After reading this article in MAKE I found out about Big Blue Saw, which is similar to eMachineShop. They'll take a DXF file and will produce machined parts in a handful of materials (plastic, steel, etc) and thicknesses. They even provide & promote links to a bunch of Open Source CAD software. Good stuff.
Actually, back when I got my real estate license they were very quick to point out that if you rent out a portion of your primary place of residence the FHA does not apply, though it does vary from state to state. In California, at least, even in a place as crazy rent-controlled as San Francisco, as owner you are essentially king of your castle and can even go so far as to cancel a lease and kick someone out for any reason or for no reason at all, though it's usually couched in language along the lines of "You may remove tenants for the purposes of using the formerly-occupied space for your own or your family's usage."
Since iTunes 6 came out and broke the Hymn Project I have stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store and have instead taken to browsing torrentz.com and other similar sites (but never downloading from them, of course, as I have heard that doing so is illegal.)
Perhaps I am in the minority, but I want to do whatever I want with music I purchase. If I can't do that with iTunes then I simply won't spend money there.
It's "Dvorak." When calling someone an idiot you should probably spell their name properly, lest you look like an idiot yourself.
There is no incentive to fix the code base if it can make additional money selling "protection."
That's not true at all. Microsoft has all types of incentives, namely competition from alternatives like Linux and Mac OS. But even from a programming standpoint, it makes sense. Virtually all software companies update their software; it makes sense that MS will too. It's foolish and cynical to think they "just don't care", even though I know a lot of people do.
Dvorak is making an apt comparison here. It's a racket. They have a bad product that's full of security holes, and now they are either going to A.) charge for software to "protect" you from the flaws they didn't care enough to fix in the first place and B.) charge you for an upgrade to a new OS that in all liklihood will have very similar problems to the current incarnation, thus necessitating A.), as well. This is in fact a conflict of interest.
Two points about this:
1. There is a lot of functionality added by the registry. Yes, it has a curse along with the blessing, but does Dorvack actually think Windows ran better without a registry like it did in 3.1? I think he's just a little behind the times.
2. How about he actually suggest an alternative? Bashing MS is one thing. How about Dorvack suggest a better way? It's easy to say "Microsoft sucks". How about he come up with a plan on his own?
Dvorak is probably referring to how other operating systems (*nix and OSX, for example) do things: store configuration data in text files. In the case of OSX this allows you to oftentimes just copy an application file from one computer to another and simply have it work. The Windows Registry is a pain in the ass to work with-- a pain to back up and restore, a pain to alter, a pain to transfer from system to system, a pain to find things in, a pain to even understand without explicit instructions-- and other simpler solutions have existed since basically the beginning of computing. The alternative is fairly obvious to anyone who has worked with more than just Windows, which is perhaps both why Dvorak did not suggest it and why you did not understand it.
Maybe we should start making parks or other arbitrary public places 18-only to prevent child molesters.
We already have. This woman was fined $1000 and faces up to 90 days in jail for sitting on a park bench where there was a small sign that said she must be accompanied by a child.
Absurd.
Right now in California if you are caught streaking you are marked as a sex offender for life. This Puritanical hysteria over kids and sex is absolutely ridiculous. Kids do not need to be protected from every goddamned thing in the world, they need to be informed about everything and taught to make sensible decisions. As in all things, the truth will set you free.
Mambo actually has caching built in, IIRC. You just need to turn it on in the admin. Also, using something like eAccelerator or the Zend Performance Suite can also help things tremendously.
Well, you could do what Verio does in NYC and open all of the security doors and put box fans in the doors to help keep the NOC cool. The sparks from overheated motherboards should add a nice splash of light and smoke, and you wouldn't even have to hire extras to be the frustrated throngs of people beating down the door to the OC.
You very clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
This is the sort of categorical statement that makes people who posit them look like idiots, especially when they go and spew forth untruths like you spew.
and most importantly, no branch of government has the right to exert direct control over the activities of another.
