Have you ever taken that certification exam ? Maybe then you wouldn't be so impressed.
One must also consider that not everyone is as dumb/irresponsible as the average North American kid. I grew up with other kids that would be considered "mature" by such standards, but really it was perfectly common and expected to learn things from your parents and uncles, instead of parking us in front of a TV. I had an uncle who was studing CS, so by age 2 I was writing my first Hello World program in BASIC. My neighbour was an EE, so naturally his kid was a whiz at electronics and robotics. By the time we hit 3rd grade, we would spend our evenings and weekends porting each other's computer games (he had a C64, I had an Atari).
Kids don't have any of the distractions and frustrations of us adults. If they are interested in something, they can easily invest 16 hours a day into that passion. They have no bills to pay, no spouses to patronize. Given the kind of harsh parenting seen in many 3rd world countries, I'm surprised we haven't heard of other kids getting an MS cert even earlier than 9. If a kid is bright enough, you could train them to pass the test by the time they're out of diapers - at the expense of their sanity of course.
there's such a thing as too much choice and too much TV.
Yes indeed, as my 42 TB file server would suggest. First it was a 1 TB drive shared off my old PC, then it was 4 of them in a RAID, then 8, 16, and now 42 TB in a SAS expander. Of that, about 8 TB is just movies and TV shows. Flipping through the list is a depressing affair, as there is so much choice yet I never know what I feel like watching.
My next pet project will be a "what's hot" script for XBMC, that filters things down to the latest additions, along with some semi-random suggestions for each genre. "Feel like a comedy ? How about this old episode of South Park season 4 ?"
Do yourself a favour: don't ever start hoarding video for your wife... or you'll end up like me.
Well... you're a bit optimistic there. Good TVs have 3+ HDMI ports, but a lot of the cheaper - thus popular - models only have 1 or 2. And CableCARD is a weird little thing, in that I've heard it mentioned over the years, but never seen it, neither as a device, nor as a port on the back of any TV.
Perhaps the saving grace is that these MHL dongles can be made backward-compatible, using just a plain old HDMI output and some external power source. They would still require a remote, but that's a small price to pay for the benefit of having today's tech on yesterday's TV.
You're right. I should totally fly over there and apply my network and software expertise to building a manufacturing plant. Or not.
I do disaster planning for local businesses, big and small. My clients plan for various levels of disaster. For some, it means having a second building in a nearby city, fully furnished and ready to go live should the main office be affected in any way, be it a power outage, hurricane, or false-flag terrorist attack. For others, it's a matter of making sure everyone has a good PC at home for telecommuting when we get another icestorm or flood.
For a billion-dollar, multinational manufacturer, I would expect their disaster planning to include the possibility of shuttering an entire country's facilities without missing a beat. Sure, in hindsight they will probably take such precautions in the future, but they will be feeling the pain of this mistake for years to come, as this is exactly the kind of thing investors shit bricks over.
No. Eugenics would be preventing those people from breeding, and/or exterminating them outright. I'm just saying we should introduce subliminal messages to help keep them out of hospitals.
Too bad Canada isn't one of those countries. Having them designed and tested to work in tandem with seatbelts is something I can agree with, unlike the idiot-proof approach of the U.S. airbags.
You're right, I did forget The Dark Knight. I missed its theatrical run but that is indeed a fantastic movie. Inception, not so much. I've watched it twice, and I still don't see what all the fuss is about. It takes some decently heady material, fumbles all over it in typical Hollywood fashion, and layers on the cheese to try and appease the dunces in the audience. To me, it's a feeble rehashing of older, more skillful reality-benders such as Existenz or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
My gripe with cinemas is they're competing for my entertainment budget, and losing out by a wide margin to other venues. Going to the movies is a roughly $40 expense per person (tickets, munchies, travel). Then if we factor in that I only really enjoy 1 out of every 10 movies, that means my net cost for 2 hours of top-quality entertainment is $400. That's half a year's worth of video games, two months of fine craft beer in my fridge, a weeklong all-inclusive vacation in Cuba, or five rock concert tickets.
The value just isn't there and I'm quite happy to watch movies at home, be they rented, streamed or torrented, on my plasma TV with the mega overkill studio monitors, fancy beer from the fridge, fresh snacks out of the deep fryer, and my big floaty couch with the wife or a friend. Oh, and no goddamned kids talking/texting/pointing. Only then do I find the expense worthy of my time anymore. I *might* see the next Batman on the big screen, because that's a sure hit, but otherwise I'm quite content to stay home.
