"The company in North America would just say "we want software that does x."
My experience as a consultant is that the "does x" is something like "increases sales" or "reduces costs".
Most of project management and software design is translating "does x" into a set of requirements that can be realised as a piece of software.
If you do not have an ability to map business requirements to software requirements in-house the likelihood of getting something usable from an offshore development company is akin to winning the Powerball lottery.
Bombadill is only interesting if you are looking at understanding Tolkien as a person and the history of the writing of his body of work. Bombadill otherwise has no importance to the story.
I do miss the barrow-downs as it touches on important back-story for LoTR, and is especially important because it is where Merry gets the sword that helps defeat the Witch King of Angmar (the leader of the Nazgul).
It is strange how this backstory appears here and there in the movies. For example, the Ring of Barahir. Nowhere else in the movies is the old lineage and the deep relationship between Elrond and Aragorn hinted at.
Re:Wrong. Apple offers a $99 battery replacement
on
"iPod's Dirty Secret"
·
· Score: 1
so the ipodsdirtysecret dot something might have been quite right when it started
Maybe, maybe not. Clearly the release date for it was after Apple started offering the $99 replacement, and was WELL after 3rd party repair solutions were on the market.
"neither of them had as easy a time refusing to take it"
Others in LoTR had no problem resisting the Ring. Bombadil. Aragorn. Elrond. Frodo only succumbed after carrying around for over a year under very difficult conditions.
It's just a matter of your quality.
Peter Jackson butchered Faramir and Fanghorn's character in the movie adaptation. Nonetheless, he did a far better job of it than anyone had a right to expect. Andy Serkis deserves an Oscar.
"Aging is a concern with most Li-ion batteries. For unknown reasons, battery manufacturers are silent about this issue. Some capacity deterioration is noticeable after one year, whether the battery is in use or not. Over two or perhaps three years, the battery frequently fails."
Apple's engineers sat down one day, desinged the cheapest battery in the world that barely met all the requirements, and laughed as they increased Job's profit margin and screwed the end user with an inferior product.
I don't think Apple is designing batteries. Like every other box vendor they are buying technologies available from others.
Re:And a third-party iPod battery costs... $50.
on
"iPod's Dirty Secret"
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Opening the case of a consumer electornic device more often than not voids the warranty.
Irrelevant in this case since if the iPod is under warranty Apple will fix it for you for the mailing costs.
Would you pop open the case of your VCR and replace the damaged or worn out heads?
Probably not because I don't have the equipment to do the alignment etc.
You can't compare this to ram, hard drives or any replaceable computer part.
I have seen plenty of PC's where installation of RAM requires pulling the power supply, something I consider beyond most end users.
The fact of the matter is that this article is total nonsense. Apple offers a $99 replacement service, and there are companies like PDA smart that will replace the battery for you for $69.
Ugh. If your iPod is under warranty and the battery dies, Apple will fix it for free. No need to put in a 3rd party battery if the iPod is still under warranty.
I told him the serial, he told me to frigg off.
Apple states specifically that they don't support some types of G3's on some versions of OS X. For example OS X 10.3 requires a G3 with USB.
If Apple states on the box that you need a certain hardware level to run a given version of the OS, I think they are well within their rights to tell you to 'frigg off'.
Wrong. Apple offers a $99 battery replacement
on
"iPod's Dirty Secret"
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I have to laugh when people make such sweeping generalizations. The fact is that for some companies IT doesn't matter. These are old school operations where pretty much every last opportunity for optimization has already been exploited.
But for other companies the answer is very different. Business conditions are such that applications of technologies make large economic differences to the company.
There are a number of sources for such things. If I was looking for a list of great papers I would look in Citations Classics - papers selected based on thier frequency of citation by other papers. I would also look in the bibliographies of text books and dissertations. Articles in review journals are also expected to have very strong bibliographies.
They could be built now, from radioactive waste, using the same really simple technology used aboard space missions..
You mean the plutonium thermopiles used on deep space probes? Aside from the fact they have deadly radiation levels and very high temperature and use the deadliest substance known to man and if enough of them were collected you could make a nuclear bomb, this is perfect.
the only thing the USPTO considers as prior art are previous patents, until the said patent challenged in the courts.
Not true at all. The USPTO does dog food as a preference, but if you try to patent something and include references to scientific literature in the patent, it is quite likely that the examiner will turn around and use those references against you.
Please try to remember that the abstract of a patent doesn't mean a single thing legally.
