Give her what every shy, young, sweet, innocent, 18-year-old female college freshman needs: a webcam! At least, that's what I think they all need...
Heck, yah. If she has a webcam (and can make a camwhore site), she can "wishlist" for anything else.
No, seriously, get her:
some prepaid calling cards (if she doesn't want to call home, she can barter them to exchange students);
some gift cards to the nearby video store;
a rice pot/crock pot/hot plate/whatever you think she might use for small cooking;
a crate of ramen (heh)
some really good tea or coffee. That means no herbal decaffeinated crap, unless she's Mormon or Muslim, etc. (in which case she wouldn't want it anyway);
a portable cd player with good headphones so she can tune her roommate out or keep the roommate from being annoyed by her music...
Tons of stuff along this vein should be good. Practical, cheap stuff that she won't remember to pack or buy for herself. Oh, that also includes the biggest and softest towels and/or a bathrobe/"dressing gown" unless you think that would be improper.
The original movie has been out for 25 years, now. It makes sense to actually do a complete remake of it, in the hope that it will breathe new life into the story, and appeal to a new generation.
If the remake sucks, well... we still have the original.
because they charge you extra to use their modems. That's why it's called "leasing" it.
The whole point of this was was it costs more overall if you refuse to lease their modem. In other words, they charge you extra to not use their modems. That's why I say take the modem... you're not obligated to actually use it.
Let them ship you their modem. Take it out of the box, examine it, make sure it isn't damaged, and then... put it back in the box and stick it in your closet. Use your own modem. Who's going to know?
If they run tests and decide that you're not using their equipment (either by checking MAC addrs, which, as a practical matter, they really can't keep on file, or by issuing instructions to the modems), what can they do? You're "testing alternatives."
Besides, hey. This way you get a backup modem, in case the spiffy one you bought dies. And you can plug the modem in and turn it on when you're having service problems, if you feel like it, too.
Let me see if I can boil all this down to something smaller:
You have the right to speak; you don't have the right to force people to listen.
Spam wastes my time. If I pay by bandwidth, it wastes my money. At the very least, I have the right to refuse it; at best, I have the right to restitution for damages.
From what I understand, however, that card chews up system resources when using the firewire card and sound card together. You might want to invest in a US$20-40 dollar dedicated firewire card if that turns out to be the case.
After all, how are they going to know who owns a DVD- or CD-recorder with a certain ID? Purchase records? Not if the culprit paid cash for his device... and if the industry ends up requiring "registration" of recorders, people will just find other media (small hard drives! CF or SM cards!) or mod their recorders.
Also, I'm skeptical that this could ever work in a practical sense, anyway. Look at MAC addresses on NIC cards, and how those supposedly unique numbers sometimes do repeat and conflict. That's why we're allowed to manually change them. If the computer industry can't get totally unique MACs, how can they be relied on to get totally unique recorder IDs?
This also, of course, obviates the argument as to whether recorders should just record the MAC addresses of the machines they're in =)
Instead, how about a "Thank you" for the driver who lets you into his lane during busy traffic?
If you've got hands, you've already got all you need to say thanks: wave! =)
Seriously, it's not the letting people in that annoys me, it's when those people think it just happened naturally, or something. You know, the people creeping onto the onramp at lower than average traffic speeds, and cutting in just in front of someone going at least the speed limit, conveniently forgeting that they actually do not have right-of-way.
Can a Tivo be sold to someone else, and the service continue? If so, then it would mean loss of hardware sales
Actually, yes, the "lifetime" subscription stays with the machine, not the owner. However, I don't think the aftermarket sales will impact the bottom line nearly as much as might be expected: most of these buyers are people who haven't justified the expense at the original price of the hardware+lifetime or hardware+monthly.fee, so when they buy it in the aftermarket, they are paying either
(hardware+lifetime)-x or (hardware+monthly.fee)-x, where they still have to pay Tivo the monthly fee.
