Perhaps these people neglected to live within their means and save money in case something happened. It's pretty sad when self-proclaimed "ants" (Aesop's Fable) turn out to be cousins of "grasshoppers." Sure, they worked, and probably even worked hard. But if they didn't save much, they're still going to be living off the forced kindness of strangers.
I'm getting laid off in a little over 2 months, from an internet company. I was the last person in my circle of acquaintances to get laid off in the industry, and I've known for a long time that it could easily happen to me. However, I went to work there for the stock, and knew the risks I was taking in doing so. I am disappointed, but I'm not too worried.
Perhaps I'd be a bit more unhappy about it if they hadn't gifted me with a huge severance package (almost 6 months' pay), but again: they could have easily have given me nothing and no warning, and many of my friends were let go from other places via e-mail or being locked out, etc.
What kind of person doesn't plan for being laid off or fired? Regarding those who say they can't afford to save because they have car payments and kids and stuff... why'd they decide on the expensive car instead of a cheaper one, and why did they have kids without planning, etc? (I'll accept "accidentally" having kids, but only if the condom broke... and most of the people here are educated enough to know how to use condoms or not have unsafe sex, and should know that by having sex they're implicitly agreeing to any consequences that may result despite efforts to the contrary)
I once met some people who hinted that they needed money and wanted me to help them out (and they didn't mean loans, but a gift), but they had summer houses and mobile phones and multiple cars and 3 phone lines and cable tv, etc. They had higher living expectations than I do, but still wanted me to support them rather than make some realistic budgetary sacrifices. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people like that here, now, who want more money from the government but shudder to think of selling off or cancelling some of the goods and services they enjoy.
If you take two people with $45k/year jobs (don't laugh, that's higher than probably 90% of families make, not just single adults, and higher than my base salary), and one person buys a Toyota over 3 years and puts the rest in savings and the other guy buys a BMW and after 3 years is still making car payments, and then both get laid off... who do you think will complain more, and sooner, about having no money? But which person was acting in a more responsible manner?
Well, okay, I could be wrong. Perhaps consumerism is a disease, and some of these people are forced by their brain chemistry or whatever to buy things they don't need and lack the math skills to figure out how to live within a budget, much less save money. Still, if they have shown lack of fiscal ability, we don't help their problem by feeding them more cash. I doubt we'll see any material-addiction 12-steps starting up any time soon, though. And I do understand that sometimes sweeping economic changes occur that throw whole categories of people out of work, who then require retraining that they can't afford - but I'm not talking about people in labor-intensive fields, here. I'm talking about a group of people here that have on average probably at least 3 computers each and who pride themselves on being technologically sophisticated, but who can't think about the future when it comes to their own lives - and expect as much slack or more as people who have more valid uses for the money.
even "low-interest" cards have ridiculous rates in the neighborhood of 12-18%
Not true. AmEx's "Blue" has a standard rate of ~10%, and most cards have low "promo" rates to get you in the door. Just remember to check both the new purchase rate and the transfer rate, if you have current balances you want to transfer - I fell for Fleet's offer of 0% for 6 months, but somehow missed the 11% they started charging me for transfers. =(
Also they make it excessively difficult to pay that $20 a month from a foreign country, which is where I am 99% of the time
Do they not have a website, and allow you to make transactions debiting your checking acocunt? If you do that, and have your salary direct-deposited, it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you can get on the Net.
[...]they barely know who Bugs Bunny is, thought they knew Daffy and Elmer, recognized Yosemite Sam, but had no clue who the Tazmanian Devil, Marvin the Martian, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner, or Sylvester are.
That's pretty strange, considering the "Kids WB" shows a lot of intros to cartoons with thse characters, and I think Animaniacs had some of them as well, though maybe in "kid" versions (kids of today wouldn't relate to the "adult" Marvin or Wiley, or some other stupid reason, so they have kids now).
