It takes more than some "badass camera equipment" to get a Streetview-like interface to your vacation photos. Someone has to write the software, which is going to be either extremely non-trivial and time-consuming, or monumentally expensive.
I know I'll be modded down for this, but it seems that the best, most efficient, and cheapest answer to this problem is as follows:
If you feel so strongly abotu sharing your vacation with people you know, then take some of them with you.
And then, gasp, instead of spending huge piles of money so that you can occupy your vacation fucking with technology that nobody wants to use anyway (Hey, Martha! Look! George sent more pictures of the LOVELY GREAT FUCKING TIME HE'S HAVING over there! Start the fire!), you'll be able to take a few folks who might actually be interested in this stuff along with you.
Just a thought.
(And: To answer the original question of, "Can I do this?" No. No, you can't. Don't bother. Give up.)
Make any distinction you like -- just make it bloody distinct.
In your analogy, damning all hackers is like damning all painters. Go ahead and hate the taggers if that's what you're up to, but don't hate all painters just because someone happens to paint things of no value in places where it doesn't belong.
According to this guy, IE using visitors account for only about 14% of the crowd here on Slashdot, and the number is shrinking.
And, personally, I agree with all of the meanings of "hacker" shown at Wikipedia here on the disambiguation page, though I'd personally prefer to extend it to also include the classic MIT usage, since that seems to be where the word originated to begin with.
But it's all just hacking. Whether you're hacking kernels, or browsers, websites, electronics, cars, or something else entirely. Please note that any of these examples of "hacking" may be either constructive, destructive, altruistic, malicious, glorious, or psychotic -- it's still just hacking, as done by hackers.
Therefore, to damn all hackers is to damn a whole class of people for their mindset and their methodology. Such broad damnation will be unfairly damning to good folks who haven't done a damned thing wrong.
It ain't "the city." It's another small town in Ohio, that happens to be a whole fuckton dirtier than I wish to tolerate, and about 30 miles from here. Ohio only really has about 5 cities, proper: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Cleveland, and maybe Toledo. This isn't any of them.
And, yeah: I guess you could say I chose not to try to sell my house in one of the most down realestate markets in recent history. But then you might also say that I've simply chosen not to be a fucking fool.
Oh, but they're both oh so very...1996! That's the problem! Yeah! They need more AJAX Web 2.0 Javascripted-to-death bullshit, or nobody will respect them. Haven't they ever heard of Ruby? On Rails? Sheesh. Why don't they just get with the program already? Why aren't there Flash games built into the advertisements, for fuck's sake? Everyone knows you need a Flash game built into your banner ads before the crowds will come.
(This post is extremely tongue-in-cheek, since the first useful web page I ever found about Linux was http://sunsite.unc.edu/~mdw. This was the page of Matt Welsh, then dictator of the Linux Documentation Project. Before that, everything I learned came from actually reading Usenet, and digging around with FTP. Aside from Matt's book, Running Linux, that is. After I found Matt's page, replete with well-written and complete HOWTOs along with news, I didn't need any more help. And then Slashdot and Freshmeat happened, and I stopped caring about Matt's efforts. And then, sadly, both of the latter were bought out and it's been downhill since.)
Indeed. Most of the desktop computers at work are 3-5 year old Dell Dimensions with P4 Celerons running XP. And these aren't just idling along: The industry-specific quasi-web-based POS system they run is heavily intertwined with ActiveX, Java, and Acrobat, with bizarre hooks into strange hardware like signature pads, in an environment where time is money.
We fix them when they break (which isn't bloody often and usually consists of either a software or a power supply failure), and feed them more RAM periodically. New machines (we're growing) get 2 gigs of RAM because it's cheap these days. Most of the old ones are slugging along just fine, and have generally been upgraded to at least 768MB.
The next big performance boost would probably be to upgrade the hard drive for something faster, but that's generally labor-intensive, and getting close to the point where it'd be cheaper to replace the whole thing with something new.
The CPU? Geez. The machine spends its life thrashing the disk looking for DLLs or whatever, not number-crunching. A 2GHz-ish Celeron is brilliantly fast for this application.
I live in a nice, small city (about 40k) in Ohio. I've lived in the same town my entire life. I worked for a local branch of a slightly regional company. They closed the division I worked for, and moved my job to their home office, 30 miles away.
They paid hourly for my drive time, and for my gas. The arrangement has changed some now that I drive a company truck instead of my own car, but it's still similar to what it was.
