This debate raged a couple of weeks ago. There's apparently at least two camps on portable computing: fully-featured and super-portable.
The fully featured camp really wants a desktop with a laptop-style form factor. It's easily portable, but not necessarily "highly mobile". Battery life, size and weight are all traded for power, peripherals and screen size.
The super-portable camp wants something that's convenient to take anywhere without being a burden. Size, weight and battery life are more important than power, peripherals and screen size.
We got a bunch of Dell X300s in the other day, and they've taken kind of an interesting path -- they all come with these docking stations that attack to the laptop in the same footprint; it just makes the laptop thicker, and provides a place for the DVD/CDRW, extra ports, extra battery, etc. Otherwise you can remove the laptop from this and have a thinner, lighter, more portable device.
A clever extension on this idea would be a very small laptop (say 800x600 screen) with no peripherals except USB2/LAN ports that slotted into a "full size" laptop and gained the usual ports/bays AND a larger screen.
I think the franchise fee typically goes to offset the costs of all the "free" shit that the cable providers offered to provide if they were granted the municipality's cable TV monopoly. I think in Minneapolis it goes toward the studios used by community television and the broadcast of city council meetings and god knows what else (free CATV for some city departments or offices?)
The irony, of course, is that its just a public-private tax and the "free" stuff isn't free, since the citizens are paying for it.
It's worked out fine though most formal records just exclude it.
I wonder if unusual, yet legal, names are able to monkeywrench the system. Presumably most database systems go through periodic cleaning and junk some records based upon some heuristic for what a name "is", and if your name doesn't match those, it gets dumped.
Which could be great or could be a pain in the ass when your account gets suspended, passport invalidated or some other thing you'd rather not get junked gets junked.
Did I miss something? Were game vendors, the MPAA or the RIAA promised a certain amount of revenue or revenue growth? If not, how can their revenues be "damaged"?
The only thing I can think of is that they're just automatically expecting revenue growth, or they have some model that says X consoles means Y games should be sold.
Either way, why automatically blame piracy for this? Why not blame shitty games, aging console tech, a bad economy, or some other problem?
It kind of reminds me of the computer software industry that counts every pirated copy a lost sale, despite the fact that most of those copies would have never have been 'sold' due to their cost, complexity or sheer lack of use by the person with a copy of them.
I'd like to see tabs that were movable: within the current browser window, to another browser window or into its own broswer window.
Like you, I often keep a browser window for a specific "topics" and have various aspects of that topic in different tabs. Sometimes I get "lost" and open something in the wrong browser window, but can't reorganize it.
I thought the iPod phones (mine from a G3 20GB iPod) sucked rocks.
I've been using mine either with my Koss PortaPro headphones or my Koss "The Plug" ear buds, depending on where I am and whether I'm wearing a hat or not.
The Sennheiser buds I got with my Teac CD/MP3 player a couple of years ago sound better than the Apple buds, despite a lot of wear and tear.
The Koss stuff seems to have a much higher sensitivity, which helps with the iPod's rather lame amplifier.
I liked the idea of packages, but often got nailed trying to use more complex software. In man pages or documentation, I'd find something like "this feature depends on whether you built using the --fubar switch or not, and whether you added -llibrary to the linker" or my favorite, "foo.rc is located wherever you told./configure to locate it."
These things were seldom, if ever, documented by the package builder (in my case, typically Red Hat [and this was circa 1998]). In fact, I found that so many packages had build-time configurations and options unknowable except to the builder or through some tricky strace operations, they were hard to use.
Of course building from scatch has its own problems; if Linux was only a tertiery target platform, the builds were hard for someone who's not a real developer.
So building from SRPMs became my favorite tactic -- I could customize the build if I wanted (and understand all the build-time options), as well as make sure I got all the right patches and stuff.
I seem to remember being taught that the Labor Theory of Value had more to do with explaining the injustice of compensation in a capitalist economy, not the pricing of goods.
The examples I remember being used was the industrial production process. Unmined iron ore is worth less than mined ore, steel is worth more than ore, parts made from steel are worth more than steel, assembled goods are worth more than parts. At each stage of the production process it is the labor of the workers that adds value.
