Four phrases--Black Thursday, Black Friday, then Black Monday, and Black Tuesday--are commonly used to describe this collapse of stock values. All four are appropriate, for the crash was not a one-day affair. The initial crash occurred on Thursday, October 24, 1929, but the catastrophic downturn of Monday, October 28, and Tuesday, October 29, precipitated widespread alarm and the onset of an unprecedented and long-lasting economic depression for the United States and the world.
From stock market crash to Internet in 40 years, then from Internet to LOLcats in another 40. (more or less.)
Yup. I got a nice little used (1.6 GHz Celeron is a hint of its age) HP Slimline PC and so I used the restore tool which copied over the system as it was shipped from the D: drive. I spent over an hour (I timed it) removing countless crap (about 2/3 of it games) and besides how long it takes--Add/Remove Programs, remove, yes I'm sure, no I don't want to keep my settings, yes I'm aware this will lower the quality of my life, wait for it to uninstall, go back to Add/Remove programs, wait for it to redraw the list, scroll to wherever I was, repeat--there were plenty of "orphans" left over where removing an app (that evidently was part of a bundle) made it so Windows couldn't remove another piece.
Once cleaned, though, it was a nice little system.
On a Mac, all you have to do is drag the iWork demo to the trash.:-)
What would be allowed while driving * Hands-free wireless communications devices with an earpiece or Bluetooth device
Which of course makes this the stupidest law EVER, since having a conversation (which requires concentration) with someone NOT EVEN IN THE CAR (so they don't know to shut up for a second when everyone in front of you jams on their brakes all of a sudden) is the WORST DISTRACTION OF ALL.
Why can I do that, but not glance at my iPhone's "Maps" app while at a light or send a text to someone that I'll be late while sitting at a COMPLETE FUCKING STOP on a traffic-jammed freeway?
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Open Source House fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig on an Open Source House elevator for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to climb 17 floors. 20 minutes. At home, on my Microsoft Home Automation Gateways MagicStair, running Escalator 1.0, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Elevator, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, while on this elevator, my microwave will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even the parking garage is straining to keep up as I type this...
I've been into low-power conventional computers for a while. You can buy an old Compaq iPaq (the computer, not the PDA) for almost nothing ($10-$50 in speeds from 500 MHz Celeron to 1 GHz PIII) and they'll use 30W at idle and under light use. They come in "legacy" (serial, parallel) versions and "legacy-free" (USB only) versions. They have a bay that can hold a CD, floppy, or no drive. (Compatible with Armada laptops from the same era.) So beware that if you buy a used one it might come with no optical drive so shop carefully.
A slimline HP will also use about 30W and is a little newer and faster--the one I had was a 1.6 GHz Celeron with a DVD burner (could be a 2nd HDD instead) and SATA hard drive.
The Mac Mini's power supply maxes out at 85W but it uses much, much less than that. I just used my Kill-A-Watt to verify that my 1.25 GHz G4 uses less than 20W when logged in and looking at localhost in Safari. The Intels are comparable.
I have an original Mini that has been serving apache (with php and mysql), ssh, afp, and other things 24/7/365 since a month after it was released--coming up on 4 years now--with OS X. AFAIK they take Linux just fine and that shouldn't make much (if any) difference in the power usage. Original G4s can be had for ~$200 used, used Intels are around $400, and of course new ones start at $600.
Excellent summary--you're just missing one part: after A and B start fighting and refusing to compromise, company (or group) Q comes along and says "These competing standards are getting us nowhere. Thus, we will make a NEW (possibly open) standard, then EVERYONE will be happy!" And then that goes nowhere and company/group Q is never heard from again.
Better still, it should be off by default, and be off for non-logged-in users. If I want tweets in my search results I should have to log in and go to preferences.
Or else make it one more link at the top: Web Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail Twitter more
But if tweets start showing up in my search results all the time with no action on my part I swear to God I'll switch to Yahoo.
