"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically."
Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive.
So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.
Makes you stop and think when the cost of a disk + disk drive is lower than just a disc... At what point do they just scrap the whole optical media idea altogether and just package removable magnetic hard drive disk's.
- When driving the 2-door coupe, I downshift a gear or two, accelerate away suddenly and then resume my normal, reasonable cruising speed. The sudden abundance of space in front of the tailgater reminds them that they are being an asshole and makes them drive normally again. The ability to seemingly reform tailgaters, at least temporarily, makes this my favorite tactic.
- When driving the 4x4, I let the exposed steel bars on the back and the threat of your hood and/or windshield ending up under a pair of big toothy offroad tires do the talking. Speak soft, big stick. Nobody tailgates.
Avoiding tailgaters is easy, go in the right lane and slow down (on a 2 lane road or 1 lane road with a long straightaway).
but sometimes a person will pull into the left lane and either maintain the same speed as the right lane (two-lane scenario, for simplification), or so minimally faster that it will take several miles before they pass the car on their right.
Just so you know, this is illegal in Kansas, as of July 1st. They will be issuing warnings for a year, and then start ticketing.
Addendum to law needed... going into the left lane to make room for people merging onto the highway. Right now it says you have to be passing or merging off the highway. If the left lane is clear, it is good driving etiquette (IMHO) to move into the left lane when passing on-ramps to make room for traffic merging on the highway, this law would make that illegal.
As the previous poster stated, this can silence any inconvenient camcorders or photo-taking cellphones at the scene of a police action against protesters.
a HERF gun is "(a device like EMP but directional)... capable of stalling cars at a distance and crashing computers as well."
I have no intention of actually doing this since it sounds like a great way to get in trouble. So, this is entirely hypothetical. I have thought of what it would be like to have a device like this in your trunk, and arranged so that it can transmit through the trunk lid (maybe this would entail replacing a part of the metal lid with something more transmissive) and pointed backwards. Then, some aggressive idiot wants to tailgate you, you tap your brake lights to ask him to back off. If he doesn't, you flip a switch under your dashboard and kill his engine by letting the EMP disrupt the electronics that control the ignition system. Then watch him disappear in your rear-view as he is forced to pull over with what momentum he has left. That would be most satisfying. Of course, you'd probably have to shield your own electronics, but it could be done.
A more impacting and practical application would be in law enforcement to instantly stop a high speed chase.
I recently saw a discovery channel invention show with a segment on one man's invention to stall an engine using 2 electrodes across a gap in the road and a large charge, but the electrodes would have to be nearly touching the vehicle. A perfected HERF gun would seem much more useful in this application.
The real problem is speed, or rather the lack thereof. Air travel became as popular as it is because it's so much *faster*. People might book an airship flight once a decade for the novelty, kind of like a cruise ship trip, but they're not going to hop on the blimp whenever they need to get to the other side of the country. The trip would take too long. Jets are faster, so they win.
Unless they use the blimp as a launchpad for low orbit travel, which is highly efficient and fast.
You're funny. Can I have you come and perform for my birthday party?
I just have to keep reminding myself that misinformed and humorous comments are a slashdot standard lol.
He also I guess has never heard of product management and refers to "upper management" as "top brass". About the only thing he's right about is that, in a large business, there are a number of personnel managers who really don't control the product or resource allocation and aren't responsible for code and documentation issues.
But seriously, I could use this guy at my birthday party as well.
> an idealist might say [morals and ethics] could one day stop things such as war.
An idealist might say that, if he were, in addition to being an idealist, also incredibly naive.
Is he naive or is it your belief in his naivety that makes it so?
They also enslaved an entire race of people for several hundred years before realizing that was bad.
No, they enslaved just about anyone they could get their hands on, but whites - in the lesser form of indentured servitude - weren't good plantation workers in the Caribbean (and that, not the eventual USA, was the first big New World slave market) because they weren't evolved for tropical climates. Native Americans were mostly extinct in the area, so they were out. SE Asians were eventually imported in some quantity as laborers by the British, but they were a long way away by the standards of the 1600s. Africans were adapted to the tropics, located relatively nearby, and already available for sale (because of existing slave markets in Africa).
The Atlantic slave trade was a nasty business, all right, but it had its detractors from the start. Most people were just willing to overlook them, especially considering how much money was to be made.
