"But: do you want to meet people on the Web at all?"
Well, given that I met someone on match.com more than two years ago and that we're getting married in August, I'd say there's nothing wrong with meeting people on the web.
If it weren't for the web, I wouldn't have met my font-design mentor, Chank, despite the fact that we live in the same city. Some of my best friends on the planet, I've met through IRC and Livejournal
That said, I still don't want to have a sitatuation as describe in the article of being aware of people that are surfing the same sites I am. Especially when I'm surfing the pr0n. I mean, yeesh...talk about TMI.
St. Cloud is a university town..there's some manufacturing stuff around there, too, but I don't remember hearing much about a 'tech corridor' up there. I thought that was kind of an odd choice, myself. I can't speak to Jacksonville, FL, though, because, quite frankly, I avoid FL like the plague.
Who do they think they're kidding? Have you seen what mobile phone companies charge for Intarweb access? Two words: highway robbery.
Tell ya what, guys...get me a laptop with built-in 3G (better yet, 4G) cellphone, that has a Bluetooth headset interface for the phone part that can operate while the laptop is in "sleep" mode, and does all the same shit a 12" Powerbook can do, and then I'll consider it. But hand-helds? No friggin' way. Too small, too easy to lose/misplace, not enough data storage for anything useful, and you're stuck with one operating system. (Yes I view OS X as two operating systems -- the *nix side of the house and the Mac side of the house.)
I guess none of this is important, though, if Slashdot is going to start posting psuedo-astroturfing "articles" as news.
Yeah, I was just thinking the other day..."isn't it time they brought an LPC operating system to HPC hardware?" I guess Bill agrees with me. That makes me a genius. Really.
Would this be the one that France was offering to host? Because I seem to recall they got push-back from the U.S. (part of the ITER consortium) because of their lack of support for the Iraq war, and that the U.S. was putting its support with the Japanese site.
This, of course, raises the question as to when Internet blockades become legitimate poltical tools... Should we cut China off the Internet until it cleans up its act? I don't agree, but I'm surprised that it hasn't occured to anyone yet.
...I've been wanting something like this at the office for a long time now. I'm a project manager, I have ~60 accounts that I am working on simultaneously and with that, it becomes more and more difficult to keep on top of where each project is. If I had something like this where I had all my information and conversation threads under one roof, I'd be sitting pretty. In the end, the one thing that holds up a project -- more than anything else -- is dropped information.
Time to go write a specification for a new intranet tool. 'Scuse me.
I used to think the same thing...I realized that I was still a geek in '99, even after having been at competitive cycling for 10 years at that point -- I'm not sure what drove me to that conclusion. But when I was at the rock gym, discussing the merits of Ruby scripting with a friend while tackling the first 10 feet of a 5.9+ route, I realized that I am, above all else, a fucking geek.:-)
Yeah, as someone who's been serious about cycling (competitively) for the last 15 years, I have to agree with the other poster that "ultralight components" are not a passing fad. Cycling, perhaps more than any other sport has a materials science and mechanical engineering war brewing. Every company is looking for an edge in materials -- look at the recent adoption of scandium-aluminum alloys for frames. Old ideas get rehashed every so often -- it used to be that carbon fiber frames were three main tubes of carbon, lugged together with aluminum. That "fad" passed away, but has returned now that people realize that blending materials in certain parts of the frame have benefits -- adding carbon seatstays to an aluminum frame cuts weight and dampens road-shock before it reaches the rider...and recently, LeMond bikes have shown up where the primary stress-bearing portion of the frame (the chainstays, down tube, and head tube) are titanium and the remainder of the bike (seat stays, seat tube and top tube) are Trek's proprietary OCLV carbon (LeMond is owned by Trek)...making for a very light bike that rides smoothly (the carbon upper portion gives it nice shock absorption) and is torsionally stiff (thank you, titanium), so it rides nice, is much lighter than typical titanium frames, and it sprints and climbs like a m-therf-cker.
