James Watt invented the double-acting piston steam engine. It was much more efficient than Newcomen's single-acting steam engine. Edison didn't invent the incandescent light bulb, but he did improve the bulb life to the point where it was practical as a source of light.
These people didn't just put their name on someone else's invention and profit from it. They made huge improvements on them.
That's the perfect example of something that's easy for humans and hard for robots. It's one thing to detect the presence of obstacles. It's another to identify obstacles and determine their risk to vehicular progress. We know oil is black, shiny and slippery. We know rocks usually look jagged and the color of dirt, and they're hard when you run into them. We know that it's a long way down if you fall over a cliff ledge. If there's a cliff wall going up on one side of the road and down the other side of the road, we know that falling off the cliff is much more dangerous than hitting the side of the mountain, at least at low speeds. It's common sense things like this that humans just know, and it's hard to program every possible scenario into an AI.
Are the CPU and video card 5 years old too? They're what really make the difference in gaming performance. If you consider that high end 5 years ago was a PIII-600 and TNT2 Ultra, today's low end system might have a CPU 3 times faster, but the onboard video would still be crap compared to a TNT2 Ultra.
I know biodiesel can be made from waste oil. The problem is that even us fat, junk food loving Americans can't possibly eat enough deep fried food to create enough used fryer oil to supply a significant number of vehicles. You're right about lots of edible soy protein left over from oil extraction. Guess we'll have to get creative with those soy protein recipes if this takes off.
Growing soybeans or whatever to harvest vegetable oil requires farmland and fresh water, both of which have a limited supply. With 6 billion+ people to feed, demand for them will only go up. That's why last week's story about biodiesel from algae is such good news. It'll grow in salt water. Hell, by the time world population hits 20 billion, I predict the shortage of farmland and fresh water will make us start processing the algae into artificially flavored, nutritious food.
Re:The DMA hates spammers (true)
on
NYT on Spam Cops
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· Score: 2, Informative
"the DMA is made up of companies who want to play by the rules. True, they want to have a hand in writing the rules as well, but the rules are pretty good ones. No faking your source IP addresses or From: fields. Always have an Unsubscribe feature that actually works."
The problem is that email addresses eventually leak out from the more legit DMA members to shadier and shadier spammers, whether it's through "affiliates", bankruptcy sales, or corrupt employees. See the story of Nadine for an excellent example of how this happens.
Maybe because the Audiovox Thera has had terrible reviews for its phone functionality. It's a standard PocketPC case with the microphone above the screen and the speaker in the corner below it. To speak on it you have to turn it upside down AND lower the speaker volume so you can hold it against your ear. I suppose if you wanted a connected PDA more than a PDA smartphone, it works for you. I thought about it for a minute when I saw them on sale at Compgeeks for $150, but I really need something that works better as a phone.
Switzerland is not really a fair comparison. Rifles are used much less often than handguns to commit crimes because they're not concealable. Handgun ownership is still very low. However, having strict gun control laws doesn't make them all peaceniks. If anything, Europe has more people than the US trained in firearms because of the mandatory military service in many countries.
Not only is an ipod not worth a life. It's only worth about 3 hours of lawyer time. If you shoot someone you'll need a lot more lawyer hours than that even if it's an obvious case of self defense. A CCW is not something to take lightly. It's one thing to use a gun to protect your life. Just don't do anything stupid like shoot a mugger fleeing with your laptop.
Yes, printer driver hell was our experience with our Citrix users. Other than that, we're happy with it. Much more efficient over a WAN than a fat client that's passing a lot more data.
Sure, if you get the $40 a month plan and go over they'll rape you on the airtime charges. If you know you'll be calling a lot, just get a plan with plenty of minutes. Could you really talk more than 2000 daytime minutes a month (about what you get with the $99 a month plan)? Remember, 4 x 40hr workweeks is 9600 minutes. All the wireless carriers have free domestic long distance or offer it for a small fee like $5 a month.
I don't think they'd be getting rid of their POTS line. They just don't want to run up big long distance bills on their home phone line. Don't need to worry about 911.
