It wouldn't have anything to do with the retarded combat system (right-click 600 times on the enemy!) or the fact that you could lose everything by being ganked by roving bands of 13 year olds. Better yet, I believe there were ways to steal things out of your house. Nope, got to be the graphics.
One reason I never played any previous MMO to WoW was that I didn't want to lose everything I had worked for like UO, or be there at specfic times like EQ or SWG. I can play for an hour (any hour) and run a few quests or an instance if I have uninterrupted time. Have to leave in the middle of questing? Oh well, just exit the game, and run back to my body next time I log on. Try randomly exiting in the middle of nowhere in any other game.
There are plenty of hardcore players that are quite vocal. There are about 10x more casual people that are not.
But a Jetta TDI new will run you about $20,000. A 2009 corolla will run you about $15,000 or so, and there are a couple of options under $15k like the Nissan Versa, Mazda 3i, and the new Smart Fortwo.
Yes, Jettas are $5k more than Corollas new - that's not due to diesel vs gas.
A better comparison would be the Jetta TDI vs Jetta gas. kbb.com prices the TDI at $21,393 invoice and the gas version at $18,445 invoice, a $2,948 difference. There is a $1,300 tax credit for clean diesel (check vw's homepage, filter ate my url)
So the real difference is $1,645 more for diesel. At $521/year, that's a 3 year payback at current prices. If prices rise, it would be faster.
To imiprove your standing in the real world takes YEARS of work, day in and day out. I can level (or whatever your game mechanics allow) in just hours. In just a few months of really dedicated playing, I could be near the top of the heap in terms of skills. What real-world activity can you master in a non-trivial way, with a low degree of inborn talent, in just a few months? that's the allure.
Well said. The rewards are greater in real life, but so is the effort required.
It doesn't always stem from addiction. I notice the majority of MMO players are teens and college students who have a lot of free time. There's nothing wrong with wasting a little spare time (hello Slashdot), but there is a point at which it can impact your quality of life.
I bought WoW (on Valentine's Day, LOL) specficially because I had a lot of free time and my life already sucked. I had lost my girl and most of my friends in some unfortunate (read: my fault) social drama, my work was stagnant, and life in general was terrible at the time. I knew it was temporary, but I still spent most of my nights alone and bored. There are only so many movies you can watch. Things picked up again after about 6 months, but having something to fill all those hours during that time really helped. I suppose I could've instead written angsty things and drank a lot like I did the previous time my life went in the toilet; I figure playing WoW is the better of the two.
Anyways once my life got back in order, WoW took a backseat; I still like the game, and play to this day, but these days it's more auction house in the morning before work and fishing on Sundays.:)
If they hold down a job and remember to eat and have the occasional friend over they're not really addicted are they?
The term is "functional addict", for example "functional alcoholic".
Addiction takes over your life.
Some people that hold down a job, family, and are seemingly normal - but drink themselves to a blackout every night. Addiction doesn't have to take over your *whole* life for it to be a problem.
Conversely, "something that takes up a lot of your time" is not the same thing as addiction. Spend 20 hours a week on any hobby that isn't videogames - football, TV, dancing, drinking - and nobody will think twice. Do that with a videogame, suddenly you're an addict - even if you're replacing one hobby (usually TV) with another (videogames).
We use remote systems in our franchise stores (Django-based). Things run in Firefox. Even the touch screen PCs run Firefox full screen mode (and soon to be tablets). Makes deploying new versions a breeze.
What is your policy for communication failure? For example, a backhoe knocks out the local interchange for a site. It's going to be two (days|weeks|months) before you can restore communications. Do you have locally cached versions of the software or are you just running paper and pen till its restored? (You do have a no-power paper and pen system right?)
What about nighttime on a not-very-windy day? Oh right, we don't have massive electrical storage stations built around the US.
In fact we do. There are numerous dams located around the country. You merely need to install a pump, and pump water from the bottom to the top of the dam during the day or when it's windy. Then the dam can extract most of that stored water to generate extra power when needed. The big downside is evaporation, but that's still only up to 20% loss, which is pretty good. And that can be eliminated by building such uphill/downhill water storage/generation facilities that are completely enclosed, rather than re-using dams.
Using this logic: In fact I have a water desalinization plant. There's tons of water in the ocean, I just need to install a pump and evaporation chamber.
