Hmm... It's kinda hard to compare a cutie who can tear a spaceship apart & put it back together, then have a beer with the guys and laugh at stupid jokes, all the while being so frickin' adorable you just want to buy her a pony or something - and a super-killer-tough-chick who seems to have been born with an axe in one hand and a gun in the other. Two different worlds, man, two worlds.
...Summer Glau does need a sandwich, though.
P.S. If you haven't watched "Firefly" / "Serenity" yet, you're missing the best show that was ever on Sci-Fi. Srsly. It's so good that fans bought advertising at their own expense.
the average user just doesn't give a shit and is unwilling if not incapable of tweaking the OS to accomplish otherwise simple tasks.
Absolutely. You've hit the nail right on the head. 95% of users out there are not going to RTFM, will not open the command prompt, and will not edit a config file. Not because they're stupid, or lazy - but because it's not their job. And the sooner developers realize this, the better.
It's not a question of "how can we make the stupid users figure out that 1% of the application experience so we don't have to code a step-by-step GUI configuration util for it?", it's a question of "how do we understand that the secretary/doctor/lawyer/manager *expects* the machine to work just like every other machine in his/her universe?".
The problem is not that the average office user / home user is stupid. The problem is that they're used to their coffee-maker, microwave, fax machine, and calculator being 100% operational out-of-the-box, and the computer should not be any different.
There is a significant difference in the mentality of Joe Q. User and Jim Q. Developer when it comes to the question of what's acceptable in a computer application, and until we IT professionals suspend our hubris for a minute and try to work out a solution that "just plain works", we'll keep running into the same brick wall and wondering why it's still there.
Falconwolf, you're missing the forest for the trees, just like the ACLU is missing the forest of "everyone's rights" for the trees of "those few guys in prison".
Grishnakh is pointing out that while the ACLU is rabid about "terrorists' rights", they have a much less aggressive stance on defending the freedoms of Americans, especially when it comes to electronic communication. That's EFF's domain, and they're pretty damn good at it, even with their scarce (compared to ACLU) resources / influence.
And yeah, I know it's a local custom to latch on to any minor point of an argument you disagree with, and blow that one point the hell out of proportion while ignoring the rest of the post, and I'm also keenly aware of the irony of a 7-digit-UID'er lecturing a 6-digiter on the finer points of discussion board etiquette, but still... Unintentional *WHOOOOSH* or intentional nit-picking?
Well, none of those statistics are exact (and should be taken with a shaker of salt even if they do promise to be exact), but the point is something along the lines of "99% of user-gen content comes from top 1% of users, while the other 99% of users just consume and never generate anything."
Thanks for the link fix... weird, worked on my system.
...These reactions are far from equilibrium and remain so for a significant length of time... ...An essential aspect of the BZ reaction is its so called "excitability" â" under the influence of stimuli, patterns develop in what would otherwise be a perfectly quiescent medium. Some clock reactions... can be excited into self-organising activity through the influence of light...
Well, looks like the power-transmission problem is solved - just shine a flashlight on the thing.
...The discovery of the phenomenon is credited to Boris Belousov. He noted... that in a mix of potassium bromate, cerium(IV) sulfate, propanedioic acid and citric acid in dilute sulfuric acid...
Hang on a second. That's not exactly a common mix. Was this guy trying out for the "Most Random Acid Cocktail" award?
I also have suspect that "greeting card" sites and "free SMS" sites will cause more spam to go to the supplied email/phone number.
You forgot Facebook apps, especially "IQ Test" ones.:D
Seriously though, is there still a single non-AOL user who honestly believes that "opting out" will actually be honored by the same people whose business it is to send you the junk in the first place?
honeypot email address
Oh yeah. That, and/or bouncing all E-mail to a Gmail account, which sanitizes it & bounces back (reduced spam volume by ~80%, with only one false-positive in the last 6 months (over 8,000 messages). YMMV, of course).
The idea of the interstate highway system had several advantages compared to the idea of an interstate high-speed rail link:
Eisenhower's conviction that a system resembling the German Autobahn was necessary for countrywide logistics and troop movements. The man was a wartime general, and knew how to get things done once he started something.
Public support for a project that would benefit civilian drivers and help the military response in case of another war (the memory of WWII, especially the threat of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast, was still a big public-fear factor).
The support from automobile manufacturers. More highways = more cars = more profit.
The highway system had a strong raison d'etre, a proven workable "template" (Autobahn), hell of a lot of public support, and an insane amount of money.
