I use a desktop, I don't care about my battery life there.
No, you care about your power bill and your circuit breaker. (And, FWIW, LCDs or other large-watt power savers are more important than processors at the moment...)
It's the fan in my pc that's loud not the processor. even small fans make noise.
You only need a fan in your PC because of your too-hot processor. My first two computers didn't have any fan outside of the power supply.
I still have a couple Pentium I with MMX running and without a hitch. How much longer are you talking about?
About that long. CPUs didn't start to get Too Hot until after the Pentium I.
So basically what your saying is, regardless of what you may actually plan on doing with that information, you should automatically be considered suspicious and investigated?
Yes.
A mere investigation is not, can not, and never will be a violation of anyone's rights. So long as the officers have a reasonable lead and aren't simply randomly investigating people, there is NOTHING wrong with it.
If I went out and bought a gun tomorrow in cash, or happened to fit the description of someone who committed a crime, or just happened to walk into a falaffel house when the FBI thinks a terrorist cell is meeting, I would be investigated. I might even be haulted down to the federal building and yelled at.
Investigations happen. Forget death or taxes--the only constant in life is that people will judge you, and when you do suspicious things they'll suspect you of doing something wicked.
Does this free viewer run on other OSs (Mac, Linux)?
Not AFAIK. Mac, maybe. But both Linux and Mac have, essentially, free-as-in-beer DOC readers.
Can you cut the text from the viewer and paste into another word processing app?
YES!
Hell, why doesn't Adobe make a word processing version of Acrobat?
Because PDFs are a pain in the butt to edit, and, at current, it simply wouldn't make much sense. (As I understand it, the PDF file model has each line of text as a seperate entry in the file--which means that it'd be well nigh impossible to do a descent PDF writer.)
Then again, maybe they just have an agreement with MS to not compete; Adobe doesn't try to out-Word Word, and MS doesn't try to out-Acrobat Acrobat.
Duh. Two technologies, one free, the other having outrageous royalties... which would you pick?
I, like everyone else with enough sense to use AMD instead of Intel, would add up the cost of using each of them--including the royalty cost and the value of any performance increase the new tech has over the open one--and pick the one that does what I need done.
And that royalties on technology is bad, m'kay?
are, bad. ARE bad. Or, rather, are NOT bad, just a thing that happens. (They're actually a basic idea behind the whole patent process--we essentially pay people to tell us what they've invented, and in exchange we give them a right to charge royalties on anyone who wants to use that invention for a relatively short while. Based on the USA's performance since we intorudced the patent system, I'd say it works.)
What's bad, btw, is companies thinking that they have a right to their customers, and suing to get MORE customers. Talk about abuse of the legal system.
(hint--your answer is the reason why MS 4 doesn't do all you need.)
the newest office is a thousand times the size and uses so much more cpu and ram but does no more.
Wrong. Office does a LOT more. Tasks that used to require running a specific process now run idly in the background, multiple times in-between keystrokes. If my PC falls behind me in typing now, I know that there's a problem--not just that I'm typing too fast.
Of course, the world would be a cleaner place if MS made up their minds between "easy to use" and "powerful", instead of trying to be both and failing miserably at each.
Microsoft will not survive if it keeps making larger and larger demands of the hardware market.
Ever try doing a USENET search for that subject? You can probably find the same arguments throught MS's history--and the market doesn't seem to be doing anything with them yet.
As such, have you planned for the hereafter, and if so, how?"
Every password I have for a meaningful username (i.e., no GalaxisOnline) is known by someone else--either my employer or my wife.
If I were to die tomorrow, my wife--as executor of my estate--would be able to post on my/., Livejournal, and webpage that I have passed away, and do with the myriad bits of data as she sees fit.
Any/.er who isn't married is, actually, in a very simliar situation. Create a way that your executor--whomever has to handle your affairs when you're dead, either your eldest adult child or your parents as a default--can get in and correct everything upon your death.
If you have enough meaningful wealth that you need real estate planing, just mention it to your lawyer when you write up a will. You might even want to pay him to be the executor of your estate, and entrust him with a "user is dead" password to retrieve data and take care of the regular "I'm dead" messages.
