It's worth mentioning in the summary that these new Macs are Intel based. The linked articles state this. The first Intel Macs are here, ahead of when they were expected.
And the store is Appledotted:)
I've been an apple user for over 20 years now (I must be getting old, I've said the over 20 years thing for a bunch of stuff now:). Although, I basically kept away from Macs from inception to 10.3.
I thought that MacOS whatever to 9 was not good, the hardware was slow, and I just was OK mostly with UNIX and Linux, and then I got a PowerBook with 10.3 on it, and I am hands down convinced that OS X is the best OS I have ever used for general purpose interactive use.
I never thought that I would get excited about whatever a CEO (or whatever title SJ is), but I am actually reading the transcripts and I am enthusiastic about many of the new hardware and software announcements. I'm even impressed with the iPod success even though I don't like them. I believe there is a lot of branding and hype right now for them, but I've also heard that people like them too. Unfortunately, they are not flexible enough for my needs.
Intel iMacs that look just like the old ones. Nice.
Intel MacBooks. Nice.
Tons of updated software. Nice.
I was skeptable about the Intel transition. Some, I don't like x86 stuff. Some its a little religious because of previous terms like Wintel. But I believe that Apple can pull off the transition. I don't like to bash MS for the fact that they are MS, but I like to bash them because its so easy (bully on little kid). But MS has so much legacy crap AND still breaks current software with every service pack. OS X is not perfect in its updates either, but better than what I hear from MS.
I respect Apple as a company and community. Their QA is pretty good. Their software is excellent (except quicktime). Their hardware is excellent.
As far as "Desktop" OSes go, I believe that Apple is the one to follow. I wish I worked for them to get some of the annoyances out of OS X. I'm easy to annoy, and they are fixable, and maybe not widely accepted.
Ironically, I would still like for a decent media player for OS X or at least one that plays audio and one that plays video. VLC is the best for video, but is not very stable and its full of usability bugs. Its the most reliable to double click on a movie and have it play. The GUI and bugs are horrible on OS X. iTunes would be fine (maybe) if it were more extensible with media formats, but if it doesn't play my media, its worthless. Even when there was flac and ogg development going on in both iTunes and quicktime (don't know where the overlap ends), the software simply did not work, or was unreliable, or it would work in quicktime but not itunes. very frustrating.
I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.
That shows on slashdot in general. Even if I start drafting an article that has not been posted yet, it can get buried. Sometimes I cheat, and tack it higher on a top thread if I can remotely quote something to be part of the submission, and either intentionally or intentionally many other people do the same thing.
Rewarding speed over quality simply does not make sense to me. Does Frist Post 500 times count as good speed vs quality? Does +5 funnies on silly, quick, and witty stuff count as something slashdot wants to reward? I believe that I have heard Taco say that he doesn't consider most of the funny stuff funny. I don't either. In fact I browse at -3 applied to the funnies, and see little of them, and even then 75% of the ones that slip through are still not funny to me.
On funny, I get pissed when I use irony or sarcasm to make a point that may be slightly funny, maybe, but gets modded as funny. I rarely strive for funny, and funny moderations to my posts almost appear random.
I had a batch of CD-Rs that I used for audio. They worked fine for about a month. After that each subsequent play of the disc would yield noticeable audio deterioration (static) until they quit working altogether.
Although I rarely reply to Anonymous Cowards, because its basically useless because its doubtful that the original poster ever gets to read the reply, hopefully this will help others.
If this was just a bad batch, it was just a bad batch, but here is my advice in general:
1) Don't use crappy media. At least use Taiyo Yuden ones. Mitsui if you feel like paying 2 to 4x the cost, but AFAIK Mitsui is about the best aside from the Kodak or other "archival" ones, but I don't consider CDs archival.
2) Burn at a reasonable speed 4x, 8x, or maybe 16x if you a little impatient and it works for you. I have not verified this, but I have heard that it is visibly noticeable that the burns on slower disks appear to be "burned more".
I have had almost no issues ever with burned CDs going by these two maxims. I've burned hundreds of CDs, and the most issues I've had are scratches because of mine and others' mishandling of them, but I view burned CDs as 25 cent disposable things that I have at least one other backup copy of.
Most CDs were burned with 2-8x speed, I almost never use >16x today.
I have a friend with ADD and a slow Duron system that would complain about burns at 56x or whatever that would fail either during the burn or would not play in CD players.
Patience, even today, can still pay off from time to time. Especially, when a 5 to 10 minute accurate burn may take much less time and money than 2 or 3 try at three minute burns or whatever a 56x or extreme burners can do.
I used to dub tapes in realtime even with 2x dubbers for better quality, and I had to typically flip a 90 minute tape after 45 minutes or when I came home, woke up, or whatever. 10 even 20 minutes for a CD burn is not bad compared to realtime or even 1/2 realtime. YMMV.
I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things).
If people are worried about digital mini-dark ages, then they should stick to "analog" media. Photos are important to many people, even the old ripped ones. Old stuff is old, but unreadable or unavailable media is like trying to get it back out of/dev/zero.
