Remove the word classroom and slide from there. I think those have always been analog. I meant to hilight how 640x480 and 800x600 plagued projectors so that college presentations meant for @ 1024x768 and higher were butchered because the prof had to manually lower resolutions just so they could be over-head projected for the class. This was sacrificing font clarity and screen real estate and seems to still be a problem on our more modern business Smartboards when the video source is on PC's and laptops designed around a native res of 1280x800.
1080p on a cellphone is nothing more than a sales gimmick
It's irritatingly commendable that cellphone makers must create a market at 5 inch resolutions that doesn't even exist at 4 to 7 times that size for living room enjoyment.
Where the hell is our overdue 1080p on sub-40-inch TVs? The industry is holding out at the low end: If it wasn't for this 3D LCD fad, we'd sooner be seeing 20 inch TV's finally get 1080p so they, and classroom slide projectors can finally catch up to 15-year old desktop resolutions.
Housing in NYC is as high as 1/3 of your gross income
Moving to New Jersey or Phildadelphia can get one cheaper rent and to-own houses (though USA still charges thousands a year in land and property taxes.) The cheapest houses in NYC are in Brooklyn for nearly half a million dollars. If college loans take long on a 30k/year job, imagine paying off a house. Someone I knew got an $80k house in Philadelphia some years ago.
The problem is for living in suburbs one must own a car to do daily work or even get to convenience stores (I hear of $300/month insurance fees, a kinda rent by its own weight.) NYC makes it so owning a car is less expensive than riding the 24/7 subway/buses to any part of within it.
Also, IT jobs are fewer and probably pay lots less unless you are quick to rise to the top. At least there is probably less competition and one might even start a business without all the annoying competition you get in LA and NYC.
Leave it to us to make up new scummy standards for the rest of the world to copy --kinda like "unlimited internet" turned out:
At least on websearches, netbooks are increasingly advertised with an "all day" batt life, while the description on the same page details it as 7 hours for the traveller. That fails on many counts:
a day is more than 300% of 7 hours a workday is 7 to 8 hours, lunch not included --no room for a crafty "this is a *business* machine following a shorter day's quantification."
If I went to lunch, I would enjoy plugging my laptop to the lunchroom's WAP, but the laptop would not guarantee the power that would be stolen from my work.
I prefer more subtle advertisement lies to the ones that pretend the buyer's IQ is 0, since packaging lies imply dozens of invisible hardware lies... only in the US can sell a lie in ads if worded in loophole talk and defended by the lawyer-commercial conglomerates
The parent AC's words above are currently invisible in some/. threshholds, but his answer to the GP is valuable. Even the weirdo Win32 GUI Apple's browser had now feels right at home on my machine after some GUI de-alienation improvements these past two years.
Google's ignoring print preview without some visible explanation is another reason I not to like their already-alien interface and odd point of view. It's what kept me on the fence with Opera vs Firefox vs. Chrom[e|ium.] Opera won.
Flash is one of those programs that suffer from bloat and therefore run slowly on older CPUs.
^^^THIS! Virus slowness used to be the #1 reason for Joe users to purchase a new PC [unknown to them that version downgrades and yearly OS wiping fixed that.]... Enter the Flash! Its forced version upgrades in part of video entertainment providers due to advertisement-overlays that could really be done with older versions anyway, provide additional Flash jerkiness. That became the #1 reason people think "their internet" or their PC is too slow.
For older CPU owners stuck with their box during this recession, I present practical advice from the trenches:
2) Google for guides on disabling non-essential services... tons of Toshiba, HP and other OEM-forced services phone home or just check for updates without trading you any additional functionality for hogging your CPU and RAM 100% of the time... they are useless about 99.9% of the year. Yes, that is about 1 hour of payload per of slowness --a waste if your enjoyment of their products depends on only main EXE's functionality and your site doesn't upgrade more than the OS for security.
1) It's really a Flash runs so differently accross different sandboxes on Windows, really. Give Opera a try if you haven't done so. Out of browsers like IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox 3.6+ it is the only one with watchable Youtube speeds fullscreen on this 1.7Ghz single core P4 at my home desk (*).
