But if the trojan hoses the host PC along with all the family photographs and all the music they've paid good money for - ah, now that might actually make people realise that there's a problem.
I take it you have no experience dealing with "the public" and computers. They get horked, they see weird popups, and have no idea that it's really unusual. It's all "black magic" to them, anyway, so they don't differentiate much between a "Are you sure you want to NNN" and "Sending bomb threat to Pres Obama" messages.
If it has an OK button, they'll click on it to get it out of their face.
Once, I was doing tech support, and the customer was complaining about a condition, and I was SURE that the instructions for how to fix the condition were being displayed to the end user, who adamantly denied it. I walked her through the process, step by step, and at the appropriate point, asked her if any warning box or anything showed up. She said she saw nothing.
So I set up a remote desktop session, had the customer perform the software procedure again, slowly, so I could see what happened. She clicked slowly, step by step, and then, at the appropriate point, I saw a brief white flash before she told me that, once again, nothing had happened.
So I told her to take her hand OFF THE MOUSE while I performed the sequence myself.
This time, as expected, the dialog box popped up explaining what the problem was, and exactly what to do to fix it. When I asked if she'd ever seen it before, she said "Oh yeah, I just click OK whenever I see it". I pointed out to her the first sentence in the box, which was something like "WARNING: read this carefully or you will probably lose important data!". Somehow, "lose important data" was not the same as "Why isn't the program remembering what I typed?".
And this was no idiot - she was a well trained, college/university graduated professional!
There is lots of humor in society about the stupidity of the average Joe. Remember that, by definition, half of everybody is even dumber than that. Sad, when you think about it, huh?
Most of the costs to drive are hidden. Gas is cheap, even at three bux/gallon. You have to consider:
1) Purchase of the car! Or did you ever stop to think about the 400 or more/month you pay? And even when you aren't paying this, you are probably paying more on:
2) Cost of repairs. Tires, brakes, transmissions...
3) Insurance and accidents. Neither are cheap, one partially covers the cost of the other.
4) Police action. I'm a good driver, with zero serios accidents in 20 years of driving, and two fender benders. I still get a ticket every other year or so, and always have.
Etc. The IRS gives a standard deduction of about 0.50 / mile, and that's about right. It's what my company reimburses for travel on trips. It only costs about 1.5 times as much to fly a private plane!
Cars are much more expensive than we give them credit for!
Comparing energy production density to Corn-based Ethanol is like stealing candy from a baby. Corn-fueled Ethanol has a tough time doing much better than just burning fossil fuels outright in systemic carbon footprint, and in some studies, is actually WORSE than strictly burning gasoline/oil.
Yes, the average is a net improvement of anywhere from 25% to 70% return on investment, but even then, you have to consider the value of the farmland itself! We'd probably do much better by simply growing wild grass on prime farmland, harvesting it, and burying it, when looking in terms of carbon footprint!
So saying that NNN technology is X% better than bioethanol is like saying that doing X is less painful than scraping off your penile foreskin with a cheese grater.
Truthful, but not very useful. Come back when you have something that actually works. For example, what's the benefit of bio-electricity over Photo-voltaics? Now that the latter technology is down to (or better than) $1/watt, this becomes a very, very tough technology to beat, and actually works better on craptastic, rocky soil off in the desert someplace with 3 inches of rainfall per year.
Meaning, we can get back to using farmland for growing food, and stop with this silly "let's raid the kitchen cupboard to feed our guzzling SUVs!" craze that's been on for the last few years.
you can use your old PC to download one of 1000 linux variants, all with different advantages and disadvantages, copy it over to this new box, spend hours installing and tweaking it, with no guarantee it will work with this hardware, and then it will work....reasonably well.
I've been using Linux for my desktop for years, so it was no surprise when my friend, a Science teacher, decided he wanted to give it a try. I grabbed my Fedora Core 10 DVD and we were off!
So we loaded the DVD. We had to swap the CD drive with a DVD drive, but loading it was otherwise uneventful. It recognized video, sound, mouse, etc. without issue.
But then we grabbed the USB wireless network adapter, plugged it in, and about 10 seconds later, it asks for the WPA key! Within 2 minutes of the first reboot, we had logged onto the Internet, had decent-looking video, sound, and it was downloading the first round of security updates!
I'm not saying Linux is perfect, and it's still not as polished as OSX. But it's come a long, long way from the frustrating hours I used to spend trying to get X11 to work with RedHat Linux 5.2!