This is utterly, totally wrong. The legislature writes laws that the executive branch must execute. Or, the legislature writes laws that the judicial branch rules on, meaning that the judicial branch has ultimate veto power over the legislature. They directly affect one another as a core function of their existence.
The court had no basis in the MA constitution, which it cites, for its decision.
Wrong. The basis was that there is no law prohibiting it (that things are legal unless explicitly named illegal) and the equal protection clause. They found that marriage is a religious institution and that civil union is one that affords rights to two people who decide to share their livlihoods together-- be they siblings, parent and child, very good friends, or gay lovers-- and that the government has no business whatsoever in telling people what sex they must be to take part in that civil institution.
the government still exists to serve and implement the will of the majority.
Really? Don't the majority of people want individual rights, low taxes, as little government intrusion in their lives as possible, less poverty, fair healthcare, excellent schools, low inflation, and truth from their elected leaders? If that's the case, why is the government doing a piss-poor job of each and every one of those things right now? Further, there are lots of majorities in history-- Nazi Germany or the current North Korea, for instance-- where I would be very careful of saying that a government who represented the majority was doing the right thing.
The government exists to protect my individual rights, even if you don't like what I do with them. The vast majority of people were against interracial marriage before it was made legal, so are you saying we should have abolished that? The vast majority of people in this country are Christian, so should we legislate that since a simple majority are Christian, everyone should be?
I'm sorry, I recognize that there are some things wrong with my original post and have tried to admit to them, but the one which I am replying to is just so off the mark I don't know what else to say.
Um, were you born yesterday? How does bullshit like this get modded up?
I guess I did not Recall Correctly. I was unaware of the term "activist judge" before I heard it in reference to the gay marriage issue.
The term activist judges applies to judges who rule based on what THEY think the law should be - not on what it is.
Wrong. Go read the Constitution, yourself. The point of the judiciary is to interpret the law, which is ultimately Constitutional but far more often has been legislated afterwards by Congress or the states. Interpretation by definition requires one to add one's own viewpoint to one's decision. This is why there is an appeals process: one judge may interpret the law diferently from another judge. If the law was that black and white then the need for a judiciary would not exist-- we would just feed the cases into a computer program and a decision would come out.
Furthermore, while the framers didn't put a paragraph in there like "Paragraph 25: How to Protect the Minority from the Majority," it doesn't mean that there are not systems in place set forth by the Constitution that have this effect. I am quite aware that nowhere in the Constitution is the judiciary literally tasked with "protecting the minority from the tyrrany of the majority" but that is, in effect, what it ends up doing in many instances when it strikes down laws that unfairly favor or oppress a given group. Actually, every check and balance built into the Constitution is supposed to have the effect of "protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority;" an independent judciary is just one of them.
And the task of making laws was given explicitly to the Congress and implicitly to the Judiciary. Again, these things are not spelled out explicitly in the Constitution, but the rules the Constitution sets up end up have the same effect.
IIRC the term "activist judge" first appeared when the gay marriage debate sprung its head, and the Bush administration and its shills started bitching about how judges weren't "representing the will of the people."
Last time I checked, that wasn't the role of the judiciary; that is the role of the legislature. The purpose of the judiciary is to protect the minority from the "tyranny of the majority" -- to protect people from the legislative and executive branches. As "activist coporations" and "activist fundamentalists" take over more and more of our country, the judiciary branch is increasingly the only branch of government that an average person can actually use to get anything accomplished.
While judges are supposed to be as fair and objective as possible they are still human, and thus, just as with journalists, it is utterly impossible for them to be truly objective. They categorically cannot help but throw in a bit of their own personal viewpoints on the judgments they make.
"Judicial activism" is now bandied about whenever someone doesn't like the results of a certain trial. While I certainly don't agree with this particular judgment (and it affects me directly) I think that this will be easily overturned in a higher court.
Let's quit it with the "judicial activism" epithets whenever a judge makes a decision that is diferent from our own viewpoints.
I think the dissenting judge's opinion in the matter is interesting:
In a strong dissent, Judge Robert Smith argued that the basis of the majority's decision that all income is taxable is "that the commissioner says it is... The majority cites no authority at all, and offers no persuasive reason, in support of this new interpretation."