Its possible (although not trivial) to assign a value to the finished product at each stage of the production process, and its possible to calculate the individual worker's contribution to the increased value.
Whenever this is done, the question that always gets asked is, is the compensation system just? Why doesn't the worker retain more of the value they added to the product? Why does management appear to get more than they contributed?
There are, of course, lots of questions about this analysis, such as the difficulty in measuring management output and added value, the role of machinery in adding value (tooling a precision gear with hand tools is an obvious example of adding value; pressing a button on a CNC machine raises questions); the fact that people willingly work for less than their labor value; the value of intangibles such as education and intellectual skill, and so on.
But anyway, that's how I remember it. In terms of OSS development vs. spammers, I don't even think the labor theory of value applies, it's actually a pricing disparity of the finished products.
I've found both Winamp and iTunes to be abyssmal at randomization. Just last night I made a playlist of 3 bands. I manually balanced the playlist so that there were 5 songs by each artist, but before I burned it to a CD I hit randomize -- I had to shuffle the list 6 times before I got one that didn't have large blocks of songs by a single artist.
I've noticed similar phenomenon when making Smart Playlists as well -- make one made up of 3 artists with 3 albums each and you end up with one dominated by a single artist, and seldom do you get a normal distribution. I'm also a little bugged by the fact that I can't take a smart playlist and edit it (without just copying it to a dumb playlist).
I'd like to see SPs also have AND and OR operators instead of ALL or ANY operators for the whole list, as well as more intelligent randomization.
The Smart Playlists are nice, but not entirely a solution of *choice* since I'm still stuck with choosing to a certain degree and with the ability skip it if its not giving me instant gratification.
I've got good ID3 tags (90% of the music is from my own CD collection, 75% ripped with iTunes), although scoring the music with 5-star ratings would be a huge chore; I might get around to doing it on an album basis. I kind of wish there was a way to "import" ratings from someplace like All Music Guide. I could adjust to better match my personal preferences, but it would be a good start.
Fixing the tags and labels on the stuff I had before iTunes was a PITA by itself.
And they re-created it with the iPod
on
The Paradox of Choice
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I got a 20g iPod a couple of months ago and in some ways it's made walking with music a worse experience for me than before.
My first Walkmen (dating back to 1984) were cassettes, and while you could carry extra tapes, you were largely stuck with one or two and even then skipping around wasn't much of an option (no music search on a Walkman I could afford until the mid 1990s). So you listened to bands you really liked or spent a lot of time making a few mix tapes to guarantee you'd like most of the songs.
About 6 years ago I traded up to a Minidisc player and while the selection problem wasn't much different, I did start "running out" of music, even though I could reasonably carry a half-dozen discs. The ease of skipping made me far less satisfied with what I had playing.
Same thing occured when I got a Teac CD/MP3 player. Mine only took 7cm discs, but I'd still "run out" of music due to skipping around, even when I made a mix disc with a bunch of "good" songs I "liked".
Now that I have my iPod it's far, far worse. I can't run out of music (3k songs), but I do find myself bored/irritated with what I'm listening to, skipping around. On one recent excursion I damn near stepped into a hole because I was spending so much time fucking around with my iPod (trying to find music I "wanted").
I don't know if its *entirely* due to the paradox of choice or just a vague sense of dissatisfaction with everything, but the paradox of choice sure seems to explain it well.
After the recent Viacom/Dish dust-up, we were reminded of the bundling forced on cable operators by content providers -- want ESPN? Then you need ESPN2, ESPN classic, ESPN gardening, ESPN chess, the Menstruation Network, and the Colonoscopy Channel *or* you don't get ESPN. Oh, and because we're providing so many channels, the cost is high, too.
Cable operators have said that forced bundling by the content providers forces them to bundle channels as well, since they could easily sell ESPN ala cart but the 27 shit channels they have to pay for as well to get ESPN wouldn't sell, making it a huge money loser.