* Disclaimer: ballooning bitrates and resolutions ain't helping. The average Youtube upload apparently moved to 360p from the previously bandwidth-conscious 240p... my 768K connection became nearly useless for streaming them. I doubled it but more and more videos from them and netorks like Hulu default to 720p, which even cached locally run at like 2fps in my other browsers.
L1 CPU caches are shamefully stuck with the laughable 20-year old 640K meme in rarely noticed ways. Everyone's first thought is about RAM memory, but remember that CPU's are less change friendly and benefit more from tech like 128K * 5 size at the new density improvement.
The current excuse is that cost and die-space constraints keep size-improvements mostly on the L2 and L3 side. Sadly, someone tagged the article "tenyears" and we'll be dealing with different research by then, like utilizing today's 64 bit, multi-core technology to its fullest.
As a Droid Incredible owner, I'm pretty pissed off that Android 2.2 is so many months old and there's STILL no official build available for my device. Why can't I just go to a magic URL like google.com/android/2.2, then download a supported ROM for my device, and then install the new OS just like downloading a new version of Ubuntu for a PC?
Heh. I'm equally angry that nobody has released final-draft ROMs for the acclaimed wireless N standard. It's supposed to be an easier one-time task than porting Android every 6 months to a plethora of incompatible carrier hardware here in the US. That's specially true because final-N is supposedly a "virtually no-change" update to the draft-N standards that we bought for years. If even that small a promise at face value (namely NOT saying "oh, there was really no change" then what is my hope that buying this month's $500 phone will mean continued support for the lengh of my almost-forced 2-year contract to make that price a reasonable $299?
Like with the Android case, all implementors promised quick updates via ROM downloads. I log into the otherwise great DLINK router and click on check for new firmware every few months... and realize that the industry has a hard threshold of 9-12 months after which no BIOS or firmware updates are ever released.
Unlike with hammers and typewriters, we are in a world of perpetual hardware beta bugfix and functionality-wise. A world where companies brainwash us to not demand release-quality products --just buy next year's version with the standard built in! Look at Vista taking 2 years to be stable by way of Windows 7. It costs us more that way, though, but companies aren't taking our pockets into account so much as their need to jump out of that same recession.
Another outstanding reason to avoid shiny geegaws from an evil company.
To be fair, the flaw is almost a first for Quicktime --an ancient product line predating iProducts, back when "multimedia" came in big letters on all home computers and all videos on the web were MPEG or MOV downloads. What is so bad is how we sleep in our laurels and wake up to find that we falsely associated safety with it because QT ran on a little targetted OS before it was ported to Windows...
IIRC, Apple isn't the number one seller of smartphones nor MP3 players, or distributor of Windows Multimedia readers. Yet it's generating enough attention to get exploited. Even if you and I don't own recent apple products, we have been falling in a parallel situation and taking it for granted again: all those free Google clients downloaded over the years have become a juicy target. All we need is someone to find a weak spot.
Scratch that! All we need is an unlikely "someone" among that small group who will PUBLISH the weak spot of that juicy target. All the others just exploit it for months without us being the wiser.
Slashdot. is now Slashdot: News For Nerds Or Stuff You Can Read From CNN.
No problem. All newspapers repost the same news from Reuters, AP and EFE at about the same time, and many users complain when the one they subscribe to "leaves them in the dark" on grounds of bothersome redundancy for any news, and might leave to a more "all-encompassing," redundant-ish source. Slashdot is doing us a services, since we don't all read your same other sites and few IT admins ever block slashdot.
Wasn't slashdot a site meant to TALK about techish news with tech people? Our tech subscriber base is broader and better informed than you'll find on random non-specialized sites. We can post hacks, opinion on the recent wikileak and pr0n related stuff freely here; because it would otherwise leave broadcast a trail through your Facebook account on CNN. Hey, you just posted Anonymously! try THAT on CNN and any chan-free board these days!:)
My new laptop came with _THREE_ recovery partitions and a Windows partition, so I had to delete one of the recovery partitions to be able to install Linux at all...
I really would like to steer away from that problem you're facing... brand and model, please?
I never thought to look at how much the US business news mentioning them this year. A look at your Google list of acquisitions shows that have ballooned back to 2007 levels this year (between 14 and 16 mergers) and that they're not afraid to spend a billion or three for big fish like Youtube, Doubleclick and even 5% of AOL (ugh.)