The fact that an aftermarket exists, however, tends to boost initial sales slightly, as people are aware that they can eventually sell the systems to someone else, and also promote purchase of the Series2, except in such cases where the marginal utility of the Series2 is less than the current marginal cost, which is NOT the initial cost of hardware, for upgraders, but merely the cost of
(Series2.hardware+monthly.fee)-[(hardware+monthly. fee) or (hardware.lifetime)]. (I heard something about them dropping the lifetime model, so am not including it in any new sales of Series2).
I think a million Tivo subscribers returning their boxes would be a fine educational example for Tivo, BBC, and any marketroids who read about this and thought "oooh...now that's a way to increase our market share".
And what would they learn from that? Tivo owners have already paid for the box, and will not get the money back. The only loss of income Tivo would face would be from those customers who were paying for their listings monthly, instead of ponying up the "lifetime" fee. I'm sure this would be offset by the amount of free hardware they could refurbish and resell to ohers, and collect new listing fees from... besides, if these are a large percentage of the original Tivo boxes, and not the Series2, it could speed up them killing off support for the original boxes.
I'm left to think maybe Ridley Scotts death was a blessing.
You mean Philip K. Dick, right? Ridley is still very much alive - or haven't you heard of that recent little picture he did, Black Hawk Down? I think it won some awards, or something. =)
Users of other distros are less likely to make use of that support as they are already at least somewhat knowledgable about Linux, thus it's less costly for Redhat to provide to those users.
I don't think this is the case. Probably (hopefully) most first-time users are turning to distros like SuSE, because frankly, installing is easier to begin with, and it looks a lot niftier and promises more out of the box to new users than Red Hat does. Especially for those installing the "Pro" version of SuSE 8, with KDE 3 and YAST 2 and all the rest. (Yes, I'm a biased user of SuSE and OpenBSD)
Regardless of whether the installers are generally more knowledgeable when it comes to other distros, the fact is that it costs Red Hat more to train its support personnel on those distros.
Think about it as if Compaq is taking over HP support... which it probably is: something you built yourself, be it hardware or software, is almost definitely going to be easier to support than someone else's stuff, because you have internal documents, access to the creators, all kinds of other source material to research with with what you make locally, as opposed to what you don't.
How can using linux halve the cost of a computer lab when the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?
Other people have touched on the extra costs that Microsoft licensing actually incurs, so I'll just answer the hardware side:
Thing is, a lot of labs run on donated hardware. That means that, other than wiring and security lock costs, these labs are virtually "free" to assemble. Therefore, almost all the costs in labs like this are from the software.
As an aside: businesses like to donate things; they get the writeoff and they get the goodwill of the community as a bonus. However, nobody wants to donate 100 seat licenses for some business software package, and most businesses don't have old academic packages to donate. What they do have to give is hardware, and it's a lot more valuable to them writeoff-wise and goodwill-wise, as well as just better sense, to give schools something they can use for a while, like an inventory of Pentium IIs or IIIs, or something. However, even businesses making hardware donations just for the writeoff tend to want to make sure the schools can actually use what they are given.
That's why free OS and free software mean so much; if a school has someone trained to administer Linux or BSD, and some useful academic software is made for *nix, they have proof they can make use of what they get. And that makes a world of difference, especially when you take this model and expand it out to every nonprofit who has to write grant proposals, etc. These agencies live or die by donations; they can't float a bond election like a school system can, etc. And as we get more accustomed to think of this as the most efficient way of doing things, governments will start having to be accountable if they buy what they could get for free. And if governments move to the banner, you know that corporations will face scrutiny by stockholders if they don't follow, and...
Fighter pilots, on the other hand, experience loads as high as nine Gs in tight turns, and they are also experiencing rapid acceleration changes during maneuvers.
I believe you... I tried to find out what Gs might be associated with a car crash at 30 MPH, with/without airbags, but couldn't. I'd also heard something about blackouts happening to pilots somewhere between 6 and 8 Gs... is that true? And 12 Gs was a magic number... like a fighter plane would shear itself apart at that horrendous level, or something. Any more notes?
I can't believe that they think that a Roller Coasters ride has more Gforce then getting shoot up into space at an ungodly speed.
It's not the speed, it's the huge change of speed in a short time that makes the difference. Relatively gradual accleration to significant speeds is not nearly as traumatic as a quick acceleration and then an abrupt deceleration.