"An entire race of people" is a subset of "anyone they can get their hands on". A better statement on my part would have been "had slaves" period, very good point.
The point is really that morals and ethics aren't trivial and their continued evolution is crucial in the betterment of our society and improvement of our lives. In fact, I would say that they aren't necessarily even communally agreed upon, particularly morals. Things that we thought weren't bad 200 years ago, with increased knowledge, we realize are indeed bad.
Fuck. Me. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a person with no moral fibre at all. I can't imagine it, must be weird.
My wife's a psychologist and we have discussed such people. The answer to what it's like to be one is depressingly simple. They have no morals to trouble them at all; no conscience, no guilt. They're happy as if they had ethics and compassion.
There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
Well to be honest, morals and ethics are just trivial rules communally agrees upon by a society. We find it unethical, perhaps even immoral, to have sex with a 14 year old. But even our own society less than 200 years ago saw nothing unusual in 40 year old men marrying 14 year old girls.
200 years ago, the average lifespan was only 35 years.
They also enslaved an entire race of people for several hundred years before realizing that was bad.
Morals and ethics are not trivial. Their evolution is crucial to the betterment of our society, an idealist might say they could one day stop things such as war.
200 years ago, they could claim ignorance from lack of knowledge. In none of these examples can we claim that today.
If you're just buying a license from a third party that bought it from Microsoft several years ago or bought it from Microsoft with the addendum that it will not be supported then it's your problem if there's an issue.
The latter case I agree with. In the former, if you bought it new and weren't informed there's a defect that won't be fixed you ought to be entitled for a refund.
Agreed, but I would add that in this case the onus would be on the netbook supplier and not Microsoft. Good point though.
Ah, a car analogy. It's more like this: You go to the Honda dealership and take a look at their 2010 models and purchase a vehicle. You discover that the engine has a serious flaw in it and ask Honda for a fix. Honda refuses because that engine is based on an 8 year old engine design. Except in this case, instead of a Honda you bought a brand new netbook and instead of an engine it came with a new copy of Windows XP.
This analogy sucks, because you can replace the netbooks "engine" with a bootable USB drive and Linux for FREE OR a bootable CD and Windows 7 for under 100 bucks.
Sure, and if it came with a defective hard drive you could replace that too. Never mind that you paid good money for the defective components it came with that you now have to waste your time and money replacing, whether software or hardware.
There is a significant difference between hardware and software and even significant differences in the economics and life cycles of hardware in a car and in a computer. If the hard drive failed in the first year or so then I would expect it to be replaced, if it failed after that then it's my problem. If the engine failed in a car in the first 100,000 miles, I'd expect it to be replaced. Software has no analogy to a car really, I'm stumped there.
Either way, from TFA, XP doesn't have any issues so a hotfix is not necessary. Even if it was necessary, I personally wouldn't deride Microsoft for not making the fix unless I was paying a service contract to them or bought the software license at the original price directly from them. If you're just buying a license from a third party that bought it from Microsoft several years ago or bought it from Microsoft with the addendum that it will not be supported then it's your problem if there's an issue.
Software costs money to support. Pay for the support, use open source software or buy new software.
The Navy will simply subcontract-out to Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and other defense companies to upgrade all their systems from XP to Windows 7 and fix any programs that "break" as a result. It will employ some 10,000 workers at a cost of 1.4 trillion dollars. Then it will fail to come-in on time, so they'll spend an extra 6 months and 0.3 trillion on schedule overrun.
That's SOP for the government.
Sounds like US Software and IT job creation to me.
Ah, a car analogy. It's more like this: You go to the Honda dealership and take a look at their 2010 models and purchase a vehicle. You discover that the engine has a serious flaw in it and ask Honda for a fix. Honda refuses because that engine is based on an 8 year old engine design. Except in this case, instead of a Honda you bought a brand new netbook and instead of an engine it came with a new copy of Windows XP.
This analogy sucks, because you can replace the netbooks "engine" with a bootable USB drive and Linux for FREE OR a bootable CD and Windows 7 for under 100 bucks.
Your argument doesn't work either though IMO. For one thing software changes a lot quicker than car technology so I was being pretty kind saying 10 years for the car stuff. You might expect a dealer to service a 30 year old car, but you're probably going to have to pay through the nose for it (and I've read of at least one case where a dealer didn't have the parts to service a car because it was so old).
