I lust after a gadget that can disable those cell phone ringers. Preferable, it would just destroy anything that longer that few second or was louder than a whisper.
Good point. Like the pictures of abused prisoners in Iraq. They've been around the rest of the world for a year before they finally surfaced in the US. Compared to that, a two day cover up in china isn't scary.
and
Unless you're talking about the abuses perpetrated by Saddam Hussein at Abu Ghraib before the US occupation, you're manufacturing facts. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_a buse
Although I am sure we all agree wikipedia is the authoritative and infallible new source, I prefer to look at a broader range of sources and treat the grandparent as hyperbole rather than manufacturing facts.
The valid point, as has been made many times, is that there is little investigative journalism in the US media. The US tends to feed facts to the media, either through agents like Woodward or press offices. The popular media takes these communiqué's and reports them as self generated investigations. We see the same thing when videos that are produced to promote some commercial interest are reported as news.
As far as who knew what when, there were people that knew of the torture in Iraq, and in Cuba, before it hit the US press. The Red Cross knew. However, the red cross can best serve prisoners by negotiating with the torturers, not going public. We can assume that the torture has been going on for quite some time, and the Red Cross, which enjoys free access in exchange for confidentiality, knew about it.
Could investigative journalists have found out? Was there a national security reason to keep the torture secret? And it there was, does that imply that the torture was authorized? Are we going to use anti-terror legislation to protect the American officials that wish to terrorize the American populous, as, for instance, the the NYPD did by shoving a stick up a persons ass? Does Bush's policies protect the torturers?
IMHO, the issue is does the government use excessive means to squash the American tradition of investigative journalism. We know that Bush, as opposed to Clinton, stated that all FOI should be aggressively denied. We know that the congress under Bush, as opposed to that under Clinton, aggressively defends all presidential meetings as secret. We know that Bush, as opposed to Clinton, does not feel the need to keep the public appraised of the administration thinking through the traditional use of press conferences, one of the few times when the press can ask the hard questions.
You made two small error. A small profit margin does not automatically imply that customers are not being gouged and profit margins cannot be compared accross industries. The later first. Supermarkets make a few cents off every sale and depend upon thousands of sales a day. The market knows these economics. The market would not accept the same economics off Exxon as a whole, although parts of it do operate on those margins.
Second, profit margins do not indicate much. One can run a very ineffecient operation and lose money, but still not provide customers a good value or suppliers a good price. The sheer size of Walmart implies that there is a lot of money spent on managing the complex relationships, money that would not be spent with smaller stores. Now, perhaps Walmart has minimized the cost per store for this infracstructure, but it is still an ineffeciency.
One suspects that Walmart has a higher average overhead, but brings value to the customer by skimping the supplier. As it is the supplier that provides innovative products to the customer, this is not a good strategy for provided long term value to the retial customer.
I purchased an LL Bean backpack many years ago. It has one section for laptop and gear, and a second section for other stuff. The laptop is stored in a paded area of the first section.
This backpack is the most useful and durable backback I have ever owned.
The only issue is that it is big. Back when all laptops were huge, it was the perfect size. If you have a small laptop, it might be a bit large of a space. OTOH, it will be big enough to hold many useful supplies. The only downside it that it does not have ties for a bedroll and such.
Now to think of it, for hiking I might get a big hiking pack and then put the laptop in a sleeve.
First, one reason MacOS runs so well is because the minimum hardware requirements tend to be more stringent. This cuts out the possibility of cheap computers, but also avoids the issue of cheap components degrading the brand. If MacOS run on the half price computers, we would see many more people complaining that the computer was 'slow', when in fact they were using an underpowered gpu.
Second, as a Mac user I appreciate that, for the most part, computer will last more than a year or two. I have G4s running between 500mHZ and 1Ghz, and they all run great in the latest version of MacOS. OTOH, my 1.2 GHZ compaq is unable to do anything with Windows XP. Now some of this is due to the fact that I have more memory in some of my macs, but I would bench test my 1 gHz mac against my 1.2 gHz compaq, both with 256MB, any day of the week.
Really, this has always been the philosophy of Apple. Make products that last. Even with the design flaws on the Apple///, I ditched that computer because the Macs came out. Even years later, it still ran like a dream.
