People tend to talk louder on cell phones than regular phones. There is no feedback of their own voice.
I find there is feedback, but it's about one second later.:S I think the main reason *I* talk louder on a cell phone is to try and make up for dropouts and crappy connections. It's sad that cell phone companies are focusing upon packing more calls into the same bandwidth, and making more money on trivial features, than truly increasing the quality of the service. I only keep one for emergencies now, it's too painful to use in daily business.
I like the concept, but I have a few problems with it.
First of all, why Apple? I love Apple, and I love the iPod, but in many ways, it's a prestige brand, not something that is warranted for a utilitarian purpose such as this. You can easily find as capable and reliable MP3 players for less than half the price of an equivalent iPod. The "wow" factor and ease of integration with iTunes, are both major features of the iPod, and both totally irrelevant to the educational purposes talked about here.
Also, learning is a very visual medium. Unless we're talking about the super expensive video iPods, then the use will be limited to audio and minimal simplistic document reading. (There are other, cheaper devices that do video and documents better/cheaper than a non-video iPod.) Are most textbooks available/suitable/useful for viewing on a 1 inch screen? Wouldn't that involve buying digital copies of all the relevant texts, and additional and unnecessary cost?
Plus, it will disguise music use; "what are you doing, Jimmy?" "Listening to a lecture, ma'am." Meanwhile he's listening to tunes. Like it or not, school kids do need some structure and supervision; this makes it too easy to goof off.
It sounds like someone's trying to seem progressive, and is very misguided.
I love having a second monitor. Especially on my MacBook, it works soooo much better than on Windows, plus you can easily rotate 90 degrees to have one of your monitors in portrait mode (good for viewing pdf documents, etc.) (Some windows drivers have this, but not most.)
However, the reasons for the productivity are *somewhat* arbitrary, and *should* be able to be achieved without separate hardware. Yes, increasing overall screen real estate certainly doesn't hurt, but it's the forced modality into two separate workspaces that is the real win. There's no reason that window managers couldn't chunk up my workspace (on a single big monitor) into two (or more) logical desktops, so when I maximize, or whatever, it does so within the context of the workspace, not the entire screen.
So when you have multiple monitors, the window managers or OS is forced to be designed around separate work spaces. But the same thing *should* be achievable with one high rez display. It's really quite a shame.
In any case, the two monitor/workspace thing really works well. Having one screen for core work, and one for reference documents, email, MSN, or testing your running application (with your debugger on the other screen), really is a productivity boost.
One thing that constantly amazes me in today's increasing tech world, is that people will still tolerate carpet in the slightest. It is like a magnet and trap for dirt and parasites and odor. A hardwood floor is so much more hygenic, hypoallergenic, and easy to clean. If you think hardwood floors are expensive or cold, there have been great advances in the past ten years. Laminate hardwood flooring is great looking, cheap, and easy to install (click together floating floors, with minimal cutting; anyone who can use a saw can pretty much install ones). If you like the look/feel of ceramic tile, you can get them to look like this, too. There are new cheap (and safety approved) in-floor heating options for use with laminate floors, as well, for a very cosy heating option. And an area rug over a hardwood floor provides added comfort, and an easier to clean/replace option.
Yes, laminate hardwood isn't quite as classy as real hardwood, but it's darn close, and it's cheap, easy to install, and tough as nails (well, tougher, really).
I see carpets as something that will seem dusgusting, ancient, and obselete within a few years. It's interesting to see technology to take care of them advancing, when there are so many better options.
I use DD-Wrt, and am very impressed with how solid, stable, flexible, and easy-to-use it is.
Some examples of its versatility:
When I first moved into my new house, I had no internet, so I shared my neighbors; in this case, I configured it as a repeated for the same wireless network. It invisibly acted as another node/booster for this network for my house, working beautifully and seamleslsy.
When I finally did get internet, the telco's router had built-in wireless, so I didn't need my Linksys/DD-Wrt box for the local gateway. I started using it in "client mode", as a handy "wireless card" for ethernet enabled items. I hook it up to my gamecube's Broadband Adapter to get it wirelessy on the network. Most of the time, I use it as a wireless gateway for my network printer. I'm finding it incredibly useful as a wireless enabler for anything with ethernet.
and then RTFA, the guy in this case is half paralyzed, do you think he is spending a lot of time sitting at his computer downloading Christina Aguilera or something?
