"You don't really think that the car manufacturer actually pays anything like those prices, do you? "
Not in the slightest, no. They're likely paying less than the 50p I could buy it at myself at an electronics store. Yet they charge me hundreds extra for something that was commodity back in the 80s when I was learning how to code.
There was a poll some time ago, must admit can't remember if slashdot or reddit, about the most overpriced piece of technology you use.
My answer would be car-related. From the ludicrous stereo to the 50p light snesing diode that seems to translate to hundreds of pounds when translated into the phrase "automatic headlights", in-car tech is ripe for commoditisation. An open platform will do wonders for this, even if 'open' isn't the libre definition but simply a published API.
"Which is why they'd probably never go for it. A business model that is incompatible with DRM? Are you mad!?!?!?
There's this tinsy little online place does it somewhere. Err...ah yes, iTunes Music Store. That's the one. DRM free and iTunes has an option to transcode to a lower bit rate when transferring to an iPod.
"For example Patti Hauseman stuck with her five-year-old Apple computer until it started making odd whirring noises and occasionally malfunctioning before she bought a new computer for Christmas"
Yep. I have a five year-old Mac Mini which I upgraded the CPU in (1.5 CoreSolo->2Ghz Core2Duo), a three-year old MacBook Pro, my wife has a five year-old MacBook (the original one). They are all doing fine for the moment, though ominously it looks like Lion is 64-bit only and so the original 32-bit MacBook will have to go.
This isn't a Mac-only thing either. I'm sure someone would be able to point me at their five year-old PC laptop and say pretty much the same thing - basically unless you're doing really demanding tasks or gaming, anything from the last five years is fine.
I have two applications where I wish I had slightly more modern hardware - Logic 9 (music production) stutters at times when I use a lot of audio effect plug-ins, and I wouldn't mind more than 4Gb so that I could run virtual machines a bit more smoothly. That's it - my day-to-day existence is more than catered for with this hardware, indeed it's pretty much overkill.
"Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."
'Claims'? I find all of those complaints to be possible and valid. I also find them valid on a Windows desktop, and also on my Mac desktop.
I don't think we need to load the article, how about the word 'states' instead? Some of these complaints could well be valid, and instead of dismissing them the Linux desktop distros should be reading and seeing how many are valid, how many just need education, how many could be imediately addressed etc..
It's a chance to learn, not to draw into a shell and defend.
"Other manufacturers have previously offered what are known as micro, femto or pico cell devices, which typically are used to take cellular traffic off congested 3G networks and delivered over broadband connections. Alcatel-Lucent claims their offering differs in that existing devices are mainly used to supplement existing cell towers in areas of high demand, such as railway stations and sports events, rather than replace them."
So the Right Thing is to force everyone to buy an OS from Microsoft or Apple? Do you know there are some crazy people developing free operating systems? And even using them! How dare they ask for a royalty free baseline codec for encoding video for the web?
You're missing what the GP said - no-one's suggesting forcing anyone to buy an OS, the suggestion is to hand off video playback to the OS. In this case, the right thing to do would be to release it to a video decoding layer for Linux and then call it from Firefox/Chrome.
I'd love a ROM for these that essentially just makes the PS3 and all its features available to a Linux distribution.
I'd love to get the Blu-Ray drive acessible and act as a ripper. I buy my media - I buy DVDs, I buy music online. I'd like to buy blu-Ray too but won't due to DRM - at the moment any blu-rays we've watched have been via rental. I'd like to rip them for use on a media server, but the only blu-ray drive I've got is the PS3. Be handy if we could get access to that and install a ripper.
Cheers,
Ian
In praise of CGI Jeff Bridges
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
I liked the fact it wasn't quite realistic, and I do think the film makers knew it too. It made him look a little more deranged, a little more mad. The effect worked for me.
I liked the film. Very different in tone to the first - my kids love the first (eldest is 9) but I doubt they'd get on well with the second. That's fine though - the film is aimed at mid-to-late thirties like me, people who saw the original and wanted it taken one step further. Lots of doom-laden portentous imagery, but that's fine.
I would have liked more of Tron himself, and felt slightly cheated of a big Tron/Clu showdown. Still, it's a minor point - I really enjoyed the whole thing. I think one thing that helped me do this was staying away from all pre-film publicity and speculation other than the initial trailer. I had no preconception coming into the film, and I'm sure I enjoyed myself more as a result.
Was running SunOS 4 (Solaris was SunOS 5), which is roughly contemporary to the original Tron, but slightly later (exactly as would be needed to have set up the new Grid). He was also running iostat, and the blk_writes went up as the laser switched on.