The LHC hurls particles with about as much kinetic energy as a flying fruit fly around. Earth is constantly bombarded with particles having orders of magnitude more energy, so if LHC could cause a black hole, we wouldn't be here to build it!
The point isn't the amount of energy (Earth is bombarded with higher energy particles constantly) but that it's finely controlled and we can observe exactly what happens when two sub-atomic particles collide with a respectable amount of energy to let us know what's really going on down at that level. And that's fascinating.
Could LHC cause the earth to implode? Perhaps with the same likelihood that Universe was created by a 7 foot tall bunny made out of spaghetti, used VHS video tape and lug nuts, or that all the subatomic particles in your body will suddenly decide to move together through the wall behind you into the ladies room on the other side and you end up convicted of a sexual crime, even though you are innocent. Possible? Yes, but don't think that "possible" means anything other than "all but infinitely unlikely except that it's near impossible to prove a negative".
And don't forget: there is a non-zero chance that the universe WAS created by a 7-foot tall bunny made of spaghetti, used video tape, and lug nuts! Everybody panic!!!
Man oh man - if you think that a teenie needle injection once a mnth is a hassle wait until you have CHILDREN! From waking up every 2 hours 24 hours a day to decimating the order of your household, children make a stupid shot seem just... stupid.
Tell you what: don't worry about the needle. Just have good, natural sex, the way nature intended. Wait a few years, and then tell me if a shot is really a big deal!
You build an extremely precise little box out of highly refined metals, circuit boards and PCBs, manufactured from parts made all around the world before being shipped thousands of miles to your local Staples, and you're worried about the half ounce of INK!?!?!
That's like cuttng calories by skipping the cherry on your triple scoop ice cream sundae!
Want to go green? Use CFLs. Replace your shower heads. Bike to work. Email instead of printing. Open windows rather than hit the thermostat. Use GotoMeeting rather than fly. Plant some trees on the South side of your home and office buildings. Buy your food from a local Farmer's Market rather than the mega-mart to avoid 'fresh' food from Argentina or some other place 4,000 miles away in refrigerated containers.
When the ink jet containers themselves are made of soy, and the mfgs standardize their cartridges so that reuse is more feasible, I'll take notice. Otherwise, this flavor of 'green' is idotic.
Buy Soy ink because it's better, lasts longer, or is cheaper and don't delude yourself with false green.
PS: We did something similar for a while, until we realized that our cost structure was such that we could undercut our competition handily and still turn a tidy profit - so we made the "sale" price our regular price...
We charge only what our competitors charge for their annual service contract, and basically charge no initial contract price at all! At what point does competition end and "dumping" begin".
IBM isn't going to re-sell the Sun hardware. Your car dealership nearly always makes a profit on the trade-in by selling them as used cars through a used car salesman on a lot with a different business name.
Still, it's not anti competitive. To be more clear: this is a textbook definition of what competitive means.
To suggest Latin rules for pluralisation is absurd because the latin word wasn't to be pluralised; the units of measurement were to be. Learned folk should not repeat this mistake.... because not knowing how to properly pluralize a word is what the "learned folk" spent 8 years and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to know, right? Either that, or there's something pretty seriously borken with the post high-school educational system.
Well, perhaps the post high-school system is pretty borken, but I sure don't remember "learning" how to conjugate Latin-derived words by studying the root word... in Latin! No, I learned other stuff that's far less important, such as how to manipulate equations, write software, and what an "ecology" is.
Some idiots like to sound smart by saying "virii" instead of "virus". These are the same folks who prefer to say "cracked" instead of "hacked". And if you take a look at how most everybody else says either of these words, you'll see just how many people listen to these time bandits.
The CA teachers' union is an excellent example of unintended consequences. When hired in any union school (basically all of elementary/high schools in CA) a teacher has to work for a few years to earn tenure, after which it becomes very difficult to fire him/her.The idea I to encourage good quality teachers by making it more paletable/desirable to be a teacher.
The reality, however, is pretty much the exact opposite.
Life circumstances are such for me that I get to see behind the scenes in K12 education in California. I've seen school administrators wring their hands over how to deal with a crappy teacher... with tenure. There really is no way to get rid of bad teachers, unless they are basically caught with their hands in the pants of a minor.
