The code is out there. Whenever the graphics folks want to start contributing, they can.
I think this is indicative of a disconnect.
There is an underlying assumption that even though the coders apparently can't do graphic design worth jack, that graphic designers can somehow code worth jack. Most graphic designers aren't coders, and most coders aren't graphic designers. The disciplines aren't mutually exclusive, but most in one field can't do much of value in the arts of the other field. Usually, it's better to have mutual cooperation than expect graphic designers to come in on their own.
It's even more than that, it links a certain IP address (you have to have a fixed IP), a certain registered domain to a specific business bank account. And in many places, you can't get that bank account without at least registering with a local bank. A typo domain spoof of a secure domain is possible, but I question why someone would go to that length. Getting registered also means that you get into the browser by default. If the browser spits out a nasty warning, a lot of users would go away, so any solution where the user has to manually add anything is probably going to cost money in lost sales.
I do agree that the cost is a bit much, $100/yr last I checked, but if you sell stuff, going with the free solution can easily cost more that that in a week's or a day's worth of lost business. You are probably better off either getting it if you maintain your own store software, or just using a reputable store services.
I think the original submission was horribly written, in part because of what you state. My home theater is very nice compared to most home movie watching setups but compared to theaters local to me, it's not nearly as good.
Maybe I've been lucky, but the few times I do go to a movie, I have had a very good experience, no phones, no babies, no (or few, but quiet) weenies talking, no sticky floors, comfortable seats in stadium arrangement.
I don't think DVD sales began to stagnate because they cut through the backlog, because even the sales of very popular top-tiear first released movies began to stagnate. I think it more like maybe most people have enough DVDs, or that the economy downturned, that fewer people have the time to watch them, or that there are other compelling entertainment options competing for the same dollar. How about Netflix? Maybe people decided that watching once was good enough. Someone might say that the current crop of movies is bad, but I have a list of catalog movies that I want to see some time, having never seen them.
Oddly the best buys around here have 1 cash line which is almost always slwoer then the 3 credit/debit lines. they know your strategies and are attempting to defeat you!
That's not my experience. Even if it was, I'm willing to jump to the credit lines if the line is too long anyway. If they want to pay that extra ~3% fee to take a charge after I've already made my purchase choices whereas taking cash with a couple anti-counterfeit measures costs a lot less, then that's their prerogative.
The global warming/cooling thing was covered on Science Friday. What was said is that there is literally 1000's of times more data points now than there existed in the 70's, and far better data collection systems to boot. As far as I know, global warming is considered a fact, the main thing being contended by the naysayers is that it's part of a natural cycle.
Dismissing global warming by itself is getting sillier and sillier. I mean, there was a South Atlantic hurricane a few years ago and it's the only hurricane ever recorded in to happen the South Atlantic, ever, and this happened in the temperate zone, not the tropics. It was NEC's Earth Simulator that predicted that it would form, so now climate simulations are apparently getting a lot more accurate. Before, the area was considered too cold for something to happen, what happened since then was not that the assumption was wrong, but that the area warmed up.
The people that claimed there were problems with emag causing cancer weren't scientists that I remember.
OEMs do not pay anything close to the retail price for Windows. The Starter Edition might not cost $50 each, though a system powerful enough to run Vista acceptably should be left to the existing market.
256MB may be the new minimum memory module for mass production. Which is fine, if the marginal cost is low enough. Usually, at the low end, there is a minimum where going below that isn't worth it because you make massive sacrifices to save a tiny percentage of money. There's little point in saving a paltry sum to get half the memory or less.
The problem is that the scatter of laser light that's intense enough to damage something is probably going to have enough scattering to cause blindness of people that see what's getting hit.
I don't care about angry MPAA fans and their mod points
I'll go along with SilentChris' incredulity. I don't remember any fans of the MPAA on slashdot, ever, at least since the DeCSS deal, and even then, the general mood against MPAA was chilly before that.