Great. I lose hundreds of precious photos. They give me a buck.
Let me guess. These are "regular" CDs in that they have to be burned, which are then probably not verified after the burn. They probably cost on order of $5/gig. They are probably susceptible to human error to scratch the disk or any of the other stuff that happens to CDs when they don't work besides whatever the 100 year part gives you.
I'm not a photographer and I don't have children or a wife or whatever, and I have zero photographs that I consider precious. I believe I have 2 photos total, and they are duplicate prints of my cats.
However, data retention is a pretty big deal nowadays with everybody, including home users now. I believe that replication on local disks and remote disks to be the cheapest and easiest, but I have "free" temporary remote disks from work (duck, but I don't use them for much, I have less than 100 megs of "important" stuff, probably closer to less than 10). But harddrives do fail. However, they can oftentimes be recovered though at a price. Especially if they are used as a backup drive where the most likely failure would be a mechanical one in the motor or head that can be recovered. I have not had filesystem corruption in a long time, but that was with a beta Linux kernel and I knew that the system could get screwed from the beginning. I'm not sure how robust, long living, and portable filesystems are, please comment if you know a thing or two about this. I use HFS+ on my drives because it works well with my macs. But I'm a little upset of the lack of portability, and questionable longevity, however I doubt either will ever be a real issue. Ironically, UFS is not as portable as it should seem to be (lack of Linux support the last time I checked). I don't like UFS that much, but considered it since OS X supports it and it's called UNIX File system. Although FAT is ubiquitous, I'm not sure how robust it is.
I have CDs that have lasted 10 years with no errors. Obviously 5 years is not the maximum life. Perhaps the maximum EXPECTED life.
I've had CDs that were about 5 years old that went bad. They went from the burner to a CD book, and maybe 2 to 5 out of about 100 were bad. I didn't investigate, or maybe even screwed up the burn (win2k), and I used good media, mostly Mitsui.
I believe the tape recommendation to be absurd. If CDs are in the though process, there must not be too much data here. Especially in the context of movies and music. An external harddrive is much cheaper and easier to use than a tape. Depending on your data needs, they can be as little as $80 or so. Drives are easy to navigate and do a restore. Tapes are a PITA.
Now, at work with terabytes of data, tapes in a robot are worth it. Hopefully, I will never have to do a restore, but I have the backup there in case of the need.
My comments are not for "enterprise" type of stuff. More towards a budget minded and low impact if loss data set. I don't consider movies and music that earth shattering if lost.
On the matter of Karma. I wish it enabled more freedoms on posting like eliminating the "slow down cowboy" for at least 2 quick posts in succession, and then enable it. Relaxation of the lameness filter too. I rarely get hit with the lameness filter, but I have for stuff that was not "lame", and I had to add junk and preview a number of times to see how much more junk I need to add in order to get past it.
I wouldn't mind seeing my karma either beyond "excellent" which I don't remember when I was not in that category.
I would like to see raw numbers of moderations besides just percentages. Sometimes controversial stuff gets modded all over the place, and it would be interesting to see how controversial something really is in that case.
create a/. staging area, where us, the real users, can rate stories, and let us decide what makes it to the front page
I pretty much agree. We subscriber see early posts, yet most if not basically all of the daddypants mails get ignored. If daddypants is spammed too much, vary the address from time to time and make the other bounce or autoreply with the new mailto.
I'm not sure how much story moderation would be trolled. I would like to see stuff like Dvorak stories to be moderated to autoflamebate, and similar.
But Intel still charges $2,000 to $3,000 for the things. Currently, AMD Opterons are the best all around chips in terms of price, performance, and power consumption. I can't wait until massive multi-core processors are commonplace, x86 finally dies with disco, and BIOS goes away with Reagonomics.
Can you imagine covering the country 6 miles at a time?
Yes. Lets assume you travel on a full charge, charge, travel on a full charge, charge while sleeping, and do the same thing the next day.
Traveling 2462 miles @ 12.5 mph will take about 200 days.
OK, that is two 100 mile stints with a 5 hour charge between them. Each 100 mile trek will take 8 hours (ouch). So one can Segway for 8 hours take 4 1/2 hours off while charging, Segway for another 8 hours, and then you only have 3 1/2 hours to charge and sleep for the next day.
He was always getting press on various things long before the Segway was announced. He got press on the Segway before anybody knew it was going to be called the Segway or what even what it was.
I call those newsvertisements. They are common. Supposedly, these guys are very good at getting newsvertisements out in the wild.
I'm probably talking about something that few people were conscious enough to remember here, but there was a very successful knife that was sold on TV in the '70s. It was called Ginsu, and it was the precursor to the modern day $19.95 junk on TV and infomertials.
What these young industrious people did, was spend something like 6 to 9 months making a commercial on how to show off a knife to people. They perfected the commercial showing the knife cut tin cans and then a tomato and other stuff under the guise of an excellent Asian made knife.
After getting the commercial together, they then decided to find a cheap supplier from Asia for an average set of knives to deliver to people when they called.
