A good majority of yogurts sold in regular grocery stores (e.g. Safeway, Publix, Kroger, etc.) are "real" with active culture in them. Perhaps the Yoplait brand is not, but in my experience, most of the other major brands are *real* yogurts. Now, they may not contain as fresh ingredients or have their milk sourced from organic grass-eating cows as you might find in smaller specialty shops, but that doesn't mean they aren't real.
If Vista's so crippled with DRM, can you explain to me what I can't do with it that I was able to do under XP? Oh nevermind, there's no sense letting reality get in the way of a good Microsoft bashing...
I see where you're coming from, but you aren't the target market for this device. It's not a PDA-phone replacement, though it has some basic business features, and it's not a flexible geek device that allows you to run linux, mame, vnc, ssh and voip -- though I have no doubt someone will eventually hack it to run all of the above. It's a slick little replacement for those who carry around both a consumer cell phone and an iPod. It's designed to just work. That's been Apple's M.O. from the beginning.
When discussing the science of storage technology (densities per area and the like) researchers have always used bits. This does not mean manufacturers intend to market such drives using bits.
The willingness to confuse megabit and mebibit in order to mislead consumers is a separate phenomenon.
Yes, I know... Mythbusters showed that a hugely amplified transmitter placed practically on top of the instrumentation could have a measurable effect. There was little even remotely cell-phone-like about the experiment at that point.
Do you really think that after all the Draconian (though mostly useless) security checks they put you though at the airport, the FAA would just say, "oh well, there's this real threat posed to flight avionics by cell phones, but we'll just ask the airlines to have flight attendants smile and ask passengers to put their cell phones in 'Airplane mode' when they hand out pretzels"?
No, they wouldn't. If they really thought that planes might go down from cell phone transmissions, they'd make you take out your cell phone battery at security and place it in a lead box with a key and then they'd scan the checked luggage compartment for cell signal and empty your socks and underwear on the tarmac in search of offending devices.
Does anyone seriously think that of the thousands of flights and hundreds of thousands of passengers that fly in the US every day, not a single one of them receives an SMS, voicemail or email during flight? Likely billions of cell phone data/voice packets find their way to and from cell phones sitting in planes during takeoff, flight and landing every day.
Yeah, it ain't gonna work for you if you frequently move gigs of data back and forth. For backups of small data files that are accessed infrequently, the zero startup costs can't be beat.
Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.20/gig transferred, $.15/gig stored... I believe). There is no minimum or fixed start-up costs and you only pay for what you use. This is much cheaper to startup than buying HDs for performance-insensitive large blobs of data, since you don't have to pay for power supply, case, drives, motherboards, cpu, memory or ongoing electrical costs. It's also a 100% quieter than running an extra storage server in your apartment. Sure, you can't stream HD video off of this thing, but it definitely has its uses.
Last month I backed up all my important financial and other data completely encrypted and lot more secure than I could have doen it locally. I conveniently mapped S3 to a drive letter on my local system so most programs can access it without even knowing what's going on. I mapped my Roboform password data to the drive, so I can access the same set of data files from multiple places without having to remember to always carry along a USB key. I even tried storing my Firefox profile there... though it technically worked, the problem is that Firefox accesses like a hundred files every time it starts up, and file access latency was too high to make this workable. What you use it for is really left up to your imagination. Anyway, all told, it cost me $.12 for the month.
You need three things to make this work for you: 1. An amazon S3 account 2. An online storage client that supports S3 (I use the free Jungledisk program, but there are several free clients available for Win/Mac/Linux) 3. Optionally (for Win32 users), a utility that can map webDAV drives to a physical drive letter. I use Webdrive.
If you don't spend some time collecting data, interviewing and generally spending time walking in the shoes of your supposed customers, guess what you end up delivering? Something that *you* may think is cool, but probably not what the customers need. Sounds like the leaders of this project don't know the first thing about Product Management. Pity, really.
