IE: There will be a redesign for the handheld console, but not any time real soon.
More like: "Even if there was a redesign coming, we would lie and say there wasn't until the last second so that people don't stop buying the current version."
There was a case in Texas, where building codes were copyrighted.
That's not uncommon at all. Most town, and even city councils can't figure out how to scratch their own asses, much less understand what is important to have in a building code, so they buy pre-written legislation from somebody. Unfortunatly, that same case will have to be fought elsewhere, and the mindless zombies that populate local governments and do what they've always done will have to be beaten into sumbision one at a time before things change. You're at their mercy, especially since they're all either union workers, or politicians that got elected on a single pet issue. Sure, a court case was won, but short of another law suit in every single town in the US, good luck getting your local building office to comply and publish the code without fee...
To keep a house warm, you need to add the same amount of heat that escapes.
To keep the house feeling warm, you need to set the internal temperature higher if the internal surfaces have been allowed to cool down too far. Additionally, your thermostat will keep the heat on until it's warmed up the wall it's mounted on.
The amount of heat that escapes is, to a first aproximation, proportional to the temperature-differential between indoors and outdoors. (if that is 0, no heat is lost, if it's 60 degrees you will require roughly twice the heating you would need if it was only 30)
Not really. We're not talking about a uniformly insulated box here, we're talking about something man-made and complex. Things shrink when they cool off and gaps widen, micro-climates of a sort are created. Lack of circulation from having your blower or radiators off causes all your heat to go upwards and stay there.
The proof is in the tests though. Try it and see how much more energy you use when you turn the heat down to 50 during the day instead of 60. It's easiest if you have a gas meter and a few days with the same outdoor temperature.
Me too, as long as the also don't get any credit for the security experience in their "new" version of Windows being any better than the old...
Clearly we're in for more of the same with Vista, so if we're all going to restrain from unfairly bashing Microsoft for having a security patch out already for an OS that isn't out already, we all better not unfairly spread Microsoft marketing statements that claim security in Vista is any better than in XP if they ever get around to shipping it.
You're easily pushing $500 (assuming you can get a suitable mac for under $100) just for parts there... How long is it going to take you to recoup that $500 through energy savings over a traditional programable thermostat?
My prediction? Never. The electrical costs of running the PowerMac 24/7 will be between $11 and $20 a month depending on where you live, and the gas or oil savings will be that much or less.
plus have the ability to do humidity setpoints (though it's not required)
Oh, one last thing. Your relative humidity setting should be a constant function of the outside temperature. Why? Otherwise you risk condensation, and condensation leads to rot and mold. Of course, if your house is insulated properly, a whole house humidifier built into your ducts will never get the humidity up to your requested setting before the furnace shuts off, but that's a whole different problem...
Bah... To be clear, that should have said "four or five week-long programming sets" In other words, multiple programs that it remembers and can easily be switched between...
As sombody who's doing the same thing to a house,(So far I've cleaned up a fuel oil spill, insulated, replaced all the plumbing, the furnace, the windows (22 new construction windows... Ugh.), the bathrooms, fireplace enclosures, siding, most of the interior trim, and refinished the wood floors), first let me congratulate you and (if you're doing the work yourself) give my condolences for the loss of all your free time from now on.
The pickings are slim, and short of a multi-thousand dollar (probably more than you paid for your furnace, and certainly more than you'll save in heating costs over the next five years from the programibility) home automation system, you're not going to find anything remotely suitable for what you described. Even then it's not going to be as flexible or open as you're hoping. You can build something yourself, but there are three things you should remember.
First, you use the most fuel transitioning from your low temperature setting to the high temperature setting. You don't want the low to be too much lower than the high or you'll actually increase consumption, and you don't want to transition too many times per day.
Second, the more complex you make your program the less change you'll notice in usage. Complexity provides deminishing returns. (At least it should if your house is insulated properly).
Lastly, and absolutly most important is that you never, ever want your thermostat to fail. As sombody who has just replaced all the plumbing in a two story house, and delt with the concequences of 4' of water in a basement (happened before I bought the house... Got me a good deal.) take my word for it when I say you don't want to do that. Especially if you have oil heat. The bottom rusting out of your oil tank is not fun for anybody. So if you want to make it programable from your computer, that's fine, but make sure it can still turn your heat on and off without your computer, or that you have a secondary manual thermostat that won't let the temperature drop below 50.