Not to mention that this is merely a patent application which could claim the sun, moon and stars as a starting point for negotiations as to what the issued patent would cover.
The following things are known to adversely affect CD-R life:
- Application of anything to the CD-R surface that is soluble in the plastic (generally polycarbonate) medium that constitutes the disk. This includes label adhesives and inks. One thing that is definitely safe is water based formulations such as what is used in the CD marking pens sold by TDK. I have personally seen enough CD-R's marked with Sharpies fail to never want to use these markers on a CD-R.
- Direct exposure to sunlight or exposure to temperatures above 40 C. With some of the crappier dye formulations out there this can lead to failure in as little as 1/2 hour.
- Use of poor quality media. Princo and other Tiawanese based CD-R manufacturers have a very bad track record. The best media is based on a gold stabilized dye formulation invented and sold by Mitsui. Kodak was a licensee of this until they got out of the CD-R manufacturing biz. (The only way you will get my cache of Kodak Gold media is by prying it out of my cold dead hands.) Kodak published estimates of 200 year lifetimes for it's Gold Ultima media. Mitsui is the same chemistry and should work just as well. I have never seen a Kodak Gold CD-R fail, including after having been left on a car dashboard in direct summer sunshine. Generally media manufactured in Japanese plants is usually ok for normal use. Be careful - outfits like TDK, Fujifilm etc. sell from several sources. Buy the ones made in Japan, not the ones made in Taiwan. For critical stuff like family pictures, tax data, etc. go for the gold.
And didn't they both set out to accomplish the same task (convey Christian morals and stories through books) through slightly differtent mediums? (Chronicles of Narnia, i.e. Children's Books vs Novels)
C.S. Lewis was actually an atheist until his talks with Tolkien led him to convert.
However the roots of LOTR also strongly lie with pre-Christain northern European mythologies, the Icelandic sagas, Beowulf, and even MacBeth. Of course there is a great deal in common with the these cultures and Christianity, but I don't see LOTR as a Christian allegory the way Narnia is at all. There is no redeemer or forgiveness of sins. Tolkien is even an Icelandic family name.
Wow, this sounded AWESOME, but oh no, they only allow this upconversion to take place over the DVI connection. Why you ask? Copy protection, the powers that be would not allow samsung to send high res upconverted video over an analog connection which could easily be recorded.
Bravo's DVD player with DVI does not require HCP, so your theory is rather shot. Also, a big reason for using DVI for 1080i upconverted video is that elimination of the digital - analog - digital conversion steps yield much higher picture quality.
Personally, I deferred making an HDTV purchase last year because of the HCP/DVI rumors (and rapidly declining prices) that were floating around as long as two years ago. I'm sorry that you got bitten by this, but the information about these issues has been widely available for a long time.
It's all about protecting their bottom line, not to mention that the ones who make the money aren't necessarily the ones who create the content.
I guess you forgot how the concept of investment works. Artist A wants to make a movie but can't fund it himself. Studio foots the bill. Movie gets made. Studio makes profit on investment in movie.
If Microsoft is the operating system of choice, even if the choice is watered down since most people get Windows free (or not free but seemingly so while paying for it in OEM costs) and prefer it, even if that choice is made out of laziness, how is that forcing their hand?
People's hands get forced because Microsoft doesn't make Office available on any x86 OS other than Windows, Office uses proprietary file formats, and people HAVE to be able to read and generate Office file formats. As soon as you get into an arena like web servers, X-Box, etc. where Office is not a factor, MS struggles.
I still think it's important to implement Charles Simonyi's ideas (as well as Alan Kay's and Doug Englebart's and Steve Wozniak's and all the others who believe that the computer can serve as a tool to liberate people).
All coolness, but how does that eliminate the need for humans to deal with complexity? It's still there at some level in the system until you build a system that can eliminate complexity adaptively. When you do that there will be no need for human beings any more.
Slashdot Mirror
We can forgive the Wachowski bros for not knowing interesting answers to the interesting questions.
The first Matrix movie was cool. The second two were milking a franchise and ripping off movie viewers for commercial gain.
"The company in North America would just say "we want software that does x."
My experience as a consultant is that the "does x" is something like "increases sales" or "reduces costs".
Most of project management and software design is translating "does x" into a set of requirements that can be realised as a piece of software.
If you do not have an ability to map business requirements to software requirements in-house the likelihood of getting something usable from an offshore development company is akin to winning the Powerball lottery.