Short answer: usually greed. Companies want THEIR standard to win, thinking that it's a better plan to have a large portion of a market, rather than a smaller fraction of a larger market overall.
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option? -- don't know this one, other than NTSC came first. (I have no explanation for why there's two flavors of HDTV, though.:-) )
- Voltages. -- don't know this one either.
- Car filters. Working at a company that distributes car stuff, a trip to the warehouse is an eye opener, there's over 1,500 types of just oil filters, the difference between some of them being half a millimeter in circumference. Add windshield wipers (also windshields, for that matter), engine bands, tires (or tyres for all you Britons, cheers mate), fuses, and I wonder why no institution has put an end to this nonsense, like the API (American Petroleum Institute) did with engine oils (BTW, a shining example of standardization success). -- because everyone makes their own stuff and solves problems in different ways. Granted oil filters are an extreme case, but different tire sizes and windshield wipers are understandable. (And the threads on oil filters are mostly the same, and you can usually get away with using a smaller one if needed.) Maybe more than needed, but still...
- Keyboards. Even in Western nations, configurations change however slightly, so that a QWERTY in the USA is a QWERTZ in Switzerland, then another thing in Spain, etc, which tends to REALLY slow down typing speed. -- depends on what letters are used commonly. Qwerty is borked in the first place, and other countries just make slight adjustments to fix horrible local problems. Z isn't used that much in English, but it's used a ton in Hungarian, which also has qwertz. ('sz' is a common construction--even "hello" is "szia".)
- DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players. -- sheer greed and spite, and some technology. AFAIK, DVD-R is closest to a factory-burned DVD, and Apple released the first machine with an optional DVD(-R) burner built in, which of course means the PC world HAD to be different and go with +R, God knows why. R vs RW = recordable (burn once) versus re-writable (reusable) and the DL = dual-layer (twice the capacity.) But just like other format wars, eventually there comes players that can read all and write some, so that's close enough--burn whatever you want, and you can read whatever you get.
- Steering wheel/Street flow. Some do it on the left side, some do it on the right side. WHY??? -- I'm sure there's some history behind that one.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a gentleman's job at explaining the concept during a lecture available on the web:
Got any links or titles? He's got a ton of videos out there.
If you read this, would you mind dropping me a line? I've got a couple quick questions about how you're doing the video stuff. brianashe at gmail. Thanks!
(Damn Slashdot! A dozen years and no private message system!!!!!11)
Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun.
Welcome to English. Pretty much ANY noun can be used as adjective are used--to modify other nouns. Lesson #1: dog house. Lesson #2: look around you. Cup board (cupboard.) Computer screen. Keyboard. Wall clock. etc etc etc. "Blue car" was a bad choice of example--"metal car" would have been better.
Spanish puts the adjective first--like Rio Grande (big river) or El Camino Real (the royal road)--but when using two nouns, they don't compound them, it's "this" of "that". Casa de perro. Cinco de Mayo. (And my favorite of all time, "anteojos de sol"--"in front of the eyes for sun", aka "sunglasses.")
Overall, it's just a convention. I happen to like the method I was born with. For one, it's shorter--"April first" instead of "the first of April"--and because it goes big -> little, just like time goes hour -> minutes -> seconds. Neither culture goes YYYY-MM-DD (which would be REALLY correct) because month/day is like significant figures--if humans are conversing about events that relate to them and a date comes up, "month" and "day" are probably as specific as they need to be in most cases. The year can be inferred.
But I'm not saying that M/D is therefore better. I'm sure people who were raised D/M can come up with reasons that it works for them as well.
As opposed to temperatures, where Fahrenheit is demonstrably better.;-)
Imagine how backwards computers would be if you had to write a new kernel, window system, and libraries every time you wanted to write an application.
Imagine Disney's state today if they hadn't been allowed to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, or Tarzan, just to name a few.
