I changed to Dvorak 3/4 years ago. There seem to be a lot of posters saying they would not switch because they would not be able to use others' keyboards. I can still type pretty fast on Qwerty. The problem is mainly that others can't use my keyboard, which isn't a very big problem in my work environment. YMMV.
It's not worth switching to Dvorak for a gain in speed - I probably type only marginally faster on Dvorak than I did on Qwerty. The main advantage is that it is more comfortable. I enjoy typing a lot more now than I used to. This holds more for typing English than typing code. Typing code is alright, depending on the language and the punctuation marks it uses.
I wouldn't specifically recommend it, or recommend against it. It takes some time to learn and offers some advantages - I'm sure people can and will make up their own minds, and militant recommendations will not help. I try to remember the same about operating systems, programming languages etc, with less success;)
The gyst is that Word, and all word-processors, confuse the distinct tasks of preparing your text logically, and laying it out. This leads to the standard situation that frustrates me when I have to use Word: I am entering text, when I see that it won't fit on a page, so I stop thinking about my text to change paragraph formatting and then, oh, where was I? Later I'll change the text, and probably want to change the paragraph formatting back, but won't be able to remember what it was before. Now my document is inconsistently laid out.
Implementations may vary. Word is often slated as being particularly obnoxious, changing formatting of its own volition. However, the conflation of distinct tasks is a conceptual error of all word-processors.
The alternative suggested by the article, LaTeX, is undoubtedly not to everyone's taste either, but at least if you read the article, you will understand the deeper reason Word is frustrating.
>I don't WANT to understand how my computer operates internally, just as much as I don't give a toss for how my car or my phone works.
I just want to type a friggin letter.
I am not entirely sure whether this is meant to be a typical joe-six pack response, or Ubi_NL's actual response. Regardless, my response follows:
I imagine you don't want to understand all that addition and subtraction crap, just as much as you don't give a toss about all those letters with red numbers your bank manager sends you. You just want to buy stuff, right?
The world at large does not yet let you be so insulated from knowledge that you can get by without a basic level of numeracy and literacy. Those are going to be joined shortly by "computeracy". And not just "typing a friggin letter". Effective use of a computer has two key results. First, routine tasks can be performed with greater speed and reliability, and even in some cases totally automated. Second, more complex problems can be solved, whether this complexty arises in terms of problem specification, or volume of data. Together these are an effective metric for intelligence. Quite simply, an effective computer-user acts with greater intelligence. Conversely, just as it would be hard to consider someone with poor numeracy or literacy skills to be smart, when 80% of people are able to use a computer to the level maybe 5% can now, what will be said of the other 20%?
The change is inevitable, and unlike numeracy and literacy, it will not take millenia. Us "nerds" already get it. When will you jocks?
The real business world doesn't have the time and re$ource$ to be constantly updating code and mangling configurations just because some open source team can't make up their mind.
Conversely, open source projects shouldn't hold themselves up because real world businesses are too busy cutting costs to look after their intellectual assets.
Why anyone uses anything besides LaTeX to prepare documents is beyond me.
Perhaps because it's a lot easier to train someone to use the tools capable of outputting.doc files (especially since that frequently means zero training today) than it is to train them to use the tools capable of outputting LaTeX files?
Just as it is easier to train someone to watch TV than to read a book.
I'm no expert, but considering OpenOffice can already open these file formats quite well (they are old), why does KOffice lag behind? I can understand difficulty in writing these files, but for reading them it shouldn't be nearly as difficult. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer the formats from scratch; they can simply read using the method from the GPLed OpenOffice code. Why the difference exactly?
Perhaps reading the files themselves isn't as hard as mapping them onto your own representation of a document. OpenOffice seems to have been reasonably like Office from the time I first saw it around '99 I believe (as StarOffice). KDE is effectively a design from scratch, although various things come out working similarly, because they are reasonable design decisions. As a consequence, even though the open world knows the data format of Word files to a large extent, reading them into KOffice is still hard.
