Once an image has been produced it will remain visible even with the power switched off.
Whoa, not good. That means I can't just hit the power switch and pretend I was done for the evening when the girlfriend walks in. Might have to actually run another application and switch over to it. Not good.
On the other hand, this could mean a self-updating Hustler magazine. Hmmm. You could pull out that ten-year-old magazine and see what the chick looks like these days - see what all those years of tanning beds got her. Heh.
This sounds goofy, and it probably is, but didn't all this stuff come from the earth? Why not put it back? We have loads of oil wells that have dried up - drop some plutonium down there when you cap a well. We have to seal the cap anyway, and the low quantities of waste per drilled hole would mean there wouldn't be much of a reward if terrorists tried to pull the stuff back up.
Written and spoken language would change drastically over 10,000 years, how would we show the people of the future that this is a BAD building to enter?
Well, I'm no psychologist, but I can't imagine anything of the sort working. Look at how we dug into pyramids, despite them having the best barricades they could think up just a short few thousand years ago.
But furthermore, you're implying that people 10,000 years from now won't be able to detect radiation before it's too late. I would imagine that 10,000 years from now, detecting radiation won't be any more difficult than it is today. "Gee, I'm losing my hair. Hmmm." Hahaha.
The higher questions are, what kind of site *should* host ads, how can advertising be incorporated into the content in such a way as to be visable, interesting, and attractive to users of the site.
Well, I can answer the first one pretty easily. If you're getting free services, you should expect to get hit with obnoxious ads. The more you pay, the less obnoxious the ads are.
For example, take radio stations. If you turn on your radio and listen to the free stations, your content will be interrupted every 10 minutes with a stream of advertisements that make banner ads look positively unobtrusive. You get a decent amount of content, but you have to sit through a lot of ads.
Next up, public radio. If you shell out money directly to the station to support it, there's a lot less commercials. Granted, not everyone shells out the money, so in exchange, guess what? You get a minor amount of commercials. They're much less annoying than regular radio, but they're there.
Finally, if you pony up a whopping $30+ a month for digital radio through your cable provider, you can listen to streaming music without any interruptions at all.
That's how media works. The more you pay, the less someone else has to pay. But sooner or later, somebody has to pay. You can point to things like Shoutcast and whine that you can indeed get free audio, but somebody's paying for that through their bandwidth costs, and so are you. You don't see anybody running Shoutcast stations on free ISP's.
What amazes me is that people are surprised by banner ads. They honestly expect someone to put up a server somewhere and offer services for free. You don't see anybody putting up free radio stations, do you? Sure, Joe Bob might pirate some radio for a while, but when he gets bored, he goes back to work like the rest of us.
They see a low number of click-throughs, and a low number of purchaces on click-throughs. So they can see the low response to their adds. They are more willing to spend their money on tv adds where they cant as readily see they are wasting money.
The industry has been fighting this for years. You'll notice that a lot of TV or radio ads say, "Ask for Extension 760". There's no real extension 760, or whatever extension they use, but it's a code that corresponds to where they placed the ad. Of course, most of us don't bother with asking for extensions when we're ordering things.
Print ads have been doing this with their web site tie-ins for a while, too. I just picked up the latest issue of Time off my desk for an example, and Covad's ad says to visit covad.com/sdsl29. That's a tie-in to the magazine ad, and it's a lot like a click-through.
The text-only ad said: 563 lively book reviews on all subjects
Whereas the Google ad said: A passionate but scholarly study of modern slavery
Anyone with half a brain is going to read book reviews before they read a "scholarly study". This isn't a controlled study, and the results are useless.
Suggestion to Danny: the next time you do a study, the test has to be set up so that it's not biased. The ads should have exactly the same content, so that you can judge the ad delivery and not the ads themselves. If you were trying to find out who found book reviews interesting as opposed to studies, then you ran a successful study, but otherwise this is totally useless.
"in order to meet the British government's target date... Dell and Microsoft worked feverishly to meet a blistering three-week rollout schedule for the first phase."
If they got the first draft to work in three weeks, they're doing a lot better than anybody I've ever worked with. Our stuff doesn't work with ANY browser that fast.
