And this is better than a good portable device. .
on
Car Digital Assistant
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How?
"Yeah boss, I'll get you that number right now. Just let let me go start up my car."
Stuff really doesn't have to be built into everything else ad infinitum, adding layer upon layer of sychronizing your fridge with your car with your PC with your portable device. . . etc.
Anybody ever hear of docking stations?
If you really need to browse the web in your car follow these two simple steps:
knows how this works. The writer is the absolute lowest man on the totem pole. It's the writer's job to come up with *ideas,* most of which are going to be rejected by the writer's *boss.*
That's the writer's boss's job. To say either, " That's the biggest dumbass thing I've ever seen," or, " Looks good, let's see where it goes."
Right at that point in time the writer is * off the hook.* Period.
And of course at this point the client is brought in and ultimately the client says yea or nay.
Are people really going to believe that some hack writer at a PR firm came up with the campaign, wrote the copy, found the stock picture, wrote the HTML forging an official MS web page, hacked the server and put the page up?
Not only did MS know about what was going on, it wouldn't even have been *possible* without their direct cooperation in the first place.
Hell, the whole reason this thing has come out publicly like it has is because on one read of the copy *everyone,* including my bloody *cat,* knew it was a professionally written bit of PR dogerel. Not very good dogerel at that. Next they'll be saying they're shocked and stunned that an actual 12 year old didn't write that bit that read like undergraduate marketing homework.
I only hope MS has the good sense to 'castigate' the PR firm, not the poor dumb slob of a writer. Like Nissan did with the disasterous " Built for the Human Race Campaign," publicly dismissing the firm, all the while publicly ignoring the fact that someone, VERY high up at Nissan, somewhere along the line looked at the idea and said, " I like it. Go!"
I thought TV drove them under decades ago. At least that's what they told me at the time.
Ok, let's take it a bit seriously for a moment, shall we? He says that people would rather stay home and watch a DVD.
Who does he think is going to make the DVD's? My guess is it will be. . . a *movie studio.* Go figure.
Maybe Hoyt's will be having trouble in a few years,(they certainly deserve it), maybe not. I still see long lines at the mall, so yeah, the *box office* might be in jeopordy, but somehow I think the "content producers" will survive, so long as they're smart enought to produce "content" at least equal to the quality of the existig catalog.
And if they don't, well, fsck 'em, they deserve to bite the big one. I have better things to do with my time and money than watch the third live remake of a cartoon that sucked in the first place.
read the Bill of Rights he made it all the way up to . . . One. Either that or his mother simply told him, " Sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you," and he listened to his mother for once.
His appreciation of, indeed his very awareness of, the remaining nine seems to be shakey at best.
He certainly stopped reading before he got up to Four. The courts are finally starting to bitch slap him around a bit over this. His response? Ignore court orders.
Yeah, there'a a guy who believes firmly in the rule of law. Right.
accetable in pluralizing acronyms, as well as for other "non word" elements.
It's a contraction. The apstrophe substitutes for the "e" in the suffix "es," which is an older, but still acceptable form.
The dropping of the apostrophe in pluralizing acronyms is a modern phemonemon that comes about because of the modern practice, unjustifiable by traditional usage, of treating acronyms as if they were actually words.
In fact, the GPL explicitly allows payment, as you can confirm for yourself by walking into an Borders and buying a copy of Redhat or Mandrake.
The GPL does not prohibit payment, it prohibits *prohibiting* giving it away for free. A subtle difference that appears to be beyond the Post's writer. Said writer should expect to find a *very* full inbox tommorow.
KFG
The problem with turbines for automotive use. . .
on
Jet Turbine Locomotives
·
· Score: 3, Informative
is that they don't throttle well. They like to rev up, to VERY high speeds, and stay there. When attempts were made to use turbines in racing cars it was found that this made them very effective for oval racing, but nearly useless for road racing. They're even more useless for road driving with it's stop and start patterns.
They are, however, when used at constant rate, far more efficient than piston engines. This makes them good for turning generators.