I got an original 1.25 GHz G4 Mini shortly after it was announced in early 2005. With the non-server version of Mac OS, it has been serving web pages via my DSL and doing other tasks 24/7 since March 2, 2005. It was also my main day-to-day machine for about 2 years until I stepped up to a used G5 and then a used Mac Pro. But it's still serving just fine, and now it's also what the kid uses to watch DVDs when he's in the room with me. (The kid is younger than the Mini, btw.)
Which, sadly, partly negates one of your points: "compatibility... applications for Android will be compatable with other manufacturers Android handsets, so different manufacturers will compete on quality of their product rather than the amount of software available." -- the more the hardware varies, the more compatibility suffers. (Not to mention quality, as QA becomes a bigger job.)
I'm not saying choice isn't good, I'm just saying it has its downsides, and 50 new handsets sounds like kind of a lot. And, honestly, it's just not that good for the manufacturers. Compared to things like CDs and movies, where people might own dozens or hundreds, the market for cell phones isn't quite that dynamic. Even if the market grows by 10% per year and people get a new cell phone every six months, people will still own, generally, one at a time. So the size of the pie is still relatively fixed, and they're all killing themselves to keep their slice the same size, when they could probably keep a similarly-sized slice with much less effort by making fewer models.
And companies often forget they ARE allowed to ignore markets. Is the size of the I-want-a-smartphone-but-work-doesn't-allow-cameraphones market really so large that it's worth the R&D expense to make an additional model of phone without a camera? Surely SOMEONE should make one like that, but do they ALL have to?
Thank you for half-answering my question. Now, does anyone know, do these handsets really have that much variety? Aw, fuckit, I'll find out for myself by searching for each one in Google Images. HTC Click - Fiesta - Tattoo --- big touchscreen slider, physical keyboard HTC Desire 6200 - October --- unknown HTC Dragon - Zoom 2 --- only screenshots, looks like a big touchscreen HTC Dream - T-Mobile G1 --- big touchscreen slider, physical keyboard HTC Hero - G2 Touch --- big touchscreen, looks like non-sliding, no physical keyboard HTC Lancaster --- big touchscreen slider, physical keyboard HTC Leo --- big touchscreen something, maybe flips open like a tiny laptop? HTC Magic - Sapphire - T-Mobile myTouch 3G - Google Ion - Dopod A6188 --- small-ish (Pre-sized?) touchscreen non-slider, no physical keyboard HTC Passion --- big touchscreen, possibly non-sliding with no physical keyboard. HTC Predator --- big touchscreen, possibly non-sliding with no physical keyboard.
So, um, yeah. Back to my original question: why? If I were a manufacturer I'd make at MOST three models: huge with everything, a slightly budget version, and one that is physically small. MAYBE the two bigger ones would be available with and without keyboards. Still, even that only takes us to five models. Are the other five a repeat of this but sans phone? That's what I'd really like to see--a non-phone Android device. Play media, browse the Web, maybe be an eBook reader too.
PS: rats, I miscounted the first time around. I missed one of the HTCs. They offer 10 models, not 9. So OVER HALF of these 51 new phones come from just three companies. Again I say, WTF??!?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny. I *thought* that date looked familiar...
Four phrases--Black Thursday, Black Friday, then Black Monday, and Black Tuesday--are commonly used to describe this collapse of stock values. All four are appropriate, for the crash was not a one-day affair. The initial crash occurred on Thursday, October 24, 1929, but the catastrophic downturn of Monday, October 28, and Tuesday, October 29, precipitated widespread alarm and the onset of an unprecedented and long-lasting economic depression for the United States and the world.
From stock market crash to Internet in 40 years, then from Internet to LOLcats in another 40. (more or less.)