I used my 20GB original iPod with the touch wheel (you know the one I mean) for just about everything for a while. I used it in the car, in the living room, in my bedroom and on the move. It's very sturdy in terms of taking knocks, sure, and especially so with a carry case. However, the constant inserting and removing of headphones and various 3.5mm-to-whatever cables took its toll in about 6 months. It developed some serious noise in the left channel, and eventually went quiet altogether. To be fair this isn't Apple's fault, but a design flaw common to 3.5mm headphone sockets.
On a more positive note, I found it didn't do badly against a CD player twice its price in my main hifi, which was a pleasant surprise. For most of the time it was working, I rarely touched a CD. And having a huge amount of music while walking around was great.
If I can't fix my iPod at some point, I'll probably end up buying one of those baby iPods. I have about 12 gigs of mp3s at the moment. I'd be quite happy to have, say 2gb of playlists of music that I can't live without, and often want to listen to on a whim, and the rest be a floating list of randomness. I can't say I gain a whole lot from being able to walk around with track 8 of some godawful CD I bought 6 years ago around with me.
I have a 20gb original iPod, with the non-moving wheel. I have had it for about 6 months. Before that it belonged to a friend, who rarely used it. Recently, it has developed a problem with the headphone socket. The sound from the left headphone is intermittent. I have tried using several different pairs of headphones, but the problem remains, so it looks like it's a problem with the contact inside the iPod rather than the headphones. I was wondering if any other slashdotters have had this problem, and if so, if you have found a solution.
I haven't seen the video... The server has gone down in flames it seems.
However, I have been thinking about 3d desktops for a while. It seems to me that the most natural way to control them would be with two mice. There are two reasons for this:
1. In the real world, to control the 3d environment around them, people use 2 hands. The matter of fine-honing what mouse actions and gestures cause what actions in the desktop is complex.
2. When people use mice, they typically are not using the other hand (unless playing quake etc)
Also, I believe that scroll wheels, while useful, are not comfortable. If I have to scroll through a large amount of text, I am more likely to use page up and page down. Although I suppose some people would prefer to mice, each with scroll-wheels.
While I'm throwing out my hardware ideas, I'll do keyboards: Why is it that my keyboard has an eject button, a print screen button and 12 function buttons, but no cut, copy and paste buttons? Why aren't there tab and backspace buttons around the numerical pad?
Not disagreeing with your point that google would not be effective were the algorithm released to the public.
However, I believe that in each of the 3 examples you have given, it would be possible to have an open-source scheme that cannot be circumvented in the manner you propose. The idea would be to assign to each case a score to indicate how likely it is that the particular case is fraudulent. Cases can then be flagged with a probability proportionate to the score.
As an example, say I calculate that you are in the 25th percentile of dodginess. I might assign you a score of 0.25, get the computer to calculate a random number, and if it's higher than 0.25 flag you for closer inspection. I might want to apply a weighting function to increase the chance of looking at top 10% cases.
The point is that there is no cutoff threshold at which you can say, I'm safe here. If you are repeatedly coming close to the previous hard limit, you will get looked at closer sooner rather than later.
Also, I can tell you my algorithm, and you would not be able to make yourself safe, only to maximize your expected return for a given risk of getting caught.
Note that a hard limit that you suggest acts like assigning probability of flagging as 1 for all scores higher than some value, and 0 for all scores below. So in all likelihood, unless your risk of being flagged was so vanishingly small that a hard filter would not catch you anyway, you are likely to decide not to take that risk.
Look at it from the fraudster point of view: If you are commiting a fraud, with a 0.96 chance of being flagged, say 17 times, you will have a 0.96^17~=0.5 chance of getting away clean. Even odds. You could try doing a bigger fraud less times, but this would have a higher chance of being flagged each time, and negate your advantage.
I would be highly surprised if credit card companies did not already use this approach.
Yes, it could work out very happily and be great for everyone involved.