So crappy teachers with tenure are free to be jerks and not give a flying shiatte about getting along. It's terrible. Teachers who bring books to read at staff meetings because their contract requires attendance, not participation. An ugly caste system based on seniority rather than competence that simultaneously discourages positive change and encourages conformity.
I've seen much better, though. I see alternative non-union schools, and it's like night and day! Teachers are brighter, happier because the arseholes just get fired! At one school I saw, the teachers were actually picked by the parents - the crappy teachers were never fired, they were simply paid as a function of how many parents chose to work with them. Guess how long the assholes stuck around? (never more than a single semester)
Unions were formed to solve a very real problem - to deal with worker abuses - but it seems that now, the unions have become their own problem that needs to be solved!
KDE begat Konqueror. Konqueror begat Safari and Webkit. Webkit is now commonly used for cell phones and alternative browsers, including Google Chrome, all of which are gaining marketshare. In a very real sense, KDE has the unique distinction of birthing one of the most common and popular browser engines anywhere on the Internet.
Whether or not you use KDE, you've almost assuredly used software created therefrom!
I would NOT pay the $50 bill. I've pulled the plug, and started using Online + Netflix to cut my monthly bill by some $100. Got rid of the Dish DVR, the dual-tv plan. Now we (in my household) all use laptops and two workstations with big screens. We still have one of the old NTSC TVs for playing video games.
Online TV Rocks!
On-demand TV has an interesting quality - when you discover a show you like, you can immediately jump to see past episodes you missed. Case in point: Heroes. I just discovered this excellent fantasy show, but jumping in "mid-stream" leaves lots to be desired. I'm able to watch past episodes all the way back to season 1, in order, on my schedule.
There is no combination of Cable/Satellite/DVR that will give you this.
The result is that I suddenly have a desire to explore, try new shows for a few minutes, see if I like it. Sure, the chances of me liking some new show are relatively small, but the payoff is so high!
It's a whole new way of doing TV made possible by a decent quality 3 Mb Internet connection, Hulu, Netflix, and Cast TV
Cars are obviously built for transporting people, is in 'uncreative' if you have a car and decide to drive it to work?
Similarly, laptops with broken screens that are otherwise stable are useful as either desktop replacements or as lightweight servers. They are compatible with both of these uses, and in the latter case, are actually quite well suited, if sufficient for your needs.
I'm using a 25 dollar used Pentium IV to serve around 5 million hits a month for a website I host, Apache/Linux, etc with good uptime and a load average around 0.01 most of the time. Pretty much just a vanilla install of CentOS with patches installed, etc.
It's amazing what you can do with junk and a decent O/S nowadays!
Small as it may seem, a major victory has been won, here.
Ever notice that the price of MS Office exceeds the price of the rest of the computer? Whole swaths of public records stand at risk, tied to a format that's both obsolete and undocumented. But, by commoditizing the document format with open standards, this has the effect of requiring Microsoft to compete on real terms - stability, usability, features, price - rather than by effective lockout through underhanded OEM de3als and shady use of their Monopoly status.
This is a very, very good thing for everybody. (Even Microsoft - if they aren't forced to compete on real terms, they will atrophy and wither, eventually losing their monopoly and going the way of DEC)
As always, the ball's not out of the park yet, we must remain ever vigilant and work to preserve a competitive marketplace....
Whew! It's a good thing that the car manufacturers know exactly what it takes to stay profitable! You can be pissed because they don't incorporate the latest 'safety features' but they have a business to run! They aren't a charity!
And it's a cold, cruel world out there! It's not like if they were dying that people would just pony up billions of dollars to keep 'em afloat, now, would they?
US cars are the best in the world, too. They last longer, they are more precisely made, they -
What's that you say? Really? Are you kidding? They did?
Games are easy to make. Gpogle for 'flash games' and you'll find 100,000 crappy little card games and Tetris clones. Good games are HARD to make. It costs real time from people with real talent who need to be paid in real money. The problem is that the costs of developing a game are not connected to the cost of replicating the game. The first copy of the game costs 5 million dollars. the second copy costs 4 cents.
Piracy isn't an issue until it's so rampant that those with the money choose to pirate anyway.
Would you pay 4 dollars to see a matinee? Would you buy a scifi novel for 6 bucks? Try comparing the time you spend enjoying each of these to the time you spend on a video game, and you'll find that the 40-50 dollars spent on a good game is surprisingly cheap!
I bought GTA San Andreas a long time ago. (years?) I picked it up again this last weekend and got another afternoon of fun out of it!
