And before you go off and start flapping your gums anyway, i dont believe in copyright, patents or the concept of IP in general. As far as I'm concerned, once a 'object' is released into the world for consumption, you lose all rights to it and it belongs to 'the people'. Fortunately, your beliefs and concerns don't matter.
Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk. Well, I can't and no normal consumer can. There are people who could build stuff that could do it, but those people are probably happily building graphics cards for NVidia and ATI, or building DVD players. You absolutely can record 1080i composite video. You need a $1000 capture card and a roughly $2500 SATA array. But that'll be cheaper as time goes on. It's true that there aren't many uses for 300MB/s throughput right now, but the progression is inevitable. In 2-3 years, recording HD composite video will be as mundane as recording SD is today. Perhaps by then composite video will be the exception, but alienating the large numbers of consumers (most of them early adopters) who own very expensive composite input equipment may not be such a good idea.
Actually, metrification wasn't a failure of the Carter administration as much as its failure was complete during the Carter administration. But it wasn't a failure. Metric units are ubiquitous in America. Soda comes measured in liters. Everyone has seen "16.9 ounce" bottles of soda. People have 4, 5, and 6mm Allen wrenches right next to their 1/4" drill bits. It's not confusing in the least.
Soda also comes measured in ounces. What caused the end of metrification was the metrification that had already been implemented by the mid 1970s. It proved that the metric system could coexist with English units. Consumers don't care whether they are buying pints or half liters. They don't care that they take 500mg capsules of Tylenol. They don't care that bullets are measured in grains (which is not exclusive to the US). They don't care that they are buying 750mL "fifths" or that beer is measured in cL in Germany.
It's a non-issue, unless you insist on being a pedantic twit who wants road signs marked in kilometers and gasoline measured in liters. Well, that's part of the cultural heritage you experience when living in or visiting our fine little country.
Why, after all, does Canada insist on using "metric dollars"?
To hear some people talk, you'd think that removing English units from America is next in line after abolishing slavery.
If you're a scientist in the US and are having unit trouble with scientists in other countries, you must be using kitchen measuring cups. Even if you are using kitchen measuring cups, you must not have a very good calculator.
I know, someone is going to mention Mars Climate Orbiter now. Actually it's probably already mentioned 50 times below but I'm too lazy to count.
Apple needs to get over it and open this up. At $600, if you can't even get the geeks excited, this product has 0 chance of succeeding.
This product isn't aimed at geeks who moan and groan about how "closed" it is. It's aimed at the vastly larger crowd of people who think it's the slickest damn thing they've ever seen, as-is.
Since the average gross income is somewhere below $50k, $20M is still "really that big a deal." Just because.0000001% of the population is billionaires doesn't mean there are plenty of people who can afford to blow $20M just to see what earth looks like from near-orbit. Also, the catch-22 with rich people is that if they had frivilous [sic] spending habits, many of them wouldn't be rich to begin with.
I don't think that there's a plan to send tens of thousands of ordinary Joes into space. On the other hand, someone like Paul Allen, who manages to stay rich only because of the sheer difficulty of spending billions of dollars and who owns something like $500M of personal yachts, might decide to fly every weekend.
Aside from the part where you missed the zeroes, $20M really isn't that big a deal anymore, relatively speaking. The Forbes 100 no longer has millionaires on it. In fact it no longer has people worth less than $6 billion on it.
So, say the Ethiopian Board of Coffee doesn't like a farmer, I mean hell, there's a lot of problems in that area, it'd be pretty easy to pick some farmers you don't like, whoever the new gov't is, and put a lot of people out of work.
Living and producing your wine in the Burgundy region isn't enough to allow you to sell wine called Burgundy. Who's to say that the French government doesn't put the thumb on individual vintners? It wouldn't take much imagination.
And then who's to say that beans trademarked Ethiopian "Sidamo" would actually come from Sidamo? There's no requirement that "Kentucky Fried Chicken" come from Kentucky.