Pumped storage is a great idea for local energy storage, but we don't currently have any built. Finding a material to pump or a technology that works is not the problem, actually doing it is. Probably mostly because it's still not yet economical.
Additional, solar-thermal has a built-in ability to store thermal energy and continue generating electricity through the night, and through several days of overcast skies. Look up liquid sodium solar-thermal power plant designs for more info.
Interesting, but it seems that the power produced would be less, so you might still need storage to get you through, just not as much as something that completely shuts off.
Also not built yet.
So again: we could build these storage solutions, and that would help with our distribution problems. But we haven't yet.
many corp/gov types won't install it until/unless they can excplicitly prevent its use.
They don't have to do anything to the desktop - they can just look at their proxy/firewall/router logs. Your choice of browser does nothing to stop corporate tracking/filtering.
9. IE Tab - Very nice for people who still stubbornly make IE specific sites, but still windows only.
I'd love a cross-platform version that could embed Safari on OS X, or Opera on Linux for example. Better yet, user-definable alternate browser. If embedding is not possible, simply launching in an external window would be nice.
And why the fixation on maxing out wind power? Because T.B. Pickens wants to get the most out of his investment, and get the Fed to pick up as much of the check as possible? What happened to solar?
What's the payback time/tax incentives/patent situation for solar vs. wind? That might be your answer.
Nearly every place in the US that isn't great for wind, is very favorable to solar. The entire southern half of the US could get by on solar, and skip wind turbines all together. That's just doubly true for the south-west. Again, see the map for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg
So put solar panels beneath/on/around your wind turbines.:)
Between the two options, where is it, exactly, that we can't locally generate all the energy needed? Seems to be pretty solid coverage, without the need for a national grid roll-out to get the Fed to subsidize the midwestern states. Of all the issues the grid has, the limited ultra-long-haul capacity (and correspondingly high losses) would be the last on my list.
What about nighttime on a not-very-windy day? Oh right, we don't have massive electrical storage stations built around the US.
There are really two problems - distribution and local storage. Solving local storage would help solve distribution - fill up storage during low usage times, pull from storage during high usage to avoid pulling from farther destinations.
There's a Walgreens in Reno that is entirely above Interstate 80. At least a few people are using that land commercially. Where I live, nearly all the interstate medians are paved, usually with a divider. That seems prohibitive towards subterranean infrastructure, based solely on cost.
I know the northeast (and CA, FL) loves concrete Jersey barriers in the middle, but that's not everywhere - especially in the non-coastal states that will likely form the bulk of the transmission paths. Many have that steel cable thing which is very small and you could easily lay a trench next to it (Example: much of I-40 in NC). Many interstates even have nothing in the median, just the median itself is v-shaped (Example: I-77 in SC). Elsewhere, there's trees in the median (example: I-26 in SC, I-85 in VA).
If you're gonna destroy the existing median in order to install electric/fiber/gas/whatever please add some rails on top...
Putting anything in the median other than a crash barrier is a bad idea because.. wait for it.. people crash into the median. Unless you're going to design whatever it is to take an 18-wheeler ramming it at 85 mph, I wouldn't put it there.
Transmission cables don't have this problem because they're underground. In fact, some telco and internet cables follow rail lines and interstates.
Going to the customers would be a huge mistake in this case, it seems the software is supposed to be "invisible" to the end user, so going to the end user and saying, "Hey, you know that software that runs on the expensive piece of equipment we sold you, well underneath the covers its crap and I need to convince the CEO of that" is probably a bad idea. Plus, the customer probably doesn't care as long as the stuff works. You can get poorly written code to work, but the huge amount of manpower it takes to maintain bad code will come back to bit the company in the ass.
Counting up bug counts and technical support calls would be a good way of showing customer input without having to upset the customer any further.
i think us developed nations need a two pronged attack. on one side we need to mandate energy efficiency and maximum power consumption for a wide range of consumer goods. second we need to promote green target into production and buildings in general.
Mandates of specific technologies or performance targets often have serious side effects when technology advances - or fails to advance because a mandate prevents it.
Rating systems (such as Energy Star in the US) let consumers evaluate competing products. If one fridge is $800 and costs $100 a year to run, and the other is $700 and costs $200 a year to run, people will spend more up front and come out ahead after a year. Manufacturers start to compete not only on price, style, and the other normal factors, but now also on energy efficiency. This gets energy efficiency in the public's consciousness as well, something the high energy prices have also done.