Sure there are fads, and they pass, but most of the time, Joe Average bike user isn't going to be concerned with it, becaus a Joe Average bike shop bike (not a department store bike) sees those development years after the "lightweight, passing-fad" parts have been put through the evolutionary wringer of the market. If the design concept works, it trickles down into Joe Average bikes -- things like aluminum frames, indexed shifting, threadless headsets, etc. -- and if it doesn't work or is too expensive to be anything but a high-end product, then you won't see it on entry-level bikes. Things like titanium bolt sets (expensive, not worth the weight savings) come to mind.
The last two to three years have brought some seriously interesting developments, some of which I suspect will be see in Joe Average bikes within 5 years -- the aforementioned carbon seatstays, scandium-aluminum alloy framesets, paired-spoke wheels, etc.
Just because the market is being used to filter out what works and what doesn't, doesn't mean that every attempt at a lightweight part is a passing fad.
Yeah, to give you an idea...I work 17 miles from home. I ride my bike. Every damn day. My ride time is faster than public transportation -- about 55 minutes, door-to-door. The drive takes about 30 minutes. I'm happier, healthier, and more productive when I ride and my stress levels are a lot lower.
Let's see...I've been a competitive cyclist for 15 years now and within 5 years, I'll be getting out of I.T. to open my own bike shop. I took up rock climbing about six months ago, and I'm horribly addicted. I went through a lot of hand-to-hand fighting training in the Army. And I definitely fit the definition of a geek. But from what I've noticed, geeks gravitate to sports that are gear intensive -- cycling and rock climbing both definitely fit the bill.
Christ, the claims for the mileage on my 2001 XTerra were off, too. What's the BFD? This kind of crap reeks of gas company crybaby marketing. Who did this study? Texaco?
That said, I'd still love to have a hybrid...and right now the 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid is looking like a winner, unless Nissan can get off it's collective ass and get me a 2006 XTerra Hybrid.
Well, I certainly won't be. I've spent a bit over $100 at the iTMS since it opened and, generally, have been pretty happy. At $0.99 per track, I've even been willing to experiment and give new artists a chance.
If it goes to $1.25 per track, that's going to cause my purchasing to drop off considerable. Once again, greed's running the show at the RIAA, and once again, they're executing Operation: Footbullet faster and better than anyone.
Want to complain to the top? Try dropping an email to sjobs@apple.com.
You know what? I'll snap this thing up right away. It's worth the cost, just as 10.2 and 10.3 were worth the cost. (Though I suspect I'll be buying a new Powerbook about the time 10.4 is released.)
I'm of the same school as a lot of posters here -- Redhat, Windows, and Mac OS X are part of my daily life. Redhat runs my webserver/small biz, Windows is the ball-and-chain of my day job, and Mac OS X does everything else.
My development work (PHP/MySQL, Ruby, Perl, etc., all of which are part of the OS X distribution), all done on OS X before deploying to the server. My design work? Fire up Photoshop on the iBook. My writing? I just installed PHPWiki a few days ago and have been using it to organize and build the notes for the sci-fi trilogy I've had rolling around in my head for years. Family? I just custom-rolled a photo book for my father-in-law that had restored copies of all his photos (gracias, Photoshop) and it arrived in hardcover (gracias, iPhoto). Road trip? Burning off CDs like mad from iTunes, including the ones I purchased from iTMS.
I'm a Mac OS X user for life. Period. I don't have to fuck around with all the annoying shit that amounts to day-to-day life on Windows/Linux.
Like an earlier poster, I used to bitch about the price of Macs. Then I got an OS X machine. The price is worthwhile -- it's no different than a car, a house, or any other consumer purchase -- you get what you pay for. And I'll happily shell out $129 for 10.4, or a few grand for a new Powerbook with 10.4. Because I have a computer that I use to work, not a computer that I have to spend hours or days trying to keep working.
