A fellow slashdotter has an absolutely fantastic collection of stories from his time working in Antarctica, primarily at Dumont D'Urville and Concordia Station (which is actually quite a bit more isolated, and colder than the south pole itself).
It's filled with plenty of nerdy anecdotes, including the difficulties of running laptops in Antarctica (hint: don't bother), and a few jury-rigged experiments that would make MacGyver proud.
If you have a good bit of time to kill, I strongly recommend reading through everything he's got. It's fascinating, inspiring, and really deserves to be bound up into a book someday.
However, you cannot seriously deny that they're quite talented at what they do, and that they're among the small subset of "rock stars" that are at least in part deserving of their massive salaries.
Ditto for Radiohead. I absolutely cannot stand their music*, or to listen to the hype that surrounds the band, although I can easily see how they're talented and why they're important.
*I quite liked OK Computer. However, anything that came after that couldn't come close to touching its genius.
On the other hand, I could care less for Amy Winehouse, Britney, and the like. Even their *FANS* admit that the music isn't that good. (I do suppose that part of Amy Winehouse's appeal is not unlike that of a train wreck....)
Imeem's missing the point. One of the biggest positive points of P2P is that the record companies, radio conglomerates, have absolutely no say over the selection and presentation of content.
What we're seeing here is the Record Companies trying to appeal to our better judgement, while making one last effort to maintain an iron grip over their content. And it's just not going to work.
You see.... last year was arguably one of the best years on record for independent artists and labels for this very reason. The amount of *great* content being released by small labels was staggering to say the least, and I'd be pretty certain that more than a few of these artists got their "big break" via P2P.
Meanwhile, the talent on the major labels was.... crap... to say the least, and it has nothing to do with the inevitable backlash that occurs between generations. Most of the "Top-40" artists are untalented, formulaic, and absolute rubbish.
The crackdown on P2P, and the agreement with Imeem is at least in part trying to mask the fact that the RIAA's members have completely lost the ability to identify and sign new talent. On the other hand, the indie labels have gotten quite good at it.
The days of rock stars with million dollar salaries are over. The labels need to accept the fact that music is going to become increasingly diverse over the next several years, and that their old strategy of promoting a very small number number of superstar artists just isn't going to work any more.
It's actually a nice gesture on N's part because with less ads, fewer kids will demand it and then (here's hoping) the ebay black market will cool off a bit.
No..... they don't want to spend money advertising a product that everybody already wants. I mean.... if you can't produce enough to keep up with demand, additional advertising is profoundly unnecessary until production catches up with demand.
This wouldn't be the first time Iran and the Middle-East have tried to modernize (and somewhat westernize)
Every time it's happened, it's been absolutely crushed by asinine American and European intervention. Although I'm usually not one for conspiracy theories, it's a pretty obvious pattern...
Atmospheric Science heavily relies upon taking what little data we *do* know, and extrapolating as much useful information as we possibly can out of it.
And it actually works pretty well... "anomalies" that have turned up in forecast models very often turn out to actually exist in reality. It was this way that we determined that a considerable amount of ash and pollution produced by industrial activity in Asia gets blown all the way to North America. It was so counterintuitive that nobody had ever thought to test for it before the forecast model suggested that it was happening quite readily.
If you also want to see something really scary, read up on the CFC Ozone depleting reaction. If it weren't for a few seasonal processes that restore the Ozone, and more importantly, wash out the CFCs, we'd have burned off our entire atmosphere in just a few years.
Well, let's see what happens in the next elections. If the people lose, you're welcome to establish here below the Bravo:)
I don't want to sound like a troll, but that is one of the most profoundly un-American things I've ever heard.
Seriously.... when did we stop solving our own problems?
I of course speak hypocritically, as an American living abroad at the moment. But, seriously. It's not too late. Do something productive, go out and vote, and make sure to spread the word so that the general public knows what's going on.
If the current state of madness doesn't end after this election cycle, I think that it will wake people up enough to create a very noticeable backlash. Protest, go on strike, and stand up to your government to show them who the real bosses are.
I'm not advocating turning into France, but the government definitely needs a kick in the pants every now and then to keep itself in line. The US hasn't had one since Vietnam, and it's long overdue.
Don't explicitly ban the use of Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia, but do make sure to ruthlessly demand that sources are cited.
When they do use Yahoo or Wikipedia, and come up with a blatantly incorrect bit, or don't cite any other sources whatsoever, come down hard, and fail their sorry asses on that paper.