Ummmmm, the guy is housebound? Do you think he'd do more playing, downloading, etc, on the computer, or less, than the person who has a full time job, kids, goes to the gym, etc., etc.? Of course he probably uses the computer more, as a great outlet considering his disability.
And while I disagree with current fair use policies, and movie pricing schemes, etc., I don't see any reason why a disability should be an exemption from any of the rules of society (other than parking in handicapped spaces).
Yes, there is an instinctive "let's show some compassion and cut this poor bugger some slack" reaction, but until something like that is actually written into a law, one can't fault any organization (who likely wasn't even aware of his problem) for treating him as shittily as they treat the rest of the population. The fact they treat the rest of the population so shitty, is the problem.
I've said it before, I've said it again; I bought my first Mac(book) recently, and the thing that pushed me over the edge to do so was the fact I knew I could fall back to Windows when I needed to, or completely stay in Windows if the OS X experience wasn't a good one. But like most people who try it, that "security blanket" of Boot Camp is more of an insurance policy, or peace of mind (or gaming option), rather than something they end up using in real life. I have my MS Office and OpenOffice, Opera/Firefox/Safari, and even IE under Crossover Office or Parallels. (I tend to use Parallels for IE testing purposes of my websites).
The only reason I reboot to windows now, is for the odd game; and even that's rare with me. Windows seems so much peppier, too, when I do go to it; since I only go there occasionally, the system doesn't get bogged down with addons, startup items, spyware, etc.. (The old reinstall-windows-every-six-months can be extended greatly, if you only use Windows occasionally.)
I think for a multimedia course that needs to teach students both Mac and PC skills, it makes all the more sense; both OS's on one machine: of course it's an overall savings, and somewhat of a no-brainer.
Yes, Mac hardware is single-vendor (unless you do the hackbook thing, not viable for a commercial enterprise); but in my experience, it's well designed, solid, stable, fast hardware. My only lament is that I'm a big fan of sub-nootbooks, like Librettos, and Apple has no such option currently. But I can live without that, for all the other benefits that OS X brings.
Yes, I'm a recent fan, and I am a boy, so fling away with your "fanboy" insults. Meanwhile, I'm productive and enjoying the experience immensely:)
If this becomes popular, then torrents and such could simply be encrypted for download (even on a per-download basis, to avoid spotting known encrypted versions).
The battle is hopeless for MPAA/RIAA/etc.. As long as light is being sent to our eyeballs, there will be someway to capture it, and share it. Make the prices reasonable, allow good fair use on any media for legitimate purchases, and you'll be surprised at how much money you'll make.
Movies and such are mass market commodities, just like bread or milk. Yes, I could buy a cow for milk, or make bread by hand, and "stick it to the man"; but it is actually *more* expensive, and *less* convenient to do so, when I can just pick them up for a buck or two each. Why would I bother rolling my own. (Well, I actually do make my own breads, but it's not for financial benefit, but other reasons, such as the joy of cooking, enjoying the freshness, etc.)
If people could get any movie they wanted for a buck or two in their home (not $7.95 for a single view), they wouldn't bother downloading; and if 10x or 15x or 100x as many people do it because the price is great, guess what? The sellers make *more* money than trying to restrict its use.
While I agree this is slightly interesting, it's not terribly useful, since it's likely that a mandatory auto-update will plug this hole soon. And without updates, the first of the many-to-be-found-exploits in all the new Vista code, will leave you vulnerable. It's rather ironic (and convenient for MS) that Windows' shoddy security, and the associate desperate need for updates, gives them a lot of control of forcing updates on you to plug activation and genuine advantage holes and such.
Thankfully for XP (which is where I level off anyway, why bother with Vista), there's Autopatcher and similar sites, which allow a *far* more convenient way of getting and applying patches than MS update. Don't know if there is anything similar for Vista, or if it's possible or will be permitted to continue by MS.
