What product is the result of the tiny increase in
cost is it that you write of?
Honestly, I don't specifically know - I don't work
in the fan industry.
But for comparison, I looked up some real numbers.
One popular (on Amazon) model of 20" box fan 20"
draws 166W for 2220CFM, or 13.4 CFM/W. An 18"
oscillating pedestal fan draws 119W for 1970CFM,
or 16.6 CFM/W. And a ceiling fan... Energy Star
actually rates those, so they have motivation
to perform well for the power they draw. And they
do - I can't even do a "fair" comparison based on
either power or CFM, because the bad ones
do over 100 CFM/W, with the best ones passing
200!
Of course, that doesn't address price - Amazon has
several models of ceiling fan for under $50. The
above-mentioned box fan (the Air King 9723) goes for
$39.99. Not pennies, but FAR less of a difference
in price than the difference in power consumption.
I wish I could find some that lit to near full brightness
in a few seconds instead of the 15-30 they take to warm up.
In this case, "you get what you pay for".
I have all CFs bulbs in my house, and have noticed that the
$5/3-packs from WallyWorld or Home Depot tend to take a second
to start and then a long time to warm up, while the $7-each
ones come on at full brightness just as fast as an incandescent.
Personally, I'll deal with the 30-second delay.;-)
Seriously, how low can they make the power consumption
without raising the price of the item significantly?
How about "very nearly zero"? Ideally, an "off" device would
draw zero watts, but I realize we expect our toys to respond at
a moments notice, and that takes some electricity.
My TV, when off, draws 7 watts. That presumeably lets it
remember its settings and watch for activity from the remote
control. Those two tasks, however, should draw in the low
milliwatts, certainly not more than a full watt.
Printers also tend to have a very high idle current draw (and
by idle I mean cold and in standby not just "not printing".
20-25W seems common for that - More than the total I use for
actively lighting my house under normal conditions (assuming
three CF lighbulbs at once, fron 5 to 9 watts each).
Of course, I think we'd do a lot better to worry about the
active draw of our appliances. For example, the
humble 19" box-fan draws a whopping 150W on high. With only
a tiny increase in cost, that can drop by a factor of three,
yet no one cares because no one realizes what a massive power
sucker they have sitting happily humming in the window.
What you need is an audio distribution amplifier (DA).
I agree completely, but the one you link to seems quite a bit
more complicated (and expensive) than necessary here - You need
the $200 base unit plus a $50 receiver in each room? No way!
The AudioVox VA100 (not a referrer link, and just search for the
model number on Amazon if you don't trust me) does 1 stereo input to
4 stereo outputs, and handles audio separate from video (ie, no need
to deal with converting it to RF and back, as with most cheap
distribution amps). $50 per eight audio outputs (for the described
use, stereo won't add anything to the quality, so might as well use
the channels independantly). If the FP poster needs less than 16
rooms, I'd even try splitting each of those outputs once, shouldn't
hurt the quality too much with active speakers.
It is equally easy for me to put on a nice sharp-looking shirt a
pair of slacks as it is to put a crummy t-shirt and pair of worn
jeans.
Agreed...
I wear the the former at work, because I certainly
need to maintain a certain kind of class
There, we part ways. I wear the latter to work
because I need to - Well, WORK.
Actually doing my job requires me to (depending on the task)
sit in front of a computer all day coding; Run cable through
hot and dusty ceilings; Replace toner cartridges (which
almost never seem all that effective at keeping the toner
on the inside); Crawl under desks; Replace motors,
amps, displays, and pretty much anything that draws electricity
on a variety of manufacturing equipment; Save the day on a
regular basis.
As in regards to the IT industry. Get out of it. I seriously
pity anyone who considers IT to be a `career path'. It is not
and I certainly don't regard that way.
If your job only requires you to suck the asses of your
customers, good for you, make sure your bib matches your
cufflinks.;-)
Personally, I ENJOY doing all of the above. I started
out as a firmware engineer - Paid wonderfully, and I would
have burned out by now had I not switched to something with a
little more day-to-day variation five years ago. Now, every
day offers me new challenges, new surprises, people appreciate
my presence rather than bitch about schedules, and I don't spend
20-hour days tracing through a crappy debugger interface to an
ICE.
I am a Software Engineer currently in college
Ahahahahaahaha... Oh, too funny!
Point 1) SE falls under the category of IT, ya uppity snob.
Point 2) Welcome to the real world - Oh, wait, you haven't
entered it yet. Perhaps you should hold off on your
condemnation of what other people chose to do, at least
untill you find out whether or not you actually like
writing non-toy code, with a real budget and real schedule
(hint - you can't take an "I" and finish it next year... And
on the flip side, even if you can code in your sleep, your workload
will just increase until you still can't possibly finish
it anyway).
Point 3) What the hell does "pure" SE have to do with going out
to talk to clients? Marketing does that. They hide you
deep in the basement, with all the caffeine you can consume,
and let you out once a week so your family doesn't call the
police to report you missing. Unless you mean one of "those"
SEs - the type the rest of us alternately pity or loath, who
only sit in a chair long enough to make it to the esteemed
ranks of middle management, where they can trade intestinal
parasites intranasally to their hearts' content.
Joking aside, though, I think you have a rather skewed view
of what "IT" entails. It doesn't mean "helpdesk troll". It
doesn't mean "telephone tech support". It doesn't mean
"whipping boy, already under the desk anyway". It may
include those tasks, but it also includes "real"
coding, it includes system and network administration, it
includes hardware maintenance. If you go to work for a
large company, you may indeed find yourself doing nothing
but staring at the same monotonous screen for 12 hours a
day. If you go to work at a small-to-mid-sized company,
you will do all of the above, and then some. And I wouldn't
give up the latter to go back to the former for anything.
The entire boogeyman of some company destroying Linux via a
patent suit never really threatened most of us in the
first place.
