no, the internet has made this question more relevant than ever. In a time of free and rapid dissemination of information, how can we judge the validity of that information. This is especially important if you're going to suggest supplanting a peer reviewed journal with open access. I await your answer!
Same way it's always done. You do realize that any idiot with a computer and a web page can put up whatever they want, right? How do we judge the validity of information we find on the Internet?
No reason we can't apply the same reasoning to online academic papers. The thing to remember is research is very rarely done in a vacuum - you draw on other's work and you want them to draw on yours.
If you're just starting out your research, you're probably working under the eye of another or assisting someone else's research (which if done pright, gets your name in the final paper). Perhaps you come across something interesting - write it up and show others in the field who may be interested to comment on it. Peer review happens constantly - you're reading papers from your field, you're publishing papers others are reading. The only thing a journal does is formalize the process a bit.
"I'm finding that I have to divorce "intellectually stimulating" from "social interaction" more and more every day"
wow, you've just described the way I feel. What we need is to combine the two to have "intellectually stimulating social interaction". Something like a geek club where you can bring your projects to show-off or have a brainstorm debug session, drink beer and have a good time.
They exist, and have for a few years now - they're called "hackerspaces" and while generally places where people get together to use tools they may not otherwise be able, tend to be a gathering place for all sorts of people. Lots of people come just for the social aspect and not to use tools they don't have, and there's plenty of showing off and other stuff. Sure they won't all be programming Perl or soldering Arduinos together, but getting like-minded people together expands your horizons.
And if they don't exist in your area - start one.
And heck, even if you got a bunch of people who are only interested in welding art together, so be it - show off some of your work to them and observe some of theirs. Perhaps they always wanted some sort of controlled lighting for their project and you can help them.
Oh, and try to break out from the usual thinking of going for a drink is socializing. It is, but branch out. There are plenty of activities that can be done. Take a course in dance. Or art. Or teach a course in electronics and programming at the community college. If you go to non-intellectually stimulating places to socialize (e.g., clubbing), don't be surprised that the social activity is not intellectually stimulating.
And if your social interactions are online (forums/chats/etc) - arrange an offline meet and greet. Doesn't have to be fancy with barbecues and such, just bring interesting stuff, order some pizza or whatever, etc.
Finally, no, socializing isn't difficult for introverts at all - if you get together with a group of those with like interests, that's already a huge social barrier gone, and if nothing else, you all work on your own projects whilst together. Someone will then ask a question to this "off line forum" and there you go.
I'm sure I'll get modded down to oblivion over this, but you and the Slashdot "Norton sucks" cabal are outdated and misinformed with your opinions, based upon a number of factors, which I suspect look something like this:
* anecdotal evidence of performance problems you did not root cause, but can quickly blame on AV due to a history of bad performance and the high likelihood that a commercial AV product was probably installed at some point.
Let's see... we had a whole team of people suddenly experience BSODs on their computers, which was root-caused to be the Symantec Endpoint Protection firewall (hint: it doesn't play nice with Virtual Box). It was root caused easily enough - a bunch of us who had it removed and replaced with Microsoft ForeFront (enterprise verison of MSE) didn't experience the BSODs. IT quickly determined that it was the firewall module and pushed out SEP removal and MS FF installs. No one's complained since.
It just struck all of a sudden - one week it was fine, then another week someone gives up and sends an email and they all cluster around the week prior.
Heck, the whole company has been migrating away, we just sped up deployment in our group.
Short of establishing a self-sufficient moon base, that's all they'd have to do. Mess with NASA and become a spacer for life. And yes, self-sufficiency is a requirement since you don't know if NASA might infiltrate your Earth bases (you know, for hostages or to ship up compromised supplies...).
And then there is that iTunes store 30%. Seems kind of high to me. What is their risk? Today in 2012? Do they really deserve more per album than the artist? At least the record labels put up capital to record albums. At least the record labels provide the artist with valuable promotion and publicity. Historically in the music business when someone was taking more than 20% of gross revenues that had some Ãoeskin in the gameÃ. They risked losing a lot of money.
This does show a problem with the economic system that the industry has set up. Consumers ran screaming from one oligopoly to another. Is it this really surprising that artists are still taking the brunt of it when you are still dealing with the same businesses?
Anyone who claims Apple is ripping them off for taking 30% doesn't know how payment models are. If you sell songs individually for 99 cents on Paypal or a merchant account, guess what? Paypal will take at least 30 cents out of that transaction!
And it's not guaranteed people will buy more than 1 song at a time, so those transaction fees have to be paid. Apple gets around this by bundling up transactions and doing it all at once so they're charged the 30 cents once, but that's assuming people consume media multiple times.
Granted, it looks silly at the higher values but back when it started, everything was 99 cents.
Hell, you can find iTunes gift cards 20% off at Best Buy and other retailers extremely easily (it happens at least once a month). You can bet the retailer's not losing money off it, and Apple's not losing money off it - it's coming from that 30%. (E.g., Apple sells cards for 25% off face value - retailer pays Apple $75 for a $100 card, for example, leaving Apple with 5% of the leftover and the retailer with the rest - to which they can discount and offer users 20% off and still pocket 5%).
Artists are free to set up alternative payment methods, but if there's only one song of interest, they're going to find the payment processor will take 30% or so off that one 99 cent song. Hell, dealing with merchant accounts manually (or Paypal) will probably eat into earnings as well purely due to the time involved.
There's a reason why many sites take a flat 30%. You'd think wiht competition Amazon would take less, or Google, just to undercut Apple on the supply side.
Would suggest money is better spent curing cancer then finding intelligent life in the proverbial haystack that is the the galaxy.
While I would be fascinated by the idea we are not alone in the universe, ultimately I really don't care. While other "pure" scientific investigation might yield off-shoot technologies, having radio scanners record and computers process Fourier transforms trying to find some pattern to space noise pretty much has yielded about all the scientific discovery that is going to come out of the project. Nothing is going to be cured, improved, or evolve out of a continued dumping of money into Seti.