Exactly, if people want support for XP at this point... they would have to be willing to PAY a for it. With cash. The initial cost of the OS doesn't wrap up into it the costs of support for 15 years, maybe 5 sure.
But that's the big sticking point, people don't want to pay for anything, they want it all for free. If that is the case, then use Linux. If you want premium software and are willing to pay, upgrade to Windows 7. I actually happen to think that re-designing the OS is a good thing, hell it creates jobs for engineers and IT across the board. Not to mention the fact that it's a better and more secure OS.
It's really that simple, Microsoft isn't the bad guy here (although they often are).
Yea, it would have to be some new encrypted unconvertable file format, which doesn't exist since you can convert from analog output if necessary. Or a player that enforces some such meta-data DRM tags on all file formats, which doesn't work as you can just use another player that doesn't enforce it. If you illegalize all players that don't enforce DRM meta-data then yea... but that's just bat fucking crazy.
I agree with all that you're saying, but I have also found a high number of managers who will simply ask me to explain verbally what I've already typed. I'm not talking about the "give me the executive summary" kind of brevity, but it's clearly a case of being too weak at everyday reading skills.
Not to say that this is the case, because I haven't seen them obviously, but this could potentially be the case of poorly written e-mails targeted at the wrong audience. This could be the product of a combination of a lack of attention payed in college English courses and high school Touch-Typing courses.
I never get asked for verbal explanations, but I pay a lot of attention to detail in what I'm writing (and I iteratively re-read and revise) and I pay attention to who my audience is (IE. don't give managers or techs design details, speak the right language).
I find people who type faster are more likely to document their work because it takes less time to do so. After all, you've spent all that time thinking, what is it to write a half page summary of what that new module does and why it does it, and why it does it the way it does it? If you're hunting and pecking, it could take you longer to write the summary than it did to think of the code. If you can touch type (or at the very least type faster than 40-50WPM by whatever means), then it's no real burden. After all, if you're spending that much time thinking about your work, then you've already worked out pretty much everything you need to say.
I type 80-90WPM from copy myself, thanks to having taking a touch typing course. Granted, I don't follow 100% proper classroom technique, but I do pretty well. Before that, I was a four-finger typer that did pretty good. I managed 35WPM from copy on my first typing test when I started my touch typing course. That was hard won from typing BASIC programs on my TI home computer as well as any other 80s machine I could get time on.
I enjoy the freedom that touch typing gives me. In the same amount of time I can write much clearer and more complete documentation, clearer, more complete emails, and generally get communication done with and out of the way much more fluidly. I can type almost as fast as I can think. When I was pecking away at 35WPM, I was thinking way faster than I wrote, and so I wrote only the minimum, and ended up with cryptic crud.
*shrug*
I agree 100%, I can type 90+ WPM since high school. I know a lot of people who write crappy poorly written e-mails and crappy documentation, just because they are poor typers and it would take them forever to put together a proper paragraph. Good typing also gives you time to re-read and revise. I think nothing of deleting a paragraph and re-writing it in 60 seconds to sound better.
Is there Open Source software around to replace their product? I know I've seen enough developers on here discussing how easy of a problem it is to solve. What about a backing company who is able and ready to sell a complete package using it (hardware, support, training, etc.), who can be liable and responsible if anything goes wrong?
With the low quality crap these Diebold people keep bringing out, you'd think there would be 100 other companies in line to take their place.
Or the solution isn't trivial and the Premier Elections stuff wasn't really crap... Nevermind, I believe everything I hear on slashdot.
I've always thought that the only way for us as a race to become a unified nation is to simple explore space together. As soon as one nation decides to call Mars or whatever other celestial body their own, it will just be downhill from there.
Reminds me of the Robber's Cave experiment that I actually read from someone posting here.
Would be interesting if we could get China involved in the venture.
While I personally don't think that they're much of a deterrent,
Sometimes they are just an amusement.
My local Dunkin Donuts is about 60 feet by 30 feet and has, count 'em, 13 of those dark plastic ceiling bubbles. I think they should hold a contest and give out free donuts to anyone who can guess exactly how many of them actually contain a camera.
Oh, and the place has been robbed twice in the last year.
The only real solution to crime is an active deterrent, try installing one of these outside of Dunkin Donuts.
I think you're either greatly over estimating the cost of a police officer or greatly underestimating the cost of installing, maintaining and monitoring videos. A thousand cameras is going to cost you a pretty substantial sum of money to keep in repair.