Alternative scenario:
Having joined themselves together like some sort of financial Siamese twins, one of them gets struck down by competitors. Maybe Intel releases a good 64-bit processor; maybe they just market a 32-bit Pentium V really hard. Maybe linux continues to eat Sun's lunch from the low-end up, and destroys their core business. Maybe some other random thing happens, but the point is that it's certainly not clear that both Sun and AMD have rosy futures forever.
Now one of your Siamese twins is limping around attached to a corpse. And that's not going to do it any good.
Not saying that's what's going to happen, but "we'll both break into new ground" is precisely the reasoning behind the AOL-TW merger, and look how well that's worked. AOL is, to some extent, sinking, and TW will not be able to carry them forever.
I think I'd prefer them to stay seperate, and sink or swim on their own merits, because as it is, despite the synergy they might or might not have, if they did join, then the risk that either of them faces becomes a risk for both of them. And any one of those risks could drive them both straight into the ground.
Even without the cash, you can still go down to your local hi-fi dealer and ask him to demonstrate a system or two to you (you might want to phone in advance). In fact, when I intend to buy a new piece of kit, I generally leave all methods of payment at home so that I can rationally examine whether I want it enough to spend the cash, without a salesman egging me on. It's tempting enough already.
As to whether your hearing is good enough to distinguish the difference, almost certainly yes. Most people can tell the difference between a Ford and a BMW, between economy cola and Coke, between pretty much any cheaper copy and the premium product. It's just down to whether you care enough to pay the extra (and whether you can). The way I look at it, taken with the fact that you can try a hi-fi out free (just your time) at your local hi-fi dealer, you might as well see if you care.
If you are in the UK, you might want to try out Richer Sounds. They do good deals on low-end (synonym for reasonably priced rather than stratospherically priced) systems. You can pick up something pretty decent for 200UKP, not a hell of a lot more than a decent PC speaker system.
500GB = 4194304000Kbits = 16384000 secs @ 256kbps = 3792.6 72min albums @ 256kbps = $20,000 worth of CDs, assuming you can find them at $5 each.
Not to mention the fact that that's half a year of music. So pretty cool for a radio station on a mission never to play a top 40 hit ever again maybe?
I would like to nominate "Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection" as the most fatuous comment on slashdot now that "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" is dead.
This is an oversimplification that I hear a lot. Closer to the truth would be that music has an emotional element. Britney may not, but, for me at least, Bach does. Now, listening to a piece of music on a cheap transistor radio, or even a run-of-the-mill mini system gives a somewhat stunted emotional response compared to going to a concert and hearing an entire orchestra perform. The aim of audiophiles is to reproduce the music well enough to reproduce that emotional element. That is all.
Me, I'll take the music too, but it's worthless if it can't have the effect it's meant to have, and that needs a little more work.
So, I think paying about 10 quid a month for 9 or 10 (or more I guess, I'm not counting the regional channels) channels, NO adverts, mostly original programming and a pretty much unbiased news service (their website has a lot more depth than you might initially think, BTW) is not a bad deal.
Probably it is not a bad deal. However, I want 10 MTV channels and as much primetime Simpsons and Star Trek as I can get my hands on. So being forced to pay 100 quid a month for some other channels I don't even use doesn't seem like such a great deal. If *you* want to watch BBC TV, and listen to BBC radio, and look at the BBC website, then *you* can pay for it. Seems like a better deal to me. You'll notice that I am not saying that the BBC does not provide a quality service (and with millions of pounds being poured into it every year, it had better be). I am saying I resent not being able to opt out of it. If the BBC is such a desirable service, then surely everyone would pony up were it to be made optional?
Isn't it more sad for the British citizens forced into paying 100UKP a year to prop up the BBC? Oh well, at least there news website is a more productive waste of money than the "Perfect Day" adverts they screened at the cinema a few years back. What were they advertising for anyway, it's not like you can choose not to pay them money over here.
