I stopped reading after he mentioned that there was no concept of a Mana pool for spells, just cooldown timers. I was actually looking forward to this game, but not any more.
Why? I played casters in most MMO's since the original Everquest, and the mana pool was simply another form of cooldown timer. You needed to manage your casting rate, your regen rate, your meditation (when it was a factor), etc. against the size of your mana pool. The only thing that a mana pool actually allows that this wouldn't is the quick burn and I'd be surprised if they didn't put some kind of special ability or skill that would allow that, too.
As a long time SysAd/webmaster/developer, I'm certainly interested
At the risk of sounding incredibly condescending....
If you were really a sysadmin who could benefit from that kind of speed improvement, you'd know that it's possible to achieve that level of performance with MySQL already, by either running it from memory or by using a fast hard drive array. The simplest/cheapest option to drastically improve MySQL performance is to throw a large amount of RAM at a system and point MySQL at the memory. MySQL can be configured to keep the database in active memory and sync to the disk on a regular basis, which is almost exactly the kind of behaviour described for MemSQL... for an exceptionally large database that can't be stored in system memory, I imagine that the advantage that MemSQL is boasting would evapourate. There are other ways to go about doing it, such as running a fast disk array or a cluster, in order to get around the limitations of using RAM, but ultimately the prime determining factor for speed in MySQL is speed of access to the database file itself.
In which of the four countries it's illegal to sell this kind of technology to does the US currently have a military presence? The closest example I can think of Guantanamo Bay, which isn't actually part of Cuba any more.
And even if that weren't an impediment to your argument, there's an exemption for bringing something of your own to a foreign country for personal use, with the intention of bringing it back to the US with you when you leave. The ban is on the *sale* of technology to embargoed countries, not the use of embargoed technology in said countries.
The discrimination victim in this story is a citizen of the United States.
US trade laws explicitly prohibit selling electronic or cryptographic technology that will make its way to Iran. It also blocks Cuba, Syria and Sudan for these kinds of technology sales (and until quite recently, blocked North Korea, too). There's a reason that Dell and HP have in their scripting, if you buy it over the phone or as a clickthrough on the website, a statement that you will not knowingly trade the equipment you're buying with an embargoed country... they're on the hook for megabucks in fines and penalties if they get caught selling to an embargoed country.
Apparently she said that she was buying it for her uncle in Iran. US Citizen or no, she was still buying a restricted piece of technology with the intent to ship it to an embargoed country.
My machine still chokes on Alice: Madness Returns, and that's with a 6970.
There's something wrong with your machine, then. My machine has a 6870, and that game runs perfectly at 1920x1080 max graphics settings. (CPU is an i5 2500k oc'd to 4.7GHz, with 16GB of RAM). Aside from some idiotic load cues triggering hard drive access in the middle of some of the puzzles (and the game not caching the loaded results so if you turn around and attempt the puzzle again the cues triggers again), no problems at all, but that's bad game design not bad graphics support, and the problem went away when I switched the hard drive for an SSD.
High poly count was the benchmark for the mid-late 1990's. In the 2nd decade of the 21st century, the benchmark is texture fill rate. Modern graphics usually use phong shading in addition to textures to give better lighting effects. In simpler terms... good looking phong-shaded games showed up in the 1980's, but it was nearly 20 years later before good-looking texture-shaded games showed up.
The numbers you quote aren't bad, and are quite playable for a variety of games, but the truth is that it's about par with what I get out of the Sandy Bridge graphics on my laptop. Your card *should* be able to wipe the floor with my laptop's graphics, and the fact that it doesn't is down to bad driver support. Intel has, far and above, the best driver support for Linux graphics, and their lag behind the other major players in performance is thinning: the IB and SB graphics are quite usable for light gaming these days.
and there isn't a thing in the world he can do about it, and it is perfectly legal.
He can't stop you from filing, but he can get it dismissed with prejudice, with an order that you have to pay his legal fees. Ultimately it costs him nothing, but it's still a pain in the ass to reach that point.
no, the reason to hate them is that they're giving loans to people who shouldn't be given loans in the first place. otherwise they could be getting it from the bank for 15% apr.
You give a few specific examples of times when people need to take payday loans, but the simple reality is that if you have a credit card or an overdraft with the bank, you don't need a payday loan. That's what credit and overdraft are for.
And I'm not entirely sure where you get the idea that a $300 loan with a $90 finance charge is "much, much cheaper than bank overdrafts". I have an overdraft on my chequing account, and the APR for going into it is prime + 2%. Prime lending rate with my bank right now is 2.25%, meaning that the *annual* interest rate for going into overdraft is 4.25% for me. There is a "convenience fee" stipulated in the contract of $25, but that gets waived if I haven't used the overdraft in more than 30 days. The point of an overdraft is *not* to give you an extra $1000 to spend as you will, it's to let you write cheques for emergency things like fixing your car without worrying about whether you'll have the money until next Friday.