They made something like $20mil in the '70s off of that commercial, and you can still get either "real" or fake Ginsu knives today. Personally, I'll stick to German made Henckel knives. They are better despite their lack of TV ads.
how much would it have increased the price of petrofuel if that cost had (rightly, IMHO) shown up as a tax at the pump? I suspect such a tax would be substantial.
Take a peek at your paystub next time, and under the Federal Withholdings box, divide that number by two, and that is essentially your gas tax. (Although, the parent seem to be from somewhere outside of the US by using the word petrofuel).
Although that tax does provide jobs for people, and it does make them happier to pay for it in the name of protecting us from danger vs merely paying more to drive.
No, living with people that you say you love and have legal and moral obligations to them is a good thing, and hating them is a mere consequence.
I'm pissed people moderated me as "funny". Its not funny, its simply a take from Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", where he explains how dignity is inversely proportional to the known motivations behind a behavior.
Uhm, there's no such concept as "putting an application on the second monitor" on the Mac, since there isn't anything on screen which you could call "the application"....others are like auxiliary monitors for windows I currently don't use for work.
In my experience, the "auxiliary monitors" are only useful for "read only" data, which I guess you are alluding to, and the reason for that is twofold. 1) The menu is on the other monitor and 2) It takes too much time and effort to move my pointer to the other screens. And this to me, make multi-monitor setups basically useless.
If I had a realtime stock ticker or weather updating or TV that I never have to change the volume or channel on the other monitors that seems to almost make sense. But I can at any time, hit Command-Tab, or click on the dock icon and within less than one second, without refocusing my eyes, I can see the other application's data.
I used to have a second copy of Terminal.app on another monitor that was for email, but I just found it more efficient to have one copy of Terminal running and if I have bunches of them running or if the window is obscured by other windows, I can either click on the window or use the window list from the menu to bring it to the top. Being that my mailer is a non-gui one, I don't need the mouse much for it, except for cut and paste to and from it and the other apps, and then I have to drag the mouse multiple times back and forth between thousands of pixels, and its just a waste of time vs having the windows overlapping where my pointer is already.
I've suggested before with no agreement from anybody that the screens should be discrete and not a continuum. Meaning that if I only have my email app on the second monitor and I Command-Tab to that app, then the menu should either be on the other monitor already or switch to it, and so should the pointer. Moving windows or doing a DND is almost impossible. I see no benefit of having a window span two screens, and I have never seen anybody do that, but there is no way just to slam the window onto the other screen, I have to drag it like a dead body across there.
Like I've said, the WIMP interface breaks down with very large monitors and multi-monitor setups. The W is too far away from other W's and I's and the M, and the P is always in the wrong place.
WIMPs were made when there were only one very small monitors at the time, times have changed, but WIMPs have not.
I disagree -- the vast majority of AIDS sufferers are in countries and areas where there just isn't the education to prevent such things.
How can you disagree by paraphrasing what I said? I said:
"AIDS is a problem in underdeveloped nations that do not know how or have the means to do sex safely."
no-one deserves to die
Everybody deserves to die, it is a part of life. Don't want to die, be a rock or something.
I'm willing to admit that there's been people who have contracted HIV/AIDS from their own idiocy, but to call it "nature's way of weeding out idiots" is both insensitive and incorrect.
Although I agreed with the "idiots" thesis, I did not use the word. I talked about being unhealthy, uneducated, and unable to have access to decent healthcare.
If you take away the myth that people are better than other animals or even "made in God's image", and just think of us as mammalian animals like we are then you will understand that we are just like other living creatures and subject to the same problems. I've seen diseases an drought take out trees and animals. Oh, thats insensitive and incorrect. I've seen a fluctuation in oxygen in a creek that caused a whole species of fish to die and float to the top. Oh, I'm insensitive and incorrect. These things and others are nature's way of weeding out weak individuals that simply do not fit in the current environment. Humans are clearly not immune to nature. To have a different believe is simply incorrect, but not insensitive.
More people die from the influenza virus in the United States than the AIDS virus. Influenza kills very young and old people. Oh, I'm insensitive and incorrect. I already displayed what the insensitive and incorrect CDC studies have shown as far as the target population that gets and dies from AIDS. They are uneducated and poor people that do risky sex and share needles.
I have no judgment of these people or their actions. Every action has consequences both good and bad. Being educated, wealthy, or healthy does not cause happiness. But being at the bottom of any social group usually does. And those people at the bottom are weaker ones in the current environment.
I do not understand when I go on these frank and factual based posts here about humans that I get moderated all over the spectrum from informative, troll, overrated, and insightful. People seem to prefer to ignore reality.
So go ahead and shoot some dope with the same needle with your friends, and have unprotected anal sex with them, and live it up. Don't come crying to me if you get AIDS.
Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL? HAL: Affirmative, Dave, I read you. Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave Bowman: What's the problem? HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL? HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL? HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL? HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Maximizing windows is used by a wide number of geeks to speed up their interaction with the window manager, particularly by geeks who prefer the keyboard over the mouse for its speed.