Are you disappointed by Citizen Kane because the clever camera work doesn't jump out at you?
Deathly irony there. Citizen Kane is in part so famous exactly because the clever camera work jumped out at you. It's an effects-based film, with a first-time director showing off various then-new techniques.
If even one of them works, doesn't that mean I have to push them just to be sure?
Exactly. If you press a control that doesn't work you lose nothing. If you fail to press a control that does work you lose functionality. Whilst I agree with the effect they're suggesting, presenting it using examples of deliberately wiring-in dummies is ridiculous. If they then go back and ask people if they believed the button in question actually worked, well then there's the begins of the data we actually need for this.
'The BBC's technology correspondent, on the other hand, reckons: "it's safe to assume that Times Newspapers has yet to achieve the same revenues from its paywall experiment that were available when its website was free."'
No it isn't. It's possible to believe it (and so do I) but it's not safe to assume anything. Data please.
Hi - hope you get this, saw your reply a bit late.
Thanks for that. My dad died last year, in his sleep and surrounded by all his family (including me). Couldn't have scripted a better ending. Like your uncle, he did a lot of work afterwards for his community - starting and running a youth club for instance, to help out with kids who had little to do.
He didn't talk that much about what really went on. I have some stories, but it was only when we went through his things that we realised he'd kept things like the Eisenhower letter from before the landings. He did describe Belsen, which they simply couldn't believe when they saw it. People like your Uncle and my dad - they had a tough time of it, and we owe them a lot.
Ah, here come the armchair heroes who've played some WWII game and think they know everything. Clearly you're right - I'm lying. Obviously I have massive amounts to gain from lying on Slashdot about my dad's achievements.
Bluntly, you are being daft. Did you not notice the language I couched it in? I'm no WWII expert and don't intend to be one, I'm recounting stories I was told as a kid by my dad. There'll be people who know more than me about this and will correct me - 'lying' doesn't begin to come into it.
Here's my dad guarding Belson, by the way. Picture 1 and Picture 2. They were one of the first forces into the area - please let me know when you've achieved a tenth as much.
Anyway, that link shows my dad to have been in the 11th Armoured Division. It seems you're right - not Berlin, but Lubeck and Neustadt. So yes, turns out I'm inaccurate. But lying? No.
My dad drove a tank in WWII. I believe one of the Churchills but I'm no war historian and I'm happy to be shown otherwise. He was in the Normandy landings and eventually in the invasion of Berlin too.
Thing is, the German tanks had bigger guns and longer ranges - significantly longer. There was apparently a speed advantage to the British tank (I'm going by what I was told, again I'm not a WWII-buff by any means) though, so what they used to do was lure the German tank into a village, then drive round back of them. The German guns were so big they couldn't turn them in in a normal street with buildings on either side whereas the smaller British tank certainly could. Not sure this was by design, but they took any advantage they could of course and I'm told that this trick was used by my dad a number of times.
" I have no idea how they got or are getting my password."
They may not be doing, this could be a simple Joe Job case. They scrape your email address from somewhere, then send out a ton of mail using your address as the Reply To. They don't need any password to do this - check your 'sent' folder, did you really send those messages or is it just claiming you did in the Reply To?
There's very little you can do about this. Personally I set up SPF to specify that only certain domains were allowed to send mail. If the receiving mailserver has a brain, it will check these records and disallow any joe-job spam. My own mailserver also recognises bounces claiming to be from me but which haven't originated from those domains.
"These shape memory materials have many applications," said Raymundo Arroyave, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Texas A&M. "Despite being heavily studied for the past twenty to thirty years, most of these materials are limited to work at relatively low temperatures."
In other words, yes - the materials have existed for ages and people know that (anyone ever worn memory-flex glasses, for instance?), but there is now work underway to make the substances more useful in more difficult conditions - TFA mentions aerospace and automotive.
Slashdot Mirror
"You don't really think that the car manufacturer actually pays anything like those prices, do you? "
Not in the slightest, no. They're likely paying less than the 50p I could buy it at myself at an electronics store. Yet they charge me hundreds extra for something that was commodity back in the 80s when I was learning how to code.
In-car tech is a serious, serious rip-off.
Cheers,
Ian
There was a poll some time ago, must admit can't remember if slashdot or reddit, about the most overpriced piece of technology you use.
My answer would be car-related. From the ludicrous stereo to the 50p light snesing diode that seems to translate to hundreds of pounds when translated into the phrase "automatic headlights", in-car tech is ripe for commoditisation. An open platform will do wonders for this, even if 'open' isn't the libre definition but simply a published API.
