I have no doubt the publicity blitz is the work of plaintiff's lawyers, but the allegations are pretty shocking even by overworked IT standards (although I don't know if they're standard procedure by overworked game maker standards). This is a profitable company where permanent crunch time was calculated into its financials and staffing levels.
I support free markets and competition on principle, but you shouldn't really be holding up Verizon as shining example of free market capitalism. Verizon and the other ILECS are heavily regulated quasi-monopolies. They have no problem with gaming the regulatory process to shut out competition while collecting economic rents on their local loop monopoly.
Umm... VirtualPC is both. Virtual PC for the Mac is an emulator that translates x86 code to PowerPC. Virtual PC for Windows is a virtual machine that executes x86 code natively.
If a municipal wireless ISP were so inefficient compared to the private sector why would Verizon have lobbied so hard to ban it? Discuss among yourselves...
You're right about private information being irrelevant to educational statistics. A year or two ago I got a survey in the mail from the National Science Foundation for science and engineering graduates, probably not related to this DoE thing but sounds very similar. In addition to degree and institution info it had all kinds of intrusive questions*, all personalized and with no way to anonymize your response. I took one look at the thing and said no fuckin' way. I looked around the NSF site, and I think the survey was the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG).
---- * Here are the survey variables from the website:
* Citizenship
* Country of birth
* Country of citizenship
* Degrees Held (for each degree held: field, level, when received)
* Date of birth
* Disability status
* Educational history
* Employment status (unemployed, part time, full time)
* Geographic place of employment
* Labor force status
* Marital status
* Number of children
* Occupation (current, past, second, salary)
* Primary work activity (e.g., teaching, basic research, etc.)
* Race/ethnicity
* Salary
* School enrollment status
* Sector of employment (academia, industry, government)
* Sex
Yes. Hydrogen from electrolysis reacted in a fuel cell makes for a very inefficient electrical storage battery. It makes battery electric cars look like a good idea in comparison (and I freakin' hate electric cars!).
No, they're model numbers. Way back when, a court ruled that you can't trademark a model number like 80486, and AMD could keep selling 80486 processors. So Intel responded by calling their 586 the Pentium which is trademarked.
The GTA games have always been at the center of this violent video game controversy. I've enjoyed all the GTA games myself, and I don't see a problem with them for any mature adult (or teen) who has a firm grasp of reality vs. fantasy. The funniest part is that GTA San Andreas has added a role playing element with player stats for staminia, strength and fat. You eat to regain energy, but if you eat too much without exercising you'll get fat. At the gym you can work out on the treadmill or exercise bike to gain stamina and work off fat or work out on the weights to gain strength. Seems to me it's a not so gentle reminder to the player to get out and get some exercise and not play the game all day. It's a little unrealistic though. Three or four days of working out on the weights is enough to max out your strength.
"I'm not talking about encoding digital signals as analog video then recording it. I'm talking about densely recording digital data on VHS tapes."
In that case, you'd end up with an expensive tape backup drive. 4mm DAT and 8mm Hi8 for audio and video recording use the same size tapes and similar mechanisms as the 4mm DDS and 8mm AIT drives used for data backup.
Know what you mean. I don't think non-techies are going to be particularly impressed. I left a Knoppix CD in the girlfriend's computer once and the next time it booted up it just confused her. That version had some wierd defaults like Konqueror prompting to accept cookies (why on a liveCD distro?!?). Still might be a good idea for a temporary rescue CD like when Windows gets hosed by a virus and they just need to surf the web.
Not necessarily. You don't have to wire every mile of road as if this were an electric streetcar. You just have to wire enough road to give electric cars enough charge for a useful boost in range. A good place to start for these charging zones would be the few hundred feet behind a traffic light at busy intersections. Cars would be waiting at least a minute at those places and definitely longer at rush hour.
What's the safety of these inductive charging circuits? For instance if a pedestrian or bicyclist went over this area with some kind of electrical coil in their pocket?
FWIW I'm not a big fan of electric cars. I think our best chances are biodiesels running with strict pollution controls.
Yeah, too many apps rely on IE. Way back in my Windows 95/98 I resisted installing IE, but finally when I bought Quicken wouldn't let me install w/o IE. Now I'm fighting with Mcafee Virusscan 8.0 on my computer and it's the biggest POS antivirus I've ever seen (shoulda read the reviews first I guess. v7 was fine so I figured how could v8 be much worse?). Bloated "security center" that pushes their other software like spamkiller and personal firewall. YOU HAVE TO INSTALL AN ACTIVEX CONTROL TO DOWNLOAD VIRUS DEF UPDATES! WTF? What's wrong with doing an HTTP get in the updater app like the rest of the world? You have to put an ActiveX control on my computer? Not just that, my default browser was Firefox and it tried to install an ActiveX wrapper plugin. After setting the default browser to IE it's finally downloading the program and virus def updates, but only after 2 reboots (one after installing the ActiveX and again after updating the "McAfee HTML dialog component" whatever the fuck that is). I'm about to reboot again, and I have no idea if it'll be finished updating or not after this reboot.
