I'd shudder to hand out 1-hour codes to customers. That makes the owner seem like a penny-pincher, and it destroys the casual atmosphere. If it's a slow Tuesday evening and a college kid wants to sit and nurse his one cup of coffee while surfing the web for a few hours, who cares? On the other hand, if it's crowded, I have no problem with the manager asking a couch potato to pack up and leave in favor of paying customers.
Human problems are best solved with human solutions, I'd say;-)
Actually, charging for the WiFi isn't a very good idea, because your clientele will relocate to another nearby coffee shop that does offer free wireless.
This is the perfect response. I just want to add that it's amusing to see people come up with technological solutions, when the problem is so clearly a human one. If someone has been sitting at a table for the last four hours after buying one cup of coffee, and the place is packed with people looking for seats, then ask him to relocate. He's not generating any revenue for your store, and he's driving away other customers. What an amazing thought, that a manager should actually manage the store!
People really can be shameless, and it's usually a sign of bad management when "customers" (I use the term loosely) are allowed to get away with that. Most competent managers would ask such a group to either buy the review books or leave.
89% of Americans own a car and the average cars per household is 2.28. We have a lot less need for mass transit.
His point, I believe, refers mainly to the lives of kids, who can't drive. It really sucks to be carless in a car-dependent culture. I think it's why mid-to-late teenage years are so stressful... the kids want to be out from under the parents' constant supervision, but lack the ability to transport themselves.
Re:imaged a waved Real Estate contract
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
I think Wave is the last step of solution that begins with "accepting electronic documents." For some reason traditional industries (like law and real estate) love the idea of signatures on paper, even when it makes no sense (protip: faxes are just physical copies of electronic documents!) Personally I'd love it if we could just use digital forms and digital signatures. I wouldn't even mind passing them around by email.
I apologize for my lack of imagination, but why would Slashdot discussions benefit from being Waves? It seems like D2 is a pretty decent comment/messageboard system (despite occasionally flaking out on me), and I don't see how all the added features of Wave would add anything desirable.
The basic idea, near as I can tell from 30 seconds of playing with it, is to create documents that can be edited simultaneously, in real time, by many people.
That's basically it. Sure, it adds some extra features, like being able to add and reply to comments within the document, that could give it more of a message-board feel, and you can quickly add multimedia and other features to your documents (like quick polls and the like). But fundamentally it's multiple people working on the same document simultaneously.
The thing is, that's actually kind of cool. But apparently some people didn't think that was cool enough, so they started going on about how it replaces email with socially networked instant messaging collaborative wiki forum web 2.0 open protocol servers, and all of a sudden no one has any clue what the hell it is or does.
I've often wondered why such print-on-demand kiosks haven't really taken off, because it seems like such an inherently desirable thing. But now I'm wondering if they just don't make business sense. You've got to buy an expensive machine and pay to keep it supplied and maintained. To make back the cost, you won't be able to rely on sales of popular bestsellers, because you'll already have copies of those on the shelves. At that point you're relying on the "long tail" of people's book-buying interests. While the long tail is probably more significant than retailers have traditionally assumed, I'd be very wary as a bookstore proprietor to invest tens of thousands of dollars in it. (Of course, I am not a bookstore proprietor, so I'm relying on mildly informed wild guesses to make this assessment.)
For the record, there was a time when I would have loved print-on-demand kiosks at airports, because the book selections at most airports royally suck, and I'm not usually foresighted enough to have brought reading material. But, then I got a Kindle, and the Kindle app for my phone and laptop, and now I'm not bothered by the lack of quality material at airport bookstores.
Although it's not the solution mentioned in the article, one possibility is to have two competing outsourcers produce the same block, then add comparison logic that verifies that each block is doing the same thing.
Of course, this more than doubles the chip area. Also, the checking logic could be very difficult or practically impossible depending on the complexity of the block.
Teaching is fundamentally a human activity. The best way to ensure quality teaching is to hire good teachers. A crappy teacher who keeps a class blog or uses videoconferencing is still a crappy teacher. A good teacher who stands in front of the class and engages the students using nothing more than chalk and a blackboard is still a good teacher.
Technology is all but irrelevant here, but it's trendy to propose it as a way to improve education because it skirts the real issue of hiring excellent teachers, and allows administrators to throw money at the problem in the form of tech budgets.
The music industry would have us believe they are the verge of bankruptcy, but that is simply not true. The record sales have gone down during the last decade, but that is more than offset by the increase in legally downloaded music and the increased revenues from collection agencies like ASCAP. As a whole, the music industry is making more money than ever
Care to share any evidence for that? I have never seen anyone else suggest that downloads have made up for the CD sales slump, and I don't think ASCAP bridges the gap either.