So, I present Apple, which is the other golden boy in the eyes of tech investors in this down market. Though it has decades more behind it, there's only about 37 transactions, in comparison with the 77 on the Google list. Google's long list is probably par for the course for giants like IBM, Intel and Microsoft's yearly acquisitions, but this being slashdot, please think of what "giants" and "par for the course" mean for Google's faltering "don't be evil" motto.
Once you have that many companies in your corporate bloodstream, your original identity starts to fade and your decisions are no longer yours --they're made in consultation with previously alien VP's who all had different directions prior to the merger. Scary times ahead.
I am also continually mystified by the refusal of developers to port even a single MMO to a console
Though you added conditions after that line like "MODERN" and it came out on a console a year before going PC, we see your point painfully... let Wikipedia grant you some joy:
Final Fantasy XI, also known as Final Fantasy XI Online, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by Square (later Square Enix) as part of the Final Fantasy series. It was released in Japan on Sony's PlayStation 2 on May 16, 2002, and was released for Microsoft's Windows-based personal computers in November 2002. The PC version was released in North America on October 28, 2003, and the PlayStation 2 version on March 23, 2004. In Europe, only the Windows version was released, on September 17, 2004. An Xbox 360 version was released worldwide in April 2006 for all regions, as the system's first MMORPG and the first cross-platform MMORPG.[2] All versions require a monthly subscription to the game and the Xbox 360 version does not require an Xbox Live Gold account to play.[3]
Final Fantasy series is mainstream, and installment # XI is only two behind the current XIII, or one PS{digit} console behind. Technically, XBOX 360 fulfills being a MODERN console for it, but then the game itself is 2 years older than WoW, so never believe you've seen everything:)
Upon glancing the Development section of the wiki, I saw hints of "other" multi-environment MMO's, but no names.
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb. - Dark Helmet
True. More technically, because of evil whistle-blowers with vested evil interests (usually monetary) or a few goody two-shoes touting a "who watches the watchers" attitude that keeps necessary law from being created.
The goody-two shoes normally support *other* laws giving otherwise-worrysome lethal or raiding force to the police/justice/penal system, but worry that certain rights of theirs will be trampled if they stand down for "good" causes tangential to their main interests. See also NRA activism in anti-gun states.
Not this antenna. I'll be damned if the "transmission" ground photo/. post and its link were eaten up by/. thresholds, but Google still links to it Hooray for my browsing history.
Check my original post's shadow of a the nearby cemetery's cross (they are forearm-sized.) It's halfway between the two trees that aren't green. It is not from the thombstone itself. Note the relative sizes of trees and larger thombs, and even a lance-like statue casting another shadow to the right. The antenna from russian ground links above is not just a coat-hanger wire, and has a lamppost height and anchoring support structure --that should definitely be as simple to spot as the spire at my cemetery. From Google Earth zoom estimates, both pics are at about the same resolution seen at 400ft of elevation.
Putting car noise aside, it's annoying that companies have a fixation with arguably unnecessary feedback noises.
Want to IM someone? ICQ99 used to have a typewriter clacking at each key pressed
Need a cellphone? here's some loud key beeps
Need a digital camera? here's some louder-than life camera shutter noises [protects us from 3rd party snooping, but analog cams used to be quieter and never configurable to actually chirp like the figurative flashtime "birdie"]
Need a PC? here's some loud click noises just to assure you that Internet Explorer hyperlink is processing your hyperlink over that slow ISP connection
Now that cars are quiet, Toyota has decided to start a malicious wave of charging A LOT in hopes that all other car makers bringing quiet cars copy their move. Supposing this happens, 80 years from now our kids will still be going deaf from simulated car noise.
I think I just missed a chance for unnecessary car analogies:)
Thanks. Apparently the Wiki picture was extracted from Google Earth's clock feature.