Really ? Why not ? Why does scale matter so much with healthcare ?
More importantly: what do you consider "sustainable" ? What kind of price would you put on your own health ? How many costly medical procedures are caused by lack of preventive care ? How do you think that relates to crime levels ? Why is my life expectancy 3% higher than yours ?
You know, we Canadians bitch and moan about long wait times, but we're quite grateful to have it when we need it, and I'd like to posit the theory that having public healthcare directly results in lower rates of violent crime, thanks to decreased stress. For most people, fear of death is the greatest fear of all, so having that fear mitigated by the government is a tremendous weight off our shoulders.
This. As much as I despise Harper for being a hypocritical sell-out, at least he's consistent. Watching U.S. presidential races is like Fox Jersey Shore Survivor Race Idol: bunch of babbling idiots all trying to out-retard each other, while the audience wonders what kind of lax breeding history would result in such weak sperm beating its peers to the egg. Yeah, we have our crazies in all parties, but none of them come anywhere near the level of obstinate stupidity displayed by characters such as Palin, Bachmann, Cain, Romney, Santorum and Perry. If that is the best the nation has to offer, then the political system needs the mother of all overhauls or else the U.S. is doomed to collapse.
Buddy, even when you play nice, even play by the rules, sometimes it gets uglier than "Cops: Too Hot for TV". You refuse to instate socialized healthcare because of those mythical "death panels", yet any half-witted thug that manages to reach adulthood without a criminal record can go to police college, be given a weapon, a badge, an inflated sense of self-worth, and a salary so low it ensures their allegiance to the underworld to make ends meet.
You can have your cowboy cops. I'll keep my socialized healthcare and life long enough to watch you free market crazies crumble under the weight of your egos like Caesar's Rome.
We allow protest because it gives enough of an illusion of freedom to safely maintain the tyranny.
Or, if I dare use a movie reference, protesting is the Neo to our Matrix. It collects, vents, and ultimately disposes of, nonconforming elements.
Just think of how protests work: certain highly-mobile people lead the movement, often labeled as "jobless hippies", or in more recent times "terrorists". The masses quietly signal their approval without actually doing anything. Nothing ever really changes, at least not for the better, but this ritual makes it appear as though people's voices are heard, which is enough to keep such cowards obedient and peaceful.
If the establishment didn't allow protest, they couldn't call themselves a democracy at all. Then even the most hardcore bible-thumping shotgun-collecting cousin-fucker would realize it's just a old-fashioned fascist regime, and that would be a dangerous realization indeed.
The only person holding that gun against your temple is yourself, by living in a structured society. If you don't like paying taxes and being somewhat protected from the evils of the world, you can disappear into the forest and live like your ancestors.
But, seeing as your last name is "Coward", I think you like the safety that social gun provides.
Capitalism says we have limited resources, but is there really a shortage of people who can help others ? Instead of hiding the medical practice behind the giant paywall that is med. school, maybe if you didn't need to be the son of a crooked senator to afford the damn piece of paper, we could crank out enough doctors to take care of everyone.
Just watch Jersey Shore for 2 minutes and tell me we shouldn't prioritize the thinkers at least a tiny bit, I fucking dare you.
I'm not saying the world is ready for eugenics just yet, but maybe we could apply some social engineering to slightly decrease the life expectancy of the terminally stupid.
Okay so, we have MythTV, XBMC/Boxee/Plex, Freevo, Enna, and only Github knows how many others... and now Ubuntu TV.
How many of these me-too media center suites do we need ? I've been an XBMC fan since it was an actual Xbox app, but it is only a player. The few of my friends who want PVR functionality use MythTV. Would it not make a million times more sense to concentrate people's efforts on those two projects ? I'd rather have two awesome media center apps than ten shitty ones. Both are extensively configurable so it doesn't seem like anyone would be losing prized functionality by switching to one of the big two - or even merging them into one.
And no, I'm not new here. I'm just fed up with the unnecessary fracturing of limited free software resources. Even the venerable GeeXboX has seen the light and transformed itself into a polished XBMC-based distro. The more developers and eyeballs we have on the core projects, the better.