Why, you might ask?
Because most of us don't really care. Patents count as
a silly abstract nuissance for business-folk, not for hobbyist
developers. Treble damages? 3 * $0 = $0. No doubt some lawyer
will point out that other dangers exist, but really, I (and I
doubt most of us) really lose sleep over the idea that our use, or
even code contributions, of Linux may violate some obscure
submarine patent waiting to spring out at us.
Or to look at it another way: If the USSC banned Linux tomorrow
due to it infringing some patent - How many of you would run out
and buy XP to "fix" all your now-illegal machines?
Do you think you'll have to pay more or less than
$0.99 for your favorite throwback band.
Multiply $1.00 by two. Demand halves, profit stays the
same.
Divide $1.00 by two. Demand doubles, profit stays the
same.
Now - Do both of those hold true?
For the most popular music, you have people who will
pay almost anything for it. So demand doesn't really
halve, it drops by something less than that.
For the less popular music, you have people who want
it but won't pay a buck for it. I would predict that
the demand will actually go up exponentially as the
price drops.
So profit goes up at both ends of the spectrum.
Now - One more confounding problem - This assumes people can
only "get their fix" from iTunes. A typical 10-15
track album costs basically a buck-per-track to buy as a CD.
Will people pay twice that to get it track-wise in a digital
form, or will they just buy the CD and rip it themselves?
You forget these people may need to send or receive documents
from the well-to-do people that are using Microsoft Office
already. Communication is supposed to be a two-way street, after
all.
The "economically disadvantaged" don't blow $300 to $600 on buying
Office, Acrobat, Photoshop, and whatever other crap they need to
view "standard" formats.
They either run Free Software, or they pirate the real thing.
When you can choose between food for the next two months, and
Excel - Well, one of those wins without even a second though. And
that winner doesn't start with "M" and end with "T".
Or, just in case you have no frame of reference for this - Think
back to college, to eating nothing but ramen (or worse, the
school's "Food" Services chow) between visits to the family. If
you came across a $10 bill - Would you put it away towards your
student copy of MathCad... Or buy a pizza?
without wasting a couple hours just to figure out the code.
A couple hours???
Look, no offense, but you either only deal in "toy" code, or
you have such high expectation that you will fail, and
quite spectacularly.
A new coder, even an experienced one, takes days or even
weeks after coming into an existing project before he
can contribute anything but the most trivial of changes.
For a truly massive project, or one that requires intimate
domain-specific knowledge in a niche industry, extend that
to months.
If you can find a way to get an unfamiliar newcomer up to
speed on any "real" project in a matter of hours, consider
your talents wasted in your current position.
It was both accessable and absolutely hilarious,
without sacrificing the soul of the play
As I said, I don't have a problem with modern adaptations of
classic works - So long as they don't sacrifice the shared
cultural aspects that make the underlying plays "classics".
Hell, Shakespeare himself stole (at least) half of his plays
from "classics" of that era - Pyramis and Thisbe (aka
Romeo and Juliet), as perhaps the best known example.
I just find it a waste of time, and generally a sadly blatant
attempt to get me to buy somthing by making it "cool and edgy",
the ultimate draw for the flocks of "individualist" consumers.
An attempt to over-"modernize" something to the point that it
will look horribly dated a mere five years from now. Like
Devo - "hyper-modern", or a very laughable stereotype of an
80's prog rock band?
We put far too much devotion into the "classics' and
developing our "canon recognition", and not enough time
into actual thinking up new and interesting ideas.
Because "the classics", if not actually defining our
culture, give us a common foundation on which to build
a shared cultural experience.
Did a dead semi-anonymous 16th century hack pop-poet/playwright
really create the best-ever-and-always set of English
writings? Of course not! He wrote the equivalent of
"Seinfeld" for the televidiots of his day. But like it
or not, that does give us a certain common ground
on which to relate to one another socially. We like
"lowbrow" humor. We prefer the good guy to win. We want
blood and guts and gore and veins in our teeth. We enjoy
Moe getting poked in the eyes by Larry. We want to see
the queen kiss a Federline, everyone to tragically die
at the end, and the servants to get away with a good
practical joke on their bosses.
Now, based on the above, does it commit some grievous
sin to "translate" the works of this ancient hack into
a more modern form? To that, I would say no, with a
qualification - One can modernize without butchering.
Converting Hamlet to the style of texting fails to
make the work more accessible, instead tailoring
it to a very niche subculture of rebellion-without-a-clue
(and likely a short-lived subculture at that, as it only
even exists as the fleeting intersection of a technological
limitation with an economic convenience).
it will permit english to be used in new ways where
the reader isn't sure what the writer is getting at
That would completely defeat the entire purpose of language.
Not to mention, it would make self-propagation of the meme
rather difficult, if no one can decode the message.
Not to say that some of the deliberately incoherent or
semicoherent work of authors such as Stein have no value...
But their value lies directly in breaking the verbal mind
out of its rut, rather than as a means of communication.
Sound bytes will be more important in winning someone
over to the writer's view, not a coherent argument.
Unfortunately, that has held true for all of human
history. I can't even count how many times I've
presented solid arguments in a discussion, only to hear
a "concession" along the lines of "I can't argue with
your logic, but I still consider you wrong". If you really
want to sway opinions, rather than minds, you'll do more
by applying the "dark side" of Aristotelian logic than
you will by avoiding fallacies.
I am amazed that nobody mentioned anything about how long
the prints are expected to last. That beautiful photo you're
printing as a gift - will is still look the same 5 years from
now? 10 years? 20 years?
I think you've overlooked the obvious explanation - Most
people simply don't care how long it will last,
because the answer really doesn't matter... 99.9% of them
count as trash before they hit the printer, and for the
very, very few shots you really value - well, digital
photography has the perk that you can store the original
data forever, and pop off a 100% perfect print any time
you feel like it.