So, for cheap office machines, the Windows PC is a fine choice. I often have used on at the office. Windows is a reasonable choice, and I would not see any reason not to run it. On my machines, in which i pay for, and buy so that I can get work done, I buy mac. Not just because of MacOS, but because the package is a useful holistic device created to allow me to do work, not minimize costs to my employer.
I guess what I am saying is that I would not recommend that anyone use MacOS on PC hardware unless that I knew that hardware meet minimum standards. It would just hut the Apple brand. Just like cheap hardware hurts the MS brand. I certainly would be unlike to buy a Compaq, Dell, or Gateway machine instead of a Mac. The price difference for comparable hardware would be like 10-15%. Such discounts would not be worth my time. As MS says, there are things that save you money only if your time is worth nothing.
There was a good article on the register yesterday about building consumer electronics that do enough, but not too much, and not so much that the manufacturer gets sued by the content distributors. I think back to the VCR and think it might have been a mistake to put record capability on consumer boxes from day one. The MS stuff is going to be crippled becuase it does too much, and therefore has to have lots of intrusive DRM to compensate.
Apple is giving us a product that works. It is not as flexible as it could be, but not as useless as the MS offerings. Apple adds features slowly that can be exanded to meet future need. The iPod can be used to violate copyright, but it is not the primary mechanism of violation. The Windows machine, or the Mac, is in fact the primary means of violation.
With an FM tuner, however, recording music off the airwaves become a possiblity. With some widely available hacks, the iPod could become a tool for copyright violation. Which could open Apple up to yet more lazy corporations who wish to suck off the teats of an innovator.
Picture viewing though is good both short and long term. It immidately makes the extra space of the iPod meaningful. I mean how much more do we need for music. And how much more music are we going to buy? Now the extra space is not for unlicensed music, but for the family phot album. Which all parents have gigibytes of because they all have digital cameras. Long term this is a small step towards the video iPod, which the technologically ignorant critics want now, but which is not going to be a mass market item for a couple more years.
The fantastic four was part of a generations of cartoons that were just lame. At least for kids. IIRC, the basic dynamic of the show was a roommate situation and the villian destroying was not nearly the highest priority. It was all about relationships and feeling and that kind of crap. Which would be fine except it took itself too seriously.
Other cartoons of this period still make good money because they appeal to the adolescent male. The fantastic four just doesn't.
On my my exercise machine there was an electrical issue. The vendos sent out a kit to fix the problem. I had to install the kit. It was not a big deal. On my car, even the smalles issue, typically requires a mechanic.
The difference is that the exercise machine was 'some assembly required' and the car is not. So, given that ASP is some assembly required, it might be reasonable for MS to push the fix to the code monkeys.
The hitch might be that MS does have responsibilty to put the fix in kit form. I was not required to buy the wire and hooks, cut and crimp, and then test. It was all there. MS may or not be provided the proper level of kit.
Also meanwhile, my decrepit Hotmail account still hasn't given me that promised 250 megabytes..."
But you have, and I can actually get, a hotmail account. Can I get a gmail account? No. So WTF do I care if gmail has tons of space or cool features. I hate to be a MS fanboy, but when gmail is giving accounts to everyone, then you can dis MS. Up to that point MS is providing a service, and gmail is little better than vapour.
All these articles are free advertisements for a service that is not even fully available. Did South Park get the ploy from google, or google from South Park?
That is what I was thinking. Any sane person would just put a shot of whisky in a glass of coke or a cup of coffee. That is what I do.
There was some talk that american beer was basically watered alcohol because americans just wanted to get drunk and could not take a full bodied beer. I have seen this in the bars, and did not understand why people did not just do shots of whiskey, vodka, rum, tequilla, aguardiente, or whatever. Again, that is the effecient way to get drunk.
I really believe that some people, who have no problem drinking beer until they are unable to move, have a moral objection to the 'hard stuff'.
This is not necessarily a Democrat versus Republican thing. It is not like Fox News fabricated quotes from Kerry. It a broader failure to understand that searching for truth does not mean deciding what is true than creating a fact pattern that fits the truth. It has been a problem with this administration. They consistently abuse logic and science to justify the things they believe and the actions they wish to take.
