You don't need icons to take up 1/16th of your desktop; however I think if I spent more than a few seconds, I could dig up several studies that 90% of consumers use less than 8 applications on a daily basis (internet, facebook, twitter, email, instant messaging, word, excel, calculator - or similar! take your pick!).
Win8's metro/active desktop won't be for the power user, but this is definitely the direction things are going to head for consumer laptop/netbook/tablets in the future. This is the appliance interface your mom wants to see when she turns on her computer. Power users will still need a "real" desktop of course, but this style interface wasn't designed for them. Apple has proven that large icon based app navigation works, which I think is why Microsoft is willing to throw their weight behind this. This is one of the few things I've seen Microsoft do in the consumer space in the last decade that wasn't a complete disaster. To top it all off, they've given a nod to you and I, the power users, and allowed us to turn off the sparkly new crap and use our old desktop system how we need it.
Here in Texas we have a Natural Gas plant that's been mothballed since 2002 or so because electricity is too cheap to warrant running it (at a profit). If natural gas prices drop, or the cost of electricity (I pay about $0.07/kwh at a fixed rate) goes up enough they can bring it back online. So there's definitely excess capacity in various regions of the country already. Add to this, Texas is requiring 20% of their power to be renewable by 2020, and they're well over halfway to their goal already -- while the nation was waxing poetic about the cap cod wind farm, Texas had already put up nearly 200 giant windmills along the coast of Corpus Christi. So not only do you have overcapacity in the market, but due to green regulation, they're adding in an additional 20% capacity.
It's been recognized for generations that people won't rebel against a government for light reasons. As long as people have food and jobs to keep them busy, they'll tolerate quite a bit of oppression.
Cuba's been extremely successful with this, as has southern Mexico. Liquor prices are suspiciously low in both countries. Hell, if Oaxaca (s. mexico) stopped protesting about being oppressed, they might get worried they were planning some big revolution.
I'm going to go with "easy to sell to venture capitalists, not designed to actually sell to consumers". Pump and dump. Move on to the "next big thing".
Welcome to advertising 101! Let's begin with the invention of the newspaper in 1605, where the invention of "people as a product" was invented four hundred years ago . Perhaps consider adding some commentary rather than some tired soundbyte from reddit please. Just because Rob left Slashdot doesn't mean we need to degenerate it in to yet another meme mirror.
Sure, but they produce Wide Screen Polaroids ! That's totally like, HD Polaroid, or something. Widescreen, man.
I heard in a few years they're going to be releasing 3-D polaroids, but the first few models are going to require special glasses to view, and they give some viewers headaches.
Is anybody else a little shocked that that photograph is shot at 16ft (4.8m) resolution? I'm assuming they mean 1:16 or 1 pixel to 16 ft. That seems like the sort of resolution you might get from a stop end film spy satellite from the 1960's. I would have figured that we would be down to 1m or 0.3m (1ft) resolution by now.
Or are public images severely degraded to not give away the more obscure pros and cons of their imaging systems at actual resolution? The pictures of the moon landers seemed awfully crisp compared to this, although one was flying at 24km (presumably with a much smaller camera) vs a geopolar orbit at (searches wikipedia) 1000km. Also presumably with a much larger camera.
What's average resolution these days for satellite imagery? That seems awfully low.
$200 million will buy housing for 35 thousand? There's a town just north of Dallas called Frisco, also known as "Frisclosure" for the number of foreclosures in the area. Why not just do the testing there? Or in Las Vegas where there are thousands of homes in neighborhoods sitting empty?
Considering the state of the housing/mortgage crisis, this seems like a prime pork barrel project. I'd rather see $200 million (let's rephrase that, $0.2 billion) spent buying out mortgages or at least the principal on many, many homes so people can afford to continue living in them and paying down the mortgages instead. Building even more homes, even in a "test city" seems like a poor decision given the rabid abundance in homes for sale on the already poor housing market.