Don't be at all hesitant to buy a good game, even if you have a playable pirate copy - it's insurance for more fun in the future!
I host some good-sized databases. (aroung 100 GB when dumped as sql statements) I do this on commodity x64 systems and RHEL/EXT3. Although an F/S swap may boost performance some, I'd almost a guarantee in blood before I'd consider swapping.
Performance is already good/excellent, so the benefit would be minor, while the cost of any corruption would be extreme. I'd be far more likely to upgrade the ECC RAM than do anything to the F/S until a few years of stability have assured me that the change would work out.
Given how fast CHEAP hardware is nowadays, speed takes a distant back seat to reliability nowadays!
Wouldn't it be better for the supermarket to simply not rearrange their store all the damn time?
My grocery store changes layout significantly perhaps every year or two. That's not exactly "all the damn time"...
Or alternatively, provide decent customer service by having employees give the elderly people directions?
Decent customer service costs money. Given the choice, people generally vote (with their money) for cheaper food over better serviced food. Put another way: Would you rather pay $9 for a bottle of wine in the bag you carry to your car, or $13 for the same bottle of wine carried to your car by a checker?
Me? I'll pocket the $4 since I'm walking thataway anyhow, and so will enough other people that mega-marts (like WinCo or Wal-Mart) are the order of the day, now. Your (expensive!) friendly local grocery store is a relic of ancient memory.
But not *everybody* can carry their $9 bottle of wine to the car, and that's where ever-cheaper technology comes into play. It's just part of the gradual move society and technology are making towards The technology singularity that you'll see mentioned around these parts. One more case of human intelligence being off-loaded to a machine because it can do the same job faster/better/cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
But if the trojan hoses the host PC along with all the family photographs and all the music they've paid good money for - ah, now that might actually make people realise that there's a problem.
I take it you have no experience dealing with "the public" and computers. They get horked, they see weird popups, and have no idea that it's really unusual. It's all "black magic" to them, anyway, so they don't differentiate much between a "Are you sure you want to NNN" and "Sending bomb threat to Pres Obama" messages.
If it has an OK button, they'll click on it to get it out of their face.
Once, I was doing tech support, and the customer was complaining about a condition, and I was SURE that the instructions for how to fix the condition were being displayed to the end user, who adamantly denied it. I walked her through the process, step by step, and at the appropriate point, asked her if any warning box or anything showed up. She said she saw nothing.
So I set up a remote desktop session, had the customer perform the software procedure again, slowly, so I could see what happened. She clicked slowly, step by step, and then, at the appropriate point, I saw a brief white flash before she told me that, once again, nothing had happened.
So I told her to take her hand OFF THE MOUSE while I performed the sequence myself.
This time, as expected, the dialog box popped up explaining what the problem was, and exactly what to do to fix it. When I asked if she'd ever seen it before, she said "Oh yeah, I just click OK whenever I see it". I pointed out to her the first sentence in the box, which was something like "WARNING: read this carefully or you will probably lose important data!". Somehow, "lose important data" was not the same as "Why isn't the program remembering what I typed?".
And this was no idiot - she was a well trained, college/university graduated professional!
There is lots of humor in society about the stupidity of the average Joe. Remember that, by definition, half of everybody is even dumber than that. Sad, when you think about it, huh?
All the substantial problems with electric cars and energy density have been solved. No, I'm not kidding.
Google the name: Shai Agassi, and push your local senators and representatives to PAY ATTENTION to this man!
Once again: Shai Agassi. This is for real.
Most of the costs to drive are hidden. Gas is cheap, even at three bux/gallon. You have to consider:
1) Purchase of the car! Or did you ever stop to think about the 400
or more/month you pay? And even when you aren't paying this, you are probably paying more on:
2) Cost of repairs. Tires, brakes, transmissions...
3) Insurance and accidents. Neither are cheap, one partially covers the cost of the other.
4) Police action. I'm a good driver, with zero serios accidents in 20 years of driving, and two fender benders. I still get a ticket every other year or so, and always have.
Etc. The IRS gives a standard deduction of about 0.50 / mile, and that's about right. It's what my company reimburses for travel on trips. It only costs about 1.5 times as much to fly a private plane!
Cars are much more expensive than we give them credit for!
Comparing energy production density to Corn-based Ethanol is like stealing candy from a baby. Corn-fueled Ethanol has a tough time doing much better than just burning fossil fuels outright in systemic carbon footprint, and in some studies, is actually WORSE than strictly burning gasoline/oil.