Too bad Bush won't allow the U.S. to fund this fantastic, useful research because it clashes with his religious ideals
Step back, oh, sixty-seventy years.
"Too bad the UK won't allow this stunning new Eugenics research, because it clashes with their religious ideals. I mean, it's not like they're PEOPLE or anything."
Stopping research because of religiously-based morals has a long and time-honored tradition, that didn't start with Bush and won't go away when he leaves office.
That said, Bush is just fine with companies doing research with "morally obtained" stem cells. I don't recall what the criteria is, but I do believe that "not from abortion" is a big one, and that about twenty (out of 100 or so) of the extant stem-cell lines qualify.
You may not agree with Speiglman's views or his portrayal of them.
Screw the comic book debate. I want to clear this point up.
It is entirely possible to critizise someone and point out a shortcoming without disagreeing with them. I'm not some brain-dead freak who thinks that the Jews caused the Holocaust, or that there isn't literary merit in works about it. I just know that, as a matter of our black and white society, whatever crimes the pre-WWII Jews might have done are ignored because of the Holocaust.
That said, back to the discussion at hand.
Is this any different from books, movies, television, radio, music, and theatre in the impossible and fantastic characters and situations they depict? Again, me central point is that the medium of expression does not in any way dictate or limit what you can express with it
But it does. It does in so many ways, that thinking that you can really seperate the medium and the story you're telling is at best sophmoric. When an artist attempts to do a comic book that isn't superhero or fantastic, as often as not it simply comes out bad.
In fact, it's not just comics that color and affect as a medium of expression. Movies, novels, paintings, television shows, radio dramas, music, dance, spoken word, performance art, and every other possible kind of artistic medium imposes its own limits and requirements upon art done in its medium.
I must correct my previous statement. "Superhero" should be amended to "Superhero and/or fantasy-like [fantastic, fanciful]".
Maus by Art Speiglman
And, despite the clear historical wave Art rode, he still chose to render the characters as animals. (And, like most Holocaust retellings, its imagery absolves the victims of any wrongdoing they might have done. Just because a serial killer murders an adulterer doesn't mean that the adulterer should be posthumously fogiven.)
Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore
A love triangle is hardly new to comic books. The Superman/Lois Lane/Clark Kent love triange is a clever take on a classic literary device, and even the X-Men and Fantastic Four have love triangles between the characters.
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.
The Sandman is, by an objective measure, a "superhero." So are the Watchmen (also Gaiman, IIRC)--who, as I understand them, very much reflect the intertwining of comics and the impossible people they show, be they talking mice, men who can withstand bullets, or cosmic characters of godlike power.
Chemical rockets would only be needed for manuvering thrusters and station-keeping activities, and for the very short burst to get away from Phobos. Some of this could even be manufactured on Phobos as a back-up reserve supply (just in case).
What makes you think that we can't make small-scale ion drives for manuvering? Some chemical rockets for QUICK manuvering are good, but ion drives can work nearly as well for most manuvering.
With the sole exception of trying to get an Ion Propusion engine going
Check your research, buddy. We've built a working Ion drive before--and we even landed it, IIRC, on a comet.
You might be thinking of getting a large-scale ion drive that puts out a sufficient ammount of thrust to be a primary interplantary engine. But, AFAIK, that's just a question of scale, voltage, and how much Xe you can carry.
humans are fragile, require massive resources (living quarters, food, oxygen, water etc), and are error-prone--
Stop. Humans are more adaptable and "reprogrammable" than any computer we've ever designed. And we handle radiation better than a computer of the same weight, too.
The best reason to send humans as soon as we know enough to do it is that they can adapt, repair, and we know far more about human intelligence than we EVER will about artificial intelligence--and when we finally do get sentient AI, expect the necessary hardware to be every bit as resource-hungry as humans.
Of course remote-controlling stuff is very slow, but it still requires less resources and time than to put actual people into space.
And when a mission fails, we don't have black flags of mourning across the world and the launch mechanism shelved for a year. There is a solid place for probes, and of COURSE we will always send probes first. But when we want to do more than map or test a handful of technologies, sending humans is, and always will be, the right thing to do.
Now, I like comic books the same as anyone else. And I like art--real art, which says something--as much as anyone. And I know that comic books are art.
But I don't look for violent action in ballet.
