The only way to break into the competitive console gaming market was by spending gigabucks. Consider it the ante for the game. For Microsoft, just staying in the game is winning.
Yeah, but that would add thickness and sacrifice the "design", meaning the cool looking case. Either there would be a bulge over the battery or the whole case would have to be thicker.
Part of it is that people treat expensive items more gently and carefully than cheap items, but the other part is that some electronics are engineered to tougher durability standards than others.
My pet peeve are flip phones. Every one I've had busted the hinge eventually.
even the Comcast HD cable box is still a piece of garbage that regularly freezes, never behaves, and offers a very limited range of HD
My off-the-air tuner isn't much better. I bought an ATSC tuner from Radio Shack. It worked fine for a while, getting most local HD channels with just an indoor antenna. It's broken now though. It's stuck on channel 4 and freeze when I try changing the channel. I even unplugged it to clear the memory, but it still remembers it's on channel 4.
Brick houses or "unreinforced masonry" performs pretty badly in earthquakes. After the Northridge quake, every brick wall and every brick chimney in the area was trashed while the wood frame houses did fine. Wood frame apartments do suck because you can practically hear your neighbors like they were talking in the same room, but it beats dying in an earthquake.
I'm not anti-capitalist, I'm just saying there are physical limits to economic processes. Economic growth is only possible with inputs of energy, both oil for transportation and electricity (which doesn't use much oil but does use coal and natural gas).
The problem with waiting for market signals is that energy and transportation projects take time to develop. They're talking about 10 years to start producing from that deep water oil field in the Gulf of Mexico. Transportation infrastructure takes decades to build. If we accept this paper's optimistic figure of peaking in 2030, the choices we make today and the next few years in transportation infrastructure will be what we're using in 25 years.
Now about market volatility and prices, it's not a linear process in real life. High prices don't stimulate more production in the short term because there are hard limits on production capacity. Substitutes for oil or oil-based transportation don't become available immediately. Combine those two and you get wild price swings as buyers outbid each other for the last scraps of oil on the market. Now look at our own lives. Could you afford to drive if gas doubled or tripled in price? Do you have a substitute available if you didn't want to drive? The U.S. has all its transportation eggs in one basket: oil and cars. If that ever gets unaffordable, we're screwed unless we start planning now.
Demand is growing because capitalism requires constant growth, and one of the essential inputs into economic activity is energy (in the form of oil). If production rate is flat while demand is growing, you get a supply crunch. Buyers bid up the price, and sellers make out like bandits. That's the whole point of Peak Oil theory, not that we run out of oil, but when demand outstrips supply we'll run out of cheap oil. Markets are cyclical, so we'll still get highs and lows in oil prices, and prices will spike high more often because producers are tapped out and can't crank up more production to take advantage of high prices. Because of the volatility of financial markets, we won't get much warning about it either.
We slashdotters know lots of things can go wrong with computers. They're complex and maintenance-intensive. With all the buzz about hacking the software to flip votes, we shouldn't forget there's an easier way to attack these machines. In addition to being a waste of our tax dollars, their complexity and unreliability make them vulnerable to a targeted denial of service attack.
Here's the scenario. Pollworkers in a heavily Democratic (or Republican) precinct boot up the machines in the morning, and oops they're not working. That precinct is offline for hours until a vendor tech shows up to fix them. Meanwhile the voters either wait around, they're told to come back later, or maybe they'll vote on provisional paper ballots. It happened in Maryland in their primaries, and it's happening in Ohio today.
The problem in Florida wasn't just that we needed to modernize it. The voting system there was broken in more ways than just the age of the antiquated punch card technology. I think the complaint you're referring to was the complicated layout of the paper ballots. Voters had to follow an arrowed line across pages to match the candidate with the punch hole. Electronic voting was offered as one solution, but I think having good, uniform standards for paper ballots go a long way in solving that problem. We got electronic voting because the election systems vendors smelled money, and HAVA ended up being written with all kinds of requirements that could only have been met by electronic systems. Computers are expensive, complex, and maintenance-intensive. That's why the vendors love selling us this shit.
The other problem was the infamous "hanging chad". However, that would not have been a problem if there had been uniform statewide standards for counting those punch card ballots (there weren't uniform standards). A ballot with a hanging chad counted as a vote in one county, but counted as no vote in another county. If you ask me, a hole punched out is a clear indication of voter intent, even with a hanging chad.