I live in California and just took a contract position with a company in New York. This ruling does not say anything about contractors vs. employees, but knowing New York's tax system, I would guess they want it to apply to me, too. I of course do not intend on paying NYS a single cent, since as far as I can tell they have no authority over me whatsoever, but IANAL.
Let me start by saying I am not an M$ fanboy nor do I appreciate the amount of extra effort I have to go through to support IE's broken CSS.
Several of these articles say that M$ doesn't really consider CSS2 to be a fully fleshed-out standard or has reservations about it. I work with CSS every day, and I develop on Firefox first and then "backport" to less-compliant browsers, but I still partly agree with M$: as a standard I think CSS is rather sucky.
I love the idea of CSS, I love having beautiful clean content/presentation-separated code, but I think that CSS itself is still a pain in the ass and often simply gets in the way of what I want to do rather than helping me along. There are lots of things- centering, differing implementations of padding vs. margin, the positioning mess- that simply don't work as they should. Some of these are the fault of browsers, and some are the fault of the standard.
I assume there are "good" reasons why CSS2 was designed the way it was, but there are simply things that should be much easier than they are in CSS. These inexplicably difficult parts of CSS are what I think ultimately drive people to throw up their hands and just say "I can do this in five minutes with tables and it will work in all browsers. Screw this."
The problem is larger than just M$ and IE: I think it's partly the fault of the browser makers interpreting the standard differently, partly the fault of browser makers not supporting the standard at all, and partly the fault of the specification itself.
Motorola takes forever to develop and launch phones. For example, the v600 and the phones based on the same platform (basically all of the vXXX phones with some exceptions) were all supposed to start shipping in Q2 of 2003. They ended up not shipping until Q2 of 2004, literally a year late.
A couple of years ago one of my very good friends was hired as part of the small team designing new phones for Moto when they realized they were losing market share because their phones basically sucked. Even he didn't know when the v600 was actually going to ship, and he helped design the damned thing!
Differences in marketing between consumers and phone carriers aside, Motorola has a horrible history of delivering their products late. Past performance would indicate that they are shifting the blame to Apple in this instance even though they have no idea when their product will truly be ready.
I think perhaps you don't go the gym very often, then. Most gyms broadcast their televisions' audio over various FM frequencies, enabling you to watch CNN or The Simpsons whilst monotonously running on a treadmill. An FM radio is very nice to have when you finally tire of the same 20 songs on your flash-based iPodLikeDevice and want to switch to something else.
I saw this upside-down tomato garden on a recent flight in SkyMall and thought it looked pretty cool. The tomato plants grow downwards and then you can plant something else on top. It's rather large, but I think it's rather unusual and is the ideal geek planter.
but does Picasa ever send any data back to Google? Does it ever send back "anonymous" basic data like "This is the pixel data for what user X12345 selects as a problem redeye area" or "The user liked the results of the 'I'm feeling lucky'' button.'
For example, what if User X used the redeye tool to successfully and satisfactorially remove redeye from a random image, and all of the data regarding how the software did the redeye fix and the data about whe sent to Google anonymously. This data could then be used, for example, by a relatively basic artificial intelligence image processing algorithm in order to be able to use it to determine the best way to de-red-eye an image.
Anonymous image data of such magnitude could be immensely useful.
Because for nearly 100 years the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers embarked on a sort of war between one another to see who could build more dams (thereby "reclaiming" water) in America west of the Mississippi, which is largely one big desert (with some exceptions such as the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades and parts of the SF Bay Area). There was-- seriously-- an attitude that if people just moved there and started farming that the weather would change. People even coined the term "the rain follows the plow."
Of course this is ridiculous, but people believed it. The antics that ensued are simply astounding, with the end result that the US now essentially gives away vast amounts of water to farmers who grow crops like corn and wheat that have very little nutritional value. Furthermore, a vast majority-- more than 90%-- of the reclaimed water does *not* go to people in cities, but instead gets poured into the ground with inefficient irrigation techniques.
