Now you've gone and done it. It's Politically Incorrect to question the dogma of Global Warming. They keep massaging the stats, taking a trendline from the bottom of one solar cycle to the top of another, and repeating the GW mantra that any changes must be the result of Evil Human Technology.
What if you, and the other doubters are wrong? Just how extreme do the changes have to be before you believe it's a fact? In 10 years time will the doubters be saying "but Earth was this temperature 1.5 million years ago" instead of the current "Earth had this temperature 200,000 years ago"? What if you do realise it's a problem in 5 years time and it's too late because a
bunch of positive feedback loops have been discovered?
I notice that dispite your generally sarcastic description of global warming data that first page you mentioned states:
Historical evidence and what we know about the Earth's energy balance and the Earth's atmosphere point to an increased greenhouse effect caused by people.
I agree, very similar plot to Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. IMO, Snatch isn't quite as good, but I probably feel that way becuase it doesn't have the originality of Lock, Stock. It's well worth seeing though.
If I was feeling cynical I'd say that Richie made this movie (and cast Brad Pitt in it) to have a second go at the US market since Lock, Stock didn't enjoy the same success in the US that it did in the rest of the world.
"Kleenex" is very much a registered and protected trademark, despite the yabberings of the uninformed.
An article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology states (references in the quote removed):
It is important to keep in mind that trademarks are inherently adjectival and must remain distinctive to retain their protected status. While many formerly distinctive marks have made a transition into common, generic nouns ("Kleenex" for "tissue") or even verbs (e.g., "to (make a) Xerox"), this metamorphosis, when complete, sacrifices the trademark to the public domain.
The thing to remember is that it will take a court case to determine whether that metamorphosis from trademark to generic term is complete. AFAIK for Kleenex that case has not happened, and Kimberly-Clark are still vigorously defending the trademark. A list of trademarks that have become generic can be found here. Kleenex is not on it.
I do know that when Be was focused on BeOS, Apple was not forthcoming with that information.
BeOS could have moved forward with PPC. They chose not to. It's as simple as that. Apple shut down the Mac clone market, some of those companies would have been willing to try BeOS, and IBM and Motorola still produced PPC machines that BeOS could have run on.
The reason the Linux PPC crowd got it working was because they reverse-engineered the information they needed. It would not have been rational for Be to do that and open themselves up to lawsuits by Apple.
Be could have opened up the HAL and let other companies do the G3/4 support, like MS does with NT. Face it, Be decided they weren't interested in PPC anymore.
For a company which on some fronts decries government intervention, Microsoft seems to have a different tack here.
Microsoft are all in favour of government intervention provided it's them the government is protecting.
They're kind of right about the broadband situation though. There's two main cable networks but it's common to only be able to connect to one of them. ADSL is in it's infancy and satellite is an inferior option (IMO).
He-Ne laser --> 683 nm --> red
Ar-Ion laser --> 514 nm --> green
The Philips DVD710 (one model I was looking at buying) uses dual laser pickup: 650nm for DVD and 780nm for CD (including VCD) / CD-R / CD-RW. Other manufacturers advertising dual laser pickup and/or CD-R compatibility include LG, JVC, NEC, Pioneer, and high end Samsung units. Sony and Sharp don't seem to bother. Most low-end (unknown) brands that feature MP3 playback will also handle CD-Rs. The buyer of the unit in the original story didn't do their homework.
I doubt that laser intensity and reflectivity prevent CD-R's from being read by a DVD player. My laptop, which has a toshiba DVD drive, can read CD-R's just fine. It only has one laser. My conclusion from this observation would be that Sony is jerking you around.
CD-R compatibility is far more important in a computer than in a stand alone DVD player. Unless the player also supports MP3 (or MPEG1/2 file) playback, CD-R compatibility is only useful for playing CDDA formatted CDs (i.e. audio CDs). That's a small market. I bought a Sony DVD336 knowing it didn't support CD-Rs and had no qualms about it since I already have a 5 disc CD changer which does handle CD-Rs. MP3 playback would be nice but the reviews for the models I looked at said that MP3 playback was pretty rough at this point (most players ignore the directory structure and present the whole CD's contents as a single list). I believe a standard is being developed for MP3 (and other format) CDs which should mean that future players have better support. When that happens you can be sure Sony's players will also support CD-Rs.
What, is Slashdot not getting enough page views or something, CmdrTaco? I'd love to moderate this story -1, Flamebait. What next: "Microsoft were good all along"?