Yes there are. I attempted to write a program to find the weak Schur numbers using this (I needed to bitshift bit arrays larger than 32-bits a lot, and I figured a way that a video card could do this well, especially on this problem). The real problem with this approach was the bandwidth back to the processor mentioned in a slashdot article not so long ago. Most consumer video cards just aren't designed to send data back to the processor fast.
My mother read an article on PVR users skipping adverts the other day.
(background info: My mother, like most mothers, is not so into tech-stuff.)
Her take on it was one that I'm not sure I've seen mentioned here. It was,
"if everybody hates adverts so much that the first thing they do when they
can is skip the adverts, why are advertisers bothering in the first place?"
You have to wonder. These guys spend gazillions on putting their message
in front of people who really don't want to see it. I guess it's just a
shame that PVRs have drawn their attention to this, so that they'll no
longer fund your favourite show. The question then really boils down to,
"How can we continue to kid them that advertising is worthwhile, so they'll
continue to foot the bill?" This, unfortunately, sounds like a fairly doomed
arrangement to me.
The most sensible alternative I have seen, is pay-per-show. Already, you can
go to Blockbuster, and hire a DVD or video of several Friends episodes or Star
Trek episodes, or whatever floats your boat. Extending this to TV is entirely
possible with PVRs, and if priced well, could be an entirely attractive option
(after all, I'm not interested in subscribing to a channel, just in seeing the
few shows I want to watch). I know I'd be happier to subscribe to a season of Futurama, than to a channel which may or may not show that season of Futurama. This may not be ideal in all situations. For
example, I can see that the current system may work better for music channels, for which I am more interested in seeing a stream of "whatever they want to show me".
However, I believe this system could satisfy everybody's interests for more general programming.
On a different note, to all the British posters who have pointed out the
BBC's funding model, I have to say, I don't watch any BBC programs, and I
resent being gouged for 100 quid a year for a service I don't want. I'm
sure that this socialist model of TV funding would *not* be accepted in the
US, even if things were centralized enough for it to be possible.
not_cub
PS Last time I said bad things about the BBC, all hell broke loose. Moderators who love the BBC, feel free to ignore that bit;)
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine.
Strange, that a similar statement for, say, an English course would be that now English students can more time plagiarizing Shakespeare, and less time learning the difference between "your" and "you're". The thing about a CS course, is that it is meant to give you a good theoretical underpinning to your coding skills. Knowing there is a black box called sort you can use is worthless. Knowing how the black box works is not.
Learning to use others work is a useful skill, sure, but unless you have something in your own brain that you can put into the process, you will never get anything but rehashes of previous work out. Maybe that's ok for an English student looking to write middle-of-the-road sitcoms, or a CS student who is going to churn out the same web application for the rest of their lives.
Summary, there are some things you need to learn for yourself. It's no good knowing that a calculator can add, if you don't know what addition is.
Does anyone trust a telecom company that puts spaces in their directory names, thus causing problems with some web browers?
Worked fine in Mozilla and konqueror. So yes, I think I trust them, at least with this. Getting broadband to my home is another matter.
... Wow, this must be really important news for nerds.
You know, when your masters at VA tell you to get some eyeballs on another of their sites, you might want to communicate and decide who is going to do it, rather than all rushing off to plaster it all over slashdot.
Actually the phenomenon of resonance is well documented in science. Engineering involves disgarding the pieces of science that are unimportant. For example, most of quantum theory can be ignored when modelling a bridge, which simplifies things a bit. In the case of the millenium bridge, they oversimplified, and ignored the horizontal force exerted by people walking, which is what caused the swaying. So this is not science, not software, just an engineering error.
Also maybe Sony should take their time and develope a quality console that will meet the needs of the gaming public, even if it takes a few extra months to a year. They have already demonstrated their market dominence over the superior (hardware wise) machines of their competition.