And the funny part is, despite the expense, the only people who hate payday loans are the people who have never had one. The lenders are scared of being legislated into the dog house, so they're careful and play nice.
29.97% interest rate on loans is *not* playing nice. That's how much the payday loans people charge in this neck of the woods, and the only reason they charge so little is because usury laws prohibit charging 30%. My Visa rate is 12.9%. It could be lower if I was willing to pay an annual fee, but I don't carry a balance, so I don't really care what the rate is. It is cheaper, by far, for almost all of us to put that car repair on credit than it is to get a payday loan. The only people who *need* to get a payday loan are the people whose credit is bad enough that they can't get a credit card, and you need to have pretty bad credit to be in that situation. (if your credit is absolutely *terrible* you can still get a card at 29% annual interest, which is the same that the payday lenders charge, but the credit card won't charge you the $90 processing fee on a $300 loan, they'll just start charging interest 30 days after the purchase date).
If a customer is having trouble, all they have to do is say so. Generally they'll stop assessing interest, and then they'll create an installment plan that works best (e.g. one that makes the customer happy so they won't walk away).
If you think credit cards and bank loans don't work like that, then you've never dealt with a credit card or a bank. If you have a good relationship with your bank manager, then this kind of thing is easy to arrange with them. Even if you don't have that kind of relationship, most of them have a clause that will let you skip a payment, and most credit card companies will lower your interest rate without argument if you call them and ask them to do it. (the "official" interest rate on my Visa is 19.99% to start... I called them and asked them to lower it).
So yeah. I do hate payday lenders. And no, I've never needed to use one. But I still have a legitimate reason for hating them: their client base is, by and large, people who are at the lower income tiers and can *least* afford to pay the exorbitant rates they have. Beyond that, their client base is, largely, people who were never taught how finance actually works, and they are being taken advantage of. Nobody has bothered to explain to these people that they are buying the most expensive credit on the market, and it sets up a vicious cycle. I know too many people who get into a payday loan and end up getting one every paycheque because they have bills that they can't pay because they're paying last week's loan.
So yes. I have an ethical problem with payday lenders... they are the dregs of society, and they are feeding on the poor. And they are set up in such a way that keeps the poor down. They need to go.
It's unfortunate that today's society seems more concerned with what they can 'get away with' or how closely they can skate to the rules, than simply recognizing the difference between right and wrong.
Meanwhile, the 29.97% interest rate that the payday loans people charge (and that only because 30% is considered usury and is illegal) is in no way wrong? Even when you consider that the people who take payday loans are generally the poorest part of the population?
I'm not arguing that trying to extort money from the payday loans people isn't wrong... it is. Very much so. But simply obtaining the information from the website is not wrong... people are using the open door analogy which is fundamentally flawed... it's more like putting a big poster up on a tree, with a smaller poster on the other side of the tree saying "please don't read the other sign". There was no hacking involved, the "hackers" in question simply walked around to the other side of the tree and took a picture of the poster. The payday loan people put this information up, and need to be held to task for their actions.
As for how to hold them to task... extortion is the wrong way to do it. I would look into the privacy laws, and report them to the appropriate authorities.... publishing customer account data like that is illegal in most jurisdictions in the world.
Am I the only one feeling a bit uneasy about this thread? Some Chinese construction projects are underfunded and of poor quality, therefore all Chinese buildings are crap? Some Chinese products are rip-off of foreign products, therefore all Chinese tech is copied? All Chinamen talk funny therefore all Chinamen dumb?
That's not it at all... what's making people uneasy about this construction project is that we have a firm claiming they can do, in 90 days, what has traditionally taken many years. While I'm very willing to accept that they can find efficiencies in the process, it's a bit much.
I can't compare the trackpads but other (most?) ultra books come with back lit keyboards. It's not something exclusive to Apple and therefore shouldn't really be a selling point when comparing products.
My low end Dell Vostro V131 doesn't have a backlit keyboard... it was an option but I decided not to get it. In all honesty, the backlit keyboards are of marginal use for an experienced typist... I could see them being handy for people who need to look at the keyboard, but if you're the kind of person who can type simply by finding the home keys with your index fingers, then it's really quite useless... my last laptop had a backlit keyboard and I never turned it on.
High framerate in itself is obviously a good thing to do. The "motionflow" (framerate upsampling) on current TVs is uncanny when it works, but sometimes it's bad because it fails and creates jitters. Filming at a higher framerate in the first place is a logical step.