Do you own a car? A washing machine? A refrigerator? A microwave? A TV? A blender? Do you know how those things work? Do you want to spend time fixing the blender's motor or do you want to make a milkshake?
A computer is a tool. It does stuff for you. Making the tool hard to use doesn't make it better, it makes it worse.
Heard that analogy before and like most analogies it's obviously flawed. Here's a better one:
A computer is like a workshop. It can contain the tools necessary for the job at hand. You still need to know how to use the tools, where they are, how to plug them in and switch them on, what combination of tools are necessary to do the job.
The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go.
Not in my case. In my case online ads don't work because they aren't targeted well enough. On virtually every site I visit the ads are not relevant to me, partly because I'm not in the US, but mainly because the ads are not targeted specifically at the site's audience. So I ignore them. Slashdot's a notable exception to this, and I often do notice the ads on Slashdot. I'd bet porn sites get better click-through rates than average too, because their ads are usually relevant to what the viewer is looking for. Anyway, the same thing will happen with interstital ads - if they aren't relevant to the viewer often enough the viewer will form a habit of ignoring them without even reading them.
You're right about the Web being like a big phone book. And guess what? There is no advertising in the phone book because it just doesn't work. Advertising works in the Yellow Pages when I'm looking to buy something (provided it's relevant to what I'm looking for), it works on TV when you've got a captive audience. It doesn't work when I'm trying to get something done.
The reason why banner ads don't work is quite simple: the expectations are wrong. In magazines advertisers are looking to increase brand awareness or provide information (prices etc). They don't expect you to drop everything and rush out to buy their product as soon as you see the ad. Yet that's exactly what they expect to happen with banner ads. And of course it doesn't happen, because we're trying to do something else. So I don't think mass advertising on Web is ever going to work regardless of the quality of the advert. Advertisers will have to figure out how to target me with relevant ads, and they'll have to do it without any personal data collection because I don't want them building any sort of profile on me, and if they do they guarentee I'll never buy
any of the products they advertise.
Right click: Advanced goto options: Occasionally you'll find someone who links to a non-existent page, such as an expired PHP/ASP page. I'd like to be able to right click and say "Go to this domain". Better yet, pop the complete URL up into the URL window, and allow the user to click on sections. Thus, for the URL http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/3/index.html, I could click on "/2", and everything before it would be selected. (This will save manually deleting characters.) It might sound dumb, but it can be unbelievably useful.
The Google toolbar does almost this. It has an "Up" button with a dropdown (like the back button) which allows you to quickly select a higher directory in the current URL. Using your example (http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/3/index.html) the dropdown menu would let you pick from:
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/3/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/
The catch? The damn thing is only available for Internet Explorer (at least at the moment).
Say the Linux distributions didn't want to release procompiled binaries.
That's not the point. Sure 90+% of users want binaries, but then 90+% of users don't use pre-beta software, which is what we're talking about here. Release early and often, sure, but how to release? Personally I think source only is fine, if the project is not ready for the end user. If it's almost functionally complete (i.e. late alpha or beta quality, such as Evolution and Nautilus) then binaries should also be available.
Of course there's no hard and fast rule, after all the Linux kernel still only has source releases.
Payphones are not lucrative at all. At least not here in Sydney. The local communications (near-)monopoly has been removing them as fast as they can, especially from small towns. Those public phones which are around have often been converted into advertising space, basically a big billboard close to the road that is completely open so they're nearly impossible to use. There's been the odd bit public outcry which slows them down but they really aren't interested. And neither is anyone else - none of the competition has displayed any interest in the payphone market.
Yes it is. No it's not the first magnetic memory, that predates Honeywell's 1997 efforts too. But it is the first to use the particular technology involved (Magnetic Tunnel Junctions).
Did you read that article? It points out that Honeywell's devices where 10 times slower and 256 times less dense than DRAM in 1997. Not even close to competitive. The article actually mentions the technology IBM are talking about (Magnetic Tunnel Junctions):
In March a team of IBM engineers led by William J. Gallagher and Stuart S. P. Parkin announced that it had constructed arrays of 14 bits from such tunnel junctions, as they are known. They have demonstrated bits that are as small as 200 nanometers wide and that switch in five nanoseconds or less, Gallagher reports.
Of the other technologies mentioned, I haven't heard anything from Motorola and Ramtron's FRAM is also too slow by an order of magnitude for use in todays machines (70+ns access time) in place of SDRAM or RDRAM.