If you had read the article, all 10K+ words of it, you would have seen that there was bipartisan support for the attacking of Iraq. In Bush's rhetoric, he has repeatedly pushed the issue that Kerry supported the war. Democrats and Republicans crossed the lines in both directions during the votes, mostly based on their understanding of the data. Intelligence is a fragile art. The Clinton administration could have done more to help prevent 9/11. The Bush administration is certainly not helping matters by creating an environment in which communication is purposefully confounded so as to make the facts look different from what they are generally agreed to be.
Examples from the article.
There was no evidence linking Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. Cheney, needing a justification to attack Iraq, asked the CIA to find a link. The scariest link would be if Iraq was still developing WMD. There was no real evidence that such a program still existed, but when your boss tells you to do something, you do it. The WMD was a necessary truth, and facts were not going to get int the way.
The only people really pushing the idea that the aluminum tubes were for a centrifuge was the CIA. Most other experts agreed that they were probably for conventional rockets. The US in fact used similar tubes with similar tolerances. In fact the tubes could only have been used in a prototype centrifuge that would likely be unsuitable for production. This information was given to the administration at all levels. He was specifically warned by the security committee that some of his statement were untrue. Yet when Powell made a speech before the security council concerning the tubes, he stated most intelligence officials thought the tubes were for a centrifuge, even though he had recently been informed this was not the case.
The day before the State of the Union address the IEAE concluded that Iraq had not credible WMD program. They concluded the tubes were not for a centrifuge. They looked at the inspection data and concluded that the tubes were for a conventional rocket program, again much like rockets in the west. In the address, the president cited past reports of the IEAE that stated Iraq had a WMD program, but did not reference the latest report that stated such a program no longer existed. The people generating the speech admitted purposefully leaving such information out. The president has consistently said sanctions did not work, when in fact every shred of credible evidence indicates that they did work.
The junior analyst who proposed the possibility that the tubes were for a centrifuge was told by many national and international experts that his theory was flawed and likely wrong. This information was generally available. When he was sent to conference, the attendees were quoted as saying they felt embarrassed for him.
Even when the pre invasion inspection found the tubes were used for conventional rockets. Even when we found not WMD. Even when every shred of credible evidence seems to point that there is not WMD program. The president still believes his story.
The problem is not the republicans or the democrats. The problem is that we have a set of people who have no sense of logic. No sense of shame. No sense that the truth is something that is not set in stone. Just because I believe that I am the greatest guy in the world does not make it so. I am just going to say this. Bush is a truly stupid person. He drove drunk into his thirties. That was truly stupid. He lied about his arrests. That is truly stupid. The republicans are in t
I am offended by your generalities. As a long time listener of all music forms, I can assure you that all musical forms encourage homocides and suicides equally. In Country music, for example, there is a long tradition of killing those that piss you off, like the guy who walked in front of you or the girl who won't sleep with you. In thrash sometime the world is so hopeless you just have to kill yourself. In rap, the chances are always 50/50 that you will be dead before you get the chance to kill, and you going into the situation hoping that someone will finally take you out. In classical suicide pacts are the only noble way out.
You are absolutely correct. I have used many an OS and find that all them require much housekeeping, which necessarily reduces the amount of time that real work can get done. They all have subtle errors that make life more difficult that it has to be.
I use macs. I spend much time maintaining them. These are not perfect machines, but i know how to keep them running, the updates tend to small and not too frequent. Most important the things I want to do are easily done.
In most of my jobs I use MS Windows machines. In the spirit that free beer is the best beer, I have no issue with this. The computer is given to me. Someone else has the headache of maintaining it. Someone else has the headache of making sure all the software I need for work is installed. Frankly my job could set me up with a connection to a PDP and it would be the same difference.
It really is a simple matter of what things are in the core of the OS and what things are not. In the Modern OS it is perfectly reasonable that a tool to code and decode complex audio and video be part of the OS, perhaps not the kernal, but at some low level.
It would also be reasonable that such code be general and simple enough so that everyone could use that as the basis for whatever audio application they need. It is also reasonable tha customers who do not need full functionality could strip off the higher levels. They might want to do this for management, security, or whatever.