This is such BS. Who cares if the US is 180th in the world in broadband adoption? It's as if broadband adoption is some kind of bellwether for thought leadership or cultural hegemony.
What is broadband good for? Porn, Youtube videos, on-demand porn, downloading copyright music and movies via bittorrent, gaming and porn. Did I happen to mention porn?
In a matter of minutes on a mere 56k modem, you can download more historic literary works, scientific discourse, political bills, candidate voting records and world news than you can possibly ever read through in a month. Aside from the convenience of serving our 'gotta have it now' sensibilities, what tangible benefit is it that 'broadband to every home' really delivers, other than a medium through which the latest pop culture crap can be shoved down our throats?
The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the talent (musicians and actors)? If monies were received as part of a license to Youtube then they would contractually obligated to share a substantial portion of the proceeds with others. For example most record label contracts call for artists to get 50% of all license deals. It was decided the media companies would receive an equity position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them. This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position. A few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired.
If true, Google is firmly outside the "do no evil" camp to me.
Re:The never ending march ...
on
School Bans 'Tag'
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Fathers are portrayed in the media as stupid, aloof, or cruel.
You must've been watching Fox's Sunday night line-up again.
Funny? Oh definitely, but did you ever stop to think about what message these programs send about fathers in general? It practically goes without notice in our culture that mothers are are portrayed as the only legitimate stabilizing force while fathers and their "caveman impulses" are to be ridiculed. Think about that next time you watch the "Four fathers of comedy" or whatever they call it.
It means you have a boot squence where you use a *LOT* of power.
I have a "Watt's Up Pro" watt meter. I've tested it: 200 Watts average during boot, 120 Watts idle. The amount of electricity it takes to boot for 60 seconds (@~200W) is quickly going to pale in comparison to leaving it on for hours at a time... Obviously, YMMV.
And where you do a LOT of reading/writing to/from disk.
Mostly reading on boot actually. And disks R/W heads are designed to handle *a lot* of that during their lifetimes. The biggest concern in my mind frankly is the shock of spinning the disk up time and time again -- this *IS* hard on them drives!
And you have to sit around and wait for your computer to boot.
True, but what's 60 seconds gonna cost ya?
And then reopen everything you closed when you shut-down.
Hibernate.
I'll admit it, I do leave my computer on most of the time for convenience and because I access it remotely from work throughout the day, but I would clearly save money on the electricity bill if I it was shut down for a good part of the day.
Forced obsolescence? Don't you think you're being a bit dramatic? M$ has given *plenty* of time for users (home and corporate) to upgrade to SP2. It's not like they're forcing you to fork over more money... They're saying "get to the latest patch level" so they can focus their support resources. Read into it what you must, but in my experience EOS/EOL policies are practical reality for most well-established software companies.
The concept of leasing seems to work alright for expensive material goods such as cars, but people generally don't like spending money to temporarily "rent" crippled, DRM-infected media they're used to owning... or can otherwise download for free (regardless of legality). Witness the downfall of the original DivX DVD format (not the codec): http://news.com.com/2100-1040-227194.html. Though the creators believed the blame for its downfall was not lack of consumer interest, the truth is most folks don't like the concept of renting semi-permanent access to media on a monthly basis from a company that may or may not be in business in a couple years -- even if the average person would actually save money in the long run using this method versus traditional purchases.
That and Napster didn't really provide much value above and beyond competitive alternatives such as: illegal P2P downloads, Amazon, iTunes, etc...
If you want an idea of whats going on, read/view as much as you can -- from as many sources as you can. From Fox to CNN, from the far left Pacifica to convervative talk radio. From The Standard to the NY Times. From LGF to DailyKos. My limited experience has suggested to me that the 'real story' is usually somewhere in the middle.
Unfortunately, I already have a day job. Even if I did this, would I be any closer to the "truth" after listening to the left-wing and right-wing wackos expound their propaganda? I'd probably just settle on a viewpoint that's inline with my existing beliefs/personality anyway.