If you think their knowledge of WB characters is bad, though, ask them about Felix or Popeye or Rocky and Bullwinkle... our cartoon heritage is really fading into obscurity. Sure, there's good new stuff out there, like Dexter's Laboratory and Invader Zim, but so many other popular cartoons today are just rip-offs or parodies of older ones, that it's important to show where they came from. Oh, and don't forget to show them G-Force and Starblazers, too!
The resolution of digital projection must be improved if it is to be taken seriously. 1280x1024 doesn't cut it. There are rumors that TI might finally inch their way up to full HDTV resolution (1920x1080) by the time Ep. II premeires, but even that isn't good enough.
You're thinking about for prosumer-type use. As projectionists and filmmakers alike have already noted here, the engine used in theater projectors already does the 1920x1080 format.
Current DLP projectors have a set of 1280x1024 chips in them, which have a native aspect ratio of 1.25:1. The projector also comes with two anamorphic lenses, a 1.5X lens to stretch the image out for 1.85:1 movies, and a 1.9X lens to stretch the image out for 2.39:1 movies. The lenses must be changed whenever the theatre is getting ready to show a feature in a different aspect ratio than the previous one.
And for anyone who thinks the lens changing is too unwieldy: the same thing is required with analog projectors.
You have no idea how embarrassing it can be to have the producer of a film at a premiere for your film festival, only to have the "projectionist"(popcorn boy) forget to pop in the right lens... =)
Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?
Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.
Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.
I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.
Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?
Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.
best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.
I've been wanting a DirecTivo for a while, but have been waiting. I know it's not hard to set up, and isn't terribly expensive over time, but still I am waiting.
Why am I waiting?
I'm waiting because Tivo announced a "series 2" technology, and a new standalone box, but no DirecTivo2, and no telling what the new features really are (other than a bunch of peripheral ports) or whether the processor and encoding algorithm can be upgraded when it becomes necessary.
I'm waiting because HDTV is going to be mandatory in 2006, and all the current units, at least the standalones (no idea if DirecTV has to comply), will become pretty worthless, when they can't directly tune and record any more.
I'm waiting because the subscription "for the life of the unit" means about 4 years, now, because of obsolescence...
No offense, but it looks awfully like a really really grainy shot through a webcam in someone's darkened bedroom of the nether parts of a human female, and not the center of... oh, wait. I see your point, now.
This also answers the question about where life came from, doesn't it?
Reuters is reporting a new digital tape format (D-VHS) to be marketed to upscale households. Interesting highlights include more encryption and claims that it's much higher quality than DVD, though no specifics were given.
spamming != mass sending of resumes
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Resume Spamming Redux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think the article was referring to people who send their resume out to non-job-related mailing lists, random people they see online, or picking a bunch of inappropriate names from a corporate website. Some people seem to be confusing this with sending resumes out to all the job search engines and sending messages to all the jobs/hr@prospective.companies-type addresses. Remember that these lists and addresses are created specifically for this purpose... so it's not abusive to take advantage of them.
(Which reminds me... I may be losing my job in a week or so... wish I could figure out why all the "internet" jobs on the search engines are for the point-and-click-FP-of-website-designer, and none for router jockeys/infrastructure engineers)
This sounds like an excellent idea. With mobile companies now offering multi-user plans for "small" premiums over their single-user rates, this might even be cheaper than getting a prepaid card with unlimited SMS on it. That's assuming, of course, that you already use a mobile service...
One question: assuming you've made this work, what GPS mobile phone(s) offer the ability to automatically SMS a location? I just can't help thinking that surely I'd have heard about this by now, if it was already built-in. Or is this decision you made just a theoretical one?
Further thoughts for anyone else trying this: make sure you disconnect the speaker of the mobile phone internally. Remember, most phones beep when they power up, not to mention that you don't want your computer to "ring" when someone calls you! Also... if you think your mobile vendor is friendly with the local police and helps track down stolen phones, you can probably forego the GPS, since they should be able to triangulate the location of a phone on the network, anyway.
What happens if there's a power failure while you're not around? When the system reboots and you're not around, you're in trouble. Of course, many BIOSes are compliant enough with ATX to offer the ability to stay down if power failure occurs, but what if your BIOS battery gets wiped out?