CmdrTaco must be feeling cynical today. When have IBM ever announced a technology which doesn't work? Some more details from their site are here and here.
The palm pilot is not the most advanced piece of equipment out there, but for me it is the most useful of the handheld machines. CE is based on windows 95, and thus works better on machines with keyboard and very small laptop type computers.
Have you ever used PocketPC (what WinCE is called this month)? On a handheld such as an iPAQ rather than a machine with a keyboard? It is nothing like 95.
1) Graffitti, while difficult to learn compared to typing, eventually is much more natural than typing on a tiny keyboard which only serves to make the device larger.
Graffiti is not as good as PocketPC's handwriting recognition in my experience. The PocketPC's system allows you to print almost normally so there is virtually no learning curve and it seems to be just as quick.
2) Simple GUI.
PocketPC is much the same. What people have to realise though is that these devices will follow Moore's Law. They already do. 2 years ago state of the art was the 20MHz, 4MB Palm V. Now its the 200MHz, 48MB (including ROM) iPAQ. Handhelds will soon be powerful enough to run virtually everything short of graphics intensive stuff well. The only constraint will be the size of the screen.
I know why Java doesn't let you, what I can't see is why the language doesn't automatically perform the work around that you described. Other languages have managed to do this in the past (Sather, Smalltalk, probably Eiffel, IIRC).
My pet annoyance in the Java language is that the primitive types don't behave like objects. You can't put an int into a Vector. Why? No good reason AFAICS.
On the good side I really like the design of Swing. Sure it's slow and buggy, but it's nicely designed and powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was feeling cynical I'd say that Richie made this movie (and cast Brad Pitt in it) to have a second go at the US market since Lock, Stock didn't enjoy the same success in the US that it did in the rest of the world.
There are people in parts of the world other than Europe and America who read Slashdot. You forgot to insult whole continents full of people.
They're kind of right about the broadband situation though. There's two main cable networks but it's common to only be able to connect to one of them. ADSL is in it's infancy and satellite is an inferior option (IMO).
It's called Moore's Law rather then Moore's Theory or Moore's Conjecture or any other more accurate term for one simple reason: Moore's Law rhymes.
What, is Slashdot not getting enough page views or something, CmdrTaco?
I'd love to moderate this story -1, Flamebait. What next: "Microsoft were good all along"?
A computer is like a workshop. It can contain the tools necessary for the job at hand. You still need to know how to use the tools, where they are, how to plug them in and switch them on, what combination of tools are necessary to do the job.
You're right about the Web being like a big phone book. And guess what? There is no advertising in the phone book because it just doesn't work. Advertising works in the Yellow Pages when I'm looking to buy something (provided it's relevant to what I'm looking for), it works on TV when you've got a captive audience. It doesn't work when I'm trying to get something done.
The reason why banner ads don't work is quite simple: the expectations are wrong. In magazines advertisers are looking to increase brand awareness or provide information (prices etc). They don't expect you to drop everything and rush out to buy their product as soon as you see the ad. Yet that's exactly what they expect to happen with banner ads. And of course it doesn't happen, because we're trying to do something else. So I don't think mass advertising on Web is ever going to work regardless of the quality of the advert. Advertisers will have to figure out how to target me with relevant ads, and they'll have to do it without any personal data collection because I don't want them building any sort of profile on me, and if they do they guarentee I'll never buy any of the products they advertise.
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/3/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/
The catch? The damn thing is only available for Internet Explorer (at least at the moment).
Of course there's no hard and fast rule, after all the Linux kernel still only has source releases.
Payphones are not lucrative at all. At least not here in Sydney. The local communications (near-)monopoly has been removing them as fast as they can, especially from small towns. Those public phones which are around have often been converted into advertising space, basically a big billboard close to the road that is completely open so they're nearly impossible to use. There's been the odd bit public outcry which slows them down but they really aren't interested. And neither is anyone else - none of the competition has displayed any interest in the payphone market.
Yes it is. No it's not the first magnetic memory, that predates Honeywell's 1997 efforts too. But it is the first to use the particular technology involved (Magnetic Tunnel Junctions).
I know why Java doesn't let you, what I can't see is why the language doesn't automatically perform the work around that you described. Other languages have managed to do this in the past (Sather, Smalltalk, probably Eiffel, IIRC).
On the good side I really like the design of Swing. Sure it's slow and buggy, but it's nicely designed and powerful.