That doesn't mean the fans don't exist, but I'd think that they would be an insignificant minority. As such, they wouldn't have enough mod points to do anything about the seemingly legions of MPAA anti-fans that are on slashdot.
One problem is power. There isn't consistent power in many places. The OLPC unit has a wind-up crank for situations there is no power.
One advantage is part of Jet Blue's maintenance model. Standardizing on one design means that parts are probably easier to manage and inventory, and training and documentation can be simplified. And if you had to, you can part out one device and possibly make five other broken units, assuming the broken part in each unit is different. Working with donated computers means that there will probably be different generations of parts, different drivers (bigger drive images or more images), different CPU types, different types of memory, and the part you need might not be available.
Actually, you do have to be discriminatory which inkjet. My uncle gave my grandma one that prints crude photos and it was $90. To be fair, it was a multifunction, but none of those other functions were great either.
I didn't bag my ink cartriges, that's silly. I wrapped the entire printer in one large bag. It only takes a minute to set up and a minute to take down and wrap up. I don't print a lot of photos either, but just enough that I keep such a printer around.
I really haven't had such significant problems with ink drying like that, and I have left my inkjet printer unused for months at a time. The only special treatment I do is to wrap the printer in a large bag for storage in a closet. Years is silly because if you print that rarely, then you don't need a printer.
For general use, laser is fine, and that's what I use most of the time. Still, for quality photos, I'm not going to pretend that an inexpensive laser is going to do that as well as my inkjet can for picture quality.
BTW, just to add something off the wall, at the one desk I use for printing various things, I have four types of printers associated to just one computer. I can actually justify a fifth printer.
The simple fact is that inkjet printing is just a bad idea, no matter what the costs are. It can't compete in any way with laser printing technology, except by using marketing to take advantage of peoples' stupidity and shortsightedness.
I really don't think that's a universal case.
Laser printing has many advantages, but I still keep an inkjet around for photos. I just saw someone's fancy new color laser today and it's still clearly inferior to the inkjet photo prints that I get with my inkjet. To get a laser that's competitive in quality is prohibitively priced. In other words, if you care about photo quality for something that is consumer-affordable, then you'll have to do inkjet if you don't want to shlep over to a Kinko's or the like for every print. I think energy consumption on lasers is pretty high too.
I don't print often with my inkjet, between print sessions, I just wrap it in a big bag to protect it from the elements and put it in a closet.
Both platforms have so many different programs for digital content creation that it's not necessary to go to another platform to do a task. I was at a presentation where a person (IIRC, director Steve Odekerk) praised the Vegas program saying "now we don't have to go to the Mac" for video editing. I knew that was dumb because there are numerous high end video editing programs available for Windows. Each program does have strong points though, but if you've chosen a specific platform, then you shouldn't have a problem finding a program that best fits the need.
Personally, I have no problem using Windows or Macintosh, I use both and I use the one that best fits a given task.
Hard drives are fine for near-line backups, but they aren't very good for archival use. I expect the cost of drives and media to go down quicker than the cost of hard drives goes down. DVDs are something like a tenth the cost per GB, but the media trading does get to be tedious.
I agree. I do own a couple Macs and I get shot down on several occasions any time I said something that members of the Mac cult disagree with.
I don't assume that Apple is good and right all the time, and I don't assume they are wrong all the time. I think it's unfortunate that there are so many cultists out there, pro- or anti-Apple or Mac.
I think the open source people have had access to BR drives, they've been available for many months now. They seem to be more the type to try to make a free player, a lot of the free Mac players seem to be ports from Linux software.
if they cant provide the bandwidth they sold to their customers then they should be sued for fraud, not allowed to strip down and hobble what they advertised as "unlimited".
The ISPs contend that unlimited meant always-connected, not always maxed-out. I wish they didn't put that bit in the fine print of an ad, but I've seen it there.
Lesson to learn: don't oversell your bandwidth.