My solution has always been simple: after I've been using a product for a few months, and I've really got a good handle on its shortcomings, and after I've seen how it treats my support needs (or lack thereof), I re-evaluate the purchase price. If I feel like I got way, way more than I bargained for, and the stuff is really good, I give money where it counts - THE DEVELOPERS directly.
You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how easy it is to find out who the key developers are on any given software project. Rather than just mailing them a check, send them a gift certificate for something useful. It tells them that you are thankful for the great job they did, and it makes them more likely to improve the product and take your comments seriously.
Even better, if you're selective about where you buy the gift certificates, you can actually kill two birds with one stone. It goes without saying that you shouldn't be giving away Amazon gift certificates, but ThinkGeek might be a good candidate for you.
You can make a statement to the developer that they're doing a great job, and you can make a statement about the kind of company you'd like to support.
After saying all this, it should be pretty clear that I don't endorse sending money directly to the companies themselves. If they go down the tubes because they're not smart enough to price their products successfully and market them, that's their own dang problem.
THis was actually a very good and accurate review by Katz (/me waits for all the Katz bashers to jump on the bandwagon).
I totally have to agree with you there. IMHO, Katz is generally a raving idiot with an amazing knack for restating and restating the obvious, but this time, he's told me everything I wanted to know. I've read a few reviews of this movie, all written by people who review movies for a living, but this was the best one I'd read. Nice job to Captain K.
Where have I seen this before?
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 4
Hmmm, a quick search on Google turns up plenty of hits for this stuff - it's not THAT new.
All with URLs displayed, for you who fear goatse.cx. Somehow, this doesn't look like that new of a technology. (And besides, I thought a REGULAR UPS was heavy!)
It's funny to see a Microsoft domain with completely unformatted text, just plain jane text, no graphics, funny verbage, etc. Everything they do on the web is so incredibly over-produced, it just screams "ad agency", but then you come to this page and it's just black text on a big white blank page. It reminds me of when I first started surfing the internet, and how everything was really content-driven instead of image-driven.
It bowled me over. I was actually excited to see this page, because I'm sure the guys who wrote it (and posted the server) are just as excited. They're working on cutting edge stuff (well, IPv6 is more cutting edge than MY projects) and they're probably having a blast. You don't hear about this often from the MS camp - by the time things make it to their web site, you get the feeling a dozen graphic artists and content managers have put their OK on it, and it's completely sanitized of humor.
I can't help but wonder what's going to happen to these poor guys when some image-driven schmuck from MS catches this page. "What?!? This is our first IPv6 web server, and it's this plain and ugly? It should be jazzy! It should have lots of IE-only controls! And take out that humor! Now hop to it!"
My questions is Why anyone would want to cheat SETI?
Yeah, especially when there's the new shared IBM mainframe coming out, where anybody can install programs. That's going to be the biggest use of it - a bunch of l33t h4x0rs installing various Distributed.net clients on it, all trying to add more power to their results. Whoop-dee-doo.
At work I've been able to get some of our MCSE Gates clones to switch to Linux and Gnome using Mandrake.
I rarely make book recommendations, but when you said that, you caught my eye. I'm an MCSE in the process of switching over to Mandrake, and I've got the perfect tool for your conversions: "Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators, The Secret Decoder Ring" by Mark Minasi with Dan York and Craig Hunt. It's put out by Sybex, and you can find it at your local big bookstores on the shelves. The book is outstanding. I tried to make the leap several times, but I couldn't do it until I got this book.
It explains everything in terms Windows admins can understand, and it's even honest about the advantages of both platforms. It's the first book I've seen that really makes the transformation easy.
Re:Look at the bottom line - not so fast
on
Mandrake Shakeup
·
· Score: 4
but it is a simply matter of a simple budget.
When executives are let go in groups, it is very, very rarely an issue of budget cuts.
For example, when you hear companies taking hits, and they need to drop staff, who do they drop first? The visionaries? The guys at the top? Why would they can themselves? If they knew of severe budget problems, they'd stand up in front of the press, talk about it, and either quit or find other jobs to get into. People who know about really tough budgets usually find a graceful way out, or else they start canning the low-level staff.