What height exaggeration were the flyovers done with? NASA has a long history of doing planetary animations that make things look way taller than they actually are, apparently in an attempt to make the animations appeal more to the public. Are these flyovers similarly exaggerated? If so, I'm not interested.
You see the same thing with stereoscopic aerial photographs of earth. I believe that around here (Nova Scotia), when you view the Department of Natural Resources photos in stereo, you get something like a 10-to-1 exaggeration of height. It's not a marketing thing to "appeal more to the public", but allows one to actually notice height differences. If it weren't for the exaggeration, we wouldn't be able to perceive any height differences. The world really is amazingly flat (consider the view from space, it looks like a perfect sphere). Without some exaggeration, perhaps NASA videos wouldn't be "less marketable", but just completely unremarkable (who wants to look at nothing but seemingly flat surfaces).
(In the case of aerial photographs, the exaggeration is simply an artifact of the spacing of the photos and the spacing of the human eyes; it's not some major plot to deceive. But the exaggeration is actually useful for people doing work in the field.)
This is actually quite an interesting concept. If memory serves, the typical cable modem, uses the bandwidth within the allocation of a single cable channel (video has quite a high bandwidth demand). So utilizing the over-the-air equivalent for local connections makes an awful lot of sense (adding an extra channel or two for redundancy and error correction, due to the increased noise of radio).
I used Direcway satellite for a couple of years, and it was good, but pricey and high latency, due to the trip to the satellite and back for every packet (and I was on two-way, doubling the fun). With local over-the-air broadcast, latency wouldn't be an issue. (I would imagine, dialup-return would be the norm; not a big bottleneck for the typical web-surfing/email-fetching individual.) I think this would be far preferrable to satellite for those out of range of cable, and hopefully more modest in pricing than satellite.
According to CNN.com, a gas price bump is expected now because people are expected to drive more with the expanded daylight hours.
So wait, Washington passed a law to change DST early...the early DST change is now being used to justify gas price increases? Coincidence? Happenstance?
Wow, it's a good thing that the president and other people of power in the US have no personal stake in oil companies and interests. That would be quite a scary conflict of interest. Whew!
I find WikiPedia's search not as good as google (fixing typo's and such), so I tend to do most of my searches with google, adding "wiki" as a keyword, and the relevant wiki articles typically shows up as the first matches. Works well.
The country would be in much better shape if we had more business people in politics and less politicians who are, by and large, mostly lawyers and career politicians.
While I agree with this in general, I think the blood-thirstiness and ruthlessness of Gates would scare the hell out of me as a president. (Not that Bush doesn't scare the hell out of me, too.) But I'd sooner a businessman than an oil cowboy, any day.
You guys did have your chance with Perot; watching that election fiasco of yours from Canada, it was truly sad how the media seemed to be partisan to the other parties, totally dismissing Perot. When he was eliminated from the race (and the manner in which it occurred), that was the point in which I totally lost faith in the US people and their government. And boy, it only got a lot worse since then. Good luck with that.
Text? Luxury! We had to convert it to hex in our heads and enter it on paper tape.
Offtopic, but it reminds me of one of my first coding jobs. Most young'un's today don't believe it, but it was programming Z-80 *machine* language by hand, on an APL interpreter that was about 32K in size. Using an assembler was way too much overhead, and slowed us down too much. If we wanted to compare the 'A' register against the value 128, well that was "FE 80" (it's sad that these codes are still in my head, 20 years later). If the edits we were making to a chunk of code were bigger than the old one, we had to find space, which often involved moving a chunk of code to an unused block, searching for all calls to that routine and manually changing the call to them. It actually worked surprisingly well.
Although ironically, I still look back upon that was simple times.
I used a Sony Vaio Picturebook subnotebook for years, and loved it. Prior to that, was the old Toshiba Libretto. Now, I use the newer Libretto. I bought a laptop for portability, dammit. I take my notebook with me everywhere, in my small camerabag, and get a lot more use out of it because of the size. I find most laptops are portable desktop/media centers these days. If I want a big screen and keyboard, I plug my libretto into an external monitor, no problem. It's the best of both worlds.
I've recently switched to a MacBook for OS X (and loving it); but I wish there were a subnotebook option from Apple. One of the disadvantages of one-vendor-selling-the-hardware for OS X.