What I personally don't understand is why is it taking so long to resume production elsewhere ? When a multi-billion dollar industry is threatened, I would expect them to take some of those billions and poop out new facilities at ludicrous speed.
If the alarm only sounds when the car is in motion, then fine, but that's not often the case.
My car's seatbelt alarm was even dumber than this: it would beep with the key on "accessory". If I was parked, and wanted to play the radio or turn on a reading light, it expected me to buckle up or suffer constant beeping after a 15 second warning timer. You know what ? FUCK THAT! I disabled the dumb thing. I'm responsible enough to put on a seatbelt when I'm driving/riding, I don't need a dumb resistor-capacitor circuit to remind me.
If I'm in an accident so violent that a seatbelt alone can't keep me safe, the last thing I want is an explosively inflated balloon shooting toward my face, pushing my head and torso back into the seat at equally violent speeds. I would much rather have a stronger belt system that does a better job of keeping me in the seat in the first place.
I personally know two guys who were severely injured by airbags. One was a driver, he was hospitalized for weeks, because the airbag smacked him so hard it broke his left arm and dislocated his jaw. His passenger, who did not have an airbag, walked away with just cuts and bruises on from his head smashing the window. Seatbelt 1, Airbag -10.
The other guy was a passenger, in a newer car with passenger-side airbags. He suffered several fractured vertebrae and is paralyzed from the waist down. The real clincher is the car wasn't even in motion at the time: a drunk driver lost control on an icy road and swerved into the intersection. The drunk driver broke his leg, friendly driver had nothing but soiled underwear. Seatbelt 3, Airbag -9000.
So please, before repeating the crap you heard on TV, get yourself some first-hand facts. I used to think airbags were a good idea, back in the 80's and 90's when they were starting to catch on. My own car at the time didn't have any airbags, and I survived a terrifying roll completely unharmed, just with a seatbelt and hanging on to the wheel for dear life. The car looked like it had been in a compactor, and we found some debris flung 50 feet away. Didn't have an airbag, and didn't need one. Then my buddy got badly injured by an airbag, but I figured it was a freak accident, perhaps caused by excessive speed or odd positioning. It's not until I met the guy in the wheelchair that I started looking into studies about airbag injuries and fatalities, and the data isn't pretty. Airbags have been steadily improving over time, with many efforts focused on dynamically adjusting inflation speed/pressure, but there is still a LONG way to go before I'll be ready to trust an airbag. There are enough threats on the road, I don't want to be worrying about the devices inside my own freakin' car.
A few years back, I needed a new cell phone. Despite being a big PC freak, I had avoided smartphones for a very long time. I preferred using a cheap phone, and a separate Palm Pilot. Anyway, when shopping for phones, I didn't know much about iPhones and Androids, so the wife and I decided to get one of each, with the option of swapping them, or replacing one outright if it sucked. Despite being Motorola's then-flagship, the XT720 was running an outdated version of Android, with no upgrade path whatsoever (fuck you, Moto!). It also lacked graphics acceleration and had a really irritating touchscreen. Next to the iPhone 3GS, the XT720 looked like a dinosaur - albeit one with a better camera. I really hate to say this, but it's a safe bet that the iPhone is what finally lured me over to the Apple side, after 30 years of mocking those hipsters.
As a mobile app developer dealing with all 4 platforms, the Android is only slightly less frustrating to work with than a Blackberry. Fragmentation means I have several dozen variations to worry about, between OS versions, display resolutions, vendor and hardware-specific quirks like cheapass displays and no multitouch. Let's not forget that many of these devices use CPUs that are way below spec, because there is no minimum hardware enforcement whatsoever, as long as it (eventually) boots... It just so happens that these shit devices make up a huge portion of the user base, as they tend to be flogged en-masse as the $49 upgrade with 2-3 year contracts, instead of a $0 flip-phone. You really cannot rely on any sort of baseline and that means Android apps tend to be sloppy unreliable messes, unless you're a big company with access to lots of testers. It's also a very tough business position to charge more for developing an Android port of an IOS app, when the perceived user base is much smaller. I don't know if it actually is, but clients always ask for the IOS version first, Android/BB second.