When someone hands me a photo, it goes into "the drawer".
You all have a "the drawer", admit it. Do you
really care about your niece Tiffany's 4th-grade-mid-term-graduation
picture? About your neighbor's kid Billy's first bike ride?
About the 627 blurry pictures of clouds, dirt, and water, that
your newly-in-touch-with-her-earthy-photographer-self mother
printed for you?
HELL NO!
Perhaps you work as a professional photographer,
in which case I suppose the above might not
apply (though I've seen some pretty worthless crap from
pros, too, so that doesn't automaticall exempt you
from the "photos count as tacky gifts" rule). But most
pictures, whether digital or analog, only have
value to either the photographer or the subect(s) (and
not necessarily, or even most-of-the-time, to both).
but you must still distribute the sources of at least
the free software (free as in RMS).
Thus explaining why every single open source project
includes the full GCC source tree with it?
Sony did a very bad thing, and should suffer greatly for
their actions. But this particular part of it strikes
me as a non-issue, unless we have some proof that they
modified Lame before linking against it.
However, the source code has not also been distrbuted,
hence breaching the license
Uhh... Probably not going to say something popular here,
but wouldn't it only violate the LGPL if they had
made changes to the code and then not made those
changes available?
If they just linked against it as a library, well, the LGPL
exists for exactly that reason.
Not to say that I find it all that unlikely that Sony did
in fact make changes (adding some other DRM, beyond
the rootkit itself - Though even that, they could theoretically
have done without modifying the Lame code itself), but
this seems all too much like exactly what we fault SCO for.
"You used our code! Give us your changes!" "We didn't make
any changes..." "Well give us the code and prove it!"
Are you going to find a proper recycler so you don't
poison the environment with mercury?
Environmentalism aside - Considering that my state (Maine)
requires proper disposal of fluorescent bulbs by law - Yes,
I most certainly will dispose of them properly, as
hazardous waste.
Most likely, I'll make use of my town's
yearly "bring down a bucket of hazardous waste for free"
week, but even if not, the $5 fee or whatever pittance they
charge to take them still makes CFs cheaper (dollar-wise)
over their lifetime than incandescents.
Amusing little story about the lifespan of Cf bulbs...
I've switched over to 100% CF (except the refrigerator, CF bulbs
really don't like the cold) in my own house. While visiting a
friend's apartment last winter, a lightbulb (incandescent) went out
in the kitchen. My friend got up and flipped the switch a couple
times, and of course nothing happened. I helpfully suggested reseating
the bulb, to a strange look but no comment in response. He got
up and took the cover off the lamp, then removed and reinserted
the bulb. A few more switch flips, no light. I asked if it
felt too cold (he kept his apartment rather chilly) and suggested
warming it against his skin for a few minutes. At this point he
annoyedly started a mini-rant resembling Monty Python's dead parrot
scene, pointing out that it cost a whopping 49 cents and he had
a dozen in the closet.
Call me an idiot, but it simply didn't occur to me that it just
burned out - I've had one CF die ever, in at least
five years of use, and I attribute that largely to a brownout
the night before. The common task of "changing a lightbulb" has,
to me, become an event comparable in rarity (if fortunately not
expense) of replacing the TV or a car.
My sincere apologies to the... Um... Now great-grand-parent.:)
Gotta remember to hit the "parent" link before responding to anything
seemingly out of place. Or browse at -1, but the
four-letters-whose-utterance-leads-to-bannination make that ever
such a pain to wade through the crap.
I would think. If Kontiki is legal, how would caching a
bittorrent for an episode of "Lost" be any different?
Don't mistake the medium for the content (even if the world's
governments can't tell the difference).
Kontiki or BT or plain ol' Kazaa, doesn't matter here.
The holders of the copyright can give you permission
to do anything at all (beyond fair use, of course) with
that content. If that means "you have the right to watch
this, keep a copy or part of a copy, and redistribute it
to others in response to a valid request over our proprietary
network", they can certainly do so. They can even say
"you can distribute this over our branded-but-identical
version of Kontiki, but not any other version of Kontiki".
Now, personally, I see this as a good thing, assuming
they don't make it so Windows-only and DRM'd to death that
they alienate their entire target audience. If they can avoid
that... Well, I don't like most of the "X marks the death of
Y" claims, but this could well put quite a few nails in the
coffin of traditional broadcast television.
Both Toyota and Honda were unable to tell CarPoint exactly
how much of the battery could be recycled. Both have left the
task of recycling in the hands of a third party recycler.
That doesn't mean quite the same thing as saying
that we can't recycle them. I suspect that, currently,
not a lot of demand exists for recycling NiMH and
Li-ion batteries, so they only go after the "easy" bits.
If a lot more demand, and supply of EOL parts that otherwise
someone needs to pay to throw away, starts appearing,
we'll see a much more complete recycling program for them.
35-40 MPG when a standard gas burner gets 25-30?
For which one? A friend's Prius gets consistantly over 50,
with over 60 not uncommon (and ironically, while most cars
do better on the highway than in normal traffic, hers does
better in traffic! Supposedly that has something to do
with the engine stopping itself when not in use, so wind drag
becomes a bigger fuel waste than idleing).
Now why in the HELL haven't we seen THESE on the market?!?!
On that point, I will agree with you 100%. Granted, hydrogen
may or may not solve our dependence on foreign oil, but it
can come from far cleaner sources, and burns
as "green" as anything possibly can.
The only reason to buy a hybrid is show other people
how much you care about the environment: it's a statement,
not an answer.
Okay, mr-stereotypical-SUV-driving-cellphone-talking
mcdonalds-sucking-American-corporatist-pigdog, some
of us actually do care about the environment.