With the Mac, it's plug in and go. No drivers needed. Even have mine formatted for NTFS so it works at the office (Win2k) and at home (iBook). The 128MB I have is filling up too quickly for my tastes, lately, so I'll probably bite the bullet on a 1GB model sometime later this year.
It seems they try to follow Apple's example: have a cool product and overcharge for its functionality.
Clearly, you've never used products from Apple or Iomega -- the Apple products are worth the extra money, the Iomega problem^H^H^H^Hducts are not. Iomega products are not "cool" -- they're cheap junk that's got shitty reliability and poor customer support.
These people are clearly making hooch out of cleaning solvents...if you can't afford vodka, comrade, how the hell are you going to come up with the ludicrous $3.5 billion pricetag you've put on your mission?
You couldn't launch a mission to the moon for $3.5 billion. Hell, you couldn't spend $3.5 billion and make the public forget Brian DePalma's shitheap Mission to Mars much less launch a real mission.
Stop drinking the glass cleaner, comrade, and call us when you sober up.
A mission to Mars is probably going to end up being footprints-and-flags, a wildly expensive waste of time.
I'd advise you to examine Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct program concept, which is the current NASA baseline for a manned Mars mission. The profile calls for a 1.5 year stay on the surface of Mars, which should provide considerable time for science and about five minutes for flags and footprints.
If it means that I get better search results, based on the content of my non-spam email, then you know what? MORE POWER TO THEM. I get so sick of this Luddite shit, sometimes. Oh no! Someone might know my name and where I surf to! If what you peruse on the Intarweb is so damn sacred to you, get an anonymous proxy server and quit your bitching.
Slashdot Mirror
"But: do you want to meet people on the Web at all?"
Well, given that I met someone on match.com more than two years ago and that we're getting married in August, I'd say there's nothing wrong with meeting people on the web.
If it weren't for the web, I wouldn't have met my font-design mentor, Chank, despite the fact that we live in the same city. Some of my best friends on the planet, I've met through IRC and Livejournal
That said, I still don't want to have a sitatuation as describe in the article of being aware of people that are surfing the same sites I am. Especially when I'm surfing the pr0n. I mean, yeesh...talk about TMI.
St. Cloud is a university town..there's some manufacturing stuff around there, too, but I don't remember hearing much about a 'tech corridor' up there. I thought that was kind of an odd choice, myself. I can't speak to Jacksonville, FL, though, because, quite frankly, I avoid FL like the plague.
Who do they think they're kidding? Have you seen what mobile phone companies charge for Intarweb access? Two words: highway robbery.
Tell ya what, guys...get me a laptop with built-in 3G (better yet, 4G) cellphone, that has a Bluetooth headset interface for the phone part that can operate while the laptop is in "sleep" mode, and does all the same shit a 12" Powerbook can do, and then I'll consider it. But hand-helds? No friggin' way. Too small, too easy to lose/misplace, not enough data storage for anything useful, and you're stuck with one operating system. (Yes I view OS X as two operating systems -- the *nix side of the house and the Mac side of the house.)
I guess none of this is important, though, if Slashdot is going to start posting psuedo-astroturfing "articles" as news.
"Is your computer leaking toxic dust?"
I sure hope so. I'd like it to kill me before my job does. At least my death would be caused by something I like.
Maybe you should have found an S.O. that plays video games?
Put your money where your mouth is. Hook me up with a new Blade Server for free. I could use one for my small biz.
You know, the way the headline is written, it makes it sound like MS SQL Server never had security features before.
Oh, yeah. Waitaminute. Nevermind.
Yeah, I was just thinking the other day..."isn't it time they brought an LPC operating system to HPC hardware?" I guess Bill agrees with me. That makes me a genius. Really.
Would this be the one that France was offering to host? Because I seem to recall they got push-back from the U.S. (part of the ITER consortium) because of their lack of support for the Iraq war, and that the U.S. was putting its support with the Japanese site.