Research has shown that regardless of the speed limit, almost all motorists will drive roughly the same speed on the same road, indicating that most people have common sense and will find a "max safe" speed that they're comfortable with. Some people will speed, some will go far slower.
Unfortunately, the "max safe" speed that some people are comfortable with, isn't necessarily the speed at which they are *safe*. You might be a perfectly competent driver, and stay within your means. There are an *awful* lot of people out there that are feeling comfortable with their driving speeds, but are a danger to themselves and everyone on the road. So an "artificially low" flat limit is required to try and rein such people in.
I really believe that if the powers that be started enforcing reckless driving statutes - ticketing people for weaving in and out of traffic, not using signals, etc -
I notice one of the wreckless driving things you do not mention (possibly by innocent omission), is tailgating. I find most drivers that claim they are perfectly safe, and bitch about the low speed limits, tend to be the worst tailgaters around. And that is one of the most dangerous things on the road.
My response to tailgaters is to simply slow down: not out of spite, but to leave more room between me and the can in front of me. If a kid dashes out on the road and the person in front of me slams on the brakes, I'm going to slow down far more gradually to keep the asshole behind me from hitting me. (There's a reason why it's pretty much universal that if you're behind someone and you hit them, it's *your* fault. There's *always* opportunity to give yourself enough room to stop and not hit the car in front of you. If you choose not to give yourself that room, that's your problem; well, unless you happen to kill the kids in the car in front of you in an accident.)
Bought an MacBook just before Vista Came out. I really love studying the various aspects of UI's that make my life easier or harder; and OS X generally does nothing but make my life easier. I'm also a Unix/Linux developer, and OS X is perfect for me; develop in my console, with a great UI kicking around for the Web browsing and other GUI stuff. I tried out Vista (ever so briefly), and my impression was that it was big, cute, a bit confusing, and didn't really seem to offer me anything that XP did. (I keep a licensed copy of XP in a Paralllels virtual window, for compatability testing, and in case I need to run a Windows-specific app [hasn't happened yet].)
If you're teetering on the edge, check out the Mac's. Just do it. If you don't like OS X, you can still run XP/Vista on them. That's one of the justifications I used to convinced myself to jump. But believe me, the number of people who *will* primarily run XP/Vista on Mac hardware can probably be counted on one hand (even though apple hardware has been found to be the fastest Windows platform). OS X really *is* just that much better.
And this is with the "previous" (well, current) release of OS X; Leopard will only make that moreso.
I've started up two companies in the past. The next one I start up, I will provision primarily with Apple OS X Machines. So little downtime, no reinstallations, no viruses, very productive, quality hardware, and Unix under the hood for the type of development we do. No longer will there need to be a distinction between Marketing and Development's hardware. My Unix developers have portable workstations, while having a great desktop, and all the necessary productivity apps. Plus a cheap copy of Parallels desktop and an XP License for anyone who needs to do compatability testing or run specific Windows apps.
It'd be worth the slight premium (although even the premium is arguable, given the quality and features of the gear you get).
It would also be good for morale; people get excited about a shiny new OS/X machine with a slick UI, rather than yet-another-PC with endless Windows configuration ahead of them.
Another interesting point about the Trieste. It was designed by Auguste Piccard and piloted by his son, Jacques Piccard. Auguste had a brother that was a balloonist, Jean Piccard.
I was wondering if Roddenberry named Jean-Luc Picard after these Hydronaut (love that term) pioneers. It turns out, that "Gene Roddenberry most likely named Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation for one or both of the twin brothers Auguste Piccard and Jean Felix Piccard, and derived Jean-Luc Picard from their names."
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People tend to talk louder on cell phones than regular phones. There is no feedback of their own voice.
I find there is feedback, but it's about one second later. :S I think the main reason *I* talk louder on a cell phone is to try and make up for dropouts and crappy connections. It's sad that cell phone companies are focusing upon packing more calls into the same bandwidth, and making more money on trivial features, than truly increasing the quality of the service. I only keep one for emergencies now, it's too painful to use in daily business.
Okay, Captain Acronym, I'll bite:
mini is still at CD, not C2D.