Of course, there's a huge philosophical shift between the two strategies. On one hand, you assume the manufacturers and consumers are, in general, rational and will work towards efficiency because it's in their best interest long term. On the other, you force manufacturers to only produce what you deem efficient and consumers to only buy approved products, because you assume both the manufacturers and consumers are idiotic children and need to be looked after and told what to do.
By mandating specific targets and technologies, you remove all incentive for the manufacturer to experiment and improve his product, instead only selling what the government mandates.
Case in point: part of the reason car manufacturers pushed SUVs so hard is that they helped them meet their government mandated fuel efficiency standards (SUVs, as "trucks", were classed differently).
Mandates have a usage, but they are not the end-all-be-all, nor should they be the first or only method used. They are often necessary to set a baseline, and as long as they're deliberately vague enough to incorporate new technology and advances, shouldn't stifle innovation.
as well as tacking end up of power, then it should be mandated that energy collection/storage should be built in as standard, perhaps as interlocking solar "tiles". the technology is not quite there yet, but there are prototypes and companies looking at this.
You want to mandate that something that doesn't work?
there is no efficient infrastructure to store/release power on a such a large scale yet.
Currently the electric grid is the most efficient storage. Pump power in when you're generating excess (and likely other people are using more), draw power when you need it.
Efficient local storage - flywheels do pretty well. Cheap, no.
of course this will never happen, because no government has the balls to attempt is and collectively society is always looking for the cheapest ticket.
Deciding to not cripple your economy with expensive mandates isn't a lack of courage, it's pragmatism.
there are some encouraging signs, but not enough and too slow.
The larger a system is, the slower it changes. The energy systems we've built over the past century are some of the largest things humans have built. Stability and change are polar opposites, you have to lean towards one or the other. Energy systems try to lean towards stability.
So is it possible for her to obtain full commercial protection for her invention and then release all the details free for non-commercial use and reduced license fees for the third world? This would be ideal.
As far as I know there's no problem with granting user A one patent license and user B a different one. It's not like you have to have one license for everyone that asks (though that's often easier/cheaper/more profitable for companies).
But if you're trying to help the world, why would you try to make it expensive for first-worlders? Wouldn't greater adoption by the first world (leading to economy of scale) make it cheaper for third world countries? Wouldn't reducing the massive energy footprint of the first world help the earth more than adding energy consumption in places it doesn't currently exist?
I think 5-10 years after someone stops selling software, people should be able to redistribute it as abandonware for software preservation.
Easily circumvented by offering to sell it for $9,999.95 or other ridiculous amounts.
Large game companies (EA, Vivendi, etc) don't want the old stuff given away for two reasons: 1. Competition with current games. Why would you buy the newe stuff if the old stuff was fun and free/cheap? 2. Reselling old stuff in new formats. For example, Wii's repackaging of old 8-bit NES games - not possible if old games that were not offered any more were free and people were already playing them.
Face it, the videogame industry has for the most part joined its brothers in Big Content (movies, music) and is following the same paths. Their thinking isn't about selling something the consumer wants; it's preventing anything being sold except what they want to sell, and in any way except how they want to sell. The idea is that the only legal choice left is to buy their new stuff, whether or not it's what you wanted, because it's the only content available.
Keanu Reeves adds suck to just about anything he touches.
I thought he was great in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Of course, there he was *trying* to play someone with a dumb teenager's intelligence and emotional range.
Hmmm... I don't grok that at all. If you're using Unicode, you must be using at least one codepage, right? That's how Unicode is organized. Obviously I don't understand something.
Eh... "code page" is an overloaded term. Yes, "code page" = "character encoding". I prefer to call the old 256-char 8 bit code page system "code pages", vs Unicode and "character encodings". What I should have said was non-Unicode code pages.
The old method (what I was calling "code pages"): You had 256 characters. The first 128 stay the same; you swapped out the top 127 for different characters. For example in default CP1251 (Latin-1), character D9 is a U with a backward accent mark (in Unicode, it's U+00D9). In CP1251 (Cyrillic), character D9 is the W with a foot (U+0429). There is no way to represent both characters at the same time.
Note that you are using the same byte, D9, to represent different characters depending on what global code page you have set. How do you know whether it's a CP1251 D9 or a CP1252 D9? You don't, except by setting a system setting.