It does nothing for consumers or growers, but it would do some corrupt government officials and generals some good. Anyway, my $.02.
... in 2006 word processors are easy to use and do exactly what you want and are so simple that your 70 year old [grand]mom can figure them out by herself while sipping tea.
In some 2006 in some other alternate universe, that is.
*shaking head*
The reality disconnect here gets pretty bad at times.
Maybe we can add a few flourescent sows to the breeding population in Hawaii and then it'll become easier to control them....
Re:a 1080p LCD stole my heart
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 1
... Is there a VGA connector on the back of that one? PC DVI-HDMI doesn't necessarily work that well, yet, or at the current rate, maybe never. My 40" Samsung (the 720 resolution) works perfectly through VGA. I mean, perfectly.
Use the "lift it" criterion
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 1
I can (easily) lift my 40" Samsung TV.
Therefore, it's an LCD.
It looks great plugged into my computer (waaaaay too many hours of Civilization IV on it now) and hey it also looks great plugged into the DVR. And most anything else.
If you want to shoot black bear and moose, the biggest problem is that you can't just shoot the ones in your backyard. Or skin it before the ravens do....:-)
I find that alcohol is a great drug also and I hate to disappoint you but it's even better than tobacco. When I used to drink 2/3 bottle of corporate produced vodka per night I had terrible headaches in the morning. However, now I drink only pure liquor distilled from organic corn mash by a neighbor. It comes from a copper still with pure lead solder, not the corporate lead that has so many heavy metals in it. Natural liquor is much purer than the stuff from Big Liquor and its unique characteristics have really helped me. My liver and kidneys have adjusted away from the water-dominated diet I used to have, and of course 60% ethanol is absolutely sterile. My driving is much better and I get places a lot faster with fewer worries than I used to, especially at night. I find that few things if any trouble me. When I wake up I have a cup of it slightly warmed and there are no headaches either. My life is great! (I think.)
JavaScript is a developing and well-defined standard - ECMAScript. It's no less standardized than, say, CSS, and as a practical matter, JavaScript is generally less variable and more predictable across platforms than is CSS.
Nor is JavaScript necessarily slow. In fact, it's quite fast in many cases when you consider what it's doing. If all you do in JavaScript is time loops, you should be using a different language.
Google has demonstrated that JavaScript can be translated (compiled) into other languages, Java in the case of GWT.
There are JavaScript shells that you can use as a means of writing command-line applications in JavaScript (more or less).
Now, what I'd like to do with JavaScript is be able to write client-side applications with it. I want to be able to do file i/o (and so forth) locally, without running a local web server. Make it a full featured "normal" programming language with access to local resources except that it is, of course, running via a browser and/or able to manipulate a browser's DOM. Having to use a mini-web server running locally, or *cough* XUL, or whatever, to do this is so 20th century.
JavaScript is a nice language with unique abilities and applications, and it is the only language with a well-known and widely used interface to the DOM. If you dismiss it out of hand, you are dismissing it out of ignorance.
Any serializing transport where, ultimately, figuring out what is going wrong - in normal use - involves using a packet sniffer to dump XML, is just broken. Nevermind that XML was never intended to be written by humans. Nevermind that the XML used in SOAP isn't intended to be human readable. It's just a layer of unnecessary crap that isn't even interoperable between different languages. Or, for that matter, different implementations on the same platform. "Web services" is a lovely addition that removes the last bit of comprehensibility and connection to reality while adding nothing except gaping security holes.
JSON and the like are, on the other hand, reasonable, and also fairly easy on the eyes of us tired old programmers.
American cabbies are usually fine, but then again....
I once had this cab driver who picked me up from Fairbanks International and didn't know the way to Ester.* He was actually angry at me for "wasting his time" and wanted me to call 911 for directions and eventually dropped me back off the airport and wanted $25 for his trouble. (!)