There is a fascinating book by Mark Reisman called Cadillac Desert that goes into the whole history of water in the American West. PBS even made a multi-part documentary about it. It's particularly timely to read it during the Reign of the Bush Family because it reminds you that people have been corrupt throughout history, and that we're not the only people who have to have lived under the thumb of nepotistic good old boyism.
San Francisco has a ridiculously high poor and homeless population. It's truly obscene. However, you can bet money that the mayor is thinking much more about the poor and the homeless and the agencies that support them than he is about rich Pacific Heights Ladies Who Lunch. Google for "Gavin Newsom" and see what the guy stands for, and what's he's done for San Francisco. He's pretty cool.
The median income is so high because there are so many people here with so much money. "Poor" people here make more money than "poor" people in other areas, though, largely due to higher-than-federal minimum wage laws. Still, there are huge swaths of San Francisco that are "poor," and the mayor has focused a large part of his administration on serving the poor and the homeless.
The mayor is *not* trying to get re-elected. The mayor, in fact, is only in the first year of his 4-year term, and by just about any San Franciscan's account he has done nothing but kicked ass and mopped up the streets afterwards. He has completely revamped the budget, took a voluntary pay cut, reorganized the police and fire departments, cracked down on unsolved murders and crime, led the nation on human rights and gay marriage issues, and tackled San Francisco's biggest issue-- homelessness-- with a multidisciplinary team that seems to actually be working.
Say whatever you want to about Gavin Newsom, but he has been a major boon to San Francisco at a time when it's down. The WiFi thing of course could cost a lot of money, but imagine the potential benefits of pervasive, citywide, free access.
And I don't mean this to be a troll. Their computers suck, their web site is atrocious, they're absurdly overpriced, and they seem to coast by on their brand alone.
Every time I sit down to repair a VAIO it's a harrowing experience-- you have to have their specific installation CD's to really make it go anywhere near smoothly. While a normal XP installation will technically work, getting it correct is nigh on impossible. They do weird things like partition the hard drives into multiple, inexplicable partitions.
Then there's the website. It's awful. It's impossible to find the support section. The Knowledge Base is more like a Lack of Knowledge Base. The driver download process is cumbersome and it has a propensity for repeatedly kicking you into the Sony Online Store.
Then there's their hideous propensity to stick to random, proprietary "standards" of their own creation. They stick useless things (like the ThumbWheelXPPro2000) on every single device. They've been pushing Memory Stick for years and haven't really gotten anywhere with it. This is to say nothing of their insistence on using ATRAC as their audio format on all of their digital audio players (which they apparently have finally rescinded), or their stupid MiniDiscs, which somehow still survive in spite of their relative uselessness when compared to other solutions on the market.
They do have nice industrial design-- sometimes-- and a remarkable capability for shrinking things. But by and large their products are proprietary and waaaaaay overpriced, a combination that damns them in my book.
I find that hard to believe. Without exception *every* politico I have written to via email or snail mail, even those not in my own state, have written me back. I used to live in Ohio, then New York, and now in California, and I shuffle between the three randomly and still have deep interests in what goes on in those states, so I write to Congresspeople in all of them. It may take awhile, but they have always responded.
I just had to write something similar for a client using XML-RPC and PHP. They have multiple entertainment properties, some of which they operate themselves and some of which are outsourced. They wanted a user to be able to sign up at any of their partners, search their local database of users, match up existing customer data if possible, and synchronize passwords. Then we built a single change password page, and now whenever a user needs to change his password all the partners direct him to the centralized page. The software then sends out an XML-RPC payload to each of the partners who have established relationships with the user.
The partners all maintain local copies of their records and can continue to function (without the option to change passwords) if for some reason our client's system goes down. In effect it works similarly to Passport. It was surprisingly easy to do, though it did take rigorous testing.
In retrospect an LDAP solution would have been more elegant but we had to think about getting the largest number of partners onboard at once, and a fairly simple PHP script is easier for most people to swallow than learning LDAP (which I am doing right now, and I must say that it is the worst-documented software I've ever seen since delving into Linux TTY/Serial port programming).