Apple, in limiting their hardware to 5 currently supported devices with backward compatibility, makes my job a whole lot easier. I don't even need one of each, I can do all my testing on an old 3GS and 1st-gen iPad, with the confidence that my app will look and work perfectly on their iPhone 4/4S and iPad2. Had Google enforced some sort of baseline device and support requirements, excluded some of the fly-by-night manufacturers, and actually provided first-party software updates instead of leaving users at the mercy of the hardware vendor, Android could have been a far more pleasant platform - but they fucked it up, and it's a bit late to fix it now. Sure, there are some outstanding Android devices out there, like Samsung's offerings, but only connaisseurs have them, so as a developer I still have to target the shitty knockoffs, lest I exclude 98% of the user base. Those few good Androids may as well be considered a separate platform...
If those people are too thrifty to suffer the complete movie theatre financial dick-punck, maybe they're not in the theatre in the first place. Maybe they're at home, grabbing the latest cams and eating cardboard flavoured store-brand popcorn and watery store-brand cola.
How many times have I looked at a theatre's "now showing" list for 10 minutes before deciding there wasn't anything worth seeing for $13 ? Even for blockbuster titles, I have a hard time justifying the expense unless I'm truly psyched about the movie, because the last time a movie gave me $13.worth of entertainment was 1998. I've watched several hundred movies since then, but they just fall short of expectations, very short.
Today's writers just don't know what the fuck they're doing anymore, it's all these ADD-afflected JJ Abrams types who can't juggle a single idea in their head long enough to carry it through. Few movies are either fun or thought-provoking from start to finish, the great majority are cheap whores that quite literally cram 90 seconds worth of punchy trailer material inside a hastily-edited snooze sandwich, with a "what-the-fuck" ending you can see coming before you even set foot inside the lobby. Poster with a guy and some chick staring into the distance ? SHE'S GONNA LOSE HER BABY (then get it back). There, I'm a fuckin' writer now, where's my goddamned Prius and Vitamin Water ?
I would love to see figures for unfilled seats, because most of the times I've been to the theatre, a week or two after release, there have been maybe 30-50 seats filled out of 600+, so it seems there's a big mindless rush on opening night, and then nothing for the remainder of the 6 to 12 week run. Six shows a day, and even if you rolled them all up into one, you'd still be half-empty. I'm not saying they should expect to sell out every show, every day, but 35% occupancy is usually a good baseline for other entertainment venues. How much money are they throwing down the drain with these shows nobody watches ?
If I look at indie theatres, they're packed four nights a week. Tickets are $6 to $8, popcorn and a large soda for $7, and they rarely screen garbage because with a single screen, they have to make it good or else they're going to bleed money that week. Okay, so the latest blockbuster probably won't be screened here until 4-6 weeks after its first run, but what do I care ? Do I need to watch MI4 right this freakin' second ? The megaplexes need to take a clue from the little guys and go back to a moviegoer-centric model, instead of their current role as Hollywood's captive gimp. Give US what WE want, and tell Hollywood to shape up or slip out. There are hundreds of thousands of films out there, spanning over a century, and a few of them are even worth seeing. Even if they stopped making movies forever, theatres could show old stuff and bring in audiences. I would absolutely love to see some 80's and 90's favorites on the big screen; hell I'd even pay to see Hardware with a bunch of B-movie dorks cheering on the bad robot, or bizarro classics like Spider Baby. Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's good.
It's briefly interesting that they can hit such numbers with LN2, but I fail to see much value in the exercise. To the best of my knowledge, increasing the core multiplier doesn't have any impact on the motherboard, it's all internal to the CPU. As long as the board's power circuitry can deliver enough voltage, you just need to dissipate the heat, hence the LN2. You could replicate this on a $100 board, as long as it's not a Biostar.
Surely, some people must have wanted WWIII, else they wouldn't have started the whole "cold war" cockfight in the first place. Cold War = money and power for the fear factories. SOPA blackout = loss of money for these megacorps. I'd say they stand at polar opposites, as far as analogies go.
Forget Yahoo, they're a joke, but for Google, Amazon and Facebook to forgo 1/365th of their user-based income probably represents more cash than the sum of all the SOPA lobbyists' payola. If they really wanted to stomp SOPA, they would have bought it out like any other SIG.
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Have you ever taken that certification exam ? Maybe then you wouldn't be so impressed.