2009 is the obscured picture you linked to 2005 has white clouds badly obscuring half the area 2004 is exactly what you linked to
Maybe pay-for subscribers have newer imagery of the site and can repost. The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows. The long straight lines on the grass are just ground partitions of some sort and are unlikely to be parallel to the antenna's clock-like moving shadow exactly as the imaging satellite passed by. If you're in doubt, notice even gravestone cross's shadows are easily picked up from satellites. Blurring are would not be different between the very crisp imagery for coordinates in question (aside from the stupid clouds!) and the Woodlawn Cemetery in my link.
Another poster did give out a link with ground pictures of the supposed site, though it's all in russian and has a bunch random nature pictures. For the lazy, the map DOES shut up anyone believing this is a remote area --there's several roads and towns near the forest for those coordinates. Then, again, I'm not sure how/. could validate b>anyone's coordinates or "translations" of these Russian-language sources...;-)
Can someone write an app that links every app to each other, in a huge pointless loop that feeds information to itself?
I "see" your one App and "raise" you one web search:)
Apparently Google's search results in your things like your|your neighbors name being available to spyware-spreaders or online data miners like pipl.com and "spokes" who clone your info. To incite you to pay to find "full" details, they feed it location data like age, hometown and last few different addresses [public USA records can be a pest to hide]. Some sites link google search visitors to "top search results for [your search string]" where you go in circles within their site (while new ads are served to you for their trouble) or catapult over to other data providers having the same data seeds and links back to your starting point. If you do searches for files like "[hot actress] rar" you'll never get the file, but you'll certainly be told there is some payfor download link one click away.
Eventually google indexes al this new crap and adds to the ever-inflating feedback loop that results in searches or even your dusty old / deleted myspace data surfacing all over, even by categories including your family name or circle of friends (mylife.com)
This is exactly why I can't seem to get a new job these days. Only after the fact did I realize that Novell and Active Directory are like Lotus Notes and Outlook: made for the same thing, but with not a soul believing that you can transfer your skills from one to the other... they keep searching for that metaphorical shark in a sea of fish.
One simple fact will have you rest easier: wanted ads are free for you to find, but NOT free to the poster who wants the job filled while lacking a postings website. Besides the outrageous prices (pennies to large corporations, but those recruit via consulting companies anyway) I have heard it said that only 15% of jobs are ever advertised. Remember that the money means that sane job descriptions don't even have to be posted to be filled because someone always knows a friend who can fill it.
This means that networking (ugh) and blindly submitting your resume is the only choice. Random walkins sometimes help, but this past decade all you hear is 1) sorry, you have no employee ID and can't even reach the IT department to hand over the resume 2) sorry, you must apply online (a 30+ minute process yielding false hope because 0 eyeballs land on your resume till someone does an exact query)
In hopes of catching sharks, temp agencies usually contact you without even reading your resume, and read 5 or 6 major technologies totally absent from your resume. Should you mention that 3 of those aren't there, but can be learned from your prior experience with 10 others, they insist that in this recession, their job clients need nothing but experts. So, it seems like a deadend. Find companies you'd like and push your way in after you find a non-outsourced helpdesk phone, fax, or snail-mail rep who is not a mere peon. HR is generally unwilling to assist over the phone and will just give you the run-around.
I see you are advocating for the fight against [X] cybercafe keylogger, [X] fitting room spy camera, [X] toilet voyeur cams.
So... Think before you travel! Unfortunately the above crimes are too common outside the United States because there's little infrastructure to keep private businesses in check. Dirty owners installing spy tools get pretty far in Asia and Latin America by just saying you willingly used their computers and paid too little to warrant your security. If someone has some power, then the usual bribing is resorted to.
Indeed, and it's just impossible that anyone could ever get friend access to your facebook account. It would take people in some random site like, totally from the top of my head, 4chan, many, many long minutes.
Sarcasm noted. Indeed, "friends" is probably all that's needed to be approached by the press [probably for free too and without any citation] to unlock a friend's full-resolution photograph or two. I'm pretty sure the Time Square, NY would-be bomber a few months ago didn't just have a public page for everyone to see, when he went and messed up the bombing and got put to jail away from his facebook account.
It's terrifying that the press doesn't even need a police photo anymore... they post one of your own looking your best, but without your "permission" (even criminals pending a trial have privacy rights... correct?)