The issue is that MS does not build an OS that can be used to create new things, it builds and OS that is made to force people in the current market position. IE could be built in several layers, and allow customers to customize the browser for thier needs, buy it isn't. WMP could be build in layers that would enforce all DRM, or, if someone chose, could be rewritten using the same basic to create a bare bones media player, but it isn't.
Most MS products are written in an effort to tie users to the MS desktop and the MS standards. There does not appear to be any true layes. There does not appear to be any real structured composit design. It really just appears to a megalithic structure. You want the cheap desktop for your manufacturing plant. You also need the insecure browser, music player, and chat. After all, your employees have the right to watch porn while they build the widgets.
It is not only not a bad idea, but nothing new. MS already sells two levels of XP. Home and Prof. This is just a another level targeted at another market. And judging from what OEM charge extra for Prof, it looks like this new edition just follows existing price structures.
The problem is that the editions stil are not customer oriented. There is not way to get the consumser level crap out of the Prof edition. Any commercial computer is exposed to numerous security risks caused by the consumer crap build into into the system level code.
What would be innovative is if MS sold the consumer package for $30, which for all we know, given discounts and incentives is what the likes of Dell pays, had a standard professional version for $100 or so, and then had a customizable commercial version for $200+. Like the MS office products, the money is made by selling corporate liscenses.
And this is the fucked up synthetic asymetry of capitalist America. The companies producing goods can go anywhere to get or produce the goods that they sell Americans, but if normal consuming Americans try to make the same economies, as they are often forced to do due the ineffeciencies of a few ultimately unnecesary middle men raking in millions of dollars of compensation, these Americans get called unpatriotic and the American Government tries to pass laws to stop the free trade.
This is the kind of crap that caused the American Revlutionary War. This is the kind of crap that caused the economic boycott by opporessed population in the Southern US. This is no different than the British Government saying the Indian people can't make salt from thier own sea water, Yes, the government and corporations must be recompensed for thier useful work. However, neither has an inherent right to exist. The US corporations have all but stated they agree with this statement by artificially moving much profit out of the US, which is where most executives live, into lower tax havens. I wonder if they even check to see if some of these havens perhaps provide financial services for unfriendly military organazations.
It looks like there is growth coming out of the sunglasses. Quite ugly. It appears to be a quick hack will little thought of the aesthetics. Quite not Oakley. On the other hands Oakley are more and more worn by people who want to look cool and hip, and need quite a bit help with that image.
OTOH the lack of wires is a big benefit for many applications. If I were working outside often I would definitely consider a pair of these. Of course the battery life makes it unsuitable for anyone but the hobbyist, but that is still a market.
In future versions I hope they put bluetooth connectivity for a remote and hookup to a cell phone as an additional mic. In fact, this might be a better product all together.
The biggest problem might be for someone who uses this regularly. The battery will run out, probably lose half it's lifetime in relatively short order, then what happens. Throw the entire thing away?
I wish I had mod points, I think this is subtlety insightful. The problem with hiring janitorial staff is that these employees need to be trustworthy and responsible but the employer can't really pay them an amount that fully compensates that level of trust. The employee must be inherently honest, or need the job enough not to risk termination by stealing stuff or goofing off.
Therefore one can't hire the pimply faced teenager as they do at the movie theaters. Theaters get away with this because they watch the employees carefully, count everything at the end of the night, and generally use draconian measures. For unsupervised clean up, one generally hires someone with little skills to do anything else and dependents to support. This is why Good Will Hunting is such a stupid movie. Damon would have never been allowed access to the rooms to clean.
Of course this would be no problem on the Death Star. If they hired private staff, the staff would know they would be spaced if anything came up missing. It is not an issue anyway because, like any ship, the sailors keep it clean.
I could be wrong, but I remeber when Yahoo was an index and manual rating system. It had what we would now call search engine features, but those were mostly made relevent by Alta Vista, which is why Yahoo! had to buy a search engine.
When it was clear that Yahoo searches were not the thing, Yahoo! reinvented itself as a portal, something that was just becoming the big thing to do. As a portal, a one stop shop, it does a pretty good job. Also as a portal it has to have lots of stuff, some of which it might be valuable to own.