In my experience, people maximize windows out of 1) habit 2) they seem to prefer to see one thing at a time.
I can't read slashdot with a browser over 800 pixels wide or so. If its wider, I cannot follow from the right side to the left on the same line. 800 pixels is roughly the width of an average book page, I guess they will start making widescreen books.
Maximizing to speed up using the keyboard makes no sense. Alt-tab or the equivalent works at the same speed if the program is maximized, minimized, hidden, or normal.
Unless your doing a dedicated application that takes up bunches of real estate on your computer like Protools, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or similar then maximizing make sense. OS X really doesn't have a maximize option and MDI interfaces are basically gone. On OS X programs like Photoshop just have multiple windows for the images and tools that you can put anywhere. There is nothing to "maximize". On something like MS windows, I believe that photoshop is still and MDI where the images and toolboxes are inside of the probably maximized MDI window.
Personally, I believe that people that maximize everything are simpletons or neat freaks that cannot stand seeing more than one thing on their computer screen.
If nature did have a way of weeding out idiots, you'd be in serious trouble!
I think the grandparent was right.
Although there are new TV ads about how a white girl and a black girl are talking about another black girl that was "partying" and "being dumb" and got high and now she has HIV, the actual data does not support that.
AIDS is a problem in underdeveloped nations that do not know how or have the means to do sex safely.
In the US, look at the CDC data:
At the end of 2004, the CDC estimates that 415,193 people were living with AIDS in the USA.1
Of these,
35% were white 43% were black 20% were Hispanic 1% were of other race/ethnicity. Of the adults and adolescents2 with AIDS, 77% were men. Of these men,
58% were men who had sex with men (MSM) 21% were injection drug users (IDU) 11% were exposed through heterosexual contact 8% were both MSM and IDU.
Of the 93,566 adult and adolescent women with AIDS,
64% were exposed through heterosexual contact 34% were exposed through injection drug use.
For those that do not know, blacks are less than 15% of the US population. I wish they stopped issuing these data only by race but also by socioeconomic status. Despite the etiology of the situation, blacks are on average at the bottom of the stack as far as education, income, good housing, and healthcare go. If the data were separated by socioeconomics, I would believe that the best predictor would be that unsuccessful people are those that get AIDS. I would bet that the largest predictor of AIDS is that these people are simply not healthy to begin with and as the grandparent posted, they should just die. The only reason we "care" is that there are very expensive drugs that never cure the disease, but they extend the life of the patient, which means that they can take the drugs longer.
Bill Gates has given more to charity than anyone EVER. Other billionaires, on the other hand (Trump, for example), have given almost nothing to charity. I think the guy deserves a little credit, regardless of why he's doing it. We can't judge his motives, since we don't know them. We can judge his actions though, and they speak pretty loudly.
I knew a woman once that didn't have much money because she was a "housewife" or "stay at home mom", whichever you prefer.
She volunteered everywhere she could. The animal shelter, local museums, homeless shelters, Special Olympics walks, cancer drives, the list goes on.
Everyone thought she was the kindest person in the world, and one day I asked her why she did all of this stuff.
She said that she absolutely hated her husband and family and would do anything to get out of the house.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but exactly how is a terrorist going to hijack a spacecraft and crash it into even the approximate neighbourhood of Pennsylvania Avenue?
Get with the program.
All someone has to do is be motivated and quiet enough to get a passport and come into the US or walk across the Canadian or Mexican border if that is easier. Then, take spaceship flying lessons at the local NASA-mart. Then, take over spacecraft. Then, carefully aim it at your house, not the big white one on Pennsylvania Ave. It happens every day. Some people still get upset because they simply have not accepted that this is how things go, but they will get accustomed to it over time.
I mean, besides the US government killing thousands of people every year, what motivation would outsiders even have to give us trouble? Suicide bombings don't give too much gratification like they used to. Once the god that loves everyone so much puts you in hell for eternity, the fun of a quick bombing looses its appeal.
Keep in mind, that the largest terrorist attack on US soil before 2000 AD was by a US military trained citizen in protest of the government's involvement in a raid of private property.
Maybe if the government would abide by the Constitution and keep out of its citizens and the citizens of other countries business then people wouldn't get so pissed off.
Hell, even I wouldn't mind the government if all they did was provide decent transportation systems, healthcare systems, protect our borders, protect our rights, and the other basics. Its the imprisonment, murder, revocation of rights, deception, and that stuff that pisses people off.
Terrorism, therefore, is worth mentioning in the context of civilian space flight - even if only as a political concept and not as a practicle concern.
Yup. Aside from a few airplanes in 2001, the building in Oklahoma in 1995, and the mostly failed WTC bombing in 1993 for less than 4,000 people have died from these things in over a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth mentioning in the summary that these new Macs are Intel based. The linked articles state this. The first Intel Macs are here, ahead of when they were expected.
:)
:). Although, I basically kept away from Macs from inception to 10.3.