On top of that, criminals no where the cameras are pointed, if you spend enough time around them you can spot which way they're pointed without looking too hard. On top of that a police office can be sent to other areas of the city as needed and get information which is completely inaccessible to a camera. And an officer is already there and in these parts ready to respond to anything that might be going on, not just crimes, but medical emergencies and such as well.
I'm sure these sources aren't completely accurate, but they are accurate enough for our arguments...
The average cost of a CCTV camera and recording facilities is about 1500 pounds.
The maintenance cost is about 70 pounds a month for 32 cameras. This is a high estimate, since the police department likely has a higher bulk deal.
The average wage of a police officer in the UK is about 22000 pounds a year.
So, (22000/(70*12)) * 32 = 838 cameras per cop.
I'd say that 1000 cameras per cop is a pretty good estimate. Especially considering that a journeyman cop (10 years) makes a lot more than 22k, more like 30k+.
The loss of privacy and all of the cameras around is annoying, I'd hate it in the US. But the arguments brought forth thus far to remove them (aside from privacy) are not compelling. If 1000 cameras solve 1 crime and prevent 1 more, then they are worth their cost. My gut is telling me that, privacy issues aside, they are a useful tool for the police and, when used appropriately, a good mix of both is ideal.
Sure, 10 lbs is heavy, but this would be a first version. That, and the summary says 10 lbs and under. 10 lbs is probably the maximum weight they asked for in their request for proposals.
On the other hand, imagine if they got it down to the size of a tennis ball or golf ball, and it only weighed a couple ounces. You could throw several into an area simultaneously, or throw them at night... I feel like I've seen several sci-fi or action films where the protagonist rolls a little ball with a camera around a corner.
Yea, something like throw a handful of objects into a room with radar or sonar sensors on them that scatter about and each relay information back that allows you to reproduce a semi real-time 3d projection of what what's inside the room.
They'd probably all just roll into a corner under a bed and be useless but it would be cool while it lasted.
Slashdot Mirror
"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically." Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive. So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.
Makes you stop and think when the cost of a disk + disk drive is lower than just a disc... At what point do they just scrap the whole optical media idea altogether and just package removable magnetic hard drive disk's.
- When driving the 2-door coupe, I downshift a gear or two, accelerate away suddenly and then resume my normal, reasonable cruising speed. The sudden abundance of space in front of the tailgater reminds them that they are being an asshole and makes them drive normally again. The ability to seemingly reform tailgaters, at least temporarily, makes this my favorite tactic. - When driving the 4x4, I let the exposed steel bars on the back and the threat of your hood and/or windshield ending up under a pair of big toothy offroad tires do the talking. Speak soft, big stick. Nobody tailgates.
Avoiding tailgaters is easy, go in the right lane and slow down (on a 2 lane road or 1 lane road with a long straightaway).
but sometimes a person will pull into the left lane and either maintain the same speed as the right lane (two-lane scenario, for simplification), or so minimally faster that it will take several miles before they pass the car on their right.
Just so you know, this is illegal in Kansas, as of July 1st. They will be issuing warnings for a year, and then start ticketing.
Addendum to law needed... going into the left lane to make room for people merging onto the highway. Right now it says you have to be passing or merging off the highway. If the left lane is clear, it is good driving etiquette (IMHO) to move into the left lane when passing on-ramps to make room for traffic merging on the highway, this law would make that illegal.
As the previous poster stated, this can silence any inconvenient camcorders or photo-taking cellphones at the scene of a police action against protesters.
Or at Lebron's training camp.
a HERF gun is "(a device like EMP but directional) ... capable of stalling cars at a distance and crashing computers as well."
I have no intention of actually doing this since it sounds like a great way to get in trouble. So, this is entirely hypothetical. I have thought of what it would be like to have a device like this in your trunk, and arranged so that it can transmit through the trunk lid (maybe this would entail replacing a part of the metal lid with something more transmissive) and pointed backwards. Then, some aggressive idiot wants to tailgate you, you tap your brake lights to ask him to back off. If he doesn't, you flip a switch under your dashboard and kill his engine by letting the EMP disrupt the electronics that control the ignition system. Then watch him disappear in your rear-view as he is forced to pull over with what momentum he has left. That would be most satisfying. Of course, you'd probably have to shield your own electronics, but it could be done.