Yes, the average is a net improvement of anywhere from 25% to 70% return on investment, but even then, you have to consider the value of the farmland itself! We'd probably do much better by simply growing wild grass on prime farmland, harvesting it, and burying it, when looking in terms of carbon footprint!
So saying that NNN technology is X% better than bioethanol is like saying that doing X is less painful than scraping off your penile foreskin with a cheese grater.
Truthful, but not very useful. Come back when you have something that actually works. For example, what's the benefit of bio-electricity over Photo-voltaics? Now that the latter technology is down to (or better than) $1/watt, this becomes a very, very tough technology to beat, and actually works better on craptastic, rocky soil off in the desert someplace with 3 inches of rainfall per year.
Meaning, we can get back to using farmland for growing food, and stop with this silly "let's raid the kitchen cupboard to feed our guzzling SUVs!" craze that's been on for the last few years.
you can use your old PC to download one of 1000 linux variants, all with different advantages and disadvantages, copy it over to this new box, spend hours installing and tweaking it, with no guarantee it will work with this hardware, and then it will work....reasonably well.
I've been using Linux for my desktop for years, so it was no surprise when my friend, a Science teacher, decided he wanted to give it a try. I grabbed my Fedora Core 10 DVD and we were off!
So we loaded the DVD. We had to swap the CD drive with a DVD drive, but loading it was otherwise uneventful. It recognized video, sound, mouse, etc. without issue.
But then we grabbed the USB wireless network adapter, plugged it in, and about 10 seconds later, it asks for the WPA key! Within 2 minutes of the first reboot, we had logged onto the Internet, had decent-looking video, sound, and it was downloading the first round of security updates!
I'm not saying Linux is perfect, and it's still not as polished as OSX. But it's come a long, long way from the frustrating hours I used to spend trying to get X11 to work with RedHat Linux 5.2!
The LHC hurls particles with about as much kinetic energy as a flying fruit fly around. Earth is constantly bombarded with particles having orders of magnitude more energy, so if LHC could cause a black hole, we wouldn't be here to build it!
The point isn't the amount of energy (Earth is bombarded with higher energy particles constantly) but that it's finely controlled and we can observe exactly what happens when two sub-atomic particles collide with a respectable amount of energy to let us know what's really going on down at that level. And that's fascinating.
Could LHC cause the earth to implode? Perhaps with the same likelihood that Universe was created by a 7 foot tall bunny made out of spaghetti, used VHS video tape and lug nuts, or that all the subatomic particles in your body will suddenly decide to move together through the wall behind you into the ladies room on the other side and you end up convicted of a sexual crime, even though you are innocent. Possible? Yes, but don't think that "possible" means anything other than "all but infinitely unlikely except that it's near impossible to prove a negative".
And don't forget: there is a non-zero chance that the universe WAS created by a 7-foot tall bunny made of spaghetti, used video tape, and lug nuts! Everybody panic!!!
Man oh man - if you think that a teenie needle injection once a mnth is a hassle wait until you have CHILDREN! From waking up every 2 hours 24 hours a day to decimating the order of your household, children make a stupid shot seem just... stupid.
Tell you what: don't worry about the needle. Just have good, natural sex, the way nature intended. Wait a few years, and then tell me if a shot is really a big deal!
Why would you think it's the same people complaining in bost cases?
I didn't build anything. I certainly didn't ship anything thousands of miles to my local Staples. And I'm not worried about ink.
You did both by proxy by purchasing ink-jet cartridges. Without the demand produced by purchases such as yours, why would suppliers supply them?
Let me get this straight...
You build an extremely precise little box out of highly refined metals, circuit boards and PCBs, manufactured from parts made all around the world before being shipped thousands of miles to your local Staples, and you're worried about the half ounce of INK!?!?!
That's like cuttng calories by skipping the cherry on your triple scoop ice cream sundae!
Want to go green? Use CFLs. Replace your shower heads. Bike to work. Email instead of printing. Open windows rather than hit the thermostat. Use GotoMeeting rather than fly. Plant some trees on the South side of your home and office buildings. Buy your food from a local Farmer's Market rather than the mega-mart to avoid 'fresh' food from Argentina or some other place 4,000 miles away in refrigerated containers.