Fair enough. In my first reading of your original post I didn't gather that you were an enthusiast for the old hardware as well. For my part, I don't really care about the hardware; the software's the draw for me.
Of course, I usually prefer playing the original version of the software, as opposed to fan remakes or even new official releases. Those versions definitely fall under your "modern kit car" analogy. They may be nice enough, but they serve a different purpose.
I was playing Final Fantasy on an NES emulator the other day, and I had to smile when I went to an inn and the NPC reminded me to "Hold Reset while you turn Power off!" I still don't know what the hardware reason for that was, but suffice to say that I don't have to do it anymore!
Emulation is really the way to go here. In fact, in many cases it improves the experience. I remember that getting Ultima VII, Serpent Isle running on hardware at the time of its release was a nightmare of customized bootdisks. Once Windows 95 came along it was basically impossible to run the game anymore, without maintaining a separate DOS boot environment. With emulation I can be up and running in a couple minutes!
It's one thing to get a custom part made for a classic auto, but it's another thing to get a custom VLSI chip produced. Not to say that it couldn't be done, but you'd need some fairly dedicated enthusiasts with relatively deep pockets.
I had the inverse of your problem - I've got the physical CD for Diablo, but the CD key is nowhere to be found. Was it in the original box or manual? Maybe it's at my parents' house (if it wasn't thrown out years ago)?
I used a CD key from a list I found on the net. I don't think it's fair to have to buy the game again because I lost a stupid piece of paper. DRM sucks:-(.
Actually, my last Ubuntu install (in December) pleasantly surprised me: it picked up all the drivers immediately, except for a USB wireless adapter, which I was able to get working with a quick Google search. Contrast Windows 7, which didn't have a driver available, so I was SOL on that component. Last time I tried a Linux was 2005, I think, and trying to get the wireless going involved a descent into ndiswrapper hell from which I never recovered. Of course, these were two different machines, and two different distros, so who knows what was really going on, but I did feel that Linux has progressed in the intervening years.
Of course, it's an academic question for me, because after my wireless debacle of years ago I realized I could throw money at my problems and buy a Mac to get Unix in a shiny box:-).
In my opinion CPU model numbers are a paragon of sanity compared to GPU numbers.
With intel Core iX branded CPUs, the model number looks something like iX-NNN. You can ignore the X pretty much entirely. From there, increasing NNNs indicate generally increasing performance and "features" (hyperthreading, turbo boost, cores). At that point, it's pretty much just picking a budget and buying the most expensive thing within that price range (I promise I'm not getting a kickback from Intel for saying that:-D). Right now it looks like the 875K is the most powerful CPU you can get before prices go insane
With GPUs... well, let's look at the Radeon series. 4xxx vs. 5xxx indicates DX 10 vs. 11, so I guess I can deal with that. The xxx basically indicates performance within a generation, but to compare between generations you basically have to go look at benchmarks.
Of course, if you just want to play games, pretty much any current-gen CPU will do pretty darn well. If you actually care about the tech, then the research is fun. And if your job depends on the research, then it's probably worth doing;-)
These are pretty reasonable questions, but I've seen them answered before. I'll take a crack at them here:
1. Yes, there is a definite positive correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures. Using ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc., this has been confirmed. But the fly in the ointment is that the CO2 levels *lag* the temperature changes by 40 to 50 years. Excuse me? The "cause" of the global warming happens "after" things warm up? That little datum all by its lonesome is rather hard to dispute.
CO2 has lagged global temperature changes in the past, but that doesn't mean it can't lead in the future. The geologic record has no precedent for the rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 we've seen since the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, the magnitude of previous warnings can only be explained by the CO2 rise: it didn't start the fire, but it kept it burning.
2. The major greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn't CO2. It's H2O. Yup, plain old water. The effect of the CO2 is about 1 percent of the overall greenhouse effect. And of that 1%, mankind is contributing a much smaller percentage.
Water is a significant greenhouse gas, but it precipitates out of the atmosphere so readily that it's not as concerning as CO2, which can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Also, 1% is a very low figure for the total heat absorbed by CO2. I think it's more in the 15% neighborhood (but I'm only lightly fact-checking myself here, so please correct if I'm wrong). The larger issue is that global warming is a 1% type of problem. That extra percent can cause significant climactic changes, even if it appears numerically small.
3. There seems to be some viking farms being uncovered in Greenland. Yup, the glaciers are melting and in the process exposing abandoned farms. Hmm. Seems to me that if there were farms where there's currently glaciers, that would imply it being much warmer in the past.