CD? Compact Disk? Consumer Device? What the hell is C2D then. Hmmmm. Ohhhhhh, core 2 duo versus core duo. Got it. Almost had me there.
iMacs haven't been updated in over 200 days. macbook and MBP in 150.
Hmmm, MBP; MacBook Pro. Ha! That was an easy one!
And sorry, I don't count an additional option for 8-core on the Mac Pro a rev as much as it's another BTO option.
Damn, you got me there. BTO? Bacon, Tomato, ummmm. Big Turn Off? Nope, that one was just too subtle for me. Anyone? Anyone?
I like the concept, but I have a few problems with it.
First of all, why Apple? I love Apple, and I love the iPod, but in many ways, it's a prestige brand, not something that is warranted for a utilitarian purpose such as this. You can easily find as capable and reliable MP3 players for less than half the price of an equivalent iPod. The "wow" factor and ease of integration with iTunes, are both major features of the iPod, and both totally irrelevant to the educational purposes talked about here.
Also, learning is a very visual medium. Unless we're talking about the super expensive video iPods, then the use will be limited to audio and minimal simplistic document reading. (There are other, cheaper devices that do video and documents better/cheaper than a non-video iPod.) Are most textbooks available/suitable/useful for viewing on a 1 inch screen? Wouldn't that involve buying digital copies of all the relevant texts, and additional and unnecessary cost?
Plus, it will disguise music use; "what are you doing, Jimmy?" "Listening to a lecture, ma'am." Meanwhile he's listening to tunes. Like it or not, school kids do need some structure and supervision; this makes it too easy to goof off.
It sounds like someone's trying to seem progressive, and is very misguided.
I love having a second monitor. Especially on my MacBook, it works soooo much better than on Windows, plus you can easily rotate 90 degrees to have one of your monitors in portrait mode (good for viewing pdf documents, etc.) (Some windows drivers have this, but not most.)
However, the reasons for the productivity are *somewhat* arbitrary, and *should* be able to be achieved without separate hardware. Yes, increasing overall screen real estate certainly doesn't hurt, but it's the forced modality into two separate workspaces that is the real win. There's no reason that window managers couldn't chunk up my workspace (on a single big monitor) into two (or more) logical desktops, so when I maximize, or whatever, it does so within the context of the workspace, not the entire screen.
So when you have multiple monitors, the window managers or OS is forced to be designed around separate work spaces. But the same thing *should* be achievable with one high rez display. It's really quite a shame.
In any case, the two monitor/workspace thing really works well. Having one screen for core work, and one for reference documents, email, MSN, or testing your running application (with your debugger on the other screen), really is a productivity boost.
One thing that constantly amazes me in today's increasing tech world, is that people will still tolerate carpet in the slightest. It is like a magnet and trap for dirt and parasites and odor. A hardwood floor is so much more hygenic, hypoallergenic, and easy to clean. If you think hardwood floors are expensive or cold, there have been great advances in the past ten years. Laminate hardwood flooring is great looking, cheap, and easy to install (click together floating floors, with minimal cutting; anyone who can use a saw can pretty much install ones). If you like the look/feel of ceramic tile, you can get them to look like this, too. There are new cheap (and safety approved) in-floor heating options for use with laminate floors, as well, for a very cosy heating option. And an area rug over a hardwood floor provides added comfort, and an easier to clean/replace option.
Yes, laminate hardwood isn't quite as classy as real hardwood, but it's darn close, and it's cheap, easy to install, and tough as nails (well, tougher, really).
I see carpets as something that will seem dusgusting, ancient, and obselete within a few years. It's interesting to see technology to take care of them advancing, when there are so many better options.
I use DD-Wrt, and am very impressed with how solid, stable, flexible, and easy-to-use it is.
Some examples of its versatility:
When I first moved into my new house, I had no internet, so I shared my neighbors; in this case, I configured it as a repeated for the same wireless network. It invisibly acted as another node/booster for this network for my house, working beautifully and seamleslsy.