Student learns valuable lesson, and learns to be generally skeptical of whatever they read from *any* source. Wikipedia, Britannica, and The New York Times are all rife with errors. With any luck, this will be one of the few things said student will remember long after he's done with your class.
If the student learns from his mistake, and you're a decent human being, offer to drop the bad grade at the end of the term. Learning from mistakes is an integral part of education, and if the student has demonstrated to indeed have learned the lesson, don't punish him for it!
The more skeptical the students are, and the more they learn to think on their own, the better --- a truly great teacher will also encourage students to be skeptical of his lectures.
I had a university professor who would intentionally make two subtle errors in derivations during Physics lectures that would cancel each other out, resulting in the correct solution at the end of the derivation.
He'd mention in the next lecture that there were two such "mistakes" in the previous day's lecture, and would then assign a problem set that explicitly depended upon those two mistakes not being there. At the time, we hated him for it, but it was an absolutely fantastic way of making us learn the material through and through, and taught us to think on our own, rather than rote transcription of whatever was written on the board.
- How are we 'maxxed out' on hydro?? I guess I'm thinking in terms of Canada too.
Hydro's nowhere nearly as easy as it sounds. For starters, you need a river with sufficient flow to make the project worthwhile, and you then need a location to put the dam so that it forms a reservoir in an area that you don't mind flooding.
Dams can have massive (and devastating) environmental impacts. Take a look at the three gorges dam. Although I commend China for building a power plant that doesn't run off of coal, it's going to displace 1.4 million people who currently live in the 600km (375mi) long reservoir, not to mention destroying *anything* of significance in that 600km area. Wildlife, agriculture, sites of historical significance, you name it..... Fish living in the river are also adversely affected.
Downstream, the dam will stop the seasonal flooding of the Yangtze river, which has traditionally kept the farmland downstream from the river fertile, in what is otherwise a very poor climate for growing crops. On the other hand, it does keep flooding under control in urban areas, which is no doubt a very good thing.
So, yes. I wouldn't doubt that most of our feasable hydro options have been used up...
It is unfortunate that the damage is done. People are convinced that nuclear is a dangerous, dirty, and impossible to maintain power source. Building one is next to impossible due to the misinformation. It will take another 30 years to convince people that they are ok.
Not really. People are starting to wake up to the dangers of coal and fossil fuels.
Last I checked, the NRC has issued at least 3 permits in the past few years to build new nuclear plants. As far as I know, plans for their construction are currently underway, and have considerable public support. Although the number's not particularly high, progress is being made.
Although I strongly agree with you in principle, I'm somewhat skeptical of the efficacy of the OLPC as a teaching device.
Yes, Dvorak's a troll. We all know that. However, in this case I think he just might be right. The "let them eat cake" analogy is a good one, and I believe very applicable in this situation.
Although there's more and more free content online these days, you cannot teach a primary school class using Wikipedia. Time and time again, I need to point out that there are virtually no free resources online that can even remotely rival the thoroughness and consistency of a printed textbook. (I will concede that this is somewhat of a chicken/egg situation)
And therein lies the other problem where the OLPC's UI is (almost insultingly) childish. It's geared toward teachers teaching subjects in which computers will offer very few benefits, and is ineffective at teaching subjects where computers *might* be helpful in the upper-levels (assuming that they're even being taught).
As a current University student who's had "computer assisted" education forced down my throat for most of my life, I can safely say that the time spent in the computer labs (apart from those teaching basic computer literacy) would have *much* better spent on a traditional lesson. If computer-assisted instruction and 1:1 laptop initiatives have proven to be ineffective in the developed world, why on earth do we think they'll work in Africa?
I've also worked part-time as an IT guy in quite a few K-12 districts. The hands-down best, and most effective way to use computers for instruction is to give one to the teacher, along with a projector. Putting a few more in the room for students to occasionally use is also sometimes beneficial, but not strictly necessary.
And, really.... can you really learn how to farm using a computer? It's like trying to learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book. Possibly helpful, but not really practical at all.
Although I agree with most of the skeptics that giving money to hunger-relief programs might not be such a great idea (corruption, putting farmers out of work, etc...), organizations like the peace corps have proven to be extremely effective at teaching sustainable farming techniques, and other practical skills to allow developing nations pull themselves out of poverty. That's where my money (if I had any to give away -- see above comment about being a student) would go.