A more impacting and practical application would be in law enforcement to instantly stop a high speed chase.
I recently saw a discovery channel invention show with a segment on one man's invention to stall an engine using 2 electrodes across a gap in the road and a large charge, but the electrodes would have to be nearly touching the vehicle. A perfected HERF gun would seem much more useful in this application.
A low orbit recon blimp would be way cooler... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5025388/ns/technology_and_science-space/
Except LEO is 527,999+ feet, so yea I'm an idiot lol...
The real problem is speed, or rather the lack thereof. Air travel became as popular as it is because it's so much *faster*. People might book an airship flight once a decade for the novelty, kind of like a cruise ship trip, but they're not going to hop on the blimp whenever they need to get to the other side of the country. The trip would take too long. Jets are faster, so they win.
Unless they use the blimp as a launchpad for low orbit travel, which is highly efficient and fast.
C++ makes sure nothing gets to become a real mess
You're funny. Can I have you come and perform for my birthday party?
I just have to keep reminding myself that misinformed and humorous comments are a slashdot standard lol.
He also I guess has never heard of product management and refers to "upper management" as "top brass". About the only thing he's right about is that, in a large business, there are a number of personnel managers who really don't control the product or resource allocation and aren't responsible for code and documentation issues.
But seriously, I could use this guy at my birthday party as well.
> an idealist might say [morals and ethics] could one day stop things such as war. An idealist might say that, if he were, in addition to being an idealist, also incredibly naive.
Is he naive or is it your belief in his naivety that makes it so?
They also enslaved an entire race of people for several hundred years before realizing that was bad.
No, they enslaved just about anyone they could get their hands on, but whites - in the lesser form of indentured servitude - weren't good plantation workers in the Caribbean (and that, not the eventual USA, was the first big New World slave market) because they weren't evolved for tropical climates. Native Americans were mostly extinct in the area, so they were out. SE Asians were eventually imported in some quantity as laborers by the British, but they were a long way away by the standards of the 1600s. Africans were adapted to the tropics, located relatively nearby, and already available for sale (because of existing slave markets in Africa). The Atlantic slave trade was a nasty business, all right, but it had its detractors from the start. Most people were just willing to overlook them, especially considering how much money was to be made.
"An entire race of people" is a subset of "anyone they can get their hands on". A better statement on my part would have been "had slaves" period, very good point.
The point is really that morals and ethics aren't trivial and their continued evolution is crucial in the betterment of our society and improvement of our lives. In fact, I would say that they aren't necessarily even communally agreed upon, particularly morals. Things that we thought weren't bad 200 years ago, with increased knowledge, we realize are indeed bad.
Fuck. Me. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a person with no moral fibre at all. I can't imagine it, must be weird.
My wife's a psychologist and we have discussed such people. The answer to what it's like to be one is depressingly simple. They have no morals to trouble them at all; no conscience, no guilt. They're happy as if they had ethics and compassion.
There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
Well to be honest, morals and ethics are just trivial rules communally agrees upon by a society. We find it unethical, perhaps even immoral, to have sex with a 14 year old. But even our own society less than 200 years ago saw nothing unusual in 40 year old men marrying 14 year old girls.
200 years ago, the average lifespan was only 35 years.
They also enslaved an entire race of people for several hundred years before realizing that was bad.
Morals and ethics are not trivial. Their evolution is crucial to the betterment of our society, an idealist might say they could one day stop things such as war.
200 years ago, they could claim ignorance from lack of knowledge. In none of these examples can we claim that today.
If you're just buying a license from a third party that bought it from Microsoft several years ago or bought it from Microsoft with the addendum that it will not be supported then it's your problem if there's an issue.
The latter case I agree with. In the former, if you bought it new and weren't informed there's a defect that won't be fixed you ought to be entitled for a refund.
Agreed, but I would add that in this case the onus would be on the netbook supplier and not Microsoft. Good point though.
Ah, a car analogy. It's more like this: You go to the Honda dealership and take a look at their 2010 models and purchase a vehicle. You discover that the engine has a serious flaw in it and ask Honda for a fix. Honda refuses because that engine is based on an 8 year old engine design. Except in this case, instead of a Honda you bought a brand new netbook and instead of an engine it came with a new copy of Windows XP.