You can say the same for people too. Why buy a BMW when a used Toyota will do the same job? Why buy a fancy cellphone when a basic one does the job? Why buy a big screen 52" TV when you can buy a 20" one that does the same job? Why buy an expensive laptop when a cheap one sale probably does all you need?
It's all about freedom to choose (and being a participant in the free market). Some people choose a fancy car but basic clothes. Others choose a fancy phone and a basic car.
Some choose cancer research for the good of humanity, others choose SETI for the scientific good. Sure cancer research may be more practical to humanity, but practicality isn't (and shouldn't be) the sole reason people choose to spend their dollars.
Hell, even investing in cancer research may not be that practical either - given big pharma will just use it to find ways to treat it for life, rather than cure it and lose a life-long customer. And heck, why is big pharma investing in "lifestyle" drug research instead of curing disease research - after all, prostate cancer is far more serious disease than erectile dysfunction.
Meanwhile the bottle specifically says to use a pea-sized amount. The version shown on TV is huge so as to show off the sparkly pretty colours in the bottle, not as an example of how to brush your teeth.
Most people apply paste by treating it as a one-dimensional object and measure it on length. And while the ads show a full toothbrush bristle length of paste, most people DO apply that much paste! Those who read pea-sized amount do use a lot less, but they measure just one dimension of paste - if the manufacturer increased the size of the opening 10% by area, the amount dispensed is around 21% more by volume as most people don't measure the volume of paste, just the length.
Even worse is the detergent overuse problem. This happens in dishwashers, washing machines, hand washed dishes, etc. The measuring cup is often 10X the necessary size, and some people fill it twice to get things extra clean. All that detergent cleans less effectively, clogs the machinery and plumbing, pollutes waterways. You can take most peoples laundry and wash it without soap several times before it gets clean. There is so much residue on swimsuits that pools and hot tubs get sudsy.
Yeah, you have to look VERY carefully at the cup attached. The instructions often say "fill to the first line for normal loads" but it's often hard to see (especially since it's usually close to the bottom) so people end up filling to the first marking on the cup (halfway up) or the full cup.
It's just like computers and probably the "rest of the world" use case of the dancing pigs problem. Just that everyone managed to exploit it for profit rather than questionable scams.
And they are used in some of the best old-school reel-to-reel recorders. I don't know if they are making new components with tubes, but older tube pre-amps for Ampex and Scully tape recorders are prized by some audiophiles for their "warm" sound. They are also great for creating distortion...over-driving tube pre-amps creates some nice distortion effects which digital components would just clip.
But (and I'm speaking as someone who has been out of radio and audio for many years...I own a hardware store), from what I've seen and heard there are some pretty awesome digital programs that can duplicate nearly any pre-amp ever made. Based on what my daughter can do with her Mac (Protools, FInale, etc) I am pretty impressed at the sounds that can be processed even in a home environment with no need for tubes.
That's primarily the reason why tubes sound better - they distort far more harmonoisly than transistors. Overdrive a transistor and it clips. Clipping distortion is extremely harsh on the ear, which limits dynamic range of the transistor (you need to prevent them from clipping).
Early MP3s people made sticking cords from CD players to their sound cards often suffered from clipping, and the MP3 process made them sound even worse.
Overdrive tubes and they distort the audio (dynamic range compression) at the peaks. This kind of distortion is much more pleasant sounding to the ear and makes for more cool effects (hence why guitar amps use them).
it's also why the loudness wars sucked - because instead of using DSP to distort the peaks, they just clipped it.
And yes, once a preamp is characterised (either through impulse response and convolution, or modelling), you can use DSP to make the sound of any pre-amp. However, the input signal must be recorded in such a way to not exceed the dynamic range of the ADCs, because you don't want clipping (and no amount of DSP can fix that). Once you have a clean signal in though, it's easy.
Dismissal? What the judge should do is take away both set of patents!
That would hurt Samsung more than it would hurt Apple.
Because Samsung's patents are FRAND, and by taking it away, it means everyone who implements a cellphone (ANY cellphone) no longer has to negotiate with Samsung on those patents.
Apple's patents are design dress patents, which have a much shorter life (5 years), and really cover a specific design of product. If you wonder why companies periodically change the design of long-running products, it's usually because their design patents are about to expire, and the design isn't iconic enough to apply for a trademark (e.g., the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle IS trademarked, and it's why only Coke comes in those bottle designs).
Of course, the two sides can never come to an agreement - Apple knows Samsung's patents are FRAND, and since they're essential to implement a cellphone, believes they already got a license through purchase of Qualcomm chips. (Basically, Apple buys chips from Qualcomm, of which part of the price of those chips is used to pay for the patents paid to Samsung etc.). Samsung believes Apple should still pay, akin to the recording/videogame industry saying if you buy a CD/game secondhand, you still owe them money. Whether or not that is true, is up to bunch of agreements between Samsung, Qualcomm and Apple.
Apple's beef with Samsung is the design of their tablets, and Samsung believes they're distinct enough ("we don't let lawyers design our products"). Since it's not an FRAND issue, Apple values part of the whole Apple Experience(tm) is the product design and thus values it highly.
And it's also why Apple's push for nano-sim will never succeed. Even if Apple gives away patent licenses to anyone who asks for whatever terms they want. Nokia and RIM are opposing Apple purely because if Apple gets a patent into the FRAND pool, it means Apple pays a lot less money to them for their FRAND patents. Apple's got the money and everyone wants some of it, and they definitely do not want Apple getting their patents into the standard at all. Even if Apple's implementation is techically superior to Nokia and RIM's design - they will vote for an inferior standard in order to keep the Apple goldmine coming.
Sorry, but you're full of shit. My Uncle used to work for a company that produced gelled consumables - stuff like ketchup. He designed bottles that would avoid high adhesion at the bottom. See, it turns out that people get really annoyed when they can't get that last bit out of the bottle. Enough to switch brands, even.
