I beg to differ. Palladium only costs about as much as gold, and is used commonly for things like spark plugs and catalytic converters for cars. It's also not consumed by the reaction, so it's a one-time cost.
In regards to tritium, I'll agree that it's expensive now. This may not always be the case, though, especially if there's a use for it besides thermonuclear devices and glowing keychains. The article seemed quite optimistic about the possiblity of getting the needed heavy water from the sea ("Much of this work was carried out at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the idea of generating energy from sea water--a good source of heavy water--may have seemed more captivating than at other laboratories." - emphasis added).
If cold fusion turns out to be the Real Deal (TM), then there will be scientists and engineers falling over themselves to find economical ways of producing the fuel, I guarantee it.
Yeah, but if you go down that route, where do you stop? There are two main schools of thought in linguistics - those who believe in a prescriptive role for the study of language (i.e. grammar books dictate what is correct and what is not) and those who believe it should have a more descriptive role (i.e. it describes what is actually in use).
You can generally tell what kind of linguist you are dealing with by what kind of books they write. Prescriptive linguists write grammar books. Descriptive linguists write dictionaries.
The descriptive linguists also write studies on the cross-polination you referred to, but they generally get offended when people use their dictionaries to justify clubbing others over the head with their preferred spellings. To answer your question of where to stop, don't. Embrace diversity, recognize its role in defining culture, and don't get so hung up about being "right" or others being "wrong".
Conventional wisdom at my school (Brigham Young University) holds that sometime in the Golden Age (TM) HPs had long-ranged IR ports, capable of "talking" across rooms (given a clear line-of-sight, of course). According to the legend, the Powers That Be (TM) were displeased by the potential that had for cheating. As a result, the good engineers at HP nerfed the IR receiver, such that it would only receive if the transmitter were four inches away, rather than have their calculator banned at better institutions of higher learning nationwide. Interestingly, the legend also asserts that the transmitter remained unchanged, making the HP calculators suitable for use as remote controls.
Your mileage may vary, of course. This legend colored my reading of the article, though, such that I thought they were saying the receive-from-anywhere feature was back. That would be good, IMHO, as long as HP keeps a line of nerfed ones. And keeps them clearly labeled so proctors can tell them apart. I'm hoping my children can bring [nerfed] HPs to school [/me shows faith that HP will hang around that long].
So, since it looks like I might be wrong about long-range IR returning, can anyone confirm that there were IR-less HPs any time in the recent past? I haven't heard of them...
The saddest thing I've seen lately is a letter-boxed widescreen movie played on a widescreen TV in a store display. The letterbox effect printed on the DVD shrunk the image vertically to accommodate the aspect ratio of most TVs. The widescreen TV, for some unfathomable reason, stretched the image it was given to fit the wider aspect ratio of the widescreen TV. The result was a short, elongated version of the original movie, and I don't think the implementation could have been further from the intent of its designers (the film makers). There's no way I was going to even consider buying that TV. Unfortunately, most of the "widescreen" TVs I look at (casual inspection only) seem to be pulling the same "stretch it a little and no one will notice" trick, so unless I hear that the industry is making an effort to coordinate solutions I'm not putting my hard-earned $thousands into the new technology.
Two possible solutions: (1) sell widescreen format movies that look weird on normal sets because they'd be squished horizontally. (2) make the TV able to recognize the letterbox format and adjust intelligently.
My vote is on option 2 - better backwards compatibility. I just hope that the industry picks soon and sticks with the decision.
The Mozilla project has had people working on this for almost 3 years now, see bug #21521 on Bugzilla (they deny links from Slashdot, so I won't even try). Unfortunately, there are technical problems that can't be ignored when designing a system like this. One of the stickiest problems is the fact that, as you browse, the history of where you went becomes larger and larger - it starts to act just like a memory leak. Using menu items for this (like the go menu or, I think, the back button's menu) makes the memory problem worse, since menus are memory intensive. There are also cross platform compatibility issues to deal with.
The article mentions the non-technical issues as well: "Unsurprisingly, it's harder to return to index pages with this system - so it's easier to get lost in big websites. New users tended to solve problems either very efficiently or very inefficiently." I believe that this is one of the bigger problems the developers of more advanced navigation systems face, how to provide controls that afford the user good access to the information.
I wish them luck. And if you want to see something like it in Mozilla, please vote for bug 21521 on Bugzilla. It's only got 7 votes, which is pathetic.
On the other hand, if no one cares, perhaps the answer really is to just let it drop. Once again, I wish them luck.
If I recall correctly, clowns trademark their faces, and somewhere all the registered faces are stored, painted on egg shells. If a clown wears another clown's face without permission, the law suit is over trademark violation.
Which brings up an interesting point; should actors trademark their own faces? I've heard that the actors from Cheers have already had problems with people using their likenesses without permission. The movie The Crow showed that it's possible to put an actor's face on a stunt double if there's budget for it. Having a trademark on your likeness could be an important part of acting in the future.
Of course, if Hollywood were like the music industry, the studio would want to hold the trademark. It would sure suck if you quit, but your contract said you couldn't act anymore because the producers own your face. Even worse, they keep on making movies using your face a la S1m0ne.