Don't forget, also, that the people piloting military planes and shuttles have gone through significant physical training and monitoring to make sure they're in good shape. The same cannot be true of the vast majority of couch-potatoes visiting the fair. And if the stress on the adult body isn't enough, imagine what the stress might be like on a teen or preteen's body, especially to the brain stem, when suddenly given a 3 or 4 G shock. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot more... especially as the stress gets repeated.
Go ask a pediatric neurologist about the effect repeated stresses like this could have, or go ask any trauma surgeon what repeated low-grade whiplash, which is a potential risk at these levels, can do to anyone.
Think about it - the whole point of roller coasters is to give you a "rush" by stressing your body extremely. It makes sense to at least examine the need for regulation, to make sure roller coasters don't get too extreme.
As a Christian who doesn't buy Creationism (I believe God created the universe, but "creationism" is hardly the same thing - it takes a literal interpretation of the Bible and adds very nutty presuppositions to make modern ideas about the past sound plausible to people who want to stay blind to science - as if faith can stay faith even if it requires pseudoscience to be bolstered), Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Stephen Hawking have been the contemporary scientists that I have looked up to in order to further my understanding of the physical world. I was hoping to hear live lectures by them all one day, but now only Hawking is left.
Can anyone name some scientists of the newest generation worth watching, now?
p.s. Ironically, I was watching a showb about Charles Darwin on PBS a night or two ago (Darwin's Diary?), and Gould was on. I said to myself, "Wow! He's still around." Sigh.
I'm sure that if there was a national ID card system they would have been caught immediately.
Dude, I know this was meant to be funny, but instead it's really sad - because few people ever look at ID, even in face to face transactions.
My next-door-neighbor recently told me that someone had found a single check in her trash, and used it to buy stuff at the local Fred Meyer (grocery store that also sells home stuff and clothes). Nobody bothered to ask for ID... for over US$500 worth of stuff! She was able to convince her bank it wasn't her, but jeez. I went to Fry's the next day and finally got a paper shredder =) Suddenly tearing up my mail didn't seem good enough any more...
The Nintendo Entertainment was released in 1985 and was still going strong in 1991 when the Super NES was released.
I think we will see the length of time shrink with each round.
I feel that the PS2 backwards compatibility will carry the first platform for a while.
Yes, I think it's precisely for that reason that PSOne sales are still going strong; there are still PSOne games being released, because the manufacturers know that they work on two systems, not just one. I'm not sure that backwards compatibility for years on end is such a good thing for users in the long run, however; look at how hacked up and convoluted Windows has turned out to be, even converted to the NT tree. =)
Whoops, I forgot to use the Slashdot link.:( No new jacuzzi (or server upgrade) for Taco!
Bah. I usually only use Amazon to store my wishlist. There are cheaper places online(reel, djangos, buy.com, etc.), and I've seen Gattaca for $12 on sale around here, and I live in Oregon, where there's no state sales tax =)
Still, I think you'll find it's worth it at Amazon's price. Gattaca is a movie that enters your subconscious, so that months from watching it, something will pop up (like someone talking about colored contact lenses, or looking at all the hair on the floor of a barber shop) and you'll remember it. I remember at the time, in the theater, the intro sequence alone was enough to make me want this film =)
My only complaint with the article is my disbelief that console manufacturers really expect the markets for consoles to last 6-7 years.
The other side of Moore's Law is that quite a few people are going to be demanding better hardware, more quickly. That's why Sony already has the PS/3 in the pipeline.
Actually, around here, you can buy DVD players for about $60. =)
However, DVD playability in consoles is a big deal for the millions of parents who are buying consoles for their kids. They may not know much about the great games or the technical aspects of the consoles, but they do know that they're buying the console as a way to keep little Jimmy and Julie occupied, and if they can go play their Disney DVDs in their rooms and not in the den, even better.
I've always thought that Circuit City would charge above-retail if it could get away with it. I really don't understand why anyone supports that chain; it sucks.
That being said, did you actually visit the stores, or just look at the Sunday ads? Those ads are printed weeks in advance...
Slashdot Mirror
a webcam!
At least, that's what I think they all need...