Slashdot Mirror
After reading this article in MAKE I found out about Big Blue Saw, which is similar to eMachineShop. They'll take a DXF file and will produce machined parts in a handful of materials (plastic, steel, etc) and thicknesses. They even provide & promote links to a bunch of Open Source CAD software. Good stuff.
Actually, back when I got my real estate license they were very quick to point out that if you rent out a portion of your primary place of residence the FHA does not apply, though it does vary from state to state. In California, at least, even in a place as crazy rent-controlled as San Francisco, as owner you are essentially king of your castle and can even go so far as to cancel a lease and kick someone out for any reason or for no reason at all, though it's usually couched in language along the lines of "You may remove tenants for the purposes of using the formerly-occupied space for your own or your family's usage."
Since iTunes 6 came out and broke the Hymn Project I have stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store and have instead taken to browsing torrentz.com and other similar sites (but never downloading from them, of course, as I have heard that doing so is illegal.)
Perhaps I am in the minority, but I want to do whatever I want with music I purchase. If I can't do that with iTunes then I simply won't spend money there.
It's "Dvorak." When calling someone an idiot you should probably spell their name properly, lest you look like an idiot yourself.
Dvorak is making an apt comparison here. It's a racket. They have a bad product that's full of security holes, and now they are either going to A.) charge for software to "protect" you from the flaws they didn't care enough to fix in the first place and B.) charge you for an upgrade to a new OS that in all liklihood will have very similar problems to the current incarnation, thus necessitating A.), as well. This is in fact a conflict of interest.
Dvorak is probably referring to how other operating systems (*nix and OSX, for example) do things: store configuration data in text files. In the case of OSX this allows you to oftentimes just copy an application file from one computer to another and simply have it work. The Windows Registry is a pain in the ass to work with-- a pain to back up and restore, a pain to alter, a pain to transfer from system to system, a pain to find things in, a pain to even understand without explicit instructions-- and other simpler solutions have existed since basically the beginning of computing. The alternative is fairly obvious to anyone who has worked with more than just Windows, which is perhaps both why Dvorak did not suggest it and why you did not understand it.
We already have. This woman was fined $1000 and faces up to 90 days in jail for sitting on a park bench where there was a small sign that said she must be accompanied by a child.
Absurd.
Right now in California if you are caught streaking you are marked as a sex offender for life. This Puritanical hysteria over kids and sex is absolutely ridiculous. Kids do not need to be protected from every goddamned thing in the world, they need to be informed about everything and taught to make sensible decisions. As in all things, the truth will set you free.
No, they're actually going to do the rendering with the Ethernet controller. The GPU has just become to unwieldy for doing graphics.
Mambo actually has caching built in, IIRC. You just need to turn it on in the admin. Also, using something like eAccelerator or the Zend Performance Suite can also help things tremendously.
Well, you could do what Verio does in NYC and open all of the security doors and put box fans in the doors to help keep the NOC cool. The sparks from overheated motherboards should add a nice splash of light and smoke, and you wouldn't even have to hire extras to be the frustrated throngs of people beating down the door to the OC.
Falcarius utahensis definitely evolved morals and realized that it is moral folly to eat other animals. Definitely.
You very clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
This is the sort of categorical statement that makes people who posit them look like idiots, especially when they go and spew forth untruths like you spew.
and most importantly, no branch of government has the right to exert direct control over the activities of another.
This is utterly, totally wrong. The legislature writes laws that the executive branch must execute. Or, the legislature writes laws that the judicial branch rules on, meaning that the judicial branch has ultimate veto power over the legislature. They directly affect one another as a core function of their existence.
The court had no basis in the MA constitution, which it cites, for its decision.
Wrong. The basis was that there is no law prohibiting it (that things are legal unless explicitly named illegal) and the equal protection clause. They found that marriage is a religious institution and that civil union is one that affords rights to two people who decide to share their livlihoods together-- be they siblings, parent and child, very good friends, or gay lovers-- and that the government has no business whatsoever in telling people what sex they must be to take part in that civil institution.
the government still exists to serve and implement the will of the majority.