This, of course, raises the question as to when Internet blockades become legitimate poltical tools... Should we cut China off the Internet until it cleans up its act? I don't agree, but I'm surprised that it hasn't occured to anyone yet.
...I've been wanting something like this at the office for a long time now. I'm a project manager, I have ~60 accounts that I am working on simultaneously and with that, it becomes more and more difficult to keep on top of where each project is. If I had something like this where I had all my information and conversation threads under one roof, I'd be sitting pretty. In the end, the one thing that holds up a project -- more than anything else -- is dropped information.
Time to go write a specification for a new intranet tool. 'Scuse me.
I used to think the same thing...I realized that I was still a geek in '99, even after having been at competitive cycling for 10 years at that point -- I'm not sure what drove me to that conclusion. But when I was at the rock gym, discussing the merits of Ruby scripting with a friend while tackling the first 10 feet of a 5.9+ route, I realized that I am, above all else, a fucking geek. :-)
Yeah, as someone who's been serious about cycling (competitively) for the last 15 years, I have to agree with the other poster that "ultralight components" are not a passing fad. Cycling, perhaps more than any other sport has a materials science and mechanical engineering war brewing. Every company is looking for an edge in materials -- look at the recent adoption of scandium-aluminum alloys for frames. Old ideas get rehashed every so often -- it used to be that carbon fiber frames were three main tubes of carbon, lugged together with aluminum. That "fad" passed away, but has returned now that people realize that blending materials in certain parts of the frame have benefits -- adding carbon seatstays to an aluminum frame cuts weight and dampens road-shock before it reaches the rider...and recently, LeMond bikes have shown up where the primary stress-bearing portion of the frame (the chainstays, down tube, and head tube) are titanium and the remainder of the bike (seat stays, seat tube and top tube) are Trek's proprietary OCLV carbon (LeMond is owned by Trek)...making for a very light bike that rides smoothly (the carbon upper portion gives it nice shock absorption) and is torsionally stiff (thank you, titanium), so it rides nice, is much lighter than typical titanium frames, and it sprints and climbs like a m-therf-cker.
Sure there are fads, and they pass, but most of the time, Joe Average bike user isn't going to be concerned with it, becaus a Joe Average bike shop bike (not a department store bike) sees those development years after the "lightweight, passing-fad" parts have been put through the evolutionary wringer of the market. If the design concept works, it trickles down into Joe Average bikes -- things like aluminum frames, indexed shifting, threadless headsets, etc. -- and if it doesn't work or is too expensive to be anything but a high-end product, then you won't see it on entry-level bikes. Things like titanium bolt sets (expensive, not worth the weight savings) come to mind.
The last two to three years have brought some seriously interesting developments, some of which I suspect will be see in Joe Average bikes within 5 years -- the aforementioned carbon seatstays, scandium-aluminum alloy framesets, paired-spoke wheels, etc.
Just because the market is being used to filter out what works and what doesn't, doesn't mean that every attempt at a lightweight part is a passing fad.
Depends on the art...some are heavy on things like bo staffs and bamboo practice swords.
Yeah, to give you an idea...I work 17 miles from home. I ride my bike. Every damn day. My ride time is faster than public transportation -- about 55 minutes, door-to-door. The drive takes about 30 minutes. I'm happier, healthier, and more productive when I ride and my stress levels are a lot lower.
Let's see...I've been a competitive cyclist for 15 years now and within 5 years, I'll be getting out of I.T. to open my own bike shop. I took up rock climbing about six months ago, and I'm horribly addicted. I went through a lot of hand-to-hand fighting training in the Army. And I definitely fit the definition of a geek. But from what I've noticed, geeks gravitate to sports that are gear intensive -- cycling and rock climbing both definitely fit the bill.