So, it Yahoo! is a one stop shop, it has to sell music. It may not make much money on it, but at least customers will not have to go elsewhere.
On would think, but not really. I mean I have a computer that has 10000X the amount of memeory of the first computer I owned, and 100000X the memory of the first computer I used. And it is still not enough.
Memory gets used up in all OS. It allows to to cooler things faster. It allows us to worry about doing cool interfaces instead of writing cool small code. It allows us to write protable API with memory and CPU wasting layers.
One can see the importance of memory with the way that some of the cheaper MOBO become useless. Many years ago I bought two machines with several months of each other. The first had a hard 384MB limit. The second has a 1GB limit. Both were towers. The first is now useless. The second is still in use. Go figure.
The movies still give me that chill during certain scenes, where they just touch some part inside that you never knew you had.
Star Wars, as original, was an intermidiate step. The technology was not advanced enough so that fx could carry the whole movie, but good enough to have the enough realism to transport the viewer into another world. This realism allowed for a much better story of basic good versus evil, redemption, and human fraility. These were the happy touchy feely places.
The changes as made mostly put the movie into a more modern fx movie in which everyone is so distracted by the bells and whistles that no one notices there is no story to speak of, or, even worse, misses it.
Look at it this way. The IMDB lists barbershop as one of the first movies. It is of a guy going to the barbershop. Terrible boring, but must have been quite a spectacle. Like the horse does not have to play good music, it is interesting that the horse can play any kind of music.
So by adding the fx, Star Wars is no longer a nealy one of kind movie, almost a first and last of it's kind movie. It is now just a common space action flick. Like Buck Rodgers or Battlestar Galactica, without the camp. Which is good for money, and as you say really doesn't mess with anything substantially, but the loss is nonetheless real.
This kind of reminds me of the Circuit Cellar articles that used to appear in Byte and have since become a full magazine. I know that Steve has long since left control, but last I checked, and since I am off doing other things I do not read it regularly, it still seems to a good magazine to get project ideas.
Of course these articles appeared in the day when it made much more sense to build your own IC board, solder your own components, and build your own cable. Today one 'builds' a computer by plugging off the shelf components together and downloaded software and drivers. If the current complaints from the DIY crowd are any indications, few people even think to write their own drivers. I wonder if the articles in Make will teach the readers interesting concepts and techniques, or merely provide a step by step on making cool toys.
So my questions for this magazine are two. First, given that Steve Ciarcia showing us how to build cool technology 20 years ago, how is Make the First. For instance, the current issue og Circuit Cellar talks about building a rover. Second, O'Reilly has wonderful editors that keep errors to below industry average, but the quality of the authors vary widely. For books that is fine. One can pick a choose. But a magazine requires a much tighter control. Can O'Reilly find enough authors and good ideas?
I often wondered why it took the moz people so long to develop firefox. On of the cool things about using a Mac is Camino. Like firefox it is lean and fast. Like Firefox it is far from perfect, but better than IE.
I hope products like Firefox will encourage other developers to produce equally simple and targeted products. It would certainly make the MS Windows world much less painful.
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I lust after a gadget that can disable those cell phone ringers. Preferable, it would just destroy anything that longer that few second or was louder than a whisper.
and
Unless you're talking about the abuses perpetrated by Saddam Hussein at Abu Ghraib before the US occupation, you're manufacturing facts.a buse
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_
Although I am sure we all agree wikipedia is the authoritative and infallible new source, I prefer to look at a broader range of sources and treat the grandparent as hyperbole rather than manufacturing facts.
The valid point, as has been made many times, is that there is little investigative journalism in the US media. The US tends to feed facts to the media, either through agents like Woodward or press offices. The popular media takes these communiqué's and reports them as self generated investigations. We see the same thing when videos that are produced to promote some commercial interest are reported as news.
As far as who knew what when, there were people that knew of the torture in Iraq, and in Cuba, before it hit the US press. The Red Cross knew. However, the red cross can best serve prisoners by negotiating with the torturers, not going public. We can assume that the torture has been going on for quite some time, and the Red Cross, which enjoys free access in exchange for confidentiality, knew about it.