Very few people can tell that I use all CF lighting in my
home and pick my CPUs based on power consumption (Athlon 64
all the way, baby!). My lawn "only" looks healthy, not
the bright-chemo-green I could get by dumping fertilizer
and weed killer on it. No one but me can tell that I go
out of my way and pay more to fill my (SO's) car with B20
biodiesel. That I use biodegradable laundry detergent and
non-chlorine bleach. That I manually duplex all my printouts,
thus using only half the paper (and for personal use, I'll
even do 2- or 4-up per side as well). That I post on Slashdot
using 100% recycled electrons.
You can't tell any of those things from a casual
observation (well, I suppose if you came into my house you
might notice the color of the CFs rather than incandescents).
Therefore, I can't possibly have a "oh, look at me saving the
environment! Look, look, I care!" motive. Nor can you
attribute it (like the FP) to purely financial goals - Some
of those save me money, some cost me more. The net gain
goes straight to helping YOU breathe better.
Unfortunately, I suspect that more often than not, you have
it right. But hell, I'll take even the slight improvement
of faux-environmentalists over a proud SUV owner any
day.
Do you have any clue what types of chemicals are in batteries?
I can't speak for the parent poster, but yes, actually, I do
have a pretty good idea of the chemistry of rechargeable batteries.
A close friend of mine did his PhD work on Li-ion electrolytes, and
I worked with him with quite a bit on his data analysis.
NASTY chemicals. Literally the sort of things with thermal
decomposition products currently in the US's WMD arsenal as
chemical weapons (phosgene gas, as one example).
But, properly disposed of (or better, cleaned and recycled), these
batteries pose little threat to the environment. Far, far less
than the lifetime emmissions of an internal combustion engine.
Keep in mind that your car puts out literally TONS of
waste products per year. If you can halve that by
doubling your fuel efficiency (and since hybrids run the
ICE at its optimal load and speed, you end up doing quite a
lot better than just the reciprocal of your mileage change),
you easily beat the environmental impact of a battery change
by several orders of magnitude.
A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a
massive battery which will need to be disposed of safely
in a few years.
At least with lead-acid batteries, while it may count as
toxic waste and cost a ton to dispose of, you can also
recycle 99% of it into a new battery. Thus, the
"environmental impact" under the assumption of disposal,
doesn't really give a good indication of the real
effect on the environment.
One that is not from somebody trying to sell us on
the idea of owning a hybrid
Such studies invariably come from either pro or con
interest groups. In this case, however, I'd have to
say that we can probably trust the manufacturer-pro
groups somewhat more than on most issue, in that they
still sell non-hybrids, thus can get your money either
way. I'd also say the manufacturer-con studies should
have some validity, except currently they come mostly
from US manufacturers only interested in "uh-oh, we need
to meet these horrible new 1-MPG-higger CAFE standards in
another 20 years (after extentions and stalling), let's
talk about why we it won't really work even though Japan
already beats us by a factor of two".
Except for #6 and partially #7, those all describe
real laws pending in various "civilized"
nations around the globe (mostly the US, UK, and AU).
And it really wouldn't surprise me to learn that some
(non-sharia, which fails the above qualification of
"civilized") country currently has 6 and 7 on the table,
since I suspect that the GP deliberately mentioned each
of those as all-too-real legislation currently under
consideration.
I hope you realize you're talking about murdering some guys
Hyperbole? Look it up.;-)
Besides, how about critising the ones who are really
responsible for this? You know, the so-called ARTISTS
I disagree. Yes, the artists have some power to self-promote,
and the internet has made that far more realistic than ever
before. And yes, the artists may have made it easy to
victimize themselves, even going willingly to the slaughter
(metaphorically, not advocating murder here) with stars in
their eyes... But do you blame the terminal cancer victims
for actively seeking out snake-oil salesmen, or do you blame
the snake-oil salesmen for giving people false hope?
Anyway, that counts as a different argument altogether than
the one I addressed in the previous post. DRM would exist
even if every artist chose to self-promote (case in
point, iTunes).
The problem here involves the rights of a "consumer" (ye gods
I hate that term) to own and use their own property in any
manner they so desire. The right of a computer owner not to
have it controlled by Sony just because they bought a CD
containing a booby-trap that 99% of the population doesn't
even know about, much less understand. The right of
the music lover to buy a CD and play it at home, on his
computer, or in the car, without two of those not working
and one of them actually breaking from the attempt. The right
of the reader to not have their books "expire" and go blank
after six months.
Or more fundamentally - The right of social creatures to attempt
to share their cultural experience with other social creatures.
And yes, that means copying music. It means quoting Monty Python
scenes. It means describing the patented plot of a new book or
movie. It even means taking pictures at a concert or play (though
for the love of Zeus, people, will you please learn that flashes
don't work on a subject more than 10 feet away???) to show your
friends the next day.
It does NOT, lest you misunderstand my intentions
here, include making your music collection downloadable to
thousands of random strangers. It does not include
committing "real" crimes (such as B&E, murder, extortion, not
even mob-style piracy rings) to gain access to those cultural
experiences. I fully encourage the legal (and far more
powerful, the peer-group) suppression of those activities.
But rooting my machine doesn't break up a prostitution
ring in prague. It doesn't stop a HK shop owner from
getting beaten up over a copy of The Wedding Singer. It
only stops (or rather, makes it slightly harder, since
these DRM schemes really do seem laughable thus far) me from
enjoying music I legitimately paid for in the manner I so
desire.
I don't advocate murdering anyone. But I also don't
run away in fear every morning when, while grazing, the big
scary yellow thing comes up over the horizon. And you can't
deprive people of access to their own culture without expecting
a reaction, quite possibly a violent one.
Once they have the means to back up all the ludicrous
terms, you won't be ignoring it and you won't be laughing.
True - We'll stop laughing long enough to put Sony's execs
up against the wall.
