm guessing that if I ever try your suggestion and try to remember some random thingy during a Deja Vu experience, that act of remembering would end up being part of my Deja Vu experience too, and hours later I'll still remember it and the Deja Vu experience.
I figure Deja Vu is probably some "bug" in memory/familiarity, and maybe your bug allows you to forget stuff at will, but I'm not so sure it "breaks" the same way for everyone.
But anyway, I might try it the next time, IF I remember
The Sun T2000 stuff was obsolete the day it launched when compared to competing x86 solutions.
;).
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2727
The CPU power/watt wasn't really that much better compared to x86 stuff of that time.
It is now nearly 9 months from that, and AMD and Intel have improved significantly. Where is the T2000 or T1 now? Look at Intel - their latest CPUs now trash AMD's by about the same margin which AMD used to trash Intel's offerings.
As long as you skip the Intel P4 stuff, and the silly AMD FX stuff (esp the quad one), the recent x86 stuff is pretty decent.
Go do performance/watt stuff yourself. Sure the Sun wins in some niche situations and in situations when you can actually use the crypto engine, but for most cases the T2000 isn't worth the bother.
Sun doesn't even bother doing specint rate for the T2000/T1 (maybe you can guess why looking at Anandtech's benchmarks) - they only do it for their SPARC IV+ and that gets:
Sun Fire E25K (72 processor) 144 cores, 72 chips, 2 cores/chip: 1413, 1644
144 cores, how much money and watts to get a score of 1413?
In contrast Intel's CPU gets a score of 64 with just 2 cores.
Intel(R) DG965WH motherboard( 2.93 GHz, Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 2 cores, 1 chip, 2 cores/chip: 64.3, 64.4
Maybe AMD will have an answer next year, but whatever it is, AMD and Intel in their frenetic race with each other, have left Sun's CPUs behind in the dust.
If your app works much better with a single system image with 144 cores then I guess you could buy Sun, but if rest of us need the processing power of 144 SPARC IV+ cores we'd get about twenty-two single CPU x86 servers with a total of 44 cores (or eleven dual CPU x86 servers), and figure out a way to make do with such "restrictions", like having money left over for storage, UPS, backups, generators, party for everyone etc.
You can still run Solaris on a Sun x86 server y'know
You left out all those top German or Jewish scientists that moved to USA during WW2.
;).
Aerospace, rockets, nukes etc.
You guys got the cream... Got to love immigration when you get the best
Legally binding contracts, the promise of a steady stream of money, if they keep doing things the way they do it?
Their way of doing business could also be threatened if they are not careful - it's not as if they aren't making decent money now.
No more big screen films for them = more people doing other stuff instead = playing WoW, game consoles, watching movies/TV serials at home (downloaded?).
That said there were plenty of parents here that took their kiddies to watch Finding Nemo on big screen, so maybe ties could be looser and independent filmmakers could work direct with theater owners.
Maybe a copyright term of 5 years could help and have less negatives than positives, but I don't see any good justification for 120+ years. I feel even 50 is excessive nowadays.
"Gather a mob, shoot the bureaucrats between the eyes" "The world would be a better place if this happened more frequently."
Really? It already happens a bit too frequently, and the world is a worse place for it.
Typically it's the mob leaders who don't mind killing people who end up in power (because the "other options" end up dead - doh). And that's how people like Mao, Saddam Hussein, the leaders of Syria, Sudan, etc rise to the top - their opponents either get killed, jailed, or exiled. And that is why Karl Marx's Communism dreams tend to end up as nightmares - because he suggested violence as a means to communism.
If you keep doing that once in a while if you get lucky you get a benevolent dictator or a dictator who somehow thinks that democractic elections are a good idea.
But what are the odds? If you end up in such a scenario it may be better to just wait (leave or stay) and hope that the dictator picks successors who are less violent (which has a higher chance of happening, since the dictator will want to eliminate threats - e.g. others like him). Then when the time is right you make a move for mass civil disobedience - NOT violence and hope the soldiers will disobey as well.
In my country you can easily get DVD copies from unauthorized distributors at very low prices, from nice well lit air conditioned shops with catalogues etc.
;).
But tons of people still queued up to watch the LoTR at the cinemas - legit. Even a month later if you didn't book tickets there was a high chance you wouldn't get a seat.
So, I daresay people won't skip theaters altogether if there weren't copyrights. And yes, with saner (less evil?) control over costs more films would be profitable, but the way the movie industry works the high costs appear to be part of the strategy to control and distribute the flow of money to the relevant parties - on the subject of LoTR, I believe Peter Jackson wasn't/isn't happy about the way it worked out
Even a copyright of 5 years is quite long- with increasing improvements in communications, technology and distribution, people would find out pretty soon whether you should be encouraged to produce more...
Actual creators (software, books etc) should work with direct donation sites that make it easy for them to get paid. Right now it is so hard to pay people (no I do not want to use Paypal).
Actually many popular movies already make money from box office takings (skip the Hollywood accounting crap). Any extras due to DVD is icing (and a lot of icing sometimes).
So even with the current overinflated costs, many existing movies would still be profitable with copyrights as short as 1 or 2 years.
All the 100+ year copyright stuff is just greed.
"if you break Google's rules about displaying the same content to bots as to humans"
I notice many sites that do that and don't get slapped down - esp subscription sites. And seems Google doesn't cache those, so its probably collusion.
You see the keywords and paragraphs in the search, but click on it you get a login page.