Although most Mac users have gigabit NICs, very few have gigabit networking hardware elsewhere on their network.
It's only been in the past year that Copper Gigabit switches have dropped down into a price range where they're competitive with 10/100 hardware. It's also frustratingly taken even longer for gigabit to reach its way into consumer-grade router/gateway devices. It's only *just* starting to show up in 802.11n routers, and so far the cheapest (and only) name-brand model on NewEgg is $110, and that's without wireless. A decent 10/100 + 802.11g router can be easily had for $30.
I do have hope, though, that 802.11n will (ironically) bring cheap gigabit to the masses.
Of course, if you're running wireless, you could always plug the gigabit NAS directly into your Mac, manually assign it an IP address, and hope for the best. You do then, of course lose all of the benefits of an NAS, along with the fact that it's probably not nearly as fast, reliable, or well-supported as a directly-connected drive.
We're also conveniently ignoring the fact that most users are NOT mac users, although this is becoming less and less the case these days, as Microsoft continues to shoot itself in the foot.
...they are slow and OS dependent, either you loose oceans of space (FAT formatted drives) or you can't write to them from some OS'es (NTFS formatted drives) or a Mac just reformats the whole drive because it can't read it.
1) This is a complaint about the current state of filesystems, not external hard drives. Likewise, there *is* support for read/write NTFS on Mac and Linux these days if you're feeling adventurous, and it's said to be extremely reliable.
2) A mac won't format an NTFS disk unless you explicitly tell it to. For one thing, OS X has NTFS read support.
3) Gigabit NAS is nice, as long as you've got the money to pay for it, and also have gigabit network hardware (which most people at home don't these days..)
Other things: werewolves. Obviously, same deal as menstruation - less frequent, possibly for longer periods (so to speak). I'd invest in the silver industry, you could probably make a tidy profit on this! I won't make the joke about women being related to werewolves (cuz, you know, they get 'bitchy' at that time), because that would just be obvious and tacky, and this IS Slashdot.
I'm pretty sure vampires are not effected by the Moon, so that's good, though this will not help prevent Dick Cheney attacks, so that's actually disappointing.
Ah.... I love it when posts like this get modded up as Informative and Insightful.
Actually, no.... I'm no expert on the situation, but just about every source I've heard has the ruling party absolutely dominating every poll (and inexplicably at that). Whether it's out of fear, blind obedience, or something else entirely, it seems almost certain that Putin would win the election.
Which brings up the question of -- why the hell was it rigged, given that the most blatantly obvious reason for rigging an election wasn't applicable?
Were they afraid of some dark-horse candidate would sneak up and win the majority? (Extremely unlikely)
Were they preparing to rig future elections, in the event that they're planning on doing something extremely unpopular this term (Unlikely, since Putin's discovered he can get away with quite a bit without losing public confidence)?
Or the somewhat more likely scenarios: Opposition party rigs election wildly on Putin's favor in a blatantly obvious manner. Given that Putin was winning anyway, such a loss of credibility on his side would be a great boon to them.
Widespread ballet stuffing lower down on the food chain. Even though there was never a top-down order to rig the election, it's possible (even though statistically unlikely) that there was some sort of widespread "grassroots" effort among Putin's supporters and local election officials to rig the election. Higher-ups were either unaware of it, or chose not to do anything to stop it. After all, are you really going to investigate an election that your party just won?
Although I agree with you in that these materials obey the laws of physics in a very obvious sort of way (analogous to an accordion), we *have* made discoveries that do indeed contradict our current understanding of Physics (at the time, of course...)
The double-slit experiment *certainly* disobeyed the laws of physics as they were known before the development of quantum theory. There was absolutely no way to even vaguely explain the results using classical physics.
If you went up to Isaac Newton, and stated the Hesienberg Uncertainty principle to him, he'd probably write you off as being delusional as well.... the fact that one cannot simultaneously observe the momentum and location of a particle (to a certain degree) is downright counterintuitive.
On the other hand, the legal punishment for murder (up to and including death) is far worse than for fornication (none). That means your analysis is missing something about how the US perceives the relative seriousness.
No. All it does is prove that we've got a double-standard in place.
The selection isn't all that fantastic (probably the studios' fault), and it's windows-only for the moment, but it does indeed exist.
I've had Netflix for about a year now, and have virtually no complaints about it. The price is reasonable (it's actually gone *down* since I started), the response time is impressive, and their selection seems to include virtually every Region 1 DVD on the planet... What's not to like?