When it comes right down to it though, every ounce of effort and every dollar beyond $100 you spend on this would probably be better spent on insulating. There are some great thermostats off the shelf at home depot like places that have four or five week long programming sets. Get one of those, and on your way out the door every morning, or every monday, pick the program that fits your day.
I don't care either way if Quicktime Pro is free or not, but they should get rid of the damnedable nagscreen that displays every time you run the free version. Show it once or something. You know there's a problem when the most desireable feature of the 'pro' version is the lack of nag screen.
Remote root, even if it requires user interaction, and especially if that user interaction seems perfectly innocent is worse than a local root exploit *by far*, since 999 times out of a thousand an attacker never gets local access.
Your list should be re-ordered as follows: 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 7, 8, 11, 12. I removed 3 and 4 from your list because there is no such thing.
Sending SMS messages would be the big difficulty, but this is less relevant in the US
Really? Are you not from the US, or have you not met your average iPod owning cell phone user yet?
I don't think there is a resturaunt on the east coast right now where you can go in and not see a table with two people more interested in clicking their keypads than talking to each other... With the occational passing of the phones for a moment and giggling. Especially disturbing when those two people are pushing 30.
My biggest problem was finding a cheap, small and capable 12DC-DC power supply.
At almost $200 it looks like this fits two of your three requirements.
I went through the same pains a few years back. It looks like availability of DC->DC power supplies has much improved since then though. Oh, and for all of you who may be looking for an AC->DC power supply to use while these aren't in your car, check out the external adaptors for the Gamecube. Cheapest switching 12V supply in watts per dollar terms that you're likely to find. As little as $4 at a used games shop...
Other than being technologically interesting (but no more so than going from the 68XXX to the PowerPC) what's new?
Quite honestly, I think that just the new power connector alone was worth the press. It certainly was worth the press if you consider how much press the detachable cables from the original Xbox controllers got a few years back. What's the last thing Dell has added to a notebook computer that wasn't a 'Me Too' feature? IBM and Apple are the only innovators in the notebook market space, and they deserve the press more than Dell or Microsoft.
We're not talking about Apple consumer electronics, we're talking about Apple computers.
Really? I thought we were just talking about press coverage of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? Both Vista and Xbox got a boatload of coverage last week as reporters hung on Bill Gates' every word, and Vista doesn't even exist yet.
That would be lovely, but they don't get a disproportionate amount of press... Just a disporportionate amount of press that people notice. There are dozens of times as many of stories about Bill Gates and Microsoft, but they say the same old boring crap all the time, so we've learned to ignore them.
You didn't see BusinessWeek bitching after the AP issued all sorts of brown nosing crap about Bill last week after CES. In fact, it seems that they didn't even notice all those stories, they just stated in this article that they don't even remember them...
the vast majority of the computer-using population doesn't care about Apple, much less actually owns one.
The revenue from 14 million iPods last quarter is giving the revenue from Microsoft's gaming division the finger right now. Care to rethink that statement?
When is the last time a NewsAlert went out based on the words [...] Bill Gates?
Last week after the CES keynote, during which he didn't launch any new products at all, and instead talked about the same thing he's talked about for the last three years but still hasn't shipped, and a product that came out last year.
In contrast, Apple actually announced new product that was a signifigant shift from their previous strategy, and has a business impact beyond the doors of Apple itself.
If the 360 starts supporting Blu-Ray, they'll be eliminating thier fans most touted feature: Blu-Ray/PS3 trash talk. </joke>
Seriously though, cue all the 360 fanboys who are going to have to switch from HD-DVD is way better than Blu-Ray so the PS3 sucks to "Built in HD players are overrated, I'd rather the machine was cheaper".
Why would apple pay for a license from one of the big BIOS makers to include backwards BIS compatibility when they have nothing to be backwards compatable with?
Of course the real question is why intel decided to re-invent the wheel with EFI instead of adopting one of the modern standards that had developed while they fearfully lingered in the BIOS stone age, but I won't complain too much because these last few years of intel boxes with firmware that is actually useable has been heaven.