*Ester is a little village a few miles from Fairbanks on a major road that anyone of speaking age who's lived in town for more than a month can give you directions to. I know where it is now.:-)
Honestly I don't know what Windows does to "preempt," but before NT the scheduler was crap, after NT the scheduler was crap, process control has always been broken, the UI locks up and can't be restarted, anything other than a bare bones install can take minutes to shut down and/or require two or three "shut down" requests and/or manual process kills (which themselves can take minutes and/or cause lockups), and then there are things like the goofy user interfaces for networking and services. Protected memory never meant a thing for Windows stability, or if it did, I'd hate to think what it would have been without it. So, whatever.
I've never thought that Eran's articles were any loopier than those from other computer pundits. They're long and kind of dull but perfectly within the bounds of reason. It's a columnist's (= opinion writer's) job to be provocative, not balanced. Apparently Eran's mistake is wanting to participate in a fanboy blogsite whose noise level puts Slashdot's to shame. His being banned from Digg is a headscratcher, but the average Digg poster is a lost cause anyway.
On a couple of occasions I just whipped out the Sawzall and opened some Evil Bubbles in about.5 sec each. No muss, no fuss. Such was the level of my annoyance that prompted me, I can't say whether I'd have been angry if I'd sliced anything in two more significant than an instruction manual. The stuff came out intact though. No additional red-faced vein-popping pulling, grunting, and invective hurling required.
And it was nice to have the right toolfor that problem.
To the poster who commented that being tased with the darts isn't painful, that's not how the system was being used here. The "drive-stun" mode (which is how I am assuming the weapon was being used) causes pain and is not incapacitating. In fact Taser recommends that care be taken in its use because it can result in lengthy struggles when the pain isn't sufficient to cause the subject to comply immediately.
Duh.
Oh and those same cases, Taser warns, are where police are often criticized for excessive force or brutality.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah.
I've always drawn a distinction between "I'm making myself a copy because I can't get it any other way" and "It's mine, mine, all mine!"
And before you go off and start flapping your gums anyway, i dont believe in copyright, patents or the concept of IP in general. As far as I'm concerned, once a 'object' is released into the world for consumption, you lose all rights to it and it belongs to 'the people'.
Fortunately, your beliefs and concerns don't matter.
I like them mixed together. Smoooooth.
Have you ever tried playing "The Halls of Montezuma" and "The Army Goes Rolling Along" together?
You have no rights over your content once its been released.
I don't even know where to start with this.
Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk. Well, I can't and no normal consumer can. There are people who could build stuff that could do it, but those people are probably happily building graphics cards for NVidia and ATI, or building DVD players.
You absolutely can record 1080i composite video. You need a $1000 capture card and a roughly $2500 SATA array. But that'll be cheaper as time goes on. It's true that there aren't many uses for 300MB/s throughput right now, but the progression is inevitable. In 2-3 years, recording HD composite video will be as mundane as recording SD is today. Perhaps by then composite video will be the exception, but alienating the large numbers of consumers (most of them early adopters) who own very expensive composite input equipment may not be such a good idea.
Actually, metrification wasn't a failure of the Carter administration as much as its failure was complete during the Carter administration. But it wasn't a failure. Metric units are ubiquitous in America. Soda comes measured in liters. Everyone has seen "16.9 ounce" bottles of soda. People have 4, 5, and 6mm Allen wrenches right next to their 1/4" drill bits. It's not confusing in the least.
Soda also comes measured in ounces. What caused the end of metrification was the metrification that had already been implemented by the mid 1970s. It proved that the metric system could coexist with English units. Consumers don't care whether they are buying pints or half liters. They don't care that they take 500mg capsules of Tylenol. They don't care that bullets are measured in grains (which is not exclusive to the US). They don't care that they are buying 750mL "fifths" or that beer is measured in cL in Germany.
It's a non-issue, unless you insist on being a pedantic twit who wants road signs marked in kilometers and gasoline measured in liters. Well, that's part of the cultural heritage you experience when living in or visiting our fine little country.