Pandora's box really opens up when you happen to look like Mel Gibson, and you want to go into acting, but you can't because your face infringes on his trademark. In a particularly barbaric world I could even see the ruling stipulate that if you want to act you must get a facial scar of some sort. Even in this (only semi-barbaric) world, I really don't think that I'd want, as a judge, to have to set precendent for facial infringement and how close the match needs to be to qualify. How would you even measure that?
With any luck the courts would simply throw it out, but with the amount the Studios can afford to pay their lawyers, who knows...
You'd be surprised what people will cut lawns with. In Brasilia (Capital of Brasil) the standard method of trimming lawns is to use a machete. No, I'm not talking about hacking down waist-high grass, I'm talking about trimming 3-inch high grass down to two inches by hacking repeatedly at it with a machete, trying to swing parallel to the ground as best you can. No, you don't do this yourself, you hire someone to do it. And if you're a salaried groundskeeper, it makes sure that you always have something to do - you woldn't want to be found slacking off during the day. On rare occasions I've seen people using hedge trimmers (aka big scissors) instead. My family was the only one I knew about in our neighborhood that even owned an American-style lawn mower. My parents were too cheap to hire a full-time groundskeeper, and I have lots of brothers and sisters who work for free:)
Moral of the story; if it works and fits the requirements better, someone will do it.
How's this for an idea: implement something like NetFlix's rating system and user profiling. Any idea if it's patented? If not, the adaptive rating system would be a real asset to a music site of the sort we're talking about.
For those not it the know, Netflix is an online DVD rental place that has a decent system for rating the movies; it can learn your tastes and guess which movies you might want to rent. Here's a brief description of the system:
I can browse the catalog, with the available titles rated according to what the "average visitor" thought of them. This does not require signing in.
I can rate the items I have an opinion about (already watched the movie or I'm not interested) affecting the "global rating" of those items. This requires the creation of a customer account.
As a side effect of contributing ratings, the system profiles my tastes, and adjusts the ratings I see when logged in to reflect what it thinks I'd think of things I haven't rated (based on the ratings given by people of similar tastes).
I think this would be really useful to a music site. They could carry all sorts of music, the punk rockers could label the indie brittney-clones as "not interested", and once they find music they like the site can reccommend new bands for them to try out. There could even be a section on new releases, perhaps organized by genre, and the site could hold off on posting a rating until enough reviewers have judged it to be a significant sample.
now, if I only knew how to code something like that...
You know, I laughed pretty hard when I read the Tac-Nuke specs in the Paranoia manual. And someone actually built one? And DEPLOYED it? Your link said that this was sent to the field for actual combat!
I'm just glad none of my relatives were in field artillery...
The last web shop I worked in made extensive use of dreamweaver, and had little problem with accessibility. Macromdia actually provides a suite of excellent tools for checking ADA compliance of the code it writes. This feature is well advertised, and was one of the features that led us to choose it for use by our artists.
As an aside, our HTML programmers used a different program, HoT MetaL Pro, which checks HTML validity every time you save. Mostly it was just the artists causing accessibility problems (flash animations and the like), so by the time they handed their code over to the HTML jockeys it was ADA compliant and just needed to be dropped in place. Not a perfect solution, but we've never had any complaints.
Back to the point, if the editor you're using doesn't support validation features, get another one, or use a couple that give you the features you need. For anyone who is selling things on the web, the cost of Dreamweaver and HoTMetaL Pro licenses is negligible compared to the rest of your operating costs. Suck it up, and do the job right the first time.
don't some volcanic eruptions involve poisonous gasses? Couldn't that poison the lava cooked meal?
You've got a good point there. [sarcasm]Maybe the people who live there only build their houses near the non-toxic lava flows? But then, you'd think that they'd maybe move to a slightly less-active island...[/sarcasm]
I'm willing to give the guy with the web site the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's avoiding flows where he starts getting dizzy or nauseated from sniffing the fumes. I'd also be willing to guess that anyone who spends significant amounts of time around active volcanoes either 1) understands the risks and takes safety measures, or 2) quickly becomes a Darwin award nominee.
That doesn't, however, rule out the possibility of this guy trying out for the Darwins;)
From what I've heard, people don't have to accept payment in coins. Coins don't fall into the same category of "legal tender" as bills do, precisely because they are inconvenient for large transactions. I'm not sure if it's a law or just legal precedent, is there a lawyer in the house that could fill in the background?
In any case, they weren't under any obligation to accept the letter, either. They could have just as easily rejected it, and it would have been returned to you, postage-due.
Let me make a guess, though: it was a college campus parking ticket, not a city one. More than likely the person recieving the letter was a student employee who didn't know the trivia facts I've stated above and who didn't care that the postage for heavy letter-class mail is extortionary because she didn't have to pay it personally. Besides, counting all of those pennies probably reduced the boredom of her afternoon:)
From the article: "The original idea of a hard disk having two heads emerged around 1985..."
Funny that the technology hasn't been implemented after all this time... Or has it?
From the StorageReview.com reference section: "Such hard disks have been built. Conner Peripherals, which was an innovator in the hard disk field in the late 1980s and early 1990s (they later went bankrupt and their product line and technology were purchased by Seagate) had a drive model called the Chinook that had two complete head-actuator assemblies: two sets of heads, sliders and arms and two actuators. They also duplicated the control circuitry to allow them to run independently. For its time, this drive was a great performer. But the drive never gained wide acceptance, and the design was dropped. Nobody to my knowledge has tried to repeat the experiment in the last several years.