It is a foolish thing to supose that comic books, a medium born from superheroes, will ever change dramatically to something that is not very much superherolike. You may as well demand that publicly aired television become more than a simple-story setup. Even the most "mature" television art still neatly breaks into episodes--which is simply part of the medium.
Comic books aren't all about superheroes because of the relatively stagnant market or any real artisitc barrier preventing them from being about, oh, an ordinary family dealing with a divorce. What keeps them about superheroes and locked into the superhero formula is part and parcel of what makes a comic book a comic book.
That said, there's nothing that says a comic book can't tell whatever story it wants--it just has to be against the backdrop of superheroes and supervillians. (And, while I'm making my arrogant claims, there's nothing that says just because someone's story is old means it isn't good, or that just because a story is new means that it's worth the paper it's printed on.)
In the comic industry, things are just starting to open up
Only if by "just starting" you mean "fifteen years ago."
As for Marvel and DC--they generally follow the very-defunct "comics code" (aside from the things like "never show cleavage" that, believe it or not, Marvel tossed out before Image or Sandman) because that's their target audience. Just like you'll never seen hardcore nudity on Nickelodeon.
The last thing we need is a version of the CCA for games. Imagine if all major retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart stopped carrying anything with an ESRB rating higher than E (everyone)? You would definitely see a shift in what projects publishers would fund. Many of the most critically acclaimed games would never see the light of day, as the publishers couldn't hope to recoup development and publishing costs.
Yeah. Ever since the MPAA was founded, we haven't seen any R or XXX rated films...
. But the placement of pedals, shifter, etc. has no inherent meaning (other than they're easily reachable by limbs). We grow up watching our parents drive, so we're used to it, and don't notice the training so much, but it is very much a learned experience.
Knowing what does what is learned--but once you learn it, it reacts exactly as it should. (Push harder, get more effect.)
A good example of the same sort of good design is the gun. Learning how it works requires someone to tell you or you to figure it out by chance (which, with a loaded gun, isn't that hard), but once you know what the basic is, it works exactly as you think it should. Especially with a modern semiautomatic.
right click and look is not particularly better than "click the menu at the top", is it?
It's a hell of a lot worse, because (1) it requires an action before any visual feedback, which has no parable in the real world, and (2) it isn't the standard, so it's very hard to pull off.
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned."
You read and write English, obviously. If I were to hand you a list of directions written in Swahili, would you be able to follow along?
If I handed you a list of direction in English--or French, which is related to but different from English--you'd be much faster, wouldn't you?
The word "intuitive" doesn't mean "I know it genetically". It means "it works like I think it should work" or "I don't need any training". Part of this is not breaking conventions when you don't have to, and another part is making sure that the system's interface makes sense.
A car is intuitive. Tell someone how five controls work (steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, turn signal, gear shifter), and they can learn the rest in a day. And each of those controls works almost exactly as it should work--turning the wheel faster makes the car turn faster, pushing the gas or brake harder makes the car accellerate faster or brake sooner, etc., etc.
GIMP, OTOH, isn't intuitive. "right click and look around for what you want" really doesn't make a lot of sense, and everyone and their brother I've seen has a problem looking for a tool in the GIMP.
The universal connector thing is only useful if you already have devices that make use of it. For anyone starting from scratch, this new setup is much, much easier.
So, if you decide that the acessories are worthless and you never want one--yes, then the mini-USB is worthwhile.
But EVERY accessory that you might want--a cradle, a keyboard, a GPS module, an extended battery, etc--either uses the Universal Connector or the power-wasting IR port. And the very-nice ones don't do anything but the UC.
Slashdot Mirror
Some rebuttals.
I use a desktop, I don't care about my battery life there.
No, you care about your power bill and your circuit breaker. (And, FWIW, LCDs or other large-watt power savers are more important than processors at the moment...)
It's the fan in my pc that's loud not the processor. even small fans make noise.
You only need a fan in your PC because of your too-hot processor. My first two computers didn't have any fan outside of the power supply.
I still have a couple Pentium I with MMX running and without a hitch. How much longer are you talking about?
About that long. CPUs didn't start to get Too Hot until after the Pentium I.
