"Moon Rocket Scrubbed and Blown Dry" is not a good choice of words. When a launch is postponed it's said to be "scrubbed." And "blown dry" does not evoke the right image because of "scrubbed." If you want to have fun with a headline make it internally consistent so readers will get the joke. A better choice would have been "Moon Rocket Gets a Wash and Blow Dry."
Methinks Comrade Radoslaw is wearing his underwear a little too tight.
Let's get one thing right, right now, right here all you programmers and system analysts:
The user is your GOD! YOU serve the USER. YOU make systems and appplications that give the USER maximum flexibility. What the USER wants is paramount. If you think the user is abusing your metaphor (sheesh!) it's because your mind ain't right. Get right with your god. Listen. Serve. Adapt. Obey.
Yeah I know I'm flaming but this is no troll. I'm just sick and tired of the insanely arrogant attitude that SOME (I emphasize some, but it's too many) developers have towards the people who feed and clothe them.
One bright spot in the gloom of the high tech bust is that it drove some of these characters into careers more suited to their attitudes, like being prison guards.
The article states "HDTV offers only a 30-degree field of view horizontally, whereas UHDV's massive screen size expands this to about 100 degrees"
Uhh only if you get close enough to it. A 16:9 ratio is a 16:9 ratio. If you make the screen bigger you don't magically get a wider field of view. I suppose they mean to say that with the greater resolution you can get close enough to the screen so it takes up more of your field of view, while maintaining perceived picture quality. I do that by sitting in the first row at the movies.
For the record, human sight has an 8:1 ratio. If your vision is normal you can see about 120 degrees across (a third of a circle) and about 15 degrees vertically (5 degrees above the line of sight, 10 degrees below). Divide 120 by 15 and you get the 8:1 ratio. Now THAT would give you an immersive experience!
It was refreshing to see how many/.ers, despite their possible admiration for Sterling's fiction, recognized that his sophomoric comments are no substitute for reasoned arguments.
I remember reading this a long time ago: If there were solid gold ingots,.999 pure already fabricated and neatly stacked on the surface of the moon, it wouldn't pay to go up there and bring them back.
That is a strange way of saying whatever it is they're trying to say. It's pretty much incomprehensible. I'm guessing they mean it will cost 20 cents to build one watt of capacity that will last 20 years?
Anyone else have a guess? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Why do people insist on using this weird construction? In simple English "twenty times cheaper" means "95 percent cheaper." You use "times" when the cost of item A is more expensive than item B and a fraction (95%, 2/3 etc.) when it's cheaper.
Where did this thing come from? I suspect marketdroids are the culprits.
"That could mean that Vonage is loosing at least some ground in its battle against government VOIP regulations."
Or it could mean they've decided to screw their customers the same way the big PSTN phone companies do by breaking out much of their overhead into separate "fees."
"Corel Ousted From Public Life" is a poor choice of words. "Ousted" means "To eject from a position or place; force out." Nobody is forcing anything. Vector is simply making a tender offer.
And when a company goes private it doesn't disappear from "public life." Its ownership merely changes hands.
Recorded music, at close to $20.00 a CD is overpriced. Live music performances are underpriced. If they weren't, there wouldn't be any scalpers. Scalpers thrive because bands refuse to charge the price that the market will bear. Scalpers step in, buy tickets at what are essentially discount prices, then resell them at the market price (the price that clears the market.)
The acts leave money on the table (or, more accurately, in the pockets of scalpers) because they don't want to be seen as greedy. Fans still pay the high market prices; the acts just transfer the negative press and a large portion of their revenues to the scalpers.
(Of course, this is true only for those acts who have built up a following and who can therefore command premium prices for their live appearances. Those acts that haven't yet achieved that level of success still make a living, just not at "rock star" income levels. Building up a fan base through word of mouth and the judicious distribution of songs on their websites and through file sharing networks will bring a lucky few up to that level.)
So what should be done? First, tickets should be sold by some kind of Dutch auction system so that the artists, not scalpers, will receive the highest price the market will bear. If they fear a backlash, or they simply don't care to receive all of the possible revenue, they can donate a portion of revenues to charities they choose, or perhaps even let fans designate which charities will benefit.
This scheme would generate enough additional revenue that artists could cut in their recording companies for a piece of the live performance revenue pie. This revenue would partially reimburse the record companies for the effects of file sharing, and also possibly permit lower prices for recorded music. In effect, it would turn recorded music into a loss leader to promote live performances, which is not only where the real money is now, but where it will increasingly be.
Everyone into file sharing says the old business models don't work anymore. They are correct. So with what do we replace them? The mechanism I've described here is one alternative.
This doesn't answer the main questions posed by the proposed deregulation but here goes.