There are several reasons why it is not practical to make a drive with more than one actuator. Some are technical; for starters, it is very difficult to engineer. Having multiple arms moving around on a platter makes the design complex, especially in small form factors. There are more issues related to thermal expansion and contraction. The heat generated inside the hard drive is increased. The logic required to coordinate and optimize the seeks going on with the two sets of heads requires a great deal of work. And with hard disk designs and materials changing so quickly, this work would have to be re-done fairly often.
However, the biggest reasons why multiple actuators designs aren't practical are related to marketing. The added expense in writing specialty electronics and duplicating most of the internal control components in the drive would make it very expensive, and most people just don't care enough about performance to pay the difference. Hard disks are complex technology that can only be manufactured economically if they are mass-produced, and the market for those who would appreciate the extra actuators isn't large enough to amortize the development costs inherent in these fancy designs. It makes more sense instead to standardize on mass-produced drives with a single actuator stack, and build RAID arrays from these for those who need the added performance. Compare a single 36 GB drive to an array of four 9 GB drives: in effect, the array is a 36 GB drive with four sets of everything. It would in most cases yield performance and reliability superior to a single 36 GB drive with four actuators, and can be made from standard components without special engineering."
So, from the looks of things, it would be easier and cheaper to use single-head drives in easy-to-put-together configurations than put two heads in the same drive. Admittedly, the StorgeReview.com reference's author didn't mention setting up a read-only/read-write scheme, but the logic still works. I'd guess that it would still be easier to make a RAID container that provides read-only access on one channel and read-write on another.
Again, from the article: "Scarabs is also working on a different version of the technology--instead of putting two heads on a hard disk, the company is connecting two SCSI interface circuits to a conventional hard disk with one head, one set to send read-only electronic signals and the other to send read/write signals."
This company already knows that their gimmick drive won't sell. No one will buy an over-priced drive with higher probability of failure over a (comparatively) cheap SCSI trick that requires no extra moving parts.
Couldn't the problem be solved by brancing the unstable first, then releasing the stable branch when it's ready?
For example, let's say that we're happy with the feature set in the 2.5 unstable series. Instead of putting off waiting for all of the bugs to get shaken out and call it 2.6, just switch from 2.5 to 2.7 on the unstable development side. Linus can pass the reins off to someone he trusts, we can have a GROF (Get Rid Of the Fin) party and his trusted lieutenant can finish stabilizing 2.5 into 2.6 without him.
This solves the problem of wanting to keep back-porting features from 2.7 into 2.6, it allows for time to make sure the 2.5 code is stable before public release as 2.6, and provides a clear feature-freeze mechanism: once Linus is gone, go bugfixes only. If you want the new features, run the unstable kernel or wait for 2.8 (released sometime after 2.9 is branched).
Not that my opinion matters at all, it's just an idea.
"They're offering to license their IP under reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms; will license rights to the extent necessary, provided a reciprocal license is granted to MS.
Granted on 1:1 basis for OpenGL 1.3, 1.4, and earlier versions." (emphasis added)
So, they want to trade this one piece of IP for many pieces currently belonging to other people? Sounds like a really sweet deal for them. I'm not sure whether to accuse them of being sneaky or just stand in awe that they actually do understand the potentially non-scarce nature of information.
Does anyone who knows about how these comittees work want to comment on whether this is considered ethical? It would be better from an openness standpoint to have them just give it up, but reasonable licensing is better than having them try to exploit it after the standard is implemented (like happened with Rambus).
I know it would never happen, but I have to wonder what Tim Burton would do with ep3. If you want dark, I think he could do the job. And there's some chance that he'd even let George go wild on CG, just keep it focused... I could go for that.
Wouldn't the plan be to put all of the environmentalists and conservationists ^W^W^W hairdressers and telephone sanitizers on the first ships out? I think that would solve the problem nicely, and we'd only need one wave of ships...
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not an expert here. In fact, you seem to have quite a bit of knowledge based on your other posts in this thread.
So I'm going to punt (ie. appeal to authority): storagereview.com's hard drive reference.
While it may be true that a faster parallel equivalent can be created for any serial system, it may not be economical to do so. If it's cheaper to double the frequency of your transmission than to double the number of connections then it makes sense to stay with serial (or in this case, revert to it). According to the reference I linked above, it looks like this will be the case for the next while.
When speeds get high enough parallel can't get to 2x, while serial can.
The wires in the parallel cables introduce all sorts of electrical effects like picking up RF and capacitance between the wires. Increasing the signal frequency aggravates this problem, doubling the number of connections doubles the thickness of the wire, and eventually it becomes more trouble than it's worth.
Serial cables using small numbers of connections can use thicker, shielded connectors, and because there are fewer of them the cable size stays manageable. The signal frequency can be increased much more easily due to the better isolation of the wires.
In short, the high end achievable by serial is higher than the high end for parallel because serial's weaknesses are easier to work around and engineer for.
PS - any electrical engineers out there that want to correct/amplify any of the points here, feel free. I'm just a mechanical-engineer-in-training who reads too much outside his field.
At least "Mormon" is less offensive than the nickname the Church got in Russia - it tranlslates to "polygamist". Since the Saints haven't practiced polygamy for about 150 years now we get a bit touchy about that...