This analogy sucks, because you can replace the netbooks "engine" with a bootable USB drive and Linux for FREE OR a bootable CD and Windows 7 for under 100 bucks.
Sure, and if it came with a defective hard drive you could replace that too. Never mind that you paid good money for the defective components it came with that you now have to waste your time and money replacing, whether software or hardware.
There is a significant difference between hardware and software and even significant differences in the economics and life cycles of hardware in a car and in a computer. If the hard drive failed in the first year or so then I would expect it to be replaced, if it failed after that then it's my problem. If the engine failed in a car in the first 100,000 miles, I'd expect it to be replaced. Software has no analogy to a car really, I'm stumped there.
Either way, from TFA, XP doesn't have any issues so a hotfix is not necessary. Even if it was necessary, I personally wouldn't deride Microsoft for not making the fix unless I was paying a service contract to them or bought the software license at the original price directly from them. If you're just buying a license from a third party that bought it from Microsoft several years ago or bought it from Microsoft with the addendum that it will not be supported then it's your problem if there's an issue.
Software costs money to support. Pay for the support, use open source software or buy new software.
The Navy will simply subcontract-out to Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and other defense companies to upgrade all their systems from XP to Windows 7 and fix any programs that "break" as a result. It will employ some 10,000 workers at a cost of 1.4 trillion dollars. Then it will fail to come-in on time, so they'll spend an extra 6 months and 0.3 trillion on schedule overrun.
That's SOP for the government.
Sounds like US Software and IT job creation to me.
Ah, a car analogy. It's more like this: You go to the Honda dealership and take a look at their 2010 models and purchase a vehicle. You discover that the engine has a serious flaw in it and ask Honda for a fix. Honda refuses because that engine is based on an 8 year old engine design. Except in this case, instead of a Honda you bought a brand new netbook and instead of an engine it came with a new copy of Windows XP.
This analogy sucks, because you can replace the netbooks "engine" with a bootable USB drive and Linux for FREE OR a bootable CD and Windows 7 for under 100 bucks.
Your argument doesn't work either though IMO. For one thing software changes a lot quicker than car technology so I was being pretty kind saying 10 years for the car stuff. You might expect a dealer to service a 30 year old car, but you're probably going to have to pay through the nose for it (and I've read of at least one case where a dealer didn't have the parts to service a car because it was so old).
Exactly, if people want support for XP at this point... they would have to be willing to PAY a for it. With cash. The initial cost of the OS doesn't wrap up into it the costs of support for 15 years, maybe 5 sure.
But that's the big sticking point, people don't want to pay for anything, they want it all for free. If that is the case, then use Linux. If you want premium software and are willing to pay, upgrade to Windows 7. I actually happen to think that re-designing the OS is a good thing, hell it creates jobs for engineers and IT across the board. Not to mention the fact that it's a better and more secure OS.
It's really that simple, Microsoft isn't the bad guy here (although they often are).
Yea, it would have to be some new encrypted unconvertable file format, which doesn't exist since you can convert from analog output if necessary. Or a player that enforces some such meta-data DRM tags on all file formats, which doesn't work as you can just use another player that doesn't enforce it. If you illegalize all players that don't enforce DRM meta-data then yea... but that's just bat fucking crazy.
I agree with all that you're saying, but I have also found a high number of managers who will simply ask me to explain verbally what I've already typed. I'm not talking about the "give me the executive summary" kind of brevity, but it's clearly a case of being too weak at everyday reading skills.
Not to say that this is the case, because I haven't seen them obviously, but this could potentially be the case of poorly written e-mails targeted at the wrong audience. This could be the product of a combination of a lack of attention payed in college English courses and high school Touch-Typing courses.
I never get asked for verbal explanations, but I pay a lot of attention to detail in what I'm writing (and I iteratively re-read and revise) and I pay attention to who my audience is (IE. don't give managers or techs design details, speak the right language).
I find people who type faster are more likely to document their work because it takes less time to do so. After all, you've spent all that time thinking, what is it to write a half page summary of what that new module does and why it does it, and why it does it the way it does it? If you're hunting and pecking, it could take you longer to write the summary than it did to think of the code. If you can touch type (or at the very least type faster than 40-50WPM by whatever means), then it's no real burden. After all, if you're spending that much time thinking about your work, then you've already worked out pretty much everything you need to say.