Now, I like my job. And I like my town. And I'm a homeowner (and also was one when my job moved). I'm not moving to that other city (let's call it Ghettotropolis, complete with burned-out houses, street-walking hookers, and lots of crack), for any amount of money. Where I come from, folks lock their doors sometimes. Where my job moved to, crackheads will smash your car window to get the change out of the ashtray.
Not. Fucking. Happening.
So, what to do? Do you propose that I find another job nearer to home? Nevermind that there aren't even any local companies which are in even remotely the same trade.
I do work from home quite a bit, nowadays, which helps. But still: I haven't CHOSEN to commute. I've only chosen to keep my job. And it's a good job - in a time of cutbacks and layoffs and late bills, this company is having the best couple of years that it's ever seen.
It isn't always someone's personal decision to be a commuter.
I done told you once: I don't care if it's illegal or not. I'm totally uninterested in discussing the law as it stands.
Laws exist to be enforced and, and to change with the needs of the people. You don't seem to like the law(s) much, as it relates to your own bloody car, either.
The issue is whether you would mind. I think everyone in America should mind if a cop can put a hidden tracking device on a car without any formal process or scrutiny. I don't particularly care if it's currently a legal thing to do or not.
But, you know, it's cool. Since you're OK with it as long as there's no damage, I'll zip-tie a big photo of Barney to your left-front wheel next time I see your car on the street. And I'm going to hang a long string of tin cans from your rear towing hook while I'm at it, too. If you have those fancy wipers that can be stood away from the window to facilitate cleaning, I'll pull those up for you, too. And I'll leave your gas cap cover open.
And I don't know if you ever ride a bicycle, but if you do: Look out. I'm about to endeavor on a mission to tie pink and white streamers to the ends the handlebars of all of bicycles I see unattended in public. Two thirds of these will also get a treatment of baseball cards in the spokes.
It's a free speech thing, you see: I'm attempting to say, by doing these things, that your thoughts on the subject are absurd.
I'm pretty picky about my vehicles, though. I don't particularly want anyone fidgeting with anything on them, no matter how harmless, no matter where they might be parked.
Do you really care so little about your property that you really wouldn't mind if I stuck a few fliers to the bottom of it with some neodymium magnets? Really?
What if I just velcro them to the spokes on the wheels?
Can I stick a non-adhesive vinyl cling to the rear of the trunk lid on your car that says "BABIES - THE OTHER WHITE MEAT," where you're unlikely to see it right away but everyone behind you in traffic will?
A line must be drawn somewhere. Is physical damage really where it should be?
I bring you this: A battery-powered GPS tracker with integrated tri-band GSM, for $123 delivered. Just epoxy a magnet on there somewhere, and stick it someplace where it won't get wet. There's no audio, and the battery life is probably only a few days, but the latter is something that can easily be fixed by any enterprising geek.
Fliers on the window are different in their visibility. This is a magnetically-attached thing which you aren't even supposed to know is there -- it is deliberately hidden.
Can I show up at your house and toss a handful of magnets on the bottom of your car? I know it's a pretty silly thing to be doing, but, well - at least I'm not hurting anything, right?
Can I use those same magnets to attach a flier to the button of your car?
Beside my house is a grass alley[1], owned by the city. Someone, at some point, dumped a bunch of gravel on it and called it a "driveway." And while it is, in fact, the only reasonable way to enter my property, and it was, in fact, only ever improved by the former property owner (instead of with public money), it's still public land. And it's still my driveway, though the neighbors sometimes use it too.
So, yeah. Seems realistic to me.
Come to think of it, I also have a spot in front of the house on the treelawn[2], which is covered in stone and used for parking. This might also be considered a "driveway" in a manner of speaking, but it's also public land. I guess, then, it might be reasonable to say that my house has two driveways, and that both of them are public.
[1]: A grass alley, for those who don't know, is just like any other alley in a grid-system neighborhood. It's just never been paved. Technically, you can drive down any of them, even though it might sometimes seem like you're just going through someone's back yard. They use them a lot in my neighborhood for utility right-of-ways.
[2]: The land between the sidewalk and the paved street, here at least, is typically public, and is not included in the real estate parcel.
For power supplies, weight is a fine metric. All of those copper windings and capacitors and heatsinks are heavy, and so is the chassis needed to properly support them.
Worser power supplies use fewer parts, and weigh less.
Part of the Alienware fancy-pants RGB LED lighting is a strange little circuit board at the bottom of the case, with some dip switches to select color a large array of SMD resistors.
It had an issue wherein only certain LEDs could do certain colors, and the behavior would change a bit upon applying a slight technical tap to the card.
So I called them. They sent a tech out to replace it. Works fine, now. (I could've replaced it myself, but I wanted to see exactly how well their services worked.)