SBC does have unlimited long distance for $30/month, but that's for residential use only. Since it's at home it's a residence line, but it's clearly being used for business. I don't know how they'd police that. Maybe they look at usage patterns, but you definitely don't want to fight them on this.
I'd say for calling into the office, the best bet would be to set up a toll free number that goes to the receptionist or (if you don't have one) to a voice response menu that lets you dial an extension.
For calling customers, you can get a long distance calling card billed to the company or a cell phone with free long distance. It may or may not be cheaper than VoIP, but it saves you hassle because it's billed to the company and you don't have to mess with expense reports.
I remember that too. At the time the high end CPU was the Pentium Pro 200. Today's CPUs are so overpowered for simple word processing I think we can afford the overhead. For a long time I was skeptical too about Java, but look at Jedit to see what's possible in a full featured text editor. Sure, the memory usage is a little high (25MB w/ an empty document) and it launches slower than a native app, but still, it runs great on a modern CPU.
The FPU is a little better now. It runs at full CPU speed instead of half like the earlier C3's. It's still underpowered though. Sudhian has a review of the last generation MII 12000 here. The 1.2Ghz w/o hardware MPEG4 acceleration can't play 720x540 DIVX file smoothly. If the hardware MPEG4 works, 1.3Ghz should be fast enough for any home theater PC job except video encoding like recording TV. You'll need a TV tuner card with a hardware MPEG encoder.
"I solved all my reception problems in one fell swoop. I fully discontinued my use of cellular services."
There's something called a power switch. I turn it off in the car, restaurant, theater or when I just plain don't want to be bothered. My work cell phone happens to be AT&T which happens to have crappy signal in what seems like half of LA. So I have that automatic excuse if they can't get me on the phone (my personal phone is Verizon wireless and I'm pretty happy with the signal on that one). I'm glad it worked out for you, but I got tired of paying $.10/min long distance on any call over 15 mi away on my landline and ditched that instead. Fuck the ILECs.
If you want a good RPM based server distro, try Trustix. It's like Redhat but without the bloat. They seem to be following Redhat's lead though. The next version after the current 2.1 won't be free.
"We're going to run out of water and light from the sun eventually too."
Unlike food crops, algae grows just fine in salt water. That's only like 3/4 of the Earth's surface. The sun won't be running out of fuel for another 5 billion years.
Any regular sedan can fit a week's worth of groceries in the trunk or back seat. I think the once a month trips are more about the big box items like lumber, BBQ grills, furniture, or the mega packs of groceries at the wholesale club.
Did you try the "Set Programs Access and Defaults" to disable access to MSN Messenger? If you want to block on the firewall, you can run Messenger through an http proxy and log the hostnames it's trying to reach. I think the hostnames will be unique to Messenger and won't be a web page.
"Because corporations won't do the right thing, they have to be regulated so that it's unprofitable to do the wrong thing."
There's another reason behind it. Customers don't punish companies in the marketplace for violating their privacy. Some theories I have are:
- Customers don't make the connection between companies handing over their private info and the results like junk mail and telemarketing. - Some privacy violations have abstract and not concrete results like your data going into some giant government database, e.g. TIA, CAPPS II. So either customers don't know about it, don't care because it doesn't affect their everyday lives, or don't make the connection back to the company that handed over their data. - Customer have no choice. We assume everybody will sell your data to telemarketers given the chance.
You make a good point about people vs. technology. In security, policy is as important as firewalls. If IM's are prohibited by company policy and blocked so that advanced measures like httport are required to circumvent your block, you have good cause to reprimand someone found using IM.
You can draw analogies to other industries but the PC industry has certain dynamics. Chip makers are the innovators, companies like Intel, AMD, Via, ATI and NVIDIA. There's nobody for these people to copy except from each other and from their own previous work. OEMs buy the chips and build video cards and motherboards. PC OEMs buy those parts and build systems. This article was specifically about printers, and here the debate is really between in-house vs. outsourcing. Dell pays Lexmark to license their printer technology. If Lexmark stopped selling to end users they'd still have Dell as a customer.