And the store is Appledotted
I've been an apple user for over 20 years now (I must be getting old, I've said the over 20 years thing for a bunch of stuff now
I thought that MacOS whatever to 9 was not good, the hardware was slow, and I just was OK mostly with UNIX and Linux, and then I got a PowerBook with 10.3 on it, and I am hands down convinced that OS X is the best OS I have ever used for general purpose interactive use.
I never thought that I would get excited about whatever a CEO (or whatever title SJ is), but I am actually reading the transcripts and I am enthusiastic about many of the new hardware and software announcements. I'm even impressed with the iPod success even though I don't like them. I believe there is a lot of branding and hype right now for them, but I've also heard that people like them too. Unfortunately, they are not flexible enough for my needs.
Intel iMacs that look just like the old ones. Nice.
Intel MacBooks. Nice.
Tons of updated software. Nice.
I was skeptable about the Intel transition. Some, I don't like x86 stuff. Some its a little religious because of previous terms like Wintel. But I believe that Apple can pull off the transition. I don't like to bash MS for the fact that they are MS, but I like to bash them because its so easy (bully on little kid). But MS has so much legacy crap AND still breaks current software with every service pack. OS X is not perfect in its updates either, but better than what I hear from MS.
I respect Apple as a company and community. Their QA is pretty good. Their software is excellent (except quicktime). Their hardware is excellent.
As far as "Desktop" OSes go, I believe that Apple is the one to follow. I wish I worked for them to get some of the annoyances out of OS X. I'm easy to annoy, and they are fixable, and maybe not widely accepted.
Ironically, I would still like for a decent media player for OS X or at least one that plays audio and one that plays video. VLC is the best for video, but is not very stable and its full of usability bugs. Its the most reliable to double click on a movie and have it play. The GUI and bugs are horrible on OS X. iTunes would be fine (maybe) if it were more extensible with media formats, but if it doesn't play my media, its worthless. Even when there was flac and ogg development going on in both iTunes and quicktime (don't know where the overlap ends), the software simply did not work, or was unreliable, or it would work in quicktime but not itunes. very frustrating.
I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.
That shows on slashdot in general. Even if I start drafting an article that has not been posted yet, it can get buried. Sometimes I cheat, and tack it higher on a top thread if I can remotely quote something to be part of the submission, and either intentionally or intentionally many other people do the same thing.
Rewarding speed over quality simply does not make sense to me. Does Frist Post 500 times count as good speed vs quality? Does +5 funnies on silly, quick, and witty stuff count as something slashdot wants to reward? I believe that I have heard Taco say that he doesn't consider most of the funny stuff funny. I don't either. In fact I browse at -3 applied to the funnies, and see little of them, and even then 75% of the ones that slip through are still not funny to me.
On funny, I get pissed when I use irony or sarcasm to make a point that may be slightly funny, maybe, but gets modded as funny. I rarely strive for funny, and funny moderations to my posts almost appear random.
I had a batch of CD-Rs that I used for audio. They worked fine for about a month. After that each subsequent play of the disc would yield noticeable audio deterioration (static) until they quit working altogether.
Although I rarely reply to Anonymous Cowards, because its basically useless because its doubtful that the original poster ever gets to read the reply, hopefully this will help others.
If this was just a bad batch, it was just a bad batch, but here is my advice in general:
1) Don't use crappy media. At least use Taiyo Yuden ones. Mitsui if you feel like paying 2 to 4x the cost, but AFAIK Mitsui is about the best aside from the Kodak or other "archival" ones, but I don't consider CDs archival.
2) Burn at a reasonable speed 4x, 8x, or maybe 16x if you a little impatient and it works for you. I have not verified this, but I have heard that it is visibly noticeable that the burns on slower disks appear to be "burned more".
I have had almost no issues ever with burned CDs going by these two maxims. I've burned hundreds of CDs, and the most issues I've had are scratches because of mine and others' mishandling of them, but I view burned CDs as 25 cent disposable things that I have at least one other backup copy of.
Most CDs were burned with 2-8x speed, I almost never use >16x today.
I have a friend with ADD and a slow Duron system that would complain about burns at 56x or whatever that would fail either during the burn or would not play in CD players.
Patience, even today, can still pay off from time to time. Especially, when a 5 to 10 minute accurate burn may take much less time and money than 2 or 3 try at three minute burns or whatever a 56x or extreme burners can do.
I used to dub tapes in realtime even with 2x dubbers for better quality, and I had to typically flip a 90 minute tape after 45 minutes or when I came home, woke up, or whatever. 10 even 20 minutes for a CD burn is not bad compared to realtime or even 1/2 realtime. YMMV.
I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things).
/dev/zero.
If people are worried about digital mini-dark ages, then they should stick to "analog" media. Photos are important to many people, even the old ripped ones. Old stuff is old, but unreadable or unavailable media is like trying to get it back out of
Great. I lose hundreds of precious photos. They give me a buck.
Let me guess. These are "regular" CDs in that they have to be burned, which are then probably not verified after the burn. They probably cost on order of $5/gig. They are probably susceptible to human error to scratch the disk or any of the other stuff that happens to CDs when they don't work besides whatever the 100 year part gives you.