They can only get away with this precisely because they
can't enforce it (physically - legally still hase a lot of
uncertaintly, particularly with some of the more bizarre terms).
As soon as people start coming home and finding their laptops
"courtesy-wiped" after a break-in, you can bet the public won't
just happily ignore the crap we geeks have known about for
years. And THAT counts as the point that really matters...
As much as we may understand the dangers of DRM, Joe Sixpack
currently does not. As soon as he does, the tide will turn,
and it might get ugly(-ier).
Slashdot Mirror
What product is the result of the tiny increase in cost is it that you write of?
Honestly, I don't specifically know - I don't work in the fan industry.
But for comparison, I looked up some real numbers. One popular (on Amazon) model of 20" box fan 20" draws 166W for 2220CFM, or 13.4 CFM/W. An 18" oscillating pedestal fan draws 119W for 1970CFM, or 16.6 CFM/W. And a ceiling fan... Energy Star actually rates those, so they have motivation to perform well for the power they draw. And they do - I can't even do a "fair" comparison based on either power or CFM, because the bad ones do over 100 CFM/W, with the best ones passing 200!
Of course, that doesn't address price - Amazon has several models of ceiling fan for under $50. The above-mentioned box fan (the Air King 9723) goes for $39.99. Not pennies, but FAR less of a difference in price than the difference in power consumption.
I wish I could find some that lit to near full brightness in a few seconds instead of the 15-30 they take to warm up.
;-)
In this case, "you get what you pay for".
I have all CFs bulbs in my house, and have noticed that the $5/3-packs from WallyWorld or Home Depot tend to take a second to start and then a long time to warm up, while the $7-each ones come on at full brightness just as fast as an incandescent.
Personally, I'll deal with the 30-second delay.
Seriously, how low can they make the power consumption without raising the price of the item significantly?
How about "very nearly zero"? Ideally, an "off" device would draw zero watts, but I realize we expect our toys to respond at a moments notice, and that takes some electricity.
My TV, when off, draws 7 watts. That presumeably lets it remember its settings and watch for activity from the remote control. Those two tasks, however, should draw in the low milliwatts, certainly not more than a full watt.
Printers also tend to have a very high idle current draw (and by idle I mean cold and in standby not just "not printing". 20-25W seems common for that - More than the total I use for actively lighting my house under normal conditions (assuming three CF lighbulbs at once, fron 5 to 9 watts each).
Of course, I think we'd do a lot better to worry about the active draw of our appliances. For example, the humble 19" box-fan draws a whopping 150W on high. With only a tiny increase in cost, that can drop by a factor of three, yet no one cares because no one realizes what a massive power sucker they have sitting happily humming in the window.
What you need is an audio distribution amplifier (DA).
I agree completely, but the one you link to seems quite a bit more complicated (and expensive) than necessary here - You need the $200 base unit plus a $50 receiver in each room? No way!
The AudioVox VA100 (not a referrer link, and just search for the model number on Amazon if you don't trust me) does 1 stereo input to 4 stereo outputs, and handles audio separate from video (ie, no need to deal with converting it to RF and back, as with most cheap distribution amps). $50 per eight audio outputs (for the described use, stereo won't add anything to the quality, so might as well use the channels independantly). If the FP poster needs less than 16 rooms, I'd even try splitting each of those outputs once, shouldn't hurt the quality too much with active speakers.
It is equally easy for me to put on a nice sharp-looking shirt a pair of slacks as it is to put a crummy t-shirt and pair of worn jeans.
;-)
Agreed...
I wear the the former at work, because I certainly need to maintain a certain kind of class
There, we part ways. I wear the latter to work because I need to - Well, WORK.
Actually doing my job requires me to (depending on the task) sit in front of a computer all day coding; Run cable through hot and dusty ceilings; Replace toner cartridges (which almost never seem all that effective at keeping the toner on the inside); Crawl under desks; Replace motors, amps, displays, and pretty much anything that draws electricity on a variety of manufacturing equipment; Save the day on a regular basis.
As in regards to the IT industry. Get out of it. I seriously pity anyone who considers IT to be a `career path'. It is not and I certainly don't regard that way.
If your job only requires you to suck the asses of your customers, good for you, make sure your bib matches your cufflinks.
Personally, I ENJOY doing all of the above. I started out as a firmware engineer - Paid wonderfully, and I would have burned out by now had I not switched to something with a little more day-to-day variation five years ago. Now, every day offers me new challenges, new surprises, people appreciate my presence rather than bitch about schedules, and I don't spend 20-hour days tracing through a crappy debugger interface to an ICE.
I am a Software Engineer currently in college
Ahahahahaahaha... Oh, too funny!
Point 1) SE falls under the category of IT, ya uppity snob.
Point 2) Welcome to the real world - Oh, wait, you haven't entered it yet. Perhaps you should hold off on your condemnation of what other people chose to do, at least untill you find out whether or not you actually like writing non-toy code, with a real budget and real schedule (hint - you can't take an "I" and finish it next year... And on the flip side, even if you can code in your sleep, your workload will just increase until you still can't possibly finish it anyway).
Point 3) What the hell does "pure" SE have to do with going out to talk to clients? Marketing does that. They hide you deep in the basement, with all the caffeine you can consume, and let you out once a week so your family doesn't call the police to report you missing. Unless you mean one of "those" SEs - the type the rest of us alternately pity or loath, who only sit in a chair long enough to make it to the esteemed ranks of middle management, where they can trade intestinal parasites intranasally to their hearts' content.
Joking aside, though, I think you have a rather skewed view of what "IT" entails. It doesn't mean "helpdesk troll". It doesn't mean "telephone tech support". It doesn't mean "whipping boy, already under the desk anyway". It may include those tasks, but it also includes "real" coding, it includes system and network administration, it includes hardware maintenance. If you go to work for a large company, you may indeed find yourself doing nothing but staring at the same monotonous screen for 12 hours a day. If you go to work at a small-to-mid-sized company, you will do all of the above, and then some. And I wouldn't give up the latter to go back to the former for anything.
