I agree. I'm sure Dunn would be more than happy to take responsibility for any good news to come out of HP. Why won't she take responsibility for the bad acts that resulted from an investigation she, by all accounts, ordered and oversaw?
Silicon Valley has gotten rotten. Dunn's refusal to take responsibility is a textbook example.
One of these days, the RIAA is going to blindly file suit against a Congressman's kid, and it's going to cause one hell of a flare-up. This ought to be a parallel situation, but it isn't, because the victim journalist involved was a "nobody."
I don't disagree, but the likelihood is small.
The RIAA has a big database. The ratio of hits to stupid lawyers in their campaign is growing.
Good point about Declan. I just don't care for his tone primarily; his politics are a bit obtuse, but I would be inclined to listen more closely to his points if he didn't come off as a privileged rich kid. I can't decide whether his C|net head shot looks like an A&F model or George W. the younger's personal ad.
Pissing off the media is a great way to hurt your PR. I can't imagine CNet having anything good to say about HP for a while.
They've been fluffing HP and damning Apple for so many years now...why stop?
At least the pathetic "Coop's corner" has some condemnation of HP in it. Nothing compared to C|Net's vitriol against Apple for suing a blogger, though.
not that I wish any ill will upon Declan McCullagh, but if he'd been the C|Net reporter who'd been "pretexted," this would have been a much bigger story
Declan is a faux-Libertarian goofball. I disagree with most of what he writes. He's a pro-business at-any-cost nut.
Declan will forgive HP for this crap once the dust dies down while castigating Apple for suing bloggers over leaks.
That huge flaw will be found out and consumer will demand change.
Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?
You just did a better job explaining that problem than many of Apple's response engineers could at the time.
I worked in Customer Relations during the dark days (1995-1997) of Apple's history. No, you don't want to hear the stories about third and fourth repair visits to 5200 owners...because even the modem could cause the problem you describe. Good motherboards after bad, until the isolated and fixed the problem.
Fortunately Apple is much better at identifying and fixing things now. Ultimately, replacing the Cache/ROM DIMM of the 5200 fixed the problem. (I'd bet five dollars that the ROM upgrade polled ADB every half-second or so...)
When I first saw these at Comdex 2000, I thought "These things will replace all removable media someday."
And yet most computers still ship with a single, useless extra cost item. The floppy drive.
Apple stopped shipping floppy drives in 1999 and everyone called them crazy. I think they saw the emergence of CF and digital memory cards for cameras and hoped those plus a network connection would obviate the need for a floppy drive. I also happen to think they killed the floppy too soon, but it was a bold step.
that it's a generally accepted practice not to create viruses for any reason
It was generally accepted practice for 50 years not to crash perfectly good cars. Until we started learning that we could protect the occupants of said cars better by finding out where the weak points were...by crashing perfectly good cars.
Wouldn't it be sweeeeet if they put those 12V DC jacks on every seat in Economy too?
American Airlines has done this on most coach class seats in the U.S. and on all Int'l flights. I used seat power on a greying MD-83 the other day. Normally, I'm loathe to fly American, but Continental doesn't have seat power in coach yet.
Sony was the designer and build partner for Apple's original PowerBook 5300 battery, which would have been the first mass-marketed laptop with an L-Ion battery.
Introduced in the fall of 1995, only about 1500 of the powerBook 5300 units had shipped when the battery - again, designed and built by Sony - caught fire in an Apple lab. A separate overheating incident at Apple later that week caused the company to pull all the stops to recall and destroy the Sony L-Ion cells. Customers all received two NiMH batteries as compensation.
Apple's new flagship laptop started life with a misstep because of Sony - who Apple never explicitly named in the press.
What's Sony's problem? Have they figured L-Ion batteries out in the past 11 years? Apparently not. no word on whether UPS is going to seek damages from Sony/Dell for the cargo jet they suspect was lost to an L-Ion fire in February.
Right on target, good citizen. Predictably, after almost 6 years of Bush, al Qaeda is larger than ever (some say it has grown by over 1,000%), and Osama is living the high life, occasionally giving public testimonies on the Osama Broadcasting Network (OBN).
And yet just over 1/3 of American citizens approve of how Bush the younger is handling the war on terra.