This would make them good for *hybrid* cars, in which there is renewed interest. In fact, the locomotives that are in question here are conceptually the same as a hybrid car.
Although many people seem to think of them in the same way. Jet fuel is a very close relative to diesel fuel. . . and kerosene, and in a pinch they can often be substituted for one another, so substituting jet fuel for diesel will have *no* effect on the enviroment, per se. However, burning jet fuel more completely than a diesel engine burns its fuel will, indeed, have a positive effect and is virtually soot free.
You want a nasty fuel enviromentally? Very little is worse than ordinary pump gasoline.
You are incorrect. A *patch* for GPLed software may be released under any license the author desires. This is what allows propriatary binary only hardware support, as well as providing functionality for such software as might otherwise violate the DMCA, such as DVD players.
The *patch* is the work of the author and has nothing to do with the code otherwise under the GPL. You're thinking along the MS lines that the GPL is somehow a "virus" that infects your propriatary code. Stop it.
You also seem to be laboring under some sort of misconception that the GPL somehow can confer legality/illegality. It's perfectly possible to write GPLed code under one jurisdiction that may be illegal under another and thus may be freely distributable in, say, the US, but not in, say, China. Or in this case China, but not the US.
that makes it illegal to release the information to US citizens. The patch code was written entirely by non US citizens outside of the US borders. In order to prevent the possible prosecution by the US government, ala Skylarov, they released under license terms that forbid divulging information about it.
*Redhat* is not the refuser here, they are simply bound by the terms of the author's *license.*
Now, let's do a little deductive work here while we're about it, shall we?
This isn't a "Linux" patch, it's "Redhat" patch. And what *Redhat* kernel developer has already shown a propensity for making socio-political statements with the license terms of his kernel patches regarding the DMCA?
Anyone care to go waaaaaaaaaay out on a limb and "guess" just who might have had a hand in this?
I'll give you three guesses, but if you don't get it in one you haven't been paying attention.
I'd only point out that when the point is reached that an OS fills the users needs little R&D is left to do actually. That's kind of the point actually. Competition spurs development, development creates maturity, maturity creates a commodity market. Maybe not a "good thing" for the company trying to rake in billions of excess profits, but damned good for the consumer who simply wants a cheap effective product that accomplishes what he wants. Like, say, a TV set. You can already see the effect in the latest OS's/GUI's being released which tout the transparency of its widgets rather than the actual functionality of the OS. From the point of view of the user the state of the art in OS's has already reached the point where they're being sold on the size of their "tailfins."
A Linux "zealot" might also point out the the fastest developing OS at the moment isn't a commercial product at all and is indicitive of the fact the the price of an OS had *already* dropped to $0, yet development continues.
Well yes, I worded that badly. I didn't mean to imply that diamonds were organic, merely that they were carbon.
I understand that many (perhaps even the majority) now except the definition of organic that you use, but all definitions of organic have always been controversial and even arbitrary.
In 1846 William Gregory ( Professor of Chemistry at U. Edinburgh) defined it thus:
"Organic chemistry is so called because it treats of the substances which form the structure of organized beings, and of their products, whether animal or vegetable."
This is pretty much what the common conception of the word "organic" still means.
In my day ( as a student, I'm still here actually) it was taken to mean any compound containing carbon in a covalent bond, thus the polymer teflon ( whose monomer is C2F4) was considered organic.
I suppose your definition will prevail universally in time because it makes more practical ( as opposed to historical ) sense in this day and age for both commercial and biochemical purposes.
However, I would like to point out in my defense that the carbon containing compound I specifically mentioned ( the material used to make monitor cases) is, in fact, a hydrocarbon compound.
Oh, and by the way, IANAC, IAAP, so what the hell do I know anyway.
Just as moldy as the other organic compounds around your house, and in your computer, like the case of your existing monitor.
Organic != biodegradable, it means containing carbon, like a diamond, which is about as far from biodegradable as you can get.