Perhaps the support person you spoke to was an idiot.
To expound my previous point: I don't trust programs to be well-written. I don't trust programs to not execute data when they should only be reading that data. I don't trust file extensions, and I don't trust metadata. Hell, I don't even trust metadata to be totally non-executable.
Meanwhile, my wife and I each have an Alienware desktop PC.
Why? Well, first, we each needed a new computer. The motherboard was dead on her venerable Dell desktop, and Dell's case was sufficiently strange to preclude replacing that component by itself. Later, I wanted a box to play games on, without disturbing my Linux desktop machine.
Second: The price was right. Before we bought these computers, I did the usual sanity check against Newegg. After buying putting a whole PC worth of good components of similar specification into my cart, the price difference was about $100.
Yeah - $100.
For that hundred bucks, one gets a very fancy ATX case which is easy to work on. Working audio ports on the front which interface properly with the sound card (instead of stupid rear-panel pass-through crap), such that the sound card can detect when headphones are plugged in and reconfigure itself automatically. An in-home service agreement. A PC which doesn't need assembled, but just unpacked and plugged in.
And unlike most prebuilt machines, when they're first turned on, they just boot Windows. I don't have to spend a couple of hours removing extraneous crap software. It comes up and behaves about the same way a new PC would if I'd have taken the time to build it myself and install Windows with a base load of drivers, except I didn't have to do it myself.
Meanwhile, they use about the same parts I'd have chosen myself if I were building a new PC. Good DVD-R, XFX video, fancy-pants motherboard with lots of expansion. The power supply is nameless, but is every bit as heavy as a good power supply ought to be. It included the same Logitech mouse I'd have bought myself. So on, so forth.
And it's pretty.
I don't think Alienware's pricing is out-of-line at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear AC,
It takes more than some "badass camera equipment" to get a Streetview-like interface to your vacation photos. Someone has to write the software, which is going to be either extremely non-trivial and time-consuming, or monumentally expensive.
Vacations, by and large, are cheap in comparison.
What's 1GB of RAM these days? $12? Sheesh.
Vista has far cheaper memory requirements than any other released version of desktop Windows, to date.
I know I'll be modded down for this, but it seems that the best, most efficient, and cheapest answer to this problem is as follows:
If you feel so strongly abotu sharing your vacation with people you know, then take some of them with you.
And then, gasp, instead of spending huge piles of money so that you can occupy your vacation fucking with technology that nobody wants to use anyway (Hey, Martha! Look! George sent more pictures of the LOVELY GREAT FUCKING TIME HE'S HAVING over there! Start the fire!), you'll be able to take a few folks who might actually be interested in this stuff along with you.
Just a thought.
(And: To answer the original question of, "Can I do this?" No. No, you can't. Don't bother. Give up.)
Make any distinction you like -- just make it bloody distinct.
In your analogy, damning all hackers is like damning all painters. Go ahead and hate the taggers if that's what you're up to, but don't hate all painters just because someone happens to paint things of no value in places where it doesn't belong.
Actually...
According to this guy, IE using visitors account for only about 14% of the crowd here on Slashdot, and the number is shrinking.
And, personally, I agree with all of the meanings of "hacker" shown at Wikipedia here on the disambiguation page, though I'd personally prefer to extend it to also include the classic MIT usage, since that seems to be where the word originated to begin with.
But it's all just hacking. Whether you're hacking kernels, or browsers, websites, electronics, cars, or something else entirely. Please note that any of these examples of "hacking" may be either constructive, destructive, altruistic, malicious, glorious, or psychotic -- it's still just hacking, as done by hackers.
Therefore, to damn all hackers is to damn a whole class of people for their mindset and their methodology. Such broad damnation will be unfairly damning to good folks who haven't done a damned thing wrong.
What, you mean like this guy? You probably wouldn't even have the browser you're using right now if it weren't for that particular, uh. hacker.
It ain't "the city." It's another small town in Ohio, that happens to be a whole fuckton dirtier than I wish to tolerate, and about 30 miles from here. Ohio only really has about 5 cities, proper: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Cleveland, and maybe Toledo. This isn't any of them.
And, yeah: I guess you could say I chose not to try to sell my house in one of the most down realestate markets in recent history. But then you might also say that I've simply chosen not to be a fucking fool.
Seriously? Did you know it was a discussion about stress-based CPU throttling? WTF. Over!
Oh, but they're both oh so very...1996! That's the problem! Yeah! They need more AJAX Web 2.0 Javascripted-to-death bullshit, or nobody will respect them. Haven't they ever heard of Ruby? On Rails? Sheesh. Why don't they just get with the program already? Why aren't there Flash games built into the advertisements, for fuck's sake? Everyone knows you need a Flash game built into your banner ads before the crowds will come.