Why do you want Tom Bombadill?
Bombadill is only interesting if you are looking at understanding Tolkien as a person and the history of the writing of his body of work. Bombadill otherwise has no importance to the story.
I do miss the barrow-downs as it touches on important back-story for LoTR, and is especially important because it is where Merry gets the sword that helps defeat the Witch King of Angmar (the leader of the Nazgul).
It is strange how this backstory appears here and there in the movies. For example, the Ring of Barahir. Nowhere else in the movies is the old lineage and the deep relationship between Elrond and Aragorn hinted at.
so the ipodsdirtysecret dot something might have been quite right when it started
Maybe, maybe not. Clearly the release date for it was after Apple started offering the $99 replacement, and was WELL after 3rd party repair solutions were on the market.
"neither of them had as easy a time refusing to take it"
Others in LoTR had no problem resisting the Ring. Bombadil. Aragorn. Elrond. Frodo only succumbed after carrying around for over a year under very difficult conditions.
It's just a matter of your quality.
Peter Jackson butchered Faramir and Fanghorn's character in the movie adaptation. Nonetheless, he did a far better job of it than anyone had a right to expect. Andy Serkis deserves an Oscar.
Since when do LI-Ion batteries DIE? Since when?
Since always. Li-ion batteries often show failure at 2 years.
Li-ion
"Aging is a concern with most Li-ion batteries. For unknown reasons, battery manufacturers are silent about this issue. Some capacity deterioration is noticeable after one year, whether the battery is in use or not. Over two or perhaps three years, the battery frequently fails."
Apple's engineers sat down one day, desinged the cheapest battery in the world that barely met all the requirements, and laughed as they increased Job's profit margin and screwed the end user with an inferior product.
I don't think Apple is designing batteries. Like every other box vendor they are buying technologies available from others.
Opening the case of a consumer electornic device more often than not voids the warranty.
Irrelevant in this case since if the iPod is under warranty Apple will fix it for you for the mailing costs.
Would you pop open the case of your VCR and replace the damaged or worn out heads?
Probably not because I don't have the equipment to do the alignment etc.
You can't compare this to ram, hard drives or any replaceable computer part.
I have seen plenty of PC's where installation of RAM requires pulling the power supply, something I consider beyond most end users.
The fact of the matter is that this article is total nonsense. Apple offers a $99 replacement service, and there are companies like PDA smart that will replace the battery for you for $69.
but of course, this will void your "warranty"
Ugh. If your iPod is under warranty and the battery dies, Apple will fix it for free. No need to put in a 3rd party battery if the iPod is still under warranty.
I told him the serial, he told me to frigg off.
Apple states specifically that they don't support some types of G3's on some versions of OS X. For example OS X 10.3 requires a G3 with USB.
If Apple states on the box that you need a certain hardware level to run a given version of the OS, I think they are well within their rights to tell you to 'frigg off'.
here
Voodoo specs the unit at 8 lbs, but our test unit weighted in at 9 lbs, 4 oz.
Yeah, and when you buy it, the carrier will list the shipping weight at 12 lbs, but you will charged by your vendor for shipping 14 lbs.
But some proved unproductive and were fired
I bet that the cost of firing and replacing these employees was larger than the savings associated with the open seating plan. By far.
I have to laugh when people make such sweeping generalizations. The fact is that for some companies IT doesn't matter. These are old school operations where pretty much every last opportunity for optimization has already been exploited.
But for other companies the answer is very different. Business conditions are such that applications of technologies make large economic differences to the company.
Making such a broad characterization is silly.
Actually the fatal dose by ingestion of plutonium is about 0.5 g. 10 g will kill you pretty quick.
Arsenic requires about 0.12 grams.
"Poisoning", J.M. Arena, C.C. Thomas, 1963,pp. 53, 54, 119.
This is of course short term chemical toxicity. Radiation effects are much longer term and require much smaller doses to induce metastisizing tumors.
There are a number of sources for such things. If I was looking for a list of great papers I would look in Citations Classics - papers selected based on thier frequency of citation by other papers. I would also look in the bibliographies of text books and dissertations. Articles in review journals are also expected to have very strong bibliographies.
They could be built now, from radioactive waste, using the same really simple technology used aboard space missions..
You mean the plutonium thermopiles used on deep space probes? Aside from the fact they have deadly radiation levels and very high temperature and use the deadliest substance known to man and if enough of them were collected you could make a nuclear bomb, this is perfect.