Modern TV's don't need to upsample... the jitter you see is when there's a difference between the refresh rate on the TV and the framerate on the source. If you're watching a 24fps source on a 60Hz display, that's 2.5 refreshes on the TV for every frame on the source. There will be jitter, because each frame on the screen can't have 2.5 refreshes, so it alternates between 2 and 3. Most sources we watch on TV are either 24fps or 30fps, which is why most good TV's on the market today are either 120Hz or 240Hz... 120Hz is 5 draws per frame at 24fps, and 4 draws per frame at 30fps... nice whole number, and each frame gets exactly the same screen time.
Back when they were actually using film, what allowed wide-screen in the first place was rotating the film 90 degrees as it passed through the camera... each frame could have an essentially arbitrary aspect ratio either way by increasing or decreasing the amount of film that was exposed with each frame, and by having it go sideways through the camera instead of vertically allowed it to have a wider aspect ratio like we see today. Switching to a different aspect ratio was a matter of changing the lens and increasing the speed that the film moves through the camera.
Now that they're using digital cameras and largely digital projectors, though, it's moot... the aspect ratio is fixed to what the capturing CCD is capable of, and the final resolution is a question of how it's transcoded (most HD films are recorded in much higher resolution than the 1080p you buy on a bluray). *many* theatres have gone with digital projectors these days, and changing the aspect ratio with a digital projector is a matter of specifying either a letter box or pillar that gets overlaid on the source so that the final output is the native resolution of the projector.
10 Boston–Cambridge–Quincy, MA–NH MSA 4,591,112 4,552,402 +0.85% Boston–Worcester–Manchester, MA–RI–NH CSA 11 San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont, CA MSA 4,391,037 4,335,391 +1.28% San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA CSA 12 Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario, CA MSA 4,304,997 4,224,851 +1.90% Los Angeles–Long Beach–Riverside, CA CSA 13 Detroit–Warren–Livonia, MI MSA 4,285,832 4,296,250 0.24% Detroit–Warren–Flint, MI CSA 14 Phoenix–Mesa–Glendale, AZ MSA 4,262,236 4,192,887 +1.65% primary census statistical area 15 Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue, WA MSA 3,500,026 3,439,809 +1.75% Seattle–Tacoma–Olympia, WA CSA
Within a 30 mile drive of downtown San Francisco, there's 10 airports.
San Bernadino/Ontario California, ok you got me there... there's only 1 airport that comes up on the search, but zooming out a bit (in case you didn't already know the geography) reveals that you're within 30 miles of Los Angeles... do you *really* want me to come up with a list of airports within 1 hour of LA?
I could continue, but do I need to to expound on the point? People think "airport" means "international terminal", but they're wrong. An airport is somewhere you can get a plane that flies you to where you want to go. I don't think there's a single metropolitan area in the world with a population over 500,000 that has only one airport within an hour's drive... they're all over the place, and you *can* get a domestic hop from a small or private airport, you just won't find most major airliners servicing out of there... and it's not because they can't, it's because they prefer to fly larger planes, and need longer runways to accommodate them.
A catastrophic failure that happened some time after the initial impact... time which allowed the majority of the people occupying the buildings to be safely evacuated. Yes, a lot of people died, but a *lot* more would have died if the buildings had collapsed immediately upon impact.
A little under 3000 people died, and we shouldn't forget that. But we also shouldn't forget that on the average day, the observation deck at the top of the building turned about 80,000 visitors, not to mention the staff that actually worked in the buildings. So no, don't be silly... understand that they withstood a catastrophic failure, and remained standing for long enough that the majority of the people in the buildings were able to evacuate. The casualties were *much* lower than they would have been in what I would consider a catastrophic failure.
Bullshit. How many airports are there near you? I live in a metro area with 4 million people, and there's a single airport here for any real flights out-of-state. Whatever private company gets the contract from the airport becomes an effective monopoly; it's not like I can choose to go with a different screening company if I don't like the screeners at my city's airport.
I live in a metro area with 1 million people. There's a single international hub, but there's at least 10 airports within an hour's drive of here from which I can charter a domestic flight. If I extend the radius to 2 hours from here, I add 3 more international hubs and at least 20 domestic airports.
Just because Delta doesn't fly there doesn't mean you can't fly a charter from a small airport and not have to deal with the TSA. They aren't generally that expensive, either.
Why they didn't is a matter of speculation for government-contracted (of course!) engineers and conspiracy theorists.
Except that they did withstand it... the buildings kept standing for quite some time after the initial impact, allowing the majority of the people in either building to evacuate before they collapsed. What got them was the heat of the jet fuel burning, causing main support structures to melt, but all things considered they did remarkably well.