One must also consider that not everyone is as dumb/irresponsible as the average North American kid. I grew up with other kids that would be considered "mature" by such standards, but really it was perfectly common and expected to learn things from your parents and uncles, instead of parking us in front of a TV. I had an uncle who was studing CS, so by age 2 I was writing my first Hello World program in BASIC. My neighbour was an EE, so naturally his kid was a whiz at electronics and robotics. By the time we hit 3rd grade, we would spend our evenings and weekends porting each other's computer games (he had a C64, I had an Atari).
Kids don't have any of the distractions and frustrations of us adults. If they are interested in something, they can easily invest 16 hours a day into that passion. They have no bills to pay, no spouses to patronize. Given the kind of harsh parenting seen in many 3rd world countries, I'm surprised we haven't heard of other kids getting an MS cert even earlier than 9. If a kid is bright enough, you could train them to pass the test by the time they're out of diapers - at the expense of their sanity of course.
there's such a thing as too much choice and too much TV.
Yes indeed, as my 42 TB file server would suggest. First it was a 1 TB drive shared off my old PC, then it was 4 of them in a RAID, then 8, 16, and now 42 TB in a SAS expander. Of that, about 8 TB is just movies and TV shows. Flipping through the list is a depressing affair, as there is so much choice yet I never know what I feel like watching.
My next pet project will be a "what's hot" script for XBMC, that filters things down to the latest additions, along with some semi-random suggestions for each genre. "Feel like a comedy ? How about this old episode of South Park season 4 ?"
Do yourself a favour: don't ever start hoarding video for your wife... or you'll end up like me.
Well... you're a bit optimistic there. Good TVs have 3+ HDMI ports, but a lot of the cheaper - thus popular - models only have 1 or 2. And CableCARD is a weird little thing, in that I've heard it mentioned over the years, but never seen it, neither as a device, nor as a port on the back of any TV.
Perhaps the saving grace is that these MHL dongles can be made backward-compatible, using just a plain old HDMI output and some external power source. They would still require a remote, but that's a small price to pay for the benefit of having today's tech on yesterday's TV.
You're right. I should totally fly over there and apply my network and software expertise to building a manufacturing plant. Or not.
I do disaster planning for local businesses, big and small. My clients plan for various levels of disaster. For some, it means having a second building in a nearby city, fully furnished and ready to go live should the main office be affected in any way, be it a power outage, hurricane, or false-flag terrorist attack. For others, it's a matter of making sure everyone has a good PC at home for telecommuting when we get another icestorm or flood.
For a billion-dollar, multinational manufacturer, I would expect their disaster planning to include the possibility of shuttering an entire country's facilities without missing a beat. Sure, in hindsight they will probably take such precautions in the future, but they will be feeling the pain of this mistake for years to come, as this is exactly the kind of thing investors shit bricks over.
No. Eugenics would be preventing those people from breeding, and/or exterminating them outright. I'm just saying we should introduce subliminal messages to help keep them out of hospitals.
Too bad Canada isn't one of those countries. Having them designed and tested to work in tandem with seatbelts is something I can agree with, unlike the idiot-proof approach of the U.S. airbags.
You're right, I did forget The Dark Knight. I missed its theatrical run but that is indeed a fantastic movie. Inception, not so much. I've watched it twice, and I still don't see what all the fuss is about. It takes some decently heady material, fumbles all over it in typical Hollywood fashion, and layers on the cheese to try and appease the dunces in the audience. To me, it's a feeble rehashing of older, more skillful reality-benders such as Existenz or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
My gripe with cinemas is they're competing for my entertainment budget, and losing out by a wide margin to other venues. Going to the movies is a roughly $40 expense per person (tickets, munchies, travel). Then if we factor in that I only really enjoy 1 out of every 10 movies, that means my net cost for 2 hours of top-quality entertainment is $400. That's half a year's worth of video games, two months of fine craft beer in my fridge, a weeklong all-inclusive vacation in Cuba, or five rock concert tickets.
The value just isn't there and I'm quite happy to watch movies at home, be they rented, streamed or torrented, on my plasma TV with the mega overkill studio monitors, fancy beer from the fridge, fresh snacks out of the deep fryer, and my big floaty couch with the wife or a friend. Oh, and no goddamned kids talking/texting/pointing. Only then do I find the expense worthy of my time anymore. I *might* see the next Batman on the big screen, because that's a sure hit, but otherwise I'm quite content to stay home.
