Lost my 256MB Lexar JumpDrive 2.0 Pro in the driveway during winter (lots of snow); found it a week later while shovelling. Dried it off, plugged it in, no problems.
I was a secondary photographer for a wedding once, having been loaned a high-end Kodak digital pro camera. I got a lot of great shots precisely because I could shoot so many pictures - and I undoubtedly missed many precisely because I had to keep swapping cards and copying the contents to a hard drive (several GBs of high-res images). Two or three (!) 8GB cards would have improved my productivity 10-50%.
Supply and demand is an economic law. Telecommuting means anyone anywhere can do software for anyone anywhere else.
Someone elsewhere is willing to do the work for less, and don't have to be anywhere in particular to do it, so customers/employers just hire whoever can do the job for less. Nothing wrong with that - just like you buying widget X from the cheapest source.
A whole bunch of old unusable computers were piled up in the warehouse floor at work, well-known the company would soon pay to have them recycled. Imagine my shock when, upon taking a few back to my desk to re-assemble into a working box, the two of us doing so were suddenly accused of transgressing HAZARDOUS WASTE LAWS! Caught on tape and chastized by four layers of management, we learned the hard way that creative and conciencious recycling of junked computers is now a FEDERAL OFFENSE.
Ya see, there's enough nasty stuff (lead, mercury, etc.) in a computer that, while not a concern when normally used, it suddenly acquires the HAZARDOUS WASTE label when the computing resources department deems the machine unuseable. Once declared unusable (broken hard drive, scratched display, whatever) and tracked for recycling, the federal government declares it HAZMAT and requires a chain-of-custody paperwork and handling so strict that one faces $100,000 fines and felony-level jail times for merely taking it from the trash pile.
In Medievial England, stealing garbage from royalty was a hanging offense. That sentiment has returned: just trying to revive a dead computer to improve your work resources can get you fired, even jailed.
Be careful of "creative recycling" and "dumpster diving". You're trying to save some old hardware, the feds think you're criminally evading the HAZMAT laws.
Actually, you can print on wood with your own laser printer...and a clothes iron.
1. Print the image on paper backwards (mirror the image).
2. Place the printout face-down on the wood.
3. Set the clothes iron on high, and use it to heat the paper enough to melt the toner (but not so hot as to burn the paper or wood). While applying the heat, carefully peel the paper off - leaving toner behind.
Helps if you set the printer to use as much toner as possible. Takes a few tries to get the knack.
I periodically get a credit card offer from my alma mater, freely offering a $100,000 limit. If they're pushing a card with a limit high enough to buy a house on impulse, I'm sure I could negotiate a higher limit; maybe not in the millions, but likely a large fraction thereof. Ironically, my income is rather modest, so I don't understand why they keep offering me a card that could require several years of my net income to pay off.
You can achieve that effect by putting a computer disk in your old audio CD player.
Worse: I went to a screening of The Matrix on an IMAX screen, where the audio was farked up. They stopped the film to fix the sound system. Something went extra wrong, and they pumped digital noise (maybe the PCM audio stream directly into audio in) at full 50,000 watts volume. AAAAAAAAA!!!! All the tweeters blew out; not sure about my hearing.
Another reason Japan gets all the cool stuff.
on
Sony PCG-U1
·
· Score: 2
I asked a Japanese co-worker why we don't have all the nifty technostuff Japan does. Interesting explaination:
In Japanese culture, women are not allowed to bring any money into a marriage. In centuries past, this made sense as they rarely had any money to bring. Today, Japanese women (like Americans) get married significantly older, and often have high-paying careers before getting hitched. Since they socially can't save that money for use in marriage, they have a relatively HUGE disposable income - coupled with miniscule apartments, no other big-ticket items (like house or car), and a fantastic telecom infrastructure (due to dense population) - they have the money & motivation to buy lots of really nifty communication-oriented (remember, these are women) gizmos.