On the other hand, when there's personal disputes, the low-level staff keep their jobs. For example, if there was a battle between the Yanks and the French, with major disagreements, that's when you see the kind of executive bloodbath that Roblimo talks about in the article. You see people get sacked en masse without a chance to talk to the press first, or to spin it their way. Executives never get sacked en masse as a result of budget problems, because they're the ones making the budget. The only way that happens is if you have dissatisfied funders or shareholders - which of course, could still be the case here.
do it right. This guy certainly put the legwork into researching his plan, and his comparisons of weight and center of gravity with the Microsoft Intellimouse are brilliant.
When I first saw the device, I thought, "Nah, it's going to be way too heavy and awkward." He's already got the research done to make sure it isn't, and he does a great job of disproving a lot of problems that users like me would consider. In fact, his product demo on that page is better than the documentation that comes with a lot of the products I've purchased.
Even if the mouse/kb combo concept doesn't take off, this guy deserves a great project management job somewhere. I'd love to write code for somebody who puts this kind of thought into their work.
But I can see how having a big chunck of ram disk space could speed a system up.
Like caching, or different? Sounds like the system you describe is just persistent caching that restores upon login. And if it has to restore, then you're hitting the disk upon login, and all you're doing is trading login time for cache loading time later. Interesting idea, though.
Well I know I've got a huge handful of old 30 and 72 pin memory simms...Does this sound feasible???
Sure, if you don't mind losing all your data when the power goes out. Me, personally, that's not my cup of cake, though. Besides, your huge handful of simms adds up to what, 256mb? You could get a 256mb ram chip for $50. The price of the IDE bay with simm slots would cost at least that much, and you'd still end up with a bunch of old ram chips in a drive you couldn't upgrade.
The sad part of this new technology is that it's going to allow game programmers to be even more sloppy. Back in my day (I'm not that old) I had a 128mb hard drive. Games had to be small.
What?!? So, back in the day, did your game have full-motion video clips? Support for 1600x1200 resolution? Speech clips? Support for force-feedback joysticks and mice? Oh, it didn't? Gee, I wonder why the game sizes are so much bigger these days. Hmmm. Must be because of those sloppy game programmers.
So help me, if somebody mods that post up as insightful, I'll...I'll...
Didn't that happen with windows 98? An omen of things to come? Or maybe they just forgot to add the bluescreen routine, so the hardware just died instead of giving the notorious error message.
At that price, you can buy an incredibly killer PC and a Tivo, and still have plenty of cash left over. Yes, I realize that Sony's stuff always commands a premium, but that's ridiculous.
Surely the oil companies and their presidential puppet will not stand for this blasphemy.
I know I'm going to get marked as a troll or flamebait for this, but here it comes anyway: Clinton had two terms in office, and Mr. "I Invented The Internet" Gore did what for the California energy crisis? The power problems in California didn't suddenly begin in January when Bush took office - they've been brewing for years. Never heard of Gore doing anything about it, did you? Hmm, don't hear Gore speaking up too much about that energy crisis, do you? Wonder why that is? I don't.
From the article: The direction of the beam's transmission was able to be changed.
Grrreat, it's bad enough that this big device is up there beaming down enough microwave energy to power homes, and it might get accidentally shot in the wrong direction, but you're telling me that these beams can actually be manipulated from the ground? Am I the only one who gets terrified at the thought of some scr1pt k1dd13 who "owns" his first power satellite? Forget testing the viability of the power generation, I wanna see testing of the security. These things are just begging to be hacked, and I'm not interested in waking up baked by microwaves.
Re:The only drawback - 40mph max
on
Got Tracks?
·
· Score: 3
They'd be having to repave the street up to your house every few days!
Nah, they're rubber tracks. You're thinking about the steel tracks used on tanks, which would indeed rip up the road. These are relatively harmless. The specs even list the PSI pressure exerted on the ground, and it's quite low compared to regular tires, because the weight is spread out across so much more area. These are actually a lot easier on the road, believe it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Once an image has been produced it will remain visible even with the power switched off.
Whoa, not good. That means I can't just hit the power switch and pretend I was done for the evening when the girlfriend walks in. Might have to actually run another application and switch over to it. Not good.