I like the idea, written above, of having a GPS phone send an SMS daily with tracking info. However, I know nothing about GPS phones. I hope this functionality is easy to create...
It's quite possible that AOL wants to make a thin client/small cheap desktop a la the nifty web-browser-based PC people are finding over at Fry's. AOL has a browser, already, remember? Just not the underlying code to run it on. They may have no plans to "fight Microsoft" (they need to go buy some office suite from Gobe or someone in order to do that), they may just want to embed something they can control into grandma's new set-top AOL box.
Even if they did do this in order to square off against Microsoft, why is everyone screaming that Linux will die as a result? Okay, admittedly Netscape is now even more grossy bloated and useless than before they got bought, but everyone is missing one important difference: Red Hat is not synonymous with Linux! Linux was around before Red Hat, and there are other commercial distros around (compare Suse market share in Europe to Red Hat). If anything, this will stop people being so Red-Hat centric. Besides, if Red Hat gets bought out, then I'll bet at least some of the open source programmers on staff will rake in some big bucks for staying, etc. Sounds like a great thing to point out to our kids... sometimes, the good geeks do win. =)
One more thing... I'm sorry, wasn't this what you wanted? If it wasn't AOL, you'd be happy. Unless, of course, it was Microsoft. =)
Does this give you ideas for other sources of revenue? Make everything literally free (to download) on the internet. With, maybe, a royalty on home-user (IE, non-business) bandwidth, with statistical sampling to determine how much of that royalty should go to which entertainment industries for mass-market entertainment. Maybe add in hard drives or cd blanks. Basically, make something similar to the Audio-CDR mechanism.
What a scary thought. This would make artists even more subject to patronage than they are under the current system. Remember, at least now you can come up with your own money and release what you want independently, and it may find a market. If business can effectively control the means of delivery, you won't be able to do that without cutting deals... and those deals will be excruciating for the little guy.
Of course I am being a bit extreme here; independent producers could find alternate methods of delivery. But still... look back to the roots of artistic patronage, when museums and "salons" were solely showcases for the baubles of the rich. Great things came out of counter-movements to that paradigm - but lots of good and important artists and ideas starved while it was still dominant. Or look more recently at MTV (since the whole recording industry is too byzantine to summarize here). When it first came out, it had a monopoly on playing music videos, and could directly control what millions of teens saw - and so not only commanded billions from advertisers, but also from record companies... not to mention asserting "creative control" in other ways as well. (Who do you think made the "a" in "alternative" a capital letter? The same people who now sell you pre-rumpled plaid shirts and jeans for more than "dress" clothes. ) Even now, the "discoveries" or "underground" bands that get airtime go through rigorous vetting and are brought in primarily for novelty and market share.
We must remain vigilant when new technologies get introduced, that there are no hidden strings attached. By the way, the best way to see that alternative and free technologies get chosen by the masses over what industry will offer them is to make it available to them in ways they can use - that means making your super-cool new codecs and software available for MS-Windows and Mac, not just for *nix and BSD, because otherwise, for most of them, it's still no choice at all.
If the government is going to hold copies of that, then I don't need to waste the disk space on my own. Let's get a modern FOIA together that will compel the government to give us personal access to the database info on/about us! Also, if they've got everyone else's stuff, as well, they should be able to offer me porn^N^N^N^N medical advice similar to that which I already make, um, use of.
Man, I loved that movie when I was a kid. That, and Wargames, and D.A.R.Y.L. I was a perfect little nerd boy. Of course, if I could meet myself as a kid now, I'd sigh, ruffle my younger self's hair, and explain things like sports and friends and maybe even dating... (wait, I still haven't figured that one out, much less girls or boys)
I wanted a light cycle (though not quite so fast, a whatever-that-big-thing-was-that-got-chopped-away- from-beneath-Jeff-Bridges, and, most of all, my very own Bit. (Pretty sad, I thought it would be my friend)
Oh, yeah, Tron got me into learning ASCII and keyboard control codes, too, once I learned there was a code for [EOL](end of line).