So basically what your saying is, regardless of what you may actually plan on doing with that information, you should automatically be considered suspicious and investigated?
Yes.
A mere investigation is not, can not, and never will be a violation of anyone's rights. So long as the officers have a reasonable lead and aren't simply randomly investigating people, there is NOTHING wrong with it.
If I went out and bought a gun tomorrow in cash, or happened to fit the description of someone who committed a crime, or just happened to walk into a falaffel house when the FBI thinks a terrorist cell is meeting, I would be investigated. I might even be haulted down to the federal building and yelled at.
Investigations happen. Forget death or taxes--the only constant in life is that people will judge you, and when you do suspicious things they'll suspect you of doing something wicked.
Does this free viewer run on other OSs (Mac, Linux)?
Not AFAIK. Mac, maybe. But both Linux and Mac have, essentially, free-as-in-beer DOC readers.
Can you cut the text from the viewer and paste into another word processing app?
YES!
Hell, why doesn't Adobe make a word processing version of Acrobat?
Because PDFs are a pain in the butt to edit, and, at current, it simply wouldn't make much sense. (As I understand it, the PDF file model has each line of text as a seperate entry in the file--which means that it'd be well nigh impossible to do a descent PDF writer.)
Then again, maybe they just have an agreement with MS to not compete; Adobe doesn't try to out-Word Word, and MS doesn't try to out-Acrobat Acrobat.
Duh. Two technologies, one free, the other having outrageous royalties... which would you pick?
I, like everyone else with enough sense to use AMD instead of Intel, would add up the cost of using each of them--including the royalty cost and the value of any performance increase the new tech has over the open one--and pick the one that does what I need done.
And that royalties on technology is bad, m'kay?
are, bad. ARE bad. Or, rather, are NOT bad, just a thing that happens. (They're actually a basic idea behind the whole patent process--we essentially pay people to tell us what they've invented, and in exchange we give them a right to charge royalties on anyone who wants to use that invention for a relatively short while. Based on the USA's performance since we intorudced the patent system, I'd say it works.)
What's bad, btw, is companies thinking that they have a right to their customers, and suing to get MORE customers. Talk about abuse of the legal system.
is that ms word 4 did all I need
And you aren't still using it why?
(hint--your answer is the reason why MS 4 doesn't do all you need.)
the newest office is a thousand times the size and uses so much more cpu and ram but does no more.
Wrong. Office does a LOT more. Tasks that used to require running a specific process now run idly in the background, multiple times in-between keystrokes. If my PC falls behind me in typing now, I know that there's a problem--not just that I'm typing too fast.
Of course, the world would be a cleaner place if MS made up their minds between "easy to use" and "powerful", instead of trying to be both and failing miserably at each.
Microsoft will not survive if it keeps making larger and larger demands of the hardware market.
Ever try doing a USENET search for that subject? You can probably find the same arguments throught MS's history--and the market doesn't seem to be doing anything with them yet.
As such, have you planned for the hereafter, and if so, how?"
/., Livejournal, and webpage that I have passed away, and do with the myriad bits of data as she sees fit.
/.er who isn't married is, actually, in a very simliar situation. Create a way that your executor--whomever has to handle your affairs when you're dead, either your eldest adult child or your parents as a default--can get in and correct everything upon your death.
Every password I have for a meaningful username (i.e., no GalaxisOnline) is known by someone else--either my employer or my wife.
If I were to die tomorrow, my wife--as executor of my estate--would be able to post on my
Any
If you have enough meaningful wealth that you need real estate planing, just mention it to your lawyer when you write up a will. You might even want to pay him to be the executor of your estate, and entrust him with a "user is dead" password to retrieve data and take care of the regular "I'm dead" messages.
I've seen how Dreamweaver (4) handles page "themes".
You probably haven't seen the latest version, then. Go download the free demo, and see the improvements.
Dreamweaver has acceptable HTML now--as does, allegedly, MS Frontpage.
How do the stem cells know when to *stop* growing the tooth?
Via the excact same mechanism they do in every human being already, maybe?
Oh, and human tissue that grows out of control doesn't become huge and monstrous. It becomes cancer, and kills its own flesh & blood.
Too bad Bush won't allow the U.S. to fund this fantastic, useful research because it clashes with his religious ideals
Step back, oh, sixty-seventy years.