Sorry for the long rant, but I know many of you will be updating antivirus on your families' computers. I'm just warning you about Virusscan 8! If you're doing the antivirus thing, I'd suggest making sure it has at least a year of virus def updates and set it to check and install all updates automatically.
Yeah, Businessweek and Fortune have both run articles saying the same thing: overly broad patents are obstacles to innovation. People out there "get it", but we're up against some deeply entrenched special interests.
I never knew why they pushed AOL Broadband as an ISP when they already offered Roadrunner on Time Warner cable. Now I know AOL and Time Warner never really worked together as one company. The smart thing would have been to rebrand Roadrunner as AOL Broadband or partner AOL as a content provider for Roadrunner, but that would've been too obvious.
If you take a solved cube and rotate one corner piece, the cube becomes unsolvable. It's also somewhat less obvious that it was tampered with than if someone moved the stickers.
"Can the PHB "Hotsync" with their Handspring / Blackberry? Can they just download some software and install it themselves? How about their iPod? Their digital camera? Their scanner? The latest and greatest gadget that does who-knows-what?"
Well, is it a toy that's supposed to accomodate a PHB's every wish for a gadget and game or is it a tool to get your work done? You could reasonably consider a Blackberry or PDA to be used for legitimate business purposes. If that's the case, it should be a company-issued device that's officially supported by the IT dept. Don't even think about going down the road of supporting personally owned PDAs or the more frivolous gadgets. You have a point though. PDA and Blackberry support is severely lacking on Linux right now.
New CDs on sale at discount retailers are $9.99 to $12.99 + tax, and the ones on sale are often the popular new releases. But have you seen regular prices on CDs at the more expensive stores like Wherehouse and Tower? Try $16.99 + tax which is damn close to $20. No surprise then that Wherehouse closed half their stores. Music CD pricing is just plain dumb. Big discounts on popular new releases. Full price on obscure or back-catalog titles. And a few $9.99 or less bargain bin specials. Other forms of entertainment are getting better and cheaper all the time and disposable income isn't much bigger than before. Music CDs with more of the same music just look boring and a bad value for your money compared to the fancy graphics of video games or all the extras on a DVD. Not sure how you'd glitz up a CD compared to those things. Maybe include a special code to give them priority for concert tickets.
... The rough gist of it is that if you have a population that has a tendency to be religous and value hard, honest work, economic prosperity is bound to follow (sort of a socioeconomic version of good karma).
The United States is not nor will ever be Europe. The mindset of large urban centers such as New York, LA and San Francisco is not the mindset of the rest of the country
Yes, because the Bible Belt is so much more productive economically than New York and San Francisco. Try again.
I agree a 90 day warranty is ridiculously short for an expensive electronic item, but nobody is hiding the fact of a 90 day warranty. If someone knew about it, bought an Xbox, and declined the extended warranty offered by the store, I really don't see why Microsoft would give him anything more than what was guaranteed in writing.
This is dumb alright. How is this different from any other consumer electronics device that has a 90 day warranty (Rio MP3 players being another)? Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances. Sometimes you get a lemon, and if you don't give it a good thrashing in the first 90 days it might fail later. The extended warranty offered by stores is usually a ripoff with big commissions for the salesperson, but for some items it may be worth it.
It's not so much that Intel is the perfect CPU. It's just that economies of scale in the x86 CPU market give it a huge advantage over other CPU architectures, and this effect was amplified by the Gigahertz Race between Intel and AMD. They can simply afford to spend more on R&D and sell CPUs for less because of the huge x86 PC market. The only other company in the running is IBM, and they have a good chunk of the desktop CPU market too thanks to Apple.
VC is somewhat more of the same. It's an update built on the same game engine. But aside from the new city and new missions, the big new thing in VC was all the new drivable/flyable vehicles, the helicopter, seaplane, motorcycles. It's no simulation, but all the vehicles have unique handling, and the basic controls on the plane and helicopter are correct.