Bush the younger, who thinks that Al-Quada are "Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation," - that's a direct quote from today.
TSA/will/ cut the locks off of any luggage they want to search.
People on this thread must never fly...
First, you can put whatever toothpaste, liquids, etc. in your CHECKED luggage, negating the entire question this thread was based on.
TSA will cut off unapproved locks. You can buy TSA-approved locks at almost any department store. These locks can be unlocked and relocked with a TSA-issued tool. The lock's owner can set an appropriate combination, which is not changed in the course of the TSA locking and unlocking. This will prevent baggage handlers from rifling through the luggage during the 12 seconds it is in non-TSA hands. (Provided the luggage is not lost.)
Was it really so tough for the submitter to miss the line in every news report today that stated "checked luggage is not subject to these restrictions"? Put your fucking toothpaste in your checked bag, dolt.
Uh, excuse me. Pro photojournalists almost exclusively shoot digital.
However, many pro photographers still shoot film.
A more accurate statement would be "These days many kinds of pro photographers shoot digital."
You don't see a whole lot of large format black and white digital work, but Alan Ross, Chip Hooper, and a few others I could name are definitely pros, as they derive all or most of their income from photography. There are still few options for high-resolution digital architectural photography - while the P45 digital back almost rivals 4x5 film, there are no tilt/swing/shift lenses for the medium format cameras it works with.
There are many types of professional photography. Journalism is one - Slashdot is already a haven for generalizations, so please don't lump all of us photographers into the digital camp.
(I might add that while I use 4x5 film to capture images, after the film is souped, it's scanned for printing on a Chromira and put into dark storage.)
The versioning FS is nice, but it's really just a pretty UI on something that VMS had a couple of decades ago.
Cool. Well, let us know how using VMS goes for you. Myself, I like to use Photoshop, and I don't think Adobe's shipping that for VMS yet. I'd use Photoshop on Windows, and that doesn't have a versioning file system yet either. Darn. Guess I'm stuck with a Mac and it's twenty-year-old idea that someone finally brought to the desktop. Shucks.
Spotlight over the network? The pre-Tiger technical docs I read about Spotlight said that it was a Tiger feature; the fact that I didn't even notice that they'd pulled it shows how useful it is.
Your reading comprehension sucks. Spotlight is in Tiger. The new feature is that it now indexes and searches public files over the network.
Core Animation? Maybe nice, I'd have to see. It sounds like they're really going after Adobe with that one though; I hope it doesn't backfire...
Uh, how does this go after Adobe? This is an API developers can use to add features to applications. Does Adobe create APIs for Apple's OS now? Does Adobe write development environments for applications? I can't see how you might compare this to Flash unless...well, given all your other comparisons, maybe you're just that dense.
Mail stationary? I hated that 'feature' in Outlook Express a decade ago, and I can't imagine not hating it today.
Take a moment to surf over to Apple's web site and look at the stationery. Come back here and tell me that it's remotely like Outlook Express ten years ago. Then I'll know you're certifiable - as if your previous comments weren't enough. And you're not forced to use it. Good lord, what a whiny ass titty baby you are.
The most disappointing thing was the lack of Core 2 MacBooks. I was planning on ordering one this evening.
No you weren't.
The Mac Pros look nice, but I can't imagine buying a desktop in 2006.
Yeah, I hate it when people don't ship the things I want. I mean, I I can't believe Apple has the gall not to live up to the rumors sites' promises! I'm really disappointed that GM hasn't shipped that Hybrid H2 with six-wheel drive yet either.
What even harder to believe than your weirdly off base post is that it was modded +4 insightful when I started this reply.
I consider it a bit of a double standard to be criticizing Microsoft for "photocopying" on one hand and then unveiling a bunch of features that have been done before. Virtual desktop yes, but also the whole "time machine" which is really just a versioning system from the looks of it. VMS had that years and years ago, it's nothing new.
So, how's VMS running on your PC? Or was it the Mac you had it installed on?
A versioning file system on a computer you can buy at the mall is something new. So are virtual desktops.
Apple's "photocopying" comment was spot-on in that they compared competing products to each other, and noted that Microsoft apes Apple's features on a regular basis. VMS and other operating systems with versioning file systems or virtual desktops (I still have nightmares about CDE on AIX 4.1) do not compete with OS X on the consumer or business productivity or creative space desktop markets.