Two years ago Steve Mann had a very similar run-in with AirCanada, they being very hostile towards him bringing his equipment on-board, and damaging some of his equipment in the process.
Just because your site isn't making enough money doesn't mean people are merely leeches or thieves, and it's insulting to paint them as such (even vegan.com visitors).
Supply and demand rules. If there's a supply of free stuff, people aren't likely to pay for the same thing - that's not leeching, that just makes economic sense. Like broadcast TV, some sites find that giving away products provides an avenue for advertising (a very profitable activity when done right). There are a lot of ways of extracting money from pockets, and much of that involves knowing who your clients/customers REALLY are. You may not buy from ThinkGeek, but enough do to support SlashDot through advertising.
If people aren't giving you enough money to support your site, then that's YOUR problem for not balancing the supply-and-demand equation profitably - it does NOT mean your customers are the dregs of society.
.coms DO work - there's an awful lot of them out there, and there's a lot of money being made.
What the author doesn't understand is "supply and demand" still rules economics. There was a huge burst of startups trying to find the money, and most simply didn't provide what people were willing to pay for...or worse, many startups thought they could make a fortune giving things away for free. Like any new technology/industry, a lot of people jump in at first, and those companies not economically viable get washed out - that doesn't mean that the whole industry is a loss.
There are plenty of.coms out there. Millions of customers like me do most of our purchases on-line. Those who provide what we want at fair & reasonable prices will survive; those that don't, won't. Paying to send an animated greeting card may very well be one of the "won't" as even the author is unwilling to pay real cash for what others provide for free.
This is a new industry..com business is here to stay - that does not mean that all.com companies will survive. Supply and demand rules; those who don't follow it will fail.
Sheesh...this is one of the coolest input devices to appear in a LONG time. Look at what's on your desk right now: CRT, windowing GUI, keyboard, mouse, all tied together by a spaghetti of cables...practically unchanged for the last FOURTY YEARS! Awwww, you'll lack a little tactile feedback - wah. This is just a half-step forward (still a durn QWERTY keyboard) and you so-called "computer geeks" are whiny and fearful of the change. HMDs, datagloves, speech I/O, and other forward-moving tech, all merely niche fringe devices (only the PDA has moved us foward) lost to people glued to their CRTs. How disappointing...
Gimmie one of these nifty units ASAP! When's it out? Price? Need beta testers?
Let's move technology FORWARD, and not just refine nearly antique technologies!
Agreed, bigtime. I've got i-Glasses with stereo vision & head tracking - and nothing to run on it.
My guess is that the VR fad of the '90s ran so far ahead of the technology, most people looked at the state of the art and said "if I can't have full-body immersion (a la "Lawnmower Man" or "Disclosure") with infinite resolution and zero lag for $50, forget it."
90% of my documents fail grammar checking, despite being correct. Grammar checkers expect a certain audience, which usually is not technical or academic.
I re-watched that match a couple more times, and decided that it was indeed a proper ruling. SOW was definitely more aggressive and caused more damage, while BioHazard was just barely staying alive.
The refs did goof by stopping the match when they did, though it was so close to the end of the second count as to be forgiveable, and BioHazard was clearly doomed anyway. The BioHazard team wholly accepted the ruling, so there's no need to fuss.
Re:USB 2.0 _HARDWARE_ is here, drivers barely
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
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· Score: 2
The USB 2.0 PC cards may have been on the shelves, but they did not come with drivers. Only a couple manufacturers are releasing drivers now, and those arrived just a few weeks ago. It's kinda hard to develop, debug & release a device when the software isn't there to let them talk.
That's nice and all, but a long way from film-making.
Not as far as you might think. Actually, it's about 100 feet down the hall from where I'm sitting right now.
Consider the resolution. Images rendered for film are typically done at about 3000 x 2000
The final product is about half that. Resolutions up to 4k x 3k are used for intermediate special-effects editing. Digital cinema will be operating about HDTV resolutions.
we're left with another problem: you can't record VGA signals on film.