Really? Don't the majority of people want individual rights, low taxes, as little government intrusion in their lives as possible, less poverty, fair healthcare, excellent schools, low inflation, and truth from their elected leaders? If that's the case, why is the government doing a piss-poor job of each and every one of those things right now? Further, there are lots of majorities in history-- Nazi Germany or the current North Korea, for instance-- where I would be very careful of saying that a government who represented the majority was doing the right thing.
The government exists to protect my individual rights, even if you don't like what I do with them. The vast majority of people were against interracial marriage before it was made legal, so are you saying we should have abolished that? The vast majority of people in this country are Christian, so should we legislate that since a simple majority are Christian, everyone should be?
I'm sorry, I recognize that there are some things wrong with my original post and have tried to admit to them, but the one which I am replying to is just so off the mark I don't know what else to say.
Um, were you born yesterday? How does bullshit like this get modded up?
I guess I did not Recall Correctly. I was unaware of the term "activist judge" before I heard it in reference to the gay marriage issue.
The term activist judges applies to judges who rule based on what THEY think the law should be - not on what it is.
Wrong. Go read the Constitution, yourself. The point of the judiciary is to interpret the law, which is ultimately Constitutional but far more often has been legislated afterwards by Congress or the states. Interpretation by definition requires one to add one's own viewpoint to one's decision. This is why there is an appeals process: one judge may interpret the law diferently from another judge. If the law was that black and white then the need for a judiciary would not exist-- we would just feed the cases into a computer program and a decision would come out.
Furthermore, while the framers didn't put a paragraph in there like "Paragraph 25: How to Protect the Minority from the Majority," it doesn't mean that there are not systems in place set forth by the Constitution that have this effect. I am quite aware that nowhere in the Constitution is the judiciary literally tasked with "protecting the minority from the tyrrany of the majority" but that is, in effect, what it ends up doing in many instances when it strikes down laws that unfairly favor or oppress a given group. Actually, every check and balance built into the Constitution is supposed to have the effect of "protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority;" an independent judciary is just one of them.
And the task of making laws was given explicitly to the Congress and implicitly to the Judiciary. Again, these things are not spelled out explicitly in the Constitution, but the rules the Constitution sets up end up have the same effect.
IIRC the term "activist judge" first appeared when the gay marriage debate sprung its head, and the Bush administration and its shills started bitching about how judges weren't "representing the will of the people."
Last time I checked, that wasn't the role of the judiciary; that is the role of the legislature. The purpose of the judiciary is to protect the minority from the "tyranny of the majority" -- to protect people from the legislative and executive branches. As "activist coporations" and "activist fundamentalists" take over more and more of our country, the judiciary branch is increasingly the only branch of government that an average person can actually use to get anything accomplished.
While judges are supposed to be as fair and objective as possible they are still human, and thus, just as with journalists, it is utterly impossible for them to be truly objective. They categorically cannot help but throw in a bit of their own personal viewpoints on the judgments they make.
"Judicial activism" is now bandied about whenever someone doesn't like the results of a certain trial. While I certainly don't agree with this particular judgment (and it affects me directly) I think that this will be easily overturned in a higher court.
Let's quit it with the "judicial activism" epithets whenever a judge makes a decision that is diferent from our own viewpoints.
I think the dissenting judge's opinion in the matter is interesting:
... The majority cites no authority at all, and offers no persuasive reason, in support of this new interpretation."
In a strong dissent, Judge Robert Smith argued that the basis of the majority's decision that all income is taxable is "that the commissioner says it is
I live in California and just took a contract position with a company in New York. This ruling does not say anything about contractors vs. employees, but knowing New York's tax system, I would guess they want it to apply to me, too. I of course do not intend on paying NYS a single cent, since as far as I can tell they have no authority over me whatsoever, but IANAL.
Any tax lawyers care to comment on this?