OLED's are are made in polymer sheets rather than in individual chips of silicon. Ultimately this will make them cheap, rugged, rollable and producable in almost arbitrary sizes, like wallpaper.
I feel a Ray Bradbury story coming on.
KFG
Yes, the O stands for organic, which in this case
on
15" OLED Display Prototype
·
· Score: 5, Informative
means *plastic.* Polymers are organic compounds, which means containing carbon, as opposed the the silicon of traditional diodes.
I've also got his hot news flash for you, you're covered in bacteria already.
AOL simply finds itself in the position many online services found themselves in with the advent of the WWW, without an actual raison d'etre, and managed, somehow, to reposition themselves as the "hallway" where others failed to do the same.
So while I believe the author is correct in that they're fighting a battle they will ultimately lose, the premise that they somehow positioned themselves for this is faulty.
They were originally based on the premise that *ordinary* people would pay for online services, and for a number of years were the *only* such service available to such ordinary people.
The "Information Superhighway" didn't happen to be built throught their "town," nor was its future existence predictable in the first place. Much as many ghost towns in the midwest were "created" by the particular route the railroad companies happened to pick, such railroad companies not being predictable when the towns were founded a century before on perfectly solid river routes.
that infects many that made their money young and retired. . . he doesn't know what to do with himself.
Rather than spending the next few years pissing away his money on ill considered ventures I'd like to suggest to him what many have found to be the cure for his ennui.
Slashdot Mirror
not an elf.
Rumors of his being a fairy persist, however.
KFG
How?
"Yeah boss, I'll get you that number right now. Just let let me go start up my car."
Stuff really doesn't have to be built into everything else ad infinitum, adding layer upon layer of sychronizing your fridge with your car with your PC with your portable device. . . etc.
Anybody ever hear of docking stations?
If you really need to browse the web in your car follow these two simple steps:
1:PARK!
2:Fire up your PDA/Laptop.
Is that really so hard?
KFG
knows how this works. The writer is the absolute lowest man on the totem pole. It's the writer's job to come up with *ideas,* most of which are going to be rejected by the writer's *boss.*
That's the writer's boss's job. To say either, " That's the biggest dumbass thing I've ever seen," or, " Looks good, let's see where it goes."
Right at that point in time the writer is * off the hook.* Period.
And of course at this point the client is brought in and ultimately the client says yea or nay.
Are people really going to believe that some hack writer at a PR firm came up with the campaign, wrote the copy, found the stock picture, wrote the HTML forging an official MS web page, hacked the server and put the page up?
Not only did MS know about what was going on, it wouldn't even have been *possible* without their direct cooperation in the first place.
Hell, the whole reason this thing has come out publicly like it has is because on one read of the copy *everyone,* including my bloody *cat,* knew it was a professionally written bit of PR dogerel. Not very good dogerel at that. Next they'll be saying they're shocked and stunned that an actual 12 year old didn't write that bit that read like undergraduate marketing homework.
I only hope MS has the good sense to 'castigate' the PR firm, not the poor dumb slob of a writer. Like Nissan did with the disasterous " Built for the Human Race Campaign," publicly dismissing the firm, all the while publicly ignoring the fact that someone, VERY high up at Nissan, somewhere along the line looked at the idea and said, " I like it. Go!"
KFG
I thought TV drove them under decades ago. At least that's what they told me at the time.
Ok, let's take it a bit seriously for a moment, shall we? He says that people would rather stay home and watch a DVD.
Who does he think is going to make the DVD's? My guess is it will be. . . a *movie studio.* Go figure.
Maybe Hoyt's will be having trouble in a few years,(they certainly deserve it), maybe not. I still see long lines at the mall, so yeah, the *box office* might be in jeopordy, but somehow I think the "content producers" will survive, so long as they're smart enought to produce "content" at least equal to the quality of the existig catalog.
And if they don't, well, fsck 'em, they deserve to bite the big one. I have better things to do with my time and money than watch the third live remake of a cartoon that sucked in the first place.