Silverlight is not just a competitor to Flash, it's yet another attempt to kill the web as a competitor to desktop apps - really it's a competitor to DHTML.
Yes, and no... DHTML is done almost completely inline with the page, whereas Silverlight is indeed just an object on the page. Granted, it does compensate for one of Flash's shortcomings by interfacing better with external data, but can you really blatantly ascribe Microsoft's efforts to pure malace? It sounds to me like they're trying to make a buck, and improve their own platform, rather than serve as the death star for all things technological.
Secondly, the Linux port is being undertaken by the Mono project, who have been quite successful in re-implementing Microsoft's.NET routines. Even *if* Microsoft abandons its Mac version, the open-source implementation will still be around.
(Also, as much as I hate to stand up for Microsoft, they never dropped Mac Office... it's reportedly one of their most profitable products, as most mac users buy it, and the dev team for it is quite small. Mac IE was *never* a good product, and I don't think anybody was sad when it got abandoned. Finally, Java's not a Microsoft technology... not quite sure where you were going with that)
As it stands, DHTML absolutely sucks for creating desktop-like applications, and developing "desktop-like" apps on the web right now isn't really all that great. Take a look at what it takes to develop even a simple app, deal with Javascript's stupid shortcomings, and reconcile differences between browsers. It's not desirable to the developer or the user (not to mention being slow as molasses). If somebody else wants to step up to the plate, and fill this gap, I'd welcome it, but Microsoft is clearly the innovator in this area, like it or not.
One person's witches are another's alternative remedy practitioners.
"Svalbard is completely controlled by the Kingdom of Norway and is part of it. Svalbard has a population of approximately 2,400 people as of 2005. Approximately 70% of the people are Norwegian; the remaining 30% are Russian, Ukrainian and Polish." -- wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
That sound you're hearing is the reference passing straight over your head....
Yeah.... I believe Flash on Win32 has hooks into the graphics hardware that lets it get away with that.
No such luck on the mac side of things. Although my machine's not terribly powerful compared to some (Core Duo Mac Mini), a 320x240 video should *not* bring the machine to a crawl. Things are even worse on my "old" G4 Powerbook, and some videos won't even play at the full framerate. (And these are machines that don't have a problem doing H.264 *encoding* at close to real-time!)
Flashblock is virtually essential for browsing, so that a full-page Flash ad (or a typical MySpace page) doesn't make the entire browser unresponsive....
Agreed, although I'm no fan of Microsoft, I will wholeheartedly welcome any serious competitor to Flash.
In order to seriously compete with Flash, Microsoft's going to have to provide some compelling features, and be a wee bit more "open" than Adobe is, which they do appear to be doing.
For one, their video codec doesn't suck up 100% CPU to DECODE a 320x240 video on a decently powerful machine.
Although it's not "open" by any stretch of the imagination if you want to compare it to the GPL, they *are* being considerably more open about it than Adobe are with flash, and there is a serious effort to support it on Linux. Mac users should be happy too, because it would be difficult (even for Microsoft) to produce something worse than the OS X Flash Player, and the Silverlight betas look promising.
As long as it's not unnecessarily DRM-encumbered (which it doesn't appear to be), I'm all for Silverlight.
Slashdot Mirror
A fellow slashdotter has an absolutely fantastic collection of stories from his time working in Antarctica, primarily at Dumont D'Urville and Concordia Station (which is actually quite a bit more isolated, and colder than the south pole itself).
It's filled with plenty of nerdy anecdotes, including the difficulties of running laptops in Antarctica (hint: don't bother), and a few jury-rigged experiments that would make MacGyver proud.
If you have a good bit of time to kill, I strongly recommend reading through everything he's got. It's fascinating, inspiring, and really deserves to be bound up into a book someday.
Oh, sure they're overrated to hell.
However, you cannot seriously deny that they're quite talented at what they do, and that they're among the small subset of "rock stars" that are at least in part deserving of their massive salaries.
Ditto for Radiohead. I absolutely cannot stand their music*, or to listen to the hype that surrounds the band, although I can easily see how they're talented and why they're important.
*I quite liked OK Computer. However, anything that came after that couldn't come close to touching its genius.
On the other hand, I could care less for Amy Winehouse, Britney, and the like. Even their *FANS* admit that the music isn't that good. (I do suppose that part of Amy Winehouse's appeal is not unlike that of a train wreck....)