I could point out issues like the oil companies are making only 9 cents per gallon of profit which would put them in lower area's of margin with industry
Yeah. I mean, how many other industries make only nine cents per unit profit, while selling hundreds of millions of units a week?
Oh - and your little oil industry pity party forgot one thing - there are many, many products made from oil. Fuel is one of the less profitable products per volume, but it is profitable - most other products made from petrochemicals have far higher rates of profit for the oil companies - but no product makes them more money than fuel.
I fucking hate people who throw little pity parties for the poor people in the petrochemical industry who make nine cents a gallon on every single gallon of fuel every single person in the world uses. I mean, that fuel is only necessary for, uh, everything. Getting to work. Getting food on the table. Getting ANYTHING.
Poor bastards only making nine cents every time some H2-driving idiot goes 8 miles.
Poor folks in the oil industry only making $2.00 every time you fill up. Except they actually making another ten-twelve cents per gallon, because in many cases, they own the franchise the fuel is sold at.
Poor oil companies! What will they ever do? How about diversifying, and spending those nine cents per gallon on finding a way to put themselves out of business?
But that's too hard. So the ExxonMobil CEO goes home worth 400 million at retirement (with all six chins and bad tooth). It's too tough to back off of the multi-billion dollar quarterly net profit in order to be responsible corporate "citizens". Too tough to ally with humanity instead of the Republicans.
Only nine cents a gallon, hunh? Somebody call the Waaahmbulance - I think I'm gonna cry for the poor souls!
Prettying up a Windows PC is tantamount to spraying perfume on a pig.
Exactly, and to borrow a line from an old joke, when it's all over, Microsoft smells better, the user smells worse, and they're both left standing in a pen full of shit and mud*.
What will happen when Apple goes bankrupt? Or when the next generation of mini-players comes out with a new DRM?
Either the files revert to their original rights holders (the record publisher) or, if it worth their while, some other company will quickly buy the rights to the DRM'ed tracks and handle the business.
I love this alarmist screaming - Doctorow's really got himself convinced that all it would take is Apple's demise to screw everyone who ever bought songs from the TMS. He didn't bother to do any research, but instead decided to scream from the rooftops about how bad the coming dark age of digital rights management will be.
In the old days, the physical medium was the DRM.
Then, consumers started demanding smaller and better sonic reproduction.
Then came the.mp3 file - almost perfect, but no good for distribution - at least not if the publisher wanted to make money.
Now, we have iTMS, windows media, etc. ad infinitium. Arguably, iTMS does a really good job - and I have a hard time believing no one would buy the iTMS IP if Apple were to suddenly go out of business. (Think about it, Cory - would the labels have let Apple run with this whole music store idea if they were the slightest bit afraid of the lawsuits that would results from a defunct iTMS?)
Doctorow either hasn't thought this through or more likely has let the more hysterical elements of the Anti-DRM crowd pollute his normally well-oiled brain with "what ifs" and half-truths. The real truth is that DRM is here to stay in one form or another, and with sufficient consumer protection laws, there will always be recourse against businesses who try to leave consumer holding the bag - but unfortunately, gutting consumer protection laws in deference to "out of control" lawsuits (which will be the next thing to get legislated out of existence) seems to be the political course lately.
LPR cameras, which are usually around the size of a can of tomato sauce, can be mounted on police cruisers and powered by cigarette lighters.
I had no idea cigarette lighters were an energy source. I'm going to load up on Bic lighters and flick my way to a cooler home, a gasoline-less car, and energy independence. All it'll take is a little flicking!
If the rest of the article is this poorly written, I won't even bother reading it.
On the other hand, I am almost always the guy that is standing in line with just _one_ thing to buy... I have it in my left hand and my debit card in my right. It takes me all of 30 seconds to whip through a self checkout line. Everyone else needs to get the _hell_ out of the way!;-)
In most places where self-checkout is available (Home Depot, Albertson's, to name two) you'll find that most people are purchasing many more items than self-checkout was designed for, yet there is no sign indicating a suggested item limit for best results...they've always driven me crazy because I try to move too fast for them - so I hear a lot of "Please place item in the bagging area" and "you have removed an item from the bagging area, then it locks up and the cashier has to come over anyway.