They can VAC ban you, which means you can't play certain games on registered servers (i.e. most of them). VAC bans can be for single games, or account wide. You can still open the game and play them in single player/lan mode. That's the least intrusive way. The most intrusive way is locking your account, which is on par with taking away all your toys and stuffing them down the garbage disposal, because you can't even log in to play your single player games or view your steam friends list. Though you can sometimes negotiate with customer service to conditionally unlock your account.
Or did she simply take the path of least resistance and lay down every time
Oh boy, in all my years of being a grammar nazi here on Slashdot, this makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Now, had I written does instead, then yes, lie would have been correct due to the present tense used. But your quote is out of context and I said did; due to the fact that she no longer works there (at least, according to the summary). Sharp eye though! That sentence does read a little awkwardly, leading with "Or". I guess that's what I get before posting right before bed.:)
Out of curiosity, my pet theory was that Bartz was installed by Microsoft after the 2008 buyout failed, under the premise that Yahoo would invest heavily in Microsoft's ad network and bing search engine back end. Is there any truth in this? Or did she simply take the path of least resistance and lay down every time Microsoft waived money in her direction?
Particularly after the backdoor buyout of Nokia and installing a Microsoft executive as CEO there, Bartz at the time sure looked like a backdoor buyout of Yahoo.
At $3/day do they support virtual machines?
on
Rent Your Own Botnet
·
· Score: 1
Can you distribute virtual machines across a bot network?
This is wrong. I was a projectionist for far too long. First off, only very high end projectors do this. Megaplexes don't shell out for the pricey projectors. Most projectors simply display the frame once before moving on to the next frame. The amount of time between frame changes (i.e. it stops and is displayed, just like a slide projector) is 1/48th of a second, and the time the image is shown on the screen is 1/48th of a second, meaning the screen, on 99% of theaters/projectors in the world, is in fact only displaying images for 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time the screen is black.
What they're describing is displaying the same image twice, with the frame advance on a separate cam. By closing the shutter they take the light off the frame allowing it to cool and extends the life of the print dramatically, rather than expose it for a continuous 3/96th of a second. It does let more light through (50-100% more) resulting in a brighter picture and less percieved flicker, but it's not "48 images". If I have 100 slides in a slide projector and the slide advance is broken so that it only advances every second push, you see each image twice, but it doesn't mean 200 images are displayed each time I show my vacation photos to hawaii. It just means more light from each image is displayed on the screen over N time.
I think the main problem is that the company who makes the eink "paper" displays is also the company that makes the video controllers for them. There are no third party video controller manufacturers yet. From what I understand, the "paper" is a solid, quality product at this point; the main sticking point is that the controllers are still very basic; several eink products use the same video controller as the Kindle. It's not like you can just attach a VGA or HDMI cable to one of these things and get video output (yet). Due to the design of the video controller, they don't scale terribly well.
That said, put me on the mailing list for a 1x2 meter display when they become available! Nothing like having a weather/news display on the wall you can see from across the room, or being able to check your email from across the living room at a glance.
The only way someone this late in the game is going to buy an Android tablet is one of three ways:
1) Integrated as part of an ereader (B&N, soon Amazon, etc)
2) Potential customer has never used an iPad before
3) Potential customer bought online without test driving one in a store first
Don't get me wrong, I love android (and my android phone), but until Google sorts out Android on the tablet, Apple's product is still light years ahead of Android in the tablet market (i.e. for the average consumer, don't tell me about App Launcher X for the power user please). Android has a long ways to go to be competitive in this market, and I suspect the only reason corporations/manufacturers are being dragged kicking and screaming in to this market (how many CEOs have flat out gone on the record to denounce the tablet market in slashdot stories in the last quarter?) is that stockholders want a piece of that Juicy iPad Market despite android not being ready. If I was being forced by the board and stockholders to produce an Android tablet, I'd be making the same cautious remarks about sales figures, and doing premptive damage control now rather than after the Christmas retail season where retailers are sitting on mountains of unsold non-iPad tablet stock.