I don't think it's fair to say that Democrats specifically demanded electronic voting after 2000 when what we really had were specific complaints about the paper ballots in Florida. If someone posted to Slashdot in 2000 that they were going to build voting systems on Windows CE, Microsoft Access, and write the results to a removable flash card (or even better, over a modem link), I'll bet we all would've laughed him out of here.
The noobs who just want to do email, web and some light word processing. They'll run what came on their computer as long as they can figure it out. They'll complain if their computer can't play Deer Hunter or some embedded web video. I guarantee you this category outnumbers the home power users.
I know flip phones are in, but the hinge is a weak spot on a lot of them. I've had much better luck with the durability of candy bar phones. This Moto phone is a non-flip.
HardOCP buys their review systems through retail channels and tests their tech support while posing as a regular customer. They're one of the few hardware sites that reviews the "consumer experience" instead of just the hardware.
"not the fact that a lot of people are disgusted with both main-stream parties, don't want to have to choose the 'lesser of two evils', so just don't vote. "
Look, if people aren't happy with the choices they have, do something about it. Don't just complain. You can accomplish some things going the third party route. You won't win, but you can get your issues out and influence the position of the closest major party. If you're playing to win, what you have to do is take over one of the major parties and make it over in your image. Reagan did that in the 80's with his unholy alliance of corporate lobbyists and Christian Fundamentalists. People can do it again only this time without the obligation to big corporate donors. You won't get everything you want issue-wise because you have to find enough people to agree with you, but the end result is still a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
Not necessarily. In any conflict between natives and colonists, or insurgents and occupiers, the willingness to sustain higher casualties is a big equalizer against a superior force. We're talking much higher casualties, like 10 to 1. However, I get the feeling that the recruiting pool of Americans willing to die for freedom is pretty small, given our addiction to bread and circuses.
Thanks for pointing that out. That's gotta be the biggest insult to customers. The funny part is, the staff roll credits at the end usually run long enough to play 2 or 3 complete songs from the score or soundtrack. As for extras, freebies like screensavers are useless. Give us something good like a bonus DVD with a few music videos or concert outtakes.
Given similar levels of safety engineering, a larger vehicle is safer in a multi-vehicle crash, but that's a big assumption and a very specific scenario. Try looking up the frontal offset crash test of the F-150 before and after the redesign around 2003 (*hint* the old F-150 folded like a cardboard box).
In a single vehicle crash, a large vehicle isn't necessarily safer because it has more kinetic energy for the vehicle structure to absorb, and taller vehicles are more likely to roll over (and rollovers happen to be the most deadly type of crash). Stability control goes a long way in preventing rollovers, but try finding that option on any truck more than 2 years old. If you drive a 10 year old truck it's definitely not safer than a decent new car.
It's going to take a tamper-proof margin of victory in 11 days if this sleazy little tin-pot dictator in the White House and the crooked pricks who are pulling his strings are going to be stopped. It's the only chance we have to put a little oversight on these bad actors.
This is the reason why people can't stop voting even if they suspect fraud. Run up the score to get a big margin of victory. You can't flip too much of the vote without looking suspicious.
Oracle does have money, so presumably, if Redhat dies Oracle has the resources to continue developing Unbreakable. However, they're tracking RHEL as a standard, so at this point there's no room for independent development. Right now, they're doing the exact same job as CentOS (repackaging the Free software from RHEL) except they're charging half a brickload of cash to officially support it (as opposed to Redhat's whole brickload). Maybe the plan is to scoop up Redhat at a discount price.
The article did talk about a machine like that, but closed-source from a proprietary vendor. The problem with using such a machine for everybody is that you've just created a complex, multi-thousand dollar, computerized pen for marking paper ballots, not a wise way to spend our tax dollars. They are useful for letting blind people vote unassisted through audio prompts, but most people do fine with an ink marker and paper ballots. The plan for Los Angeles County is to have one of these machines per precinct for disabled accessibility.
The optical scanners that count paper ballots are the most important link. We absolutely need to put them under a microscope. A hand recount of a small percent of randomly selected ballots helps. It's the law in many states already, but it's no substitute for full disclosure and oversight of the optical scanners.
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The only way to break into the competitive console gaming market was by spending gigabucks. Consider it the ante for the game. For Microsoft, just staying in the game is winning.