Could investigative journalists have found out? Was there a national security reason to keep the torture secret? And it there was, does that imply that the torture was authorized? Are we going to use anti-terror legislation to protect the American officials that wish to terrorize the American populous, as, for instance, the the NYPD did by shoving a stick up a persons ass? Does Bush's policies protect the torturers?
IMHO, the issue is does the government use excessive means to squash the American tradition of investigative journalism. We know that Bush, as opposed to Clinton, stated that all FOI should be aggressively denied. We know that the congress under Bush, as opposed to that under Clinton, aggressively defends all presidential meetings as secret. We know that Bush, as opposed to Clinton, does not feel the need to keep the public appraised of the administration thinking through the traditional use of press conferences, one of the few times when the press can ask the hard questions.
Second, profit margins do not indicate much. One can run a very ineffecient operation and lose money, but still not provide customers a good value or suppliers a good price. The sheer size of Walmart implies that there is a lot of money spent on managing the complex relationships, money that would not be spent with smaller stores. Now, perhaps Walmart has minimized the cost per store for this infracstructure, but it is still an ineffeciency.
One suspects that Walmart has a higher average overhead, but brings value to the customer by skimping the supplier. As it is the supplier that provides innovative products to the customer, this is not a good strategy for provided long term value to the retial customer.
This backpack is the most useful and durable backback I have ever owned.
The only issue is that it is big. Back when all laptops were huge, it was the perfect size. If you have a small laptop, it might be a bit large of a space. OTOH, it will be big enough to hold many useful supplies. The only downside it that it does not have ties for a bedroll and such.
Now to think of it, for hiking I might get a big hiking pack and then put the laptop in a sleeve.
Second, as a Mac user I appreciate that, for the most part, computer will last more than a year or two. I have G4s running between 500mHZ and 1Ghz, and they all run great in the latest version of MacOS. OTOH, my 1.2 GHZ compaq is unable to do anything with Windows XP. Now some of this is due to the fact that I have more memory in some of my macs, but I would bench test my 1 gHz mac against my 1.2 gHz compaq, both with 256MB, any day of the week.
Really, this has always been the philosophy of Apple. Make products that last. Even with the design flaws on the Apple ///, I ditched that computer because the Macs came out. Even years later, it still ran like a dream.
So, for cheap office machines, the Windows PC is a fine choice. I often have used on at the office. Windows is a reasonable choice, and I would not see any reason not to run it. On my machines, in which i pay for, and buy so that I can get work done, I buy mac. Not just because of MacOS, but because the package is a useful holistic device created to allow me to do work, not minimize costs to my employer.
I guess what I am saying is that I would not recommend that anyone use MacOS on PC hardware unless that I knew that hardware meet minimum standards. It would just hut the Apple brand. Just like cheap hardware hurts the MS brand. I certainly would be unlike to buy a Compaq, Dell, or Gateway machine instead of a Mac. The price difference for comparable hardware would be like 10-15%. Such discounts would not be worth my time. As MS says, there are things that save you money only if your time is worth nothing.
Apple is giving us a product that works. It is not as flexible as it could be, but not as useless as the MS offerings. Apple adds features slowly that can be exanded to meet future need. The iPod can be used to violate copyright, but it is not the primary mechanism of violation. The Windows machine, or the Mac, is in fact the primary means of violation.
With an FM tuner, however, recording music off the airwaves become a possiblity. With some widely available hacks, the iPod could become a tool for copyright violation. Which could open Apple up to yet more lazy corporations who wish to suck off the teats of an innovator.
Picture viewing though is good both short and long term. It immidately makes the extra space of the iPod meaningful. I mean how much more do we need for music. And how much more music are we going to buy? Now the extra space is not for unlicensed music, but for the family phot album. Which all parents have gigibytes of because they all have digital cameras. Long term this is a small step towards the video iPod, which the technologically ignorant critics want now, but which is not going to be a mass market item for a couple more years.
Other cartoons of this period still make good money because they appeal to the adolescent male. The fantastic four just doesn't.
The difference is that the exercise machine was 'some assembly required' and the car is not. So, given that ASP is some assembly required, it might be reasonable for MS to push the fix to the code monkeys.
The hitch might be that MS does have responsibilty to put the fix in kit form. I was not required to buy the wire and hooks, cut and crimp, and then test. It was all there. MS may or not be provided the proper level of kit.