The entire boogeyman of some company destroying Linux via a patent suit never really threatened most of us in the first place.
Why, you might ask?
Because most of us don't really care. Patents count as a silly abstract nuissance for business-folk, not for hobbyist developers. Treble damages? 3 * $0 = $0. No doubt some lawyer will point out that other dangers exist, but really, I (and I doubt most of us) really lose sleep over the idea that our use, or even code contributions, of Linux may violate some obscure submarine patent waiting to spring out at us.
Or to look at it another way: If the USSC banned Linux tomorrow due to it infringing some patent - How many of you would run out and buy XP to "fix" all your now-illegal machines?
Do you think you'll have to pay more or less than $0.99 for your favorite throwback band.
Multiply $1.00 by two. Demand halves, profit stays the same.
Divide $1.00 by two. Demand doubles, profit stays the same.
Now - Do both of those hold true?
For the most popular music, you have people who will pay almost anything for it. So demand doesn't really halve, it drops by something less than that.
For the less popular music, you have people who want it but won't pay a buck for it. I would predict that the demand will actually go up exponentially as the price drops.
So profit goes up at both ends of the spectrum.
Now - One more confounding problem - This assumes people can only "get their fix" from iTunes. A typical 10-15 track album costs basically a buck-per-track to buy as a CD. Will people pay twice that to get it track-wise in a digital form, or will they just buy the CD and rip it themselves?
You forget these people may need to send or receive documents from the well-to-do people that are using Microsoft Office already. Communication is supposed to be a two-way street, after all.
The "economically disadvantaged" don't blow $300 to $600 on buying Office, Acrobat, Photoshop, and whatever other crap they need to view "standard" formats.
They either run Free Software, or they pirate the real thing.
When you can choose between food for the next two months, and Excel - Well, one of those wins without even a second though. And that winner doesn't start with "M" and end with "T".
Or, just in case you have no frame of reference for this - Think back to college, to eating nothing but ramen (or worse, the school's "Food" Services chow) between visits to the family. If you came across a $10 bill - Would you put it away towards your student copy of MathCad... Or buy a pizza?
without wasting a couple hours just to figure out the code.
A couple hours???
Look, no offense, but you either only deal in "toy" code, or you have such high expectation that you will fail, and quite spectacularly.
A new coder, even an experienced one, takes days or even weeks after coming into an existing project before he can contribute anything but the most trivial of changes. For a truly massive project, or one that requires intimate domain-specific knowledge in a niche industry, extend that to months.
If you can find a way to get an unfamiliar newcomer up to speed on any "real" project in a matter of hours, consider your talents wasted in your current position.
It was both accessable and absolutely hilarious, without sacrificing the soul of the play
As I said, I don't have a problem with modern adaptations of classic works - So long as they don't sacrifice the shared cultural aspects that make the underlying plays "classics". Hell, Shakespeare himself stole (at least) half of his plays from "classics" of that era - Pyramis and Thisbe (aka Romeo and Juliet), as perhaps the best known example.
I just find it a waste of time, and generally a sadly blatant attempt to get me to buy somthing by making it "cool and edgy", the ultimate draw for the flocks of "individualist" consumers. An attempt to over-"modernize" something to the point that it will look horribly dated a mere five years from now. Like Devo - "hyper-modern", or a very laughable stereotype of an 80's prog rock band?
We put far too much devotion into the "classics' and developing our "canon recognition", and not enough time into actual thinking up new and interesting ideas.
Because "the classics", if not actually defining our culture, give us a common foundation on which to build a shared cultural experience.
Did a dead semi-anonymous 16th century hack pop-poet/playwright really create the best-ever-and-always set of English writings? Of course not! He wrote the equivalent of "Seinfeld" for the televidiots of his day. But like it or not, that does give us a certain common ground on which to relate to one another socially. We like "lowbrow" humor. We prefer the good guy to win. We want blood and guts and gore and veins in our teeth. We enjoy Moe getting poked in the eyes by Larry. We want to see the queen kiss a Federline, everyone to tragically die at the end, and the servants to get away with a good practical joke on their bosses.
Now, based on the above, does it commit some grievous sin to "translate" the works of this ancient hack into a more modern form? To that, I would say no, with a qualification - One can modernize without butchering. Converting Hamlet to the style of texting fails to make the work more accessible, instead tailoring it to a very niche subculture of rebellion-without-a-clue (and likely a short-lived subculture at that, as it only even exists as the fleeting intersection of a technological limitation with an economic convenience).
it will permit english to be used in new ways where the reader isn't sure what the writer is getting at
That would completely defeat the entire purpose of language. Not to mention, it would make self-propagation of the meme rather difficult, if no one can decode the message.
Not to say that some of the deliberately incoherent or semicoherent work of authors such as Stein have no value... But their value lies directly in breaking the verbal mind out of its rut, rather than as a means of communication.
Sound bytes will be more important in winning someone over to the writer's view, not a coherent argument.
Unfortunately, that has held true for all of human history. I can't even count how many times I've presented solid arguments in a discussion, only to hear a "concession" along the lines of "I can't argue with your logic, but I still consider you wrong". If you really want to sway opinions, rather than minds, you'll do more by applying the "dark side" of Aristotelian logic than you will by avoiding fallacies.
I am amazed that nobody mentioned anything about how long the prints are expected to last. That beautiful photo you're printing as a gift - will is still look the same 5 years from now? 10 years? 20 years?
I think you've overlooked the obvious explanation - Most people simply don't care how long it will last, because the answer really doesn't matter... 99.9% of them count as trash before they hit the printer, and for the very, very few shots you really value - well, digital photography has the perk that you can store the original data forever, and pop off a 100% perfect print any time you feel like it.