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James Watt invented the double-acting piston steam engine. It was much more efficient than Newcomen's single-acting steam engine. Edison didn't invent the incandescent light bulb, but he did improve the bulb life to the point where it was practical as a source of light.
These people didn't just put their name on someone else's invention and profit from it. They made huge improvements on them.
That's the perfect example of something that's easy for humans and hard for robots. It's one thing to detect the presence of obstacles. It's another to identify obstacles and determine their risk to vehicular progress. We know oil is black, shiny and slippery. We know rocks usually look jagged and the color of dirt, and they're hard when you run into them. We know that it's a long way down if you fall over a cliff ledge. If there's a cliff wall going up on one side of the road and down the other side of the road, we know that falling off the cliff is much more dangerous than hitting the side of the mountain, at least at low speeds. It's common sense things like this that humans just know, and it's hard to program every possible scenario into an AI.
What do you think all the salt in the popcorn topping is for? It makes me pretty damn thirsty.
Are the CPU and video card 5 years old too? They're what really make the difference in gaming performance. If you consider that high end 5 years ago was a PIII-600 and TNT2 Ultra, today's low end system might have a CPU 3 times faster, but the onboard video would still be crap compared to a TNT2 Ultra.
I know biodiesel can be made from waste oil. The problem is that even us fat, junk food loving Americans can't possibly eat enough deep fried food to create enough used fryer oil to supply a significant number of vehicles. You're right about lots of edible soy protein left over from oil extraction. Guess we'll have to get creative with those soy protein recipes if this takes off.
Growing soybeans or whatever to harvest vegetable oil requires farmland and fresh water, both of which have a limited supply. With 6 billion+ people to feed, demand for them will only go up. That's why last week's story about biodiesel from algae is such good news. It'll grow in salt water. Hell, by the time world population hits 20 billion, I predict the shortage of farmland and fresh water will make us start processing the algae into artificially flavored, nutritious food.
"the DMA is made up of companies who want to play by the rules. True, they want to have a hand in writing the rules as well, but the rules are pretty good ones. No faking your source IP addresses or From: fields. Always have an Unsubscribe feature that actually works."
The problem is that email addresses eventually leak out from the more legit DMA members to shadier and shadier spammers, whether it's through "affiliates", bankruptcy sales, or corrupt employees. See the story of Nadine for an excellent example of how this happens.
Maybe because the Audiovox Thera has had terrible reviews for its phone functionality. It's a standard PocketPC case with the microphone above the screen and the speaker in the corner below it. To speak on it you have to turn it upside down AND lower the speaker volume so you can hold it against your ear. I suppose if you wanted a connected PDA more than a PDA smartphone, it works for you. I thought about it for a minute when I saw them on sale at Compgeeks for $150, but I really need something that works better as a phone.
Switzerland is not really a fair comparison. Rifles are used much less often than handguns to commit crimes because they're not concealable. Handgun ownership is still very low. However, having strict gun control laws doesn't make them all peaceniks. If anything, Europe has more people than the US trained in firearms because of the mandatory military service in many countries.
Not only is an ipod not worth a life. It's only worth about 3 hours of lawyer time. If you shoot someone you'll need a lot more lawyer hours than that even if it's an obvious case of self defense. A CCW is not something to take lightly. It's one thing to use a gun to protect your life. Just don't do anything stupid like shoot a mugger fleeing with your laptop.
Yes, printer driver hell was our experience with our Citrix users. Other than that, we're happy with it. Much more efficient over a WAN than a fat client that's passing a lot more data.
Sure, if you get the $40 a month plan and go over they'll rape you on the airtime charges. If you know you'll be calling a lot, just get a plan with plenty of minutes. Could you really talk more than 2000 daytime minutes a month (about what you get with the $99 a month plan)? Remember, 4 x 40hr workweeks is 9600 minutes. All the wireless carriers have free domestic long distance or offer it for a small fee like $5 a month.
I don't think they'd be getting rid of their POTS line. They just don't want to run up big long distance bills on their home phone line. Don't need to worry about 911.
SBC does have unlimited long distance for $30/month, but that's for residential use only. Since it's at home it's a residence line, but it's clearly being used for business. I don't know how they'd police that. Maybe they look at usage patterns, but you definitely don't want to fight them on this.