But you have, and I can actually get, a hotmail account. Can I get a gmail account? No. So WTF do I care if gmail has tons of space or cool features. I hate to be a MS fanboy, but when gmail is giving accounts to everyone, then you can dis MS. Up to that point MS is providing a service, and gmail is little better than vapour.
All these articles are free advertisements for a service that is not even fully available. Did South Park get the ploy from google, or google from South Park?
There was some talk that american beer was basically watered alcohol because americans just wanted to get drunk and could not take a full bodied beer. I have seen this in the bars, and did not understand why people did not just do shots of whiskey, vodka, rum, tequilla, aguardiente, or whatever. Again, that is the effecient way to get drunk.
I really believe that some people, who have no problem drinking beer until they are unable to move, have a moral objection to the 'hard stuff'.
If you had read the article, all 10K+ words of it, you would have seen that there was bipartisan support for the attacking of Iraq. In Bush's rhetoric, he has repeatedly pushed the issue that Kerry supported the war. Democrats and Republicans crossed the lines in both directions during the votes, mostly based on their understanding of the data. Intelligence is a fragile art. The Clinton administration could have done more to help prevent 9/11. The Bush administration is certainly not helping matters by creating an environment in which communication is purposefully confounded so as to make the facts look different from what they are generally agreed to be.
Examples from the article.
Even when the pre invasion inspection found the tubes were used for conventional rockets. Even when we found not WMD. Even when every shred of credible evidence seems to point that there is not WMD program. The president still believes his story.
The problem is not the republicans or the democrats. The problem is that we have a set of people who have no sense of logic. No sense of shame. No sense that the truth is something that is not set in stone. Just because I believe that I am the greatest guy in the world does not make it so. I am just going to say this. Bush is a truly stupid person. He drove drunk into his thirties. That was truly stupid. He lied about his arrests. That is truly stupid. The republicans are in t
I am offended by your generalities. As a long time listener of all music forms, I can assure you that all musical forms encourage homocides and suicides equally. In Country music, for example, there is a long tradition of killing those that piss you off, like the guy who walked in front of you or the girl who won't sleep with you. In thrash sometime the world is so hopeless you just have to kill yourself. In rap, the chances are always 50/50 that you will be dead before you get the chance to kill, and you going into the situation hoping that someone will finally take you out. In classical suicide pacts are the only noble way out.
I use macs. I spend much time maintaining them. These are not perfect machines, but i know how to keep them running, the updates tend to small and not too frequent. Most important the things I want to do are easily done.
In most of my jobs I use MS Windows machines. In the spirit that free beer is the best beer, I have no issue with this. The computer is given to me. Someone else has the headache of maintaining it. Someone else has the headache of making sure all the software I need for work is installed. Frankly my job could set me up with a connection to a PDP and it would be the same difference.
It would also be reasonable that such code be general and simple enough so that everyone could use that as the basis for whatever audio application they need. It is also reasonable tha customers who do not need full functionality could strip off the higher levels. They might want to do this for management, security, or whatever.
The issue is that MS does not build an OS that can be used to create new things, it builds and OS that is made to force people in the current market position. IE could be built in several layers, and allow customers to customize the browser for thier needs, buy it isn't. WMP could be build in layers that would enforce all DRM, or, if someone chose, could be rewritten using the same basic to create a bare bones media player, but it isn't.
Most MS products are written in an effort to tie users to the MS desktop and the MS standards. There does not appear to be any true layes. There does not appear to be any real structured composit design. It really just appears to a megalithic structure. You want the cheap desktop for your manufacturing plant. You also need the insecure browser, music player, and chat. After all, your employees have the right to watch porn while they build the widgets.
The problem is that the editions stil are not customer oriented. There is not way to get the consumser level crap out of the Prof edition. Any commercial computer is exposed to numerous security risks caused by the consumer crap build into into the system level code.
What would be innovative is if MS sold the consumer package for $30, which for all we know, given discounts and incentives is what the likes of Dell pays, had a standard professional version for $100 or so, and then had a customizable commercial version for $200+. Like the MS office products, the money is made by selling corporate liscenses.