When someone hands me a photo, it goes into "the drawer". You all have a "the drawer", admit it. Do you really care about your niece Tiffany's 4th-grade-mid-term-graduation picture? About your neighbor's kid Billy's first bike ride? About the 627 blurry pictures of clouds, dirt, and water, that your newly-in-touch-with-her-earthy-photographer-self mother printed for you?
HELL NO!
Perhaps you work as a professional photographer, in which case I suppose the above might not apply (though I've seen some pretty worthless crap from pros, too, so that doesn't automaticall exempt you from the "photos count as tacky gifts" rule). But most pictures, whether digital or analog, only have value to either the photographer or the subect(s) (and not necessarily, or even most-of-the-time, to both).
but you must still distribute the sources of at least the free software (free as in RMS).
Thus explaining why every single open source project includes the full GCC source tree with it?
Sony did a very bad thing, and should suffer greatly for their actions. But this particular part of it strikes me as a non-issue, unless we have some proof that they modified Lame before linking against it.
However, the source code has not also been distrbuted, hence breaching the license
Uhh... Probably not going to say something popular here, but wouldn't it only violate the LGPL if they had made changes to the code and then not made those changes available?
If they just linked against it as a library, well, the LGPL exists for exactly that reason.
Not to say that I find it all that unlikely that Sony did in fact make changes (adding some other DRM, beyond the rootkit itself - Though even that, they could theoretically have done without modifying the Lame code itself), but this seems all too much like exactly what we fault SCO for.
"You used our code! Give us your changes!" "We didn't make any changes..." "Well give us the code and prove it!"
Are you going to find a proper recycler so you don't poison the environment with mercury?
Environmentalism aside - Considering that my state (Maine) requires proper disposal of fluorescent bulbs by law - Yes, I most certainly will dispose of them properly, as hazardous waste.
Most likely, I'll make use of my town's yearly "bring down a bucket of hazardous waste for free" week, but even if not, the $5 fee or whatever pittance they charge to take them still makes CFs cheaper (dollar-wise) over their lifetime than incandescents.
Amusing little story about the lifespan of Cf bulbs...
I've switched over to 100% CF (except the refrigerator, CF bulbs really don't like the cold) in my own house. While visiting a friend's apartment last winter, a lightbulb (incandescent) went out in the kitchen. My friend got up and flipped the switch a couple times, and of course nothing happened. I helpfully suggested reseating the bulb, to a strange look but no comment in response. He got up and took the cover off the lamp, then removed and reinserted the bulb. A few more switch flips, no light. I asked if it felt too cold (he kept his apartment rather chilly) and suggested warming it against his skin for a few minutes. At this point he annoyedly started a mini-rant resembling Monty Python's dead parrot scene, pointing out that it cost a whopping 49 cents and he had a dozen in the closet.
Call me an idiot, but it simply didn't occur to me that it just burned out - I've had one CF die ever, in at least five years of use, and I attribute that largely to a brownout the night before. The common task of "changing a lightbulb" has, to me, become an event comparable in rarity (if fortunately not expense) of replacing the TV or a car.
Ah... Oops, my bad.
:)
My sincere apologies to the... Um... Now great-grand-parent.
Gotta remember to hit the "parent" link before responding to anything seemingly out of place. Or browse at -1, but the four-letters-whose-utterance-leads-to-bannination make that ever such a pain to wade through the crap.
I would think. If Kontiki is legal, how would caching a bittorrent for an episode of "Lost" be any different?
Don't mistake the medium for the content (even if the world's governments can't tell the difference).
Kontiki or BT or plain ol' Kazaa, doesn't matter here. The holders of the copyright can give you permission to do anything at all (beyond fair use, of course) with that content. If that means "you have the right to watch this, keep a copy or part of a copy, and redistribute it to others in response to a valid request over our proprietary network", they can certainly do so. They can even say "you can distribute this over our branded-but-identical version of Kontiki, but not any other version of Kontiki".
Now, personally, I see this as a good thing, assuming they don't make it so Windows-only and DRM'd to death that they alienate their entire target audience. If they can avoid that... Well, I don't like most of the "X marks the death of Y" claims, but this could well put quite a few nails in the coffin of traditional broadcast television.
Both Toyota and Honda were unable to tell CarPoint exactly how much of the battery could be recycled. Both have left the task of recycling in the hands of a third party recycler.
That doesn't mean quite the same thing as saying that we can't recycle them. I suspect that, currently, not a lot of demand exists for recycling NiMH and Li-ion batteries, so they only go after the "easy" bits. If a lot more demand, and supply of EOL parts that otherwise someone needs to pay to throw away, starts appearing, we'll see a much more complete recycling program for them.
35-40 MPG when a standard gas burner gets 25-30?
For which one? A friend's Prius gets consistantly over 50, with over 60 not uncommon (and ironically, while most cars do better on the highway than in normal traffic, hers does better in traffic! Supposedly that has something to do with the engine stopping itself when not in use, so wind drag becomes a bigger fuel waste than idleing).
Now why in the HELL haven't we seen THESE on the market?!?!
On that point, I will agree with you 100%. Granted, hydrogen may or may not solve our dependence on foreign oil, but it can come from far cleaner sources, and burns as "green" as anything possibly can.
The only reason to buy a hybrid is show other people how much you care about the environment: it's a statement, not an answer.
Okay, mr-stereotypical-SUV-driving-cellphone-talking mcdonalds-sucking-American-corporatist-pigdog, some of us actually do care about the environment.
Very few people can tell that I use all CF lighting in my home and pick my CPUs based on power consumption (Athlon 64 all the way, baby!). My lawn "only" looks healthy, not the bright-chemo-green I could get by dumping fertilizer and weed killer on it. No one but me can tell that I go out of my way and pay more to fill my (SO's) car with B20 biodiesel. That I use biodegradable laundry detergent and non-chlorine bleach. That I manually duplex all my printouts, thus using only half the paper (and for personal use, I'll even do 2- or 4-up per side as well). That I post on Slashdot using 100% recycled electrons.