Pi.
Also Blade, my guilty pleasure.
Really ? Why not ? Why does scale matter so much with healthcare ?
More importantly: what do you consider "sustainable" ? What kind of price would you put on your own health ? How many costly medical procedures are caused by lack of preventive care ? How do you think that relates to crime levels ? Why is my life expectancy 3% higher than yours ?
You know, we Canadians bitch and moan about long wait times, but we're quite grateful to have it when we need it, and I'd like to posit the theory that having public healthcare directly results in lower rates of violent crime, thanks to decreased stress. For most people, fear of death is the greatest fear of all, so having that fear mitigated by the government is a tremendous weight off our shoulders.
This. As much as I despise Harper for being a hypocritical sell-out, at least he's consistent. Watching U.S. presidential races is like Fox Jersey Shore Survivor Race Idol: bunch of babbling idiots all trying to out-retard each other, while the audience wonders what kind of lax breeding history would result in such weak sperm beating its peers to the egg. Yeah, we have our crazies in all parties, but none of them come anywhere near the level of obstinate stupidity displayed by characters such as Palin, Bachmann, Cain, Romney, Santorum and Perry. If that is the best the nation has to offer, then the political system needs the mother of all overhauls or else the U.S. is doomed to collapse.
I'll take a big inefficient government that saves my life, over a small government that puts my fate in the hands of insurance companies.
Buddy, even when you play nice, even play by the rules, sometimes it gets uglier than "Cops: Too Hot for TV". You refuse to instate socialized healthcare because of those mythical "death panels", yet any half-witted thug that manages to reach adulthood without a criminal record can go to police college, be given a weapon, a badge, an inflated sense of self-worth, and a salary so low it ensures their allegiance to the underworld to make ends meet.
You can have your cowboy cops. I'll keep my socialized healthcare and life long enough to watch you free market crazies crumble under the weight of your egos like Caesar's Rome.
We allow protest because it gives enough of an illusion of freedom to safely maintain the tyranny.
Or, if I dare use a movie reference, protesting is the Neo to our Matrix. It collects, vents, and ultimately disposes of, nonconforming elements.
Just think of how protests work: certain highly-mobile people lead the movement, often labeled as "jobless hippies", or in more recent times "terrorists". The masses quietly signal their approval without actually doing anything. Nothing ever really changes, at least not for the better, but this ritual makes it appear as though people's voices are heard, which is enough to keep such cowards obedient and peaceful.
If the establishment didn't allow protest, they couldn't call themselves a democracy at all. Then even the most hardcore bible-thumping shotgun-collecting cousin-fucker would realize it's just a old-fashioned fascist regime, and that would be a dangerous realization indeed.
The only person holding that gun against your temple is yourself, by living in a structured society. If you don't like paying taxes and being somewhat protected from the evils of the world, you can disappear into the forest and live like your ancestors.
But, seeing as your last name is "Coward", I think you like the safety that social gun provides.
Capitalism says we have limited resources, but is there really a shortage of people who can help others ? Instead of hiding the medical practice behind the giant paywall that is med. school, maybe if you didn't need to be the son of a crooked senator to afford the damn piece of paper, we could crank out enough doctors to take care of everyone.
Just watch Jersey Shore for 2 minutes and tell me we shouldn't prioritize the thinkers at least a tiny bit, I fucking dare you.
I'm not saying the world is ready for eugenics just yet, but maybe we could apply some social engineering to slightly decrease the life expectancy of the terminally stupid.
Okay so, we have MythTV, XBMC/Boxee/Plex, Freevo, Enna, and only Github knows how many others... and now Ubuntu TV.
How many of these me-too media center suites do we need ? I've been an XBMC fan since it was an actual Xbox app, but it is only a player. The few of my friends who want PVR functionality use MythTV. Would it not make a million times more sense to concentrate people's efforts on those two projects ? I'd rather have two awesome media center apps than ten shitty ones. Both are extensively configurable so it doesn't seem like anyone would be losing prized functionality by switching to one of the big two - or even merging them into one.
And no, I'm not new here. I'm just fed up with the unnecessary fracturing of limited free software resources. Even the venerable GeeXboX has seen the light and transformed itself into a polished XBMC-based distro. The more developers and eyeballs we have on the core projects, the better.