R&D costs aren't included in manufacturing costs. The costs exist, but they're not included in the numbers analysts give when they discuss manufacturing costs.
Re:Extremely easy to disable, and more info
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
Business entities wouldn't go to the expense of collecting this information if it didn't have value. This information belongs to me so where's my compensation?
That argument disgusts me. That's the essentially the same bullshit argument made the people who claim you can't take pictures of their publically visible property for copyright reasons.
You don't own non-atributable information. You especially don't own the non-atributable information that essentially adds up to server activity on somebody else's server just because one or two log entries may have been generated by your clicks. You don't own that stuff any more than you own a picture somebody took on the street corner that happens to have you in it.
Many people dislike being sold anything. I don't appreciate the business world trying to convince me to buy things I don't want and don't need. When I want something, I'll buy it. I do everything that I can to prevent something from being sold to me. Do you get the distinction?
Quite honestly, tough. That's the price you pay for living in a free society; everybody else is free too and they can try to sell you shit. If you don't like it, you can go hide in a cave somewhere, or more simply just ignore it. I understand the distinction, but you want it both ways, don't you? You want the software that this company provides for free in exchange for trying to sell you stuff, *and* you don't want them to sell you stuff. Given what you said about compensation above, that's fairly hypocritical.
Would you prefer to buy a car or would you prefer to be sold a car?
My answer to this question is officially off-topic. I like both. Certainly, I decide what car I want before I go shopping for it, but once I get to the car dealership, that salesman better be trying damned hard to get me to buy it. He doesn't know I've already made up my mind, and his need to make the sale is my advantage in the price negotiations. Plus it's an oddly nice feeling to have somebody pulling out all the stops to sell you something once you're relieved of any associated pressure by having made up your mind already.
Slashdot Mirror
God forbid sombody can sniff your packets and see how much you suck at Mario Kart.
All your important traffic is probably encrypted at the application layer anyway, right? So why bother with WPA? Especially on a gaming device.
IE: There will be a redesign for the handheld console, but not any time real soon.
More like: "Even if there was a redesign coming, we would lie and say there wasn't until the last second so that people don't stop buying the current version."
There was a case in Texas, where building codes were copyrighted.
That's not uncommon at all. Most town, and even city councils can't figure out how to scratch their own asses, much less understand what is important to have in a building code, so they buy pre-written legislation from somebody. Unfortunatly, that same case will have to be fought elsewhere, and the mindless zombies that populate local governments and do what they've always done will have to be beaten into sumbision one at a time before things change. You're at their mercy, especially since they're all either union workers, or politicians that got elected on a single pet issue. Sure, a court case was won, but short of another law suit in every single town in the US, good luck getting your local building office to comply and publish the code without fee...
To keep a house warm, you need to add the same amount of heat that escapes.
To keep the house feeling warm, you need to set the internal temperature higher if the internal surfaces have been allowed to cool down too far. Additionally, your thermostat will keep the heat on until it's warmed up the wall it's mounted on.
The amount of heat that escapes is, to a first aproximation, proportional to the temperature-differential between indoors and outdoors. (if that is 0, no heat is lost, if it's 60 degrees you will require roughly twice the heating you would need if it was only 30)
Not really. We're not talking about a uniformly insulated box here, we're talking about something man-made and complex. Things shrink when they cool off and gaps widen, micro-climates of a sort are created. Lack of circulation from having your blower or radiators off causes all your heat to go upwards and stay there.
The proof is in the tests though. Try it and see how much more energy you use when you turn the heat down to 50 during the day instead of 60. It's easiest if you have a gas meter and a few days with the same outdoor temperature.
I hope they don't get unfairly bashed for this
Me too, as long as the also don't get any credit for the security experience in their "new" version of Windows being any better than the old...
Clearly we're in for more of the same with Vista, so if we're all going to restrain from unfairly bashing Microsoft for having a security patch out already for an OS that isn't out already, we all better not unfairly spread Microsoft marketing statements that claim security in Vista is any better than in XP if they ever get around to shipping it.
You're easily pushing $500 (assuming you can get a suitable mac for under $100) just for parts there... How long is it going to take you to recoup that $500 through energy savings over a traditional programable thermostat?