Why, after all, does Canada insist on using "metric dollars"?
To hear some people talk, you'd think that removing English units from America is next in line after abolishing slavery.
You won't find anyone in the UK who doesn't know what a mile is. Or a pint. Especially a pint.
If you're a scientist in the US and are having unit trouble with scientists in other countries, you must be using kitchen measuring cups. Even if you are using kitchen measuring cups, you must not have a very good calculator.
I know, someone is going to mention Mars Climate Orbiter now. Actually it's probably already mentioned 50 times below but I'm too lazy to count.
Apple needs to get over it and open this up. At $600, if you can't even get the geeks excited, this product has 0 chance of succeeding.
This product isn't aimed at geeks who moan and groan about how "closed" it is. It's aimed at the vastly larger crowd of people who think it's the slickest damn thing they've ever seen, as-is.
Since the average gross income is somewhere below $50k, $20M is still "really that big a deal." Just because .0000001% of the population is billionaires doesn't mean there are plenty of people who can afford to blow $20M just to see what earth looks like from near-orbit. Also, the catch-22 with rich people is that if they had frivilous [sic] spending habits, many of them wouldn't be rich to begin with.
I don't think that there's a plan to send tens of thousands of ordinary Joes into space. On the other hand, someone like Paul Allen, who manages to stay rich only because of the sheer difficulty of spending billions of dollars and who owns something like $500M of personal yachts, might decide to fly every weekend.
Aside from the part where you missed the zeroes, $20M really isn't that big a deal anymore, relatively speaking. The Forbes 100 no longer has millionaires on it. In fact it no longer has people worth less than $6 billion on it.
So, say the Ethiopian Board of Coffee doesn't like a farmer, I mean hell, there's a lot of problems in that area, it'd be pretty easy to pick some farmers you don't like, whoever the new gov't is, and put a lot of people out of work.
Living and producing your wine in the Burgundy region isn't enough to allow you to sell wine called Burgundy. Who's to say that the French government doesn't put the thumb on individual vintners? It wouldn't take much imagination.
And then who's to say that beans trademarked Ethiopian "Sidamo" would actually come from Sidamo? There's no requirement that "Kentucky Fried Chicken" come from Kentucky.
It does nothing for consumers or growers, but it would do some corrupt government officials and generals some good. Anyway, my $.02.
... in 2006 word processors are easy to use and do exactly what you want and are so simple that your 70 year old [grand]mom can figure them out by herself while sipping tea.
In some 2006 in some other alternate universe, that is.
*shaking head*
The reality disconnect here gets pretty bad at times.
Maybe we can add a few flourescent sows to the breeding population in Hawaii and then it'll become easier to control them ....
... Is there a VGA connector on the back of that one? PC DVI-HDMI doesn't necessarily work that well, yet, or at the current rate, maybe never. My 40" Samsung (the 720 resolution) works perfectly through VGA. I mean, perfectly.
I can (easily) lift my 40" Samsung TV.
Therefore, it's an LCD.
It looks great plugged into my computer (waaaaay too many hours of Civilization IV on it now) and hey it also looks great plugged into the DVR. And most anything else.
If you want to shoot black bear and moose, the biggest problem is that you can't just shoot the ones in your backyard. Or skin it before the ravens do .... :-)
I find that alcohol is a great drug also and I hate to disappoint you but it's even better than tobacco. When I used to drink 2/3 bottle of corporate produced vodka per night I had terrible headaches in the morning. However, now I drink only pure liquor distilled from organic corn mash by a neighbor. It comes from a copper still with pure lead solder, not the corporate lead that has so many heavy metals in it. Natural liquor is much purer than the stuff from Big Liquor and its unique characteristics have really helped me. My liver and kidneys have adjusted away from the water-dominated diet I used to have, and of course 60% ethanol is absolutely sterile. My driving is much better and I get places a lot faster with fewer worries than I used to, especially at night. I find that few things if any trouble me. When I wake up I have a cup of it slightly warmed and there are no headaches either. My life is great! (I think.)