Imeem's missing the point. One of the biggest positive points of P2P is that the record companies, radio conglomerates, have absolutely no say over the selection and presentation of content.
What we're seeing here is the Record Companies trying to appeal to our better judgement, while making one last effort to maintain an iron grip over their content. And it's just not going to work.
You see.... last year was arguably one of the best years on record for independent artists and labels for this very reason. The amount of *great* content being released by small labels was staggering to say the least, and I'd be pretty certain that more than a few of these artists got their "big break" via P2P.
Meanwhile, the talent on the major labels was.... crap... to say the least, and it has nothing to do with the inevitable backlash that occurs between generations. Most of the "Top-40" artists are untalented, formulaic, and absolute rubbish.
The crackdown on P2P, and the agreement with Imeem is at least in part trying to mask the fact that the RIAA's members have completely lost the ability to identify and sign new talent. On the other hand, the indie labels have gotten quite good at it.
The days of rock stars with million dollar salaries are over. The labels need to accept the fact that music is going to become increasingly diverse over the next several years, and that their old strategy of promoting a very small number number of superstar artists just isn't going to work any more.
No..... they don't want to spend money advertising a product that everybody already wants. I mean.... if you can't produce enough to keep up with demand, additional advertising is profoundly unnecessary until production catches up with demand.
This wouldn't be the first time Iran and the Middle-East have tried to modernize (and somewhat westernize)
Every time it's happened, it's been absolutely crushed by asinine American and European intervention. Although I'm usually not one for conspiracy theories, it's a pretty obvious pattern...
Precisely.
Atmospheric Science heavily relies upon taking what little data we *do* know, and extrapolating as much useful information as we possibly can out of it.
And it actually works pretty well... "anomalies" that have turned up in forecast models very often turn out to actually exist in reality. It was this way that we determined that a considerable amount of ash and pollution produced by industrial activity in Asia gets blown all the way to North America. It was so counterintuitive that nobody had ever thought to test for it before the forecast model suggested that it was happening quite readily.
If you also want to see something really scary, read up on the CFC Ozone depleting reaction. If it weren't for a few seasonal processes that restore the Ozone, and more importantly, wash out the CFCs, we'd have burned off our entire atmosphere in just a few years.
I don't want to sound like a troll, but that is one of the most profoundly un-American things I've ever heard.
Seriously.... when did we stop solving our own problems?
I of course speak hypocritically, as an American living abroad at the moment. But, seriously. It's not too late. Do something productive, go out and vote, and make sure to spread the word so that the general public knows what's going on.
If the current state of madness doesn't end after this election cycle, I think that it will wake people up enough to create a very noticeable backlash. Protest, go on strike, and stand up to your government to show them who the real bosses are.
I'm not advocating turning into France, but the government definitely needs a kick in the pants every now and then to keep itself in line. The US hasn't had one since Vietnam, and it's long overdue.
Suppose you're a teacher or librarian....
The more skeptical the students are, and the more they learn to think on their own, the better --- a truly great teacher will also encourage students to be skeptical of his lectures.
I had a university professor who would intentionally make two subtle errors in derivations during Physics lectures that would cancel each other out, resulting in the correct solution at the end of the derivation.
He'd mention in the next lecture that there were two such "mistakes" in the previous day's lecture, and would then assign a problem set that explicitly depended upon those two mistakes not being there. At the time, we hated him for it, but it was an absolutely fantastic way of making us learn the material through and through, and taught us to think on our own, rather than rote transcription of whatever was written on the board.
Hydro's nowhere nearly as easy as it sounds. For starters, you need a river with sufficient flow to make the project worthwhile, and you then need a location to put the dam so that it forms a reservoir in an area that you don't mind flooding.
Dams can have massive (and devastating) environmental impacts. Take a look at the three gorges dam. Although I commend China for building a power plant that doesn't run off of coal, it's going to displace 1.4 million people who currently live in the 600km (375mi) long reservoir, not to mention destroying *anything* of significance in that 600km area. Wildlife, agriculture, sites of historical significance, you name it..... Fish living in the river are also adversely affected.
Downstream, the dam will stop the seasonal flooding of the Yangtze river, which has traditionally kept the farmland downstream from the river fertile, in what is otherwise a very poor climate for growing crops. On the other hand, it does keep flooding under control in urban areas, which is no doubt a very good thing.
So, yes. I wouldn't doubt that most of our feasable hydro options have been used up...