I think it's fine for it's intended purpose, but trained, competent, (dare I say union) checkers are far more efficient and I'm hoping that will deter grocery chains from deploying too many of these self-checkout lanes. A store with only self-checkout? Well, that'd be a store with a lot of fistfights.
One of best road signs in the US, seen upon crossing into texas from Louisiana:
El Paso: 968 miles
Most people do a double take when I tell them there's only one state between Louisiana and New Mexico. Then they do a triple take when I tell them that Los Angeles is east of Reno.
Sadly, most people in the US are no good at geography, just as tragic, most other citizens of the world can't comprehend why we all seem to have cars and love to drive; it's because our country is freakin' huge. Not that it makes our wasteful US driving habits any more acceptable, but hey - you gotta get there somehow.
Uh, and to stay on topic, we also like to carry big, fast memory cards in our big, fast cameras in our big, fast cars.
Octane in the UK and in the US are computed differently. The US uses a combined average motor octane number (MON) and research octane number (RON). At US pumps, the dsplayed octane number is RON+MON/2=AKI, or Anti-Knock Index, but most marketing refers to this AKI as the "octane" number of the fuel
The UK and most other countries uses RON as the displayed octane number at the pump, which is usually a couple of points higher than the averaged US AKI.
For example, a 97 Octane gasoline in the UK is roughly equivalent to the 93 octane gasolines in our pumps here in the ol' US.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I'm sure Dunn would be more than happy to take responsibility for any good news to come out of HP. Why won't she take responsibility for the bad acts that resulted from an investigation she, by all accounts, ordered and oversaw?
Silicon Valley has gotten rotten. Dunn's refusal to take responsibility is a textbook example.
One of these days, the RIAA is going to blindly file suit against a Congressman's kid, and it's going to cause one hell of a flare-up. This ought to be a parallel situation, but it isn't, because the victim journalist involved was a "nobody."
I don't disagree, but the likelihood is small.
The RIAA has a big database. The ratio of hits to stupid lawyers in their campaign is growing.
Good point about Declan. I just don't care for his tone primarily; his politics are a bit obtuse, but I would be inclined to listen more closely to his points if he didn't come off as a privileged rich kid. I can't decide whether his C|net head shot looks like an A&F model or George W. the younger's personal ad.
Pissing off the media is a great way to hurt your PR. I can't imagine CNet having anything good to say about HP for a while.
They've been fluffing HP and damning Apple for so many years now...why stop?
At least the pathetic "Coop's corner" has some condemnation of HP in it. Nothing compared to C|Net's vitriol against Apple for suing a blogger, though.
not that I wish any ill will upon Declan McCullagh, but if he'd been the C|Net reporter who'd been "pretexted," this would have been a much bigger story
Declan is a faux-Libertarian goofball. I disagree with most of what he writes. He's a pro-business at-any-cost nut.
Declan will forgive HP for this crap once the dust dies down while castigating Apple for suing bloggers over leaks.
Trying to be more and more efficient -- essentially trying to slice the pie up into smaller and smaller slices -- is a losing game in the long run
You must not work in wireless data. Spectrum reuse and faster processors make this argument virtually moot!
That huge flaw will be found out and consumer will demand change.
Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!
Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?
You just did a better job explaining that problem than many of Apple's response engineers could at the time.
I worked in Customer Relations during the dark days (1995-1997) of Apple's history. No, you don't want to hear the stories about third and fourth repair visits to 5200 owners...because even the modem could cause the problem you describe. Good motherboards after bad, until the isolated and fixed the problem.
Fortunately Apple is much better at identifying and fixing things now. Ultimately, replacing the Cache/ROM DIMM of the 5200 fixed the problem. (I'd bet five dollars that the ROM upgrade polled ADB every half-second or so...)
When I first saw these at Comdex 2000, I thought "These things will replace all removable media someday."
And yet most computers still ship with a single, useless extra cost item. The floppy drive.