In Unicode, you can have both characters at the same time. U+00D9 is always a U with a backward accent mark; U+0429 is always the W with a foot. There's no swapping out of characters for others, like trading one code page for another. How U+0429 is written to disk is determined by the Unicode encoding. UTF8 is one such encoding (the best/most popular IMHO), but there are others (UTF16, UTF7, etc). Think of it like taking a text file and then storing that text file in ZIP or TAR or CAB. So in this sense Unicode has "code pages" - UTF8 for example - but they're not like the old code pages since there is no swapping out of one set of characters for another, only different ways of representing the same character set.
So - what I was originally saying, you may have had accented characters in CP1251 for example, and when the other system sees it, it has no way of knowing if the characters are encoded in CP1252 or CP1251 or CP874 unless you specify, so it defaults to CP1252. Which, if you meant a different code page, means your accented characters will get messed up.
Most systems will recognize UTF8 on the other hand, so once you've converted to UTF8 there's no configuration needed. You don't have to tell receiving systems that D9 is a Cyrillic D9, or a Latin D9, or whatever - in Unicode, U+0429 is U+0429 and that's it.
(Whether or not your font has a way to show U+0429 on the screen is a font problem, not character encoding)
So - the old code page system (CP1252, etc) was a way of swapping out some characters to represent a subset of all available characters plus a way of encoding that subset. Unicode code pages (UTF8, etc) are just different ways of encoding the whole Unicode character set, no swapping out, all characters are available simultaneously.
Oh and Slashdot sucks for not supported Unicode, would've made this explanation easier.:)
It'd be nice to find a good forum where one can ask dumb questions about i18n on various platforms without being flamed for being an idiot. I've found a lot of forums, but most of my (and others') questions seem to go unanswered on all of them. I have a query out on ubuntuforums.org right now about Chinese and Arabic text in uxterm, but it's not getting any answers. Maybe later, though.
Most English-speaking people don't care since they stick to unaccented letters. Speakers of languages represented in the default Latin set (CP1252) such as most of Western Europe don't care since it just w
But on OSX, we'd see non-ASCII chars simply garbaged with no obvious pattern.
My guess is you were using a codepage instead of Unicode. I've had issues with old MP3 files ripped over the years - for example Björk:). There are several converters for filenames (and ID3 tags). After switching everything to UTF8, all my systems (mac, win, linux) produced consistent results. Unicode is the future, convert now or die.:)
Whatever happened to the concept of generic hardware? It usedc to be that when you bought a printer, it would work with everything. They published the escape codes that you used to change fonts, or draw lines, or whatever. Same thing with modems. You used to be able to grab any modem off the shelf and expect it to work with any computer.
Things like the AT command set for modems and Postscript decoding for printers are expensive to implement in hardware vs. a program on your PC. It's much cheaper to make stupid hardware and smart drivers. This explains Winmodems and Winprinters - it's cheaper for the manufacturer, so more profit for them. The customer might see a decrease in price as well.
This Windows-only BIOS has nothing to do with the Winmodem trend. It's not cheaper or easier for them; they're maintaining separate tables for Windows and Linux. It's actually *more* work, and the only reasonable explanation is that they're doing this extra work to deliberately hurt non-Windows operating systems.
Basic Facilities Charge per month $ 7.87 For the first 350 kWh used per month, per kWh 7.3572 For all over 350 kWh used per month, per kWh 7.7470
Yes, that's 7-something cents a kWh, 24 hours a day. Of course, there are at least 2, possibly 3 nuclear reactors feeding this service area, and NC is well regulated.
Actually, you can't use the iPhone in manual mode. To use gtkpod with the iPhone, you have to use sshfs on a jailbroken device because of this omission.
Disk mode doesn't exist on the iPhone, right. There is no way around the iTunes requirement, or to use the iPhone as a USB drive, without jailbreaking.
Manual mode refers to manually managing your music - that is, dragging and dropping individual files from iTunes into the iPhone instead of the default mode, automatically syncing to playlists. This does in fact exist for the iPhone.
If you really want to leave your music in file folders, you can leave your iTunes library empty. Then when you want to add music, you can drag new music into the library, then onto the iPhone, then delete it from the iTunes Library. If it's already in MP3 or AAC format, you don't even have to copy the files within the PC; they can stay where they are on disk.