What I personally don't understand is why is it taking so long to resume production elsewhere ? When a multi-billion dollar industry is threatened, I would expect them to take some of those billions and poop out new facilities at ludicrous speed.
If the alarm only sounds when the car is in motion, then fine, but that's not often the case.
My car's seatbelt alarm was even dumber than this: it would beep with the key on "accessory". If I was parked, and wanted to play the radio or turn on a reading light, it expected me to buckle up or suffer constant beeping after a 15 second warning timer. You know what ? FUCK THAT! I disabled the dumb thing. I'm responsible enough to put on a seatbelt when I'm driving/riding, I don't need a dumb resistor-capacitor circuit to remind me.
When in doubt, thermite!
If I'm in an accident so violent that a seatbelt alone can't keep me safe, the last thing I want is an explosively inflated balloon shooting toward my face, pushing my head and torso back into the seat at equally violent speeds. I would much rather have a stronger belt system that does a better job of keeping me in the seat in the first place.
I personally know two guys who were severely injured by airbags. One was a driver, he was hospitalized for weeks, because the airbag smacked him so hard it broke his left arm and dislocated his jaw. His passenger, who did not have an airbag, walked away with just cuts and bruises on from his head smashing the window. Seatbelt 1, Airbag -10.
The other guy was a passenger, in a newer car with passenger-side airbags. He suffered several fractured vertebrae and is paralyzed from the waist down. The real clincher is the car wasn't even in motion at the time: a drunk driver lost control on an icy road and swerved into the intersection. The drunk driver broke his leg, friendly driver had nothing but soiled underwear. Seatbelt 3, Airbag -9000.
So please, before repeating the crap you heard on TV, get yourself some first-hand facts. I used to think airbags were a good idea, back in the 80's and 90's when they were starting to catch on. My own car at the time didn't have any airbags, and I survived a terrifying roll completely unharmed, just with a seatbelt and hanging on to the wheel for dear life. The car looked like it had been in a compactor, and we found some debris flung 50 feet away. Didn't have an airbag, and didn't need one. Then my buddy got badly injured by an airbag, but I figured it was a freak accident, perhaps caused by excessive speed or odd positioning. It's not until I met the guy in the wheelchair that I started looking into studies about airbag injuries and fatalities, and the data isn't pretty. Airbags have been steadily improving over time, with many efforts focused on dynamically adjusting inflation speed/pressure, but there is still a LONG way to go before I'll be ready to trust an airbag. There are enough threats on the road, I don't want to be worrying about the devices inside my own freakin' car.
Agreed on all points.
A few years back, I needed a new cell phone. Despite being a big PC freak, I had avoided smartphones for a very long time. I preferred using a cheap phone, and a separate Palm Pilot. Anyway, when shopping for phones, I didn't know much about iPhones and Androids, so the wife and I decided to get one of each, with the option of swapping them, or replacing one outright if it sucked. Despite being Motorola's then-flagship, the XT720 was running an outdated version of Android, with no upgrade path whatsoever (fuck you, Moto!). It also lacked graphics acceleration and had a really irritating touchscreen. Next to the iPhone 3GS, the XT720 looked like a dinosaur - albeit one with a better camera. I really hate to say this, but it's a safe bet that the iPhone is what finally lured me over to the Apple side, after 30 years of mocking those hipsters.
As a mobile app developer dealing with all 4 platforms, the Android is only slightly less frustrating to work with than a Blackberry. Fragmentation means I have several dozen variations to worry about, between OS versions, display resolutions, vendor and hardware-specific quirks like cheapass displays and no multitouch. Let's not forget that many of these devices use CPUs that are way below spec, because there is no minimum hardware enforcement whatsoever, as long as it (eventually) boots... It just so happens that these shit devices make up a huge portion of the user base, as they tend to be flogged en-masse as the $49 upgrade with 2-3 year contracts, instead of a $0 flip-phone. You really cannot rely on any sort of baseline and that means Android apps tend to be sloppy unreliable messes, unless you're a big company with access to lots of testers. It's also a very tough business position to charge more for developing an Android port of an IOS app, when the perceived user base is much smaller. I don't know if it actually is, but clients always ask for the IOS version first, Android/BB second.