The hardware is amazing, but until Android catches up, tablets are going to be a non-starter in the retail sector unless you can dramatically improve the software by ten-fold, or get the price of a full-featured 9" tablet under $150
Somehow I doubt teenagers in highschool torrenting movies have the kind of budget to buy a $500 thumb drive. If they're lucky, they might be able to afford a couple of cheap hard drives instead. But really, if you've got 2TB of downloaded movies you can't delete after watching, you might have issues with hoarding or collecting that should be checked out.
Actually, that's a really interesting idea. Swing by the library and have them swap out 70gb of video and books for 70gb of newer content. You'd only have to visit the library every 2 years or so...
I think you missed my point. Yes, there are other storage media out there. I'm trying to figure out what sort of consumer scenario is common enough that you would need to be lugging about 2TB of data on your keychain to justify the initial $500+ price. I don't doubt the average consumer, given enough time and equipment can generate 2TB of video or still images. I'm dubious as to why you would need to transport over half of your lifetime video achievements in raw unedited format so far from your editing station in such a small form factor when, as you've pointed out, DV tapes and other media seem to do a great job of already for a much lower buy in cost.
Sure, but the camera either uses DV tape or internal storage of some sort. Unless you found a video camera worthy of a hockey parent that accepts thumb drives as recording media? Otherwise you still need to sync with a PC (laptop) as an intermediary process. I guess if you were hellbent on buying a 2tb thumb drive and using it for that purpose, you could, but my old camera took up to 256mb of video at a time before needing to sync up with my PC. I can't ever recall loading up my entire video archives on a 8gb thumb drive to go to a friend's house and review all 32 hours of raw video at once. My laptop, on the other hand..
That video is going to be stored internally in the camera though.which will later be offloaded to the pc for editing. I don't see why you would need to offload the entire seasons worth of video after you put it on the pc. Even if you were going to edit down last weeks games to a highlight video on your laptop, you should only need a16 gb thumb drive for that data.
What market does this target? In the past, removable solid state media like CF cards and SD cards (mostly CF cards) were well taken by professional photographers because it meant they could fit more pictures on a single memory card, which meant as long as their battery lasted, they could continue working uninterrupted.
I think everyone here agrees that the 2GB-8GB flash drive/thumb drive has completely replaced the floppy drive in this decade. People are still leery about keeping important data on a thumb drive for long periods of time, either due to ease of loss or possible read/write problems down the road (cue the know-it-all slashdotter telling me that they've solved all those problems despite continued miniaturization throughout the last half-decade.)
So who are these for? Eventually the 2TB thumb drives are going to drop below $500, then below $150, and be mass produced for $99 or less during a Thanksgiving Black Friday Sale in our near future.
Blu-Ray is only 50-60GB completely maxed out. That's the biggest common media I can think of that consumers have access to these days. Even all of Wikipedia will fit in a 60gb rar archive. Databases are bigger than 2TB. Or if you want a better reference, the plans for the Deathstar are bigger than 2TB. I'm not sure your sysadmin would recommend you walk around with your company's (or Empire's) most important IP in your pocket where it might get lost.
I'm not trying to say 640KB is enough for anyone.... but is it? How much space do consumers really need for portable, temporary storage, vs enterprise use? And do you really want your enterprise data on a portable, corporate espionage-sized device?
I was checking weather stations all along the path of the storm this weekend. I was also seeing 8-10 knots of wind along the coast on official weather stations (comparing cities directly in the "eye-wall" of the storm against the live readout). I never saw anything above 15kts (a light breeze by most standards, excellent kite flying weather). I thought it seemed low as well, but it's good to see an independent report of seeing the same wind speeds along the coast/path of the storm as me.