Or you can of course say that it doesn't meet your needs and buy something else, which is probably a better idea if you can't/won't run iTunes either natively, through Wine, or through a virtual machine.
(This is also one of the reasons why games look nicer on CRTs - the other is higher refresh rates)
Off-topic to text consoles, but that's mostly not a problem any more. 80Hz on a CRT is equivalent to a 12.5ms response time LCD; most LCDs now quote 5 or 6ms response time.
I suppose KiloByte is having problems because he can't set the resolution of the console to match the resolution of the LCD and everythings looks blurry and ugly.
Yes, if you're not matching a resolution your monitor supports, it will look crappy.
I guess I immediately assumed console meant 80x25 text, which every LCD+video card combination should be capable of, at 640x480 or whatever the LCD's native resolution is. Better.. uh.. "text resolutions"(?) like 80x50 or 132x50 or something might require a decent pixel resolution, like 800x600 or 1024x768, true.
Still, it seemed like the original poster had something in particular against LCDs, as opposed to low-resolution monitors (whether CRT or LCD), which is why I was questioning it. "I bought a monitor that doesn't support the resolution I want" doesn't exactly map to "console on LCD sucks", the original statement. Could be what he meant though.
- less and less graphic card having good console support (my previous 3DFx Voodoo had a nice accelerated framebuffer device, my current Readeon HD is only usable using the VESA framebuffer - and svgatextmode hasn't been kept up to date with modern chipsets) - nobody bothers to write framebuffer drivers for newer gpus, because writing X+Mesa drivers is hard enough and there's no point in losing time and diluting efforts in writing additional drivers for things that are only used to draw a bootsplash for most users and that can approximately be handled by the vesa driver anyway - fewer video modes are available in VESA most of the exotic resolutions require hardware specific drivers
Agreed these are problem for consoles, but not specific to LCDs.. more of graphics card/driver issues.
- modern LCDs are 16:9 or 16:10 and don't fit the default 4:3 aspect ratio of the few resolutions available in VESA video modes
I could see this being a problem, if you didn't want to letterbox the sides. But 4:3 LCDs are available too (and often cheaper).
And since switching from CRT to LCD dragged me kicking and screaming into X (console on LCD sucks)
This is a very surprising statement to me.. how did changing to an LCD make console mode suck? Were you going from a high-resolution CRT to a 640x480 LCD or something?
Personally once I got an LCD I couldn't stand to look at CRTs any more - to the point where I banished them from my house.
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't have anything to do with the retarded combat system (right-click 600 times on the enemy!) or the fact that you could lose everything by being ganked by roving bands of 13 year olds. Better yet, I believe there were ways to steal things out of your house. Nope, got to be the graphics.
One reason I never played any previous MMO to WoW was that I didn't want to lose everything I had worked for like UO, or be there at specfic times like EQ or SWG. I can play for an hour (any hour) and run a few quests or an instance if I have uninterrupted time. Have to leave in the middle of questing? Oh well, just exit the game, and run back to my body next time I log on. Try randomly exiting in the middle of nowhere in any other game.
There are plenty of hardcore players that are quite vocal. There are about 10x more casual people that are not.
Yes, Jettas are $5k more than Corollas new - that's not due to diesel vs gas.
A better comparison would be the Jetta TDI vs Jetta gas. kbb.com prices the TDI at $21,393 invoice and the gas version at $18,445 invoice, a $2,948 difference. There is a $1,300 tax credit for clean diesel (check vw's homepage, filter ate my url)
So the real difference is $1,645 more for diesel. At $521/year, that's a 3 year payback at current prices. If prices rise, it would be faster.
Since it's not the first result in Google (or the second, or even the first page):
http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/
Indeed, it seems it only makes a static picture, versus being a data exploration tool like Google Earth.
Well said. The rewards are greater in real life, but so is the effort required.
I bought WoW (on Valentine's Day, LOL) specficially because I had a lot of free time and my life already sucked. I had lost my girl and most of my friends in some unfortunate (read: my fault) social drama, my work was stagnant, and life in general was terrible at the time. I knew it was temporary, but I still spent most of my nights alone and bored. There are only so many movies you can watch. Things picked up again after about 6 months, but having something to fill all those hours during that time really helped. I suppose I could've instead written angsty things and drank a lot like I did the previous time my life went in the toilet; I figure playing WoW is the better of the two.