It's relatively inexpensive, has a reasonable amount of horsepower, is reasonably light-weight*, and it has Ubuntu preinstalled, so switching it over to Edubuntu should be as easy as "apt-get install edubuntu", and you have a reasonable assurance that everything will work out of the box, and the *base* warranty option on it, because it's in the SMB line of products, includes next business day onsite hardware support. They've also been known to give some very nice deals to educational institutions.
* - It's not as small/lightweight as the V130 I'm typing this on, but that has been replaced by the V131 and they seem to have removed the Linux option on it. That being said, if you get a V131, everything'll work out of the box, too, and that is a smaller/lighter system.
As zippy as your P4 with 768MB of RAM, only on a 300MHz P2 with 128MB of RAM. And that's with the compositing effects turned on with CPU rendering.
I like XFCE, but I wouldn't switch back to it now that I have a stable e17 system up... many of the work flow concepts are identical between them, though. They both treat work flow very differently from how Gnome and KDE do, and both are *significantly* more productive.
Except you're not in the same boat at that point... you're still working with a lower-res screen that's 8 years old (dead pixels/backlight fade), a battery that's 8 years old (which may or may not still work), and a much smaller/slower hard drive (that's still 8 years old and could be near the failing point), not to mention that the processor is still only a single core 32-bit architecture that's, again, 8 years old.
I'm not going to get into the whole 64-bit/32-bit argument. It's not really germane to the point. But I am going to point out that Moore's Law is still in effect, and that a modern 1.2GHz dual core Celeron is a *significant* leap over an 8-year old single core G4 PPC, and that's without even considering reduced power requirements and heat generation from the smaller fab. In a mobile device, that, alone, should be enough of a selling point.
It would be a pity to throw away a good piece of hardware because Java 1.6 and recent OSX API are not supported.
While I understand that the hardware still works, and that it was certainly good equipment when you originally bought it, it is still an 8-year old laptop. It's still functional, it certainly doesn't owe you anything, but you do need to consider what you actually have.
In the 15" model, you have an LCD at 1280x854. At absolute best possible configuration, you have 2GB of memory in it, and a 1.5GHz G4, rounded out with an 80GB hard drive and a 64MB Radeon 9700M.
While it's certainly usable for light computing uses, we need to keep in mind that the base configuration was 256MB of RAM, upgradeable to 512MB from Apple, which is extremely low by modern standards and may not be enough for a modern browser running some modern websites. We also need to consider that the processor is a single core 32-bit processor, and while it's running a RISC architecture it's still orders of magnitude slower than even the cheapest modern processor you can get today. It's also, by modern standards, an extremely low res screen, which would limit your ability to use it even for text processing.
Ultimately, it's your choice and your money, but I wouldn't consider using that system on a daily basis. When you can buy a cheap laptop for $350, and if you have a problem with Windows you can wipe it and install Linux free of charge (or BSD!), it really doesn't make sense to keep nursing an ancient laptop. Shame though it is to be considering retiring it, it's probably for the best.
Amiga support, presumably. Includes a "native" emulator for 68k Amiga hardware, too. Just in case you want to play Fire and Ice on your G4 laptop, I guess.
The article is right, though... 50 years from now, Steve Jobs' chief contribution will have been the creation of a design company that hasn't actually come up with a new idea since a couple of years before Jobs' death. I would be surprised if Apple is still in existence in 50 years. Jobs will end up as a footnote in history. I would be equally surprised if Microsoft is still in existence in 50 years, but they do have a better chance because they're ruled by committee. How many people remember what Douglas Engelbart did for computing? This place is populated by geeks, and I'd lay odds that several people reading this don't know what he did, even though modern computers couldn't work the way they do without his contributions. 50 years from now, Jobs will be in the same category.
Here's the thing... the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is set up as a self-perpetuating trust. They are spending gobs of cash, but they're only spending the interest and are actually profitable despite the amount of money they're spending on charity work. Barring some kind of global economic meltdown orders of magnitude worse than the one in 2008, 50 years from now the Gates Foundation will still be around, and will still be doing charitable work. For that reason alone, Bill Gates will be better remembered by history.
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I stopped reading after he mentioned that there was no concept of a Mana pool for spells, just cooldown timers. I was actually looking forward to this game, but not any more.
Why? I played casters in most MMO's since the original Everquest, and the mana pool was simply another form of cooldown timer. You needed to manage your casting rate, your regen rate, your meditation (when it was a factor), etc. against the size of your mana pool. The only thing that a mana pool actually allows that this wouldn't is the quick burn and I'd be surprised if they didn't put some kind of special ability or skill that would allow that, too.
I pirate Top Gear; the BBC really ought to get with the program and offer foreigners a way to pay for series or subscriptions.
You mean, like Netflix? Most of the BBC series I watch are on it....
As a long time SysAd/webmaster/developer, I'm certainly interested
At the risk of sounding incredibly condescending....