KFG
Perhaps Slashdot Slashdoted itself?
Still, you managed to get in somehow, or I couldn't have replied to you, perhaps hightening my misunderstanding.
Ain't all this "technology" shit grand?
KFG
aren't you? :)
The next time you read someone refering to "The Slashdot Effect," well, you'll know what they're talking about.
KFG
read the Bill of Rights he made it all the way up to . . . One. Either that or his mother simply told him, " Sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you," and he listened to his mother for once.
His appreciation of, indeed his very awareness of, the remaining nine seems to be shakey at best.
He certainly stopped reading before he got up to Four. The courts are finally starting to bitch slap him around a bit over this. His response? Ignore court orders.
Yeah, there'a a guy who believes firmly in the rule of law. Right.
KFG
"Please, we do not need the grammar lesson from old fogies ;)"
:)
The evidence suggests otherwise.
KFG
accetable in pluralizing acronyms, as well as for other "non word" elements.
It's a contraction. The apstrophe substitutes for the "e" in the suffix "es," which is an older, but still acceptable form.
The dropping of the apostrophe in pluralizing acronyms is a modern phemonemon that comes about because of the modern practice, unjustifiable by traditional usage, of treating acronyms as if they were actually words.
They are not. They are abbreviations.
KFG
In fact, the GPL explicitly allows payment, as you can confirm for yourself by walking into an Borders and buying a copy of Redhat or Mandrake.
The GPL does not prohibit payment, it prohibits *prohibiting* giving it away for free. A subtle difference that appears to be beyond the Post's writer. Said writer should expect to find a *very* full inbox tommorow.
KFG
is that they don't throttle well. They like to rev up, to VERY high speeds, and stay there. When attempts were made to use turbines in racing cars it was found that this made them very effective for oval racing, but nearly useless for road racing. They're even more useless for road driving with it's stop and start patterns.
They are, however, when used at constant rate, far more efficient than piston engines. This makes them good for turning generators.
This would make them good for *hybrid* cars, in which there is renewed interest. In fact, the locomotives that are in question here are conceptually the same as a hybrid car.
KFG
Although many people seem to think of them in the same way. Jet fuel is a very close relative to diesel fuel. . . and kerosene, and in a pinch they can often be substituted for one another, so substituting jet fuel for diesel will have *no* effect on the enviroment, per se. However, burning jet fuel more completely than a diesel engine burns its fuel will, indeed, have a positive effect and is virtually soot free.
You want a nasty fuel enviromentally? Very little is worse than ordinary pump gasoline.
KFG
remarkably like I get mine to look by *failing* to type startx.
We are Devo, Dee Ee Vee Oh.
KFG
this could catch on. Why on earth do you think they were so hot to kill the browser market for anything but IE?
Hint: It was *not* to simply have the most popular browser that they made no profit on.
KFG
You are incorrect. A *patch* for GPLed software may be released under any license the author desires. This is what allows propriatary binary only hardware support, as well as providing functionality for such software as might otherwise violate the DMCA, such as DVD players.
/.
The *patch* is the work of the author and has nothing to do with the code otherwise under the GPL. You're thinking along the MS lines that the GPL is somehow a "virus" that infects your propriatary code. Stop it.
You also seem to be laboring under some sort of misconception that the GPL somehow can confer legality/illegality. It's perfectly possible to write GPLed code under one jurisdiction that may be illegal under another and thus may be freely distributable in, say, the US, but not in, say, China. Or in this case China, but not the US.
The licese has been posted here on
Read it and think about it.
KFG
that makes it illegal to release the information to US citizens. The patch code was written entirely by non US citizens outside of the US borders. In order to prevent the possible prosecution by the US government, ala Skylarov, they released under license terms that forbid divulging information about it.
*Redhat* is not the refuser here, they are simply bound by the terms of the author's *license.*
Now, let's do a little deductive work here while we're about it, shall we?
This isn't a "Linux" patch, it's "Redhat" patch. And what *Redhat* kernel developer has already shown a propensity for making socio-political statements with the license terms of his kernel patches regarding the DMCA?