Yeah, that's why most people start putting the bottle upside down when it gets low so you don't wait ages for the ketchup to move from the bottom to the cap. Heck, it can go on its side and maybe elevate the bottom a bit.
Or why they make those squeeze bottles where the opening is on the bottom.
Anyhow, the problem I had with ketchup was never it sticking to the glass, but when they were new, and the ketchup doesn't flow. Especially after you get it moving and invert it just a bit too much so it plugs the opening and no air can flow in. And once it plugs like that, it's a pain to get the flow restarted.
My understanding is that the Xbox 360 uses Windows Media Audio 10 Professional for all system and game audio.
If the main issue is the H.264 video codec, why can't they just switch to Microsoft WMV/VC-1 or one of the many open source ones available? Sounds like a simple software system update to me if its just the video apps doing it. If H.264 is used on game discs then MS needs to payup.
h.264 is everywhere, and yes, the Xbox must use them for things like YouTube and whatnot.
Now, the question on paying up is the big question. After all, h.264 is at issue, and yes, it's patented. However, the MPEG-LA is the authority handed the powers to license patents for h.264. You pay one fee and get to use all the patents required for h.264 to implement your h.264-using device. Everyone pays - Apple uses it to pay for every iPod, iPad, iPhone, iTunes, QuickTime, etc. Likewise, everyone else does the same. As part of the group standardizing on h.264, everyone agrees to license their patents FRAND style - hence paying MPEG-LA for the licenses (one person is better than many). The alternative is to license each patent individually which can be done, but can fall flat if the patents aren't forced to be FRAND individually (i.e., MPEG-LA will give a license to anyone who pays, but each patent holder may refuse to license you their patents if you wish to bypass MPEG-LA).
Cellphones and WiFi is a somewhat different arena, for they insist all patents used be FRAND licensed BUT they do NOT have a centralized licensing authority - instead, you have to go to everyone and license them all separately (or buy products with the license already embedded). In this case, you have stuff like Apple vs. Motorola/Samsung/etc.
So the big question is - what is going on? Microsoft may have made deals with everyone individually and the one with Motorola expired or something, because otherwise h.264 is fully licensed through the MPEG-LA, barring any submarine patents.
So... don't. NTP works just fine on a private network. And you don't even need a proper time source, either. As long as everything ticks within a narrow boundary of time, it doesn't really matter if the master NTP server clock is off. If it's stable, the offset between it and the real time would be well known.
NTP's just a way to distribute the time. It doesn't have to be used to distribute exact time. As long as everything's ticking to the same clock, things are fine. Heck, they can have the same machine that does their slaved clocks be the NTP machine.
For a home, it depends on the lock and needs (Another disclaimer: I have a relative who installs and rekeys locks). If someone just wants a lock and a key, they can easily do it themselves. If they want one key to open several doors, some of which can be opened by another key that is the only one to open still other doors, that's probably going to need custom work.
Depends how you do it. If you want to physically change all the locks and don't care for the old, you can actually buy at Home Depot locks that use the same keycode and get a bunch of locks with the same keying. If you want to reuse the lock, then yes, you'd have to call in a locksmith to rekey your lock. Or if you have an odd door that uses a different key for whatever reason and want to make them all use the same key.
For new construction or replacing whole sets of locks they make locks with the same keying. Locksmith is only required if you don't want a new locks or just want to rekey a lock.
Multi-key locks will always require a locksmith, though. Especially if you want complex locking (one key can open doors A, B, C, and D, while another key can only do B, C and E). Though that's one reason everyone moved to electronic locks.
Precisely. I recently built a network for a surgical center. The owners wanted to keep costs down as much as they could, so i setup LibreOffice and Thunderbird for the users. Every single person there went nuts, calling me, yelling at me, yelling at the owners, wanting "the regular email program", meaning Outlook. Even though Thunderbird is, IMO, far easier to use than outlook, they apparently had no idea whatsoever how to use Thunderbird, even after I tought everyone how to use it. So we had to spend hundreds more dollars to supply each user with a copy of MS Office. User preference is a big deal. Of course, this office is the most computer illiterate bunch of people I have ever encountered in my entire life. So a different crowd might be more welcoming to applications that aren't from Microsoft.
Well, the problem is in your first line - "surgical center". Of course they'll be less willing to train because they have other work to do. IT's a necessary evil these days for everything, and users are often forced to use computers because it's a required part of their job.
Of course, the ideal would be for people to want to be well-rounded and learn more about the world around them, but that's not going to happen - from geeks arguing why they should be forced to take arts courses at college/university (just give me the technical courses I need to graduate, I don't care for philosophy/ethics/writing/etc), to other professionals (doctors/nurses/mechanics/lawyers/etc) having to waste time "screwing with the computer" instead of doing their jobs.
And to be honest, most people would rather have a doctor who spends their time keeping up to date on the latest medical advances to one who spends their free time showing off how fast they can build Linux from scratch. Or getting billed for the time the doctor took to rebuild the kernel in the middle of a diagnosis or something because they had to.
The irony of someone stealing a bible is not lost on me, either.
The irony is lost on me.
The irony is because the person doing the stealing is supposedly religious (otherwise why would you bother stealing a Bible?), most likely a religious Christian. And one of the 10 commandments is "thou shalt not steal". Hence the irony - a religious person violating a tenet of their religion to acquire a religous item.
Of course, there is no real need to steal Bibles, for every community with a Church, there will be someone willing to give you one.
Of course, there are businesses disguised as religions (e.g., Scientology) who are in the business of selling belief for money. You can't acquire any Scientology materials "for free" and they will prosecute you for copyright infrtingement and other stuff if you do. But hey, it's a business after all - the worship of profit (for the founders).
Not to mention that Hollywood pays their way - military assistance is paid for completely by Hollywood and that includes wear and tear on equipment, fuel, personnel, etc.
The only thing DoD does is approve use of personnel and equipment for that purpose (or not) and determine schedule of rates to charge out. Reasons to deny have included national security, they have doubts the film will do well, they don't like the premise of the film, etc.