Do you know why they beat the superior N64 with the original playstation? It's because they were first to market. Do you know why the PS2 is whumping the Gamecube and the X-box right now? It's because they were first to market. That's right. And you know why? Because little Jimmy will rush out and buy the first next-generation system that's available. And when the second comes out, he's a little hard up, and all his friends have a Sony anyway, and there are no good games for the second one yet.
So while it'd be nice if Sony could be like Debian, and take just a little longer to get everything right, it's clear that the real world doesn't work that way. And if the PS3 doesn't come out 6 months before the Nintendo gamesphere and the Microsoft Y-box, then Sony lose their all their advantage.
All this disregards the fact that it will take them as much time to design the PS3 with 4 ports as with 2 anyway. They don't come up with a design for 2 ports and then spend a couple of months tacking on the extra ones. What they are trying to do is meet a price point, and compromising on features where necessary. And I'm sure they are not unhappy that you have to spend more money on a multi-tap.
take you time and give me something remotely worth the ammount money I am going to have to drop on this thing
Since you have already professed you will buy this thing whether they give you 4 ports or not, why should they bother to add them? If it really matters to you, then bite the bullet and wait for the console that does have what you want. And no, they should not take their time, because then they would be in second place, regardless of technical merit.
Slashdot Mirror
I changed to Dvorak 3/4 years ago. There seem to be a lot of posters saying they would not switch because they would not be able to use others' keyboards. I can still type pretty fast on Qwerty. The problem is mainly that others can't use my keyboard, which isn't a very big problem in my work environment. YMMV.
It's not worth switching to Dvorak for a gain in speed - I probably type only marginally faster on Dvorak than I did on Qwerty. The main advantage is that it is more comfortable. I enjoy typing a lot more now than I used to. This holds more for typing English than typing code. Typing code is alright, depending on the language and the punctuation marks it uses.
I wouldn't specifically recommend it, or recommend against it. It takes some time to learn and offers some advantages - I'm sure people can and will make up their own minds, and militant recommendations will not help. I try to remember the same about operating systems, programming languages etc, with less success ;)
not_cub
The best article I have read that summarizes what word got wrong is http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html.
The gyst is that Word, and all word-processors, confuse the distinct tasks of preparing your text logically, and laying it out. This leads to the standard situation that frustrates me when I have to use Word: I am entering text, when I see that it won't fit on a page, so I stop thinking about my text to change paragraph formatting and then, oh, where was I? Later I'll change the text, and probably want to change the paragraph formatting back, but won't be able to remember what it was before. Now my document is inconsistently laid out.
Implementations may vary. Word is often slated as being particularly obnoxious, changing formatting of its own volition. However, the conflation of distinct tasks is a conceptual error of all word-processors.
The alternative suggested by the article, LaTeX, is undoubtedly not to everyone's taste either, but at least if you read the article, you will understand the deeper reason Word is frustrating.
not_cub
I just want to type a friggin letter.
I am not entirely sure whether this is meant to be a typical joe-six pack response, or Ubi_NL's actual response. Regardless, my response follows:
I imagine you don't want to understand all that addition and subtraction crap, just as much as you don't give a toss about all those letters with red numbers your bank manager sends you. You just want to buy stuff, right?
The world at large does not yet let you be so insulated from knowledge that you can get by without a basic level of numeracy and literacy. Those are going to be joined shortly by "computeracy". And not just "typing a friggin letter". Effective use of a computer has two key results. First, routine tasks can be performed with greater speed and reliability, and even in some cases totally automated. Second, more complex problems can be solved, whether this complexty arises in terms of problem specification, or volume of data. Together these are an effective metric for intelligence. Quite simply, an effective computer-user acts with greater intelligence. Conversely, just as it would be hard to consider someone with poor numeracy or literacy skills to be smart, when 80% of people are able to use a computer to the level maybe 5% can now, what will be said of the other 20%?