In all seriousness, is it just because you wanted to see your name in lights, or is there some other reason?
It was because the story was new then, and I wanted to talk about it. Once It became clear that Slashdot didn't think it worthwhile to discuss, I put my ideas away. I only saw that the story finally got put in by someone else by accident, well after it had left the front page. By now, of course, the interest has ebbed.
I know this is going to seem like just more off-topic whining to most of you, but hear me out:
I've only submitted 3 stories in recent history, all have been rejected, but at least 2 were later accepted when others submitted them, with no substantial difference in comments. Here's my latest one:
2002-01-10 14:36:07 IPod under Windows (articles,music) (rejected)
In this submission, I pretty much stated exactly what was later said in the submission that was accepted, except that I speculated that Linux software couldn't be far behind, either.
Tell me, is the secret to submissions being accepted a matter of which editor reads them? If so, it looks like the right tactic would be to just keep resending rejected submissions back many times over a period of days, to make sure we hit all possible readers. If that's not the case, please explain why not.
What does this ugly, gangly design have that others don't? It offers greater mobility for swiveling your LCD screen since it's attached to that weird stalk instead of to the base just as most (far better looking) rumor site concept art had it.
Careful... you might give someone at Apple ideas. I mean, think about it. Every product they release now has a lot of leaking beforehand about specs, and concept art, etc... what would it take for them to just say, "hey, let's leak the specs and see what the users come up with..." The sites certainly won't admit that they totally made up the images (especially if their userbase and therefore advertising revenue gets boosted by "correct" hits), and having multiple designs coming from the user community couldn't hurt the process.
You take a 1d10 roll per metric ton of impactor, and the resultant number is the number of square meters, in thousands, of surface land that is flattened/destroyed. If the impactor is above 1000 metric tons, you need a additional rolls to determine volume of matter thrown into the atmosphere, length of time before the matter settles back out, how far the matter spreads, and how much the Earth's albedo might change - but it starts getting complicated...
I can already imagine the comments that 14yo boys will be making to each other and to Fry's salespeople (15yos):
"Uhh, I want a woody. Gimme a woody! Heh-heh-heh. Hey Beavis, did that guy give you a woody?"
Re:..console manufacturer has unhelpful support...
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XBox Defects Draw Ire
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· Score: 1
In your vast wisdom, surely you know about the ability to not show stories that belong in categories you don't like. Even if you don't, you ought to know how to skim the front page and not read stuff that doesn't interest you.
Why, then, are you deliberately reading articles that you know you won't like, and then whining about them? You must either have some grudge against Slashdot, or just have nothing better to do with your life. No matter - the new system just came out, and now we won't have to see you whine any longer. Take your bellyaching to one of the IDG websites. You don't want us, and we sure don't want you.
Sigh. I thought it would be obvious that by product differentiation, I meant positive differentiation. Nuon was a marginal, more expensive format, that wasn't relevant to what consumers wanted:
nothing significantly new, different, or already in demand was offered - "interactive" titles had already been tried with CD-I and other formats, to say nothing of the fact that the games were not overwhelming - how many people can name a single Nuon game? Did any of them even get covered in gaming magazines?
DVDs had not yet achieved significant penetration in the market, to the extent that there were still few players on the market, and features like DTS and progressive-scan were still the hot selling points.
Personally, I feel Nuon was an excuse to re-key the coding scheme of DVD, and get rid of the plain-text keys that people are exploiting in the current specification, but was otherwise an engineering feat looking for a problem to address. Shoving a Gamecube (which people want) into a DVD player satisfies the desires of people who want both, or who want one but are interested in the other. I know I'm trying to hold off on buying a Gamecube until this hybrid hits the US - most of what I use my Playstation 2 for is playing movies, and my justification for buying the hybrid is that it's a secondary DVD player for another room, that also plays a different format of game than what I already have.
Why would DVD manufacturers be interested in attaching something that would really cut profits?