On the other hand, this could mean a self-updating Hustler magazine. Hmmm. You could pull out that ten-year-old magazine and see what the chick looks like these days - see what all those years of tanning beds got her. Heh.
This sounds goofy, and it probably is, but didn't all this stuff come from the earth? Why not put it back? We have loads of oil wells that have dried up - drop some plutonium down there when you cap a well. We have to seal the cap anyway, and the low quantities of waste per drilled hole would mean there wouldn't be much of a reward if terrorists tried to pull the stuff back up.
Written and spoken language would change drastically over 10,000 years, how would we show the people of the future that this is a BAD building to enter?
Well, I'm no psychologist, but I can't imagine anything of the sort working. Look at how we dug into pyramids, despite them having the best barricades they could think up just a short few thousand years ago.
But furthermore, you're implying that people 10,000 years from now won't be able to detect radiation before it's too late. I would imagine that 10,000 years from now, detecting radiation won't be any more difficult than it is today. "Gee, I'm losing my hair. Hmmm." Hahaha.
The higher questions are, what kind of site *should* host ads, how can advertising be incorporated into the content in such a way as to be visable, interesting, and attractive to users of the site.
Well, I can answer the first one pretty easily. If you're getting free services, you should expect to get hit with obnoxious ads. The more you pay, the less obnoxious the ads are.
For example, take radio stations. If you turn on your radio and listen to the free stations, your content will be interrupted every 10 minutes with a stream of advertisements that make banner ads look positively unobtrusive. You get a decent amount of content, but you have to sit through a lot of ads.
Next up, public radio. If you shell out money directly to the station to support it, there's a lot less commercials. Granted, not everyone shells out the money, so in exchange, guess what? You get a minor amount of commercials. They're much less annoying than regular radio, but they're there.
Finally, if you pony up a whopping $30+ a month for digital radio through your cable provider, you can listen to streaming music without any interruptions at all.
That's how media works. The more you pay, the less someone else has to pay. But sooner or later, somebody has to pay. You can point to things like Shoutcast and whine that you can indeed get free audio, but somebody's paying for that through their bandwidth costs, and so are you. You don't see anybody running Shoutcast stations on free ISP's.
What amazes me is that people are surprised by banner ads. They honestly expect someone to put up a server somewhere and offer services for free. You don't see anybody putting up free radio stations, do you? Sure, Joe Bob might pirate some radio for a while, but when he gets bored, he goes back to work like the rest of us.
They see a low number of click-throughs, and a low number of purchaces on click-throughs. So they can see the low response to their adds. They are more willing to spend their money on tv adds where they cant as readily see they are wasting money.
The industry has been fighting this for years. You'll notice that a lot of TV or radio ads say, "Ask for Extension 760". There's no real extension 760, or whatever extension they use, but it's a code that corresponds to where they placed the ad. Of course, most of us don't bother with asking for extensions when we're ordering things.
Print ads have been doing this with their web site tie-ins for a while, too. I just picked up the latest issue of Time off my desk for an example, and Covad's ad says to visit covad.com/sdsl29. That's a tie-in to the magazine ad, and it's a lot like a click-through.
The text-only ad said:
563 lively book reviews on all subjects
Whereas the Google ad said:
A passionate but scholarly study of modern slavery
Anyone with half a brain is going to read book reviews before they read a "scholarly study". This isn't a controlled study, and the results are useless.
Suggestion to Danny: the next time you do a study, the test has to be set up so that it's not biased. The ads should have exactly the same content, so that you can judge the ad delivery and not the ads themselves. If you were trying to find out who found book reviews interesting as opposed to studies, then you ran a successful study, but otherwise this is totally useless.
"in order to meet the British government's target date... Dell and Microsoft worked feverishly to meet a blistering three-week rollout schedule for the first phase."
If they got the first draft to work in three weeks, they're doing a lot better than anybody I've ever worked with. Our stuff doesn't work with ANY browser that fast.
My solution has always been simple: after I've been using a product for a few months, and I've really got a good handle on its shortcomings, and after I've seen how it treats my support needs (or lack thereof), I re-evaluate the purchase price. If I feel like I got way, way more than I bargained for, and the stuff is really good, I give money where it counts - THE DEVELOPERS directly.