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I have no doubt the publicity blitz is the work of plaintiff's lawyers, but the allegations are pretty shocking even by overworked IT standards (although I don't know if they're standard procedure by overworked game maker standards). This is a profitable company where permanent crunch time was calculated into its financials and staffing levels.
I support free markets and competition on principle, but you shouldn't really be holding up Verizon as shining example of free market capitalism. Verizon and the other ILECS are heavily regulated quasi-monopolies. They have no problem with gaming the regulatory process to shut out competition while collecting economic rents on their local loop monopoly.
Umm... VirtualPC is both. Virtual PC for the Mac is an emulator that translates x86 code to PowerPC. Virtual PC for Windows is a virtual machine that executes x86 code natively.
If a municipal wireless ISP were so inefficient compared to the private sector why would Verizon have lobbied so hard to ban it? Discuss among yourselves...
You're right about private information being irrelevant to educational statistics. A year or two ago I got a survey in the mail from the National Science Foundation for science and engineering graduates, probably not related to this DoE thing but sounds very similar. In addition to degree and institution info it had all kinds of intrusive questions*, all personalized and with no way to anonymize your response. I took one look at the thing and said no fuckin' way. I looked around the NSF site, and I think the survey was the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG).
----
* Here are the survey variables from the website:
* Citizenship
* Country of birth
* Country of citizenship
* Degrees Held (for each degree held: field, level, when received)
* Date of birth
* Disability status
* Educational history
* Employment status (unemployed, part time, full time)
* Geographic place of employment
* Labor force status
* Marital status
* Number of children
* Occupation (current, past, second, salary)
* Primary work activity (e.g., teaching, basic research, etc.)
* Race/ethnicity
* Salary
* School enrollment status
* Sector of employment (academia, industry, government)
* Sex
Yes. Hydrogen from electrolysis reacted in a fuel cell makes for a very inefficient electrical storage battery. It makes battery electric cars look like a good idea in comparison (and I freakin' hate electric cars!).
No, they're model numbers. Way back when, a court ruled that you can't trademark a model number like 80486, and AMD could keep selling 80486 processors. So Intel responded by calling their 586 the Pentium which is trademarked.
The GTA games have always been at the center of this violent video game controversy. I've enjoyed all the GTA games myself, and I don't see a problem with them for any mature adult (or teen) who has a firm grasp of reality vs. fantasy. The funniest part is that GTA San Andreas has added a role playing element with player stats for staminia, strength and fat. You eat to regain energy, but if you eat too much without exercising you'll get fat. At the gym you can work out on the treadmill or exercise bike to gain stamina and work off fat or work out on the weights to gain strength. Seems to me it's a not so gentle reminder to the player to get out and get some exercise and not play the game all day. It's a little unrealistic though. Three or four days of working out on the weights is enough to max out your strength.
"I'm not talking about encoding digital signals as analog video then recording it. I'm talking about densely recording digital data on VHS tapes."
In that case, you'd end up with an expensive tape backup drive. 4mm DAT and 8mm Hi8 for audio and video recording use the same size tapes and similar mechanisms as the 4mm DDS and 8mm AIT drives used for data backup.
Know what you mean. I don't think non-techies are going to be particularly impressed. I left a Knoppix CD in the girlfriend's computer once and the next time it booted up it just confused her. That version had some wierd defaults like Konqueror prompting to accept cookies (why on a liveCD distro?!?). Still might be a good idea for a temporary rescue CD like when Windows gets hosed by a virus and they just need to surf the web.
Not necessarily. You don't have to wire every mile of road as if this were an electric streetcar. You just have to wire enough road to give electric cars enough charge for a useful boost in range. A good place to start for these charging zones would be the few hundred feet behind a traffic light at busy intersections. Cars would be waiting at least a minute at those places and definitely longer at rush hour.
What's the safety of these inductive charging circuits? For instance if a pedestrian or bicyclist went over this area with some kind of electrical coil in their pocket?
FWIW I'm not a big fan of electric cars. I think our best chances are biodiesels running with strict pollution controls.
Yeah, too many apps rely on IE. Way back in my Windows 95/98 I resisted installing IE, but finally when I bought Quicken wouldn't let me install w/o IE. Now I'm fighting with Mcafee Virusscan 8.0 on my computer and it's the biggest POS antivirus I've ever seen (shoulda read the reviews first I guess. v7 was fine so I figured how could v8 be much worse?). Bloated "security center" that pushes their other software like spamkiller and personal firewall. YOU HAVE TO INSTALL AN ACTIVEX CONTROL TO DOWNLOAD VIRUS DEF UPDATES! WTF? What's wrong with doing an HTTP get in the updater app like the rest of the world? You have to put an ActiveX control on my computer? Not just that, my default browser was Firefox and it tried to install an ActiveX wrapper plugin. After setting the default browser to IE it's finally downloading the program and virus def updates, but only after 2 reboots (one after installing the ActiveX and again after updating the "McAfee HTML dialog component" whatever the fuck that is). I'm about to reboot again, and I have no idea if it'll be finished updating or not after this reboot.