"Too bad the UK won't allow this stunning new Eugenics research, because it clashes with their religious ideals. I mean, it's not like they're PEOPLE or anything."
Stopping research because of religiously-based morals has a long and time-honored tradition, that didn't start with Bush and won't go away when he leaves office.
That said, Bush is just fine with companies doing research with "morally obtained" stem cells. I don't recall what the criteria is, but I do believe that "not from abortion" is a big one, and that about twenty (out of 100 or so) of the extant stem-cell lines qualify.
You may not agree with Speiglman's views or his portrayal of them.
Screw the comic book debate. I want to clear this point up.
It is entirely possible to critizise someone and point out a shortcoming without disagreeing with them. I'm not some brain-dead freak who thinks that the Jews caused the Holocaust, or that there isn't literary merit in works about it. I just know that, as a matter of our black and white society, whatever crimes the pre-WWII Jews might have done are ignored because of the Holocaust.
That said, back to the discussion at hand.
Is this any different from books, movies, television, radio, music, and theatre in the impossible and fantastic characters and situations they depict? Again, me central point is that the medium of expression does not in any way dictate or limit what you can express with it
But it does. It does in so many ways, that thinking that you can really seperate the medium and the story you're telling is at best sophmoric. When an artist attempts to do a comic book that isn't superhero or fantastic, as often as not it simply comes out bad.
In fact, it's not just comics that color and affect as a medium of expression. Movies, novels, paintings, television shows, radio dramas, music, dance, spoken word, performance art, and every other possible kind of artistic medium imposes its own limits and requirements upon art done in its medium.
Where does "need superhero" fit there?
I must correct my previous statement. "Superhero" should be amended to "Superhero and/or fantasy-like [fantastic, fanciful]".
Maus by Art Speiglman
And, despite the clear historical wave Art rode, he still chose to render the characters as animals. (And, like most Holocaust retellings, its imagery absolves the victims of any wrongdoing they might have done. Just because a serial killer murders an adulterer doesn't mean that the adulterer should be posthumously fogiven.)
Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore
A love triangle is hardly new to comic books. The Superman/Lois Lane/Clark Kent love triange is a clever take on a classic literary device, and even the X-Men and Fantastic Four have love triangles between the characters.
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.
The Sandman is, by an objective measure, a "superhero." So are the Watchmen (also Gaiman, IIRC)--who, as I understand them, very much reflect the intertwining of comics and the impossible people they show, be they talking mice, men who can withstand bullets, or cosmic characters of godlike power.
Chemical rockets would only be needed for manuvering thrusters and station-keeping activities, and for the very short burst to get away from Phobos. Some of this could even be manufactured on Phobos as a back-up reserve supply (just in case).
What makes you think that we can't make small-scale ion drives for manuvering? Some chemical rockets for QUICK manuvering are good, but ion drives can work nearly as well for most manuvering.
With the sole exception of trying to get an Ion Propusion engine going
Check your research, buddy. We've built a working Ion drive before--and we even landed it, IIRC, on a comet.
You might be thinking of getting a large-scale ion drive that puts out a sufficient ammount of thrust to be a primary interplantary engine. But, AFAIK, that's just a question of scale, voltage, and how much Xe you can carry.
humans are fragile, require massive resources (living quarters, food, oxygen, water etc), and are error-prone--
Stop. Humans are more adaptable and "reprogrammable" than any computer we've ever designed. And we handle radiation better than a computer of the same weight, too.
The best reason to send humans as soon as we know enough to do it is that they can adapt, repair, and we know far more about human intelligence than we EVER will about artificial intelligence--and when we finally do get sentient AI, expect the necessary hardware to be every bit as resource-hungry as humans.
Of course remote-controlling stuff is very slow, but it still requires less resources and time than to put actual people into space.
And when a mission fails, we don't have black flags of mourning across the world and the launch mechanism shelved for a year. There is a solid place for probes, and of COURSE we will always send probes first. But when we want to do more than map or test a handful of technologies, sending humans is, and always will be, the right thing to do.
standpoint [of] artistic maturity
Now, I like comic books the same as anyone else. And I like art--real art, which says something--as much as anyone. And I know that comic books are art.