Yeah, but that would add thickness and sacrifice the "design", meaning the cool looking case. Either there would be a bulge over the battery or the whole case would have to be thicker.
Part of it is that people treat expensive items more gently and carefully than cheap items, but the other part is that some electronics are engineered to tougher durability standards than others.
My pet peeve are flip phones. Every one I've had busted the hinge eventually.
My off-the-air tuner isn't much better. I bought an ATSC tuner from Radio Shack. It worked fine for a while, getting most local HD channels with just an indoor antenna. It's broken now though. It's stuck on channel 4 and freeze when I try changing the channel. I even unplugged it to clear the memory, but it still remembers it's on channel 4.
Brick houses or "unreinforced masonry" performs pretty badly in earthquakes. After the Northridge quake, every brick wall and every brick chimney in the area was trashed while the wood frame houses did fine. Wood frame apartments do suck because you can practically hear your neighbors like they were talking in the same room, but it beats dying in an earthquake.
I'm not anti-capitalist, I'm just saying there are physical limits to economic processes. Economic growth is only possible with inputs of energy, both oil for transportation and electricity (which doesn't use much oil but does use coal and natural gas).
The problem with waiting for market signals is that energy and transportation projects take time to develop. They're talking about 10 years to start producing from that deep water oil field in the Gulf of Mexico. Transportation infrastructure takes decades to build. If we accept this paper's optimistic figure of peaking in 2030, the choices we make today and the next few years in transportation infrastructure will be what we're using in 25 years.
Now about market volatility and prices, it's not a linear process in real life. High prices don't stimulate more production in the short term because there are hard limits on production capacity. Substitutes for oil or oil-based transportation don't become available immediately. Combine those two and you get wild price swings as buyers outbid each other for the last scraps of oil on the market. Now look at our own lives. Could you afford to drive if gas doubled or tripled in price? Do you have a substitute available if you didn't want to drive? The U.S. has all its transportation eggs in one basket: oil and cars. If that ever gets unaffordable, we're screwed unless we start planning now.
Demand is growing because capitalism requires constant growth, and one of the essential inputs into economic activity is energy (in the form of oil). If production rate is flat while demand is growing, you get a supply crunch. Buyers bid up the price, and sellers make out like bandits. That's the whole point of Peak Oil theory, not that we run out of oil, but when demand outstrips supply we'll run out of cheap oil. Markets are cyclical, so we'll still get highs and lows in oil prices, and prices will spike high more often because producers are tapped out and can't crank up more production to take advantage of high prices. Because of the volatility of financial markets, we won't get much warning about it either.
Not just reputation but financial health. Compare that to Microsoft which has unlimited cash to pour into marketing the 360.
30GB of storage on a writable optical disc is pretty cool, but as far as buying DRM'ed movies on that media, yeah, just say no.
You don't get a free pass from testifying just because you quit your job. Congress could subpoena him for hearings all the same.
Where have you been the last six years? The Bush administration has set the bar pretty low on "spending tax dollars wisely".
We slashdotters know lots of things can go wrong with computers. They're complex and maintenance-intensive. With all the buzz about hacking the software to flip votes, we shouldn't forget there's an easier way to attack these machines. In addition to being a waste of our tax dollars, their complexity and unreliability make them vulnerable to a targeted denial of service attack.
Here's the scenario. Pollworkers in a heavily Democratic (or Republican) precinct boot up the machines in the morning, and oops they're not working. That precinct is offline for hours until a vendor tech shows up to fix them. Meanwhile the voters either wait around, they're told to come back later, or maybe they'll vote on provisional paper ballots. It happened in Maryland in their primaries, and it's happening in Ohio today.
The problem in Florida wasn't just that we needed to modernize it. The voting system there was broken in more ways than just the age of the antiquated punch card technology. I think the complaint you're referring to was the complicated layout of the paper ballots. Voters had to follow an arrowed line across pages to match the candidate with the punch hole. Electronic voting was offered as one solution, but I think having good, uniform standards for paper ballots go a long way in solving that problem. We got electronic voting because the election systems vendors smelled money, and HAVA ended up being written with all kinds of requirements that could only have been met by electronic systems. Computers are expensive, complex, and maintenance-intensive. That's why the vendors love selling us this shit.