The proposed rail-link setup doesn't have a strong, committed leader, nor military value, nor massive public support, nor the money. And moreover, the same automobile manufacturers who were all "rah-rah!" over the highway system will fight this tooth and nail.
Yes, the rail system in Europe is absolutely beautiful. However, it won't translate (pun intended) to the US setup.
First of all, in the US, anything that has enough money attached automatically becomes a "pork-barrel" project. It's like the lunar cycles and the tides. Can't stop it, can't change it.
Second, it will be a union setup, with all the unfortunate consequences arising therefrom.
Third, the management will be as greedy, uncaring, and corrupt as the guys who proposed & funded the system. You can't expect a system built by shameless self-promoters to be staffed by honest people all of a sudden.
Fourth, there will be almost no attention paid to the system's usability, accessibility, or consumer-driven design. They won't consider the importance of precise timing (like the Japanese and the Swiss train systems). The interface won't be nearly as well-designed as London's Underground. The stations won't be decorated and made pleasant, like the Moscow Metro. And moreover, I sincerely doubt that there will be any kind of integrated passenger information system, whereby one could instantly find out where s/he is, what options are available, and where the trains are at the moment.
Considering the track record (pun oh-so-intended) of the US mass-transit enterprises to date, compared to Europe or Asia, the end result will be an unreliable, expensive system, that will be hard or impossible to navigate for anyone with disabilities, with cookie-cutter stations and ugly signage, staffed with union workers who can't be fired and therefore simply do not give a flying fuck about customer service.
Yes, I have zero faith that we could ever build anything approaching the TGV, the Underground, or the shinkansen.
Re the misc costs - I didn't forget, but didn't want to make the damn post even longer. There are the costs you've mentioned, and then there's possible additional expenses like: additional insurance cost, security/customs compliance expenses, possibly reprogramming the nav computers to account for the additional source of thrust (not an expert on marine guidance systems, so just a wild guess), new rules for kite-sail system usage within NNN miles of a port / within certain shipping lanes (to prevent sails entangling & stranding 2 big-ass container ships right in the middle of the port), etc, etc - probably 1,001 other hidden costs that won't even be apparent to anyone not in the industry.
I don't expect sail power would scale to the size of modern container ships.
Sure, a sail array may not be the best solution for getting a container ship underway from a standstill, but once the ship reaches open ocean, and a course is set, sails can be used to replace some of the engines' thrust, saving fuel.
Considering that container ships consume 100-400 metric tons of fuel per day, even a 5-10% savings would be pretty damn significant.
(Of course, 100-400 is a very broad range - the 4,250-TEU Arafura consumes ~65 MT / day, while the 11,000-TEU Emma Maersk chows down on 350 MT per day, so yeah, YMMV).
As an intellectual exercise, let's take a 6,000-TEU ship consuming 100 MT/day, making the Shanghai-Long Beach run at express speed (15 days), and let's take the cost of MDO at $ 435.00 per metric ton.
At 5% savings, the sail array will save $ 2,175 / day. Multiply by 15 days = $ 32,625 saved per trip.
To put this into even more of a perspective, the average lifetime of a container ship is 27 years. Assume it's running 75% of the year. (27*365)-25% = 7,391 days. Take $ 2,125 saved per day * 7,391 days = $ 15,705,875 saved.
Is $ 15.7 million enough to pay for the sail array + computers? Seems like it to me.
And here's an idea for reducing turbulence & drag, by adding submerged hull sections so the main hull is above water: http://www.swath.com/concept.htm.
It's been around since 1938, but not actually used until the late 80's, when some luxury-yacht builders, ahem, floated, the concept.
I can see someone building a SWATH container ship, outfitting it with a kite-sail array, and enjoying a huge reduction in operational costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... It's kinda hard to compare a cutie who can tear a spaceship apart & put it back together, then have a beer with the guys and laugh at stupid jokes, all the while being so frickin' adorable you just want to buy her a pony or something - and a super-killer-tough-chick who seems to have been born with an axe in one hand and a gun in the other. Two different worlds, man, two worlds.
...Summer Glau does need a sandwich, though.
P.S. If you haven't watched "Firefly" / "Serenity" yet, you're missing the best show that was ever on Sci-Fi. Srsly. It's so good that fans bought advertising at their own expense.
the average user just doesn't give a shit and is unwilling if not incapable of tweaking the OS to accomplish otherwise simple tasks.
Absolutely. You've hit the nail right on the head. 95% of users out there are not going to RTFM, will not open the command prompt, and will not edit a config file. Not because they're stupid, or lazy - but because it's not their job. And the sooner developers realize this, the better.