The official name of the church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints". [1] As you can expect, that's quite a mouthful so a nickname is necessary. "Latter-Day Saint (LDS) Church" is acceptable, and the church Presidency supports it. Likewise, it's appropriate to call members of the LDS church "Latter-Day Saints".
"Mormon" [2] is a nickname that was given to the church and its members by others, who knew that we considered the Book of Mormon to be scripture [3] (but didn't know much else about us). This is not a nickname sanctioned by the church Presidency, but most of the church members tolerate it. The problem is that using the name "Mormon" for the church and its members makes it sound like we worship Mormon, or that the church was perhaps founded by Mormon; neither is the case.
What's worse, there are several groups that claim to be "Mormons" - most notably the "Reformed LDS Church" and the polygamists [4] in southern Utah (who I think call themselves "Fundamentalist Mormons", or something like that) - who have little to do with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the most part these other "Mormon" churches are splinter groups formed by people who left the church (or were kicked out) because they felt that they should be leading the flock instead of the current Presidency. The legitimate leaders are understandably anxious to make a clear distinction between the real LDS church and the others that call themselves "Mormons".
I personally respond to either and don't make a big deal about it in most cases as long as I'm sure that there's no confusion about what people mean by it.
[1] The "Latter Days" referred to are the present times. The members of Christ's church in His day were called saints, and members of His church today are called "Latter-Day Saints to distinguish the "former" church from the "latter".
[2] Mormon was a real person, a prophet-historian who compiled the Book of Mormon. It's his book, so it's named after him.
[3] We recognize the Bible as scripture, too. There are also a couple of other books of scripture that we use: the Doctrine and Covenants records revelations given to Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the latter days; and the Pearl of Great Price, which records revelations recived by Moses and Abraham, found and translated by Joseph Smith.
[4] Polygamy used to be practiced by the LDS church, but was discontinued about 150 years ago. Anyone church member who practices it modernly is promptly excommunicated. So Tom Green, on trial for various sex crimes against one of his underage wives has nothing whatever to do with the LDS church, regardless of how much he may protest that he is a "Mormon".
I would have responded sooner, but I decided to actually do some reseach before responding.
I don't know what you mean by "many years", but here in the US I don't remember seeing any manufacturer of MD products other than Sony prior to about 1998. I also have vague recollections (although I can't find references now, sorry) of news articles about the same time talking about how Sony was shooting itself in the foot by not opening up the format to clone makers. Care to name any consumer-priced (less than US$300) being sold before then as a conter-example?
This compared to the CD format, which was already entrenched in the market, many people already had a large investment in the technology, and MD only gave marginal benefits at a much higher price. My point was that Sony was pushing a proprietary technology on an already CD-saturated market at too high a price to be competitive. I don't know why they were surprised that it didn't work (twice, once in 1992, once in 1998). By now, Sony and friends have lost on the MD format - my computer didn't come with an MD drive.
And while Sony's cheapest MD player goes for $150 (I'm trusting your research on that one), you only have to look as far as thinkgeek.com to find cheaper mp3-based alternatives. The Rio Volt SP-90 plays normal CDs, CDRs, and CDRWs, can read both MP3 and WMA encoded music files, and costs US$95 (+tax, of course). Teac makes a similar mini-cd player that costs US$120 (MP3 only, though). And if you want the "pocket recorder", you can pay US$200 and get the "Imation RipGo!" (I hate products with exclamation points in the name).
Saying that CDs are too big is entirely subjective. Yes, they are big, but if you go for the MP3-on-CD players they hold about 5 times the music at equivalent quality (I'm comparing 128K/sec MP3 to SP mode MD). I'd pick the CD rather than the 5 MDs, personally (I'd never have to switch it out). And if it doesn't fit in your pocket, get bigger pockets;) Or do like the people I see running with a Diskman: spend $20 on a case and strap it to yourself.
I have to eat some crow on the topic of compression. SP mode on a mini disk is considered "near-CD quality", as it is almost lossless. The equivalent MP3 bitrate quality is 128k. The real benefit that MP3 has over MD in this case is customizable bitrates, especially variable bitrate settings. MDs are only capable of constant bitrate encoding, and only on 3 settings (normal, 1/2, and 1/4 bitrate).
So, perhaps MD should have become big in the US; Beta cassettes should have won the video war, too. Meanwhile, the cost of MD use in the States until recently has not even been close to competitive, and even now I'd be hesitant to make the switch based on cost and benefits. If it works for you, keep it.
The "way of the minidisk" is that you refuse to license the technology to anyone, charge ridiculous prices for both the hardware and the media, and wait for the cash to roll in until your patent runs out. This technique doesn't work so well for getting tech to take off in the States, as Sony found out with the minidisk. Now that the patent _has_ run out, we're finally seeing reasonably-priced hardware from other manufacturers. Unfortunately, mp3 players now offer the same features (digital music, random access to the tracks, and customizable playlists) and better performance (shorter access time, less-lossy compression, and lower likelihood of skipping) for about the same price, so they've pretty much lost in the US marketplace.
As another poster pointed out, minidisks are very popular in Europe and Asia; over there the cost of living is so high that paying the equivalent of US$150-300 for a walkman-like device isn't considered so ridiculous. In Italy, every woman owns a real fur coat, even the ones on welfare for goodness' sake.