We do know that some regions have been warmer in the past, so it's entirely plausible that it was warm enough to farm there. It may have been a localized phenomenon, also. The issue with the current climate is that we're currently looking at a very rapid temperature increase, with few brakes in sight and possible feedback loops. We probably don't want to race past "farms in Greenland" and into hot water.
4. And finally, the polar ice on Mars seems to be also shrinking. Guess those probes we've sent there have had a massive effect on Mar's temperature as well.
Nobody (sane) ever claimed that there was only one variable affecting climate, so Mars could very well be warming for reasons totally different from ours. Climate models don't show that solar effects could account for all Earth's recent warming, AFAIK.
The bottom line is that we understand most of the major climate forcings, including CO2, and can model climate with enough accuracy to say that the globe is increasingly, if gradually, warming, and will continue to do so if we continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There are climate fluctuations in the record, but they're useful more in calibrating the models and understanding climate as a whole, because CO2 release on a modern scale simply has not happened before.
Seems to me that the global warming crowd have a bit of a secondary agenda running that has nothing what so ever to do with actual global warming.
I don't have an agenda other than that people attempt to understand and accept what's happening, physically, when deciding on an appropriate political response. Personally, I'd like to see more efforts on deploying concentrated solar power, photovoltaics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles.
Ah, gotcha. I agree, there is some sense to that. Boosting the extremely low rural access speeds, even if that's a minority of the population, could be quite beneficial to the average. I still think the high-end needs work though; I hear of much higher speeds in other countries (a poster above mentioned 100 Mbps in Scotland) than anything I can get here.
I understand the population density argument, but there are problems with it. Sweden, for example, has a lower population density than the US, but higher average speeds. Now, perhaps in Sweden everyone lives in a small metro area and there is a lot of land that is completely vacant. But, the US is quite similar. There's no reason to provide fast access to the vacant areas, because they're vacant. The one dude living in a shack in the middle of the Mojave desert is not really driving down the US average national broadband speed. By contrast, folks in dense metro areas in the US should be able to get speeds comparable to dense, urban nations. That doesn't seem to be happening, or at least there is much less high-end than what I hear of other nations.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd shudder to hand out 1-hour codes to customers. That makes the owner seem like a penny-pincher, and it destroys the casual atmosphere. If it's a slow Tuesday evening and a college kid wants to sit and nurse his one cup of coffee while surfing the web for a few hours, who cares? On the other hand, if it's crowded, I have no problem with the manager asking a couch potato to pack up and leave in favor of paying customers.
Human problems are best solved with human solutions, I'd say ;-)
Actually, charging for the WiFi isn't a very good idea, because your clientele will relocate to another nearby coffee shop that does offer free wireless.
This is the perfect response. I just want to add that it's amusing to see people come up with technological solutions, when the problem is so clearly a human one. If someone has been sitting at a table for the last four hours after buying one cup of coffee, and the place is packed with people looking for seats, then ask him to relocate. He's not generating any revenue for your store, and he's driving away other customers. What an amazing thought, that a manager should actually manage the store!
People really can be shameless, and it's usually a sign of bad management when "customers" (I use the term loosely) are allowed to get away with that. Most competent managers would ask such a group to either buy the review books or leave.
89% of Americans own a car and the average cars per household is 2.28. We have a lot less need for mass transit.
His point, I believe, refers mainly to the lives of kids, who can't drive. It really sucks to be carless in a car-dependent culture. I think it's why mid-to-late teenage years are so stressful... the kids want to be out from under the parents' constant supervision, but lack the ability to transport themselves.
I think Wave is the last step of solution that begins with "accepting electronic documents." For some reason traditional industries (like law and real estate) love the idea of signatures on paper, even when it makes no sense (protip: faxes are just physical copies of electronic documents!) Personally I'd love it if we could just use digital forms and digital signatures. I wouldn't even mind passing them around by email.
I apologize for my lack of imagination, but why would Slashdot discussions benefit from being Waves? It seems like D2 is a pretty decent comment/messageboard system (despite occasionally flaking out on me), and I don't see how all the added features of Wave would add anything desirable.
I totally agree with you.
The basic idea, near as I can tell from 30 seconds of playing with it, is to create documents that can be edited simultaneously, in real time, by many people.
That's basically it. Sure, it adds some extra features, like being able to add and reply to comments within the document, that could give it more of a message-board feel, and you can quickly add multimedia and other features to your documents (like quick polls and the like). But fundamentally it's multiple people working on the same document simultaneously.