Slashdot Mirror
classroom slide projectors
Remove the word classroom and slide from there. I think those have always been analog. I meant to hilight how 640x480 and 800x600 plagued projectors so that college presentations meant for @ 1024x768 and higher were butchered because the prof had to manually lower resolutions just so they could be over-head projected for the class. This was sacrificing font clarity and screen real estate and seems to still be a problem on our more modern business Smartboards when the video source is on PC's and laptops designed around a native res of 1280x800.
1080p on a cellphone is nothing more than a sales gimmick
It's irritatingly commendable that cellphone makers must create a market at 5 inch resolutions that doesn't even exist at 4 to 7 times that size for living room enjoyment.
Where the hell is our overdue 1080p on sub-40-inch TVs? The industry is holding out at the low end: If it wasn't for this 3D LCD fad, we'd sooner be seeing 20 inch TV's finally get 1080p so they, and classroom slide projectors can finally catch up to 15-year old desktop resolutions.
NYC makes it so owning a car is less expensive than riding the 24/7 subway/buses to any part of within it.
Ooops! s/less/more/
Housing in NYC is as high as 1/3 of your gross income
Moving to New Jersey or Phildadelphia can get one cheaper rent and to-own houses (though USA still charges thousands a year in land and property taxes.) The cheapest houses in NYC are in Brooklyn for nearly half a million dollars. If college loans take long on a 30k/year job, imagine paying off a house. Someone I knew got an $80k house in Philadelphia some years ago.
The problem is for living in suburbs one must own a car to do daily work or even get to convenience stores (I hear of $300/month insurance fees, a kinda rent by its own weight.) NYC makes it so owning a car is less expensive than riding the 24/7 subway/buses to any part of within it.
Also, IT jobs are fewer and probably pay lots less unless you are quick to rise to the top. At least there is probably less competition and one might even start a business without all the annoying competition you get in LA and NYC.
Leave it to us to make up new scummy standards for the rest of the world to copy --kinda like "unlimited internet" turned out:
At least on websearches, netbooks are increasingly advertised with an "all day" batt life, while the description on the same page details it as 7 hours for the traveller. That fails on many counts:
a day is more than 300% of 7 hours
a workday is 7 to 8 hours, lunch not included --no room for a crafty "this is a *business* machine following a shorter day's quantification."
If I went to lunch, I would enjoy plugging my laptop to the lunchroom's WAP, but the laptop would not guarantee the power that would be stolen from my work.
I prefer more subtle advertisement lies to the ones that pretend the buyer's IQ is 0, since packaging lies imply dozens of invisible hardware lies... only in the US can sell a lie in ads if worded in loophole talk and defended by the lawyer-commercial conglomerates
No virus that can live in my head can read my passwords out of there, A.F.A.I.K.
(emphasis mine)
Now THAT's an open mind!
*ducks*
no, no and yes
My kingdom, for a mod point!
The parent AC's words above are currently invisible in some /. threshholds, but his answer to the GP is valuable. Even the weirdo Win32 GUI Apple's browser had now feels right at home on my machine after some GUI de-alienation improvements these past two years.
Google's ignoring print preview without some visible explanation is another reason I not to like their already-alien interface and odd point of view. It's what kept me on the fence with Opera vs Firefox vs. Chrom[e|ium.] Opera won.
Yes, that is about 1 hour of payload per of slowness --a waste if your enjoyment
"1 hour... per year of slowness" Oops.
Flash is one of those programs that suffer from bloat and therefore run slowly on older CPUs.
^^^THIS! ... Enter the Flash! Its forced version upgrades in part of video entertainment providers due to advertisement-overlays that could really be done with older versions anyway, provide additional Flash jerkiness. That became the #1 reason people think "their internet" or their PC is too slow.
Virus slowness used to be the #1 reason for Joe users to purchase a new PC [unknown to them that version downgrades and yearly OS wiping fixed that.]
For older CPU owners stuck with their box during this recession, I present practical advice from the trenches:
2) Google for guides on disabling non-essential services... tons of Toshiba, HP and other OEM-forced services phone home or just check for updates without trading you any additional functionality for hogging your CPU and RAM 100% of the time... they are useless about 99.9% of the year. Yes, that is about 1 hour of payload per of slowness --a waste if your enjoyment of their products depends on only main EXE's functionality and your site doesn't upgrade more than the OS for security.