When the ink jet containers themselves are made of soy, and the mfgs standardize their cartridges so that reuse is more feasible, I'll take notice. Otherwise, this flavor of 'green' is idotic.
Buy Soy ink because it's better, lasts longer, or is cheaper and don't delude yourself with false green.
PS: We did something similar for a while, until we realized that our cost structure was such that we could undercut our competition handily and still turn a tidy profit - so we made the "sale" price our regular price...
We charge only what our competitors charge for their annual service contract, and basically charge no initial contract price at all! At what point does competition end and "dumping" begin".
It would be anticompetitive if IBM had a monopoly... but they don't. Dumping in this sense is entirely legal and is, in fact, commonplace....
Upgrade from XXX competitor and we'll drop our price by 10%!
IBM isn't going to re-sell the Sun hardware. Your car dealership nearly always makes a profit on the trade-in by selling them as used cars through a used car salesman on a lot with a different business name.
Still, it's not anti competitive. To be more clear: this is a textbook definition of what competitive means.
To suggest Latin rules for pluralisation is absurd because the latin word wasn't to be pluralised; the units of measurement were to be. Learned folk should not repeat this mistake. ... because not knowing how to properly pluralize a word is what the "learned folk" spent 8 years and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to know, right? Either that, or there's something pretty seriously borken with the post high-school educational system.
Well, perhaps the post high-school system is pretty borken, but I sure don't remember "learning" how to conjugate Latin-derived words by studying the root word... in Latin! No, I learned other stuff that's far less important, such as how to manipulate equations, write software, and what an "ecology" is.
Some idiots like to sound smart by saying "virii" instead of "virus". These are the same folks who prefer to say "cracked" instead of "hacked". And if you take a look at how most everybody else says either of these words, you'll see just how many people listen to these time bandits.
The CA teachers' union is an excellent example of unintended consequences. When hired in any union school (basically all of elementary/high schools in CA) a teacher has to work for a few years to earn tenure, after which it becomes very difficult to fire him/her.The idea I to encourage good quality teachers by making it more paletable/desirable to be a teacher.
The reality, however, is pretty much the exact opposite.
Life circumstances are such for me that I get to see behind the scenes in K12 education in California. I've seen school administrators wring their hands over how to deal with a crappy teacher... with tenure. There really is no way to get rid of bad teachers, unless they are basically caught with their hands in the pants of a minor.
So crappy teachers with tenure are free to be jerks and not give a flying shiatte about getting along. It's terrible. Teachers who bring books to read at staff meetings because their contract requires attendance, not participation. An ugly caste system based on seniority rather than competence that simultaneously discourages positive change and encourages conformity.
I've seen much better, though. I see alternative non-union schools, and it's like night and day! Teachers are brighter, happier because the arseholes just get fired! At one school I saw, the teachers were actually picked by the parents - the crappy teachers were never fired, they were simply paid as a function of how many parents chose to work with them. Guess how long the assholes stuck around? (never more than a single semester)
Unions were formed to solve a very real problem - to deal with worker abuses - but it seems that now, the unions have become their own problem that needs to be solved!
Love it, hate it, doesn't matter.
KDE begat Konqueror. Konqueror begat Safari and Webkit. Webkit is now commonly used for cell phones and alternative browsers, including Google Chrome, all of which are gaining marketshare. In a very real sense, KDE has the unique distinction of birthing one of the most common and popular browser engines anywhere on the Internet.
Whether or not you use KDE, you've almost assuredly used software created therefrom!
I would NOT pay the $50 bill. I've pulled the plug, and started using Online + Netflix to cut my monthly bill by some $100. Got rid of the Dish DVR, the dual-tv plan. Now we (in my household) all use laptops and two workstations with big screens. We still have one of the old NTSC TVs for playing video games.
Online TV Rocks!
On-demand TV has an interesting quality - when you discover a show you like, you can immediately jump to see past episodes you missed. Case in point: Heroes. I just discovered this excellent fantasy show, but jumping in "mid-stream" leaves lots to be desired. I'm able to watch past episodes all the way back to season 1, in order, on my schedule.
There is no combination of Cable/Satellite/DVR that will give you this.
The result is that I suddenly have a desire to explore, try new shows for a few minutes, see if I like it. Sure, the chances of me liking some new show are relatively small, but the payoff is so high!
It's a whole new way of doing TV made possible by a decent quality 3 Mb Internet connection, Hulu, Netflix, and Cast TV
Cars are obviously built for transporting people, is in 'uncreative' if you have a car and decide to drive it to work?