With digital cinema, it's (roughly speaking) VGA in - so you could sit in the theater watching what's being generated at that moment. For film, it's not that big a deal to replace the VGA out with a connector to a real-time film recorder (remember the hall I mentioned above? go to the other side of the hall).
Not so. The vending machine does not have an endless supply of contents, it must be refilled at irregular intervals. When sales are brisk, it is more likely to go empty for an extended period, preventing sales even to people entirely willing to pay $3 a can. By raising the price, supply and demand balance better. There are times when I won't even pay $1 for a soda...and others when I'd pay $5 (which is when the vending machine is most likely empty).
Slashdot Mirror
Lost my 256MB Lexar JumpDrive 2.0 Pro in the driveway during winter (lots of snow); found it a week later while shovelling. Dried it off, plugged it in, no problems.
I was a secondary photographer for a wedding once, having been loaned a high-end Kodak digital pro camera. I got a lot of great shots precisely because I could shoot so many pictures - and I undoubtedly missed many precisely because I had to keep swapping cards and copying the contents to a hard drive (several GBs of high-res images). Two or three (!) 8GB cards would have improved my productivity 10-50%.
The goth version: Tamagothi at http://www.waningmoon.com/gothica/articles/6660077 .shtml
It's simple economics, folks:
Supply and demand is an economic law.
Telecommuting means anyone anywhere can do software for anyone anywhere else.
Someone elsewhere is willing to do the work for less, and don't have to be anywhere in particular to do it, so customers/employers just hire whoever can do the job for less. Nothing wrong with that - just like you buying widget X from the cheapest source.
Ya see, there's enough nasty stuff (lead, mercury, etc.) in a computer that, while not a concern when normally used, it suddenly acquires the HAZARDOUS WASTE label when the computing resources department deems the machine unuseable. Once declared unusable (broken hard drive, scratched display, whatever) and tracked for recycling, the federal government declares it HAZMAT and requires a chain-of-custody paperwork and handling so strict that one faces $100,000 fines and felony-level jail times for merely taking it from the trash pile.
In Medievial England, stealing garbage from royalty was a hanging offense. That sentiment has returned: just trying to revive a dead computer to improve your work resources can get you fired, even jailed.
Be careful of "creative recycling" and "dumpster diving". You're trying to save some old hardware, the feds think you're criminally evading the HAZMAT laws.
1. Print the image on paper backwards (mirror the image).
2. Place the printout face-down on the wood.
3. Set the clothes iron on high, and use it to heat the paper enough to melt the toner (but not so hot as to burn the paper or wood). While applying the heat, carefully peel the paper off - leaving toner behind.
Helps if you set the printer to use as much toner as possible. Takes a few tries to get the knack.
I want to see a Mozilla feature button which when pressed:
1. stores the spam sender's address
2. forwards the spam to all stored spammer addresses
Give 'em a taste of their own medicine. Get enough people doing this, and each spam site should get melted down.
I periodically get a credit card offer from my alma mater, freely offering a $100,000 limit. If they're pushing a card with a limit high enough to buy a house on impulse, I'm sure I could negotiate a higher limit; maybe not in the millions, but likely a large fraction thereof. Ironically, my income is rather modest, so I don't understand why they keep offering me a card that could require several years of my net income to pay off.
Worse:
I went to a screening of The Matrix on an IMAX screen, where the audio was farked up. They stopped the film to fix the sound system. Something went extra wrong, and they pumped digital noise (maybe the PCM audio stream directly into audio in) at full 50,000 watts volume. AAAAAAAAA!!!! All the tweeters blew out; not sure about my hearing.
I asked a Japanese co-worker why we don't have all the nifty technostuff Japan does. Interesting explaination:
In Japanese culture, women are not allowed to bring any money into a marriage. In centuries past, this made sense as they rarely had any money to bring. Today, Japanese women (like Americans) get married significantly older, and often have high-paying careers before getting hitched. Since they socially can't save that money for use in marriage, they have a relatively HUGE disposable income - coupled with miniscule apartments, no other big-ticket items (like house or car), and a fantastic telecom infrastructure (due to dense population) - they have the money & motivation to buy lots of really nifty communication-oriented (remember, these are women) gizmos.