1) It's really a Flash runs so differently accross different sandboxes on Windows, really. Give Opera a try if you haven't done so. Out of browsers like IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox 3.6+ it is the only one with watchable Youtube speeds fullscreen on this 1.7Ghz single core P4 at my home desk (*).
* Disclaimer: ballooning bitrates and resolutions ain't helping. The average Youtube upload apparently moved to 360p from the previously bandwidth-conscious 240p... my 768K connection became nearly useless for streaming them. I doubled it but more and more videos from them and netorks like Hulu default to 720p, which even cached locally run at like 2fps in my other browsers.
L1 CPU caches are shamefully stuck with the laughable 20-year old 640K meme in rarely noticed ways. Everyone's first thought is about RAM memory, but remember that CPU's are less change friendly and benefit more from tech like 128K * 5 size at the new density improvement.
Our supposedly macho CPU's have only 128K L1 sizes and comparably, absurdly high L2 and L3 sizes to make up.
The current excuse is that cost and die-space constraints keep size-improvements mostly on the L2 and L3 side. Sadly, someone tagged the article "tenyears" and we'll be dealing with different research by then, like utilizing today's 64 bit, multi-core technology to its fullest.
As a Droid Incredible owner, I'm pretty pissed off that Android 2.2 is so many months old and there's STILL no official build available for my device. Why can't I just go to a magic URL like google.com/android/2.2, then download a supported ROM for my device, and then install the new OS just like downloading a new version of Ubuntu for a PC?
Heh. I'm equally angry that nobody has released final-draft ROMs for the acclaimed wireless N standard. It's supposed to be an easier one-time task than porting Android every 6 months to a plethora of incompatible carrier hardware here in the US. That's specially true because final-N is supposedly a "virtually no-change" update to the draft-N standards that we bought for years. If even that small a promise at face value (namely NOT saying "oh, there was really no change" then what is my hope that buying this month's $500 phone will mean continued support for the lengh of my almost-forced 2-year contract to make that price a reasonable $299?
Like with the Android case, all implementors promised quick updates via ROM downloads. I log into the otherwise great DLINK router and click on check for new firmware every few months ... and realize that the industry has a hard threshold of 9-12 months after which no BIOS or firmware updates are ever released.
Unlike with hammers and typewriters, we are in a world of perpetual hardware beta bugfix and functionality-wise. A world where companies brainwash us to not demand release-quality products --just buy next year's version with the standard built in! Look at Vista taking 2 years to be stable by way of Windows 7. It costs us more that way, though, but companies aren't taking our pockets into account so much as their need to jump out of that same recession.
Another outstanding reason to avoid shiny geegaws from an evil company.
To be fair, the flaw is almost a first for Quicktime --an ancient product line predating iProducts, back when "multimedia" came in big letters on all home computers and all videos on the web were MPEG or MOV downloads. What is so bad is how we sleep in our laurels and wake up to find that we falsely associated safety with it because QT ran on a little targetted OS before it was ported to Windows...
IIRC, Apple isn't the number one seller of smartphones nor MP3 players, or distributor of Windows Multimedia readers. Yet it's generating enough attention to get exploited. Even if you and I don't own recent apple products, we have been falling in a parallel situation and taking it for granted again: all those free Google clients downloaded over the years have become a juicy target. All we need is someone to find a weak spot.
Scratch that! All we need is an unlikely "someone" among that small group who will PUBLISH the weak spot of that juicy target. All the others just exploit it for months without us being the wiser.
Slashdot. is now Slashdot: News For Nerds Or Stuff You Can Read From CNN.
No problem. All newspapers repost the same news from Reuters, AP and EFE at about the same time, and many users complain when the one they subscribe to "leaves them in the dark" on grounds of bothersome redundancy for any news, and might leave to a more "all-encompassing," redundant-ish source. Slashdot is doing us a services, since we don't all read your same other sites and few IT admins ever block slashdot.