Sorry for the long rant, but I know many of you will be updating antivirus on your families' computers. I'm just warning you about Virusscan 8! If you're doing the antivirus thing, I'd suggest making sure it has at least a year of virus def updates and set it to check and install all updates automatically.
Yeah, Businessweek and Fortune have both run articles saying the same thing: overly broad patents are obstacles to innovation. People out there "get it", but we're up against some deeply entrenched special interests.
I never knew why they pushed AOL Broadband as an ISP when they already offered Roadrunner on Time Warner cable. Now I know AOL and Time Warner never really worked together as one company. The smart thing would have been to rebrand Roadrunner as AOL Broadband or partner AOL as a content provider for Roadrunner, but that would've been too obvious.
If you take a solved cube and rotate one corner piece, the cube becomes unsolvable. It's also somewhat less obvious that it was tampered with than if someone moved the stickers.
"Can the PHB "Hotsync" with their Handspring / Blackberry? Can they just download some software and install it themselves? How about their iPod? Their digital camera? Their scanner? The latest and greatest gadget that does who-knows-what?"
Well, is it a toy that's supposed to accomodate a PHB's every wish for a gadget and game or is it a tool to get your work done? You could reasonably consider a Blackberry or PDA to be used for legitimate business purposes. If that's the case, it should be a company-issued device that's officially supported by the IT dept. Don't even think about going down the road of supporting personally owned PDAs or the more frivolous gadgets. You have a point though. PDA and Blackberry support is severely lacking on Linux right now.
New CDs on sale at discount retailers are $9.99 to $12.99 + tax, and the ones on sale are often the popular new releases. But have you seen regular prices on CDs at the more expensive stores like Wherehouse and Tower? Try $16.99 + tax which is damn close to $20. No surprise then that Wherehouse closed half their stores. Music CD pricing is just plain dumb. Big discounts on popular new releases. Full price on obscure or back-catalog titles. And a few $9.99 or less bargain bin specials. Other forms of entertainment are getting better and cheaper all the time and disposable income isn't much bigger than before. Music CDs with more of the same music just look boring and a bad value for your money compared to the fancy graphics of video games or all the extras on a DVD. Not sure how you'd glitz up a CD compared to those things. Maybe include a special code to give them priority for concert tickets.
I believe the Creative players support copy-protected WMA which is the format sold by many online music stores like MSN, Walmart, AOL Pressplay, etc.
... The rough gist of it is that if you have a population that has a tendency to be religous and value hard, honest work, economic prosperity is bound to follow (sort of a socioeconomic version of good karma).
The United States is not nor will ever be Europe. The mindset of large urban centers such as New York, LA and San Francisco is not the mindset of the rest of the country
Yes, because the Bible Belt is so much more productive economically than New York and San Francisco. Try again.
That and a pf ruleset actually makes sense when you read it.
I agree a 90 day warranty is ridiculously short for an expensive electronic item, but nobody is hiding the fact of a 90 day warranty. If someone knew about it, bought an Xbox, and declined the extended warranty offered by the store, I really don't see why Microsoft would give him anything more than what was guaranteed in writing.
This is dumb alright. How is this different from any other consumer electronics device that has a 90 day warranty (Rio MP3 players being another)? Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances. Sometimes you get a lemon, and if you don't give it a good thrashing in the first 90 days it might fail later. The extended warranty offered by stores is usually a ripoff with big commissions for the salesperson, but for some items it may be worth it.
It's not so much that Intel is the perfect CPU. It's just that economies of scale in the x86 CPU market give it a huge advantage over other CPU architectures, and this effect was amplified by the Gigahertz Race between Intel and AMD. They can simply afford to spend more on R&D and sell CPUs for less because of the huge x86 PC market. The only other company in the running is IBM, and they have a good chunk of the desktop CPU market too thanks to Apple.
VC is somewhat more of the same. It's an update built on the same game engine. But aside from the new city and new missions, the big new thing in VC was all the new drivable/flyable vehicles, the helicopter, seaplane, motorcycles. It's no simulation, but all the vehicles have unique handling, and the basic controls on the plane and helicopter are correct.
Hey, even Jack Bauer on 24 pronounced it "nukular".