Let me start by saying I am not an M$ fanboy nor do I appreciate the amount of extra effort I have to go through to support IE's broken CSS.
Several of these articles say that M$ doesn't really consider CSS2 to be a fully fleshed-out standard or has reservations about it. I work with CSS every day, and I develop on Firefox first and then "backport" to less-compliant browsers, but I still partly agree with M$: as a standard I think CSS is rather sucky.
I love the idea of CSS, I love having beautiful clean content/presentation-separated code, but I think that CSS itself is still a pain in the ass and often simply gets in the way of what I want to do rather than helping me along. There are lots of things- centering, differing implementations of padding vs. margin, the positioning mess- that simply don't work as they should. Some of these are the fault of browsers, and some are the fault of the standard.
I assume there are "good" reasons why CSS2 was designed the way it was, but there are simply things that should be much easier than they are in CSS. These inexplicably difficult parts of CSS are what I think ultimately drive people to throw up their hands and just say "I can do this in five minutes with tables and it will work in all browsers. Screw this."
The problem is larger than just M$ and IE: I think it's partly the fault of the browser makers interpreting the standard differently, partly the fault of browser makers not supporting the standard at all, and partly the fault of the specification itself.
Motorola takes forever to develop and launch phones. For example, the v600 and the phones based on the same platform (basically all of the vXXX phones with some exceptions) were all supposed to start shipping in Q2 of 2003. They ended up not shipping until Q2 of 2004, literally a year late.
A couple of years ago one of my very good friends was hired as part of the small team designing new phones for Moto when they realized they were losing market share because their phones basically sucked. Even he didn't know when the v600 was actually going to ship, and he helped design the damned thing!
Differences in marketing between consumers and phone carriers aside, Motorola has a horrible history of delivering their products late. Past performance would indicate that they are shifting the blame to Apple in this instance even though they have no idea when their product will truly be ready.
I think perhaps you don't go the gym very often, then. Most gyms broadcast their televisions' audio over various FM frequencies, enabling you to watch CNN or The Simpsons whilst monotonously running on a treadmill. An FM radio is very nice to have when you finally tire of the same 20 songs on your flash-based iPodLikeDevice and want to switch to something else.
I saw this upside-down tomato garden on a recent flight in SkyMall and thought it looked pretty cool. The tomato plants grow downwards and then you can plant something else on top. It's rather large, but I think it's rather unusual and is the ideal geek planter.
but does Picasa ever send any data back to Google? Does it ever send back "anonymous" basic data like "This is the pixel data for what user X12345 selects as a problem redeye area" or "The user liked the results of the 'I'm feeling lucky'' button.'
For example, what if User X used the redeye tool to successfully and satisfactorially remove redeye from a random image, and all of the data regarding how the software did the redeye fix and the data about whe sent to Google anonymously. This data could then be used, for example, by a relatively basic artificial intelligence image processing algorithm in order to be able to use it to determine the best way to de-red-eye an image.
Anonymous image data of such magnitude could be immensely useful.
It appears from browsing the rest of his site that this guy is Italian and has a weak grasp of English. FWIW, he has apparently appeared on several different Italian television shows whilst discussing P2P. And he's not too harsh on the eyes, either.
While I agree that this translation sucks, don't ride him so hard on his poor English skills.
Because for nearly 100 years the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers embarked on a sort of war between one another to see who could build more dams (thereby "reclaiming" water) in America west of the Mississippi, which is largely one big desert (with some exceptions such as the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades and parts of the SF Bay Area). There was-- seriously-- an attitude that if people just moved there and started farming that the weather would change. People even coined the term "the rain follows the plow."
Of course this is ridiculous, but people believed it. The antics that ensued are simply astounding, with the end result that the US now essentially gives away vast amounts of water to farmers who grow crops like corn and wheat that have very little nutritional value. Furthermore, a vast majority-- more than 90%-- of the reclaimed water does *not* go to people in cities, but instead gets poured into the ground with inefficient irrigation techniques.