Heck, yah. If she has a webcam (and can make a camwhore site), she can "wishlist" for anything else.
No, seriously, get her:
Tons of stuff along this vein should be good. Practical, cheap stuff that she won't remember to pack or buy for herself. Oh, that also includes the biggest and softest towels and/or a bathrobe/"dressing gown" unless you think that would be improper.
The original movie has been out for 25 years, now.
It makes sense to actually do a complete remake of it, in the hope that it will breathe new life into the story, and appeal to a new generation.
If the remake sucks, well... we still have the original.
because they charge you extra to use their modems. That's why it's called "leasing" it.
The whole point of this was was it costs more overall if you refuse to lease their modem. In other words, they charge you extra to not use their modems. That's why I say take the modem... you're not obligated to actually use it.
Let them ship you their modem. Take it out of the box, examine it, make sure it isn't damaged, and then... put it back in the box and stick it in your closet. Use your own modem. Who's going to know?
If they run tests and decide that you're not using their equipment (either by checking MAC addrs, which, as a practical matter, they really can't keep on file, or by issuing instructions to the modems), what can they do? You're "testing alternatives."
Besides, hey. This way you get a backup modem, in case the spiffy one you bought dies. And you can plug the modem in and turn it on when you're having service problems, if you feel like it, too.
Let me see if I can boil all this down to something smaller:
You have the right to speak; you don't have the right to force people to listen.
Spam wastes my time. If I pay by bandwidth, it wastes my money. At the very least, I have the right to refuse it; at best, I have the right to restitution for damages.
From what I understand, however, that card chews up system resources when using the firewire card and sound card together. You might want to invest in a US$20-40 dollar dedicated firewire card if that turns out to be the case.
After all, how are they going to know who owns a DVD- or CD-recorder with a certain ID? Purchase records? Not if the culprit paid cash for his device... and if the industry ends up requiring "registration" of recorders, people will just find other media (small hard drives! CF or SM cards!) or mod their recorders.
Also, I'm skeptical that this could ever work in a practical sense, anyway. Look at MAC addresses on NIC cards, and how those supposedly unique numbers sometimes do repeat and conflict. That's why we're allowed to manually change them. If the computer industry can't get totally unique MACs, how can they be relied on to get totally unique recorder IDs?
This also, of course, obviates the argument as to whether recorders should just record the MAC addresses of the machines they're in =)
A SHARPIE® fine point permanent marker will not help you if the new standard stores the serial number in the subcode
No, but using a DVD would. The DVD spec leaves out the subcode channels, according to this. And supposedly they're going after both CDs and DVDs.
Instead, how about a "Thank you" for the driver who lets you into his lane during busy traffic?
If you've got hands, you've already got all you need to say thanks: wave! =)
Seriously, it's not the letting people in that annoys me, it's when those people think it just happened naturally, or something. You know, the people creeping onto the onramp at lower than average traffic speeds, and cutting in just in front of someone going at least the speed limit, conveniently forgeting that they actually do not have right-of-way.
Can a Tivo be sold to someone else, and the service continue? If so, then it would mean loss of hardware sales
. fee) or (hardware.lifetime)]. (I heard something about them dropping the lifetime model, so am not including it in any new sales of Series2).
Actually, yes, the "lifetime" subscription stays with the machine, not the owner. However, I don't think the aftermarket sales will impact the bottom line nearly as much as might be expected: most of these buyers are people who haven't justified the expense at the original price of the hardware+lifetime or hardware+monthly.fee, so when they buy it in the aftermarket, they are paying either
(hardware+lifetime)-x or
(hardware+monthly.fee)-x, where they still have to pay Tivo the monthly fee.
The fact that an aftermarket exists, however, tends to boost initial sales slightly, as people are aware that they can eventually sell the systems to someone else, and also promote purchase of the Series2, except in such cases where the marginal utility of the Series2 is less than the current marginal cost, which is NOT the initial cost of hardware, for upgraders, but merely the cost of
(Series2.hardware+monthly.fee)-[(hardware+monthly
I think a million Tivo subscribers returning their boxes would be a fine educational example for Tivo, BBC, and any marketroids who read about this and thought "oooh...now that's a way to increase our market share".