Newsflash: Ron Paul's not a libertarian.
He wants to take power away from the Federal government, and allocate even more of it back to the individual states.
And yes. He's an absolute nutjob, although I do feel that he'd be very difficult to corrupt (read into that however you may...)
Not really. People are starting to wake up to the dangers of coal and fossil fuels.
Last I checked, the NRC has issued at least 3 permits in the past few years to build new nuclear plants. As far as I know, plans for their construction are currently underway, and have considerable public support. Although the number's not particularly high, progress is being made.
Although I strongly agree with you in principle, I'm somewhat skeptical of the efficacy of the OLPC as a teaching device.
Yes, Dvorak's a troll. We all know that. However, in this case I think he just might be right. The "let them eat cake" analogy is a good one, and I believe very applicable in this situation.
Although there's more and more free content online these days, you cannot teach a primary school class using Wikipedia. Time and time again, I need to point out that there are virtually no free resources online that can even remotely rival the thoroughness and consistency of a printed textbook. (I will concede that this is somewhat of a chicken/egg situation)
And therein lies the other problem where the OLPC's UI is (almost insultingly) childish. It's geared toward teachers teaching subjects in which computers will offer very few benefits, and is ineffective at teaching subjects where computers *might* be helpful in the upper-levels (assuming that they're even being taught).
As a current University student who's had "computer assisted" education forced down my throat for most of my life, I can safely say that the time spent in the computer labs (apart from those teaching basic computer literacy) would have *much* better spent on a traditional lesson. If computer-assisted instruction and 1:1 laptop initiatives have proven to be ineffective in the developed world, why on earth do we think they'll work in Africa?
I've also worked part-time as an IT guy in quite a few K-12 districts. The hands-down best, and most effective way to use computers for instruction is to give one to the teacher, along with a projector. Putting a few more in the room for students to occasionally use is also sometimes beneficial, but not strictly necessary.
And, really.... can you really learn how to farm using a computer? It's like trying to learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book. Possibly helpful, but not really practical at all.
Although I agree with most of the skeptics that giving money to hunger-relief programs might not be such a great idea (corruption, putting farmers out of work, etc...), organizations like the peace corps have proven to be extremely effective at teaching sustainable farming techniques, and other practical skills to allow developing nations pull themselves out of poverty. That's where my money (if I had any to give away -- see above comment about being a student) would go.
Yes, but only halfway.
Although most Mac users have gigabit NICs, very few have gigabit networking hardware elsewhere on their network.
It's only been in the past year that Copper Gigabit switches have dropped down into a price range where they're competitive with 10/100 hardware. It's also frustratingly taken even longer for gigabit to reach its way into consumer-grade router/gateway devices. It's only *just* starting to show up in 802.11n routers, and so far the cheapest (and only) name-brand model on NewEgg is $110, and that's without wireless. A decent 10/100 + 802.11g router can be easily had for $30.
I do have hope, though, that 802.11n will (ironically) bring cheap gigabit to the masses.
Of course, if you're running wireless, you could always plug the gigabit NAS directly into your Mac, manually assign it an IP address, and hope for the best. You do then, of course lose all of the benefits of an NAS, along with the fact that it's probably not nearly as fast, reliable, or well-supported as a directly-connected drive.
We're also conveniently ignoring the fact that most users are NOT mac users, although this is becoming less and less the case these days, as Microsoft continues to shoot itself in the foot.
1) This is a complaint about the current state of filesystems, not external hard drives. Likewise, there *is* support for read/write NTFS on Mac and Linux these days if you're feeling adventurous, and it's said to be extremely reliable.
2) A mac won't format an NTFS disk unless you explicitly tell it to. For one thing, OS X has NTFS read support.
3) Gigabit NAS is nice, as long as you've got the money to pay for it, and also have gigabit network hardware (which most people at home don't these days..)
Ah.... I love it when posts like this get modded up as Informative and Insightful.
Actually, no.... I'm no expert on the situation, but just about every source I've heard has the ruling party absolutely dominating every poll (and inexplicably at that). Whether it's out of fear, blind obedience, or something else entirely, it seems almost certain that Putin would win the election.
Which brings up the question of -- why the hell was it rigged, given that the most blatantly obvious reason for rigging an election wasn't applicable?
Were they afraid of some dark-horse candidate would sneak up and win the majority? (Extremely unlikely)
Were they preparing to rig future elections, in the event that they're planning on doing something extremely unpopular this term (Unlikely, since Putin's discovered he can get away with quite a bit without losing public confidence)?