My prediction is that if Philips makes the spec available to other manufacturers for a reasonable licensing fee then the competition will put the price at a reasonable level and people will buy it (assuming that nothing better comes out and offers better features for the same or lower price). So, yes, the market will decide; and considering that it is Philips (the owner of the CD spec, unless I'm mistaken), they probably won't make the same mistakes that Sony did. Here's to hoping.
Slashdot Mirror
I beg to differ. Palladium only costs about as much as gold, and is used commonly for things like spark plugs and catalytic converters for cars. It's also not consumed by the reaction, so it's a one-time cost.
In regards to tritium, I'll agree that it's expensive now. This may not always be the case, though, especially if there's a use for it besides thermonuclear devices and glowing keychains. The article seemed quite optimistic about the possiblity of getting the needed heavy water from the sea ("Much of this work was carried out at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the idea of generating energy from sea water--a good source of heavy water--may have seemed more captivating than at other laboratories." - emphasis added).
If cold fusion turns out to be the Real Deal (TM), then there will be scientists and engineers falling over themselves to find economical ways of producing the fuel, I guarantee it.
You can generally tell what kind of linguist you are dealing with by what kind of books they write. Prescriptive linguists write grammar books. Descriptive linguists write dictionaries.
The descriptive linguists also write studies on the cross-polination you referred to, but they generally get offended when people use their dictionaries to justify clubbing others over the head with their preferred spellings. To answer your question of where to stop, don't. Embrace diversity, recognize its role in defining culture, and don't get so hung up about being "right" or others being "wrong".
Conventional wisdom at my school (Brigham Young University) holds that sometime in the Golden Age (TM) HPs had long-ranged IR ports, capable of "talking" across rooms (given a clear line-of-sight, of course). According to the legend, the Powers That Be (TM) were displeased by the potential that had for cheating. As a result, the good engineers at HP nerfed the IR receiver, such that it would only receive if the transmitter were four inches away, rather than have their calculator banned at better institutions of higher learning nationwide. Interestingly, the legend also asserts that the transmitter remained unchanged, making the HP calculators suitable for use as remote controls.
Your mileage may vary, of course. This legend colored my reading of the article, though, such that I thought they were saying the receive-from-anywhere feature was back. That would be good, IMHO, as long as HP keeps a line of nerfed ones. And keeps them clearly labeled so proctors can tell them apart. I'm hoping my children can bring [nerfed] HPs to school [/me shows faith that HP will hang around that long].
So, since it looks like I might be wrong about long-range IR returning, can anyone confirm that there were IR-less HPs any time in the recent past? I haven't heard of them...
The saddest thing I've seen lately is a letter-boxed widescreen movie played on a widescreen TV in a store display. The letterbox effect printed on the DVD shrunk the image vertically to accommodate the aspect ratio of most TVs. The widescreen TV, for some unfathomable reason, stretched the image it was given to fit the wider aspect ratio of the widescreen TV. The result was a short, elongated version of the original movie, and I don't think the implementation could have been further from the intent of its designers (the film makers). There's no way I was going to even consider buying that TV. Unfortunately, most of the "widescreen" TVs I look at (casual inspection only) seem to be pulling the same "stretch it a little and no one will notice" trick, so unless I hear that the industry is making an effort to coordinate solutions I'm not putting my hard-earned $thousands into the new technology.
Two possible solutions:
(1) sell widescreen format movies that look weird on normal sets because they'd be squished horizontally.
(2) make the TV able to recognize the letterbox format and adjust intelligently.
My vote is on option 2 - better backwards compatibility. I just hope that the industry picks soon and sticks with the decision.
The Mozilla project has had people working on this for almost 3 years now, see bug #21521 on Bugzilla (they deny links from Slashdot, so I won't even try). Unfortunately, there are technical problems that can't be ignored when designing a system like this. One of the stickiest problems is the fact that, as you browse, the history of where you went becomes larger and larger - it starts to act just like a memory leak. Using menu items for this (like the go menu or, I think, the back button's menu) makes the memory problem worse, since menus are memory intensive. There are also cross platform compatibility issues to deal with.
The article mentions the non-technical issues as well: "Unsurprisingly, it's harder to return to index pages with this system - so it's easier to get lost in big websites. New users tended to solve problems either very efficiently or very inefficiently." I believe that this is one of the bigger problems the developers of more advanced navigation systems face, how to provide controls that afford the user good access to the information.
I wish them luck. And if you want to see something like it in Mozilla, please vote for bug 21521 on Bugzilla. It's only got 7 votes, which is pathetic.
On the other hand, if no one cares, perhaps the answer really is to just let it drop. Once again, I wish them luck.
If I recall correctly, clowns trademark their faces, and somewhere all the registered faces are stored, painted on egg shells. If a clown wears another clown's face without permission, the law suit is over trademark violation.
Which brings up an interesting point; should actors trademark their own faces? I've heard that the actors from Cheers have already had problems with people using their likenesses without permission. The movie The Crow showed that it's possible to put an actor's face on a stunt double if there's budget for it. Having a trademark on your likeness could be an important part of acting in the future.
Of course, if Hollywood were like the music industry, the studio would want to hold the trademark. It would sure suck if you quit, but your contract said you couldn't act anymore because the producers own your face. Even worse, they keep on making movies using your face a la S1m0ne.