Similarly, laptops with broken screens that are otherwise stable are useful as either desktop replacements or as lightweight servers. They are compatible with both of these uses, and in the latter case, are actually quite well suited, if sufficient for your needs.
I'm using a 25 dollar used Pentium IV to serve around 5 million hits a month for a website I host, Apache/Linux, etc with good uptime and a load average around 0.01 most of the time. Pretty much just a vanilla install of CentOS with patches installed, etc.
It's amazing what you can do with junk and a decent O/S nowadays!
Small as it may seem, a major victory has been won, here.
Ever notice that the price of MS Office exceeds the price of the rest of the computer? Whole swaths of public records stand at risk, tied to a format that's both obsolete and undocumented. But, by commoditizing the document format with open standards, this has the effect of requiring Microsoft to compete on real terms - stability, usability, features, price - rather than by effective lockout through underhanded OEM de3als and shady use of their Monopoly status.
This is a very, very good thing for everybody. (Even Microsoft - if they aren't forced to compete on real terms, they will atrophy and wither, eventually losing their monopoly and going the way of DEC)
As always, the ball's not out of the park yet, we must remain ever vigilant and work to preserve a competitive marketplace....
Whew! It's a good thing that the car manufacturers know exactly what it takes to stay profitable! You can be pissed because they don't incorporate the latest 'safety features' but they have a business to run! They aren't a charity!
And it's a cold, cruel world out there! It's not like if they were dying that people would just pony up billions of dollars to keep 'em afloat, now, would they?
US cars are the best in the world, too. They last longer, they are more precisely made, they -
What's that you say? Really? Are you kidding? They did?
Never mind.....
Games are easy to make. Gpogle for 'flash games' and you'll find 100,000 crappy little card games and Tetris clones. Good games are HARD to make. It costs real time from people with real talent who need to be paid in real money. The problem is that the costs of developing a game are not connected to the cost of replicating the game. The first copy of the game costs 5 million dollars. the second copy costs 4 cents.
Piracy isn't an issue until it's so rampant that those with the money choose to pirate anyway.
Would you pay 4 dollars to see a matinee? Would you buy a scifi novel for 6 bucks? Try comparing the time you spend enjoying each of these to the time you spend on a video game, and you'll find that the 40-50 dollars spent on a good game is surprisingly cheap!
I bought GTA San Andreas a long time ago. (years?) I picked it up again this last weekend and got another afternoon of fun out of it!
Don't be at all hesitant to buy a good game, even if you have a playable pirate copy - it's insurance for more fun in the future!
Uh, steganography is spelled like this:
I was understanding that we are generally aware of nothing where we are desperate to have fixed, at least not immediately.
Sans the bolds, that is.
I host some good-sized databases. (aroung 100 GB when dumped as sql statements) I do this on commodity x64 systems and RHEL/EXT3. Although an F/S swap may boost performance some, I'd almost a guarantee in blood before I'd consider swapping.
Performance is already good/excellent, so the benefit would be minor, while the cost of any corruption would be extreme. I'd be far more likely to upgrade the ECC RAM than do anything to the F/S until a few years of stability have assured me that the change would work out.
Given how fast CHEAP hardware is nowadays, speed takes a distant back seat to reliability nowadays!
... While the net itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jit -
Buffering... Buffering... Buffering...
Wouldn't it be better for the supermarket to simply not rearrange their store all the damn time?
My grocery store changes layout significantly perhaps every year or two. That's not exactly "all the damn time"...
Or alternatively, provide decent customer service by having employees give the elderly people directions?
Decent customer service costs money. Given the choice, people generally vote (with their money) for cheaper food over better serviced food. Put another way: Would you rather pay $9 for a bottle of wine in the bag you carry to your car, or $13 for the same bottle of wine carried to your car by a checker?
Me? I'll pocket the $4 since I'm walking thataway anyhow, and so will enough other people that mega-marts (like WinCo or Wal-Mart) are the order of the day, now. Your (expensive!) friendly local grocery store is a relic of ancient memory.
But not *everybody* can carry their $9 bottle of wine to the car, and that's where ever-cheaper technology comes into play. It's just part of the gradual move society and technology are making towards The technology singularity that you'll see mentioned around these parts. One more case of human intelligence being off-loaded to a machine because it can do the same job faster/better/cheaper.