Anyways once my life got back in order, WoW took a backseat; I still like the game, and play to this day, but these days it's more auction house in the morning before work and fishing on Sundays. :)
The term is "functional addict", for example "functional alcoholic".
Some people that hold down a job, family, and are seemingly normal - but drink themselves to a blackout every night. Addiction doesn't have to take over your *whole* life for it to be a problem.
Conversely, "something that takes up a lot of your time" is not the same thing as addiction. Spend 20 hours a week on any hobby that isn't videogames - football, TV, dancing, drinking - and nobody will think twice. Do that with a videogame, suddenly you're an addict - even if you're replacing one hobby (usually TV) with another (videogames).
What is your policy for communication failure? For example, a backhoe knocks out the local interchange for a site. It's going to be two (days|weeks|months) before you can restore communications. Do you have locally cached versions of the software or are you just running paper and pen till its restored? (You do have a no-power paper and pen system right?)
Using this logic: In fact I have a water desalinization plant. There's tons of water in the ocean, I just need to install a pump and evaporation chamber.
Pumped storage is a great idea for local energy storage, but we don't currently have any built. Finding a material to pump or a technology that works is not the problem, actually doing it is. Probably mostly because it's still not yet economical.
Interesting, but it seems that the power produced would be less, so you might still need storage to get you through, just not as much as something that completely shuts off.
Also not built yet.
So again: we could build these storage solutions, and that would help with our distribution problems. But we haven't yet.
They don't have to do anything to the desktop - they can just look at their proxy/firewall/router logs. Your choice of browser does nothing to stop corporate tracking/filtering.
I'd love a cross-platform version that could embed Safari on OS X, or Opera on Linux for example. Better yet, user-definable alternate browser. If embedding is not possible, simply launching in an external window would be nice.
What's the payback time/tax incentives/patent situation for solar vs. wind? That might be your answer.
So put solar panels beneath/on/around your wind turbines. :)
What about nighttime on a not-very-windy day? Oh right, we don't have massive electrical storage stations built around the US.
There are really two problems - distribution and local storage. Solving local storage would help solve distribution - fill up storage during low usage times, pull from storage during high usage to avoid pulling from farther destinations.
I know the northeast (and CA, FL) loves concrete Jersey barriers in the middle, but that's not everywhere - especially in the non-coastal states that will likely form the bulk of the transmission paths. Many have that steel cable thing which is very small and you could easily lay a trench next to it (Example: much of I-40 in NC). Many interstates even have nothing in the median, just the median itself is v-shaped (Example: I-77 in SC). Elsewhere, there's trees in the median (example: I-26 in SC, I-85 in VA).
More on median steel cable barriers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_barrier
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-19-highway-cables_x.htm
Putting anything in the median other than a crash barrier is a bad idea because.. wait for it.. people crash into the median. Unless you're going to design whatever it is to take an 18-wheeler ramming it at 85 mph, I wouldn't put it there.
Transmission cables don't have this problem because they're underground. In fact, some telco and internet cables follow rail lines and interstates.
The government solves most problems (including the interstate system, etc) using private contractors these days.
Counting up bug counts and technical support calls would be a good way of showing customer input without having to upset the customer any further.
Mandates of specific technologies or performance targets often have serious side effects when technology advances - or fails to advance because a mandate prevents it.
Rating systems (such as Energy Star in the US) let consumers evaluate competing products. If one fridge is $800 and costs $100 a year to run, and the other is $700 and costs $200 a year to run, people will spend more up front and come out ahead after a year. Manufacturers start to compete not only on price, style, and the other normal factors, but now also on energy efficiency. This gets energy efficiency in the public's consciousness as well, something the high energy prices have also done.
Of course, there's a huge philosophical shift between the two strategies. On one hand, you assume the manufacturers and consumers are, in general, rational and will work towards efficiency because it's in their best interest long term. On the other, you force manufacturers to only produce what you deem efficient and consumers to only buy approved products, because you assume both the manufacturers and consumers are idiotic children and need to be looked after and told what to do.
By mandating specific targets and technologies, you remove all incentive for the manufacturer to experiment and improve his product, instead only selling what the government mandates.
Case in point: part of the reason car manufacturers pushed SUVs so hard is that they helped them meet their government mandated fuel efficiency standards (SUVs, as "trucks", were classed differently).