My prediction? Never. The electrical costs of running the PowerMac 24/7 will be between $11 and $20 a month depending on where you live, and the gas or oil savings will be that much or less.
plus have the ability to do humidity setpoints (though it's not required)
Oh, one last thing. Your relative humidity setting should be a constant function of the outside temperature. Why? Otherwise you risk condensation, and condensation leads to rot and mold. Of course, if your house is insulated properly, a whole house humidifier built into your ducts will never get the humidity up to your requested setting before the furnace shuts off, but that's a whole different problem...
Bah... To be clear, that should have said "four or five week-long programming sets" In other words, multiple programs that it remembers and can easily be switched between...
As sombody who's doing the same thing to a house,(So far I've cleaned up a fuel oil spill, insulated, replaced all the plumbing, the furnace, the windows (22 new construction windows... Ugh.), the bathrooms, fireplace enclosures, siding, most of the interior trim, and refinished the wood floors), first let me congratulate you and (if you're doing the work yourself) give my condolences for the loss of all your free time from now on.
The pickings are slim, and short of a multi-thousand dollar (probably more than you paid for your furnace, and certainly more than you'll save in heating costs over the next five years from the programibility) home automation system, you're not going to find anything remotely suitable for what you described. Even then it's not going to be as flexible or open as you're hoping. You can build something yourself, but there are three things you should remember.
First, you use the most fuel transitioning from your low temperature setting to the high temperature setting. You don't want the low to be too much lower than the high or you'll actually increase consumption, and you don't want to transition too many times per day.
Second, the more complex you make your program the less change you'll notice in usage. Complexity provides deminishing returns. (At least it should if your house is insulated properly).
Lastly, and absolutly most important is that you never, ever want your thermostat to fail. As sombody who has just replaced all the plumbing in a two story house, and delt with the concequences of 4' of water in a basement (happened before I bought the house... Got me a good deal.) take my word for it when I say you don't want to do that. Especially if you have oil heat. The bottom rusting out of your oil tank is not fun for anybody. So if you want to make it programable from your computer, that's fine, but make sure it can still turn your heat on and off without your computer, or that you have a secondary manual thermostat that won't let the temperature drop below 50.
When it comes right down to it though, every ounce of effort and every dollar beyond $100 you spend on this would probably be better spent on insulating. There are some great thermostats off the shelf at home depot like places that have four or five week long programming sets. Get one of those, and on your way out the door every morning, or every monday, pick the program that fits your day.
I don't care either way if Quicktime Pro is free or not, but they should get rid of the damnedable nagscreen that displays every time you run the free version. Show it once or something. You know there's a problem when the most desireable feature of the 'pro' version is the lack of nag screen.
My bad... My comment should have said "Remote exploits", not "remote root".
The point was that anything with "Remote" at the beginning should have been higher up on the list than anything with "Local" at the beginning.
Did you pull those out of your ass?
Remote root, even if it requires user interaction, and especially if that user interaction seems perfectly innocent is worse than a local root exploit *by far*, since 999 times out of a thousand an attacker never gets local access.
Your list should be re-ordered as follows: 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 7, 8, 11, 12. I removed 3 and 4 from your list because there is no such thing.
For most boxes, local exploits are irrelevant.
Sending SMS messages would be the big difficulty, but this is less relevant in the US
Really? Are you not from the US, or have you not met your average iPod owning cell phone user yet?
I don't think there is a resturaunt on the east coast right now where you can go in and not see a table with two people more interested in clicking their keypads than talking to each other... With the occational passing of the phones for a moment and giggling. Especially disturbing when those two people are pushing 30.
My biggest problem was finding a cheap, small and capable 12DC-DC power supply.
At almost $200 it looks like this fits two of your three requirements.
I went through the same pains a few years back. It looks like availability of DC->DC power supplies has much improved since then though. Oh, and for all of you who may be looking for an AC->DC power supply to use while these aren't in your car, check out the external adaptors for the Gamecube. Cheapest switching 12V supply in watts per dollar terms that you're likely to find. As little as $4 at a used games shop...
Other than being technologically interesting (but no more so than going from the 68XXX to the PowerPC) what's new?