Apple stopped shipping floppy drives in 1999 and everyone called them crazy. I think they saw the emergence of CF and digital memory cards for cameras and hoped those plus a network connection would obviate the need for a floppy drive. I also happen to think they killed the floppy too soon, but it was a bold step.
that it's a generally accepted practice not to create viruses for any reason
It was generally accepted practice for 50 years not to crash perfectly good cars. Until we started learning that we could protect the occupants of said cars better by finding out where the weak points were...by crashing perfectly good cars.
What are Symantec. et al afraid of?
Wouldn't it be sweeeeet if they put those 12V DC jacks on every seat in Economy too?
American Airlines has done this on most coach class seats in the U.S. and on all Int'l flights. I used seat power on a greying MD-83 the other day. Normally, I'm loathe to fly American, but Continental doesn't have seat power in coach yet.
No Internet access, though.
Sony was the designer and
build partner for Apple's original PowerBook 5300 battery, which would have been the first mass-marketed laptop with an L-Ion battery.
Introduced in the fall of 1995, only about 1500 of the powerBook 5300 units had
shipped when the battery - again, designed and built by Sony -
caught fire in an Apple lab. A separate overheating incident at
Apple later that week caused the company to pull all the stops to
recall and destroy the Sony L-Ion cells. Customers all received two NiMH
batteries as compensation.
Apple's new flagship laptop started life with a misstep because
of Sony - who Apple never explicitly named in the press.
What's Sony's problem? Have they figured L-Ion batteries out in
the past 11 years? Apparently not. no word on whether UPS is going to seek damages from Sony/Dell for the cargo jet they suspect was lost to an L-Ion fire in February.
Right on target, good citizen. Predictably, after almost 6 years of Bush, al Qaeda is larger than ever (some say it has grown by over 1,000%), and Osama is living the high life, occasionally giving public testimonies on the Osama Broadcasting Network (OBN).
And yet just over 1/3 of American citizens approve of how Bush the younger is handling the war on terra.
Bush the younger, who thinks that Al-Quada are "Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation," - that's a direct quote from today.
So, Mr. Bush - Al-Quaeda are adherents of this philosophy?Fascism is a radical totalitarian political philosophy that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, militarism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism.
Good God, our president is a fucking moron - who regurgitates the worst talking points from Fox News in-house pundits, of all places.
Someone save us. Please. 2/3ds of American citizens need your help. We're fucking serious here.
TSA /will/ cut the locks off of any luggage they want to search.
People on this thread must never fly...
First, you can put whatever toothpaste, liquids, etc. in your CHECKED luggage, negating the entire question this thread was based on.
TSA will cut off unapproved locks. You can buy TSA-approved locks at almost any department store. These locks can be unlocked and relocked with a TSA-issued tool. The lock's owner can set an appropriate combination, which is not changed in the course of the TSA locking and unlocking. This will prevent baggage handlers from rifling through the luggage during the 12 seconds it is in non-TSA hands. (Provided the luggage is not lost.)
Was it really so tough for the submitter to miss the line in every news report today that stated "checked luggage is not subject to these restrictions"? Put your fucking toothpaste in your checked bag, dolt.
My point still holds (and is meant to include film).
I don't disagree with you there, only in that your initial statement seemed to exclude film users from all types of professional photography.
Shoot the same scene on Tech Pan and T-Max, develop both normally, and compare...reality is relative in any method of photography.
These days pros shoot digital.
Uh, excuse me. Pro photojournalists almost exclusively shoot digital.
However, many pro photographers still shoot film.
A more accurate statement would be "These days many kinds of pro photographers shoot digital."
You don't see a whole lot of large format black and white digital work, but Alan Ross, Chip Hooper, and a few others I could name are definitely pros, as they derive all or most of their income from photography. There are still few options for high-resolution digital architectural photography - while the P45 digital back almost rivals 4x5 film, there are no tilt/swing/shift lenses for the medium format cameras it works with.
There are many types of professional photography. Journalism is one - Slashdot is already a haven for generalizations, so please don't lump all of us photographers into the digital camp.
(I might add that while I use 4x5 film to capture images, after the film is souped, it's scanned for printing on a Chromira and put into dark storage.)
The versioning FS is nice, but it's really just a pretty UI on something that VMS had a couple of decades ago.