I'm generally in favor of unbundled channels, but only if they're vertically unbundled and the cable company only pays the content providers based on the subscriptions they have for those channels. Anything else should be considered a restraint of trade.
I could have sworn I read someplace that there's a huge problem in the Hudson due to a GE transformer operation. Tons of PCBs in the riverbottom that GE says should be left alone so as to not stir them up.
On this page with fields of abandoned heavy vehicles, helicopters, etc. her caption reads:
radiactive technics as far as only eyes can see. There were people inside of each vehicle.
I'm presuming that she means people *used* these vehicles as part of the catastrophe and perhaps all had died due to contamination, and not that there were actual dead bodies in the vehicles.
The entire place is creepy enough, corpses in abandoned vehicles would be too much.
The other followup to this thread posts a summary of the increase in death rates. I wonder if they have taken into account the other meltdown that happened, the meltdown of the Soviet Union annd former members' economies, and the decline of quality of life for a lot of rural Russians.
Then there's also the question of access to healthcare even if they could afford it -- I'd imagine that the better doctors, facilities, etc. aren't locating there -- and what impact that has on lifespan or overall heatlth.
There was a neighborhood/municipality near St. Paul, MN, called Lillydale along the banks of the Mississippi River that got flooded so often they eventually just tore it down. It was turned into parkland which was improved significantly (parking lots, etc) in the late 90s, but prior to that it was possible to still see some old sidewalks, foundations and the occasional set of stairs.
Nothing as dramatic as Times Beach, MO or Centralia, PA, but still kind of eerie, at least partly because of the location -- sandwiched between the Mississippi river and a wetland, with the steep bluffs beyond that, and a fairly dense tree canopy and undergrowth. It was like being in the woods, even though with a little effort you could see the St. Paul skyline about 1.5 miles away.
I can't see any evidence of the community anymore, I think the area with the most obvious last occupation was where they built the parking lot and boat access.
Next on the WTO docket: The Cali Cartel and the Golden Triangle Opium Warlords criticizing US bans on their products as being anti-free trade. An amicus brief has been filed by the Dutch Hashish Association and the Jamaican Ganja Grower's Collective.
So we've got this guy working for an insurance company who decides to inform the Dept. of Insurance that they are cancelling policies unlawfully. This is a good thing and brave of him to do it. Hopefully his motivations were purely good and not just because he was pissed he didn't get a raise last year or something.
Actually, I don't *care* if his motivations were good or not. I think it serves as a good warning to companies like this that not only do they have to have lying scumbags as employees, they need to constantly bribe them to be lying scumbags or they'll get turned in.
This should be a great motivation for not being theives. I agree with your complaints about the insurance industry, although I will admit to having good experience with my car insurance carrier in a recent accident where I wasn't at fault and the party who hit me wasn't insured at all.
IIRC Macs after the II series had built-in support for color in the ROMs, even for Macs that were technically monochome only, like the SE/30. I seem to remember reading something at the time about how if the SE/30 was connected to a color monitor (internal PDS slot video card) you would actually get color on the display. Internally it was a color machine, it just had B&W video display.
LoRes graphics had pretty good color; at least 16 colors, and HiRes had color but it was kind of lame and tended to shift depending on the color of the pixel adjacent to it, but those that knew how to use it did a good job of making it look nice, I can remember some great color games in HiRes graphics on my ][+.
Most of the lame monitors Apple sold were monochrome, but the signal itself was color if you hooked it to a color monitor or an RF converter.
I'm surprised that there aren't any channels using the DVD anamorphic trick -- a 16:9 image compressed horizontally into a 4:3 frame, allowing the TV to stretch it back to a 16:9 image.
You'd think that IFC or Sundance or some channel "concerned" with the presentation of cinematography would do at least the occasional movie anamorphic, or overnight or something. It would at least allow for better resolution than letterboxing gives -- zooming a 4:3 frame that's only using 60% of the screen is pretty harsh, especially on an analog channel.
Given that it wouldn't require HDTV-type bandwidth, it seems like a reasonable idea, at least part of the time.