The thing is, that's actually kind of cool. But apparently some people didn't think that was cool enough, so they started going on about how it replaces email with socially networked instant messaging collaborative wiki forum web 2.0 open protocol servers, and all of a sudden no one has any clue what the hell it is or does.
I've often wondered why such print-on-demand kiosks haven't really taken off, because it seems like such an inherently desirable thing. But now I'm wondering if they just don't make business sense. You've got to buy an expensive machine and pay to keep it supplied and maintained. To make back the cost, you won't be able to rely on sales of popular bestsellers, because you'll already have copies of those on the shelves. At that point you're relying on the "long tail" of people's book-buying interests. While the long tail is probably more significant than retailers have traditionally assumed, I'd be very wary as a bookstore proprietor to invest tens of thousands of dollars in it. (Of course, I am not a bookstore proprietor, so I'm relying on mildly informed wild guesses to make this assessment.)
For the record, there was a time when I would have loved print-on-demand kiosks at airports, because the book selections at most airports royally suck, and I'm not usually foresighted enough to have brought reading material. But, then I got a Kindle, and the Kindle app for my phone and laptop, and now I'm not bothered by the lack of quality material at airport bookstores.
Although it's not the solution mentioned in the article, one possibility is to have two competing outsourcers produce the same block, then add comparison logic that verifies that each block is doing the same thing.
Of course, this more than doubles the chip area. Also, the checking logic could be very difficult or practically impossible depending on the complexity of the block.
We can help, but I suspect your thesis will end up three parts troll and flamebait to one part insightful!
Teaching is fundamentally a human activity. The best way to ensure quality teaching is to hire good teachers. A crappy teacher who keeps a class blog or uses videoconferencing is still a crappy teacher. A good teacher who stands in front of the class and engages the students using nothing more than chalk and a blackboard is still a good teacher.
Technology is all but irrelevant here, but it's trendy to propose it as a way to improve education because it skirts the real issue of hiring excellent teachers, and allows administrators to throw money at the problem in the form of tech budgets.
The music industry would have us believe they are the verge of bankruptcy, but that is simply not true. The record sales have gone down during the last decade, but that is more than offset by the increase in legally downloaded music and the increased revenues from collection agencies like ASCAP. As a whole, the music industry is making more money than ever
Care to share any evidence for that? I have never seen anyone else suggest that downloads have made up for the CD sales slump, and I don't think ASCAP bridges the gap either.
Fair enough. In my first reading of your original post I didn't gather that you were an enthusiast for the old hardware as well. For my part, I don't really care about the hardware; the software's the draw for me.
Of course, I usually prefer playing the original version of the software, as opposed to fan remakes or even new official releases. Those versions definitely fall under your "modern kit car" analogy. They may be nice enough, but they serve a different purpose.
I was playing Final Fantasy on an NES emulator the other day, and I had to smile when I went to an inn and the NPC reminded me to "Hold Reset while you turn Power off!" I still don't know what the hardware reason for that was, but suffice to say that I don't have to do it anymore!
Emulation is really the way to go here. In fact, in many cases it improves the experience. I remember that getting Ultima VII, Serpent Isle running on hardware at the time of its release was a nightmare of customized bootdisks. Once Windows 95 came along it was basically impossible to run the game anymore, without maintaining a separate DOS boot environment. With emulation I can be up and running in a couple minutes!
If only we had a way to preserve "Ask Slashdot" topics for the benefit of future posters!
It's one thing to get a custom part made for a classic auto, but it's another thing to get a custom VLSI chip produced. Not to say that it couldn't be done, but you'd need some fairly dedicated enthusiasts with relatively deep pockets.
I had the inverse of your problem - I've got the physical CD for Diablo, but the CD key is nowhere to be found. Was it in the original box or manual? Maybe it's at my parents' house (if it wasn't thrown out years ago)?
I used a CD key from a list I found on the net. I don't think it's fair to have to buy the game again because I lost a stupid piece of paper. DRM sucks :-(.
Good catch. In case anyone's curious, about 750 W/m^2 reach the Earth's surface on a clear day.
Actually, my last Ubuntu install (in December) pleasantly surprised me: it picked up all the drivers immediately, except for a USB wireless adapter, which I was able to get working with a quick Google search. Contrast Windows 7, which didn't have a driver available, so I was SOL on that component. Last time I tried a Linux was 2005, I think, and trying to get the wireless going involved a descent into ndiswrapper hell from which I never recovered. Of course, these were two different machines, and two different distros, so who knows what was really going on, but I did feel that Linux has progressed in the intervening years.
Of course, it's an academic question for me, because after my wireless debacle of years ago I realized I could throw money at my problems and buy a Mac to get Unix in a shiny box :-).