You're mostly right, but the larger sensor size is also a major advantage in favor of dSLRs. When you squeeze 8 megapixels into something half the size of your pinky nail (which is approximately the sensor form factor most point-and-shoot digitals use) the pixels' close spacing causes interference which translates into higher overall noise (especially with higher ISOs).
When you increase the size of photoreceptors so they fill a larger APS or 35mm format sensor (typical of most dSLRs), there is less interference, which translates into smoother output independent of such factors as number of megapixels, sensor technology (CMOS vs CCD), lens size/quality, metering instruments/algorithms, etc...
My point is, you can blow against the wind only for so long before you may as well just accept that folks who treat computers as mere tools will continue to do so, no matter how exaperated you are with them. So, learn to live with it and while you're at it learn to profit from their unwillingness to learn, because they aren't changing... This coming from someone who has fixed just about everything that can go wrong with a relative's computer at one time or another: failing hard drives, exploding power supplies, XMS/EMS issues in config.sys, root kits, spyware, viruses, worms, trojans, corrupt registries, bad BIOS flashes, recurring BSODs, and of course plain old user stupidity.
Rather elitist pov, no? Here's a wakeup call to you UI developers and IT helpdesk staff: most people (i.e. non Slashdot readers) don't have time to care about how a computer works, nor will they listen to your yammering about what they should or shouldn't click. For many, computers are merely a tool that they must use to get their primary job done. They might be a doctor or a grocery store clerk. Whatever the case, unless they're an avid technologist, they just won't bother to allocate gray matter to what may seem like an important issue to YOU, because they have lives to live outside of the box.
PEBKAC is what keeps people like you employed. Deal with it.
Your music collection of MP3/OGG/AAC may be re-sold to you in 32-bit (regular CDs use 16-bit, which was always just barely acceptable to critics of the format).
Nonsense. The average person can't resolve past 12 bits. Theoretically, 16 bit recordings can reproduce a 96db range of sound intensities. Do you think you could hear a person whispering across from you at a loud rock concert? Well that there represents about a 90db range of intensity -- well beyond the capabilities of most if not all human beings. Hardly anyone who claims to be able to hear the difference between a 20-bit recording and a 16-bit recording can do so under a properly designed and administered double blind ABX listening test (notice that I didn't say it isn't worth recording at higher bit rates prior to mixing down to 16 bits for the final recording.)
Incidentally, I suspect the reason why some folks *think* they can hear the difference between 16 and 20-bit recordings (or other high quality formats such as SACD/DVD-Audio, etc...) is that if a studio is going to spend the effort to make an "audiophile quality" recording, they're also likely to carefully control all the recording equipment, from studio and mics, to mixers and cables -- whereas your typical 16-bit CD may come from an analog source, and/or use less than ideal recording equipment.
Scan through some listening tests over here for a bit if you're not convinced.
OK, obviously you know the situation better than me, so I won't bother to explain that the type of experienced low-level hardware engineers we were looking for are simply not that common.
Just because you can aleggedly find someone to fit the role for an exhorbitant fee and salary doesn't change the fact that there is low supply and high demand for certain types of engineering jobs (a jobhunter's market) -- my point in the first place.
The city (San Francisco for the uninitiated) has a high concentration of industries that feed off the valley, such as graphics design, web design, marketing, tech journalism, conference-related, etc... When things pick up in the valley, it's only a matter of time before the city follows suit. The valley has been slowly recovering and various industries within the city will probably follow along in a matter of a year or two.
We've had trouble finding qualified engineering candidates for about a year now. Believe it or not, we outsourced some development work to Pakistan not because it was cheap, but because we simply couldn't find enough qualified engineers locally in the valley (ok, and it was also quite economical). Sure, this amounts to only one data point, but I think the general concensus is that the market is good for job hunters at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
A good majority of yogurts sold in regular grocery stores (e.g. Safeway, Publix, Kroger, etc.) are "real" with active culture in them. Perhaps the Yoplait brand is not, but in my experience, most of the other major brands are *real* yogurts. Now, they may not contain as fresh ingredients or have their milk sourced from organic grass-eating cows as you might find in smaller specialty shops, but that doesn't mean they aren't real.