This is the kind of crap that caused the American Revlutionary War. This is the kind of crap that caused the economic boycott by opporessed population in the Southern US. This is no different than the British Government saying the Indian people can't make salt from thier own sea water, Yes, the government and corporations must be recompensed for thier useful work. However, neither has an inherent right to exist. The US corporations have all but stated they agree with this statement by artificially moving much profit out of the US, which is where most executives live, into lower tax havens. I wonder if they even check to see if some of these havens perhaps provide financial services for unfriendly military organazations.
OTOH the lack of wires is a big benefit for many applications. If I were working outside often I would definitely consider a pair of these. Of course the battery life makes it unsuitable for anyone but the hobbyist, but that is still a market.
In future versions I hope they put bluetooth connectivity for a remote and hookup to a cell phone as an additional mic. In fact, this might be a better product all together.
The biggest problem might be for someone who uses this regularly. The battery will run out, probably lose half it's lifetime in relatively short order, then what happens. Throw the entire thing away?
Therefore one can't hire the pimply faced teenager as they do at the movie theaters. Theaters get away with this because they watch the employees carefully, count everything at the end of the night, and generally use draconian measures. For unsupervised clean up, one generally hires someone with little skills to do anything else and dependents to support. This is why Good Will Hunting is such a stupid movie. Damon would have never been allowed access to the rooms to clean.
Of course this would be no problem on the Death Star. If they hired private staff, the staff would know they would be spaced if anything came up missing. It is not an issue anyway because, like any ship, the sailors keep it clean.
When it was clear that Yahoo searches were not the thing, Yahoo! reinvented itself as a portal, something that was just becoming the big thing to do. As a portal, a one stop shop, it does a pretty good job. Also as a portal it has to have lots of stuff, some of which it might be valuable to own.
So, it Yahoo! is a one stop shop, it has to sell music. It may not make much money on it, but at least customers will not have to go elsewhere.
Memory gets used up in all OS. It allows to to cooler things faster. It allows us to worry about doing cool interfaces instead of writing cool small code. It allows us to write protable API with memory and CPU wasting layers.
One can see the importance of memory with the way that some of the cheaper MOBO become useless. Many years ago I bought two machines with several months of each other. The first had a hard 384MB limit. The second has a 1GB limit. Both were towers. The first is now useless. The second is still in use. Go figure.
Star Wars, as original, was an intermidiate step. The technology was not advanced enough so that fx could carry the whole movie, but good enough to have the enough realism to transport the viewer into another world. This realism allowed for a much better story of basic good versus evil, redemption, and human fraility. These were the happy touchy feely places.
The changes as made mostly put the movie into a more modern fx movie in which everyone is so distracted by the bells and whistles that no one notices there is no story to speak of, or, even worse, misses it.
Look at it this way. The IMDB lists barbershop as one of the first movies. It is of a guy going to the barbershop. Terrible boring, but must have been quite a spectacle. Like the horse does not have to play good music, it is interesting that the horse can play any kind of music.
So by adding the fx, Star Wars is no longer a nealy one of kind movie, almost a first and last of it's kind movie. It is now just a common space action flick. Like Buck Rodgers or Battlestar Galactica, without the camp. Which is good for money, and as you say really doesn't mess with anything substantially, but the loss is nonetheless real.
There is an old guy in Canada that can show you how to do this with duct tape!
Of course these articles appeared in the day when it made much more sense to build your own IC board, solder your own components, and build your own cable. Today one 'builds' a computer by plugging off the shelf components together and downloaded software and drivers. If the current complaints from the DIY crowd are any indications, few people even think to write their own drivers. I wonder if the articles in Make will teach the readers interesting concepts and techniques, or merely provide a step by step on making cool toys.
So my questions for this magazine are two. First, given that Steve Ciarcia showing us how to build cool technology 20 years ago, how is Make the First. For instance, the current issue og Circuit Cellar talks about building a rover. Second, O'Reilly has wonderful editors that keep errors to below industry average, but the quality of the authors vary widely. For books that is fine. One can pick a choose. But a magazine requires a much tighter control. Can O'Reilly find enough authors and good ideas?
I hope products like Firefox will encourage other developers to produce equally simple and targeted products. It would certainly make the MS Windows world much less painful.