Pandora's box really opens up when you happen to look like Mel Gibson, and you want to go into acting, but you can't because your face infringes on his trademark. In a particularly barbaric world I could even see the ruling stipulate that if you want to act you must get a facial scar of some sort. Even in this (only semi-barbaric) world, I really don't think that I'd want, as a judge, to have to set precendent for facial infringement and how close the match needs to be to qualify. How would you even measure that?
With any luck the courts would simply throw it out, but with the amount the Studios can afford to pay their lawyers, who knows...
No one would cut a lawn with scissors
:)
You'd be surprised what people will cut lawns with. In Brasilia (Capital of Brasil) the standard method of trimming lawns is to use a machete. No, I'm not talking about hacking down waist-high grass, I'm talking about trimming 3-inch high grass down to two inches by hacking repeatedly at it with a machete, trying to swing parallel to the ground as best you can. No, you don't do this yourself, you hire someone to do it. And if you're a salaried groundskeeper, it makes sure that you always have something to do - you woldn't want to be found slacking off during the day. On rare occasions I've seen people using hedge trimmers (aka big scissors) instead. My family was the only one I knew about in our neighborhood that even owned an American-style lawn mower. My parents were too cheap to hire a full-time groundskeeper, and I have lots of brothers and sisters who work for free
Moral of the story; if it works and fits the requirements better, someone will do it.
How's this for an idea: implement something like NetFlix's rating system and user profiling. Any idea if it's patented? If not, the adaptive rating system would be a real asset to a music site of the sort we're talking about.
For those not it the know, Netflix is an online DVD rental place that has a decent system for rating the movies; it can learn your tastes and guess which movies you might want to rent. Here's a brief description of the system:
I think this would be really useful to a music site. They could carry all sorts of music, the punk rockers could label the indie brittney-clones as "not interested", and once they find music they like the site can reccommend new bands for them to try out. There could even be a section on new releases, perhaps organized by genre, and the site could hold off on posting a rating until enough reviewers have judged it to be a significant sample.
now, if I only knew how to code something like that...
You know, I laughed pretty hard when I read the Tac-Nuke specs in the Paranoia manual. And someone actually built one? And DEPLOYED it? Your link said that this was sent to the field for actual combat!
I'm just glad none of my relatives were in field artillery...
The last web shop I worked in made extensive use of dreamweaver, and had little problem with accessibility. Macromdia actually provides a suite of excellent tools for checking ADA compliance of the code it writes. This feature is well advertised, and was one of the features that led us to choose it for use by our artists.
As an aside, our HTML programmers used a different program, HoT MetaL Pro, which checks HTML validity every time you save. Mostly it was just the artists causing accessibility problems (flash animations and the like), so by the time they handed their code over to the HTML jockeys it was ADA compliant and just needed to be dropped in place. Not a perfect solution, but we've never had any complaints.
Back to the point, if the editor you're using doesn't support validation features, get another one, or use a couple that give you the features you need. For anyone who is selling things on the web, the cost of Dreamweaver and HoTMetaL Pro licenses is negligible compared to the rest of your operating costs. Suck it up, and do the job right the first time.
You've got a good point there. [sarcasm]Maybe the people who live there only build their houses near the non-toxic lava flows? But then, you'd think that they'd maybe move to a slightly less-active island...[/sarcasm]
I'm willing to give the guy with the web site the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's avoiding flows where he starts getting dizzy or nauseated from sniffing the fumes. I'd also be willing to guess that anyone who spends significant amounts of time around active volcanoes either 1) understands the risks and takes safety measures, or 2) quickly becomes a Darwin award nominee.
That doesn't, however, rule out the possibility of this guy trying out for the Darwins ;)
I hope a website with color pictures of the process would be proof enough for you... If you don't want to keep an open mind, at least keep it well ventilated. ;)
I'm surprised that they accepted it.
:)
From what I've heard, people don't have to accept payment in coins. Coins don't fall into the same category of "legal tender" as bills do, precisely because they are inconvenient for large transactions. I'm not sure if it's a law or just legal precedent, is there a lawyer in the house that could fill in the background?
In any case, they weren't under any obligation to accept the letter, either. They could have just as easily rejected it, and it would have been returned to you, postage-due.
Let me make a guess, though: it was a college campus parking ticket, not a city one. More than likely the person recieving the letter was a student employee who didn't know the trivia facts I've stated above and who didn't care that the postage for heavy letter-class mail is extortionary because she didn't have to pay it personally. Besides, counting all of those pennies probably reduced the boredom of her afternoon
New window on middle-click is the default behavior for Mozilla on Windows; it can be configured to open in a new tab instead.
From the article:
"The original idea of a hard disk having two heads emerged around 1985..."
Funny that the technology hasn't been implemented after all this time... Or has it?
From the StorageReview.com reference section:
"Such hard disks have been built. Conner Peripherals, which was an innovator in the hard disk field in the late 1980s and early 1990s (they later went bankrupt and their product line and technology were purchased by Seagate) had a drive model called the Chinook that had two complete head-actuator assemblies: two sets of heads, sliders and arms and two actuators. They also duplicated the control circuitry to allow them to run independently. For its time, this drive was a great performer. But the drive never gained wide acceptance, and the design was dropped. Nobody to my knowledge has tried to repeat the experiment in the last several years.