Cheers,
Ian
"Which is why they'd probably never go for it. A business model that is incompatible with DRM? Are you mad!?!?!?
There's this tinsy little online place does it somewhere. Err...ah yes, iTunes Music Store. That's the one. DRM free and iTunes has an option to transcode to a lower bit rate when transferring to an iPod.
Cheers,
Ian
Interesting. So this is false then?
Mac Rumors: Lion Core2Duo Minimum.
Cheers,
Ian
True, but I like what I'm hearing about Lion and if I want it I may have to upgrade to get it.
That's fine though - just means it's the start of another five year cycle. There's no desperate rush for these things.
Cheers,
Ian
"For example Patti Hauseman stuck with her five-year-old Apple computer until it started making odd whirring noises and occasionally malfunctioning before she bought a new computer for Christmas"
Yep. I have a five year-old Mac Mini which I upgraded the CPU in (1.5 CoreSolo->2Ghz Core2Duo), a three-year old MacBook Pro, my wife has a five year-old MacBook (the original one). They are all doing fine for the moment, though ominously it looks like Lion is 64-bit only and so the original 32-bit MacBook will have to go.
This isn't a Mac-only thing either. I'm sure someone would be able to point me at their five year-old PC laptop and say pretty much the same thing - basically unless you're doing really demanding tasks or gaming, anything from the last five years is fine.
I have two applications where I wish I had slightly more modern hardware - Logic 9 (music production) stutters at times when I use a lot of audio effect plug-ins, and I wouldn't mind more than 4Gb so that I could run virtual machines a bit more smoothly. That's it - my day-to-day existence is more than catered for with this hardware, indeed it's pretty much overkill.
Cheers,
Ian
"Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."
'Claims'? I find all of those complaints to be possible and valid. I also find them valid on a Windows desktop, and also on my Mac desktop.
I don't think we need to load the article, how about the word 'states' instead? Some of these complaints could well be valid, and instead of dismissing them the Linux desktop distros should be reading and seeing how many are valid, how many just need education, how many could be imediately addressed etc..
It's a chance to learn, not to draw into a shell and defend.
Cheers,
Ian
RTFA:
"Other manufacturers have previously offered what are known as micro, femto or pico cell devices, which typically are used to take cellular traffic off congested 3G networks and delivered over broadband connections. Alcatel-Lucent claims their offering differs in that existing devices are mainly used to supplement existing cell towers in areas of high demand, such as railway stations and sports events, rather than replace them."
Cheers,
Ian
So the Right Thing is to force everyone to buy an OS from Microsoft or Apple? Do you know there are some crazy people developing free operating systems? And even using them! How dare they ask for a royalty free baseline codec for encoding video for the web?
You're missing what the GP said - no-one's suggesting forcing anyone to buy an OS, the suggestion is to hand off video playback to the OS. In this case, the right thing to do would be to release it to a video decoding layer for Linux and then call it from Firefox/Chrome.
Cheers,
Ian
I'd love a ROM for these that essentially just makes the PS3 and all its features available to a Linux distribution.
I'd love to get the Blu-Ray drive acessible and act as a ripper. I buy my media - I buy DVDs, I buy music online. I'd like to buy blu-Ray too but won't due to DRM - at the moment any blu-rays we've watched have been via rental. I'd like to rip them for use on a media server, but the only blu-ray drive I've got is the PS3. Be handy if we could get access to that and install a ripper.
Cheers,
Ian
I liked the fact it wasn't quite realistic, and I do think the film makers knew it too. It made him look a little more deranged, a little more mad. The effect worked for me.
I liked the film. Very different in tone to the first - my kids love the first (eldest is 9) but I doubt they'd get on well with the second. That's fine though - the film is aimed at mid-to-late thirties like me, people who saw the original and wanted it taken one step further. Lots of doom-laden portentous imagery, but that's fine.
I would have liked more of Tron himself, and felt slightly cheated of a big Tron/Clu showdown. Still, it's a minor point - I really enjoyed the whole thing. I think one thing that helped me do this was staying away from all pre-film publicity and speculation other than the initial trailer. I had no preconception coming into the film, and I'm sure I enjoyed myself more as a result.
Cheers,
Ian
Was running SunOS 4 (Solaris was SunOS 5), which is roughly contemporary to the original Tron, but slightly later (exactly as would be needed to have set up the new Grid). He was also running iostat, and the blk_writes went up as the laser switched on.
Somebody, somewhere, cared about that scene.
Cheers,
Ian
No, it shouldn't. At that point it loses trust - I can no longer consider the information to be free of commercial conflicts of interest.
There's already enough problems with the editor model - let's not add more.