It's not a question of "how can we make the stupid users figure out that 1% of the application experience so we don't have to code a step-by-step GUI configuration util for it?", it's a question of "how do we understand that the secretary/doctor/lawyer/manager *expects* the machine to work just like every other machine in his/her universe?".
The problem is not that the average office user / home user is stupid. The problem is that they're used to their coffee-maker, microwave, fax machine, and calculator being 100% operational out-of-the-box, and the computer should not be any different.
There is a significant difference in the mentality of Joe Q. User and Jim Q. Developer when it comes to the question of what's acceptable in a computer application, and until we IT professionals suspend our hubris for a minute and try to work out a solution that "just plain works", we'll keep running into the same brick wall and wondering why it's still there.
Of course, this is IMHO, YMMV, and so on.
P.S. Someone mentioned a dearth of audio software for Linux. Here's a small list: http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/sound_and_music/59815/#habracut
Google Transation: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhabrahabr.ru%2Fblogs%2Fsound_and_music%2F59815%2F%23habracut&sl=ru&tl=en&history_state0=
"DUI defendant finally gets access to breathalyzer code, ironically finds developers were probably drunk when they wrote it". http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=4387892
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa80/austolyso/motivation/1196539615059.jpg
Falconwolf, you're missing the forest for the trees, just like the ACLU is missing the forest of "everyone's rights" for the trees of "those few guys in prison".
Grishnakh is pointing out that while the ACLU is rabid about "terrorists' rights", they have a much less aggressive stance on defending the freedoms of Americans, especially when it comes to electronic communication. That's EFF's domain, and they're pretty damn good at it, even with their scarce (compared to ACLU) resources / influence.
And yeah, I know it's a local custom to latch on to any minor point of an argument you disagree with, and blow that one point the hell out of proportion while ignoring the rest of the post, and I'm also keenly aware of the irony of a 7-digit-UID'er lecturing a 6-digiter on the finer points of discussion board etiquette, but still... Unintentional *WHOOOOSH* or intentional nit-picking?
Well, none of those statistics are exact (and should be taken with a shaker of salt even if they do promise to be exact), but the point is something along the lines of "99% of user-gen content comes from top 1% of users, while the other 99% of users just consume and never generate anything."
Thanks for the link fix... weird, worked on my system.
...Most fans don't care about where their money goes; have no inclination to design artwork for you;...
Very true, but keep in mind that although 99% of fans/users/viewers don't contribute a damn thing, it's the 1% "heavy contributors" that create the bulk of user-gen content.
Nielsen 2006, also common sense. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.useit.com/alertbox/imbalanced-contributions-pyramid.gif&
For every Slashdot poster, there's 1,000 lurkers.
For every 1,000 fans who won't lift a finger, there will be 1 who will contribute.
Dragonfly = Firebug (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_opera.asp)... well, kinda. But it's a step in the right direction.
Right on point with YSlow.
ColorZilla > ColorPicker IMHO
Also check out "Web Developer" by Chris Pederick - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60.
Opera's "shiny stuff" is nice, but for srs business - FF FTW.
409 comments as of 03:10:07 EST, and I'm the only one to notice the "to / too" issue in tagline?
And the Grammar Nazi Award goes to...
I am astonished and a little frightened that you know these details...
-1 Offtopic
+1 Entertaining
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI2Y7wzhjVA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction
...These reactions are far from equilibrium and remain so for a significant length of time...
...An essential aspect of the BZ reaction is its so called "excitability" â" under the influence of stimuli, patterns develop in what would otherwise be a perfectly quiescent medium. Some clock reactions... can be excited into self-organising activity through the influence of light...
Well, looks like the power-transmission problem is solved - just shine a flashlight on the thing.
...The discovery of the phenomenon is credited to Boris Belousov. He noted... that in a mix of potassium bromate, cerium(IV) sulfate, propanedioic acid and citric acid in dilute sulfuric acid...
Hang on a second. That's not exactly a common mix. Was this guy trying out for the "Most Random Acid Cocktail" award?
I also have suspect that "greeting card" sites and "free SMS" sites will cause more spam to go to the supplied email/phone number.
You forgot Facebook apps, especially "IQ Test" ones. :D
Seriously though, is there still a single non-AOL user who honestly believes that "opting out" will actually be honored by the same people whose business it is to send you the junk in the first place?
honeypot email address
Oh yeah. That, and/or bouncing all E-mail to a Gmail account, which sanitizes it & bounces back (reduced spam volume by ~80%, with only one false-positive in the last 6 months (over 8,000 messages). YMMV, of course).