In the south, it snows at night, and gets above freezing during the day. That snow partially melts by the afternoon, and then refreezes at night. In 15 years of living in Texas, the only snow I've ever driven on was in my driveway. From the alley to the office is one continuous sheet of 1-2" thick ice.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need icons to take up 1/16th of your desktop; however I think if I spent more than a few seconds, I could dig up several studies that 90% of consumers use less than 8 applications on a daily basis (internet, facebook, twitter, email, instant messaging, word, excel, calculator - or similar! take your pick!).
Win8's metro/active desktop won't be for the power user, but this is definitely the direction things are going to head for consumer laptop/netbook/tablets in the future. This is the appliance interface your mom wants to see when she turns on her computer. Power users will still need a "real" desktop of course, but this style interface wasn't designed for them. Apple has proven that large icon based app navigation works, which I think is why Microsoft is willing to throw their weight behind this. This is one of the few things I've seen Microsoft do in the consumer space in the last decade that wasn't a complete disaster. To top it all off, they've given a nod to you and I, the power users, and allowed us to turn off the sparkly new crap and use our old desktop system how we need it.
Here in Texas we have a Natural Gas plant that's been mothballed since 2002 or so because electricity is too cheap to warrant running it (at a profit). If natural gas prices drop, or the cost of electricity (I pay about $0.07/kwh at a fixed rate) goes up enough they can bring it back online. So there's definitely excess capacity in various regions of the country already. Add to this, Texas is requiring 20% of their power to be renewable by 2020, and they're well over halfway to their goal already -- while the nation was waxing poetic about the cap cod wind farm, Texas had already put up nearly 200 giant windmills along the coast of Corpus Christi. So not only do you have overcapacity in the market, but due to green regulation, they're adding in an additional 20% capacity.
Cuba's been extremely successful with this, as has southern Mexico. Liquor prices are suspiciously low in both countries. Hell, if Oaxaca (s. mexico) stopped protesting about being oppressed, they might get worried they were planning some big revolution.
I'm going to go with "easy to sell to venture capitalists, not designed to actually sell to consumers". Pump and dump. Move on to the "next big thing".
Welcome to advertising 101! Let's begin with the invention of the newspaper in 1605, where the invention of "people as a product" was invented four hundred years ago . Perhaps consider adding some commentary rather than some tired soundbyte from reddit please. Just because Rob left Slashdot doesn't mean we need to degenerate it in to yet another meme mirror.
Sure, but they produce Wide Screen Polaroids ! That's totally like, HD Polaroid, or something. Widescreen, man.
I heard in a few years they're going to be releasing 3-D polaroids, but the first few models are going to require special glasses to view, and they give some viewers headaches.
Is anybody else a little shocked that that photograph is shot at 16ft (4.8m) resolution? I'm assuming they mean 1:16 or 1 pixel to 16 ft. That seems like the sort of resolution you might get from a stop end film spy satellite from the 1960's. I would have figured that we would be down to 1m or 0.3m (1ft) resolution by now.
Or are public images severely degraded to not give away the more obscure pros and cons of their imaging systems at actual resolution? The pictures of the moon landers seemed awfully crisp compared to this, although one was flying at 24km (presumably with a much smaller camera) vs a geopolar orbit at (searches wikipedia) 1000km. Also presumably with a much larger camera.
What's average resolution these days for satellite imagery? That seems awfully low.
$200 million will buy housing for 35 thousand? There's a town just north of Dallas called Frisco, also known as "Frisclosure" for the number of foreclosures in the area. Why not just do the testing there? Or in Las Vegas where there are thousands of homes in neighborhoods sitting empty?
Considering the state of the housing/mortgage crisis, this seems like a prime pork barrel project. I'd rather see $200 million (let's rephrase that, $0.2 billion) spent buying out mortgages or at least the principal on many, many homes so people can afford to continue living in them and paying down the mortgages instead. Building even more homes, even in a "test city" seems like a poor decision given the rabid abundance in homes for sale on the already poor housing market.