There is a fascinating book by Mark Reisman called Cadillac Desert that goes into the whole history of water in the American West. PBS even made a multi-part documentary about it. It's particularly timely to read it during the Reign of the Bush Family because it reminds you that people have been corrupt throughout history, and that we're not the only people who have to have lived under the thumb of nepotistic good old boyism.
San Francisco has a ridiculously high poor and homeless population. It's truly obscene. However, you can bet money that the mayor is thinking much more about the poor and the homeless and the agencies that support them than he is about rich Pacific Heights Ladies Who Lunch. Google for "Gavin Newsom" and see what the guy stands for, and what's he's done for San Francisco. He's pretty cool.
The median income is so high because there are so many people here with so much money. "Poor" people here make more money than "poor" people in other areas, though, largely due to higher-than-federal minimum wage laws. Still, there are huge swaths of San Francisco that are "poor," and the mayor has focused a large part of his administration on serving the poor and the homeless.
The mayor is *not* trying to get re-elected. The mayor, in fact, is only in the first year of his 4-year term, and by just about any San Franciscan's account he has done nothing but kicked ass and mopped up the streets afterwards. He has completely revamped the budget, took a voluntary pay cut, reorganized the police and fire departments, cracked down on unsolved murders and crime, led the nation on human rights and gay marriage issues, and tackled San Francisco's biggest issue-- homelessness-- with a multidisciplinary team that seems to actually be working.
Say whatever you want to about Gavin Newsom, but he has been a major boon to San Francisco at a time when it's down. The WiFi thing of course could cost a lot of money, but imagine the potential benefits of pervasive, citywide, free access.
And I don't mean this to be a troll. Their computers suck, their web site is atrocious, they're absurdly overpriced, and they seem to coast by on their brand alone.
Every time I sit down to repair a VAIO it's a harrowing experience-- you have to have their specific installation CD's to really make it go anywhere near smoothly. While a normal XP installation will technically work, getting it correct is nigh on impossible. They do weird things like partition the hard drives into multiple, inexplicable partitions.
Then there's the website. It's awful. It's impossible to find the support section. The Knowledge Base is more like a Lack of Knowledge Base. The driver download process is cumbersome and it has a propensity for repeatedly kicking you into the Sony Online Store.
Then there's their hideous propensity to stick to random, proprietary "standards" of their own creation. They stick useless things (like the ThumbWheelXPPro2000) on every single device. They've been pushing Memory Stick for years and haven't really gotten anywhere with it. This is to say nothing of their insistence on using ATRAC as their audio format on all of their digital audio players (which they apparently have finally rescinded), or their stupid MiniDiscs, which somehow still survive in spite of their relative uselessness when compared to other solutions on the market.
They do have nice industrial design-- sometimes-- and a remarkable capability for shrinking things. But by and large their products are proprietary and waaaaaay overpriced, a combination that damns them in my book.
I find that hard to believe. Without exception *every* politico I have written to via email or snail mail, even those not in my own state, have written me back. I used to live in Ohio, then New York, and now in California, and I shuffle between the three randomly and still have deep interests in what goes on in those states, so I write to Congresspeople in all of them. It may take awhile, but they have always responded.
I just had to write something similar for a client using XML-RPC and PHP. They have multiple entertainment properties, some of which they operate themselves and some of which are outsourced. They wanted a user to be able to sign up at any of their partners, search their local database of users, match up existing customer data if possible, and synchronize passwords. Then we built a single change password page, and now whenever a user needs to change his password all the partners direct him to the centralized page. The software then sends out an XML-RPC payload to each of the partners who have established relationships with the user.
The partners all maintain local copies of their records and can continue to function (without the option to change passwords) if for some reason our client's system goes down. In effect it works similarly to Passport. It was surprisingly easy to do, though it did take rigorous testing.
In retrospect an LDAP solution would have been more elegant but we had to think about getting the largest number of partners onboard at once, and a fairly simple PHP script is easier for most people to swallow than learning LDAP (which I am doing right now, and I must say that it is the worst-documented software I've ever seen since delving into Linux TTY/Serial port programming).