The highway system had a strong raison d'etre, a proven workable "template" (Autobahn), hell of a lot of public support, and an insane amount of money.
The proposed rail-link setup doesn't have a strong, committed leader, nor military value, nor massive public support, nor the money. And moreover, the same automobile manufacturers who were all "rah-rah!" over the highway system will fight this tooth and nail.
Yes, the rail system in Europe is absolutely beautiful. However, it won't translate (pun intended) to the US setup.
First of all, in the US, anything that has enough money attached automatically becomes a "pork-barrel" project. It's like the lunar cycles and the tides. Can't stop it, can't change it.
Second, it will be a union setup, with all the unfortunate consequences arising therefrom.
Third, the management will be as greedy, uncaring, and corrupt as the guys who proposed & funded the system. You can't expect a system built by shameless self-promoters to be staffed by honest people all of a sudden.
Fourth, there will be almost no attention paid to the system's usability, accessibility, or consumer-driven design. They won't consider the importance of precise timing (like the Japanese and the Swiss train systems). The interface won't be nearly as well-designed as London's Underground. The stations won't be decorated and made pleasant, like the Moscow Metro. And moreover, I sincerely doubt that there will be any kind of integrated passenger information system, whereby one could instantly find out where s/he is, what options are available, and where the trains are at the moment.
Considering the track record (pun oh-so-intended) of the US mass-transit enterprises to date, compared to Europe or Asia, the end result will be an unreliable, expensive system, that will be hard or impossible to navigate for anyone with disabilities, with cookie-cutter stations and ugly signage, staffed with union workers who can't be fired and therefore simply do not give a flying fuck about customer service.
Yes, I have zero faith that we could ever build anything approaching the TGV, the Underground, or the shinkansen.
I really hope to be proven wrong, though.
*WHOOOOSH*
"Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts... the memes will be flying 35,000 feet above your head."
You, Sir, are and idiot. (sic)
Thanx 4 compliment.
Re the misc costs - I didn't forget, but didn't want to make the damn post even longer. There are the costs you've mentioned, and then there's possible additional expenses like: additional insurance cost, security/customs compliance expenses, possibly reprogramming the nav computers to account for the additional source of thrust (not an expert on marine guidance systems, so just a wild guess), new rules for kite-sail system usage within NNN miles of a port / within certain shipping lanes (to prevent sails entangling & stranding 2 big-ass container ships right in the middle of the port), etc, etc - probably 1,001 other hidden costs that won't even be apparent to anyone not in the industry.
*n'est ce pas
:D
*IANAL. Acronym. "ianal" sounds like an Apple Corp. sex toy.
SWATH technology reduces that risk. See my comment above.
Hmm, looks like 5-10% was a very pessimistic estimate. If this article is correct (thanks, Aceticon!), up to 35% could be saved. You do the math.
Cut out the middleman - post RIAA agents themselves on the ships.
I don't expect sail power would scale to the size of modern container ships.
Sure, a sail array may not be the best solution for getting a container ship underway from a standstill, but once the ship reaches open ocean, and a course is set, sails can be used to replace some of the engines' thrust, saving fuel.
Considering that container ships consume 100-400 metric tons of fuel per day, even a 5-10% savings would be pretty damn significant.
(Of course, 100-400 is a very broad range - the 4,250-TEU Arafura consumes ~65 MT / day, while the 11,000-TEU Emma Maersk chows down on 350 MT per day, so yeah, YMMV).
Marine Diesel is about $ 420-450 per metric ton right now.
As an intellectual exercise, let's take a 6,000-TEU ship consuming 100 MT/day, making the Shanghai-Long Beach run at express speed (15 days), and let's take the cost of MDO at $ 435.00 per metric ton.
At 5% savings, the sail array will save $ 2,175 / day. Multiply by 15 days = $ 32,625 saved per trip.
To put this into even more of a perspective, the average lifetime of a container ship is 27 years. Assume it's running 75% of the year. (27*365)-25% = 7,391 days. Take $ 2,125 saved per day * 7,391 days = $ 15,705,875 saved.
Is $ 15.7 million enough to pay for the sail array + computers? Seems like it to me.
And here's an idea for reducing turbulence & drag, by adding submerged hull sections so the main hull is above water: http://www.swath.com/concept.htm.
It's been around since 1938, but not actually used until the late 80's, when some luxury-yacht builders, ahem, floated, the concept.
I can see someone building a SWATH container ship, outfitting it with a kite-sail array, and enjoying a huge reduction in operational costs.
Awesome idea, thanks!
*runs off to the patent office*