The answer is pretty simple, actually. Adding console functionality to a DVD player (which already includes display conversion electronics and a drive unit, along with rudiments like power supply and case) is probably much cheaper than producing a whole console. Coupled with the fact that the console vendor (Sony, Nintendo, et al) might be enticed to partially subsidize the production (because the loss to them per unit would be less than for a full console), and the fact that consumers will be willing to pay somewhat more for a combination unit (which is probably priced much less than the DVD unit and the console would cost together if bought separately), it's probably a break-even or better situation.
Besides, even if they ended up losing 5% of their profit margin on the machine, but sold more units as a result, they'd still go for it. The DVD player market right now is crowded and commoditizing (products with similar features compete on price), so almost any differentiation is something to be sought, from a development and marketing standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps these people neglected to live within their means and save money in case something happened. It's pretty sad when self-proclaimed "ants" (Aesop's Fable) turn out to be cousins of "grasshoppers." Sure, they worked, and probably even worked hard. But if they didn't save much, they're still going to be living off the forced kindness of strangers.
I'm getting laid off in a little over 2 months, from an internet company. I was the last person in my circle of acquaintances to get laid off in the industry, and I've known for a long time that it could easily happen to me. However, I went to work there for the stock, and knew the risks I was taking in doing so. I am disappointed, but I'm not too worried.
Perhaps I'd be a bit more unhappy about it if they hadn't gifted me with a huge severance package (almost 6 months' pay), but again: they could have easily have given me nothing and no warning, and many of my friends were let go from other places via e-mail or being locked out, etc.
What kind of person doesn't plan for being laid off or fired? Regarding those who say they can't afford to save because they have car payments and kids and stuff... why'd they decide on the expensive car instead of a cheaper one, and why did they have kids without planning, etc? (I'll accept "accidentally" having kids, but only if the condom broke... and most of the people here are educated enough to know how to use condoms or not have unsafe sex, and should know that by having sex they're implicitly agreeing to any consequences that may result despite efforts to the contrary)
I once met some people who hinted that they needed money and wanted me to help them out (and they didn't mean loans, but a gift), but they had summer houses and mobile phones and multiple cars and 3 phone lines and cable tv, etc. They had higher living expectations than I do, but still wanted me to support them rather than make some realistic budgetary sacrifices. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people like that here, now, who want more money from the government but shudder to think of selling off or cancelling some of the goods and services they enjoy.
If you take two people with $45k/year jobs (don't laugh, that's higher than probably 90% of families make, not just single adults, and higher than my base salary), and one person buys a Toyota over 3 years and puts the rest in savings and the other guy buys a BMW and after 3 years is still making car payments, and then both get laid off... who do you think will complain more, and sooner, about having no money? But which person was acting in a more responsible manner?
Well, okay, I could be wrong. Perhaps consumerism is a disease, and some of these people are forced by their brain chemistry or whatever to buy things they don't need and lack the math skills to figure out how to live within a budget, much less save money. Still, if they have shown lack of fiscal ability, we don't help their problem by feeding them more cash. I doubt we'll see any material-addiction 12-steps starting up any time soon, though. And I do understand that sometimes sweeping economic changes occur that throw whole categories of people out of work, who then require retraining that they can't afford - but I'm not talking about people in labor-intensive fields, here. I'm talking about a group of people here that have on average probably at least 3 computers each and who pride themselves on being technologically sophisticated, but who can't think about the future when it comes to their own lives - and expect as much slack or more as people who have more valid uses for the money.
even "low-interest" cards have ridiculous rates in the neighborhood of 12-18%
Not true. AmEx's "Blue" has a standard rate of ~10%, and most cards have low "promo" rates to get you in the door. Just remember to check both the new purchase rate and the transfer rate, if you have current balances you want to transfer - I fell for Fleet's offer of 0% for 6 months, but somehow missed the 11% they started charging me for transfers. =(
Also they make it excessively difficult to pay that $20 a month from a foreign country, which is where I am 99% of the time
Do they not have a website, and allow you to make transactions debiting your checking acocunt? If you do that, and have your salary direct-deposited, it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you can get on the Net.