Wasn't slashdot a site meant to TALK about techish news with tech people? Our tech subscriber base is broader and better informed than you'll find on random non-specialized sites. We can post hacks, opinion on the recent wikileak and pr0n related stuff freely here; because it would otherwise leave broadcast a trail through your Facebook account on CNN. Hey, you just posted Anonymously! try THAT on CNN and any chan-free board these days! :)
My new laptop came with _THREE_ recovery partitions and a Windows partition, so I had to delete one of the recovery partitions to be able to install Linux at all...
I really would like to steer away from that problem you're facing... brand and model, please?
vlueboy
Ouch!
I never thought to look at how much the US business news mentioning them this year. A look at your Google list of acquisitions shows that have ballooned back to 2007 levels this year (between 14 and 16 mergers) and that they're not afraid to spend a billion or three for big fish like Youtube, Doubleclick and even 5% of AOL (ugh.)
So, I present Apple, which is the other golden boy in the eyes of tech investors in this down market. Though it has decades more behind it, there's only about 37 transactions, in comparison with the 77 on the Google list. Google's long list is probably par for the course for giants like IBM, Intel and Microsoft's yearly acquisitions, but this being slashdot, please think of what "giants" and "par for the course" mean for Google's faltering "don't be evil" motto.
Once you have that many companies in your corporate bloodstream, your original identity starts to fade and your decisions are no longer yours --they're made in consultation with previously alien VP's who all had different directions prior to the merger. Scary times ahead.
I am also continually mystified by the refusal of developers to port even a single MMO to a console
Though you added conditions after that line like "MODERN" and it came out on a console a year before going PC, we see your point painfully... let Wikipedia grant you some joy:
Final Fantasy series is mainstream, and installment # XI is only two behind the current XIII, or one PS{digit} console behind. Technically, XBOX 360 fulfills being a MODERN console for it, but then the game itself is 2 years older than WoW, so never believe you've seen everything :)
Upon glancing the Development section of the wiki, I saw hints of "other" multi-environment MMO's, but no names.
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb. - Dark Helmet
True. More technically, because of evil whistle-blowers with vested evil interests (usually monetary) or a few goody two-shoes touting a "who watches the watchers" attitude that keeps necessary law from being created.
The goody-two shoes normally support *other* laws giving otherwise-worrysome lethal or raiding force to the police/justice/penal system, but worry that certain rights of theirs will be trampled if they stand down for "good" causes tangential to their main interests. See also NRA activism in anti-gun states.
Not this antenna. I'll be damned if the "transmission" ground photo /. post and its link were eaten up by /. thresholds, but Google still links to it Hooray for my browsing history.
Check my original post's shadow of a the nearby cemetery's cross (they are forearm-sized.) It's halfway between the two trees that aren't green. It is not from the thombstone itself. Note the relative sizes of trees and larger thombs, and even a lance-like statue casting another shadow to the right. The antenna from russian ground links above is not just a coat-hanger wire, and has a lamppost height and anchoring support structure --that should definitely be as simple to spot as the spire at my cemetery. From Google Earth zoom estimates, both pics are at about the same resolution seen at 400ft of elevation.
On to more mystery!
Putting car noise aside, it's annoying that companies have a fixation with arguably unnecessary feedback noises.
Want to IM someone?
ICQ99 used to have a typewriter clacking at each key pressed
Need a cellphone?
here's some loud key beeps
Need a digital camera?
here's some louder-than life camera shutter noises [protects us from 3rd party snooping, but analog cams used to be quieter and never configurable to actually chirp like the figurative flashtime "birdie"]
Need a PC?
here's some loud click noises just to assure you that Internet Explorer hyperlink is processing your hyperlink over that slow ISP connection
Now that cars are quiet, Toyota has decided to start a malicious wave of charging A LOT in hopes that all other car makers bringing quiet cars copy their move. Supposing this happens, 80 years from now our kids will still be going deaf from simulated car noise.
I think I just missed a chance for unnecessary car analogies :)
Thanks. Apparently the Wiki picture was extracted from Google Earth's clock feature.
2009 is the obscured picture you linked to
2005 has white clouds badly obscuring half the area
2004 is exactly what you linked to
Maybe pay-for subscribers have newer imagery of the site and can repost. The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows. The long straight lines on the grass are just ground partitions of some sort and are unlikely to be parallel to the antenna's clock-like moving shadow exactly as the imaging satellite passed by. If you're in doubt, notice even gravestone cross's shadows are easily picked up from satellites. Blurring are would not be different between the very crisp imagery for coordinates in question (aside from the stupid clouds!) and the Woodlawn Cemetery in my link.