They should have to pay a special rate be marked differently from the other search results. It's a waste of time otherwise.
They appear to be sending the same spam to thousands of people.
;).
;). A relative used to send a lot of that sort of junk, the signal-noise ratio got so low that I was tempted to add said relative to my blacklist.
So what ISPs/mail providers can do is to set up decoy email addresses that nobody but spammers send email to.
If an email arrives at a decoy address and arrives at the mailboxes of 1000 other users, then it's likely to be spam, so increase the spam score of such emails.
Mailing lists can be whitelisted fairly easily - since the decoy email addresses wouldn't be subscribed to mailing lists.
After whitelisting mailing lists you might be able to use some unfortunate users who get tons of spams as "canaries", anything they get that's not mailing list, that's received by other similar users is likely to be spam
The problem with this approach is it could increase latency - you may have to wait a certain secret time period before you deliver. Of course you could also choose to not delay any emails at all, in this approach the marking happens once the threshold is hit, but some users could have downloaded their emails before the offending mail is marked.
Google probably does something like this. Yahoo might.
The other potential problem is false positives when friends/relatives/etc send those chain emails/jokes or hoaxes... That said, some might not see those as false positives
Countermeasures: spammers could gradually identify such decoy/canary addresses and treat them specially. Counter-countermeasure - as long as the emails are not really unique per mailbox the ISP can still identify them. Unique per user captcha style images could be a problem.
The problem I see is many spammers could actually be making money from sending spam for people who think that paying people to send spam for them will make them money. As long as there is a supply of such "customers" the spammers will still send spam even if nobody actually reads the spam (due to the images and messages getting unreadable).
So you'd rather be 15 seconds away (0.8 miles?) and still travelling at 200mph on a track that's now broken?
Well any Ancient Greek temple that had problems would not be standing anymore, people would just clear the rubble and build something else over it ;).
Survival of the fittest.
Seems like a lot of people still liked the drunk version of him.
In contrast: how many people like sober Sony marketdroids?
It's a recruitment tool. This is going to be used to recruit more "terrorists" etc.
...
Also, if it causes a net increase in trouble and violence I guess the _weapons_ companies are going to be a bit bothered about that aren't they?
1) Sell something to the US military that's supposed to make people pissed off with them "move away" by using something that will piss them off.
2)
3) Profit!
There's actually plenty of info out there on how to actually reduce terrorism, win people to your side, lots of actual real life cases etc.
But it actually seems the people controlling the USA are not interested in reducing the threats to the USA. Just look at the US actions after 9/11 - many Islamic nations were on the US side immediately after 9/11, but what did the USA do instead?
It's not Iraq or Iran or North Korea that's the greatest threat to the USA or the world (it never was Saddam Hussein or even Osama), it's the people ruling the USA. And that's been true for many decades.
Funny the USA spends billions on weapons and wars, and can't even afford to make and use voting machines that work. Makes you wonder what the real priorities and motives are eh?
Just more evidence that a lot of people download music because its convenient.
So there's a market out there.
"If Blizzard decides that your sword is overpowered and nerfs it, you have no legal recompense for compensation."
Yeah, just like any US Dollar you have in your wallet.
If the US Federal Reserve Bank or GW Bush of the USA decides to nerf the US Dollar, too frigging bad.
It's all worth something because enough other people think it's worth something.
If someone thinks an Enchanted Sword of Dragon Slaying is worth USD300 and actually buys it for USD250 then that's what it is worth that day. It's just like shares in the stock market, some crazy CEO could change how much it is worth overnight.
However, Blizzard/NYSE would be extremely stupid if they do things to make their players get disgusted and go away.
There are competing MMORPG companies, if one of them has a clue they might gain some ground then.
To those who say "in hindsight everybody will say they could have thought of that", I disagree - the MASER was nonobvious when it was first thought of.
;).
But the LASER is obvious to anyone knowing of the MASER.
As for in between - whether heatpipes were obvious or not I'm not sure. Let experts in that field decide.
Douglas Engelbart and team came up with plenty of things that were pretty innovative even though they built on stuff other people thought of.
I say that because it took 20 years before people reinvented _some_ of that stuff, AND even today the 1968 Demo remains impressive to "experts in the field".
The really nonobvious and innovative ideas take > $patent_expiry_period years for the masses to figure out that it's useful
Pity the caveman who thought of a steam powered automobile, after others invented fire and boiling water...
I heard the Red Delicious apples _used_ to taste good, when the breed first came out.
We get imported Red Delicious apples here in my country, and I thought calling them "Red Delicious" was a misnomer. It's just like eating sweetened water impregnated styrofoam with maybe a hint of apple flavouring.
But the worst culprits so far are the normal sized tomatoes. Tasteless tomatoes= yuck. Especially when you know how much flavour a good tomato can have (well maybe because I've never had a chance to have a really good tasty apple?).
As for saying a tasteless bitter apple is healthy, I think a tasty apple might actually be good for you in other ways. Millions of years of evolution shouldn't be too crap at correlating _naturally_ tasty stuff with stuff that is good for you.
The obesity problem in the USA is because of the stupid _USDA_ food pyramid and the huge servings of food AND sugar water (the fructose corn syrup and TFAs don't help either). Funny that the US people gets advice on what to eat from their Dept of _Agriculture_.
Uh but isn't cider alcoholic? So why bother pasteurizing? If you do things right you shouldn't have dangerous bacteria left, correct?