[...]they barely know who Bugs Bunny is, thought they knew Daffy and Elmer, recognized Yosemite Sam, but had no clue who the Tazmanian Devil, Marvin the Martian, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner, or Sylvester are.
That's pretty strange, considering the "Kids WB" shows a lot of intros to cartoons with thse characters, and I think Animaniacs had some of them as well, though maybe in "kid" versions (kids of today wouldn't relate to the "adult" Marvin or Wiley, or some other stupid reason, so they have kids now).
If you think their knowledge of WB characters is bad, though, ask them about Felix or Popeye or Rocky and Bullwinkle... our cartoon heritage is really fading into obscurity. Sure, there's good new stuff out there, like Dexter's Laboratory and Invader Zim, but so many other popular cartoons today are just rip-offs or parodies of older ones, that it's important to show where they came from. Oh, and don't forget to show them G-Force and Starblazers, too!
The resolution of digital projection must be improved if it is to be taken seriously. 1280x1024 doesn't cut it. There are rumors that TI might finally inch their way up to full HDTV resolution (1920x1080) by the time Ep. II premeires, but even that isn't good enough.
You're thinking about for prosumer-type use. As projectionists and filmmakers alike have already noted here, the engine used in theater projectors already does the 1920x1080 format.
Current DLP projectors have a set of 1280x1024 chips in them, which have a native aspect ratio of 1.25:1. The projector also comes with two anamorphic lenses, a 1.5X lens to stretch the image out for 1.85:1 movies, and a 1.9X lens to stretch the image out for 2.39:1 movies. The lenses must be changed whenever the theatre is getting ready to show a feature in a different aspect ratio than the previous one.
And for anyone who thinks the lens changing is too unwieldy: the same thing is required with analog projectors.
You have no idea how embarrassing it can be to have the producer of a film at a premiere for your film festival, only to have the "projectionist"(popcorn boy) forget to pop in the right lens... =)
Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?
Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.
Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.
I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.
Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?
Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.
best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.
Why am I waiting?
"The Galactic Center?"
No offense, but it looks awfully like a really really grainy shot through a webcam in someone's darkened bedroom of the nether parts of a human female, and not the center of... oh, wait. I see your point, now.
This also answers the question about where life came from, doesn't it?
from my (rejected) submission earlier today:
Reuters is reporting a new digital tape format (D-VHS) to be marketed to upscale households. Interesting highlights include more encryption and claims that it's much higher quality than DVD, though no specifics were given.
I think the article was referring to people who send their resume out to non-job-related mailing lists, random people they see online, or picking a bunch of inappropriate names from a corporate website. Some people seem to be confusing this with sending resumes out to all the job search engines and sending messages to all the jobs/hr@prospective.companies-type addresses. Remember that these lists and addresses are created specifically for this purpose... so it's not abusive to take advantage of them.
(Which reminds me... I may be losing my job in a week or so... wish I could figure out why all the "internet" jobs on the search engines are for the point-and-click-FP-of-website-designer, and none for router jockeys/infrastructure engineers)
This sounds like an excellent idea. With mobile companies now offering multi-user plans for "small" premiums over their single-user rates, this might even be cheaper than getting a prepaid card with unlimited SMS on it. That's assuming, of course, that you already use a mobile service...
One question: assuming you've made this work, what GPS mobile phone(s) offer the ability to automatically SMS a location? I just can't help thinking that surely I'd have heard about this by now, if it was already built-in. Or is this decision you made just a theoretical one?
Further thoughts for anyone else trying this: make sure you disconnect the speaker of the mobile phone internally. Remember, most phones beep when they power up, not to mention that you don't want your computer to "ring" when someone calls you! Also... if you think your mobile vendor is friendly with the local police and helps track down stolen phones, you can probably forego the GPS, since they should be able to triangulate the location of a phone on the network, anyway.
What happens if there's a power failure while you're not around? When the system reboots and you're not around, you're in trouble. Of course, many BIOSes are compliant enough with ATX to offer the ability to stay down if power failure occurs, but what if your BIOS battery gets wiped out?