If we are to have regulation why not prohibit the company that builds fiber to the home (FTTH) from being an ISP. It would be in the fiber business, not the Internet business. Any and all comers could use the fiber for a fee. AOL, MSN, Earthlink, whomever. All would be served equally by a company that had no axe to grind. No ILECs screwing CLECs and screaming about having to share their infrastructure with competitors.
"metalsmithing, sewing, baking bread, making soap, knot tying, brewing beer, woodcarving, yogurt and cheese.. there are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle..."
You may need those skills before you know it. I think it was former CIA director Richard Helms who is said to have had a stone axe in a frame behind his desk. The caption underneath said simply, "The Weapon of the Future".
They do this in the magazine industry too. The copies of Newsweek and Time that came out today are dated May 26. Monthly magazines are dated a month or two in advance. So I just think of the cover date as the date the magazine will be pulled from the shelf.
And of course the hard disk industry insists a megabyte is 1,000 bytes, not 1,024.
Just assume they're goosing the stats and you won't be pissed off when they do.
Back in the Before Time, when giants walked the earth and we computed by candlelight using steam-powered PCs (ca. 1988) Minitel briefly came to America.
A French company, CTL, distributed emulator software on BBSes and invited people to log on for free. I remember the first time I realized I was chatting with someone in France I was blown away. I lived in the NYC area and local Minitel users even got together for Minitel parties at bars in Manhattan a few times.
Computer Sciences Corp. even planned to bring Minitel to America and I attended one or two seminars for potential server operators. Nynex (now Verizon) was climbing aboard too, with a slew of services. A colleague and I even planned to publish a magazine for server operators.
Alas, it was all over very quickly. Most of us migrated to a service operated by a company called Quantum Computer Services. They did offer email although at first PC users and Mac users couldn't send email to each other.
Quantum Computer Services is still around, but it's now known as AOL Time Warner.
Slashdot Mirror
"Moon Rocket Scrubbed and Blown Dry" is not a good choice of words. When a launch is postponed it's said to be "scrubbed." And "blown dry" does not evoke the right image because of "scrubbed." If you want to have fun with a headline make it internally consistent so readers will get the joke. A better choice would have been "Moon Rocket Gets a Wash and Blow Dry."
If I find one on the ground should I drop the BFG 9000 to pick it up?
If I switch to that "free" operating system I can run my Windows programs if I buy a $90 program and then do a crapload of configuring.
Or I can just keep running my Windows programs on Windows.
Hmmm. Tough one.
Methinks Comrade Radoslaw is wearing his underwear a little too tight.
Let's get one thing right, right now, right here all you programmers and system analysts:
The user is your GOD! YOU serve the USER. YOU make systems and appplications that give the USER maximum flexibility. What the USER wants is paramount. If you think the user is abusing your metaphor (sheesh!) it's because your mind ain't right. Get right with your god. Listen. Serve. Adapt. Obey.
Yeah I know I'm flaming but this is no troll. I'm just sick and tired of the insanely arrogant attitude that SOME (I emphasize some, but it's too many) developers have towards the people who feed and clothe them.
One bright spot in the gloom of the high tech bust is that it drove some of these characters into careers more suited to their attitudes, like being prison guards.
The article states "HDTV offers only a 30-degree field of view horizontally, whereas UHDV's massive screen size expands this to about 100 degrees"
Uhh only if you get close enough to it. A 16:9 ratio is a 16:9 ratio. If you make the screen bigger you don't magically get a wider field of view. I suppose they mean to say that with the greater resolution you can get close enough to the screen so it takes up more of your field of view, while maintaining perceived picture quality. I do that by sitting in the first row at the movies.
For the record, human sight has an 8:1 ratio. If your vision is normal you can see about 120 degrees across (a third of a circle) and about 15 degrees vertically (5 degrees above the line of sight, 10 degrees below). Divide 120 by 15 and you get the 8:1 ratio. Now THAT would give you an immersive experience!
It was refreshing to see how many /.ers, despite their possible admiration for Sterling's fiction, recognized that his sophomoric comments are no substitute for reasoned arguments.
One thing the comparison chart doesn't mention is the type of scope Webb is. Hubble is a Ritchey-Chretien, as are (AFAIK) all recent big scopes.
That they named the new telescope after some obscure NASA bureaucrat instead of a great scientist?
I remember reading this a long time ago: If there were solid gold ingots, .999 pure already fabricated and neatly stacked on the surface of the moon, it wouldn't pay to go up there and bring them back.
And people think outerspace mining makes sense?
That is a strange way of saying whatever it is they're trying to say. It's pretty much incomprehensible. I'm guessing they mean it will cost 20 cents to build one watt of capacity that will last 20 years?
Anyone else have a guess? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Why do people insist on using this weird construction? In simple English "twenty times cheaper" means "95 percent cheaper." You use "times" when the cost of item A is more expensive than item B and a fraction (95%, 2/3 etc.) when it's cheaper.