You can't tell any of those things from a casual observation (well, I suppose if you came into my house you might notice the color of the CFs rather than incandescents). Therefore, I can't possibly have a "oh, look at me saving the environment! Look, look, I care!" motive. Nor can you attribute it (like the FP) to purely financial goals - Some of those save me money, some cost me more. The net gain goes straight to helping YOU breathe better.
Unfortunately, I suspect that more often than not, you have it right. But hell, I'll take even the slight improvement of faux-environmentalists over a proud SUV owner any day.
Do you have any clue what types of chemicals are in batteries?
I can't speak for the parent poster, but yes, actually, I do have a pretty good idea of the chemistry of rechargeable batteries. A close friend of mine did his PhD work on Li-ion electrolytes, and I worked with him with quite a bit on his data analysis.
NASTY chemicals. Literally the sort of things with thermal decomposition products currently in the US's WMD arsenal as chemical weapons (phosgene gas, as one example).
But, properly disposed of (or better, cleaned and recycled), these batteries pose little threat to the environment. Far, far less than the lifetime emmissions of an internal combustion engine.
Keep in mind that your car puts out literally TONS of waste products per year. If you can halve that by doubling your fuel efficiency (and since hybrids run the ICE at its optimal load and speed, you end up doing quite a lot better than just the reciprocal of your mileage change), you easily beat the environmental impact of a battery change by several orders of magnitude.
A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a massive battery which will need to be disposed of safely in a few years.
At least with lead-acid batteries, while it may count as toxic waste and cost a ton to dispose of, you can also recycle 99% of it into a new battery. Thus, the "environmental impact" under the assumption of disposal, doesn't really give a good indication of the real effect on the environment.
One that is not from somebody trying to sell us on the idea of owning a hybrid
Such studies invariably come from either pro or con interest groups. In this case, however, I'd have to say that we can probably trust the manufacturer-pro groups somewhat more than on most issue, in that they still sell non-hybrids, thus can get your money either way. I'd also say the manufacturer-con studies should have some validity, except currently they come mostly from US manufacturers only interested in "uh-oh, we need to meet these horrible new 1-MPG-higger CAFE standards in another 20 years (after extentions and stalling), let's talk about why we it won't really work even though Japan already beats us by a factor of two".
The only one that's real is #8.
Bzzzt.
Except for #6 and partially #7, those all describe real laws pending in various "civilized" nations around the globe (mostly the US, UK, and AU).
And it really wouldn't surprise me to learn that some (non-sharia, which fails the above qualification of "civilized") country currently has 6 and 7 on the table, since I suspect that the GP deliberately mentioned each of those as all-too-real legislation currently under consideration.
I hope you realize you're talking about murdering some guys
;-)
Hyperbole? Look it up.
Besides, how about critising the ones who are really responsible for this? You know, the so-called ARTISTS
I disagree. Yes, the artists have some power to self-promote, and the internet has made that far more realistic than ever before. And yes, the artists may have made it easy to victimize themselves, even going willingly to the slaughter (metaphorically, not advocating murder here) with stars in their eyes... But do you blame the terminal cancer victims for actively seeking out snake-oil salesmen, or do you blame the snake-oil salesmen for giving people false hope?
Anyway, that counts as a different argument altogether than the one I addressed in the previous post. DRM would exist even if every artist chose to self-promote (case in point, iTunes).
The problem here involves the rights of a "consumer" (ye gods I hate that term) to own and use their own property in any manner they so desire. The right of a computer owner not to have it controlled by Sony just because they bought a CD containing a booby-trap that 99% of the population doesn't even know about, much less understand. The right of the music lover to buy a CD and play it at home, on his computer, or in the car, without two of those not working and one of them actually breaking from the attempt. The right of the reader to not have their books "expire" and go blank after six months.
Or more fundamentally - The right of social creatures to attempt to share their cultural experience with other social creatures. And yes, that means copying music. It means quoting Monty Python scenes. It means describing the patented plot of a new book or movie. It even means taking pictures at a concert or play (though for the love of Zeus, people, will you please learn that flashes don't work on a subject more than 10 feet away???) to show your friends the next day.
It does NOT, lest you misunderstand my intentions here, include making your music collection downloadable to thousands of random strangers. It does not include committing "real" crimes (such as B&E, murder, extortion, not even mob-style piracy rings) to gain access to those cultural experiences. I fully encourage the legal (and far more powerful, the peer-group) suppression of those activities. But rooting my machine doesn't break up a prostitution ring in prague. It doesn't stop a HK shop owner from getting beaten up over a copy of The Wedding Singer. It only stops (or rather, makes it slightly harder, since these DRM schemes really do seem laughable thus far) me from enjoying music I legitimately paid for in the manner I so desire.
I don't advocate murdering anyone. But I also don't run away in fear every morning when, while grazing, the big scary yellow thing comes up over the horizon. And you can't deprive people of access to their own culture without expecting a reaction, quite possibly a violent one.
Once they have the means to back up all the ludicrous terms, you won't be ignoring it and you won't be laughing.
True - We'll stop laughing long enough to put Sony's execs up against the wall.
They can only get away with this precisely because they can't enforce it (physically - legally still hase a lot of uncertaintly, particularly with some of the more bizarre terms).
As soon as people start coming home and finding their laptops "courtesy-wiped" after a break-in, you can bet the public won't just happily ignore the crap we geeks have known about for years. And THAT counts as the point that really matters... As much as we may understand the dangers of DRM, Joe Sixpack currently does not. As soon as he does, the tide will turn, and it might get ugly(-ier).