When I finally did get internet, the telco's router had built-in wireless, so I didn't need my Linksys/DD-Wrt box for the local gateway. I started using it in "client mode", as a handy "wireless card" for ethernet enabled items. I hook it up to my gamecube's Broadband Adapter to get it wirelessy on the network. Most of the time, I use it as a wireless gateway for my network printer. I'm finding it incredibly useful as a wireless enabler for anything with ethernet.
Wouldn't the act of compressing the chest, also compress the lungs, causing a bit of fresh air flow in and out of them?
Good reference for the history of nuclear accidents.
and then RTFA, the guy in this case is half paralyzed, do you think he is spending a lot of time sitting at his computer downloading Christina Aguilera or something?
Ummmmm, the guy is housebound? Do you think he'd do more playing, downloading, etc, on the computer, or less, than the person who has a full time job, kids, goes to the gym, etc., etc.? Of course he probably uses the computer more, as a great outlet considering his disability.
And while I disagree with current fair use policies, and movie pricing schemes, etc., I don't see any reason why a disability should be an exemption from any of the rules of society (other than parking in handicapped spaces).
Yes, there is an instinctive "let's show some compassion and cut this poor bugger some slack" reaction, but until something like that is actually written into a law, one can't fault any organization (who likely wasn't even aware of his problem) for treating him as shittily as they treat the rest of the population. The fact they treat the rest of the population so shitty, is the problem.
I've said it before, I've said it again; I bought my first Mac(book) recently, and the thing that pushed me over the edge to do so was the fact I knew I could fall back to Windows when I needed to, or completely stay in Windows if the OS X experience wasn't a good one. But like most people who try it, that "security blanket" of Boot Camp is more of an insurance policy, or peace of mind (or gaming option), rather than something they end up using in real life. I have my MS Office and OpenOffice, Opera/Firefox/Safari, and even IE under Crossover Office or Parallels. (I tend to use Parallels for IE testing purposes of my websites).
:)
The only reason I reboot to windows now, is for the odd game; and even that's rare with me. Windows seems so much peppier, too, when I do go to it; since I only go there occasionally, the system doesn't get bogged down with addons, startup items, spyware, etc.. (The old reinstall-windows-every-six-months can be extended greatly, if you only use Windows occasionally.)
I think for a multimedia course that needs to teach students both Mac and PC skills, it makes all the more sense; both OS's on one machine: of course it's an overall savings, and somewhat of a no-brainer.
Yes, Mac hardware is single-vendor (unless you do the hackbook thing, not viable for a commercial enterprise); but in my experience, it's well designed, solid, stable, fast hardware. My only lament is that I'm a big fan of sub-nootbooks, like Librettos, and Apple has no such option currently. But I can live without that, for all the other benefits that OS X brings.
Yes, I'm a recent fan, and I am a boy, so fling away with your "fanboy" insults. Meanwhile, I'm productive and enjoying the experience immensely
If this becomes popular, then torrents and such could simply be encrypted for download (even on a per-download basis, to avoid spotting known encrypted versions).
The battle is hopeless for MPAA/RIAA/etc.. As long as light is being sent to our eyeballs, there will be someway to capture it, and share it. Make the prices reasonable, allow good fair use on any media for legitimate purchases, and you'll be surprised at how much money you'll make.
Movies and such are mass market commodities, just like bread or milk. Yes, I could buy a cow for milk, or make bread by hand, and "stick it to the man"; but it is actually *more* expensive, and *less* convenient to do so, when I can just pick them up for a buck or two each. Why would I bother rolling my own. (Well, I actually do make my own breads, but it's not for financial benefit, but other reasons, such as the joy of cooking, enjoying the freshness, etc.)
If people could get any movie they wanted for a buck or two in their home (not $7.95 for a single view), they wouldn't bother downloading; and if 10x or 15x or 100x as many people do it because the price is great, guess what? The sellers make *more* money than trying to restrict its use.
While I agree this is slightly interesting, it's not terribly useful, since it's likely that a mandatory auto-update will plug this hole soon. And without updates, the first of the many-to-be-found-exploits in all the new Vista code, will leave you vulnerable. It's rather ironic (and convenient for MS) that Windows' shoddy security, and the associate desperate need for updates, gives them a lot of control of forcing updates on you to plug activation and genuine advantage holes and such.