Especially when the fancy new equipment rolling off the line is shown - get people excited about the latest miltary tech and vehicles. It's basically a free recruitment ad for them (they do have paid recruitment drives - e.g., Thunderbirds, Blue Angels, boat tours, etc.).
And I'll bet almost no one here has ever encountered a vertical or horizontal "hold" control. In those days, we had to establish picture sync ourselves,
I've always wondered about that - I mean, the NTSC signal hasn't changed much (the only addition was color) so it already had vertical and horizontal sync pulses embedded in the signal. And early analog descrambler boxes relied on screwing up the sync pulses so the TV couldn't lock on and decode, which is why scrambled channels rolled and had the nasty line in the middle (the TV just went free-running, so the picture rolled and shifted as the oscillators drifted as they weren't re-synced).
And I know those hold knobs existed well into the 80s so TVs couldn't sync to the line frequency for decades. I could understand if they helped recenter the image, but I distinctly remember they being adjusted so the image didn't roll one way or another which I never understood since there are sync pulses in the signal and oscillators drift far too quickly for it to be a manual sync control.
Why is it that there is no malware for IOS? There are millions of these devices out there, so there certainly is an incentive for malware writers.
I believe that it has something to do with the fact that only Apple approved and checked software can be installed thereon. This closed system may not appeal to many here on/., but it is certainly as close as we have gotten to a malware proof computing experience we are likely to get anytime soon. Mac users will be able to enjoy this form of security with OS X 10.8 this summer.
Because there's accountability in the App Store. You see, to get an app in there, you have to pay $99 a year. Which means you need a valid billing account Sure malware can use a fake credit card, but when Apple gets a chargeback, they'll cancel the account and remove the app.
Next, if there's really a bad app in there, boom, Apple removes all the developer's apps and closes their account. And with a valid billing address means Apple can hunt you down. Hell, if you want to accept money for apps Apple makes you jump through hoops.
It's just like the Flashback trojan - making money is easy, but getting paid is actually quite hard.
The other reason is iOS makes it quite hard - to send a text message requires user intervention - an app can't send a text message on its own unless it uses its own service. Ditto phone calls - you can call up the dialer, but it'll ask if you really wanted to dial that number.
The only real way to get malware onto iOS without exposing a real identity is via jailbreaks and surreptitious installation that way. To which iOS isn't immune.
Can't play HD-DVDs on most XBoxes, either. The HD-DVD drive was a separate add-on which very few people got and has been discontinued for years. That's one of the reasons HD-DVD got beat by Blu-Ray--every PS3 came (and comes) with a Blu-Ray drive standard.
Not really. PS3 was a distant 3rd and most people were buying it because it was the cheapest (at $600) blu-ray player out there (rest were $1000+, and HD-DVD players were cheaper at $300-500).
The big reason was the drying up of HD-DVD content because the studios realized they couldn't release HD-DVDs the same as they did DVDs. The DVD Forum (behind HD-DVD) inadvertently forgot to enable region codes in HD-DVD, which many enterprising people used. So when a movie was hitting theatres in their own countries (or even before theatrical release!), owners could go to Amazon and import the latest HD-DVDs and play them.
That, and some serious money was being thrown around to get studios to go exclusive.
Of course, Blu-Ray wasn't helped by not having all HD-DVD features from the get-go (BD Profile 2.0 got it to feature parity), nor the limitation of being stuck with MPEG2 video (instead of h.264), or being stuck with 25GB single-layer discs because of yield issues with 50GB dual-layers (HD-DVDs were dual-layer 30GB). So BDs were poorly encoded messes with basically Dolby Digital or DTS only audio (if you're lucky, PCM) and discs with the movie on it because that's all that could fit.
And no, the HD-DVD addon never sold well because the HD-DVD standalone players weren't much mor expensive than the addon (addon was $200. HD-DVD players were dropping down to $300).
I wonder if the current Xbox can even play it right now - still have some HD-DVDs whose Blu-Ray releases were basically crap and never re-released, and some catalog movies where the Blu-Ray was completely destroyed by Blu-Ray mastering (DNR leading to MORE film grain, posterization, and interestingly, loss of detail - as if someone took the DVD and upscaled it).
That's pretty lame. I have some recording rules that are as old as my DVR. You only have to "program the DVR" once. That's the whole value proposition of a DVR.
Set it. Forget it. Let the whole "automation" thing do it's work.
It's a DVR, not a VCR.
That only works if you have a Good DVR(tm). Most people own digital VCRs courtesy of their cable or satellite provider.
My experience has it that the provided digital VCRs are literally crap at scheduling. Something like TiVo though IS literally "set it and forget it". Tracked many series through timeslot changes (Fringe being the latest one it automatically did for me)
When my cable company went all digital (and being in Canada, it means no CableCARD), my TiVos still had uses for me to tell me when the bloody TV show is on because the cablebox was utterly useless at recording shows.
TiVo's been around 14 years now. The patents are definitely licensed. Surely one of those is how to schedule a TV program properly. Hell, if it isn't patented, TiVo might as well do it because doing it is obviously a very difficult thing to do and non-obvious.
Last time I saw one was in high school, and our math class happened around the time of the eclipse. One of the perks our math teacher did was when we completed, he took us outside and showed us the eclipse using nothing more than a sheet of looseleaf paper with a pinhole in it made from a pushpin.
No, we didn't have a full eclipse, or even an annular one - this one was just a partial cresenting of the sun. Even with the crude viewer projected onto a concrete railing, you could definitely make it out.
Heck, if one were utterly lazy, a tree works fantastically well.
Afiact the only reason the Pi can play 1080p H.264 acceptablly it is because it's decoded by the videocore GPU. The arm is nowhere near powerful enough.
Which is all well and good if all you want to play is H.264 but if you want to play anything else you are at the mercy of the device vendor (the Pi foundation have talked about selling an additional codec pack for the videocore but it's unclear whether it will actually happen) and if you want to do something other than 3D graphics or playing video then the videocore can't help you at all.