And what would they learn from that? Tivo owners have already paid for the box, and will not get the money back. The only loss of income Tivo would face would be from those customers who were paying for their listings monthly, instead of ponying up the "lifetime" fee. I'm sure this would be offset by the amount of free hardware they could refurbish and resell to ohers, and collect new listing fees from... besides, if these are a large percentage of the original Tivo boxes, and not the Series2, it could speed up them killing off support for the original boxes.
So they're finally going to do a movie based on it? Oh great. Yet another movie for the slashdot community to bitch about. ;)
Bugger that talk.
Ever seen The Neverending Story? Yah?
Same director.
'Nuff said. Be quiet. I think OSC knows what he's doing.
I'm left to think maybe Ridley Scotts death was a blessing.
You mean Philip K. Dick, right? Ridley is still very much alive - or haven't you heard of that recent little picture he did, Black Hawk Down? I think it won some awards, or something. =)
Users of other distros are less likely to make use of that support as they are already at least somewhat knowledgable about Linux, thus it's less costly for Redhat to provide to those users.
I don't think this is the case. Probably (hopefully) most first-time users are turning to distros like SuSE, because frankly, installing is easier to begin with, and it looks a lot niftier and promises more out of the box to new users than Red Hat does. Especially for those installing the "Pro" version of SuSE 8, with KDE 3 and YAST 2 and all the rest. (Yes, I'm a biased user of SuSE and OpenBSD)
Regardless of whether the installers are generally more knowledgeable when it comes to other distros, the fact is that it costs Red Hat more to train its support personnel on those distros.
Think about it as if Compaq is taking over HP support... which it probably is: something you built yourself, be it hardware or software, is almost definitely going to be easier to support than someone else's stuff, because you have internal documents, access to the creators, all kinds of other source material to research with with what you make locally, as opposed to what you don't.
How can using linux halve the cost of a computer lab when the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?
Other people have touched on the extra costs that Microsoft licensing actually incurs, so I'll just answer the hardware side:
Thing is, a lot of labs run on donated hardware. That means that, other than wiring and security lock costs, these labs are virtually "free" to assemble. Therefore, almost all the costs in labs like this are from the software.
As an aside: businesses like to donate things; they get the writeoff and they get the goodwill of the community as a bonus. However, nobody wants to donate 100 seat licenses for some business software package, and most businesses don't have old academic packages to donate. What they do have to give is hardware, and it's a lot more valuable to them writeoff-wise and goodwill-wise, as well as just better sense, to give schools something they can use for a while, like an inventory of Pentium IIs or IIIs, or something.
However, even businesses making hardware donations just for the writeoff tend to want to make sure the schools can actually use what they are given.
That's why free OS and free software mean so much; if a school has someone trained to administer Linux or BSD, and some useful academic software is made for *nix, they have proof they can make use of what they get. And that makes a world of difference, especially when you take this model and expand it out to every nonprofit who has to write grant proposals, etc. These agencies live or die by donations; they can't float a bond election like a school system can, etc. And as we get more accustomed to think of this as the most efficient way of doing things, governments will start having to be accountable if they buy what they could get for free. And if governments move to the banner, you know that corporations will face scrutiny by stockholders if they don't follow, and...
Fighter pilots, on the other hand, experience loads as high as nine Gs in tight turns, and they are also experiencing rapid acceleration changes during maneuvers.
I believe you... I tried to find out what Gs might be associated with a car crash at 30 MPH, with/without airbags, but couldn't. I'd also heard something about blackouts happening to pilots somewhere between 6 and 8 Gs... is that true? And 12 Gs was a magic number... like a fighter plane would shear itself apart at that horrendous level, or something. Any more notes?
I can't believe that they think that a Roller Coasters ride has more Gforce then getting shoot up into space at an ungodly speed.
It's not the speed, it's the huge change of speed in a short time that makes the difference. Relatively gradual accleration to significant speeds is not nearly as traumatic as a quick acceleration and then an abrupt deceleration.