Anyone care to go waaaaaaaaaay out on a limb and "guess" just who might have had a hand in this?
I'll give you three guesses, but if you don't get it in one you haven't been paying attention.
KFG
Didn't? Rumor has it that Alan Cox is explicitly involved in *this* patch.
KFG
I'd only point out that when the point is reached that an OS fills the users needs little R&D is left to do actually. That's kind of the point actually. Competition spurs development, development creates maturity, maturity creates a commodity market. Maybe not a "good thing" for the company trying to rake in billions of excess profits, but damned good for the consumer who simply wants a cheap effective product that accomplishes what he wants. Like, say, a TV set. You can already see the effect in the latest OS's/GUI's being released which tout the transparency of its widgets rather than the actual functionality of the OS. From the point of view of the user the state of the art in OS's has already reached the point where they're being sold on the size of their "tailfins."
A Linux "zealot" might also point out the the fastest developing OS at the moment isn't a commercial product at all and is indicitive of the fact the the price of an OS had *already* dropped to $0, yet development continues.
KFG
For God's sake. . . WHY?
KFG
I'd only note that I didn't say LED, I said diode.
1 2. html
You are correct about *most* LED, although you might throw in a touch of phosphorus as well, but not all:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/nsu_pf/010308/010308-
KFG
Well yes, I worded that badly. I didn't mean to imply that diamonds were organic, merely that they were carbon.
I understand that many (perhaps even the majority) now except the definition of organic that you use, but all definitions of organic have always been controversial and even arbitrary.
In 1846 William Gregory ( Professor of Chemistry at U. Edinburgh) defined it thus:
"Organic chemistry is so called because it treats of the substances which form the structure of organized beings, and of their products, whether animal or vegetable."
This is pretty much what the common conception of the word "organic" still means.
In my day ( as a student, I'm still here actually) it was taken to mean any compound containing carbon in a covalent bond, thus the polymer teflon ( whose monomer is C2F4) was considered organic.
I suppose your definition will prevail universally in time because it makes more practical ( as opposed to historical ) sense in this day and age for both commercial and biochemical purposes.
However, I would like to point out in my defense that the carbon containing compound I specifically mentioned ( the material used to make monitor cases) is, in fact, a hydrocarbon compound.
Oh, and by the way, IANAC, IAAP, so what the hell do I know anyway.
KFG
Just as moldy as the other organic compounds around your house, and in your computer, like the case of your existing monitor.
Organic != biodegradable, it means containing carbon, like a diamond, which is about as far from biodegradable as you can get.
OLED's are are made in polymer sheets rather than in individual chips of silicon. Ultimately this will make them cheap, rugged, rollable and producable in almost arbitrary sizes, like wallpaper.
I feel a Ray Bradbury story coming on.
KFG
means *plastic.* Polymers are organic compounds, which means containing carbon, as opposed the the silicon of traditional diodes.
I've also got his hot news flash for you, you're covered in bacteria already.
KFG
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall2000/McAtee
AOL simply finds itself in the position many online services found themselves in with the advent of the WWW, without an actual raison d'etre, and managed, somehow, to reposition themselves as the "hallway" where others failed to do the same.
So while I believe the author is correct in that they're fighting a battle they will ultimately lose, the premise that they somehow positioned themselves for this is faulty.
They were originally based on the premise that *ordinary* people would pay for online services, and for a number of years were the *only* such service available to such ordinary people.
The "Information Superhighway" didn't happen to be built throught their "town," nor was its future existence predictable in the first place. Much as many ghost towns in the midwest were "created" by the particular route the railroad companies happened to pick, such railroad companies not being predictable when the towns were founded a century before on perfectly solid river routes.
KFG
that infects many that made their money young and retired. . . he doesn't know what to do with himself.
Rather than spending the next few years pissing away his money on ill considered ventures I'd like to suggest to him what many have found to be the cure for his ennui.
Golf.
KFG