Bandwidth overselling is one way that that ISPs can give you an affordable rate. I've heard of ISP techs saying that they use as much as a 50:1 oversell rate and only very rarely does anyone notice. They aren't providing a guaranteed bandwidth, for that, they want more money, such as providing a more expensive service such as what they sell to businesses.
The company I dealt with for T1 usually had the connection up and running again in less than a day. I was dealing with a company that leased lines from a Ma Bell. My only problem was that Ma Bell was doing everything they can do to patch wires, swap pairs or add repeaters when they really should have laid down new wiring.
I had T1 to that was split between two businesses (mine and my parent's) and I also had an individual subscriber too (through wireless), the only way we could have gotten any form of decent broadband was a T1 because cable and DSL was too far away.
"you PC nicks"? What the hell? Dude, you might be surprised, but I do own a Mac Pro. Owning a Mac doesn't mean I have to be happy with everything about how Apple choses to offer it. I think it's sad that there's the Mac-heads that, not in so many words, but tell everyone else to put up or shut up. I think that's one reason people stay away from the platform. Jobs isn't a god and Apple computer is more or less just another company, but one with some nice products. The Apple cult shouldn't demand homogeneity, nor should it demand that people be happy with its very limited product line.
Mac Pro doesn't support PCI-X cards, only PCIe. This is one downside compared to the Dell 690, which is one of the closest analogues in the Dell line. The 690 supports PCIe and PCIx.
I suppose for the price difference, you might be able to afford to replace even some of the very expensive PCI-X cards you might hypothetically have and might still be less than a 690 with thee most similar specs. One thing I do like about non-Apple workstations is that you can buy with one socket populated now, and buy the second CPU & heat sink later when the chip gets cheaper and when more of your software supports more cores. With Apple, all systems are sold with both sockets populated, so the original purchase is a little more prohibitive, and any later upgrades are harder to justify.
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The code is out there. Whenever the graphics folks want to start contributing, they can.
I think this is indicative of a disconnect.
There is an underlying assumption that even though the coders apparently can't do graphic design worth jack, that graphic designers can somehow code worth jack. Most graphic designers aren't coders, and most coders aren't graphic designers. The disciplines aren't mutually exclusive, but most in one field can't do much of value in the arts of the other field. Usually, it's better to have mutual cooperation than expect graphic designers to come in on their own.
It's even more than that, it links a certain IP address (you have to have a fixed IP), a certain registered domain to a specific business bank account. And in many places, you can't get that bank account without at least registering with a local bank. A typo domain spoof of a secure domain is possible, but I question why someone would go to that length. Getting registered also means that you get into the browser by default. If the browser spits out a nasty warning, a lot of users would go away, so any solution where the user has to manually add anything is probably going to cost money in lost sales.
I do agree that the cost is a bit much, $100/yr last I checked, but if you sell stuff, going with the free solution can easily cost more that that in a week's or a day's worth of lost business. You are probably better off either getting it if you maintain your own store software, or just using a reputable store services.
I think the original submission was horribly written, in part because of what you state. My home theater is very nice compared to most home movie watching setups but compared to theaters local to me, it's not nearly as good.
Maybe I've been lucky, but the few times I do go to a movie, I have had a very good experience, no phones, no babies, no (or few, but quiet) weenies talking, no sticky floors, comfortable seats in stadium arrangement.
I don't think DVD sales began to stagnate because they cut through the backlog, because even the sales of very popular top-tiear first released movies began to stagnate. I think it more like maybe most people have enough DVDs, or that the economy downturned, that fewer people have the time to watch them, or that there are other compelling entertainment options competing for the same dollar. How about Netflix? Maybe people decided that watching once was good enough. Someone might say that the current crop of movies is bad, but I have a list of catalog movies that I want to see some time, having never seen them.
Peak power usage is in the daytime, but it's been noted that a lot of power is needed at night too. Solar panels don't work at night.
I think you'd get trouble for making a better recording than Britney or that one awful Simpson girl.
Maybe. Maybe in an odd twist, the Internet might actually become a large fleet of nano-trucks.