Yup. I got a nice little used (1.6 GHz Celeron is a hint of its age) HP Slimline PC and so I used the restore tool which copied over the system as it was shipped from the D: drive. I spent over an hour (I timed it) removing countless crap (about 2/3 of it games) and besides how long it takes--Add/Remove Programs, remove, yes I'm sure, no I don't want to keep my settings, yes I'm aware this will lower the quality of my life, wait for it to uninstall, go back to Add/Remove programs, wait for it to redraw the list, scroll to wherever I was, repeat--there were plenty of "orphans" left over where removing an app (that evidently was part of a bundle) made it so Windows couldn't remove another piece.
Once cleaned, though, it was a nice little system.
On a Mac, all you have to do is drag the iWork demo to the trash. :-)
Overall it's pretty nice. Takes a while to load on older hardware, though. Maybe they could release just the browser as a separate component? ;-)
Now if they'd only release it for Android we could be on our way to a proper protocol droid!
>> Also electricity. I don't need a full blown computer running 24/7 just to provide wifi for my laptop.
> Noise too.
And heat. Not cool (no pun intended) if you pay to cool your house.
What would be allowed while driving
* Hands-free wireless communications devices with an earpiece or Bluetooth device
Which of course makes this the stupidest law EVER, since having a conversation (which requires concentration) with someone NOT EVEN IN THE CAR (so they don't know to shut up for a second when everyone in front of you jams on their brakes all of a sudden) is the WORST DISTRACTION OF ALL.
Why can I do that, but not glance at my iPhone's "Maps" app while at a light or send a text to someone that I'll be late while sitting at a COMPLETE FUCKING STOP on a traffic-jammed freeway?
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My EV gets 40 rods to the... damn, I don't know enough about how energy is measured to finish the joke.
Surprisingly, Disney is rather decent in this area.
If you accidentally damage or break one of your Disney DVDs, you can get a replacement disc for a nominal charge of $6.95.
I think it's pretty sweet! Imagine... in just a few short years, a VR headset might be this small!
(Aerosmith, Amazing, 1993)
lack of a personal income tax doesn't mean tax free.
And then there's California where there's state income tax AND sales tax of almost (if not over) 10%
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Open Source House fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig on an Open Source House elevator for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to climb 17 floors. 20 minutes. At home, on my Microsoft Home Automation Gateways MagicStair, running Escalator 1.0, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Elevator, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, while on this elevator, my microwave will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even the parking garage is straining to keep up as I type this...
I've been into low-power conventional computers for a while. You can buy an old Compaq iPaq (the computer, not the PDA) for almost nothing ($10-$50 in speeds from 500 MHz Celeron to 1 GHz PIII) and they'll use 30W at idle and under light use. They come in "legacy" (serial, parallel) versions and "legacy-free" (USB only) versions. They have a bay that can hold a CD, floppy, or no drive. (Compatible with Armada laptops from the same era.) So beware that if you buy a used one it might come with no optical drive so shop carefully.
A slimline HP will also use about 30W and is a little newer and faster--the one I had was a 1.6 GHz Celeron with a DVD burner (could be a 2nd HDD instead) and SATA hard drive.
The Mac Mini's power supply maxes out at 85W but it uses much, much less than that. I just used my Kill-A-Watt to verify that my 1.25 GHz G4 uses less than 20W when logged in and looking at localhost in Safari. The Intels are comparable.
I have an original Mini that has been serving apache (with php and mysql), ssh, afp, and other things 24/7/365 since a month after it was released--coming up on 4 years now--with OS X. AFAIK they take Linux just fine and that shouldn't make much (if any) difference in the power usage. Original G4s can be had for ~$200 used, used Intels are around $400, and of course new ones start at $600.
More info:
http://www.dssw.co.uk/sleepcentre/threads/mac_mini_power_consumption.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/apple-mac-mini,978-7.html
http://www.macintouch.com/macmini05.html#jan25
and these guys: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3468
So this could be considered a type of maid-in-the-middle attack?