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This debate raged a couple of weeks ago. There's apparently at least two camps on portable computing: fully-featured and super-portable.
The fully featured camp really wants a desktop with a laptop-style form factor. It's easily portable, but not necessarily "highly mobile". Battery life, size and weight are all traded for power, peripherals and screen size.
The super-portable camp wants something that's convenient to take anywhere without being a burden. Size, weight and battery life are more important than power, peripherals and screen size.
We got a bunch of Dell X300s in the other day, and they've taken kind of an interesting path -- they all come with these docking stations that attack to the laptop in the same footprint; it just makes the laptop thicker, and provides a place for the DVD/CDRW, extra ports, extra battery, etc. Otherwise you can remove the laptop from this and have a thinner, lighter, more portable device.
A clever extension on this idea would be a very small laptop (say 800x600 screen) with no peripherals except USB2/LAN ports that slotted into a "full size" laptop and gained the usual ports/bays AND a larger screen.
3) "It's OK, I'm on the pill."
4) "You might feel a little discomfort."
I think the franchise fee typically goes to offset the costs of all the "free" shit that the cable providers offered to provide if they were granted the municipality's cable TV monopoly. I think in Minneapolis it goes toward the studios used by community television and the broadcast of city council meetings and god knows what else (free CATV for some city departments or offices?)
The irony, of course, is that its just a public-private tax and the "free" stuff isn't free, since the citizens are paying for it.
It's worked out fine though most formal records just exclude it.
I wonder if unusual, yet legal, names are able to monkeywrench the system. Presumably most database systems go through periodic cleaning and junk some records based upon some heuristic for what a name "is", and if your name doesn't match those, it gets dumped.
Which could be great or could be a pain in the ass when your account gets suspended, passport invalidated or some other thing you'd rather not get junked gets junked.
Did I miss something? Were game vendors, the MPAA or the RIAA promised a certain amount of revenue or revenue growth? If not, how can their revenues be "damaged"?
The only thing I can think of is that they're just automatically expecting revenue growth, or they have some model that says X consoles means Y games should be sold.
Either way, why automatically blame piracy for this? Why not blame shitty games, aging console tech, a bad economy, or some other problem?
It kind of reminds me of the computer software industry that counts every pirated copy a lost sale, despite the fact that most of those copies would have never have been 'sold' due to their cost, complexity or sheer lack of use by the person with a copy of them.
I'd like to see tabs that were movable: within the current browser window, to another browser window or into its own broswer window.
Like you, I often keep a browser window for a specific "topics" and have various aspects of that topic in different tabs. Sometimes I get "lost" and open something in the wrong browser window, but can't reorganize it.
I thought the iPod phones (mine from a G3 20GB iPod) sucked rocks.
I've been using mine either with my Koss PortaPro headphones or my Koss "The Plug" ear buds, depending on where I am and whether I'm wearing a hat or not.
The Sennheiser buds I got with my Teac CD/MP3 player a couple of years ago sound better than the Apple buds, despite a lot of wear and tear.
The Koss stuff seems to have a much higher sensitivity, which helps with the iPod's rather lame amplifier.
I liked the idea of packages, but often got nailed trying to use more complex software. In man pages or documentation, I'd find something like "this feature depends on whether you built using the --fubar switch or not, and whether you added -llibrary to the linker" or my favorite, "foo.rc is located wherever you told ./configure to locate it."
These things were seldom, if ever, documented by the package builder (in my case, typically Red Hat [and this was circa 1998]). In fact, I found that so many packages had build-time configurations and options unknowable except to the builder or through some tricky strace operations, they were hard to use.
Of course building from scatch has its own problems; if Linux was only a tertiery target platform, the builds were hard for someone who's not a real developer.
So building from SRPMs became my favorite tactic -- I could customize the build if I wanted (and understand all the build-time options), as well as make sure I got all the right patches and stuff.
Now I just use FreeBSD ports.
At least I'm not getting flamed for getting it completely wrong or being a Marxist.