I'm not a photographer and I don't have children or a wife or whatever, and I have zero photographs that I consider precious. I believe I have 2 photos total, and they are duplicate prints of my cats.
However, data retention is a pretty big deal nowadays with everybody, including home users now. I believe that replication on local disks and remote disks to be the cheapest and easiest, but I have "free" temporary remote disks from work (duck, but I don't use them for much, I have less than 100 megs of "important" stuff, probably closer to less than 10). But harddrives do fail. However, they can oftentimes be recovered though at a price. Especially if they are used as a backup drive where the most likely failure would be a mechanical one in the motor or head that can be recovered. I have not had filesystem corruption in a long time, but that was with a beta Linux kernel and I knew that the system could get screwed from the beginning. I'm not sure how robust, long living, and portable filesystems are, please comment if you know a thing or two about this. I use HFS+ on my drives because it works well with my macs. But I'm a little upset of the lack of portability, and questionable longevity, however I doubt either will ever be a real issue. Ironically, UFS is not as portable as it should seem to be (lack of Linux support the last time I checked). I don't like UFS that much, but considered it since OS X supports it and it's called UNIX File system. Although FAT is ubiquitous, I'm not sure how robust it is.
I have CDs that have lasted 10 years with no errors. Obviously 5 years is not the maximum life. Perhaps the maximum EXPECTED life.
I've had CDs that were about 5 years old that went bad. They went from the burner to a CD book, and maybe 2 to 5 out of about 100 were bad. I didn't investigate, or maybe even screwed up the burn (win2k), and I used good media, mostly Mitsui.
I believe the tape recommendation to be absurd. If CDs are in the though process, there must not be too much data here. Especially in the context of movies and music. An external harddrive is much cheaper and easier to use than a tape. Depending on your data needs, they can be as little as $80 or so. Drives are easy to navigate and do a restore. Tapes are a PITA.
Now, at work with terabytes of data, tapes in a robot are worth it. Hopefully, I will never have to do a restore, but I have the backup there in case of the need.
My comments are not for "enterprise" type of stuff. More towards a budget minded and low impact if loss data set. I don't consider movies and music that earth shattering if lost.
On the matter of Karma. I wish it enabled more freedoms on posting like eliminating the "slow down cowboy" for at least 2 quick posts in succession, and then enable it. Relaxation of the lameness filter too. I rarely get hit with the lameness filter, but I have for stuff that was not "lame", and I had to add junk and preview a number of times to see how much more junk I need to add in order to get past it.
I wouldn't mind seeing my karma either beyond "excellent" which I don't remember when I was not in that category.
I would like to see raw numbers of moderations besides just percentages. Sometimes controversial stuff gets modded all over the place, and it would be interesting to see how controversial something really is in that case.
create a /. staging area, where us, the real users, can rate stories, and let us decide what makes it to the front page
I pretty much agree. We subscriber see early posts, yet most if not basically all of the daddypants mails get ignored. If daddypants is spammed too much, vary the address from time to time and make the other bounce or autoreply with the new mailto.
I'm not sure how much story moderation would be trolled. I would like to see stuff like Dvorak stories to be moderated to autoflamebate, and similar.
Not until Intel gets the memory controller on the CPU, which isn't until 2007.
2 32538.html
Huh? http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20050615
But Intel still charges $2,000 to $3,000 for the things. Currently, AMD Opterons are the best all around chips in terms of price, performance, and power consumption. I can't wait until massive multi-core processors are commonplace, x86 finally dies with disco, and BIOS goes away with Reagonomics.
I fucked up the math. /me runs with tail between legs.
Can you imagine covering the country 6 miles at a time?
Yes. Lets assume you travel on a full charge, charge, travel on a full charge, charge while sleeping, and do the same thing the next day.
Traveling 2462 miles @ 12.5 mph will take about 200 days.
OK, that is two 100 mile stints with a 5 hour charge between them. Each 100 mile trek will take 8 hours (ouch). So one can Segway for 8 hours take 4 1/2 hours off while charging, Segway for another 8 hours, and then you only have 3 1/2 hours to charge and sleep for the next day.
I imagine it would suck.
He was always getting press on various things long before the Segway was announced. He got press on the Segway before anybody knew it was going to be called the Segway or what even what it was.
I call those newsvertisements. They are common. Supposedly, these guys are very good at getting newsvertisements out in the wild.
I'm probably talking about something that few people were conscious enough to remember here, but there was a very successful knife that was sold on TV in the '70s. It was called Ginsu, and it was the precursor to the modern day $19.95 junk on TV and infomertials.
What these young industrious people did, was spend something like 6 to 9 months making a commercial on how to show off a knife to people. They perfected the commercial showing the knife cut tin cans and then a tomato and other stuff under the guise of an excellent Asian made knife.
After getting the commercial together, they then decided to find a cheap supplier from Asia for an average set of knives to deliver to people when they called.