I like the idea, written above, of having a GPS phone send an SMS daily with tracking info. However, I know nothing about GPS phones. I hope this functionality is easy to create...
Okay. So far I haven't seen this view addressed:
It's quite possible that AOL wants to make a thin client/small cheap desktop a la the nifty web-browser-based PC people are finding over at Fry's. AOL has a browser, already, remember? Just not the underlying code to run it on. They may have no plans to "fight Microsoft" (they need to go buy some office suite from Gobe or someone in order to do that), they may just want to embed something they can control into grandma's new set-top AOL box.
Even if they did do this in order to square off against Microsoft, why is everyone screaming that Linux will die as a result? Okay, admittedly Netscape is now even more grossy bloated and useless than before they got bought, but everyone is missing one important difference: Red Hat is not synonymous with Linux! Linux was around before Red Hat, and there are other commercial distros around (compare Suse market share in Europe to Red Hat). If anything, this will stop people being so Red-Hat centric. Besides, if Red Hat gets bought out, then I'll bet at least some of the open source programmers on staff will rake in some big bucks for staying, etc. Sounds like a great thing to point out to our kids... sometimes, the good geeks do win. =)
One more thing... I'm sorry, wasn't this what you wanted? If it wasn't AOL, you'd be happy. Unless, of course, it was Microsoft. =)
Does this give you ideas for other sources of revenue? Make everything literally free (to download) on the internet. With, maybe, a royalty on home-user (IE, non-business) bandwidth, with statistical sampling to determine how much of that royalty should go to which entertainment industries for mass-market entertainment. Maybe add in hard drives or cd blanks. Basically, make something similar to the Audio-CDR mechanism.
What a scary thought. This would make artists even more subject to patronage than they are under the current system. Remember, at least now you can come up with your own money and release what you want independently, and it may find a market. If business can effectively control the means of delivery, you won't be able to do that without cutting deals... and those deals will be excruciating for the little guy.
Of course I am being a bit extreme here; independent producers could find alternate methods of delivery. But still... look back to the roots of artistic patronage, when museums and "salons" were solely showcases for the baubles of the rich. Great things came out of counter-movements to that paradigm - but lots of good and important artists and ideas starved while it was still dominant. Or look more recently at MTV (since the whole recording industry is too byzantine to summarize here). When it first came out, it had a monopoly on playing music videos, and could directly control what millions of teens saw - and so not only commanded billions from advertisers, but also from record companies... not to mention asserting "creative control" in other ways as well. (Who do you think made the "a" in "alternative" a capital letter? The same people who now sell you pre-rumpled plaid shirts and jeans for more than "dress" clothes. ) Even now, the "discoveries" or "underground" bands that get airtime go through rigorous vetting and are brought in primarily for novelty and market share.
We must remain vigilant when new technologies get introduced, that there are no hidden strings attached. By the way, the best way to see that alternative and free technologies get chosen by the masses over what industry will offer them is to make it available to them in ways they can use - that means making your super-cool new codecs and software available for MS-Windows and Mac, not just for *nix and BSD, because otherwise, for most of them, it's still no choice at all.
If the government is going to hold copies of that, then I don't need to waste the disk space on my own. Let's get a modern FOIA together that will compel the government to give us personal access to the database info on/about us! Also, if they've got everyone else's stuff, as well, they should be able to offer me porn^N^N^N^N medical advice similar to that which I already make, um, use of.
"Hey, Bit, should I buy this?"
YESYESYESYES...
Man, I loved that movie when I was a kid. That, and Wargames, and D.A.R.Y.L. I was a perfect little nerd boy. Of course, if I could meet myself as a kid now, I'd sigh, ruffle my younger self's hair, and explain things like sports and friends and maybe even dating... (wait, I still haven't figured that one out, much less girls or boys)
I wanted a light cycle (though not quite so fast, a whatever-that-big-thing-was-that-got-chopped-away- from-beneath-Jeff-Bridges, and, most of all, my very own Bit. (Pretty sad, I thought it would be my friend)
Oh, yeah, Tron got me into learning ASCII and keyboard control codes, too, once I learned there was a code for [EOL](end of line).