I seem to remember being taught that the Labor Theory of Value had more to do with explaining the injustice of compensation in a capitalist economy, not the pricing of goods.
The examples I remember being used was the industrial production process. Unmined iron ore is worth less than mined ore, steel is worth more than ore, parts made from steel are worth more than steel, assembled goods are worth more than parts. At each stage of the production process it is the labor of the workers that adds value.
Its possible (although not trivial) to assign a value to the finished product at each stage of the production process, and its possible to calculate the individual worker's contribution to the increased value.
Whenever this is done, the question that always gets asked is, is the compensation system just? Why doesn't the worker retain more of the value they added to the product? Why does management appear to get more than they contributed?
There are, of course, lots of questions about this analysis, such as the difficulty in measuring management output and added value, the role of machinery in adding value (tooling a precision gear with hand tools is an obvious example of adding value; pressing a button on a CNC machine raises questions); the fact that people willingly work for less than their labor value; the value of intangibles such as education and intellectual skill, and so on.
But anyway, that's how I remember it. In terms of OSS development vs. spammers, I don't even think the labor theory of value applies, it's actually a pricing disparity of the finished products.
I've found both Winamp and iTunes to be abyssmal at randomization. Just last night I made a playlist of 3 bands. I manually balanced the playlist so that there were 5 songs by each artist, but before I burned it to a CD I hit randomize -- I had to shuffle the list 6 times before I got one that didn't have large blocks of songs by a single artist.
I've noticed similar phenomenon when making Smart Playlists as well -- make one made up of 3 artists with 3 albums each and you end up with one dominated by a single artist, and seldom do you get a normal distribution. I'm also a little bugged by the fact that I can't take a smart playlist and edit it (without just copying it to a dumb playlist).
I'd like to see SPs also have AND and OR operators instead of ALL or ANY operators for the whole list, as well as more intelligent randomization.
The Smart Playlists are nice, but not entirely a solution of *choice* since I'm still stuck with choosing to a certain degree and with the ability skip it if its not giving me instant gratification.
I've got good ID3 tags (90% of the music is from my own CD collection, 75% ripped with iTunes), although scoring the music with 5-star ratings would be a huge chore; I might get around to doing it on an album basis. I kind of wish there was a way to "import" ratings from someplace like All Music Guide. I could adjust to better match my personal preferences, but it would be a good start.
Fixing the tags and labels on the stuff I had before iTunes was a PITA by itself.
I got a 20g iPod a couple of months ago and in some ways it's made walking with music a worse experience for me than before.
My first Walkmen (dating back to 1984) were cassettes, and while you could carry extra tapes, you were largely stuck with one or two and even then skipping around wasn't much of an option (no music search on a Walkman I could afford until the mid 1990s). So you listened to bands you really liked or spent a lot of time making a few mix tapes to guarantee you'd like most of the songs.
About 6 years ago I traded up to a Minidisc player and while the selection problem wasn't much different, I did start "running out" of music, even though I could reasonably carry a half-dozen discs. The ease of skipping made me far less satisfied with what I had playing.
Same thing occured when I got a Teac CD/MP3 player. Mine only took 7cm discs, but I'd still "run out" of music due to skipping around, even when I made a mix disc with a bunch of "good" songs I "liked".
Now that I have my iPod it's far, far worse. I can't run out of music (3k songs), but I do find myself bored/irritated with what I'm listening to, skipping around. On one recent excursion I damn near stepped into a hole because I was spending so much time fucking around with my iPod (trying to find music I "wanted").
I don't know if its *entirely* due to the paradox of choice or just a vague sense of dissatisfaction with everything, but the paradox of choice sure seems to explain it well.
It's not the choosing in Linux desktops, it's the implementation of the choices that's the problem.
After the recent Viacom/Dish dust-up, we were reminded of the bundling forced on cable operators by content providers -- want ESPN? Then you need ESPN2, ESPN classic, ESPN gardening, ESPN chess, the Menstruation Network, and the Colonoscopy Channel *or* you don't get ESPN. Oh, and because we're providing so many channels, the cost is high, too.