There are several reasons why it is not practical to make a drive with more than one actuator. Some are technical; for starters, it is very difficult to engineer. Having multiple arms moving around on a platter makes the design complex, especially in small form factors. There are more issues related to thermal expansion and contraction. The heat generated inside the hard drive is increased. The logic required to coordinate and optimize the seeks going on with the two sets of heads requires a great deal of work. And with hard disk designs and materials changing so quickly, this work would have to be re-done fairly often.
However, the biggest reasons why multiple actuators designs aren't practical are related to marketing. The added expense in writing specialty electronics and duplicating most of the internal control components in the drive would make it very expensive, and most people just don't care enough about performance to pay the difference. Hard disks are complex technology that can only be manufactured economically if they are mass-produced, and the market for those who would appreciate the extra actuators isn't large enough to amortize the development costs inherent in these fancy designs. It makes more sense instead to standardize on mass-produced drives with a single actuator stack, and build RAID arrays from these for those who need the added performance. Compare a single 36 GB drive to an array of four 9 GB drives: in effect, the array is a 36 GB drive with four sets of everything. It would in most cases yield performance and reliability superior to a single 36 GB drive with four actuators, and can be made from standard components without special engineering."
So, from the looks of things, it would be easier and cheaper to use single-head drives in easy-to-put-together configurations than put two heads in the same drive. Admittedly, the StorgeReview.com reference's author didn't mention setting up a read-only/read-write scheme, but the logic still works. I'd guess that it would still be easier to make a RAID container that provides read-only access on one channel and read-write on another.
Again, from the article:
"Scarabs is also working on a different version of the technology--instead of putting two heads on a hard disk, the company is connecting two SCSI interface circuits to a conventional hard disk with one head, one set to send read-only electronic signals and the other to send read/write signals."
This company already knows that their gimmick drive won't sell. No one will buy an over-priced drive with higher probability of failure over a (comparatively) cheap SCSI trick that requires no extra moving parts.
Couldn't the problem be solved by brancing the unstable first, then releasing the stable branch when it's ready?
For example, let's say that we're happy with the feature set in the 2.5 unstable series. Instead of putting off waiting for all of the bugs to get shaken out and call it 2.6, just switch from 2.5 to 2.7 on the unstable development side. Linus can pass the reins off to someone he trusts, we can have a GROF (Get Rid Of the Fin) party and his trusted lieutenant can finish stabilizing 2.5 into 2.6 without him.
This solves the problem of wanting to keep back-porting features from 2.7 into 2.6, it allows for time to make sure the 2.5 code is stable before public release as 2.6, and provides a clear feature-freeze mechanism: once Linus is gone, go bugfixes only. If you want the new features, run the unstable kernel or wait for 2.8 (released sometime after 2.9 is branched).
Not that my opinion matters at all, it's just an idea.
So, they want to trade this one piece of IP for many pieces currently belonging to other people? Sounds like a really sweet deal for them. I'm not sure whether to accuse them of being sneaky or just stand in awe that they actually do understand the potentially non-scarce nature of information.
Does anyone who knows about how these comittees work want to comment on whether this is considered ethical? It would be better from an openness standpoint to have them just give it up, but reasonable licensing is better than having them try to exploit it after the standard is implemented (like happened with Rambus).
I know it would never happen, but I have to wonder what Tim Burton would do with ep3. If you want dark, I think he could do the job. And there's some chance that he'd even let George go wild on CG, just keep it focused... I could go for that.
Wouldn't the plan be to put all of the environmentalists and conservationists ^W^W^W hairdressers and telephone sanitizers on the first ships out? I think that would solve the problem nicely, and we'd only need one wave of ships...
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not an expert here. In fact, you seem to have quite a bit of knowledge based on your other posts in this thread.
So I'm going to punt (ie. appeal to authority): storagereview.com's hard drive reference.
While it may be true that a faster parallel equivalent can be created for any serial system, it may not be economical to do so. If it's cheaper to double the frequency of your transmission than to double the number of connections then it makes sense to stay with serial (or in this case, revert to it). According to the reference I linked above, it looks like this will be the case for the next while.
When speeds get high enough parallel can't get to 2x, while serial can.
The wires in the parallel cables introduce all sorts of electrical effects like picking up RF and capacitance between the wires. Increasing the signal frequency aggravates this problem, doubling the number of connections doubles the thickness of the wire, and eventually it becomes more trouble than it's worth.
Serial cables using small numbers of connections can use thicker, shielded connectors, and because there are fewer of them the cable size stays manageable. The signal frequency can be increased much more easily due to the better isolation of the wires.
In short, the high end achievable by serial is higher than the high end for parallel because serial's weaknesses are easier to work around and engineer for.
PS - any electrical engineers out there that want to correct/amplify any of the points here, feel free. I'm just a mechanical-engineer-in-training who reads too much outside his field.
At least "Mormon" is less offensive than the nickname the Church got in Russia - it tranlslates to "polygamist". Since the Saints haven't practiced polygamy for about 150 years now we get a bit touchy about that...
The official name of the church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints". [1] As you can expect, that's quite a mouthful so a nickname is necessary. "Latter-Day Saint (LDS) Church" is acceptable, and the church Presidency supports it. Likewise, it's appropriate to call members of the LDS church "Latter-Day Saints".