They can VAC ban you, which means you can't play certain games on registered servers (i.e. most of them). VAC bans can be for single games, or account wide. You can still open the game and play them in single player/lan mode. That's the least intrusive way. The most intrusive way is locking your account, which is on par with taking away all your toys and stuffing them down the garbage disposal, because you can't even log in to play your single player games or view your steam friends list. Though you can sometimes negotiate with customer service to conditionally unlock your account.
Oh boy, in all my years of being a grammar nazi here on Slashdot, this makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Now, had I written does instead, then yes, lie would have been correct due to the present tense used. But your quote is out of context and I said did; due to the fact that she no longer works there (at least, according to the summary). Sharp eye though! That sentence does read a little awkwardly, leading with "Or". I guess that's what I get before posting right before bed.
Out of curiosity, my pet theory was that Bartz was installed by Microsoft after the 2008 buyout failed, under the premise that Yahoo would invest heavily in Microsoft's ad network and bing search engine back end. Is there any truth in this? Or did she simply take the path of least resistance and lay down every time Microsoft waived money in her direction?
Particularly after the backdoor buyout of Nokia and installing a Microsoft executive as CEO there, Bartz at the time sure looked like a backdoor buyout of Yahoo.
Can you distribute virtual machines across a bot network?
This is wrong. I was a projectionist for far too long. First off, only very high end projectors do this. Megaplexes don't shell out for the pricey projectors. Most projectors simply display the frame once before moving on to the next frame. The amount of time between frame changes (i.e. it stops and is displayed, just like a slide projector) is 1/48th of a second, and the time the image is shown on the screen is 1/48th of a second, meaning the screen, on 99% of theaters/projectors in the world, is in fact only displaying images for 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time the screen is black.
What they're describing is displaying the same image twice, with the frame advance on a separate cam. By closing the shutter they take the light off the frame allowing it to cool and extends the life of the print dramatically, rather than expose it for a continuous 3/96th of a second. It does let more light through (50-100% more) resulting in a brighter picture and less percieved flicker, but it's not "48 images". If I have 100 slides in a slide projector and the slide advance is broken so that it only advances every second push, you see each image twice, but it doesn't mean 200 images are displayed each time I show my vacation photos to hawaii. It just means more light from each image is displayed on the screen over N time.
I think the main problem is that the company who makes the eink "paper" displays is also the company that makes the video controllers for them. There are no third party video controller manufacturers yet. From what I understand, the "paper" is a solid, quality product at this point; the main sticking point is that the controllers are still very basic; several eink products use the same video controller as the Kindle. It's not like you can just attach a VGA or HDMI cable to one of these things and get video output (yet). Due to the design of the video controller, they don't scale terribly well.
That said, put me on the mailing list for a 1x2 meter display when they become available! Nothing like having a weather/news display on the wall you can see from across the room, or being able to check your email from across the living room at a glance.
My "pre linux kernel" vintage Github account is going up on ebay to the highest bidder!
Anybody? ...anybody?
The only way someone this late in the game is going to buy an Android tablet is one of three ways:
1) Integrated as part of an ereader (B&N, soon Amazon, etc)
2) Potential customer has never used an iPad before
3) Potential customer bought online without test driving one in a store first
Don't get me wrong, I love android (and my android phone), but until Google sorts out Android on the tablet, Apple's product is still light years ahead of Android in the tablet market (i.e. for the average consumer, don't tell me about App Launcher X for the power user please). Android has a long ways to go to be competitive in this market, and I suspect the only reason corporations/manufacturers are being dragged kicking and screaming in to this market (how many CEOs have flat out gone on the record to denounce the tablet market in slashdot stories in the last quarter?) is that stockholders want a piece of that Juicy iPad Market despite android not being ready. If I was being forced by the board and stockholders to produce an Android tablet, I'd be making the same cautious remarks about sales figures, and doing premptive damage control now rather than after the Christmas retail season where retailers are sitting on mountains of unsold non-iPad tablet stock.