They made something like $20mil in the '70s off of that commercial, and you can still get either "real" or fake Ginsu knives today. Personally, I'll stick to German made Henckel knives. They are better despite their lack of TV ads.
how much would it have increased the price of petrofuel if that cost had (rightly, IMHO) shown up as a tax at the pump? I suspect such a tax would be substantial.
Take a peek at your paystub next time, and under the Federal Withholdings box, divide that number by two, and that is essentially your gas tax. (Although, the parent seem to be from somewhere outside of the US by using the word petrofuel).
Although that tax does provide jobs for people, and it does make them happier to pay for it in the name of protecting us from danger vs merely paying more to drive.
That doesn't mean that what she does is bad.
No, living with people that you say you love and have legal and moral obligations to them is a good thing, and hating them is a mere consequence.
I'm pissed people moderated me as "funny". Its not funny, its simply a take from Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", where he explains how dignity is inversely proportional to the known motivations behind a behavior.
Uhm, there's no such concept as "putting an application on the second monitor" on the Mac, since there isn't anything on screen which you could call "the application". ...others are like auxiliary monitors for windows I currently don't use for work.
In my experience, the "auxiliary monitors" are only useful for "read only" data, which I guess you are alluding to, and the reason for that is twofold. 1) The menu is on the other monitor and 2) It takes too much time and effort to move my pointer to the other screens. And this to me, make multi-monitor setups basically useless.
If I had a realtime stock ticker or weather updating or TV that I never have to change the volume or channel on the other monitors that seems to almost make sense. But I can at any time, hit Command-Tab, or click on the dock icon and within less than one second, without refocusing my eyes, I can see the other application's data.
I used to have a second copy of Terminal.app on another monitor that was for email, but I just found it more efficient to have one copy of Terminal running and if I have bunches of them running or if the window is obscured by other windows, I can either click on the window or use the window list from the menu to bring it to the top. Being that my mailer is a non-gui one, I don't need the mouse much for it, except for cut and paste to and from it and the other apps, and then I have to drag the mouse multiple times back and forth between thousands of pixels, and its just a waste of time vs having the windows overlapping where my pointer is already.
I've suggested before with no agreement from anybody that the screens should be discrete and not a continuum. Meaning that if I only have my email app on the second monitor and I Command-Tab to that app, then the menu should either be on the other monitor already or switch to it, and so should the pointer. Moving windows or doing a DND is almost impossible. I see no benefit of having a window span two screens, and I have never seen anybody do that, but there is no way just to slam the window onto the other screen, I have to drag it like a dead body across there.
Like I've said, the WIMP interface breaks down with very large monitors and multi-monitor setups. The W is too far away from other W's and I's and the M, and the P is always in the wrong place.
WIMPs were made when there were only one very small monitors at the time, times have changed, but WIMPs have not.
I disagree -- the vast majority of AIDS sufferers are in countries and areas where there just isn't the education to prevent such things.
How can you disagree by paraphrasing what I said? I said:
"AIDS is a problem in underdeveloped nations that do not know how or have the means to do sex safely."
no-one deserves to die
Everybody deserves to die, it is a part of life. Don't want to die, be a rock or something.
I'm willing to admit that there's been people who have contracted HIV/AIDS from their own idiocy, but to call it "nature's way of weeding out idiots" is both insensitive and incorrect.
Although I agreed with the "idiots" thesis, I did not use the word. I talked about being unhealthy, uneducated, and unable to have access to decent healthcare.
If you take away the myth that people are better than other animals or even "made in God's image", and just think of us as mammalian animals like we are then you will understand that we are just like other living creatures and subject to the same problems. I've seen diseases an drought take out trees and animals. Oh, thats insensitive and incorrect. I've seen a fluctuation in oxygen in a creek that caused a whole species of fish to die and float to the top. Oh, I'm insensitive and incorrect. These things and others are nature's way of weeding out weak individuals that simply do not fit in the current environment. Humans are clearly not immune to nature. To have a different believe is simply incorrect, but not insensitive.
More people die from the influenza virus in the United States than the AIDS virus. Influenza kills very young and old people. Oh, I'm insensitive and incorrect. I already displayed what the insensitive and incorrect CDC studies have shown as far as the target population that gets and dies from AIDS. They are uneducated and poor people that do risky sex and share needles.
I have no judgment of these people or their actions. Every action has consequences both good and bad. Being educated, wealthy, or healthy does not cause happiness. But being at the bottom of any social group usually does. And those people at the bottom are weaker ones in the current environment.
I do not understand when I go on these frank and factual based posts here about humans that I get moderated all over the spectrum from informative, troll, overrated, and insightful. People seem to prefer to ignore reality.
So go ahead and shoot some dope with the same needle with your friends, and have unprotected anal sex with them, and live it up. Don't come crying to me if you get AIDS.
Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?
HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
As such, I'd like an option to "echo" the menu bar onto each monitor, reducing at least half of the problem.
I second the motion.
Maximizing windows is used by a wide number of geeks to speed up their interaction with the window manager, particularly by geeks who prefer the keyboard over the mouse for its speed.
In my experience, people maximize windows out of 1) habit 2) they seem to prefer to see one thing at a time.