Apple, in limiting their hardware to 5 currently supported devices with backward compatibility, makes my job a whole lot easier. I don't even need one of each, I can do all my testing on an old 3GS and 1st-gen iPad, with the confidence that my app will look and work perfectly on their iPhone 4/4S and iPad2. Had Google enforced some sort of baseline device and support requirements, excluded some of the fly-by-night manufacturers, and actually provided first-party software updates instead of leaving users at the mercy of the hardware vendor, Android could have been a far more pleasant platform - but they fucked it up, and it's a bit late to fix it now. Sure, there are some outstanding Android devices out there, like Samsung's offerings, but only connaisseurs have them, so as a developer I still have to target the shitty knockoffs, lest I exclude 98% of the user base. Those few good Androids may as well be considered a separate platform...
If those people are too thrifty to suffer the complete movie theatre financial dick-punck, maybe they're not in the theatre in the first place. Maybe they're at home, grabbing the latest cams and eating cardboard flavoured store-brand popcorn and watery store-brand cola.
How many times have I looked at a theatre's "now showing" list for 10 minutes before deciding there wasn't anything worth seeing for $13 ? Even for blockbuster titles, I have a hard time justifying the expense unless I'm truly psyched about the movie, because the last time a movie gave me $13.worth of entertainment was 1998. I've watched several hundred movies since then, but they just fall short of expectations, very short.
Today's writers just don't know what the fuck they're doing anymore, it's all these ADD-afflected JJ Abrams types who can't juggle a single idea in their head long enough to carry it through. Few movies are either fun or thought-provoking from start to finish, the great majority are cheap whores that quite literally cram 90 seconds worth of punchy trailer material inside a hastily-edited snooze sandwich, with a "what-the-fuck" ending you can see coming before you even set foot inside the lobby. Poster with a guy and some chick staring into the distance ? SHE'S GONNA LOSE HER BABY (then get it back). There, I'm a fuckin' writer now, where's my goddamned Prius and Vitamin Water ?
I would love to see figures for unfilled seats, because most of the times I've been to the theatre, a week or two after release, there have been maybe 30-50 seats filled out of 600+, so it seems there's a big mindless rush on opening night, and then nothing for the remainder of the 6 to 12 week run. Six shows a day, and even if you rolled them all up into one, you'd still be half-empty. I'm not saying they should expect to sell out every show, every day, but 35% occupancy is usually a good baseline for other entertainment venues. How much money are they throwing down the drain with these shows nobody watches ?
If I look at indie theatres, they're packed four nights a week. Tickets are $6 to $8, popcorn and a large soda for $7, and they rarely screen garbage because with a single screen, they have to make it good or else they're going to bleed money that week. Okay, so the latest blockbuster probably won't be screened here until 4-6 weeks after its first run, but what do I care ? Do I need to watch MI4 right this freakin' second ? The megaplexes need to take a clue from the little guys and go back to a moviegoer-centric model, instead of their current role as Hollywood's captive gimp. Give US what WE want, and tell Hollywood to shape up or slip out. There are hundreds of thousands of films out there, spanning over a century, and a few of them are even worth seeing. Even if they stopped making movies forever, theatres could show old stuff and bring in audiences. I would absolutely love to see some 80's and 90's favorites on the big screen; hell I'd even pay to see Hardware with a bunch of B-movie dorks cheering on the bad robot, or bizarro classics like Spider Baby. Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's good.
It's briefly interesting that they can hit such numbers with LN2, but I fail to see much value in the exercise. To the best of my knowledge, increasing the core multiplier doesn't have any impact on the motherboard, it's all internal to the CPU. As long as the board's power circuitry can deliver enough voltage, you just need to dissipate the heat, hence the LN2. You could replicate this on a $100 board, as long as it's not a Biostar.
Really ?
Surely, some people must have wanted WWIII, else they wouldn't have started the whole "cold war" cockfight in the first place. Cold War = money and power for the fear factories. SOPA blackout = loss of money for these megacorps. I'd say they stand at polar opposites, as far as analogies go.
Forget Yahoo, they're a joke, but for Google, Amazon and Facebook to forgo 1/365th of their user-based income probably represents more cash than the sum of all the SOPA lobbyists' payola. If they really wanted to stomp SOPA, they would have bought it out like any other SIG.