The hardware is amazing, but until Android catches up, tablets are going to be a non-starter in the retail sector unless you can dramatically improve the software by ten-fold, or get the price of a full-featured 9" tablet under $150
Memory cards, or thumb sticks? The grandparent post talks specifically about the difference between memory cards and thumb sticks.
Somehow I doubt teenagers in highschool torrenting movies have the kind of budget to buy a $500 thumb drive. If they're lucky, they might be able to afford a couple of cheap hard drives instead. But really, if you've got 2TB of downloaded movies you can't delete after watching, you might have issues with hoarding or collecting that should be checked out.
Actually, that's a really interesting idea. Swing by the library and have them swap out 70gb of video and books for 70gb of newer content. You'd only have to visit the library every 2 years or so...
I think you missed my point. Yes, there are other storage media out there. I'm trying to figure out what sort of consumer scenario is common enough that you would need to be lugging about 2TB of data on your keychain to justify the initial $500+ price. I don't doubt the average consumer, given enough time and equipment can generate 2TB of video or still images. I'm dubious as to why you would need to transport over half of your lifetime video achievements in raw unedited format so far from your editing station in such a small form factor when, as you've pointed out, DV tapes and other media seem to do a great job of already for a much lower buy in cost.
Sure, but the camera either uses DV tape or internal storage of some sort. Unless you found a video camera worthy of a hockey parent that accepts thumb drives as recording media? Otherwise you still need to sync with a PC (laptop) as an intermediary process. I guess if you were hellbent on buying a 2tb thumb drive and using it for that purpose, you could, but my old camera took up to 256mb of video at a time before needing to sync up with my PC. I can't ever recall loading up my entire video archives on a 8gb thumb drive to go to a friend's house and review all 32 hours of raw video at once. My laptop, on the other hand..
That video is going to be stored internally in the camera though.which will later be offloaded to the pc for editing. I don't see why you would need to offload the entire seasons worth of video after you put it on the pc. Even if you were going to edit down last weeks games to a highlight video on your laptop, you should only need a16 gb thumb drive for that data.
What market does this target? In the past, removable solid state media like CF cards and SD cards (mostly CF cards) were well taken by professional photographers because it meant they could fit more pictures on a single memory card, which meant as long as their battery lasted, they could continue working uninterrupted.
I think everyone here agrees that the 2GB-8GB flash drive/thumb drive has completely replaced the floppy drive in this decade. People are still leery about keeping important data on a thumb drive for long periods of time, either due to ease of loss or possible read/write problems down the road (cue the know-it-all slashdotter telling me that they've solved all those problems despite continued miniaturization throughout the last half-decade.)
So who are these for? Eventually the 2TB thumb drives are going to drop below $500, then below $150, and be mass produced for $99 or less during a Thanksgiving Black Friday Sale in our near future.
Blu-Ray is only 50-60GB completely maxed out. That's the biggest common media I can think of that consumers have access to these days. Even all of Wikipedia will fit in a 60gb rar archive. Databases are bigger than 2TB. Or if you want a better reference, the plans for the Deathstar are bigger than 2TB. I'm not sure your sysadmin would recommend you walk around with your company's (or Empire's) most important IP in your pocket where it might get lost.
I'm not trying to say 640KB is enough for anyone.... but is it? How much space do consumers really need for portable, temporary storage, vs enterprise use? And do you really want your enterprise data on a portable, corporate espionage-sized device?
I was checking weather stations all along the path of the storm this weekend. I was also seeing 8-10 knots of wind along the coast on official weather stations (comparing cities directly in the "eye-wall" of the storm against the live readout). I never saw anything above 15kts (a light breeze by most standards, excellent kite flying weather). I thought it seemed low as well, but it's good to see an independent report of seeing the same wind speeds along the coast/path of the storm as me.
In the south, it snows at night, and gets above freezing during the day. That snow partially melts by the afternoon, and then refreezes at night. In 15 years of living in Texas, the only snow I've ever driven on was in my driveway. From the alley to the office is one continuous sheet of 1-2" thick ice.