Trust me, when you're playing back h.264 on your PC, the CPU's doing very little - it too is being decoded by the video card.
Try VLC sometime in full software-only decode with no video accelleration - your computer will be very noticably slower. A lot is offloaded to the GPU these days, even on Intel GPUs (which have been doing video accelleration for a long time now).
We think the CPU's doing a ton of work, but really, the GPU's been doing it for years on PCs, and only on embedded have GPUs gotten good enough to do it. One PC I got in 2007 came with an nVidia 7300 graphics. Won't play Blu-Ray without issues. Upgrade it to an 8800 and it works fine. And we're talking 5 year old video card.
All a CPU does in video decoding is demuxing of the stream and audio processing. The heavy lifting of doing the IDCT, motion estimation, colorspace transformations are don on the GPU.
i've been backed into twice without apology. once, a taxi was backing out of someone's driveway and hit me in the hip. i was almost out of his way, on his driver-side rear bumper. he didn't acknowledge me, not even a "sorry" wave. just backed out and left.
the second time some oblivious chick had stopped at a T intersection and i crossed the street behind her. she decided that she had stopped too far into the road she wanted to turn on and backed into me without looking. i was exactly centered with her car; she hit me with her trunk. she didn't even notice. a couple seconds later she calmly made her turn.
No kidding. I was walking through a parking lot and this lady was backing up and DEFINITELY not looking because she came right at me. I saw her and ran to the side (I was down the middle because there were no cars travelling (I'll move over to let them pass) and it gives me greater visibility on drivers who may not see me if I'm beside the other car hidden in the blind spot cast by the other car.
Then she decided she needed to pull forward, and nearly hit me that way. Got a lovely honk from that. If she didn't have kids I might've done something.
People don't make a fuss about Google because Google has always been transparent about their dedication to clean energy, and has been recognized many times for it. They're even making giant investments in renewables. http://www.google.com/green/energy/
Meanwhile, Apple has been as opaque as possible regarding their environmental effects, only opening up about it when they think it'll affect their bottom line.
And that's why the greenpeace thing was BS to begin with - they're not measuring "environmental friendliness", they're measuring "environmental PR column-inches". The more PR crap you post about being green, the higher you are up in the rankings.
Hell, HP kept winning with vague promises to "reduce emissions" and crap that like with no firm targets or anything.
All Apple's doing is producing PR column-inches on what they're doing which increases their ranking. (it is easy to do when plans are already being executed to do it).
Hell, I bet BP could get to be the #1 cleanest company in the world according to the greenpeace metric.
It's okay, these supposed brilliant tech people that call everyone fools probably wouldn't know the first thing about fixing their car engine..... They take it to the mechanic, who's probably the 'fool' that clicks on ads.
Exactly. People forget that computers and cars are basically required tools in modern society. You can get along never OWNING one, but it won't be long before you're required to USE one (even if it's not yours). Teaching them all the ins and outs of these required machines is a futile effort.
I mean, think about it - if you're paying a mechanic $100/hr, do you really want him "recompiling the kernel" or "reinstalling Windows" on your dime? or "Advocating for the source code", again on your dime? (someone's gotta pay for it after all).
Nevermind all the shady mechanics who insist you need a new frobber because you're the kind that looks like you can be scammed out of another thousand bucks or so. Heck, maybe some parallels can be drawn up - people constantly ask for help when dealing with mechanics to avoid situations like this, after all...
Slashdot Mirror
Same way it's always done. You do realize that any idiot with a computer and a web page can put up whatever they want, right? How do we judge the validity of information we find on the Internet?
No reason we can't apply the same reasoning to online academic papers. The thing to remember is research is very rarely done in a vacuum - you draw on other's work and you want them to draw on yours.
If you're just starting out your research, you're probably working under the eye of another or assisting someone else's research (which if done pright, gets your name in the final paper). Perhaps you come across something interesting - write it up and show others in the field who may be interested to comment on it. Peer review happens constantly - you're reading papers from your field, you're publishing papers others are reading. The only thing a journal does is formalize the process a bit.
They exist, and have for a few years now - they're called "hackerspaces" and while generally places where people get together to use tools they may not otherwise be able, tend to be a gathering place for all sorts of people. Lots of people come just for the social aspect and not to use tools they don't have, and there's plenty of showing off and other stuff. Sure they won't all be programming Perl or soldering Arduinos together, but getting like-minded people together expands your horizons.
And if they don't exist in your area - start one.
And heck, even if you got a bunch of people who are only interested in welding art together, so be it - show off some of your work to them and observe some of theirs. Perhaps they always wanted some sort of controlled lighting for their project and you can help them.
Oh, and try to break out from the usual thinking of going for a drink is socializing. It is, but branch out. There are plenty of activities that can be done. Take a course in dance. Or art. Or teach a course in electronics and programming at the community college. If you go to non-intellectually stimulating places to socialize (e.g., clubbing), don't be surprised that the social activity is not intellectually stimulating.
And if your social interactions are online (forums/chats/etc) - arrange an offline meet and greet. Doesn't have to be fancy with barbecues and such, just bring interesting stuff, order some pizza or whatever, etc.
Finally, no, socializing isn't difficult for introverts at all - if you get together with a group of those with like interests, that's already a huge social barrier gone, and if nothing else, you all work on your own projects whilst together. Someone will then ask a question to this "off line forum" and there you go.
Let's see... we had a whole team of people suddenly experience BSODs on their computers, which was root-caused to be the Symantec Endpoint Protection firewall (hint: it doesn't play nice with Virtual Box). It was root caused easily enough - a bunch of us who had it removed and replaced with Microsoft ForeFront (enterprise verison of MSE) didn't experience the BSODs. IT quickly determined that it was the firewall module and pushed out SEP removal and MS FF installs. No one's complained since.
It just struck all of a sudden - one week it was fine, then another week someone gives up and sends an email and they all cluster around the week prior.