If Vista's so crippled with DRM, can you explain to me what I can't do with it that I was able to do under XP? Oh nevermind, there's no sense letting reality get in the way of a good Microsoft bashing...
I see where you're coming from, but you aren't the target market for this device. It's not a PDA-phone replacement, though it has some basic business features, and it's not a flexible geek device that allows you to run linux, mame, vnc, ssh and voip -- though I have no doubt someone will eventually hack it to run all of the above. It's a slick little replacement for those who carry around both a consumer cell phone and an iPod. It's designed to just work. That's been Apple's M.O. from the beginning.
When discussing the science of storage technology (densities per area and the like) researchers have always used bits. This does not mean manufacturers intend to market such drives using bits.
The willingness to confuse megabit and mebibit in order to mislead consumers is a separate phenomenon.
And the FAA knows it.
Yes, I know... Mythbusters showed that a hugely amplified transmitter placed practically on top of the instrumentation could have a measurable effect. There was little even remotely cell-phone-like about the experiment at that point.
Do you really think that after all the Draconian (though mostly useless) security checks they put you though at the airport, the FAA would just say, "oh well, there's this real threat posed to flight avionics by cell phones, but we'll just ask the airlines to have flight attendants smile and ask passengers to put their cell phones in 'Airplane mode' when they hand out pretzels"?
No, they wouldn't. If they really thought that planes might go down from cell phone transmissions, they'd make you take out your cell phone battery at security and place it in a lead box with a key and then they'd scan the checked luggage compartment for cell signal and empty your socks and underwear on the tarmac in search of offending devices.
Does anyone seriously think that of the thousands of flights and hundreds of thousands of passengers that fly in the US every day, not a single one of them receives an SMS, voicemail or email during flight? Likely billions of cell phone data/voice packets find their way to and from cell phones sitting in planes during takeoff, flight and landing every day.
It's not crashing flights.
Yeah, it ain't gonna work for you if you frequently move gigs of data back and forth. For backups of small data files that are accessed infrequently, the zero startup costs can't be beat.
Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.20/gig transferred, $.15/gig stored... I believe). There is no minimum or fixed start-up costs and you only pay for what you use. This is much cheaper to startup than buying HDs for performance-insensitive large blobs of data, since you don't have to pay for power supply, case, drives, motherboards, cpu, memory or ongoing electrical costs. It's also a 100% quieter than running an extra storage server in your apartment. Sure, you can't stream HD video off of this thing, but it definitely has its uses.
Last month I backed up all my important financial and other data completely encrypted and lot more secure than I could have doen it locally. I conveniently mapped S3 to a drive letter on my local system so most programs can access it without even knowing what's going on. I mapped my Roboform password data to the drive, so I can access the same set of data files from multiple places without having to remember to always carry along a USB key. I even tried storing my Firefox profile there... though it technically worked, the problem is that Firefox accesses like a hundred files every time it starts up, and file access latency was too high to make this workable. What you use it for is really left up to your imagination. Anyway, all told, it cost me $.12 for the month.
You need three things to make this work for you:
1. An amazon S3 account
2. An online storage client that supports S3 (I use the free Jungledisk program, but there are several free clients available for Win/Mac/Linux)
3. Optionally (for Win32 users), a utility that can map webDAV drives to a physical drive letter. I use Webdrive.
If you don't spend some time collecting data, interviewing and generally spending time walking in the shoes of your supposed customers, guess what you end up delivering? Something that *you* may think is cool, but probably not what the customers need. Sounds like the leaders of this project don't know the first thing about Product Management. Pity, really.
This is such BS. Who cares if the US is 180th in the world in broadband adoption? It's as if broadband adoption is some kind of bellwether for thought leadership or cultural hegemony.