The other problem was the infamous "hanging chad". However, that would not have been a problem if there had been uniform statewide standards for counting those punch card ballots (there weren't uniform standards). A ballot with a hanging chad counted as a vote in one county, but counted as no vote in another county. If you ask me, a hole punched out is a clear indication of voter intent, even with a hanging chad.
I don't think it's fair to say that Democrats specifically demanded electronic voting after 2000 when what we really had were specific complaints about the paper ballots in Florida. If someone posted to Slashdot in 2000 that they were going to build voting systems on Windows CE, Microsoft Access, and write the results to a removable flash card (or even better, over a modem link), I'll bet we all would've laughed him out of here.
The noobs who just want to do email, web and some light word processing. They'll run what came on their computer as long as they can figure it out. They'll complain if their computer can't play Deer Hunter or some embedded web video. I guarantee you this category outnumbers the home power users.
I know flip phones are in, but the hinge is a weak spot on a lot of them. I've had much better luck with the durability of candy bar phones. This Moto phone is a non-flip.
HardOCP buys their review systems through retail channels and tests their tech support while posing as a regular customer. They're one of the few hardware sites that reviews the "consumer experience" instead of just the hardware.
"not the fact that a lot of people are disgusted with both main-stream parties, don't want to have to choose the 'lesser of two evils', so just don't vote. "
Look, if people aren't happy with the choices they have, do something about it. Don't just complain. You can accomplish some things going the third party route. You won't win, but you can get your issues out and influence the position of the closest major party. If you're playing to win, what you have to do is take over one of the major parties and make it over in your image. Reagan did that in the 80's with his unholy alliance of corporate lobbyists and Christian Fundamentalists. People can do it again only this time without the obligation to big corporate donors. You won't get everything you want issue-wise because you have to find enough people to agree with you, but the end result is still a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
Not necessarily. In any conflict between natives and colonists, or insurgents and occupiers, the willingness to sustain higher casualties is a big equalizer against a superior force. We're talking much higher casualties, like 10 to 1. However, I get the feeling that the recruiting pool of Americans willing to die for freedom is pretty small, given our addiction to bread and circuses.
Thanks for pointing that out. That's gotta be the biggest insult to customers. The funny part is, the staff roll credits at the end usually run long enough to play 2 or 3 complete songs from the score or soundtrack. As for extras, freebies like screensavers are useless. Give us something good like a bonus DVD with a few music videos or concert outtakes.
Given similar levels of safety engineering, a larger vehicle is safer in a multi-vehicle crash, but that's a big assumption and a very specific scenario. Try looking up the frontal offset crash test of the F-150 before and after the redesign around 2003 (*hint* the old F-150 folded like a cardboard box).
In a single vehicle crash, a large vehicle isn't necessarily safer because it has more kinetic energy for the vehicle structure to absorb, and taller vehicles are more likely to roll over (and rollovers happen to be the most deadly type of crash). Stability control goes a long way in preventing rollovers, but try finding that option on any truck more than 2 years old. If you drive a 10 year old truck it's definitely not safer than a decent new car.
Diebold makes ATMs too, but their division that makes voting machines was an acquisition of Global Election Systems. There's nothing in common.
This is the reason why people can't stop voting even if they suspect fraud. Run up the score to get a big margin of victory. You can't flip too much of the vote without looking suspicious.
Oracle does have money, so presumably, if Redhat dies Oracle has the resources to continue developing Unbreakable. However, they're tracking RHEL as a standard, so at this point there's no room for independent development. Right now, they're doing the exact same job as CentOS (repackaging the Free software from RHEL) except they're charging half a brickload of cash to officially support it (as opposed to Redhat's whole brickload). Maybe the plan is to scoop up Redhat at a discount price.
Well, diuretic laxatives are one old trick for losing weight, but they're not a healthy way to do it.
The article did talk about a machine like that, but closed-source from a proprietary vendor. The problem with using such a machine for everybody is that you've just created a complex, multi-thousand dollar, computerized pen for marking paper ballots, not a wise way to spend our tax dollars. They are useful for letting blind people vote unassisted through audio prompts, but most people do fine with an ink marker and paper ballots. The plan for Los Angeles County is to have one of these machines per precinct for disabled accessibility.
The optical scanners that count paper ballots are the most important link. We absolutely need to put them under a microscope. A hand recount of a small percent of randomly selected ballots helps. It's the law in many states already, but it's no substitute for full disclosure and oversight of the optical scanners.