Heck, the whole company has been migrating away, we just sped up deployment in our group.
NASA: No, we'll just wait for you back down here.
Short of establishing a self-sufficient moon base, that's all they'd have to do. Mess with NASA and become a spacer for life. And yes, self-sufficiency is a requirement since you don't know if NASA might infiltrate your Earth bases (you know, for hostages or to ship up compromised supplies...).
Anyone who claims Apple is ripping them off for taking 30% doesn't know how payment models are. If you sell songs individually for 99 cents on Paypal or a merchant account, guess what? Paypal will take at least 30 cents out of that transaction!
And it's not guaranteed people will buy more than 1 song at a time, so those transaction fees have to be paid. Apple gets around this by bundling up transactions and doing it all at once so they're charged the 30 cents once, but that's assuming people consume media multiple times.
Granted, it looks silly at the higher values but back when it started, everything was 99 cents.
Hell, you can find iTunes gift cards 20% off at Best Buy and other retailers extremely easily (it happens at least once a month). You can bet the retailer's not losing money off it, and Apple's not losing money off it - it's coming from that 30%. (E.g., Apple sells cards for 25% off face value - retailer pays Apple $75 for a $100 card, for example, leaving Apple with 5% of the leftover and the retailer with the rest - to which they can discount and offer users 20% off and still pocket 5%).
Artists are free to set up alternative payment methods, but if there's only one song of interest, they're going to find the payment processor will take 30% or so off that one 99 cent song. Hell, dealing with merchant accounts manually (or Paypal) will probably eat into earnings as well purely due to the time involved.
There's a reason why many sites take a flat 30%. You'd think wiht competition Amazon would take less, or Google, just to undercut Apple on the supply side.
You can say the same for people too. Why buy a BMW when a used Toyota will do the same job? Why buy a fancy cellphone when a basic one does the job? Why buy a big screen 52" TV when you can buy a 20" one that does the same job? Why buy an expensive laptop when a cheap one sale probably does all you need?
It's all about freedom to choose (and being a participant in the free market). Some people choose a fancy car but basic clothes. Others choose a fancy phone and a basic car.
Some choose cancer research for the good of humanity, others choose SETI for the scientific good. Sure cancer research may be more practical to humanity, but practicality isn't (and shouldn't be) the sole reason people choose to spend their dollars.
Hell, even investing in cancer research may not be that practical either - given big pharma will just use it to find ways to treat it for life, rather than cure it and lose a life-long customer. And heck, why is big pharma investing in "lifestyle" drug research instead of curing disease research - after all, prostate cancer is far more serious disease than erectile dysfunction.
Most people apply paste by treating it as a one-dimensional object and measure it on length. And while the ads show a full toothbrush bristle length of paste, most people DO apply that much paste! Those who read pea-sized amount do use a lot less, but they measure just one dimension of paste - if the manufacturer increased the size of the opening 10% by area, the amount dispensed is around 21% more by volume as most people don't measure the volume of paste, just the length.
Yeah, you have to look VERY carefully at the cup attached. The instructions often say "fill to the first line for normal loads" but it's often hard to see (especially since it's usually close to the bottom) so people end up filling to the first marking on the cup (halfway up) or the full cup.
It's just like computers and probably the "rest of the world" use case of the dancing pigs problem. Just that everyone managed to exploit it for profit rather than questionable scams.
That's primarily the reason why tubes sound better - they distort far more harmonoisly than transistors. Overdrive a transistor and it clips. Clipping distortion is extremely harsh on the ear, which limits dynamic range of the transistor (you need to prevent them from clipping).
Early MP3s people made sticking cords from CD players to their sound cards often suffered from clipping, and the MP3 process made them sound even worse.
Overdrive tubes and they distort the audio (dynamic range compression) at the peaks. This kind of distortion is much more pleasant sounding to the ear and makes for more cool effects (hence why guitar amps use them).
it's also why the loudness wars sucked - because instead of using DSP to distort the peaks, they just clipped it.
And yes, once a preamp is characterised (either through impulse response and convolution, or modelling), you can use DSP to make the sound of any pre-amp. However, the input signal must be recorded in such a way to not exceed the dynamic range of the ADCs, because you don't want clipping (and no amount of DSP can fix that). Once you have a clean signal in though, it's easy.
That would hurt Samsung more than it would hurt Apple.
Because Samsung's patents are FRAND, and by taking it away, it means everyone who implements a cellphone (ANY cellphone) no longer has to negotiate with Samsung on those patents.
Apple's patents are design dress patents, which have a much shorter life (5 years), and really cover a specific design of product. If you wonder why companies periodically change the design of long-running products, it's usually because their design patents are about to expire, and the design isn't iconic enough to apply for a trademark (e.g., the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle IS trademarked, and it's why only Coke comes in those bottle designs).
Of course, the two sides can never come to an agreement - Apple knows Samsung's patents are FRAND, and since they're essential to implement a cellphone, believes they already got a license through purchase of Qualcomm chips. (Basically, Apple buys chips from Qualcomm, of which part of the price of those chips is used to pay for the patents paid to Samsung etc.). Samsung believes Apple should still pay, akin to the recording/videogame industry saying if you buy a CD/game secondhand, you still owe them money. Whether or not that is true, is up to bunch of agreements between Samsung, Qualcomm and Apple.
Apple's beef with Samsung is the design of their tablets, and Samsung believes they're distinct enough ("we don't let lawyers design our products"). Since it's not an FRAND issue, Apple values part of the whole Apple Experience(tm) is the product design and thus values it highly.
And it's also why Apple's push for nano-sim will never succeed. Even if Apple gives away patent licenses to anyone who asks for whatever terms they want. Nokia and RIM are opposing Apple purely because if Apple gets a patent into the FRAND pool, it means Apple pays a lot less money to them for their FRAND patents. Apple's got the money and everyone wants some of it, and they definitely do not want Apple getting their patents into the standard at all. Even if Apple's implementation is techically superior to Nokia and RIM's design - they will vote for an inferior standard in order to keep the Apple goldmine coming.