What is broadband good for? Porn, Youtube videos, on-demand porn, downloading copyright music and movies via bittorrent, gaming and porn. Did I happen to mention porn?
In a matter of minutes on a mere 56k modem, you can download more historic literary works, scientific discourse, political bills, candidate voting records and world news than you can possibly ever read through in a month. Aside from the convenience of serving our 'gotta have it now' sensibilities, what tangible benefit is it that 'broadband to every home' really delivers, other than a medium through which the latest pop culture crap can be shoved down our throats?
From TFA:
The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the talent (musicians and actors)? If monies were received as part of a license to Youtube then they would contractually obligated to share a substantial portion of the proceeds with others. For example most record label contracts call for artists to get 50% of all license deals. It was decided the media companies would receive an equity position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them. This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position. A few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired.
If true, Google is firmly outside the "do no evil" camp to me.
Fathers are portrayed in the media as stupid, aloof, or cruel.
You must've been watching Fox's Sunday night line-up again.
Funny? Oh definitely, but did you ever stop to think about what message these programs send about fathers in general? It practically goes without notice in our culture that mothers are are portrayed as the only legitimate stabilizing force while fathers and their "caveman impulses" are to be ridiculed. Think about that next time you watch the "Four fathers of comedy" or whatever they call it.
It means you have a boot squence where you use a *LOT* of power.
I have a "Watt's Up Pro" watt meter. I've tested it: 200 Watts average during boot, 120 Watts idle. The amount of electricity it takes to boot for 60 seconds (@~200W) is quickly going to pale in comparison to leaving it on for hours at a time... Obviously, YMMV.
And where you do a LOT of reading/writing to/from disk.
Mostly reading on boot actually. And disks R/W heads are designed to handle *a lot* of that during their lifetimes. The biggest concern in my mind frankly is the shock of spinning the disk up time and time again -- this *IS* hard on them drives!
And you have to sit around and wait for your computer to boot.
True, but what's 60 seconds gonna cost ya?
And then reopen everything you closed when you shut-down.
Hibernate.
I'll admit it, I do leave my computer on most of the time for convenience and because I access it remotely from work throughout the day, but I would clearly save money on the electricity bill if I it was shut down for a good part of the day.
Forced obsolescence? Don't you think you're being a bit dramatic? M$ has given *plenty* of time for users (home and corporate) to upgrade to SP2. It's not like they're forcing you to fork over more money... They're saying "get to the latest patch level" so they can focus their support resources. Read into it what you must, but in my experience EOS/EOL policies are practical reality for most well-established software companies.
The concept of leasing seems to work alright for expensive material goods such as cars, but people generally don't like spending money to temporarily "rent" crippled, DRM-infected media they're used to owning... or can otherwise download for free (regardless of legality). Witness the downfall of the original DivX DVD format (not the codec): http://news.com.com/2100-1040-227194.html. Though the creators believed the blame for its downfall was not lack of consumer interest, the truth is most folks don't like the concept of renting semi-permanent access to media on a monthly basis from a company that may or may not be in business in a couple years -- even if the average person would actually save money in the long run using this method versus traditional purchases.
That and Napster didn't really provide much value above and beyond competitive alternatives such as: illegal P2P downloads, Amazon, iTunes, etc...
If you want an idea of whats going on, read/view as much as you can -- from as many sources as you can. From Fox to CNN, from the far left Pacifica to convervative talk radio. From The Standard to the NY Times. From LGF to DailyKos. My limited experience has suggested to me that the 'real story' is usually somewhere in the middle.
Unfortunately, I already have a day job. Even if I did this, would I be any closer to the "truth" after listening to the left-wing and right-wing wackos expound their propaganda? I'd probably just settle on a viewpoint that's inline with my existing beliefs/personality anyway.
You're mostly right, but the larger sensor size is also a major advantage in favor of dSLRs. When you squeeze 8 megapixels into something half the size of your pinky nail (which is approximately the sensor form factor most point-and-shoot digitals use) the pixels' close spacing causes interference which translates into higher overall noise (especially with higher ISOs).