But I don't look for violent action in ballet.
It is a foolish thing to supose that comic books, a medium born from superheroes, will ever change dramatically to something that is not very much superherolike. You may as well demand that publicly aired television become more than a simple-story setup. Even the most "mature" television art still neatly breaks into episodes--which is simply part of the medium.
Comic books aren't all about superheroes because of the relatively stagnant market or any real artisitc barrier preventing them from being about, oh, an ordinary family dealing with a divorce. What keeps them about superheroes and locked into the superhero formula is part and parcel of what makes a comic book a comic book.
That said, there's nothing that says a comic book can't tell whatever story it wants--it just has to be against the backdrop of superheroes and supervillians. (And, while I'm making my arrogant claims, there's nothing that says just because someone's story is old means it isn't good, or that just because a story is new means that it's worth the paper it's printed on.)
In the comic industry, things are just starting to open up
Only if by "just starting" you mean "fifteen years ago."
As for Marvel and DC--they generally follow the very-defunct "comics code" (aside from the things like "never show cleavage" that, believe it or not, Marvel tossed out before Image or Sandman) because that's their target audience. Just like you'll never seen hardcore nudity on Nickelodeon.
Actually, the very nice ones (think GPS) use bluetooth
Got a link? Last I heard, there weren't any bluetooth GPS modules.
The last thing we need is a version of the CCA for games. Imagine if all major retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart stopped carrying anything with an ESRB rating higher than E (everyone)? You would definitely see a shift in what projects publishers would fund. Many of the most critically acclaimed games would never see the light of day, as the publishers couldn't hope to recoup development and publishing costs.
Yeah. Ever since the MPAA was founded, we haven't seen any R or XXX rated films...
. But the placement of pedals, shifter, etc. has no inherent meaning (other than they're easily reachable by limbs). We grow up watching our parents drive, so we're used to it, and don't notice the training so much, but it is very much a learned experience.
Knowing what does what is learned--but once you learn it, it reacts exactly as it should. (Push harder, get more effect.)
A good example of the same sort of good design is the gun. Learning how it works requires someone to tell you or you to figure it out by chance (which, with a loaded gun, isn't that hard), but once you know what the basic is, it works exactly as you think it should. Especially with a modern semiautomatic.
right click and look is not particularly better than "click the menu at the top", is it?
It's a hell of a lot worse, because (1) it requires an action before any visual feedback, which has no parable in the real world, and (2) it isn't the standard, so it's very hard to pull off.
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned."
You read and write English, obviously. If I were to hand you a list of directions written in Swahili, would you be able to follow along?
If I handed you a list of direction in English--or French, which is related to but different from English--you'd be much faster, wouldn't you?
The word "intuitive" doesn't mean "I know it genetically". It means "it works like I think it should work" or "I don't need any training". Part of this is not breaking conventions when you don't have to, and another part is making sure that the system's interface makes sense.
A car is intuitive. Tell someone how five controls work (steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, turn signal, gear shifter), and they can learn the rest in a day. And each of those controls works almost exactly as it should work--turning the wheel faster makes the car turn faster, pushing the gas or brake harder makes the car accellerate faster or brake sooner, etc., etc.
GIMP, OTOH, isn't intuitive. "right click and look around for what you want" really doesn't make a lot of sense, and everyone and their brother I've seen has a problem looking for a tool in the GIMP.
To-ga To-ga To-ga.
Lingere.
paint.
Its invasive and i refuse to walk around notifying my purchasing habits
So you walk around naked, in home-made clothes?
The universal connector thing is only useful if you already have devices that make use of it. For anyone starting from scratch, this new setup is much, much easier.
So, if you decide that the acessories are worthless and you never want one--yes, then the mini-USB is worthwhile.
But EVERY accessory that you might want--a cradle, a keyboard, a GPS module, an extended battery, etc--either uses the Universal Connector or the power-wasting IR port. And the very-nice ones don't do anything but the UC.
(Since when was using DIFFERENT parts cheaper?)
When the cost savings of using a less-expensive part is greater than the economy of scale for using the same part.
No, I agree. The crippling of the Zires is a major PITA.
I've heard speculation that it was done just for cost savings reasons. *sigh*