Excellent summary--you're just missing one part: after A and B start fighting and refusing to compromise, company (or group) Q comes along and says "These competing standards are getting us nowhere. Thus, we will make a NEW (possibly open) standard, then EVERYONE will be happy!" And then that goes nowhere and company/group Q is never heard from again.
Better still, it should be off by default, and be off for non-logged-in users. If I want tweets in my search results I should have to log in and go to preferences.
Or else make it one more link at the top: Web Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail Twitter more
But if tweets start showing up in my search results all the time with no action on my part I swear to God I'll switch to Yahoo.
A couple answers and a question:
Short answer: usually greed. Companies want THEIR standard to win, thinking that it's a better plan to have a large portion of a market, rather than a smaller fraction of a larger market overall.
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option? :-) )
-- don't know this one, other than NTSC came first. (I have no explanation for why there's two flavors of HDTV, though.
- Voltages.
-- don't know this one either.
- Car filters. Working at a company that distributes car stuff, a trip to the warehouse is an eye opener, there's over 1,500 types of just oil filters, the difference between some of them being half a millimeter in circumference. Add windshield wipers (also windshields, for that matter), engine bands, tires (or tyres for all you Britons, cheers mate), fuses, and I wonder why no institution has put an end to this nonsense, like the API (American Petroleum Institute) did with engine oils (BTW, a shining example of standardization success).
-- because everyone makes their own stuff and solves problems in different ways. Granted oil filters are an extreme case, but different tire sizes and windshield wipers are understandable. (And the threads on oil filters are mostly the same, and you can usually get away with using a smaller one if needed.) Maybe more than needed, but still...
- Keyboards. Even in Western nations, configurations change however slightly, so that a QWERTY in the USA is a QWERTZ in Switzerland, then another thing in Spain, etc, which tends to REALLY slow down typing speed.
-- depends on what letters are used commonly. Qwerty is borked in the first place, and other countries just make slight adjustments to fix horrible local problems. Z isn't used that much in English, but it's used a ton in Hungarian, which also has qwertz. ('sz' is a common construction--even "hello" is "szia".)
- DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players.
-- sheer greed and spite, and some technology. AFAIK, DVD-R is closest to a factory-burned DVD, and Apple released the first machine with an optional DVD(-R) burner built in, which of course means the PC world HAD to be different and go with +R, God knows why. R vs RW = recordable (burn once) versus re-writable (reusable) and the DL = dual-layer (twice the capacity.) But just like other format wars, eventually there comes players that can read all and write some, so that's close enough--burn whatever you want, and you can read whatever you get.
- Steering wheel/Street flow. Some do it on the left side, some do it on the right side. WHY???
-- I'm sure there's some history behind that one.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a gentleman's job at explaining the concept during a lecture available on the web:
Got any links or titles? He's got a ton of videos out there.
If you read this, would you mind dropping me a line? I've got a couple quick questions about how you're doing the video stuff. brianashe at gmail. Thanks!
(Damn Slashdot! A dozen years and no private message system!!!!!11)
Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun.
Welcome to English. Pretty much ANY noun can be used as adjective are used--to modify other nouns. Lesson #1: dog house. Lesson #2: look around you. Cup board (cupboard.) Computer screen. Keyboard. Wall clock. etc etc etc. "Blue car" was a bad choice of example--"metal car" would have been better.
Spanish puts the adjective first--like Rio Grande (big river) or El Camino Real (the royal road)--but when using two nouns, they don't compound them, it's "this" of "that". Casa de perro. Cinco de Mayo. (And my favorite of all time, "anteojos de sol"--"in front of the eyes for sun", aka "sunglasses.")
Overall, it's just a convention. I happen to like the method I was born with. For one, it's shorter--"April first" instead of "the first of April"--and because it goes big -> little, just like time goes hour -> minutes -> seconds. Neither culture goes YYYY-MM-DD (which would be REALLY correct) because month/day is like significant figures--if humans are conversing about events that relate to them and a date comes up, "month" and "day" are probably as specific as they need to be in most cases. The year can be inferred.