When you increase the size of photoreceptors so they fill a larger APS or 35mm format sensor (typical of most dSLRs), there is less interference, which translates into smoother output independent of such factors as number of megapixels, sensor technology (CMOS vs CCD), lens size/quality, metering instruments/algorithms, etc...
My point is, you can blow against the wind only for so long before you may as well just accept that folks who treat computers as mere tools will continue to do so, no matter how exaperated you are with them. So, learn to live with it and while you're at it learn to profit from their unwillingness to learn, because they aren't changing... This coming from someone who has fixed just about everything that can go wrong with a relative's computer at one time or another: failing hard drives, exploding power supplies, XMS/EMS issues in config.sys, root kits, spyware, viruses, worms, trojans, corrupt registries, bad BIOS flashes, recurring BSODs, and of course plain old user stupidity.
Did mommy squeeze too hard on the way out? That's ok, have a cookie.
Your counter-example is preposterous. A computer is not a scalpel. If you fuck up with a computer, some IT jerk comes and reboots it. No one dies.
Rather elitist pov, no? Here's a wakeup call to you UI developers and IT helpdesk staff: most people (i.e. non Slashdot readers) don't have time to care about how a computer works, nor will they listen to your yammering about what they should or shouldn't click. For many, computers are merely a tool that they must use to get their primary job done. They might be a doctor or a grocery store clerk. Whatever the case, unless they're an avid technologist, they just won't bother to allocate gray matter to what may seem like an important issue to YOU, because they have lives to live outside of the box.
PEBKAC is what keeps people like you employed. Deal with it.
Your music collection of MP3/OGG/AAC may be re-sold to you in 32-bit (regular CDs use 16-bit, which was always just barely acceptable to critics of the format).
Nonsense. The average person can't resolve past 12 bits. Theoretically, 16 bit recordings can reproduce a 96db range of sound intensities. Do you think you could hear a person whispering across from you at a loud rock concert? Well that there represents about a 90db range of intensity -- well beyond the capabilities of most if not all human beings. Hardly anyone who claims to be able to hear the difference between a 20-bit recording and a 16-bit recording can do so under a properly designed and administered double blind ABX listening test (notice that I didn't say it isn't worth recording at higher bit rates prior to mixing down to 16 bits for the final recording.)
Incidentally, I suspect the reason why some folks *think* they can hear the difference between 16 and 20-bit recordings (or other high quality formats such as SACD/DVD-Audio, etc...) is that if a studio is going to spend the effort to make an "audiophile quality" recording, they're also likely to carefully control all the recording equipment, from studio and mics, to mixers and cables -- whereas your typical 16-bit CD may come from an analog source, and/or use less than ideal recording equipment.
Scan through some listening tests over here for a bit if you're not convinced.
Riiiiight... and by "moon" you mean a soundstage in Nevada. ;-)
OK, obviously you know the situation better than me, so I won't bother to explain that the type of experienced low-level hardware engineers we were looking for are simply not that common.
Just because you can aleggedly find someone to fit the role for an exhorbitant fee and salary doesn't change the fact that there is low supply and high demand for certain types of engineering jobs (a jobhunter's market) -- my point in the first place.
The city (San Francisco for the uninitiated) has a high concentration of industries that feed off the valley, such as graphics design, web design, marketing, tech journalism, conference-related, etc... When things pick up in the valley, it's only a matter of time before the city follows suit. The valley has been slowly recovering and various industries within the city will probably follow along in a matter of a year or two.
We've had trouble finding qualified engineering candidates for about a year now. Believe it or not, we outsourced some development work to Pakistan not because it was cheap, but because we simply couldn't find enough qualified engineers locally in the valley (ok, and it was also quite economical). Sure, this amounts to only one data point, but I think the general concensus is that the market is good for job hunters at the moment.