Cable operators have said that forced bundling by the content providers forces them to bundle channels as well, since they could easily sell ESPN ala cart but the 27 shit channels they have to pay for as well to get ESPN wouldn't sell, making it a huge money loser.
I'm generally in favor of unbundled channels, but only if they're vertically unbundled and the cable company only pays the content providers based on the subscriptions they have for those channels. Anything else should be considered a restraint of trade.
I could have sworn I read someplace that there's a huge problem in the Hudson due to a GE transformer operation. Tons of PCBs in the riverbottom that GE says should be left alone so as to not stir them up.
The entire place is creepy enough, corpses in abandoned vehicles would be too much.
The other followup to this thread posts a summary of the increase in death rates. I wonder if they have taken into account the other meltdown that happened, the meltdown of the Soviet Union annd former members' economies, and the decline of quality of life for a lot of rural Russians.
Then there's also the question of access to healthcare even if they could afford it -- I'd imagine that the better doctors, facilities, etc. aren't locating there -- and what impact that has on lifespan or overall heatlth.
You misspelled "victorious limited strategic nuclear bombing campaign."
The real war crimes were the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden.
There was a neighborhood/municipality near St. Paul, MN, called Lillydale along the banks of the Mississippi River that got flooded so often they eventually just tore it down. It was turned into parkland which was improved significantly (parking lots, etc) in the late 90s, but prior to that it was possible to still see some old sidewalks, foundations and the occasional set of stairs.
Nothing as dramatic as Times Beach, MO or Centralia, PA, but still kind of eerie, at least partly because of the location -- sandwiched between the Mississippi river and a wetland, with the steep bluffs beyond that, and a fairly dense tree canopy and undergrowth. It was like being in the woods, even though with a little effort you could see the St. Paul skyline about 1.5 miles away.
I can't see any evidence of the community anymore, I think the area with the most obvious last occupation was where they built the parking lot and boat access.
Next on the WTO docket: The Cali Cartel and the Golden Triangle Opium Warlords criticizing US bans on their products as being anti-free trade. An amicus brief has been filed by the Dutch Hashish Association and the Jamaican Ganja Grower's Collective.
So we've got this guy working for an insurance company who decides to inform the Dept. of Insurance that they are cancelling policies unlawfully. This is a good thing and brave of him to do it. Hopefully his motivations were purely good and not just because he was pissed he didn't get a raise last year or something.
Actually, I don't *care* if his motivations were good or not. I think it serves as a good warning to companies like this that not only do they have to have lying scumbags as employees, they need to constantly bribe them to be lying scumbags or they'll get turned in.
This should be a great motivation for not being theives. I agree with your complaints about the insurance industry, although I will admit to having good experience with my car insurance carrier in a recent accident where I wasn't at fault and the party who hit me wasn't insured at all.
IIRC Macs after the II series had built-in support for color in the ROMs, even for Macs that were technically monochome only, like the SE/30. I seem to remember reading something at the time about how if the SE/30 was connected to a color monitor (internal PDS slot video card) you would actually get color on the display. Internally it was a color machine, it just had B&W video display.
LoRes graphics had pretty good color; at least 16 colors, and HiRes had color but it was kind of lame and tended to shift depending on the color of the pixel adjacent to it, but those that knew how to use it did a good job of making it look nice, I can remember some great color games in HiRes graphics on my ][+.
Most of the lame monitors Apple sold were monochrome, but the signal itself was color if you hooked it to a color monitor or an RF converter.
I'm surprised that there aren't any channels using the DVD anamorphic trick -- a 16:9 image compressed horizontally into a 4:3 frame, allowing the TV to stretch it back to a 16:9 image.
You'd think that IFC or Sundance or some channel "concerned" with the presentation of cinematography would do at least the occasional movie anamorphic, or overnight or something. It would at least allow for better resolution than letterboxing gives -- zooming a 4:3 frame that's only using 60% of the screen is pretty harsh, especially on an analog channel.
Given that it wouldn't require HDTV-type bandwidth, it seems like a reasonable idea, at least part of the time.