Where did this thing come from? I suspect marketdroids are the culprits.
"That could mean that Vonage is loosing at least some ground in its battle against government VOIP regulations."
Or it could mean they've decided to screw their customers the same way the big PSTN phone companies do by breaking out much of their overhead into separate "fees."
And btw, it's "losing," not "loosing."
Opus flies again!
"And target the writing to intelligent adults, rather than adolescents."
The James Bond book series was not targeted to adolescents. President Kennedy, among many other non-adolescents was a well-known fan of the series.
Of course given Kennedy's now well-known sexual adventures, perhaps he was stuck in his adolescence.
And of course I'm referring to the books, not the movies.
Amateur radio and Linux go together like taped up glasses and high water pants.
"Corel Ousted From Public Life" is a poor choice of words. "Ousted" means "To eject from a position or place; force out." Nobody is forcing anything. Vector is simply making a tender offer.
And when a company goes private it doesn't disappear from "public life." Its ownership merely changes hands.
Poor bastard.
Recorded music, at close to $20.00 a CD is overpriced. Live music performances are underpriced. If they weren't, there wouldn't be any scalpers. Scalpers thrive because bands refuse to charge the price that the market will bear. Scalpers step in, buy tickets at what are essentially discount prices, then resell them at the market price (the price that clears the market.)
The acts leave money on the table (or, more accurately, in the pockets of scalpers) because they don't want to be seen as greedy. Fans still pay the high market prices; the acts just transfer the negative press and a large portion of their revenues to the scalpers.
(Of course, this is true only for those acts who have built up a following and who can therefore command premium prices for their live appearances. Those acts that haven't yet achieved that level of success still make a living, just not at "rock star" income levels. Building up a fan base through word of mouth and the judicious distribution of songs on their websites and through file sharing networks will bring a lucky few up to that level.)
So what should be done? First, tickets should be sold by some kind of Dutch auction system so that the artists, not scalpers, will receive the highest price the market will bear. If they fear a backlash, or they simply don't care to receive all of the possible revenue, they can donate a portion of revenues to charities they choose, or perhaps even let fans designate which charities will benefit.
This scheme would generate enough additional revenue that artists could cut in their recording companies for a piece of the live performance revenue pie. This revenue would partially reimburse the record companies for the effects of file sharing, and also possibly permit lower prices for recorded music. In effect, it would turn recorded music into a loss leader to promote live performances, which is not only where the real money is now, but where it will increasingly be.
Everyone into file sharing says the old business models don't work anymore. They are correct. So with what do we replace them? The mechanism I've described here is one alternative.
It's called SGML. Been around a while. Whatever they come up with, it should be based on SGML.
This doesn't answer the main questions posed by the proposed deregulation but here goes.
If we are to have regulation why not prohibit the company that builds fiber to the home (FTTH) from being an ISP. It would be in the fiber business, not the Internet business. Any and all comers could use the fiber for a fee. AOL, MSN, Earthlink, whomever. All would be served equally by a company that had no axe to grind. No ILECs screwing CLECs and screaming about having to share their infrastructure with competitors.
This is a bit of a stretch.
"metalsmithing, sewing, baking bread, making soap, knot tying, brewing beer, woodcarving, yogurt and cheese.. there are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle..."
You may need those skills before you know it. I think it was former CIA director Richard Helms who is said to have had a stone axe in a frame behind his desk. The caption underneath said simply, "The Weapon of the Future".
They do this in the magazine industry too. The copies of Newsweek and Time that came out today are dated May 26. Monthly magazines are dated a month or two in advance. So I just think of the cover date as the date the magazine will be pulled from the shelf.
And of course the hard disk industry insists a megabyte is 1,000 bytes, not 1,024.
Just assume they're goosing the stats and you won't be pissed off when they do.
"computer gaming has the greatest chance to hone skills useful for productivity in the workplace"
Yes it does! Because in my job I often have to use a chain gun, trade with elves and drive 100 mph in urban settings.
Back in the Before Time, when giants walked the earth and we computed by candlelight using steam-powered PCs (ca. 1988) Minitel briefly came to America.
A French company, CTL, distributed emulator software on BBSes and invited people to log on for free. I remember the first time I realized I was chatting with someone in France I was blown away. I lived in the NYC area and local Minitel users even got together for Minitel parties at bars in Manhattan a few times.
Computer Sciences Corp. even planned to bring Minitel to America and I attended one or two seminars for potential server operators. Nynex (now Verizon) was climbing aboard too, with a slew of services. A colleague and I even planned to publish a magazine for server operators.
Alas, it was all over very quickly. Most of us migrated to a service operated by a company called Quantum Computer Services. They did offer email although at first PC users and Mac users couldn't send email to each other.
Quantum Computer Services is still around, but it's now known as AOL Time Warner.