But I'm not saying that M/D is therefore better. I'm sure people who were raised D/M can come up with reasons that it works for them as well.
As opposed to temperatures, where Fahrenheit is demonstrably better. ;-)
My experience has been that Windows is a desktop OS trying to be a desktop OS. :-)
Imagine how backwards computers would be if you had to write a new kernel, window system, and libraries every time you wanted to write an application.
Imagine Disney's state today if they hadn't been allowed to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, or Tarzan, just to name a few.
I got an original 1.25 GHz G4 Mini shortly after it was announced in early 2005. With the non-server version of Mac OS, it has been serving web pages via my DSL and doing other tasks 24/7 since March 2, 2005. It was also my main day-to-day machine for about 2 years until I stepped up to a used G5 and then a used Mac Pro. But it's still serving just fine, and now it's also what the kid uses to watch DVDs when he's in the room with me. (The kid is younger than the Mini, btw.)
Which, sadly, partly negates one of your points: "compatibility... applications for Android will be compatable with other manufacturers Android handsets, so different manufacturers will compete on quality of their product rather than the amount of software available." -- the more the hardware varies, the more compatibility suffers. (Not to mention quality, as QA becomes a bigger job.)
I'm not saying choice isn't good, I'm just saying it has its downsides, and 50 new handsets sounds like kind of a lot. And, honestly, it's just not that good for the manufacturers. Compared to things like CDs and movies, where people might own dozens or hundreds, the market for cell phones isn't quite that dynamic. Even if the market grows by 10% per year and people get a new cell phone every six months, people will still own, generally, one at a time. So the size of the pie is still relatively fixed, and they're all killing themselves to keep their slice the same size, when they could probably keep a similarly-sized slice with much less effort by making fewer models.
And companies often forget they ARE allowed to ignore markets. Is the size of the I-want-a-smartphone-but-work-doesn't-allow-cameraphones market really so large that it's worth the R&D expense to make an additional model of phone without a camera? Surely SOMEONE should make one like that, but do they ALL have to?
Thank you for half-answering my question. Now, does anyone know, do these handsets really have that much variety? Aw, fuckit, I'll find out for myself by searching for each one in Google Images.
HTC Click - Fiesta - Tattoo --- big touchscreen slider, physical keyboard
HTC Desire 6200 - October --- unknown
HTC Dragon - Zoom 2 --- only screenshots, looks like a big touchscreen
HTC Dream - T-Mobile G1 --- big touchscreen slider, physical keyboard
HTC Hero - G2 Touch --- big touchscreen, looks like non-sliding, no physical keyboard
HTC Lancaster --- big touchscreen slider, physical keyboard
HTC Leo --- big touchscreen something, maybe flips open like a tiny laptop?
HTC Magic - Sapphire - T-Mobile myTouch 3G - Google Ion - Dopod A6188 --- small-ish (Pre-sized?) touchscreen non-slider, no physical keyboard
HTC Passion --- big touchscreen, possibly non-sliding with no physical keyboard.
HTC Predator --- big touchscreen, possibly non-sliding with no physical keyboard.
So, um, yeah. Back to my original question: why? If I were a manufacturer I'd make at MOST three models: huge with everything, a slightly budget version, and one that is physically small. MAYBE the two bigger ones would be available with and without keyboards. Still, even that only takes us to five models. Are the other five a repeat of this but sans phone? That's what I'd really like to see--a non-phone Android device. Play media, browse the Web, maybe be an eBook reader too.
PS: rats, I miscounted the first time around. I missed one of the HTCs. They offer 10 models, not 9. So OVER HALF of these 51 new phones come from just three companies. Again I say, WTF??!?
Sometimes having a million choices helps, sometimes it doesn't. It'll be interesting to see which way this goes. I have my suspicions... ;-)