Thankfully for XP (which is where I level off anyway, why bother with Vista), there's Autopatcher and similar sites, which allow a *far* more convenient way of getting and applying patches than MS update. Don't know if there is anything similar for Vista, or if it's possible or will be permitted to continue by MS.
What height exaggeration were the flyovers done with? NASA has a long history of doing planetary animations that make things look way taller than they actually are, apparently in an attempt to make the animations appeal more to the public. Are these flyovers similarly exaggerated? If so, I'm not interested.
You see the same thing with stereoscopic aerial photographs of earth. I believe that around here (Nova Scotia), when you view the Department of Natural Resources photos in stereo, you get something like a 10-to-1 exaggeration of height. It's not a marketing thing to "appeal more to the public", but allows one to actually notice height differences. If it weren't for the exaggeration, we wouldn't be able to perceive any height differences. The world really is amazingly flat (consider the view from space, it looks like a perfect sphere). Without some exaggeration, perhaps NASA videos wouldn't be "less marketable", but just completely unremarkable (who wants to look at nothing but seemingly flat surfaces).
(In the case of aerial photographs, the exaggeration is simply an artifact of the spacing of the photos and the spacing of the human eyes; it's not some major plot to deceive. But the exaggeration is actually useful for people doing work in the field.)
This is actually quite an interesting concept. If memory serves, the typical cable modem, uses the bandwidth within the allocation of a single cable channel (video has quite a high bandwidth demand). So utilizing the over-the-air equivalent for local connections makes an awful lot of sense (adding an extra channel or two for redundancy and error correction, due to the increased noise of radio).
I used Direcway satellite for a couple of years, and it was good, but pricey and high latency, due to the trip to the satellite and back for every packet (and I was on two-way, doubling the fun). With local over-the-air broadcast, latency wouldn't be an issue. (I would imagine, dialup-return would be the norm; not a big bottleneck for the typical web-surfing/email-fetching individual.) I think this would be far preferrable to satellite for those out of range of cable, and hopefully more modest in pricing than satellite.
According to CNN.com, a gas price bump is expected now because people are expected to drive more with the expanded daylight hours.
So wait, Washington passed a law to change DST early...the early DST change is now being used to justify gas price increases? Coincidence? Happenstance?
Wow, it's a good thing that the president and other people of power in the US have no personal stake in oil companies and interests. That would be quite a scary conflict of interest. Whew!
I find WikiPedia's search not as good as google (fixing typo's and such), so I tend to do most of my searches with google, adding "wiki" as a keyword, and the relevant wiki articles typically shows up as the first matches. Works well.
The country would be in much better shape if we had more business people in politics and less politicians who are, by and large, mostly lawyers and career politicians.
While I agree with this in general, I think the blood-thirstiness and ruthlessness of Gates would scare the hell out of me as a president. (Not that Bush doesn't scare the hell out of me, too.) But I'd sooner a businessman than an oil cowboy, any day.
You guys did have your chance with Perot; watching that election fiasco of yours from Canada, it was truly sad how the media seemed to be partisan to the other parties, totally dismissing Perot. When he was eliminated from the race (and the manner in which it occurred), that was the point in which I totally lost faith in the US people and their government. And boy, it only got a lot worse since then. Good luck with that.
Text? Luxury!
We had to convert it to hex in our heads and enter it on paper tape.
Offtopic, but it reminds me of one of my first coding jobs. Most young'un's today don't believe it, but it was programming Z-80 *machine* language by hand, on an APL interpreter that was about 32K in size. Using an assembler was way too much overhead, and slowed us down too much. If we wanted to compare the 'A' register against the value 128, well that was "FE 80" (it's sad that these codes are still in my head, 20 years later). If the edits we were making to a chunk of code were bigger than the old one, we had to find space, which often involved moving a chunk of code to an unused block, searching for all calls to that routine and manually changing the call to them. It actually worked surprisingly well.
Although ironically, I still look back upon that was simple times.