The change is inevitable, and unlike numeracy and literacy, it will not take millenia. Us "nerds" already get it. When will you jocks?
not_cub
Conversely, open source projects shouldn't hold themselves up because real world businesses are too busy cutting costs to look after their intellectual assets.
not_cub
Perhaps because it's a lot easier to train someone to use the tools capable of outputting .doc files (especially since that frequently means zero training today) than it is to train them to use the tools capable of outputting LaTeX files?
Just as it is easier to train someone to watch TV than to read a book.
Perhaps reading the files themselves isn't as hard as mapping them onto your own representation of a document. OpenOffice seems to have been reasonably like Office from the time I first saw it around '99 I believe (as StarOffice). KDE is effectively a design from scratch, although various things come out working similarly, because they are reasonable design decisions. As a consequence, even though the open world knows the data format of Word files to a large extent, reading them into KOffice is still hard.
This wild guess bought to you by not_cub.
Just a warning about that...
I used my 20GB original iPod with the touch wheel (you know the one I mean) for just about everything for a while. I used it in the car, in the living room, in my bedroom and on the move. It's very sturdy in terms of taking knocks, sure, and especially so with a carry case. However, the constant inserting and removing of headphones and various 3.5mm-to-whatever cables took its toll in about 6 months. It developed some serious noise in the left channel, and eventually went quiet altogether. To be fair this isn't Apple's fault, but a design flaw common to 3.5mm headphone sockets.
On a more positive note, I found it didn't do badly against a CD player twice its price in my main hifi, which was a pleasant surprise. For most of the time it was working, I rarely touched a CD. And having a huge amount of music while walking around was great.
If I can't fix my iPod at some point, I'll probably end up buying one of those baby iPods. I have about 12 gigs of mp3s at the moment. I'd be quite happy to have, say 2gb of playlists of music that I can't live without, and often want to listen to on a whim, and the rest be a floating list of randomness. I can't say I gain a whole lot from being able to walk around with track 8 of some godawful CD I bought 6 years ago around with me.
not_cub
I have a 20gb original iPod, with the non-moving wheel. I have had it for about 6 months. Before that it belonged to a friend, who rarely used it. Recently, it has developed a problem with the headphone socket. The sound from the left headphone is intermittent. I have tried using several different pairs of headphones, but the problem remains, so it looks like it's a problem with the contact inside the iPod rather than the headphones. I was wondering if any other slashdotters have had this problem, and if so, if you have found a solution.
Thanks,
not_cub
I haven't seen the video... The server has gone down in flames it seems.
However, I have been thinking about 3d desktops for a while. It seems to me that the most natural way to control them would be with two mice. There are two reasons for this:
1. In the real world, to control the 3d environment around them, people use 2 hands. The matter of fine-honing what mouse actions and gestures cause what actions in the desktop is complex.
2. When people use mice, they typically are not using the other hand (unless playing quake etc)
Also, I believe that scroll wheels, while useful, are not comfortable. If I have to scroll through a large amount of text, I am more likely to use page up and page down. Although I suppose some people would prefer to mice, each with scroll-wheels.
While I'm throwing out my hardware ideas, I'll do keyboards: Why is it that my keyboard has an eject button, a print screen button and 12 function buttons, but no cut, copy and paste buttons? Why aren't there tab and backspace buttons around the numerical pad?
not_cub
Not disagreeing with your point that google would not be effective were the algorithm released to the public.
However, I believe that in each of the 3 examples you have given, it would be possible to have an open-source scheme that cannot be circumvented in the manner you propose. The idea would be to assign to each case a score to indicate how likely it is that the particular case is fraudulent. Cases can then be flagged with a probability proportionate to the score.
As an example, say I calculate that you are in the 25th percentile of dodginess. I might assign you a score of 0.25, get the computer to calculate a random number, and if it's higher than 0.25 flag you for closer inspection. I might want to apply a weighting function to increase the chance of looking at top 10% cases.
The point is that there is no cutoff threshold at which you can say, I'm safe here. If you are repeatedly coming close to the previous hard limit, you will get looked at closer sooner rather than later.