Cool. Well, let us know how using VMS goes for you. Myself, I like to use Photoshop, and I don't think Adobe's shipping that for VMS yet. I'd use Photoshop on Windows, and that doesn't have a versioning file system yet either. Darn. Guess I'm stuck with a Mac and it's twenty-year-old idea that someone finally brought to the desktop. Shucks.
Spotlight over the network? The pre-Tiger technical docs I read about Spotlight said that it was a Tiger feature; the fact that I didn't even notice that they'd pulled it shows how useful it is.
Your reading comprehension sucks. Spotlight is in Tiger. The new feature is that it now indexes and searches public files over the network.
Core Animation? Maybe nice, I'd have to see. It sounds like they're really going after Adobe with that one though; I hope it doesn't backfire...
Uh, how does this go after Adobe? This is an API developers can use to add features to applications. Does Adobe create APIs for Apple's OS now? Does Adobe write development environments for applications? I can't see how you might compare this to Flash unless...well, given all your other comparisons, maybe you're just that dense.
Mail stationary? I hated that 'feature' in Outlook Express a decade ago, and I can't imagine not hating it today.
Take a moment to surf over to Apple's web site and look at the stationery. Come back here and tell me that it's remotely like Outlook Express ten years ago. Then I'll know you're certifiable - as if your previous comments weren't enough. And you're not forced to use it. Good lord, what a whiny ass titty baby you are.
The most disappointing thing was the lack of Core 2 MacBooks. I was planning on ordering one this evening.
No you weren't.
The Mac Pros look nice, but I can't imagine buying a desktop in 2006.
Yeah, I hate it when people don't ship the things I want. I mean, I I can't believe Apple has the gall not to live up to the rumors sites' promises! I'm really disappointed that GM hasn't shipped that Hybrid H2 with six-wheel drive yet either.
What even harder to believe than your weirdly off base post is that it was modded +4 insightful when I started this reply.
I consider it a bit of a double standard to be criticizing Microsoft for "photocopying" on one hand and then unveiling a bunch of features that have been done before. Virtual desktop yes, but also the whole "time machine" which is really just a versioning system from the looks of it. VMS had that years and years ago, it's nothing new.
So, how's VMS running on your PC? Or was it the Mac you had it installed on?
A versioning file system on a computer you can buy at the mall is something new. So are virtual desktops.
Apple's "photocopying" comment was spot-on in that they compared competing products to each other, and noted that Microsoft apes Apple's features on a regular basis. VMS and other operating systems with versioning file systems or virtual desktops (I still have nightmares about CDE on AIX 4.1) do not compete with OS X on the consumer or business productivity or creative space desktop markets.
Timemachine? Gee Windows XP has had that feature for quite a while...
Apple's appears to be a versioning file system, rather than a "save everything in a hidden partition every x days" hack.
But thanks for letting us know how great XP is.
I could point out issues like the oil companies are making only 9 cents per gallon of profit which would put them in lower area's of margin with industry
Yeah. I mean, how many other industries make only nine cents per unit profit, while selling hundreds of millions of units a week?
Oh - and your little oil industry pity party forgot one thing - there are many, many products made from oil. Fuel is one of the less profitable products per volume, but it is profitable - most other products made from petrochemicals have far higher rates of profit for the oil companies - but no product makes them more money than fuel.
I fucking hate people who throw little pity parties for the poor people in the petrochemical industry who make nine cents a gallon on every single gallon of fuel every single person in the world uses. I mean, that fuel is only necessary for, uh, everything. Getting to work. Getting food on the table. Getting ANYTHING.
Poor bastards only making nine cents every time some H2-driving idiot goes 8 miles.
Poor folks in the oil industry only making $2.00 every time you fill up. Except they actually making another ten-twelve cents per gallon, because in many cases, they own the franchise the fuel is sold at.
Poor oil companies! What will they ever do? How about diversifying, and spending those nine cents per gallon on finding a way to put themselves out of business?
But that's too hard. So the ExxonMobil CEO goes home worth 400 million at retirement (with all six chins and bad tooth). It's too tough to back off of the multi-billion dollar quarterly net profit in order to be responsible corporate "citizens". Too tough to ally with humanity instead of the Republicans.
Only nine cents a gallon, hunh? Somebody call the Waaahmbulance - I think I'm gonna cry for the poor souls!