(This post is extremely tongue-in-cheek, since the first useful web page I ever found about Linux was http://sunsite.unc.edu/~mdw. This was the page of Matt Welsh, then dictator of the Linux Documentation Project. Before that, everything I learned came from actually reading Usenet, and digging around with FTP. Aside from Matt's book, Running Linux, that is. After I found Matt's page, replete with well-written and complete HOWTOs along with news, I didn't need any more help. And then Slashdot and Freshmeat happened, and I stopped caring about Matt's efforts. And then, sadly, both of the latter were bought out and it's been downhill since.)
Indeed. Most of the desktop computers at work are 3-5 year old Dell Dimensions with P4 Celerons running XP. And these aren't just idling along: The industry-specific quasi-web-based POS system they run is heavily intertwined with ActiveX, Java, and Acrobat, with bizarre hooks into strange hardware like signature pads, in an environment where time is money.
We fix them when they break (which isn't bloody often and usually consists of either a software or a power supply failure), and feed them more RAM periodically. New machines (we're growing) get 2 gigs of RAM because it's cheap these days. Most of the old ones are slugging along just fine, and have generally been upgraded to at least 768MB.
The next big performance boost would probably be to upgrade the hard drive for something faster, but that's generally labor-intensive, and getting close to the point where it'd be cheaper to replace the whole thing with something new.
The CPU? Geez. The machine spends its life thrashing the disk looking for DLLs or whatever, not number-crunching. A 2GHz-ish Celeron is brilliantly fast for this application.
But to add stress in order to shave a few Watts?
I'm all for cleaning up the mess we've made of things, but not if it makes my personal environment less tolerable by design.
I'm not masochistic enough for this technology.
I commute, but I didn't choose to.
I live in a nice, small city (about 40k) in Ohio. I've lived in the same town my entire life. I worked for a local branch of a slightly regional company. They closed the division I worked for, and moved my job to their home office, 30 miles away.
They paid hourly for my drive time, and for my gas. The arrangement has changed some now that I drive a company truck instead of my own car, but it's still similar to what it was.
Now, I like my job. And I like my town. And I'm a homeowner (and also was one when my job moved). I'm not moving to that other city (let's call it Ghettotropolis, complete with burned-out houses, street-walking hookers, and lots of crack), for any amount of money. Where I come from, folks lock their doors sometimes. Where my job moved to, crackheads will smash your car window to get the change out of the ashtray.
Not. Fucking. Happening.
So, what to do? Do you propose that I find another job nearer to home? Nevermind that there aren't even any local companies which are in even remotely the same trade.
I do work from home quite a bit, nowadays, which helps. But still: I haven't CHOSEN to commute. I've only chosen to keep my job. And it's a good job - in a time of cutbacks and layoffs and late bills, this company is having the best couple of years that it's ever seen.
It isn't always someone's personal decision to be a commuter.
Mod parents up, please.
And then we can all go home. This is an easy problem to solve once you see it from the right angle, and that angle is described above.
I done told you once: I don't care if it's illegal or not. I'm totally uninterested in discussing the law as it stands.
Laws exist to be enforced and, and to change with the needs of the people. You don't seem to like the law(s) much, as it relates to your own bloody car, either.
So, let's change it.
Dig?
The issue is whether you would mind. I think everyone in America should mind if a cop can put a hidden tracking device on a car without any formal process or scrutiny. I don't particularly care if it's currently a legal thing to do or not.
But, you know, it's cool. Since you're OK with it as long as there's no damage, I'll zip-tie a big photo of Barney to your left-front wheel next time I see your car on the street. And I'm going to hang a long string of tin cans from your rear towing hook while I'm at it, too. If you have those fancy wipers that can be stood away from the window to facilitate cleaning, I'll pull those up for you, too. And I'll leave your gas cap cover open.
And I don't know if you ever ride a bicycle, but if you do: Look out. I'm about to endeavor on a mission to tie pink and white streamers to the ends the handlebars of all of bicycles I see unattended in public. Two thirds of these will also get a treatment of baseball cards in the spokes.
It's a free speech thing, you see: I'm attempting to say, by doing these things, that your thoughts on the subject are absurd.
Yes. The absurdity of it is so thick it can be cut with a knife. But that's how it is . . .
Dunno if it's a crime or not.
I'm pretty picky about my vehicles, though. I don't particularly want anyone fidgeting with anything on them, no matter how harmless, no matter where they might be parked.