I'd say for calling into the office, the best bet would be to set up a toll free number that goes to the receptionist or (if you don't have one) to a voice response menu that lets you dial an extension.
For calling customers, you can get a long distance calling card billed to the company or a cell phone with free long distance. It may or may not be cheaper than VoIP, but it saves you hassle because it's billed to the company and you don't have to mess with expense reports.
"Or are higher bridgers faster?"
If it reduces the elevation change in the roadway, yes. Have you seen how a fully loaded truck struggles up a mountain pass?
I remember that too. At the time the high end CPU was the Pentium Pro 200. Today's CPUs are so overpowered for simple word processing I think we can afford the overhead. For a long time I was skeptical too about Java, but look at Jedit to see what's possible in a full featured text editor. Sure, the memory usage is a little high (25MB w/ an empty document) and it launches slower than a native app, but still, it runs great on a modern CPU.
The FPU is a little better now. It runs at full CPU speed instead of half like the earlier C3's. It's still underpowered though. Sudhian has a review of the last generation MII 12000 here. The 1.2Ghz w/o hardware MPEG4 acceleration can't play 720x540 DIVX file smoothly. If the hardware MPEG4 works, 1.3Ghz should be fast enough for any home theater PC job except video encoding like recording TV. You'll need a TV tuner card with a hardware MPEG encoder.
"I solved all my reception problems in one fell swoop. I fully discontinued my use of cellular services."
There's something called a power switch. I turn it off in the car, restaurant, theater or when I just plain don't want to be bothered. My work cell phone happens to be AT&T which happens to have crappy signal in what seems like half of LA. So I have that automatic excuse if they can't get me on the phone (my personal phone is Verizon wireless and I'm pretty happy with the signal on that one). I'm glad it worked out for you, but I got tired of paying $.10/min long distance on any call over 15 mi away on my landline and ditched that instead. Fuck the ILECs.
If you want a good RPM based server distro, try Trustix. It's like Redhat but without the bloat. They seem to be following Redhat's lead though. The next version after the current 2.1 won't be free.
"We're going to run out of water and light from the sun eventually too."
Unlike food crops, algae grows just fine in salt water. That's only like 3/4 of the Earth's surface. The sun won't be running out of fuel for another 5 billion years.
Any regular sedan can fit a week's worth of groceries in the trunk or back seat. I think the once a month trips are more about the big box items like lumber, BBQ grills, furniture, or the mega packs of groceries at the wholesale club.
Did you try the "Set Programs Access and Defaults" to disable access to MSN Messenger? If you want to block on the firewall, you can run Messenger through an http proxy and log the hostnames it's trying to reach. I think the hostnames will be unique to Messenger and won't be a web page.
"Because corporations won't do the right thing, they have to be regulated so that it's unprofitable to do the wrong thing."
There's another reason behind it. Customers don't punish companies in the marketplace for violating their privacy. Some theories I have are:
- Customers don't make the connection between companies handing over their private info and the results like junk mail and telemarketing.
- Some privacy violations have abstract and not concrete results like your data going into some giant government database, e.g. TIA, CAPPS II. So either customers don't know about it, don't care because it doesn't affect their everyday lives, or don't make the connection back to the company that handed over their data.
- Customer have no choice. We assume everybody will sell your data to telemarketers given the chance.
You make a good point about people vs. technology. In security, policy is as important as firewalls. If IM's are prohibited by company policy and blocked so that advanced measures like httport are required to circumvent your block, you have good cause to reprimand someone found using IM.
You can draw analogies to other industries but the PC industry has certain dynamics. Chip makers are the innovators, companies like Intel, AMD, Via, ATI and NVIDIA. There's nobody for these people to copy except from each other and from their own previous work. OEMs buy the chips and build video cards and motherboards. PC OEMs buy those parts and build systems. This article was specifically about printers, and here the debate is really between in-house vs. outsourcing. Dell pays Lexmark to license their printer technology. If Lexmark stopped selling to end users they'd still have Dell as a customer.