In all seriousness, is it just because you wanted to see your name in lights, or is there some other reason?
It was because the story was new then, and I wanted to talk about it. Once It became clear that Slashdot didn't think it worthwhile to discuss, I put my ideas away. I only saw that the story finally got put in by someone else by accident, well after it had left the front page. By now, of course, the interest has ebbed.
I know this is going to seem like just more off-topic whining to most of you, but hear me out:
I've only submitted 3 stories in recent history, all have been rejected, but at least 2 were later accepted when others submitted them, with no substantial difference in comments. Here's my latest one:
2002-01-10 14:36:07 IPod under Windows (articles,music) (rejected)
In this submission, I pretty much stated exactly what was later said in the submission that was accepted, except that I speculated that Linux software couldn't be far behind, either.
Tell me, is the secret to submissions being accepted a matter of which editor reads them? If so, it looks like the right tactic would be to just keep resending rejected submissions back many times over a period of days, to make sure we hit all possible readers. If that's not the case, please explain why not.
What does this ugly, gangly design have that others don't? It offers greater mobility for swiveling your LCD screen since it's attached to that weird stalk instead of to the base just as most (far better looking) rumor site concept art had it.
Careful... you might give someone at Apple ideas. I mean, think about it. Every product they release now has a lot of leaking beforehand about specs, and concept art, etc... what would it take for them to just say, "hey, let's leak the specs and see what the users come up with..." The sites certainly won't admit that they totally made up the images (especially if their userbase and therefore advertising revenue gets boosted by "correct" hits), and having multiple designs coming from the user community couldn't hurt the process.
How do you calculate the damage?
You take a 1d10 roll per metric ton of impactor, and the resultant number is the number of square meters, in thousands, of surface land that is flattened/destroyed. If the impactor is above 1000 metric tons, you need a additional rolls to determine volume of matter thrown into the atmosphere, length of time before the matter settles back out, how far the matter spreads, and how much the Earth's albedo might change - but it starts getting complicated...
I can already imagine the comments that 14yo boys will be making to each other and to Fry's salespeople (15yos):
"Uhh, I want a woody. Gimme a woody! Heh-heh-heh. Hey Beavis, did that guy give you a woody?"In your vast wisdom, surely you know about the ability to not show stories that belong in categories you don't like. Even if you don't, you ought to know how to skim the front page and not read stuff that doesn't interest you.
Why, then, are you deliberately reading articles that you know you won't like, and then whining about them? You must either have some grudge against Slashdot, or just have nothing better to do with your life. No matter - the new system just came out, and now we won't have to see you whine any longer. Take your bellyaching to one of the IDG websites. You don't want us, and we sure don't want you.
Personally, I feel Nuon was an excuse to re-key the coding scheme of DVD, and get rid of the plain-text keys that people are exploiting in the current specification, but was otherwise an engineering feat looking for a problem to address. Shoving a Gamecube (which people want) into a DVD player satisfies the desires of people who want both, or who want one but are interested in the other. I know I'm trying to hold off on buying a Gamecube until this hybrid hits the US - most of what I use my Playstation 2 for is playing movies, and my justification for buying the hybrid is that it's a secondary DVD player for another room, that also plays a different format of game than what I already have.
The answer is pretty simple, actually. Adding console functionality to a DVD player (which already includes display conversion electronics and a drive unit, along with rudiments like power supply and case) is probably much cheaper than producing a whole console. Coupled with the fact that the console vendor (Sony, Nintendo, et al) might be enticed to partially subsidize the production (because the loss to them per unit would be less than for a full console), and the fact that consumers will be willing to pay somewhat more for a combination unit (which is probably priced much less than the DVD unit and the console would cost together if bought separately), it's probably a break-even or better situation.
Besides, even if they ended up losing 5% of their profit margin on the machine, but sold more units as a result, they'd still go for it. The DVD player market right now is crowded and commoditizing (products with similar features compete on price), so almost any differentiation is something to be sought, from a development and marketing standpoint.