If you were really a sysadmin who could benefit from that kind of speed improvement, you'd know that it's possible to achieve that level of performance with MySQL already, by either running it from memory or by using a fast hard drive array. The simplest/cheapest option to drastically improve MySQL performance is to throw a large amount of RAM at a system and point MySQL at the memory. MySQL can be configured to keep the database in active memory and sync to the disk on a regular basis, which is almost exactly the kind of behaviour described for MemSQL... for an exceptionally large database that can't be stored in system memory, I imagine that the advantage that MemSQL is boasting would evapourate. There are other ways to go about doing it, such as running a fast disk array or a cluster, in order to get around the limitations of using RAM, but ultimately the prime determining factor for speed in MySQL is speed of access to the database file itself.
In which of the four countries it's illegal to sell this kind of technology to does the US currently have a military presence? The closest example I can think of Guantanamo Bay, which isn't actually part of Cuba any more.
And even if that weren't an impediment to your argument, there's an exemption for bringing something of your own to a foreign country for personal use, with the intention of bringing it back to the US with you when you leave. The ban is on the *sale* of technology to embargoed countries, not the use of embargoed technology in said countries.
The discrimination victim in this story is a citizen of the United States.
US trade laws explicitly prohibit selling electronic or cryptographic technology that will make its way to Iran. It also blocks Cuba, Syria and Sudan for these kinds of technology sales (and until quite recently, blocked North Korea, too). There's a reason that Dell and HP have in their scripting, if you buy it over the phone or as a clickthrough on the website, a statement that you will not knowingly trade the equipment you're buying with an embargoed country... they're on the hook for megabucks in fines and penalties if they get caught selling to an embargoed country.
Apparently she said that she was buying it for her uncle in Iran. US Citizen or no, she was still buying a restricted piece of technology with the intent to ship it to an embargoed country.
My machine still chokes on Alice: Madness Returns, and that's with a 6970.
There's something wrong with your machine, then. My machine has a 6870, and that game runs perfectly at 1920x1080 max graphics settings. (CPU is an i5 2500k oc'd to 4.7GHz, with 16GB of RAM). Aside from some idiotic load cues triggering hard drive access in the middle of some of the puzzles (and the game not caching the loaded results so if you turn around and attempt the puzzle again the cues triggers again), no problems at all, but that's bad game design not bad graphics support, and the problem went away when I switched the hard drive for an SSD.
High poly count was the benchmark for the mid-late 1990's. In the 2nd decade of the 21st century, the benchmark is texture fill rate. Modern graphics usually use phong shading in addition to textures to give better lighting effects. In simpler terms... good looking phong-shaded games showed up in the 1980's, but it was nearly 20 years later before good-looking texture-shaded games showed up.
The numbers you quote aren't bad, and are quite playable for a variety of games, but the truth is that it's about par with what I get out of the Sandy Bridge graphics on my laptop. Your card *should* be able to wipe the floor with my laptop's graphics, and the fact that it doesn't is down to bad driver support. Intel has, far and above, the best driver support for Linux graphics, and their lag behind the other major players in performance is thinning: the IB and SB graphics are quite usable for light gaming these days.
and there isn't a thing in the world he can do about it, and it is perfectly legal.
He can't stop you from filing, but he can get it dismissed with prejudice, with an order that you have to pay his legal fees. Ultimately it costs him nothing, but it's still a pain in the ass to reach that point.
Sorry, but gl4ss was right when he said:
no, the reason to hate them is that they're giving loans to people who shouldn't be given loans in the first place. otherwise they could be getting it from the bank for 15% apr.
You give a few specific examples of times when people need to take payday loans, but the simple reality is that if you have a credit card or an overdraft with the bank, you don't need a payday loan. That's what credit and overdraft are for.
And I'm not entirely sure where you get the idea that a $300 loan with a $90 finance charge is "much, much cheaper than bank overdrafts". I have an overdraft on my chequing account, and the APR for going into it is prime + 2%. Prime lending rate with my bank right now is 2.25%, meaning that the *annual* interest rate for going into overdraft is 4.25% for me. There is a "convenience fee" stipulated in the contract of $25, but that gets waived if I haven't used the overdraft in more than 30 days. The point of an overdraft is *not* to give you an extra $1000 to spend as you will, it's to let you write cheques for emergency things like fixing your car without worrying about whether you'll have the money until next Friday.
And the funny part is, despite the expense, the only people who hate payday loans are the people who have never had one. The lenders are scared of being legislated into the dog house, so they're careful and play nice.