Also, I can tell you my algorithm, and you would not be able to make yourself safe, only to maximize your expected return for a given risk of getting caught.
Note that a hard limit that you suggest acts like assigning probability of flagging as 1 for all scores higher than some value, and 0 for all scores below. So in all likelihood, unless your risk of being flagged was so vanishingly small that a hard filter would not catch you anyway, you are likely to decide not to take that risk.
Look at it from the fraudster point of view: If you are commiting a fraud, with a 0.96 chance of being flagged, say 17 times, you will have a 0.96^17~=0.5 chance of getting away clean. Even odds. You could try doing a bigger fraud less times, but this would have a higher chance of being flagged each time, and negate your advantage.
I would be highly surprised if credit card companies did not already use this approach.
not_cub
Alternative scenario:
Having joined themselves together like some sort of financial Siamese twins, one of them gets struck down by competitors. Maybe Intel releases a good 64-bit processor; maybe they just market a 32-bit Pentium V really hard. Maybe linux continues to eat Sun's lunch from the low-end up, and destroys their core business. Maybe some other random thing happens, but the point is that it's certainly not clear that both Sun and AMD have rosy futures forever.
Now one of your Siamese twins is limping around attached to a corpse. And that's not going to do it any good.
Not saying that's what's going to happen, but "we'll both break into new ground" is precisely the reasoning behind the AOL-TW merger, and look how well that's worked. AOL is, to some extent, sinking, and TW will not be able to carry them forever.
I think I'd prefer them to stay seperate, and sink or swim on their own merits, because as it is, despite the synergy they might or might not have, if they did join, then the risk that either of them faces becomes a risk for both of them. And any one of those risks could drive them both straight into the ground.
not_cub
As to whether your hearing is good enough to distinguish the difference, almost certainly yes. Most people can tell the difference between a Ford and a BMW, between economy cola and Coke, between pretty much any cheaper copy and the premium product. It's just down to whether you care enough to pay the extra (and whether you can). The way I look at it, taken with the fact that you can try a hi-fi out free (just your time) at your local hi-fi dealer, you might as well see if you care.
If you are in the UK, you might want to try out Richer Sounds. They do good deals on low-end (synonym for reasonably priced rather than stratospherically priced) systems. You can pick up something pretty decent for 200UKP, not a hell of a lot more than a decent PC speaker system.
not_cub
11600 albums ~= 1.6 albums/day since CDs were introduced in 1982
~= 90m of shelf space
Again, the logistics are impressive, as is your voracious appetite for new music.
not_cub
500GB = 4194304000Kbits
= 16384000 secs @ 256kbps
= 3792.6 72min albums @ 256kbps
= $20,000 worth of CDs, assuming you can find them at $5 each.
Not to mention the fact that that's half a year of music. So pretty cool for a radio station on a mission never to play a top 40 hit ever again maybe?
I would like to nominate "Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection" as the most fatuous comment on slashdot now that "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" is dead.
not_cub
Me, I'll take the music too, but it's worthless if it can't have the effect it's meant to have, and that needs a little more work.
Ed.
Probably it is not a bad deal. However, I want 10 MTV channels and as much primetime Simpsons and Star Trek as I can get my hands on. So being forced to pay 100 quid a month for some other channels I don't even use doesn't seem like such a great deal. If *you* want to watch BBC TV, and listen to BBC radio, and look at the BBC website, then *you* can pay for it. Seems like a better deal to me. You'll notice that I am not saying that the BBC does not provide a quality service (and with millions of pounds being poured into it every year, it had better be). I am saying I resent not being able to opt out of it. If the BBC is such a desirable service, then surely everyone would pony up were it to be made optional?
not_cub
not_cub
not_cub
You have to wonder. These guys spend gazillions on putting their message in front of people who really don't want to see it. I guess it's just a shame that PVRs have drawn their attention to this, so that they'll no longer fund your favourite show. The question then really boils down to, "How can we continue to kid them that advertising is worthwhile, so they'll continue to foot the bill?" This, unfortunately, sounds like a fairly doomed arrangement to me.