You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how easy it is to find out who the key developers are on any given software project. Rather than just mailing them a check, send them a gift certificate for something useful. It tells them that you are thankful for the great job they did, and it makes them more likely to improve the product and take your comments seriously.
Even better, if you're selective about where you buy the gift certificates, you can actually kill two birds with one stone. It goes without saying that you shouldn't be giving away Amazon gift certificates, but ThinkGeek might be a good candidate for you.
You can make a statement to the developer that they're doing a great job, and you can make a statement about the kind of company you'd like to support.
After saying all this, it should be pretty clear that I don't endorse sending money directly to the companies themselves. If they go down the tubes because they're not smart enough to price their products successfully and market them, that's their own dang problem.
THis was actually a very good and accurate review by Katz (/me waits for all the Katz bashers to jump on the bandwagon).
I totally have to agree with you there. IMHO, Katz is generally a raving idiot with an amazing knack for restating and restating the obvious, but this time, he's told me everything I wanted to know. I've read a few reviews of this movie, all written by people who review movies for a living, but this was the best one I'd read. Nice job to Captain K.
Hmmm, a quick search on Google turns up plenty of hits for this stuff - it's not THAT new.
h eel/papers/powertrades-oct98/ - a NASA study from 1998
http://www.afstrinity.com/
http://www.activepower.com
http://www.acumentrics.com
http://space-power.grc.nasa.gov/ppo/projects/flyw
All with URLs displayed, for you who fear goatse.cx. Somehow, this doesn't look like that new of a technology. (And besides, I thought a REGULAR UPS was heavy!)
It's funny to see a Microsoft domain with completely unformatted text, just plain jane text, no graphics, funny verbage, etc. Everything they do on the web is so incredibly over-produced, it just screams "ad agency", but then you come to this page and it's just black text on a big white blank page. It reminds me of when I first started surfing the internet, and how everything was really content-driven instead of image-driven.
It bowled me over. I was actually excited to see this page, because I'm sure the guys who wrote it (and posted the server) are just as excited. They're working on cutting edge stuff (well, IPv6 is more cutting edge than MY projects) and they're probably having a blast. You don't hear about this often from the MS camp - by the time things make it to their web site, you get the feeling a dozen graphic artists and content managers have put their OK on it, and it's completely sanitized of humor.
I can't help but wonder what's going to happen to these poor guys when some image-driven schmuck from MS catches this page. "What?!? This is our first IPv6 web server, and it's this plain and ugly? It should be jazzy! It should have lots of IE-only controls! And take out that humor! Now hop to it!"
My questions is Why anyone would want to cheat SETI?
Yeah, especially when there's the new shared IBM mainframe coming out, where anybody can install programs. That's going to be the biggest use of it - a bunch of l33t h4x0rs installing various Distributed.net clients on it, all trying to add more power to their results. Whoop-dee-doo.
I'm just waiting for the day that Bo and Luke get lost and fire up the General Lee's OnStar system.
Not to pick nits, but the General Lee was a Dodge Challenger, and OnStar is a GM thing.
I suppose windows is capable of releasing an ip and getting a new one... ideas?
Yep, get Windows 2000. It can change IP's, DNS servers, and more without rebooting.
At work I've been able to get some of our MCSE Gates clones to switch to Linux and Gnome using Mandrake.
I rarely make book recommendations, but when you said that, you caught my eye. I'm an MCSE in the process of switching over to Mandrake, and I've got the perfect tool for your conversions: "Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators, The Secret Decoder Ring" by Mark Minasi with Dan York and Craig Hunt. It's put out by Sybex, and you can find it at your local big bookstores on the shelves. The book is outstanding. I tried to make the leap several times, but I couldn't do it until I got this book.
It explains everything in terms Windows admins can understand, and it's even honest about the advantages of both platforms. It's the first book I've seen that really makes the transformation easy.
but it is a simply matter of a simple budget.
When executives are let go in groups, it is very, very rarely an issue of budget cuts.
For example, when you hear companies taking hits, and they need to drop staff, who do they drop first? The visionaries? The guys at the top? Why would they can themselves? If they knew of severe budget problems, they'd stand up in front of the press, talk about it, and either quit or find other jobs to get into. People who know about really tough budgets usually find a graceful way out, or else they start canning the low-level staff.