29.97% interest rate on loans is *not* playing nice. That's how much the payday loans people charge in this neck of the woods, and the only reason they charge so little is because usury laws prohibit charging 30%. My Visa rate is 12.9%. It could be lower if I was willing to pay an annual fee, but I don't carry a balance, so I don't really care what the rate is. It is cheaper, by far, for almost all of us to put that car repair on credit than it is to get a payday loan. The only people who *need* to get a payday loan are the people whose credit is bad enough that they can't get a credit card, and you need to have pretty bad credit to be in that situation. (if your credit is absolutely *terrible* you can still get a card at 29% annual interest, which is the same that the payday lenders charge, but the credit card won't charge you the $90 processing fee on a $300 loan, they'll just start charging interest 30 days after the purchase date).
If a customer is having trouble, all they have to do is say so. Generally they'll stop assessing interest, and then they'll create an installment plan that works best (e.g. one that makes the customer happy so they won't walk away).
If you think credit cards and bank loans don't work like that, then you've never dealt with a credit card or a bank. If you have a good relationship with your bank manager, then this kind of thing is easy to arrange with them. Even if you don't have that kind of relationship, most of them have a clause that will let you skip a payment, and most credit card companies will lower your interest rate without argument if you call them and ask them to do it. (the "official" interest rate on my Visa is 19.99% to start... I called them and asked them to lower it).
So yeah. I do hate payday lenders. And no, I've never needed to use one. But I still have a legitimate reason for hating them: their client base is, by and large, people who are at the lower income tiers and can *least* afford to pay the exorbitant rates they have. Beyond that, their client base is, largely, people who were never taught how finance actually works, and they are being taken advantage of. Nobody has bothered to explain to these people that they are buying the most expensive credit on the market, and it sets up a vicious cycle. I know too many people who get into a payday loan and end up getting one every paycheque because they have bills that they can't pay because they're paying last week's loan.
So yes. I have an ethical problem with payday lenders... they are the dregs of society, and they are feeding on the poor. And they are set up in such a way that keeps the poor down. They need to go.
It's unfortunate that today's society seems more concerned with what they can 'get away with' or how closely they can skate to the rules, than simply recognizing the difference between right and wrong.
Meanwhile, the 29.97% interest rate that the payday loans people charge (and that only because 30% is considered usury and is illegal) is in no way wrong? Even when you consider that the people who take payday loans are generally the poorest part of the population?
I'm not arguing that trying to extort money from the payday loans people isn't wrong... it is. Very much so. But simply obtaining the information from the website is not wrong... people are using the open door analogy which is fundamentally flawed... it's more like putting a big poster up on a tree, with a smaller poster on the other side of the tree saying "please don't read the other sign". There was no hacking involved, the "hackers" in question simply walked around to the other side of the tree and took a picture of the poster. The payday loan people put this information up, and need to be held to task for their actions.
As for how to hold them to task... extortion is the wrong way to do it. I would look into the privacy laws, and report them to the appropriate authorities.... publishing customer account data like that is illegal in most jurisdictions in the world.
Am I the only one feeling a bit uneasy about this thread? Some Chinese construction projects are underfunded and of poor quality, therefore all Chinese buildings are crap? Some Chinese products are rip-off of foreign products, therefore all Chinese tech is copied? All Chinamen talk funny therefore all Chinamen dumb?
That's not it at all... what's making people uneasy about this construction project is that we have a firm claiming they can do, in 90 days, what has traditionally taken many years. While I'm very willing to accept that they can find efficiencies in the process, it's a bit much.
I can't compare the trackpads but other (most?) ultra books come with back lit keyboards. It's not something exclusive to Apple and therefore shouldn't really be a selling point when comparing products.
My low end Dell Vostro V131 doesn't have a backlit keyboard... it was an option but I decided not to get it. In all honesty, the backlit keyboards are of marginal use for an experienced typist... I could see them being handy for people who need to look at the keyboard, but if you're the kind of person who can type simply by finding the home keys with your index fingers, then it's really quite useless... my last laptop had a backlit keyboard and I never turned it on.
High framerate in itself is obviously a good thing to do. The "motionflow" (framerate upsampling) on current TVs is uncanny when it works, but sometimes it's bad because it fails and creates jitters. Filming at a higher framerate in the first place is a logical step.
Modern TV's don't need to upsample... the jitter you see is when there's a difference between the refresh rate on the TV and the framerate on the source. If you're watching a 24fps source on a 60Hz display, that's 2.5 refreshes on the TV for every frame on the source. There will be jitter, because each frame on the screen can't have 2.5 refreshes, so it alternates between 2 and 3. Most sources we watch on TV are either 24fps or 30fps, which is why most good TV's on the market today are either 120Hz or 240Hz... 120Hz is 5 draws per frame at 24fps, and 4 draws per frame at 30fps... nice whole number, and each frame gets exactly the same screen time.