D'oh!
JavaScript is a developing and well-defined standard - ECMAScript. It's no less standardized than, say, CSS, and as a practical matter, JavaScript is generally less variable and more predictable across platforms than is CSS.
Nor is JavaScript necessarily slow. In fact, it's quite fast in many cases when you consider what it's doing. If all you do in JavaScript is time loops, you should be using a different language.
Google has demonstrated that JavaScript can be translated (compiled) into other languages, Java in the case of GWT.
There are JavaScript shells that you can use as a means of writing command-line applications in JavaScript (more or less).
Now, what I'd like to do with JavaScript is be able to write client-side applications with it. I want to be able to do file i/o (and so forth) locally, without running a local web server. Make it a full featured "normal" programming language with access to local resources except that it is, of course, running via a browser and/or able to manipulate a browser's DOM. Having to use a mini-web server running locally, or *cough* XUL, or whatever, to do this is so 20th century.
JavaScript is a nice language with unique abilities and applications, and it is the only language with a well-known and widely used interface to the DOM. If you dismiss it out of hand, you are dismissing it out of ignorance.
Any serializing transport where, ultimately, figuring out what is going wrong - in normal use - involves using a packet sniffer to dump XML, is just broken. Nevermind that XML was never intended to be written by humans. Nevermind that the XML used in SOAP isn't intended to be human readable. It's just a layer of unnecessary crap that isn't even interoperable between different languages. Or, for that matter, different implementations on the same platform. "Web services" is a lovely addition that removes the last bit of comprehensibility and connection to reality while adding nothing except gaping security holes.
JSON and the like are, on the other hand, reasonable, and also fairly easy on the eyes of us tired old programmers.
American cabbies are usually fine, but then again ....
:-)
I once had this cab driver who picked me up from Fairbanks International and didn't know the way to Ester.* He was actually angry at me for "wasting his time" and wanted me to call 911 for directions and eventually dropped me back off the airport and wanted $25 for his trouble. (!)
*Ester is a little village a few miles from Fairbanks on a major road that anyone of speaking age who's lived in town for more than a month can give you directions to. I know where it is now.
Honestly I don't know what Windows does to "preempt," but before NT the scheduler was crap, after NT the scheduler was crap, process control has always been broken, the UI locks up and can't be restarted, anything other than a bare bones install can take minutes to shut down and/or require two or three "shut down" requests and/or manual process kills (which themselves can take minutes and/or cause lockups), and then there are things like the goofy user interfaces for networking and services. Protected memory never meant a thing for Windows stability, or if it did, I'd hate to think what it would have been without it. So, whatever.
I've never thought that Eran's articles were any loopier than those from other computer pundits. They're long and kind of dull but perfectly within the bounds of reason. It's a columnist's (= opinion writer's) job to be provocative, not balanced. Apparently Eran's mistake is wanting to participate in a fanboy blogsite whose noise level puts Slashdot's to shame. His being banned from Digg is a headscratcher, but the average Digg poster is a lost cause anyway.
On a couple of occasions I just whipped out the Sawzall and opened some Evil Bubbles in about .5 sec each. No muss, no fuss. Such was the level of my annoyance that prompted me, I can't say whether I'd have been angry if I'd sliced anything in two more significant than an instruction manual. The stuff came out intact though. No additional red-faced vein-popping pulling, grunting, and invective hurling required.
And it was nice to have the right toolfor that problem.
To the poster who commented that being tased with the darts isn't painful, that's not how the system was being used here. The "drive-stun" mode (which is how I am assuming the weapon was being used) causes pain and is not incapacitating. In fact Taser recommends that care be taken in its use because it can result in lengthy struggles when the pain isn't sufficient to cause the subject to comply immediately.
Duh.
Oh and those same cases, Taser warns, are where police are often criticized for excessive force or brutality.