Prettying up a Windows PC is tantamount to spraying perfume on a pig.
Exactly, and to borrow a line from an old joke, when it's all over, Microsoft smells better, the user smells worse, and they're both left standing in a pen full of shit and mud*.
*A.K.A. "The Windows Ecosystem"
What will happen when Apple goes bankrupt? Or when the next generation of mini-players comes out with a new DRM?
.mp3 file - almost perfect, but no good for distribution - at least not if the publisher wanted to make money.
Either the files revert to their original rights holders (the record publisher) or, if it worth their while, some other company will quickly buy the rights to the DRM'ed tracks and handle the business.
I love this alarmist screaming - Doctorow's really got himself convinced that all it would take is Apple's demise to screw everyone who ever bought songs from the TMS. He didn't bother to do any research, but instead decided to scream from the rooftops about how bad the coming dark age of digital rights management will be.
In the old days, the physical medium was the DRM.
Then, consumers started demanding smaller and better sonic reproduction.
Then came the
Now, we have iTMS, windows media, etc. ad infinitium. Arguably, iTMS does a really good job - and I have a hard time believing no one would buy the iTMS IP if Apple were to suddenly go out of business. (Think about it, Cory - would the labels have let Apple run with this whole music store idea if they were the slightest bit afraid of the lawsuits that would results from a defunct iTMS?)
Doctorow either hasn't thought this through or more likely has let the more hysterical elements of the Anti-DRM crowd pollute his normally well-oiled brain with "what ifs" and half-truths. The real truth is that DRM is here to stay in one form or another, and with sufficient consumer protection laws, there will always be recourse against businesses who try to leave consumer holding the bag - but unfortunately, gutting consumer protection laws in deference to "out of control" lawsuits (which will be the next thing to get legislated out of existence) seems to be the political course lately.
LPR cameras, which are usually around the size of a can of tomato sauce, can be mounted on police cruisers and powered by cigarette lighters.
I had no idea cigarette lighters were an energy source. I'm going to load up on Bic lighters and flick my way to a cooler home, a gasoline-less car, and energy independence. All it'll take is a little flicking!
If the rest of the article is this poorly written, I won't even bother reading it.
On the other hand, I am almost always the guy that is standing in line with just _one_ thing to buy... I have it in my left hand and my debit card in my right. It takes me all of 30 seconds to whip through a self checkout line. Everyone else needs to get the _hell_ out of the way! ;-)
In most places where self-checkout is available (Home Depot, Albertson's, to name two) you'll find that most people are purchasing many more items than self-checkout was designed for, yet there is no sign indicating a suggested item limit for best results...they've always driven me crazy because I try to move too fast for them - so I hear a lot of "Please place item in the bagging area" and "you have removed an item from the bagging area, then it locks up and the cashier has to come over anyway.
I think it's fine for it's intended purpose, but trained, competent, (dare I say union) checkers are far more efficient and I'm hoping that will deter grocery chains from deploying too many of these self-checkout lanes. A store with only self-checkout? Well, that'd be a store with a lot of fistfights.
I can drive 800 miles and not leave Texas.
One of best road signs in the US, seen upon crossing into texas from Louisiana:
El Paso: 968 miles
Most people do a double take when I tell them there's only one state between Louisiana and New Mexico. Then they do a triple take when I tell them that Los Angeles is east of Reno.
Sadly, most people in the US are no good at geography, just as tragic, most other citizens of the world can't comprehend why we all seem to have cars and love to drive; it's because our country is freakin' huge. Not that it makes our wasteful US driving habits any more acceptable, but hey - you gotta get there somehow.
Uh, and to stay on topic, we also like to carry big, fast memory cards in our big, fast cameras in our big, fast cars.
Octane in the UK and in the US are computed differently. The US uses a combined average motor octane number (MON) and research octane number (RON). At US pumps, the dsplayed octane number is RON+MON/2=AKI, or Anti-Knock Index, but most marketing refers to this AKI as the "octane" number of the fuel
The UK and most other countries uses RON as the displayed octane number at the pump, which is usually a couple of points higher than the averaged US AKI.
For example, a 97 Octane gasoline in the UK is roughly equivalent to the 93 octane gasolines in our pumps here in the ol' US.