I can't read slashdot with a browser over 800 pixels wide or so. If its wider, I cannot follow from the right side to the left on the same line. 800 pixels is roughly the width of an average book page, I guess they will start making widescreen books.
Maximizing to speed up using the keyboard makes no sense. Alt-tab or the equivalent works at the same speed if the program is maximized, minimized, hidden, or normal.
Unless your doing a dedicated application that takes up bunches of real estate on your computer like Protools, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or similar then maximizing make sense. OS X really doesn't have a maximize option and MDI interfaces are basically gone. On OS X programs like Photoshop just have multiple windows for the images and tools that you can put anywhere. There is nothing to "maximize". On something like MS windows, I believe that photoshop is still and MDI where the images and toolboxes are inside of the probably maximized MDI window.
Personally, I believe that people that maximize everything are simpletons or neat freaks that cannot stand seeing more than one thing on their computer screen.
If nature did have a way of weeding out idiots, you'd be in serious trouble!
I think the grandparent was right.
Although there are new TV ads about how a white girl and a black girl are talking about another black girl that was "partying" and "being dumb" and got high and now she has HIV, the actual data does not support that.
AIDS is a problem in underdeveloped nations that do not know how or have the means to do sex safely.
In the US, look at the CDC data:
At the end of 2004, the CDC estimates that 415,193 people were living with AIDS in the USA.1
Of these,
35% were white
43% were black
20% were Hispanic
1% were of other race/ethnicity.
Of the adults and adolescents2 with AIDS, 77% were men. Of these men,
58% were men who had sex with men (MSM)
21% were injection drug users (IDU)
11% were exposed through heterosexual contact
8% were both MSM and IDU.
Of the 93,566 adult and adolescent women with AIDS,
64% were exposed through heterosexual contact
34% were exposed through injection drug use.
For those that do not know, blacks are less than 15% of the US population. I wish they stopped issuing these data only by race but also by socioeconomic status. Despite the etiology of the situation, blacks are on average at the bottom of the stack as far as education, income, good housing, and healthcare go. If the data were separated by socioeconomics, I would believe that the best predictor would be that unsuccessful people are those that get AIDS. I would bet that the largest predictor of AIDS is that these people are simply not healthy to begin with and as the grandparent posted, they should just die. The only reason we "care" is that there are very expensive drugs that never cure the disease, but they extend the life of the patient, which means that they can take the drugs longer.
Bill Gates has given more to charity than anyone EVER. Other billionaires, on the other hand (Trump, for example), have given almost nothing to charity. I think the guy deserves a little credit, regardless of why he's doing it. We can't judge his motives, since we don't know them. We can judge his actions though, and they speak pretty loudly.
I knew a woman once that didn't have much money because she was a "housewife" or "stay at home mom", whichever you prefer.
She volunteered everywhere she could. The animal shelter, local museums, homeless shelters, Special Olympics walks, cancer drives, the list goes on.
Everyone thought she was the kindest person in the world, and one day I asked her why she did all of this stuff.
She said that she absolutely hated her husband and family and would do anything to get out of the house.
Mod me down or mod me up, at least I got you thinking, even if your thinking, "man, that guy is an ASS!".
Well I usually make a real effort not to be a jerk, but it must be my nature.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but exactly how is a terrorist going to hijack a spacecraft and crash it into even the approximate neighbourhood of Pennsylvania Avenue?
Get with the program.
All someone has to do is be motivated and quiet enough to get a passport and come into the US or walk across the Canadian or Mexican border if that is easier. Then, take spaceship flying lessons at the local NASA-mart. Then, take over spacecraft. Then, carefully aim it at your house, not the big white one on Pennsylvania Ave. It happens every day. Some people still get upset because they simply have not accepted that this is how things go, but they will get accustomed to it over time.
I mean, besides the US government killing thousands of people every year, what motivation would outsiders even have to give us trouble? Suicide bombings don't give too much gratification like they used to. Once the god that loves everyone so much puts you in hell for eternity, the fun of a quick bombing looses its appeal.
Keep in mind, that the largest terrorist attack on US soil before 2000 AD was by a US military trained citizen in protest of the government's involvement in a raid of private property.
Maybe if the government would abide by the Constitution and keep out of its citizens and the citizens of other countries business then people wouldn't get so pissed off.
Hell, even I wouldn't mind the government if all they did was provide decent transportation systems, healthcare systems, protect our borders, protect our rights, and the other basics. Its the imprisonment, murder, revocation of rights, deception, and that stuff that pisses people off.
Terrorism, therefore, is worth mentioning in the context of civilian space flight - even if only as a political concept and not as a practicle concern.
Yup. Aside from a few airplanes in 2001, the building in Oklahoma in 1995, and the mostly failed WTC bombing in 1993 for less than 4,000 people have died from these things in over a decade.
Being that Americans kill each other at the rate of 10,000 to 20,000 a year http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm, it seems as though "terrorists" suck in comparison.
I look over my shoulder at the ATM, I have no worries on mass transit or sitting in my home or at work or driving to work.