Back when they were actually using film, what allowed wide-screen in the first place was rotating the film 90 degrees as it passed through the camera... each frame could have an essentially arbitrary aspect ratio either way by increasing or decreasing the amount of film that was exposed with each frame, and by having it go sideways through the camera instead of vertically allowed it to have a wider aspect ratio like we see today. Switching to a different aspect ratio was a matter of changing the lens and increasing the speed that the film moves through the camera.
Now that they're using digital cameras and largely digital projectors, though, it's moot... the aspect ratio is fixed to what the capturing CCD is capable of, and the final resolution is a question of how it's transcoded (most HD films are recorded in much higher resolution than the 1080p you buy on a bluray). *many* theatres have gone with digital projectors these days, and changing the aspect ratio with a digital projector is a matter of specifying either a letter box or pillar that gets overlaid on the source so that the final output is the native resolution of the projector.
Alright, I'll bite...
Being generous in our definition of "4 million", and checking Wikipedia for the list of metropolitan areas by size ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas ), we come up with this:
10 Boston–Cambridge–Quincy, MA–NH MSA 4,591,112 4,552,402 +0.85% Boston–Worcester–Manchester, MA–RI–NH CSA
11 San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont, CA MSA 4,391,037 4,335,391 +1.28% San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA CSA
12 Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario, CA MSA 4,304,997 4,224,851 +1.90% Los Angeles–Long Beach–Riverside, CA CSA
13 Detroit–Warren–Livonia, MI MSA 4,285,832 4,296,250 0.24% Detroit–Warren–Flint, MI CSA
14 Phoenix–Mesa–Glendale, AZ MSA 4,262,236 4,192,887 +1.65% primary census statistical area
15 Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue, WA MSA 3,500,026 3,439,809 +1.75% Seattle–Tacoma–Olympia, WA CSA
6 cities we need to check for airports, ok.
Boston: http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=airports+near+boston,+ma&hl=en&ll=42.272228,-71.111755&spn=0.58735,1.349945&sll=49.891235,-97.15369&sspn=32.875467,86.396484&hq=airports&hnear=Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachusetts,+United+States&t=m&fll=42.256984,-70.9758&fspn=0.587492,1.349945&z=10
Within a 30 mile drive of downtown Boston, there's 10 airports.
San Francisco: http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=airports+near+san+francisco,+ca&hl=en&ll=37.527154,-122.203674&spn=0.629504,1.349945&sll=42.272228,-71.111755&sspn=0.58735,1.349945&hq=airports&hnear=San+Francisco,+California,+United+States&t=m&z=10
Within a 30 mile drive of downtown San Francisco, there's 10 airports.
San Bernadino/Ontario California, ok you got me there... there's only 1 airport that comes up on the search, but zooming out a bit (in case you didn't already know the geography) reveals that you're within 30 miles of Los Angeles... do you *really* want me to come up with a list of airports within 1 hour of LA?
I could continue, but do I need to to expound on the point? People think "airport" means "international terminal", but they're wrong. An airport is somewhere you can get a plane that flies you to where you want to go. I don't think there's a single metropolitan area in the world with a population over 500,000 that has only one airport within an hour's drive... they're all over the place, and you *can* get a domestic hop from a small or private airport, you just won't find most major airliners servicing out of there... and it's not because they can't, it's because they prefer to fly larger planes, and need longer runways to accommodate them.
A catastrophic failure that happened some time after the initial impact... time which allowed the majority of the people occupying the buildings to be safely evacuated. Yes, a lot of people died, but a *lot* more would have died if the buildings had collapsed immediately upon impact.
A little under 3000 people died, and we shouldn't forget that. But we also shouldn't forget that on the average day, the observation deck at the top of the building turned about 80,000 visitors, not to mention the staff that actually worked in the buildings. So no, don't be silly... understand that they withstood a catastrophic failure, and remained standing for long enough that the majority of the people in the buildings were able to evacuate. The casualties were *much* lower than they would have been in what I would consider a catastrophic failure.
Bullshit. How many airports are there near you? I live in a metro area with 4 million people, and there's a single airport here for any real flights out-of-state. Whatever private company gets the contract from the airport becomes an effective monopoly; it's not like I can choose to go with a different screening company if I don't like the screeners at my city's airport.
I live in a metro area with 1 million people. There's a single international hub, but there's at least 10 airports within an hour's drive of here from which I can charter a domestic flight. If I extend the radius to 2 hours from here, I add 3 more international hubs and at least 20 domestic airports.
Just because Delta doesn't fly there doesn't mean you can't fly a charter from a small airport and not have to deal with the TSA. They aren't generally that expensive, either.
Why they didn't is a matter of speculation for government-contracted (of course!) engineers and conspiracy theorists.