Mandates have a usage, but they are not the end-all-be-all, nor should they be the first or only method used. They are often necessary to set a baseline, and as long as they're deliberately vague enough to incorporate new technology and advances, shouldn't stifle innovation.
You want to mandate that something that doesn't work?
Currently the electric grid is the most efficient storage. Pump power in when you're generating excess (and likely other people are using more), draw power when you need it.
Efficient local storage - flywheels do pretty well. Cheap, no.
Deciding to not cripple your economy with expensive mandates isn't a lack of courage, it's pragmatism.
The larger a system is, the slower it changes. The energy systems we've built over the past century are some of the largest things humans have built. Stability and change are polar opposites, you have to lean towards one or the other. Energy systems try to lean towards stability.
As far as I know there's no problem with granting user A one patent license and user B a different one. It's not like you have to have one license for everyone that asks (though that's often easier/cheaper/more profitable for companies).
But if you're trying to help the world, why would you try to make it expensive for first-worlders? Wouldn't greater adoption by the first world (leading to economy of scale) make it cheaper for third world countries? Wouldn't reducing the massive energy footprint of the first world help the earth more than adding energy consumption in places it doesn't currently exist?
Easily circumvented by offering to sell it for $9,999.95 or other ridiculous amounts.
Large game companies (EA, Vivendi, etc) don't want the old stuff given away for two reasons:
1. Competition with current games. Why would you buy the newe stuff if the old stuff was fun and free/cheap?
2. Reselling old stuff in new formats. For example, Wii's repackaging of old 8-bit NES games - not possible if old games that were not offered any more were free and people were already playing them.
Face it, the videogame industry has for the most part joined its brothers in Big Content (movies, music) and is following the same paths. Their thinking isn't about selling something the consumer wants; it's preventing anything being sold except what they want to sell, and in any way except how they want to sell. The idea is that the only legal choice left is to buy their new stuff, whether or not it's what you wanted, because it's the only content available.
I thought he was great in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Of course, there he was *trying* to play someone with a dumb teenager's intelligence and emotional range.
If you remove Acrobat Reader and use an alternative viewer, it's even faster.
Preview on OS X (built-in)
Foxit Reader on Windows
Xpdf on Linux and friends
Eh... "code page" is an overloaded term. Yes, "code page" = "character encoding". I prefer to call the old 256-char 8 bit code page system "code pages", vs Unicode and "character encodings". What I should have said was non-Unicode code pages.
The old method (what I was calling "code pages"):
You had 256 characters. The first 128 stay the same; you swapped out the top 127 for different characters. For example in default CP1251 (Latin-1), character D9 is a U with a backward accent mark (in Unicode, it's U+00D9). In CP1251 (Cyrillic), character D9 is the W with a foot (U+0429). There is no way to represent both characters at the same time.
http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/unicode/unicodecp.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/1251.gif
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/1252.gif
Note that you are using the same byte, D9, to represent different characters depending on what global code page you have set. How do you know whether it's a CP1251 D9 or a CP1252 D9? You don't, except by setting a system setting.
In Unicode, you can have both characters at the same time. U+00D9 is always a U with a backward accent mark; U+0429 is always the W with a foot. There's no swapping out of characters for others, like trading one code page for another. How U+0429 is written to disk is determined by the Unicode encoding. UTF8 is one such encoding (the best/most popular IMHO), but there are others (UTF16, UTF7, etc). Think of it like taking a text file and then storing that text file in ZIP or TAR or CAB. So in this sense Unicode has "code pages" - UTF8 for example - but they're not like the old code pages since there is no swapping out of one set of characters for another, only different ways of representing the same character set.
So - what I was originally saying, you may have had accented characters in CP1251 for example, and when the other system sees it, it has no way of knowing if the characters are encoded in CP1252 or CP1251 or CP874 unless you specify, so it defaults to CP1252. Which, if you meant a different code page, means your accented characters will get messed up.
Most systems will recognize UTF8 on the other hand, so once you've converted to UTF8 there's no configuration needed. You don't have to tell receiving systems that D9 is a Cyrillic D9, or a Latin D9, or whatever - in Unicode, U+0429 is U+0429 and that's it.