Christ, the claims for the mileage on my 2001 XTerra were off, too. What's the BFD? This kind of crap reeks of gas company crybaby marketing. Who did this study? Texaco?
That said, I'd still love to have a hybrid...and right now the 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid is looking like a winner, unless Nissan can get off it's collective ass and get me a 2006 XTerra Hybrid.
So what you're saying is I should plan to make a trip to the store in January of 2006?
Well, I certainly won't be. I've spent a bit over $100 at the iTMS since it opened and, generally, have been pretty happy. At $0.99 per track, I've even been willing to experiment and give new artists a chance.
If it goes to $1.25 per track, that's going to cause my purchasing to drop off considerable. Once again, greed's running the show at the RIAA, and once again, they're executing Operation: Footbullet faster and better than anyone.
Want to complain to the top? Try dropping an email to sjobs@apple.com.
You know what? I'll snap this thing up right away. It's worth the cost, just as 10.2 and 10.3 were worth the cost. (Though I suspect I'll be buying a new Powerbook about the time 10.4 is released.)
I'm of the same school as a lot of posters here -- Redhat, Windows, and Mac OS X are part of my daily life. Redhat runs my webserver/small biz, Windows is the ball-and-chain of my day job, and Mac OS X does everything else.
My development work (PHP/MySQL, Ruby, Perl, etc., all of which are part of the OS X distribution), all done on OS X before deploying to the server. My design work? Fire up Photoshop on the iBook. My writing? I just installed PHPWiki a few days ago and have been using it to organize and build the notes for the sci-fi trilogy I've had rolling around in my head for years. Family? I just custom-rolled a photo book for my father-in-law that had restored copies of all his photos (gracias, Photoshop) and it arrived in hardcover (gracias, iPhoto). Road trip? Burning off CDs like mad from iTunes, including the ones I purchased from iTMS.
I'm a Mac OS X user for life. Period. I don't have to fuck around with all the annoying shit that amounts to day-to-day life on Windows/Linux.
Like an earlier poster, I used to bitch about the price of Macs. Then I got an OS X machine. The price is worthwhile -- it's no different than a car, a house, or any other consumer purchase -- you get what you pay for. And I'll happily shell out $129 for 10.4, or a few grand for a new Powerbook with 10.4. Because I have a computer that I use to work, not a computer that I have to spend hours or days trying to keep working.
With the Mac, it's plug in and go. No drivers needed. Even have mine formatted for NTFS so it works at the office (Win2k) and at home (iBook). The 128MB I have is filling up too quickly for my tastes, lately, so I'll probably bite the bullet on a 1GB model sometime later this year.
It seems they try to follow Apple's example: have a cool product and overcharge for its functionality.
Clearly, you've never used products from Apple or Iomega -- the Apple products are worth the extra money, the Iomega problem^H^H^H^Hducts are not. Iomega products are not "cool" -- they're cheap junk that's got shitty reliability and poor customer support.
These people are clearly making hooch out of cleaning solvents...if you can't afford vodka, comrade, how the hell are you going to come up with the ludicrous $3.5 billion pricetag you've put on your mission?
You couldn't launch a mission to the moon for $3.5 billion. Hell, you couldn't spend $3.5 billion and make the public forget Brian DePalma's shitheap Mission to Mars much less launch a real mission.
Stop drinking the glass cleaner, comrade, and call us when you sober up.
A mission to Mars is probably going to end up being footprints-and-flags, a wildly expensive waste of time.
I'd advise you to examine Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct program concept, which is the current NASA baseline for a manned Mars mission. The profile calls for a 1.5 year stay on the surface of Mars, which should provide considerable time for science and about five minutes for flags and footprints.
If it means that I get better search results, based on the content of my non-spam email, then you know what? MORE POWER TO THEM. I get so sick of this Luddite shit, sometimes. Oh no! Someone might know my name and where I surf to! If what you peruse on the Intarweb is so damn sacred to you, get an anonymous proxy server and quit your bitching.