Or the somewhat more likely scenarios:
Opposition party rigs election wildly on Putin's favor in a blatantly obvious manner. Given that Putin was winning anyway, such a loss of credibility on his side would be a great boon to them.
Widespread ballet stuffing lower down on the food chain. Even though there was never a top-down order to rig the election, it's possible (even though statistically unlikely) that there was some sort of widespread "grassroots" effort among Putin's supporters and local election officials to rig the election. Higher-ups were either unaware of it, or chose not to do anything to stop it. After all, are you really going to investigate an election that your party just won?
Although I agree with you in that these materials obey the laws of physics in a very obvious sort of way (analogous to an accordion), we *have* made discoveries that do indeed contradict our current understanding of Physics (at the time, of course...)
The double-slit experiment *certainly* disobeyed the laws of physics as they were known before the development of quantum theory. There was absolutely no way to even vaguely explain the results using classical physics.
If you went up to Isaac Newton, and stated the Hesienberg Uncertainty principle to him, he'd probably write you off as being delusional as well.... the fact that one cannot simultaneously observe the momentum and location of a particle (to a certain degree) is downright counterintuitive.
Think of it as a hardware-based /dev/null
They already do that.
The selection isn't all that fantastic (probably the studios' fault), and it's windows-only for the moment, but it does indeed exist.
I've had Netflix for about a year now, and have virtually no complaints about it. The price is reasonable (it's actually gone *down* since I started), the response time is impressive, and their selection seems to include virtually every Region 1 DVD on the planet... What's not to like?
Let's keep this sort of journalism on Dateline please.
The world is a dangerous place. Somehow, I think that humanity will soldier on nevertheless....
Yes, and no... DHTML is done almost completely inline with the page, whereas Silverlight is indeed just an object on the page. Granted, it does compensate for one of Flash's shortcomings by interfacing better with external data, but can you really blatantly ascribe Microsoft's efforts to pure malace? It sounds to me like they're trying to make a buck, and improve their own platform, rather than serve as the death star for all things technological.
Secondly, the Linux port is being undertaken by the Mono project, who have been quite successful in re-implementing Microsoft's
(Also, as much as I hate to stand up for Microsoft, they never dropped Mac Office... it's reportedly one of their most profitable products, as most mac users buy it, and the dev team for it is quite small. Mac IE was *never* a good product, and I don't think anybody was sad when it got abandoned. Finally, Java's not a Microsoft technology... not quite sure where you were going with that)
As it stands, DHTML absolutely sucks for creating desktop-like applications, and developing "desktop-like" apps on the web right now isn't really all that great. Take a look at what it takes to develop even a simple app, deal with Javascript's stupid shortcomings, and reconcile differences between browsers. It's not desirable to the developer or the user (not to mention being slow as molasses). If somebody else wants to step up to the plate, and fill this gap, I'd welcome it, but Microsoft is clearly the innovator in this area, like it or not.
That sound you're hearing is the reference passing straight over your head....
Yeah.... I believe Flash on Win32 has hooks into the graphics hardware that lets it get away with that.
No such luck on the mac side of things. Although my machine's not terribly powerful compared to some (Core Duo Mac Mini), a 320x240 video should *not* bring the machine to a crawl. Things are even worse on my "old" G4 Powerbook, and some videos won't even play at the full framerate. (And these are machines that don't have a problem doing H.264 *encoding* at close to real-time!)
Flashblock is virtually essential for browsing, so that a full-page Flash ad (or a typical MySpace page) doesn't make the entire browser unresponsive....
Agreed, although I'm no fan of Microsoft, I will wholeheartedly welcome any serious competitor to Flash.
In order to seriously compete with Flash, Microsoft's going to have to provide some compelling features, and be a wee bit more "open" than Adobe is, which they do appear to be doing.
For one, their video codec doesn't suck up 100% CPU to DECODE a 320x240 video on a decently powerful machine.
Although it's not "open" by any stretch of the imagination if you want to compare it to the GPL, they *are* being considerably more open about it than Adobe are with flash, and there is a serious effort to support it on Linux. Mac users should be happy too, because it would be difficult (even for Microsoft) to produce something worse than the OS X Flash Player, and the Silverlight betas look promising.
As long as it's not unnecessarily DRM-encumbered (which it doesn't appear to be), I'm all for Silverlight.