Oddly the best buys around here have 1 cash line which is almost always slwoer then the 3 credit/debit lines. they know your strategies and are attempting to defeat you!
That's not my experience. Even if it was, I'm willing to jump to the credit lines if the line is too long anyway. If they want to pay that extra ~3% fee to take a charge after I've already made my purchase choices whereas taking cash with a couple anti-counterfeit measures costs a lot less, then that's their prerogative.
The global warming/cooling thing was covered on Science Friday. What was said is that there is literally 1000's of times more data points now than there existed in the 70's, and far better data collection systems to boot. As far as I know, global warming is considered a fact, the main thing being contended by the naysayers is that it's part of a natural cycle.
Dismissing global warming by itself is getting sillier and sillier. I mean, there was a South Atlantic hurricane a few years ago and it's the only hurricane ever recorded in to happen the South Atlantic, ever, and this happened in the temperate zone, not the tropics. It was NEC's Earth Simulator that predicted that it would form, so now climate simulations are apparently getting a lot more accurate. Before, the area was considered too cold for something to happen, what happened since then was not that the assumption was wrong, but that the area warmed up.
The people that claimed there were problems with emag causing cancer weren't scientists that I remember.
OEMs do not pay anything close to the retail price for Windows. The Starter Edition might not cost $50 each, though a system powerful enough to run Vista acceptably should be left to the existing market.
256MB may be the new minimum memory module for mass production. Which is fine, if the marginal cost is low enough. Usually, at the low end, there is a minimum where going below that isn't worth it because you make massive sacrifices to save a tiny percentage of money. There's little point in saving a paltry sum to get half the memory or less.
More than that, you'll be probably be turned into a convenient stream of high energy particles.
The problem is that the scatter of laser light that's intense enough to damage something is probably going to have enough scattering to cause blindness of people that see what's getting hit.
I don't care about angry MPAA fans and their mod points
I'll go along with SilentChris' incredulity. I don't remember any fans of the MPAA on slashdot, ever, at least since the DeCSS deal, and even then, the general mood against MPAA was chilly before that.
That doesn't mean the fans don't exist, but I'd think that they would be an insignificant minority. As such, they wouldn't have enough mod points to do anything about the seemingly legions of MPAA anti-fans that are on slashdot.
One problem is power. There isn't consistent power in many places. The OLPC unit has a wind-up crank for situations there is no power.
One advantage is part of Jet Blue's maintenance model. Standardizing on one design means that parts are probably easier to manage and inventory, and training and documentation can be simplified. And if you had to, you can part out one device and possibly make five other broken units, assuming the broken part in each unit is different. Working with donated computers means that there will probably be different generations of parts, different drivers (bigger drive images or more images), different CPU types, different types of memory, and the part you need might not be available.
Actually, you do have to be discriminatory which inkjet. My uncle gave my grandma one that prints crude photos and it was $90. To be fair, it was a multifunction, but none of those other functions were great either.
I didn't bag my ink cartriges, that's silly. I wrapped the entire printer in one large bag. It only takes a minute to set up and a minute to take down and wrap up. I don't print a lot of photos either, but just enough that I keep such a printer around.
I really haven't had such significant problems with ink drying like that, and I have left my inkjet printer unused for months at a time. The only special treatment I do is to wrap the printer in a large bag for storage in a closet. Years is silly because if you print that rarely, then you don't need a printer.
For general use, laser is fine, and that's what I use most of the time. Still, for quality photos, I'm not going to pretend that an inexpensive laser is going to do that as well as my inkjet can for picture quality.
BTW, just to add something off the wall, at the one desk I use for printing various things, I have four types of printers associated to just one computer. I can actually justify a fifth printer.
The simple fact is that inkjet printing is just a bad idea, no matter what the costs are. It can't compete in any way with laser printing technology, except by using marketing to take advantage of peoples' stupidity and shortsightedness.
I really don't think that's a universal case.