Yeah, that's why most people start putting the bottle upside down when it gets low so you don't wait ages for the ketchup to move from the bottom to the cap. Heck, it can go on its side and maybe elevate the bottom a bit.
Or why they make those squeeze bottles where the opening is on the bottom.
Anyhow, the problem I had with ketchup was never it sticking to the glass, but when they were new, and the ketchup doesn't flow. Especially after you get it moving and invert it just a bit too much so it plugs the opening and no air can flow in. And once it plugs like that, it's a pain to get the flow restarted.
h.264 is everywhere, and yes, the Xbox must use them for things like YouTube and whatnot.
Now, the question on paying up is the big question. After all, h.264 is at issue, and yes, it's patented. However, the MPEG-LA is the authority handed the powers to license patents for h.264. You pay one fee and get to use all the patents required for h.264 to implement your h.264-using device. Everyone pays - Apple uses it to pay for every iPod, iPad, iPhone, iTunes, QuickTime, etc. Likewise, everyone else does the same. As part of the group standardizing on h.264, everyone agrees to license their patents FRAND style - hence paying MPEG-LA for the licenses (one person is better than many). The alternative is to license each patent individually which can be done, but can fall flat if the patents aren't forced to be FRAND individually (i.e., MPEG-LA will give a license to anyone who pays, but each patent holder may refuse to license you their patents if you wish to bypass MPEG-LA).
Cellphones and WiFi is a somewhat different arena, for they insist all patents used be FRAND licensed BUT they do NOT have a centralized licensing authority - instead, you have to go to everyone and license them all separately (or buy products with the license already embedded). In this case, you have stuff like Apple vs. Motorola/Samsung/etc.
So the big question is - what is going on? Microsoft may have made deals with everyone individually and the one with Motorola expired or something, because otherwise h.264 is fully licensed through the MPEG-LA, barring any submarine patents.
That is what makes this case interesting.
So... don't. NTP works just fine on a private network. And you don't even need a proper time source, either. As long as everything ticks within a narrow boundary of time, it doesn't really matter if the master NTP server clock is off. If it's stable, the offset between it and the real time would be well known.
NTP's just a way to distribute the time. It doesn't have to be used to distribute exact time. As long as everything's ticking to the same clock, things are fine. Heck, they can have the same machine that does their slaved clocks be the NTP machine.
Depends how you do it. If you want to physically change all the locks and don't care for the old, you can actually buy at Home Depot locks that use the same keycode and get a bunch of locks with the same keying. If you want to reuse the lock, then yes, you'd have to call in a locksmith to rekey your lock. Or if you have an odd door that uses a different key for whatever reason and want to make them all use the same key.
For new construction or replacing whole sets of locks they make locks with the same keying. Locksmith is only required if you don't want a new locks or just want to rekey a lock.
Multi-key locks will always require a locksmith, though. Especially if you want complex locking (one key can open doors A, B, C, and D, while another key can only do B, C and E). Though that's one reason everyone moved to electronic locks.
Well, the problem is in your first line - "surgical center". Of course they'll be less willing to train because they have other work to do. IT's a necessary evil these days for everything, and users are often forced to use computers because it's a required part of their job.
Of course, the ideal would be for people to want to be well-rounded and learn more about the world around them, but that's not going to happen - from geeks arguing why they should be forced to take arts courses at college/university (just give me the technical courses I need to graduate, I don't care for philosophy/ethics/writing/etc), to other professionals (doctors/nurses/mechanics/lawyers/etc) having to waste time "screwing with the computer" instead of doing their jobs.
And to be honest, most people would rather have a doctor who spends their time keeping up to date on the latest medical advances to one who spends their free time showing off how fast they can build Linux from scratch. Or getting billed for the time the doctor took to rebuild the kernel in the middle of a diagnosis or something because they had to.
The irony is because the person doing the stealing is supposedly religious (otherwise why would you bother stealing a Bible?), most likely a religious Christian. And one of the 10 commandments is "thou shalt not steal". Hence the irony - a religious person violating a tenet of their religion to acquire a religous item.
Of course, there is no real need to steal Bibles, for every community with a Church, there will be someone willing to give you one.
Of course, there are businesses disguised as religions (e.g., Scientology) who are in the business of selling belief for money. You can't acquire any Scientology materials "for free" and they will prosecute you for copyright infrtingement and other stuff if you do. But hey, it's a business after all - the worship of profit (for the founders).
Not to mention that Hollywood pays their way - military assistance is paid for completely by Hollywood and that includes wear and tear on equipment, fuel, personnel, etc.
The only thing DoD does is approve use of personnel and equipment for that purpose (or not) and determine schedule of rates to charge out. Reasons to deny have included national security, they have doubts the film will do well, they don't like the premise of the film, etc.
Especially when the fancy new equipment rolling off the line is shown - get people excited about the latest miltary tech and vehicles. It's basically a free recruitment ad for them (they do have paid recruitment drives - e.g., Thunderbirds, Blue Angels, boat tours, etc.).
I've always wondered about that - I mean, the NTSC signal hasn't changed much (the only addition was color) so it already had vertical and horizontal sync pulses embedded in the signal. And early analog descrambler boxes relied on screwing up the sync pulses so the TV couldn't lock on and decode, which is why scrambled channels rolled and had the nasty line in the middle (the TV just went free-running, so the picture rolled and shifted as the oscillators drifted as they weren't re-synced).
And I know those hold knobs existed well into the 80s so TVs couldn't sync to the line frequency for decades. I could understand if they helped recenter the image, but I distinctly remember they being adjusted so the image didn't roll one way or another which I never understood since there are sync pulses in the signal and oscillators drift far too quickly for it to be a manual sync control.
Because there's accountability in the App Store. You see, to get an app in there, you have to pay $99 a year. Which means you need a valid billing account Sure malware can use a fake credit card, but when Apple gets a chargeback, they'll cancel the account and remove the app.