Quite honestly, I think that just the new power connector alone was worth the press. It certainly was worth the press if you consider how much press the detachable cables from the original Xbox controllers got a few years back. What's the last thing Dell has added to a notebook computer that wasn't a 'Me Too' feature? IBM and Apple are the only innovators in the notebook market space, and they deserve the press more than Dell or Microsoft.
Macworld Expo. Much of the IT press is reporting on the only event going on this week, and Slashdot just posts links to what's out there...
Because you have the apple section enabled in your user profile.
We're not talking about Apple consumer electronics, we're talking about Apple computers.
Really? I thought we were just talking about press coverage of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? Both Vista and Xbox got a boatload of coverage last week as reporters hung on Bill Gates' every word, and Vista doesn't even exist yet.
That would be lovely, but they don't get a disproportionate amount of press... Just a disporportionate amount of press that people notice. There are dozens of times as many of stories about Bill Gates and Microsoft, but they say the same old boring crap all the time, so we've learned to ignore them.
You didn't see BusinessWeek bitching after the AP issued all sorts of brown nosing crap about Bill last week after CES. In fact, it seems that they didn't even notice all those stories, they just stated in this article that they don't even remember them...
the vast majority of the computer-using population doesn't care about Apple, much less actually owns one.
The revenue from 14 million iPods last quarter is giving the revenue from Microsoft's gaming division the finger right now. Care to rethink that statement?
Here's a link to that if you're interested...
When is the last time a NewsAlert went out based on the words [...] Bill Gates?
Last week after the CES keynote, during which he didn't launch any new products at all, and instead talked about the same thing he's talked about for the last three years but still hasn't shipped, and a product that came out last year.
In contrast, Apple actually announced new product that was a signifigant shift from their previous strategy, and has a business impact beyond the doors of Apple itself.
Which company gets an unusual amount of coverage?
If the 360 starts supporting Blu-Ray, they'll be eliminating thier fans most touted feature: Blu-Ray/PS3 trash talk.
</joke>
Seriously though, cue all the 360 fanboys who are going to have to switch from HD-DVD is way better than Blu-Ray so the PS3 sucks to "Built in HD players are overrated, I'd rather the machine was cheaper".
Why would apple pay for a license from one of the big BIOS makers to include backwards BIS compatibility when they have nothing to be backwards compatable with?
Of course the real question is why intel decided to re-invent the wheel with EFI instead of adopting one of the modern standards that had developed while they fearfully lingered in the BIOS stone age, but I won't complain too much because these last few years of intel boxes with firmware that is actually useable has been heaven.
R&D costs aren't included in manufacturing costs. The costs exist, but they're not included in the numbers analysts give when they discuss manufacturing costs.
Business entities wouldn't go to the expense of collecting this information if it didn't have value. This information belongs to me so where's my compensation?
That argument disgusts me. That's the essentially the same bullshit argument made the people who claim you can't take pictures of their publically visible property for copyright reasons.
You don't own non-atributable information. You especially don't own the non-atributable information that essentially adds up to server activity on somebody else's server just because one or two log entries may have been generated by your clicks. You don't own that stuff any more than you own a picture somebody took on the street corner that happens to have you in it.
Many people dislike being sold anything. I don't appreciate the business world trying to convince me to buy things I don't want and don't need. When I want something, I'll buy it. I do everything that I can to prevent something from being sold to me. Do you get the distinction?
Quite honestly, tough. That's the price you pay for living in a free society; everybody else is free too and they can try to sell you shit. If you don't like it, you can go hide in a cave somewhere, or more simply just ignore it. I understand the distinction, but you want it both ways, don't you? You want the software that this company provides for free in exchange for trying to sell you stuff, *and* you don't want them to sell you stuff. Given what you said about compensation above, that's fairly hypocritical.
Would you prefer to buy a car or would you prefer to be sold a car?
My answer to this question is officially off-topic. I like both. Certainly, I decide what car I want before I go shopping for it, but once I get to the car dealership, that salesman better be trying damned hard to get me to buy it. He doesn't know I've already made up my mind, and his need to make the sale is my advantage in the price negotiations. Plus it's an oddly nice feeling to have somebody pulling out all the stops to sell you something once you're relieved of any associated pressure by having made up your mind already.