The most sensible alternative I have seen, is pay-per-show. Already, you can go to Blockbuster, and hire a DVD or video of several Friends episodes or Star Trek episodes, or whatever floats your boat. Extending this to TV is entirely possible with PVRs, and if priced well, could be an entirely attractive option (after all, I'm not interested in subscribing to a channel, just in seeing the few shows I want to watch). I know I'd be happier to subscribe to a season of Futurama, than to a channel which may or may not show that season of Futurama. This may not be ideal in all situations. For example, I can see that the current system may work better for music channels, for which I am more interested in seeing a stream of "whatever they want to show me". However, I believe this system could satisfy everybody's interests for more general programming.
On a different note, to all the British posters who have pointed out the BBC's funding model, I have to say, I don't watch any BBC programs, and I resent being gouged for 100 quid a year for a service I don't want. I'm sure that this socialist model of TV funding would *not* be accepted in the US, even if things were centralized enough for it to be possible.
not_cub
PS Last time I said bad things about the BBC, all hell broke loose. Moderators who love the BBC, feel free to ignore that bit ;)
Strange, that a similar statement for, say, an English course would be that now English students can more time plagiarizing Shakespeare, and less time learning the difference between "your" and "you're". The thing about a CS course, is that it is meant to give you a good theoretical underpinning to your coding skills. Knowing there is a black box called sort you can use is worthless. Knowing how the black box works is not.
Learning to use others work is a useful skill, sure, but unless you have something in your own brain that you can put into the process, you will never get anything but rehashes of previous work out. Maybe that's ok for an English student looking to write middle-of-the-road sitcoms, or a CS student who is going to churn out the same web application for the rest of their lives.
Summary, there are some things you need to learn for yourself. It's no good knowing that a calculator can add, if you don't know what addition is.
not_cub
Worked fine in Mozilla and konqueror. So yes, I think I trust them, at least with this. Getting broadband to my home is another matter.
not_cub
You know, when your masters at VA tell you to get some eyeballs on another of their sites, you might want to communicate and decide who is going to do it, rather than all rushing off to plaster it all over slashdot.
not_cub
Actually the phenomenon of resonance is well documented in science. Engineering involves disgarding the pieces of science that are unimportant. For example, most of quantum theory can be ignored when modelling a bridge, which simplifies things a bit. In the case of the millenium bridge, they oversimplified, and ignored the horizontal force exerted by people walking, which is what caused the swaying. So this is not science, not software, just an engineering error.
not_cub
Do you know why they beat the superior N64 with the original playstation? It's because they were first to market. Do you know why the PS2 is whumping the Gamecube and the X-box right now? It's because they were first to market. That's right. And you know why? Because little Jimmy will rush out and buy the first next-generation system that's available. And when the second comes out, he's a little hard up, and all his friends have a Sony anyway, and there are no good games for the second one yet.
So while it'd be nice if Sony could be like Debian, and take just a little longer to get everything right, it's clear that the real world doesn't work that way. And if the PS3 doesn't come out 6 months before the Nintendo gamesphere and the Microsoft Y-box, then Sony lose their all their advantage.
All this disregards the fact that it will take them as much time to design the PS3 with 4 ports as with 2 anyway. They don't come up with a design for 2 ports and then spend a couple of months tacking on the extra ones. What they are trying to do is meet a price point, and compromising on features where necessary. And I'm sure they are not unhappy that you have to spend more money on a multi-tap.
take you time and give me something remotely worth the ammount money I am going to have to drop on this thing
Since you have already professed you will buy this thing whether they give you 4 ports or not, why should they bother to add them? If it really matters to you, then bite the bullet and wait for the console that does have what you want. And no, they should not take their time, because then they would be in second place, regardless of technical merit.
not_cub
And it got peed on.
not_cub