Except that they did withstand it... the buildings kept standing for quite some time after the initial impact, allowing the majority of the people in either building to evacuate before they collapsed. What got them was the heat of the jet fuel burning, causing main support structures to melt, but all things considered they did remarkably well.
Why not buy something that comes with Linux pre-installed, and has next day on-site warranty included in the base price?
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=sqct12&model_id=vostro-1440&c=us&l=en&s=soho&cs=ussoho1
It's relatively inexpensive, has a reasonable amount of horsepower, is reasonably light-weight*, and it has Ubuntu preinstalled, so switching it over to Edubuntu should be as easy as "apt-get install edubuntu", and you have a reasonable assurance that everything will work out of the box, and the *base* warranty option on it, because it's in the SMB line of products, includes next business day onsite hardware support. They've also been known to give some very nice deals to educational institutions.
* - It's not as small/lightweight as the V130 I'm typing this on, but that has been replaced by the V131 and they seem to have removed the Linux option on it. That being said, if you get a V131, everything'll work out of the box, too, and that is a smaller/lighter system.
Yup. Absolutely flies on my Sandy Bridge laptop with OpenGL rendering. :)
Why can't you have both?
As zippy as your P4 with 768MB of RAM, only on a 300MHz P2 with 128MB of RAM. And that's with the compositing effects turned on with CPU rendering.
I like XFCE, but I wouldn't switch back to it now that I have a stable e17 system up... many of the work flow concepts are identical between them, though. They both treat work flow very differently from how Gnome and KDE do, and both are *significantly* more productive.
Except you're not in the same boat at that point... you're still working with a lower-res screen that's 8 years old (dead pixels/backlight fade), a battery that's 8 years old (which may or may not still work), and a much smaller/slower hard drive (that's still 8 years old and could be near the failing point), not to mention that the processor is still only a single core 32-bit architecture that's, again, 8 years old.
I'm not going to get into the whole 64-bit/32-bit argument. It's not really germane to the point. But I am going to point out that Moore's Law is still in effect, and that a modern 1.2GHz dual core Celeron is a *significant* leap over an 8-year old single core G4 PPC, and that's without even considering reduced power requirements and heat generation from the smaller fab. In a mobile device, that, alone, should be enough of a selling point.
It would be a pity to throw away a good piece of hardware because Java 1.6 and recent OSX API are not supported.
While I understand that the hardware still works, and that it was certainly good equipment when you originally bought it, it is still an 8-year old laptop. It's still functional, it certainly doesn't owe you anything, but you do need to consider what you actually have.
8 years ago would be 2004.... the tech specs are here: http://support.apple.com/kb/SP83
In the 15" model, you have an LCD at 1280x854. At absolute best possible configuration, you have 2GB of memory in it, and a 1.5GHz G4,
rounded out with an 80GB hard drive and a 64MB Radeon 9700M.
While it's certainly usable for light computing uses, we need to keep in mind that the base configuration was 256MB of RAM, upgradeable to 512MB from Apple, which is extremely low by modern standards and may not be enough for a modern browser running some modern websites. We also need to consider that the processor is a single core 32-bit processor, and while it's running a RISC architecture it's still orders of magnitude slower than even the cheapest modern processor you can get today. It's also, by modern standards, an extremely low res screen, which would limit your ability to use it even for text processing.
Ultimately, it's your choice and your money, but I wouldn't consider using that system on a daily basis. When you can buy a cheap laptop for $350, and if you have a problem with Windows you can wipe it and install Linux free of charge (or BSD!), it really doesn't make sense to keep nursing an ancient laptop. Shame though it is to be considering retiring it, it's probably for the best.
Amiga support, presumably. Includes a "native" emulator for 68k Amiga hardware, too. Just in case you want to play Fire and Ice on your G4 laptop, I guess.
The article is right, though... 50 years from now, Steve Jobs' chief contribution will have been the creation of a design company that hasn't actually come up with a new idea since a couple of years before Jobs' death. I would be surprised if Apple is still in existence in 50 years. Jobs will end up as a footnote in history. I would be equally surprised if Microsoft is still in existence in 50 years, but they do have a better chance because they're ruled by committee. How many people remember what Douglas Engelbart did for computing? This place is populated by geeks, and I'd lay odds that several people reading this don't know what he did, even though modern computers couldn't work the way they do without his contributions. 50 years from now, Jobs will be in the same category.
Here's the thing... the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is set up as a self-perpetuating trust. They are spending gobs of cash, but they're only spending the interest and are actually profitable despite the amount of money they're spending on charity work. Barring some kind of global economic meltdown orders of magnitude worse than the one in 2008, 50 years from now the Gates Foundation will still be around, and will still be doing charitable work. For that reason alone, Bill Gates will be better remembered by history.