Laser printing has many advantages, but I still keep an inkjet around for photos. I just saw someone's fancy new color laser today and it's still clearly inferior to the inkjet photo prints that I get with my inkjet. To get a laser that's competitive in quality is prohibitively priced. In other words, if you care about photo quality for something that is consumer-affordable, then you'll have to do inkjet if you don't want to shlep over to a Kinko's or the like for every print. I think energy consumption on lasers is pretty high too.
I don't print often with my inkjet, between print sessions, I just wrap it in a big bag to protect it from the elements and put it in a closet.
Both platforms have so many different programs for digital content creation that it's not necessary to go to another platform to do a task. I was at a presentation where a person (IIRC, director Steve Odekerk) praised the Vegas program saying "now we don't have to go to the Mac" for video editing. I knew that was dumb because there are numerous high end video editing programs available for Windows. Each program does have strong points though, but if you've chosen a specific platform, then you shouldn't have a problem finding a program that best fits the need.
Personally, I have no problem using Windows or Macintosh, I use both and I use the one that best fits a given task.
Hard drives are fine for near-line backups, but they aren't very good for archival use. I expect the cost of drives and media to go down quicker than the cost of hard drives goes down. DVDs are something like a tenth the cost per GB, but the media trading does get to be tedious.
I agree. I do own a couple Macs and I get shot down on several occasions any time I said something that members of the Mac cult disagree with.
I don't assume that Apple is good and right all the time, and I don't assume they are wrong all the time. I think it's unfortunate that there are so many cultists out there, pro- or anti-Apple or Mac.
I think the open source people have had access to BR drives, they've been available for many months now. They seem to be more the type to try to make a free player, a lot of the free Mac players seem to be ports from Linux software.
if they cant provide the bandwidth they sold to their customers then they should be sued for fraud, not allowed to strip down and hobble what they advertised as "unlimited".
The ISPs contend that unlimited meant always-connected, not always maxed-out. I wish they didn't put that bit in the fine print of an ad, but I've seen it there.
Lesson to learn: don't oversell your bandwidth.
Bandwidth overselling is one way that that ISPs can give you an affordable rate. I've heard of ISP techs saying that they use as much as a 50:1 oversell rate and only very rarely does anyone notice. They aren't providing a guaranteed bandwidth, for that, they want more money, such as providing a more expensive service such as what they sell to businesses.
The company I dealt with for T1 usually had the connection up and running again in less than a day. I was dealing with a company that leased lines from a Ma Bell. My only problem was that Ma Bell was doing everything they can do to patch wires, swap pairs or add repeaters when they really should have laid down new wiring.
I had T1 to that was split between two businesses (mine and my parent's) and I also had an individual subscriber too (through wireless), the only way we could have gotten any form of decent broadband was a T1 because cable and DSL was too far away.
"you PC nicks"? What the hell? Dude, you might be surprised, but I do own a Mac Pro. Owning a Mac doesn't mean I have to be happy with everything about how Apple choses to offer it. I think it's sad that there's the Mac-heads that, not in so many words, but tell everyone else to put up or shut up. I think that's one reason people stay away from the platform. Jobs isn't a god and Apple computer is more or less just another company, but one with some nice products. The Apple cult shouldn't demand homogeneity, nor should it demand that people be happy with its very limited product line.
Sounds a lot like a high-end Mac Pro (shipping for months)
The eight core Mac Pro was released exactly three weeks ago, Wed. April 4, not months ago.
Mac Pro doesn't support PCI-X cards, only PCIe. This is one downside compared to the Dell 690, which is one of the closest analogues in the Dell line. The 690 supports PCIe and PCIx.
I suppose for the price difference, you might be able to afford to replace even some of the very expensive PCI-X cards you might hypothetically have and might still be less than a 690 with thee most similar specs. One thing I do like about non-Apple workstations is that you can buy with one socket populated now, and buy the second CPU & heat sink later when the chip gets cheaper and when more of your software supports more cores. With Apple, all systems are sold with both sockets populated, so the original purchase is a little more prohibitive, and any later upgrades are harder to justify.