I used a Sony Vaio Picturebook subnotebook for years, and loved it. Prior to that, was the old Toshiba Libretto. Now, I use the newer Libretto. I bought a laptop for portability, dammit. I take my notebook with me everywhere, in my small camerabag, and get a lot more use out of it because of the size. I find most laptops are portable desktop/media centers these days. If I want a big screen and keyboard, I plug my libretto into an external monitor, no problem. It's the best of both worlds.
I've recently switched to a MacBook for OS X (and loving it); but I wish there were a subnotebook option from Apple. One of the disadvantages of one-vendor-selling-the-hardware for OS X.
That even a previous article about the stuff failed to be seen by /. editors.
Research has shown that regardless of the speed limit, almost all motorists will drive roughly the same speed on the same road, indicating that most people have common sense and will find a "max safe" speed that they're comfortable with. Some people will speed, some will go far slower.
Unfortunately, the "max safe" speed that some people are comfortable with, isn't necessarily the speed at which they are *safe*. You might be a perfectly competent driver, and stay within your means. There are an *awful* lot of people out there that are feeling comfortable with their driving speeds, but are a danger to themselves and everyone on the road. So an "artificially low" flat limit is required to try and rein such people in.
I really believe that if the powers that be started enforcing reckless driving statutes - ticketing people for weaving in and out of traffic, not using signals, etc -
I notice one of the wreckless driving things you do not mention (possibly by innocent omission), is tailgating. I find most drivers that claim they are perfectly safe, and bitch about the low speed limits, tend to be the worst tailgaters around. And that is one of the most dangerous things on the road.
My response to tailgaters is to simply slow down: not out of spite, but to leave more room between me and the can in front of me. If a kid dashes out on the road and the person in front of me slams on the brakes, I'm going to slow down far more gradually to keep the asshole behind me from hitting me. (There's a reason why it's pretty much universal that if you're behind someone and you hit them, it's *your* fault. There's *always* opportunity to give yourself enough room to stop and not hit the car in front of you. If you choose not to give yourself that room, that's your problem; well, unless you happen to kill the kids in the car in front of you in an accident.)
Homer: "Excuse me, may I play Devil's Advocate for a moment?"
Bought an MacBook just before Vista Came out. I really love studying the various aspects of UI's that make my life easier or harder; and OS X generally does nothing but make my life easier. I'm also a Unix/Linux developer, and OS X is perfect for me; develop in my console, with a great UI kicking around for the Web browsing and other GUI stuff. I tried out Vista (ever so briefly), and my impression was that it was big, cute, a bit confusing, and didn't really seem to offer me anything that XP did. (I keep a licensed copy of XP in a Paralllels virtual window, for compatability testing, and in case I need to run a Windows-specific app [hasn't happened yet].)
If you're teetering on the edge, check out the Mac's. Just do it. If you don't like OS X, you can still run XP/Vista on them. That's one of the justifications I used to convinced myself to jump. But believe me, the number of people who *will* primarily run XP/Vista on Mac hardware can probably be counted on one hand (even though apple hardware has been found to be the fastest Windows platform). OS X really *is* just that much better.
And this is with the "previous" (well, current) release of OS X; Leopard will only make that moreso.
I've started up two companies in the past. The next one I start up, I will provision primarily with Apple OS X Machines. So little downtime, no reinstallations, no viruses, very productive, quality hardware, and Unix under the hood for the type of development we do. No longer will there need to be a distinction between Marketing and Development's hardware. My Unix developers have portable workstations, while having a great desktop, and all the necessary productivity apps. Plus a cheap copy of Parallels desktop and an XP License for anyone who needs to do compatability testing or run specific Windows apps.
It'd be worth the slight premium (although even the premium is arguable, given the quality and features of the gear you get).
It would also be good for morale; people get excited about a shiny new OS/X machine with a slick UI, rather than yet-another-PC with endless Windows configuration ahead of them.
Another interesting point about the Trieste. It was designed by Auguste Piccard and piloted by his son, Jacques Piccard. Auguste had a brother that was a balloonist, Jean Piccard.
I was wondering if Roddenberry named Jean-Luc Picard after these Hydronaut (love that term) pioneers. It turns out, that "Gene Roddenberry most likely named Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation for one or both of the twin brothers Auguste Piccard and Jean Felix Piccard, and derived Jean-Luc Picard from their names."