In my opinion CPU model numbers are a paragon of sanity compared to GPU numbers.
With intel Core iX branded CPUs, the model number looks something like iX-NNN. You can ignore the X pretty much entirely. From there, increasing NNNs indicate generally increasing performance and "features" (hyperthreading, turbo boost, cores). At that point, it's pretty much just picking a budget and buying the most expensive thing within that price range (I promise I'm not getting a kickback from Intel for saying that :-D). Right now it looks like the 875K is the most powerful CPU you can get before prices go insane
With GPUs... well, let's look at the Radeon series. 4xxx vs. 5xxx indicates DX 10 vs. 11, so I guess I can deal with that. The xxx basically indicates performance within a generation, but to compare between generations you basically have to go look at benchmarks.
Of course, if you just want to play games, pretty much any current-gen CPU will do pretty darn well. If you actually care about the tech, then the research is fun. And if your job depends on the research, then it's probably worth doing ;-)
These are pretty reasonable questions, but I've seen them answered before. I'll take a crack at them here:
1. Yes, there is a definite positive correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures. Using ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc., this has been confirmed. But the fly in the ointment is that the CO2 levels *lag* the temperature changes by 40 to 50 years. Excuse me? The "cause" of the global warming happens "after" things warm up? That little datum all by its lonesome is rather hard to dispute.
CO2 has lagged global temperature changes in the past, but that doesn't mean it can't lead in the future. The geologic record has no precedent for the rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 we've seen since the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, the magnitude of previous warnings can only be explained by the CO2 rise: it didn't start the fire, but it kept it burning.
2. The major greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn't CO2. It's H2O. Yup, plain old water. The effect of the CO2 is about 1 percent of the overall greenhouse effect. And of that 1%, mankind is contributing a much smaller percentage.
Water is a significant greenhouse gas, but it precipitates out of the atmosphere so readily that it's not as concerning as CO2, which can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Also, 1% is a very low figure for the total heat absorbed by CO2. I think it's more in the 15% neighborhood (but I'm only lightly fact-checking myself here, so please correct if I'm wrong). The larger issue is that global warming is a 1% type of problem. That extra percent can cause significant climactic changes, even if it appears numerically small.
3. There seems to be some viking farms being uncovered in Greenland. Yup, the glaciers are melting and in the process exposing abandoned farms. Hmm. Seems to me that if there were farms where there's currently glaciers, that would imply it being much warmer in the past.
We do know that some regions have been warmer in the past, so it's entirely plausible that it was warm enough to farm there. It may have been a localized phenomenon, also. The issue with the current climate is that we're currently looking at a very rapid temperature increase, with few brakes in sight and possible feedback loops. We probably don't want to race past "farms in Greenland" and into hot water.
4. And finally, the polar ice on Mars seems to be also shrinking. Guess those probes we've sent there have had a massive effect on Mar's temperature as well.
Nobody (sane) ever claimed that there was only one variable affecting climate, so Mars could very well be warming for reasons totally different from ours. Climate models don't show that solar effects could account for all Earth's recent warming, AFAIK.
The bottom line is that we understand most of the major climate forcings, including CO2, and can model climate with enough accuracy to say that the globe is increasingly, if gradually, warming, and will continue to do so if we continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There are climate fluctuations in the record, but they're useful more in calibrating the models and understanding climate as a whole, because CO2 release on a modern scale simply has not happened before.
Seems to me that the global warming crowd have a bit of a secondary agenda running that has nothing what so ever to do with actual global warming.
I don't have an agenda other than that people attempt to understand and accept what's happening, physically, when deciding on an appropriate political response. Personally, I'd like to see more efforts on deploying concentrated solar power, photovoltaics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles.
Ah, gotcha. I agree, there is some sense to that. Boosting the extremely low rural access speeds, even if that's a minority of the population, could be quite beneficial to the average. I still think the high-end needs work though; I hear of much higher speeds in other countries (a poster above mentioned 100 Mbps in Scotland) than anything I can get here.
I understand the population density argument, but there are problems with it. Sweden, for example, has a lower population density than the US, but higher average speeds. Now, perhaps in Sweden everyone lives in a small metro area and there is a lot of land that is completely vacant. But, the US is quite similar. There's no reason to provide fast access to the vacant areas, because they're vacant. The one dude living in a shack in the middle of the Mojave desert is not really driving down the US average national broadband speed. By contrast, folks in dense metro areas in the US should be able to get speeds comparable to dense, urban nations. That doesn't seem to be happening, or at least there is much less high-end than what I hear of other nations.