Two years ago Steve Mann had a very similar run-in with AirCanada, they being very hostile towards him bringing his equipment on-board, and damaging some of his equipment in the process.
His detailed description with photos is at Air Canada Irresponsibility.
Just because your site isn't making enough money doesn't mean people are merely leeches or thieves, and it's insulting to paint them as such (even vegan.com visitors).
Supply and demand rules. If there's a supply of free stuff, people aren't likely to pay for the same thing - that's not leeching, that just makes economic sense. Like broadcast TV, some sites find that giving away products provides an avenue for advertising (a very profitable activity when done right). There are a lot of ways of extracting money from pockets, and much of that involves knowing who your clients/customers REALLY are. You may not buy from ThinkGeek, but enough do to support SlashDot through advertising.
If people aren't giving you enough money to support your site, then that's YOUR problem for not balancing the supply-and-demand equation profitably - it does NOT mean your customers are the dregs of society.
What the author doesn't understand is "supply and demand" still rules economics. There was a huge burst of startups trying to find the money, and most simply didn't provide what people were willing to pay for...or worse, many startups thought they could make a fortune giving things away for free. Like any new technology/industry, a lot of people jump in at first, and those companies not economically viable get washed out - that doesn't mean that the whole industry is a loss.
There are plenty of
This is a new industry.
Common carriers are not responsible for what is carried. Period.
Sheesh...this is one of the coolest input devices to appear in a LONG time. Look at what's on your desk right now: CRT, windowing GUI, keyboard, mouse, all tied together by a spaghetti of cables...practically unchanged for the last FOURTY YEARS! Awwww, you'll lack a little tactile feedback - wah. This is just a half-step forward (still a durn QWERTY keyboard) and you so-called "computer geeks" are whiny and fearful of the change. HMDs, datagloves, speech I/O, and other forward-moving tech, all merely niche fringe devices (only the PDA has moved us foward) lost to people glued to their CRTs. How disappointing...
Gimmie one of these nifty units ASAP! When's it out? Price? Need beta testers?
Let's move technology FORWARD, and not just refine nearly antique technologies!
My guess is that the VR fad of the '90s ran so far ahead of the technology, most people looked at the state of the art and said "if I can't have full-body immersion (a la "Lawnmower Man" or "Disclosure") with infinite resolution and zero lag for $50, forget it."
Another great technology bites the big one.
90% of my documents fail grammar checking, despite being correct. Grammar checkers expect a certain audience, which usually is not technical or academic.
The refs did goof by stopping the match when they did, though it was so close to the end of the second count as to be forgiveable, and BioHazard was clearly doomed anyway. The BioHazard team wholly accepted the ruling, so there's no need to fuss.
The USB 2.0 PC cards may have been on the shelves, but they did not come with drivers. Only a couple manufacturers are releasing drivers now, and those arrived just a few weeks ago. It's kinda hard to develop, debug & release a device when the software isn't there to let them talk.
"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
Thanks for reminding me of them. Wanted one for years, just ordered one. My cube desparately needs life...
Not as far as you might think. Actually, it's about 100 feet down the hall from where I'm sitting right now.
Consider the resolution. Images rendered for film are typically done at about 3000 x 2000
The final product is about half that. Resolutions up to 4k x 3k are used for intermediate special-effects editing. Digital cinema will be operating about HDTV resolutions.
we're left with another problem: you can't record VGA signals on film.
With digital cinema, it's (roughly speaking) VGA in - so you could sit in the theater watching what's being generated at that moment. For film, it's not that big a deal to replace the VGA out with a connector to a real-time film recorder (remember the hall I mentioned above? go to the other side of the hall).
Don't like the price? Bring yer own durn drink.