Brilliant.
the only thing the USPTO considers as prior art are previous patents, until the said patent challenged in the courts.
Not true at all. The USPTO does dog food as a preference, but if you try to patent something and include references to scientific literature in the patent, it is quite likely that the examiner will turn around and use those references against you.
Please try to remember that the abstract of a patent doesn't mean a single thing legally.
Not to mention that this is merely a patent application which could claim the sun, moon and stars as a starting point for negotiations as to what the issued patent would cover.
The following things are known to adversely affect CD-R life:
- Application of anything to the CD-R surface that is soluble in the plastic (generally polycarbonate) medium that constitutes the disk. This includes label adhesives and inks. One thing that is definitely safe is water based formulations such as what is used in the CD marking pens sold by TDK. I have personally seen enough CD-R's marked with Sharpies fail to never want to use these markers on a CD-R.
- Direct exposure to sunlight or exposure to temperatures above 40 C. With some of the crappier dye formulations out there this can lead to failure in as little as 1/2 hour.
- Use of poor quality media. Princo and other Tiawanese based CD-R manufacturers have a very bad track record. The best media is based on a gold stabilized dye formulation invented and sold by Mitsui. Kodak was a licensee of this until they got out of the CD-R manufacturing biz. (The only way you will get my cache of Kodak Gold media is by prying it out of my cold dead hands.) Kodak published estimates of 200 year lifetimes for it's Gold Ultima media. Mitsui is the same chemistry and should work just as well. I have never seen a Kodak Gold CD-R fail, including after having been left on a car dashboard in direct summer sunshine. Generally media manufactured in Japanese plants is usually ok for normal use. Be careful - outfits like TDK, Fujifilm etc. sell from several sources. Buy the ones made in Japan, not the ones made in Taiwan. For critical stuff like family pictures, tax data, etc. go for the gold.
And didn't they both set out to accomplish the same task (convey Christian morals and stories through books) through slightly differtent mediums? (Chronicles of Narnia, i.e. Children's Books vs Novels)
C.S. Lewis was actually an atheist until his talks with Tolkien led him to convert.
However the roots of LOTR also strongly lie with pre-Christain northern European mythologies, the Icelandic sagas, Beowulf, and even MacBeth. Of course there is a great deal in common with the these cultures and Christianity, but I don't see LOTR as a Christian allegory the way Narnia is at all. There is no redeemer or forgiveness of sins. Tolkien is even an Icelandic family name.
Sounds like the Delphic Lottery from Larry Niven's Ringworld and related stories.
Larry should have taken out a patent on it.
Wow, this sounded AWESOME, but oh no, they only allow this upconversion to take place over the DVI connection. Why you ask? Copy protection, the powers that be would not allow samsung to send high res upconverted video over an analog connection which could easily be recorded.
Bravo's DVD player with DVI does not require HCP, so your theory is rather shot. Also, a big reason for using DVI for 1080i upconverted video is that elimination of the digital - analog - digital conversion steps yield much higher picture quality.
Personally, I deferred making an HDTV purchase last year because of the HCP/DVI rumors (and rapidly declining prices) that were floating around as long as two years ago. I'm sorry that you got bitten by this, but the information about these issues has been widely available for a long time.
It's all about protecting their bottom line, not to mention that the ones who make the money aren't necessarily the ones who create the content.
I guess you forgot how the concept of investment works. Artist A wants to make a movie but can't fund it himself. Studio foots the bill. Movie gets made. Studio makes profit on investment in movie.
What exactly is wrong with that?
If Microsoft is the operating system of choice, even if the choice is watered down since most people get Windows free (or not free but seemingly so while paying for it in OEM costs) and prefer it, even if that choice is made out of laziness, how is that forcing their hand?
People's hands get forced because Microsoft doesn't make Office available on any x86 OS other than Windows, Office uses proprietary file formats, and people HAVE to be able to read and generate Office file formats. As soon as you get into an arena like web servers, X-Box, etc. where Office is not a factor, MS struggles.
I still think it's important to implement Charles Simonyi's ideas (as well as Alan Kay's and Doug Englebart's and Steve Wozniak's and all the others who believe that the computer can serve as a tool to liberate people).
All coolness, but how does that eliminate the need for humans to deal with complexity? It's still there at some level in the system until you build a system that can eliminate complexity adaptively. When you do that there will be no need for human beings any more.
How is it ironic that the company that invented the microprocessor be the market leader in desktop computers that are based on microprocessors?