On the other hand, when there's personal disputes, the low-level staff keep their jobs. For example, if there was a battle between the Yanks and the French, with major disagreements, that's when you see the kind of executive bloodbath that Roblimo talks about in the article. You see people get sacked en masse without a chance to talk to the press first, or to spin it their way. Executives never get sacked en masse as a result of budget problems, because they're the ones making the budget. The only way that happens is if you have dissatisfied funders or shareholders - which of course, could still be the case here.
do it right. This guy certainly put the legwork into researching his plan, and his comparisons of weight and center of gravity with the Microsoft Intellimouse are brilliant.
When I first saw the device, I thought, "Nah, it's going to be way too heavy and awkward." He's already got the research done to make sure it isn't, and he does a great job of disproving a lot of problems that users like me would consider. In fact, his product demo on that page is better than the documentation that comes with a lot of the products I've purchased.
Even if the mouse/kb combo concept doesn't take off, this guy deserves a great project management job somewhere. I'd love to write code for somebody who puts this kind of thought into their work.
But I can see how having a big chunck of ram disk space could speed a system up.
Like caching, or different? Sounds like the system you describe is just persistent caching that restores upon login. And if it has to restore, then you're hitting the disk upon login, and all you're doing is trading login time for cache loading time later. Interesting idea, though.
Well I know I've got a huge handful of old 30 and 72 pin memory simms...Does this sound feasible???
Sure, if you don't mind losing all your data when the power goes out. Me, personally, that's not my cup of cake, though. Besides, your huge handful of simms adds up to what, 256mb? You could get a 256mb ram chip for $50. The price of the IDE bay with simm slots would cost at least that much, and you'd still end up with a bunch of old ram chips in a drive you couldn't upgrade.
I'm guessing not feasible.
The sad part of this new technology is that it's going to allow game programmers to be even more sloppy. Back in my day (I'm not that old) I had a 128mb hard drive. Games had to be small.
What?!? So, back in the day, did your game have full-motion video clips? Support for 1600x1200 resolution? Speech clips? Support for force-feedback joysticks and mice? Oh, it didn't? Gee, I wonder why the game sizes are so much bigger these days. Hmmm. Must be because of those sloppy game programmers.
So help me, if somebody mods that post up as insightful, I'll...I'll...
Didn't that happen with windows 98? An omen of things to come? Or maybe they just forgot to add the bluescreen routine, so the hardware just died instead of giving the notorious error message.
o mdex/
Yep, here's the story from CNN, complete with videos:
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9804/20/gates.c
At that price, you can buy an incredibly killer PC and a Tivo, and still have plenty of cash left over. Yes, I realize that Sony's stuff always commands a premium, but that's ridiculous.
Surely the oil companies and their presidential puppet will not stand for this blasphemy.
I know I'm going to get marked as a troll or flamebait for this, but here it comes anyway: Clinton had two terms in office, and Mr. "I Invented The Internet" Gore did what for the California energy crisis? The power problems in California didn't suddenly begin in January when Bush took office - they've been brewing for years. Never heard of Gore doing anything about it, did you? Hmm, don't hear Gore speaking up too much about that energy crisis, do you? Wonder why that is? I don't.
From the article:
The direction of the beam's transmission was able to be changed.
Grrreat, it's bad enough that this big device is up there beaming down enough microwave energy to power homes, and it might get accidentally shot in the wrong direction, but you're telling me that these beams can actually be manipulated from the ground? Am I the only one who gets terrified at the thought of some scr1pt k1dd13 who "owns" his first power satellite? Forget testing the viability of the power generation, I wanna see testing of the security. These things are just begging to be hacked, and I'm not interested in waking up baked by microwaves.
They'd be having to repave the street up to your house every few days!
Nah, they're rubber tracks. You're thinking about the steel tracks used on tanks, which would indeed rip up the road. These are relatively harmless. The specs even list the PSI pressure exerted on the ground, and it's quite low compared to regular tires, because the weight is spread out across so much more area. These are actually a lot easier on the road, believe it or not.