Another poster did give out a link with ground pictures of the supposed site, though it's all in russian and has a bunch random nature pictures. For the lazy, the map DOES shut up anyone believing this is a remote area --there's several roads and towns near the forest for those coordinates. Then, again, I'm not sure how /. could validate b>anyone's coordinates or "translations" of these Russian-language sources... ;-)
Can someone write an app that links every app to each other, in a huge pointless loop that feeds information to itself?
I "see" your one App and "raise" you one web search :)
Apparently Google's search results in your things like your|your neighbors name being available to spyware-spreaders or online data miners like pipl.com and "spokes" who clone your info. To incite you to pay to find "full" details, they feed it location data like age, hometown and last few different addresses [public USA records can be a pest to hide]. Some sites link google search visitors to "top search results for [your search string]" where you go in circles within their site (while new ads are served to you for their trouble) or catapult over to other data providers having the same data seeds and links back to your starting point. If you do searches for files like "[hot actress] rar" you'll never get the file, but you'll certainly be told there is some payfor download link one click away.
Eventually google indexes al this new crap and adds to the ever-inflating feedback loop that results in searches or even your dusty old / deleted myspace data surfacing all over, even by categories including your family name or circle of friends (mylife.com)
This is exactly why I can't seem to get a new job these days. Only after the fact did I realize that Novell and Active Directory are like Lotus Notes and Outlook: made for the same thing, but with not a soul believing that you can transfer your skills from one to the other... they keep searching for that metaphorical shark in a sea of fish.
One simple fact will have you rest easier: wanted ads are free for you to find, but NOT free to the poster who wants the job filled while lacking a postings website. Besides the outrageous prices (pennies to large corporations, but those recruit via consulting companies anyway) I have heard it said that only 15% of jobs are ever advertised. Remember that the money means that sane job descriptions don't even have to be posted to be filled because someone always knows a friend who can fill it.
This means that networking (ugh) and blindly submitting your resume is the only choice. Random walkins sometimes help, but this past decade all you hear is
1) sorry, you have no employee ID and can't even reach the IT department to hand over the resume
2) sorry, you must apply online (a 30+ minute process yielding false hope because 0 eyeballs land on your resume till someone does an exact query)
In hopes of catching sharks, temp agencies usually contact you without even reading your resume, and read 5 or 6 major technologies totally absent from your resume. Should you mention that 3 of those aren't there, but can be learned from your prior experience with 10 others, they insist that in this recession, their job clients need nothing but experts. So, it seems like a deadend. Find companies you'd like and push your way in after you find a non-outsourced helpdesk phone, fax, or snail-mail rep who is not a mere peon. HR is generally unwilling to assist over the phone and will just give you the run-around.
I see you are advocating for the fight against
[X] cybercafe keylogger,
[X] fitting room spy camera,
[X] toilet voyeur cams.
So... Think before you travel!
Unfortunately the above crimes are too common outside the United States because there's little infrastructure to keep private businesses in check. Dirty owners installing spy tools get pretty far in Asia and Latin America by just saying you willingly used their computers and paid too little to warrant your security. If someone has some power, then the usual bribing is resorted to.
This has nothing to do with anyone 'trying to get him'. If 'they' were 'trying to get him' ... 'they' would have.
Just like 'they' already 'got' Castro aeons ago?
Suuure... they can silence every one.
Indeed, and it's just impossible that anyone could ever get friend access to your facebook account. It would take people in some random site like, totally from the top of my head, 4chan, many, many long minutes.
Sarcasm noted. Indeed, "friends" is probably all that's needed to be approached by the press [probably for free too and without any citation] to unlock a friend's full-resolution photograph or two. I'm pretty sure the Time Square, NY would-be bomber a few months ago didn't just have a public page for everyone to see, when he went and messed up the bombing and got put to jail away from his facebook account.
It's terrifying that the press doesn't even need a police photo anymore... they post one of your own looking your best, but without your "permission" (even criminals pending a trial have privacy rights... correct?)