Next, if there's really a bad app in there, boom, Apple removes all the developer's apps and closes their account. And with a valid billing address means Apple can hunt you down. Hell, if you want to accept money for apps Apple makes you jump through hoops.
It's just like the Flashback trojan - making money is easy, but getting paid is actually quite hard.
The other reason is iOS makes it quite hard - to send a text message requires user intervention - an app can't send a text message on its own unless it uses its own service. Ditto phone calls - you can call up the dialer, but it'll ask if you really wanted to dial that number.
The only real way to get malware onto iOS without exposing a real identity is via jailbreaks and surreptitious installation that way. To which iOS isn't immune.
An interesting Android hack popped up recently - due to the way smartphone data plans work, an Android app with "Internet Access" can hijack any TCP connection on the phone.
Not really. PS3 was a distant 3rd and most people were buying it because it was the cheapest (at $600) blu-ray player out there (rest were $1000+, and HD-DVD players were cheaper at $300-500).
The big reason was the drying up of HD-DVD content because the studios realized they couldn't release HD-DVDs the same as they did DVDs. The DVD Forum (behind HD-DVD) inadvertently forgot to enable region codes in HD-DVD, which many enterprising people used. So when a movie was hitting theatres in their own countries (or even before theatrical release!), owners could go to Amazon and import the latest HD-DVDs and play them.
That, and some serious money was being thrown around to get studios to go exclusive.
Of course, Blu-Ray wasn't helped by not having all HD-DVD features from the get-go (BD Profile 2.0 got it to feature parity), nor the limitation of being stuck with MPEG2 video (instead of h.264), or being stuck with 25GB single-layer discs because of yield issues with 50GB dual-layers (HD-DVDs were dual-layer 30GB). So BDs were poorly encoded messes with basically Dolby Digital or DTS only audio (if you're lucky, PCM) and discs with the movie on it because that's all that could fit.
And no, the HD-DVD addon never sold well because the HD-DVD standalone players weren't much mor expensive than the addon (addon was $200. HD-DVD players were dropping down to $300).
I wonder if the current Xbox can even play it right now - still have some HD-DVDs whose Blu-Ray releases were basically crap and never re-released, and some catalog movies where the Blu-Ray was completely destroyed by Blu-Ray mastering (DNR leading to MORE film grain, posterization, and interestingly, loss of detail - as if someone took the DVD and upscaled it).
That only works if you have a Good DVR(tm). Most people own digital VCRs courtesy of their cable or satellite provider.
My experience has it that the provided digital VCRs are literally crap at scheduling. Something like TiVo though IS literally "set it and forget it". Tracked many series through timeslot changes (Fringe being the latest one it automatically did for me)
When my cable company went all digital (and being in Canada, it means no CableCARD), my TiVos still had uses for me to tell me when the bloody TV show is on because the cablebox was utterly useless at recording shows.
TiVo's been around 14 years now. The patents are definitely licensed. Surely one of those is how to schedule a TV program properly. Hell, if it isn't patented, TiVo might as well do it because doing it is obviously a very difficult thing to do and non-obvious.
That's a complex way to make a pinhole viewer.
Last time I saw one was in high school, and our math class happened around the time of the eclipse. One of the perks our math teacher did was when we completed, he took us outside and showed us the eclipse using nothing more than a sheet of looseleaf paper with a pinhole in it made from a pushpin.
No, we didn't have a full eclipse, or even an annular one - this one was just a partial cresenting of the sun. Even with the crude viewer projected onto a concrete railing, you could definitely make it out.
Heck, if one were utterly lazy, a tree works fantastically well.
Trust me, when you're playing back h.264 on your PC, the CPU's doing very little - it too is being decoded by the video card.
Try VLC sometime in full software-only decode with no video accelleration - your computer will be very noticably slower. A lot is offloaded to the GPU these days, even on Intel GPUs (which have been doing video accelleration for a long time now).
We think the CPU's doing a ton of work, but really, the GPU's been doing it for years on PCs, and only on embedded have GPUs gotten good enough to do it. One PC I got in 2007 came with an nVidia 7300 graphics. Won't play Blu-Ray without issues. Upgrade it to an 8800 and it works fine. And we're talking 5 year old video card.
All a CPU does in video decoding is demuxing of the stream and audio processing. The heavy lifting of doing the IDCT, motion estimation, colorspace transformations are don on the GPU.
No kidding. I was walking through a parking lot and this lady was backing up and DEFINITELY not looking because she came right at me. I saw her and ran to the side (I was down the middle because there were no cars travelling (I'll move over to let them pass) and it gives me greater visibility on drivers who may not see me if I'm beside the other car hidden in the blind spot cast by the other car.
Then she decided she needed to pull forward, and nearly hit me that way. Got a lovely honk from that. If she didn't have kids I might've done something.
Should taken a photo.
And that's why the greenpeace thing was BS to begin with - they're not measuring "environmental friendliness", they're measuring "environmental PR column-inches". The more PR crap you post about being green, the higher you are up in the rankings.
Hell, HP kept winning with vague promises to "reduce emissions" and crap that like with no firm targets or anything.
All Apple's doing is producing PR column-inches on what they're doing which increases their ranking. (it is easy to do when plans are already being executed to do it).
Hell, I bet BP could get to be the #1 cleanest company in the world according to the greenpeace metric.
Exactly. People forget that computers and cars are basically required tools in modern society. You can get along never OWNING one, but it won't be long before you're required to USE one (even if it's not yours). Teaching them all the ins and outs of these required machines is a futile effort.
I mean, think about it - if you're paying a mechanic $100/hr, do you really want him "recompiling the kernel" or "reinstalling Windows" on your dime? or "Advocating for the source code", again on your dime? (someone's gotta pay for it after all).
Nevermind all the shady mechanics who insist you need a new frobber because you're the kind that looks like you can be scammed out of another thousand bucks or so. Heck, maybe some parallels can be drawn up - people constantly ask for help when dealing with mechanics to avoid situations like this, after all...