I type 80-90WPM from copy myself, thanks to having taking a touch typing course. Granted, I don't follow 100% proper classroom technique, but I do pretty well. Before that, I was a four-finger typer that did pretty good. I managed 35WPM from copy on my first typing test when I started my touch typing course. That was hard won from typing BASIC programs on my TI home computer as well as any other 80s machine I could get time on.
I enjoy the freedom that touch typing gives me. In the same amount of time I can write much clearer and more complete documentation, clearer, more complete emails, and generally get communication done with and out of the way much more fluidly. I can type almost as fast as I can think. When I was pecking away at 35WPM, I was thinking way faster than I wrote, and so I wrote only the minimum, and ended up with cryptic crud.
*shrug*
I agree 100%, I can type 90+ WPM since high school. I know a lot of people who write crappy poorly written e-mails and crappy documentation, just because they are poor typers and it would take them forever to put together a proper paragraph. Good typing also gives you time to re-read and revise. I think nothing of deleting a paragraph and re-writing it in 60 seconds to sound better.
Is there Open Source software around to replace their product? I know I've seen enough developers on here discussing how easy of a problem it is to solve. What about a backing company who is able and ready to sell a complete package using it (hardware, support, training, etc.), who can be liable and responsible if anything goes wrong? With the low quality crap these Diebold people keep bringing out, you'd think there would be 100 other companies in line to take their place.
Or the solution isn't trivial and the Premier Elections stuff wasn't really crap... Nevermind, I believe everything I hear on slashdot.
I've always thought that the only way for us as a race to become a unified nation is to simple explore space together. As soon as one nation decides to call Mars or whatever other celestial body their own, it will just be downhill from there.
Reminds me of the Robber's Cave experiment that I actually read from someone posting here.
Would be interesting if we could get China involved in the venture.
While I personally don't think that they're much of a deterrent,
Sometimes they are just an amusement.
My local Dunkin Donuts is about 60 feet by 30 feet and has, count 'em, 13 of those dark plastic ceiling bubbles. I think they should hold a contest and give out free donuts to anyone who can guess exactly how many of them actually contain a camera.
Oh, and the place has been robbed twice in the last year.
The only real solution to crime is an active deterrent, try installing one of these outside of Dunkin Donuts.
I think you're either greatly over estimating the cost of a police officer or greatly underestimating the cost of installing, maintaining and monitoring videos. A thousand cameras is going to cost you a pretty substantial sum of money to keep in repair. On top of that, criminals no where the cameras are pointed, if you spend enough time around them you can spot which way they're pointed without looking too hard. On top of that a police office can be sent to other areas of the city as needed and get information which is completely inaccessible to a camera. And an officer is already there and in these parts ready to respond to anything that might be going on, not just crimes, but medical emergencies and such as well.
I'm sure these sources aren't completely accurate, but they are accurate enough for our arguments...
The average cost of a CCTV camera and recording facilities is about 1500 pounds.
The maintenance cost is about 70 pounds a month for 32 cameras. This is a high estimate, since the police department likely has a higher bulk deal.
The average wage of a police officer in the UK is about 22000 pounds a year.
So, (22000/(70*12)) * 32 = 838 cameras per cop.
I'd say that 1000 cameras per cop is a pretty good estimate. Especially considering that a journeyman cop (10 years) makes a lot more than 22k, more like 30k+.
The loss of privacy and all of the cameras around is annoying, I'd hate it in the US. But the arguments brought forth thus far to remove them (aside from privacy) are not compelling. If 1000 cameras solve 1 crime and prevent 1 more, then they are worth their cost. My gut is telling me that, privacy issues aside, they are a useful tool for the police and, when used appropriately, a good mix of both is ideal.
Sure, 10 lbs is heavy, but this would be a first version. That, and the summary says 10 lbs and under. 10 lbs is probably the maximum weight they asked for in their request for proposals.
On the other hand, imagine if they got it down to the size of a tennis ball or golf ball, and it only weighed a couple ounces. You could throw several into an area simultaneously, or throw them at night... I feel like I've seen several sci-fi or action films where the protagonist rolls a little ball with a camera around a corner.
Yea, something like throw a handful of objects into a room with radar or sonar sensors on them that scatter about and each relay information back that allows you to reproduce a semi real-time 3d projection of what what's inside the room.
They'd probably all just roll into a corner under a bed and be useless but it would be cool while it lasted.