Don't forget, also, that the people piloting military planes and shuttles have gone through significant physical training and monitoring to make sure they're in good shape. The same cannot be true of the vast majority of couch-potatoes visiting the fair. And if the stress on the adult body isn't enough, imagine what the stress might be like on a teen or preteen's body, especially to the brain stem, when suddenly given a 3 or 4 G shock. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot more... especially as the stress gets repeated.
Go ask a pediatric neurologist about the effect repeated stresses like this could have, or go ask any trauma surgeon what repeated low-grade whiplash, which is a potential risk at these levels, can do to anyone.
Think about it - the whole point of roller coasters is to give you a "rush" by stressing your body extremely. It makes sense to at least examine the need for regulation, to make sure roller coasters don't get too extreme.
As a Christian who doesn't buy Creationism (I believe God created the universe, but "creationism" is hardly the same thing - it takes a literal interpretation of the Bible and adds very nutty presuppositions to make modern ideas about the past sound plausible to people who want to stay blind to science - as if faith can stay faith even if it requires pseudoscience to be bolstered), Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Stephen Hawking have been the contemporary scientists that I have looked up to in order to further my understanding of the physical world. I was hoping to hear live lectures by them all one day, but now only Hawking is left.
Can anyone name some scientists of the newest generation worth watching, now?
p.s. Ironically, I was watching a showb about Charles Darwin on PBS a night or two ago (Darwin's Diary?), and Gould was on. I said to myself, "Wow! He's still around." Sigh.
I'm sure that if there was a national ID card system they would have been caught immediately.
Dude, I know this was meant to be funny, but instead it's really sad - because few people ever look at ID, even in face to face transactions.
My next-door-neighbor recently told me that someone had found a single check in her trash, and used it to buy stuff at the local Fred Meyer (grocery store that also sells home stuff and clothes). Nobody bothered to ask for ID... for over US$500 worth of stuff! She was able to convince her bank it wasn't her, but jeez. I went to Fry's the next day and finally got a paper shredder =) Suddenly tearing up my mail didn't seem good enough any more...
The Nintendo Entertainment was released in 1985 and was still going strong in 1991 when the Super NES was released.
I think we will see the length of time shrink with each round.
I feel that the PS2 backwards compatibility will carry the first platform for a while.
Yes, I think it's precisely for that reason that PSOne sales are still going strong; there are still PSOne games being released, because the manufacturers know that they work on two systems, not just one. I'm not sure that backwards compatibility for years on end is such a good thing for users in the long run, however; look at how hacked up and convoluted Windows has turned out to be, even converted to the NT tree. =)
Thanks for the suggestion; I'll look for it.
Of course you realize that all lists like this are bent towards movies that get wide play/are popular... or else we'd have ZardoZ up there somewhere.
"The gun is GOOD!" Heheh. What a dumb movie. =)
Whoops, I forgot to use the Slashdot link. :( No new jacuzzi (or server upgrade) for Taco!
Bah. I usually only use Amazon to store my wishlist. There are cheaper places online(reel, djangos, buy.com, etc.), and I've seen Gattaca for $12 on sale around here, and I live in Oregon, where there's no state sales tax =)
Still, I think you'll find it's worth it at Amazon's price. Gattaca is a movie that enters your subconscious, so that months from watching it, something will pop up (like someone talking about colored contact lenses, or looking at all the hair on the floor of a barber shop) and you'll remember it. I remember at the time, in the theater, the intro sequence alone was enough to make me want this film =)
My only complaint with the article is my disbelief that console manufacturers really expect the markets for consoles to last 6-7 years.
The other side of Moore's Law is that quite a few people are going to be demanding better hardware, more quickly. That's why Sony already has the PS/3 in the pipeline.
Actually, around here, you can buy DVD players for about $60. =)
However, DVD playability in consoles is a big deal for the millions of parents who are buying consoles for their kids. They may not know much about the great games or the technical aspects of the consoles, but they do know that they're buying the console as a way to keep little Jimmy and Julie occupied, and if they can go play their Disney DVDs in their rooms and not in the den, even better.
I've always thought that Circuit City would charge above-retail if it could get away with it. I really don't understand why anyone supports that chain; it sucks.
That being said, did you actually visit the stores, or just look at the Sunday ads? Those ads are printed weeks in advance...