"Mormon" [2] is a nickname that was given to the church and its members by others, who knew that we considered the Book of Mormon to be scripture [3] (but didn't know much else about us). This is not a nickname sanctioned by the church Presidency, but most of the church members tolerate it. The problem is that using the name "Mormon" for the church and its members makes it sound like we worship Mormon, or that the church was perhaps founded by Mormon; neither is the case.
What's worse, there are several groups that claim to be "Mormons" - most notably the "Reformed LDS Church" and the polygamists [4] in southern Utah (who I think call themselves "Fundamentalist Mormons", or something like that) - who have little to do with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the most part these other "Mormon" churches are splinter groups formed by people who left the church (or were kicked out) because they felt that they should be leading the flock instead of the current Presidency. The legitimate leaders are understandably anxious to make a clear distinction between the real LDS church and the others that call themselves "Mormons".
I personally respond to either and don't make a big deal about it in most cases as long as I'm sure that there's no confusion about what people mean by it.
[1] The "Latter Days" referred to are the present times. The members of Christ's church in His day were called saints, and members of His church today are called "Latter-Day Saints to distinguish the "former" church from the "latter".
[2] Mormon was a real person, a prophet-historian who compiled the Book of Mormon. It's his book, so it's named after him.
[3] We recognize the Bible as scripture, too. There are also a couple of other books of scripture that we use: the Doctrine and Covenants records revelations given to Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the latter days; and the Pearl of Great Price, which records revelations recived by Moses and Abraham, found and translated by Joseph Smith.
[4] Polygamy used to be practiced by the LDS church, but was discontinued about 150 years ago. Anyone church member who practices it modernly is promptly excommunicated. So Tom Green, on trial for various sex crimes against one of his underage wives has nothing whatever to do with the LDS church, regardless of how much he may protest that he is a "Mormon".
I would have responded sooner, but I decided to actually do some reseach before responding.
;) Or do like the people I see running with a Diskman: spend $20 on a case and strap it to yourself.
I don't know what you mean by "many years", but here in the US I don't remember seeing any manufacturer of MD products other than Sony prior to about 1998. I also have vague recollections (although I can't find references now, sorry) of news articles about the same time talking about how Sony was shooting itself in the foot by not opening up the format to clone makers. Care to name any consumer-priced (less than US$300) being sold before then as a conter-example?
This compared to the CD format, which was already entrenched in the market, many people already had a large investment in the technology, and MD only gave marginal benefits at a much higher price. My point was that Sony was pushing a proprietary technology on an already CD-saturated market at too high a price to be competitive. I don't know why they were surprised that it didn't work (twice, once in 1992, once in 1998). By now, Sony and friends have lost on the MD format - my computer didn't come with an MD drive.
And while Sony's cheapest MD player goes for $150 (I'm trusting your research on that one), you only have to look as far as thinkgeek.com to find cheaper mp3-based alternatives. The Rio Volt SP-90 plays normal CDs, CDRs, and CDRWs, can read both MP3 and WMA encoded music files, and costs US$95 (+tax, of course). Teac makes a similar mini-cd player that costs US$120 (MP3 only, though). And if you want the "pocket recorder", you can pay US$200 and get the "Imation RipGo!" (I hate products with exclamation points in the name).
Saying that CDs are too big is entirely subjective. Yes, they are big, but if you go for the MP3-on-CD players they hold about 5 times the music at equivalent quality (I'm comparing 128K/sec MP3 to SP mode MD). I'd pick the CD rather than the 5 MDs, personally (I'd never have to switch it out). And if it doesn't fit in your pocket, get bigger pockets
I have to eat some crow on the topic of compression. SP mode on a mini disk is considered "near-CD quality", as it is almost lossless. The equivalent MP3 bitrate quality is 128k. The real benefit that MP3 has over MD in this case is customizable bitrates, especially variable bitrate settings. MDs are only capable of constant bitrate encoding, and only on 3 settings (normal, 1/2, and 1/4 bitrate).
So, perhaps MD should have become big in the US; Beta cassettes should have won the video war, too. Meanwhile, the cost of MD use in the States until recently has not even been close to competitive, and even now I'd be hesitant to make the switch based on cost and benefits. If it works for you, keep it.
The "way of the minidisk" is that you refuse to license the technology to anyone, charge ridiculous prices for both the hardware and the media, and wait for the cash to roll in until your patent runs out. This technique doesn't work so well for getting tech to take off in the States, as Sony found out with the minidisk. Now that the patent _has_ run out, we're finally seeing reasonably-priced hardware from other manufacturers. Unfortunately, mp3 players now offer the same features (digital music, random access to the tracks, and customizable playlists) and better performance (shorter access time, less-lossy compression, and lower likelihood of skipping) for about the same price, so they've pretty much lost in the US marketplace.
As another poster pointed out, minidisks are very popular in Europe and Asia; over there the cost of living is so high that paying the equivalent of US$150-300 for a walkman-like device isn't considered so ridiculous. In Italy, every woman owns a real fur coat, even the ones on welfare for goodness' sake.
My prediction is that if Philips makes the spec available to other manufacturers for a reasonable licensing fee then the competition will put the price at a reasonable level and people will buy it (assuming that nothing better comes out and offers better features for the same or lower price). So, yes, the market will decide; and considering that it is Philips (the owner of the CD spec, unless I'm mistaken), they probably won't make the same mistakes that Sony did. Here's to hoping.