Cheers,
Ian
Are you disappointed by Citizen Kane because the clever camera work doesn't jump out at you?
Deathly irony there. Citizen Kane is in part so famous exactly because the clever camera work jumped out at you. It's an effects-based film, with a first-time director showing off various then-new techniques.
Cheers,
Ian
Hack a car gps onto some random address generator, start a timer, and race across town!
Welcome to London.
Cheers,
Ian
If even one of them works, doesn't that mean I have to push them just to be sure?
Exactly. If you press a control that doesn't work you lose nothing. If you fail to press a control that does work you lose functionality. Whilst I agree with the effect they're suggesting, presenting it using examples of deliberately wiring-in dummies is ridiculous. If they then go back and ask people if they believed the button in question actually worked, well then there's the begins of the data we actually need for this.
Cheers,
Ian
'The BBC's technology correspondent, on the other hand, reckons: "it's safe to assume that Times Newspapers has yet to achieve the same revenues from its paywall experiment that were available when its website was free."'
No it isn't. It's possible to believe it (and so do I) but it's not safe to assume anything. Data please.
Cheers,
Ian
Hi - hope you get this, saw your reply a bit late.
Thanks for that. My dad died last year, in his sleep and surrounded by all his family (including me). Couldn't have scripted a better ending. Like your uncle, he did a lot of work afterwards for his community - starting and running a youth club for instance, to help out with kids who had little to do.
He didn't talk that much about what really went on. I have some stories, but it was only when we went through his things that we realised he'd kept things like the Eisenhower letter from before the landings. He did describe Belsen, which they simply couldn't believe when they saw it. People like your Uncle and my dad - they had a tough time of it, and we owe them a lot.
Cheers,
Ian
You're right - Cromwell. Have just looked it up. Mentions the Mk IV used by the 11th Armoured. Thanks again.
Cheers,
Ian
Thanks. Having done some reading just now it seems my dad was in the 11th Armoured Division - does that help narrow it down? I'm genuinely curious.
Cheers,
Ian
Ah, here come the armchair heroes who've played some WWII game and think they know everything. Clearly you're right - I'm lying. Obviously I have massive amounts to gain from lying on Slashdot about my dad's achievements.
Bluntly, you are being daft. Did you not notice the language I couched it in? I'm no WWII expert and don't intend to be one, I'm recounting stories I was told as a kid by my dad. There'll be people who know more than me about this and will correct me - 'lying' doesn't begin to come into it.
Here's my dad guarding Belson, by the way. Picture 1 and Picture 2. They were one of the first forces into the area - please let me know when you've achieved a tenth as much.
Anyway, that link shows my dad to have been in the 11th Armoured Division. It seems you're right - not Berlin, but Lubeck and Neustadt. So yes, turns out I'm inaccurate. But lying? No.
Cheers,
Ian
My dad drove a tank in WWII. I believe one of the Churchills but I'm no war historian and I'm happy to be shown otherwise. He was in the Normandy landings and eventually in the invasion of Berlin too.
Thing is, the German tanks had bigger guns and longer ranges - significantly longer. There was apparently a speed advantage to the British tank (I'm going by what I was told, again I'm not a WWII-buff by any means) though, so what they used to do was lure the German tank into a village, then drive round back of them. The German guns were so big they couldn't turn them in in a normal street with buildings on either side whereas the smaller British tank certainly could. Not sure this was by design, but they took any advantage they could of course and I'm told that this trick was used by my dad a number of times.
Cheers,
Ian
Shouting louder isn't a legitimate way to win an argument.
Cheers,
Ian
" I have no idea how they got or are getting my password."
They may not be doing, this could be a simple Joe Job case. They scrape your email address from somewhere, then send out a ton of mail using your address as the Reply To. They don't need any password to do this - check your 'sent' folder, did you really send those messages or is it just claiming you did in the Reply To?
There's very little you can do about this. Personally I set up SPF to specify that only certain domains were allowed to send mail. If the receiving mailserver has a brain, it will check these records and disallow any joe-job spam. My own mailserver also recognises bounces claiming to be from me but which haven't originated from those domains.
Not perfect, but it's one possible step.
Cheers,
Ian
The point:
"These shape memory materials have many applications," said Raymundo Arroyave, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Texas A&M. "Despite being heavily studied for the past twenty to thirty years, most of these materials are limited to work at relatively low temperatures."
In other words, yes - the materials have existed for ages and people know that (anyone ever worn memory-flex glasses, for instance?), but there is now work underway to make the substances more useful in more difficult conditions - TFA mentions aerospace and automotive.
Cheers,
Ian