Do you really care so little about your property that you really wouldn't mind if I stuck a few fliers to the bottom of it with some neodymium magnets? Really?
What if I just velcro them to the spokes on the wheels?
Can I stick a non-adhesive vinyl cling to the rear of the trunk lid on your car that says "BABIES - THE OTHER WHITE MEAT," where you're unlikely to see it right away but everyone behind you in traffic will?
A line must be drawn somewhere. Is physical damage really where it should be?
Less than $500?
I bring you this: A battery-powered GPS tracker with integrated tri-band GSM, for $123 delivered. Just epoxy a magnet on there somewhere, and stick it someplace where it won't get wet. There's no audio, and the battery life is probably only a few days, but the latter is something that can easily be fixed by any enterprising geek.
And the countermeasure: A $32.29 GPS jammer.
Fliers on the window are different in their visibility. This is a magnetically-attached thing which you aren't even supposed to know is there -- it is deliberately hidden.
Can I show up at your house and toss a handful of magnets on the bottom of your car? I know it's a pretty silly thing to be doing, but, well - at least I'm not hurting anything, right?
Can I use those same magnets to attach a flier to the button of your car?
My driveway is public.
Beside my house is a grass alley[1], owned by the city. Someone, at some point, dumped a bunch of gravel on it and called it a "driveway." And while it is, in fact, the only reasonable way to enter my property, and it was, in fact, only ever improved by the former property owner (instead of with public money), it's still public land. And it's still my driveway, though the neighbors sometimes use it too.
So, yeah. Seems realistic to me.
Come to think of it, I also have a spot in front of the house on the treelawn[2], which is covered in stone and used for parking. This might also be considered a "driveway" in a manner of speaking, but it's also public land. I guess, then, it might be reasonable to say that my house has two driveways, and that both of them are public.
[1]: A grass alley, for those who don't know, is just like any other alley in a grid-system neighborhood. It's just never been paved. Technically, you can drive down any of them, even though it might sometimes seem like you're just going through someone's back yard. They use them a lot in my neighborhood for utility right-of-ways.
[2]: The land between the sidewalk and the paved street, here at least, is typically public, and is not included in the real estate parcel.
For power supplies, weight is a fine metric. All of those copper windings and capacitors and heatsinks are heavy, and so is the chassis needed to properly support them.
Worser power supplies use fewer parts, and weigh less.
Part of the Alienware fancy-pants RGB LED lighting is a strange little circuit board at the bottom of the case, with some dip switches to select color a large array of SMD resistors.
It had an issue wherein only certain LEDs could do certain colors, and the behavior would change a bit upon applying a slight technical tap to the card.
So I called them. They sent a tech out to replace it. Works fine, now. (I could've replaced it myself, but I wanted to see exactly how well their services worked.)
Perhaps the support person you spoke to was an idiot.
I expect you to be a mind reader, of course. ;)
To expound my previous point: I don't trust programs to be well-written. I don't trust programs to not execute data when they should only be reading that data. I don't trust file extensions, and I don't trust metadata. Hell, I don't even trust metadata to be totally non-executable.
'Tis just how it is . . .
*shrug*
I've been building PCs for decades.
Meanwhile, my wife and I each have an Alienware desktop PC.
Why? Well, first, we each needed a new computer. The motherboard was dead on her venerable Dell desktop, and Dell's case was sufficiently strange to preclude replacing that component by itself. Later, I wanted a box to play games on, without disturbing my Linux desktop machine.
Second: The price was right. Before we bought these computers, I did the usual sanity check against Newegg. After buying putting a whole PC worth of good components of similar specification into my cart, the price difference was about $100.
Yeah - $100.
For that hundred bucks, one gets a very fancy ATX case which is easy to work on. Working audio ports on the front which interface properly with the sound card (instead of stupid rear-panel pass-through crap), such that the sound card can detect when headphones are plugged in and reconfigure itself automatically. An in-home service agreement. A PC which doesn't need assembled, but just unpacked and plugged in.
And unlike most prebuilt machines, when they're first turned on, they just boot Windows. I don't have to spend a couple of hours removing extraneous crap software. It comes up and behaves about the same way a new PC would if I'd have taken the time to build it myself and install Windows with a base load of drivers, except I didn't have to do it myself.
Meanwhile, they use about the same parts I'd have chosen myself if I were building a new PC. Good DVD-R, XFX video, fancy-pants motherboard with lots of expansion. The power supply is nameless, but is every bit as heavy as a good power supply ought to be. It included the same Logitech mouse I'd have bought myself. So on, so forth.
And it's pretty.
I don't think Alienware's pricing is out-of-line at all.
YMMV.