(Whether or not your font has a way to show U+0429 on the screen is a font problem, not character encoding)
So - the old code page system (CP1252, etc) was a way of swapping out some characters to represent a subset of all available characters plus a way of encoding that subset. Unicode code pages (UTF8, etc) are just different ways of encoding the whole Unicode character set, no swapping out, all characters are available simultaneously.
Oh and Slashdot sucks for not supported Unicode, would've made this explanation easier. :)
Most English-speaking people don't care since they stick to unaccented letters. Speakers of languages represented in the default Latin set (CP1252) such as most of Western Europe don't care since it just w
My guess is you were using a codepage instead of Unicode. I've had issues with old MP3 files ripped over the years - for example Björk :). There are several converters for filenames (and ID3 tags). After switching everything to UTF8, all my systems (mac, win, linux) produced consistent results. Unicode is the future, convert now or die. :)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
http://unicoderewriter.sourceforge.net/
http://www.unicodetools.com/
http://www.linux.com/feature/58689
Things like the AT command set for modems and Postscript decoding for printers are expensive to implement in hardware vs. a program on your PC. It's much cheaper to make stupid hardware and smart drivers. This explains Winmodems and Winprinters - it's cheaper for the manufacturer, so more profit for them. The customer might see a decrease in price as well.
This Windows-only BIOS has nothing to do with the Winmodem trend. It's not cheaper or easier for them; they're maintaining separate tables for Windows and Linux. It's actually *more* work, and the only reasonable explanation is that they're doing this extra work to deliberately hurt non-Windows operating systems.
$0.33/kWh?!?!
Try a normal, non-Californian-buttrape price:
http://www.duke-energy.com/rates/north-carolina.asp
specifically the residential, no-energy discounts rate, RS:
http://www.duke-energy.com/pdfs/NCScheduleRS.pdf
Basic Facilities Charge per month $ 7.87
For the first 350 kWh used per month, per kWh 7.3572
For all over 350 kWh used per month, per kWh 7.7470
Yes, that's 7-something cents a kWh, 24 hours a day. Of course, there are at least 2, possibly 3 nuclear reactors feeding this service area, and NC is well regulated.
Ah, even better, state-by-state and national numbers:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
10.24 cents/kWh average across the US for residential in Feb 2008.
Anyways, using your $4.75/night figure and converting to my prices ($0.077470/kWh), that's more like $1.12/night.
Disk mode doesn't exist on the iPhone, right. There is no way around the iTunes requirement, or to use the iPhone as a USB drive, without jailbreaking.
Manual mode refers to manually managing your music - that is, dragging and dropping individual files from iTunes into the iPhone instead of the default mode, automatically syncing to playlists. This does in fact exist for the iPhone.
If you really want to leave your music in file folders, you can leave your iTunes library empty. Then when you want to add music, you can drag new music into the library, then onto the iPhone, then delete it from the iTunes Library. If it's already in MP3 or AAC format, you don't even have to copy the files within the PC; they can stay where they are on disk.
Or you can of course say that it doesn't meet your needs and buy something else, which is probably a better idea if you can't/won't run iTunes either natively, through Wine, or through a virtual machine.
Off-topic to text consoles, but that's mostly not a problem any more. 80Hz on a CRT is equivalent to a 12.5ms response time LCD; most LCDs now quote 5 or 6ms response time.
Yes, if you're not matching a resolution your monitor supports, it will look crappy.
I guess I immediately assumed console meant 80x25 text, which every LCD+video card combination should be capable of, at 640x480 or whatever the LCD's native resolution is. Better.. uh.. "text resolutions"(?) like 80x50 or 132x50 or something might require a decent pixel resolution, like 800x600 or 1024x768, true.
Still, it seemed like the original poster had something in particular against LCDs, as opposed to low-resolution monitors (whether CRT or LCD), which is why I was questioning it. "I bought a monitor that doesn't support the resolution I want" doesn't exactly map to "console on LCD sucks", the original statement. Could be what he meant though.
Agreed these are problem for consoles, but not specific to LCDs.. more of graphics card/driver issues.
I could see this being a problem, if you didn't want to letterbox the sides. But 4:3 LCDs are available too (and often cheaper).
This is a very surprising statement to me.. how did changing to an LCD make console mode suck? Were you going from a high-resolution CRT to a 640x480 LCD or something?
Personally once I got an LCD I couldn't stand to look at CRTs any more - to the point where I banished them from my house.