This was on the front page, on the right side, just below the fold. I believe they have since rotated in a movies section.
I do agree completely, though, that the NY Times is better than a lot of the papers and news sources here in the US. USA Today is terrible, and just recycles everything from Reuters. CNN has lost their way in their bid to fill 24 hours a day on a 2-hour a day budget. And Fox sets a standard.
But we're on a world news standard now. News.bbc.co.uk and guardian.co.uk are excellent. Google news is a great aggregator, bringing in dozens of sources on any topic you might be interested in. And the opposite, news specialization, leads to great sites like Human Rights Watch, Groklaw, etc. Compared to a lot of the available news sources, the NY Times might as well be The Sun.
While I agree all of that is valid, how is any of that related to the New York Times? There is a story about the dresses Lindsay Lohan wears to her court dates on the New York Times home page right now. There are also lots of fluffy pop stories like "Proud to be Japanese" and how to find a drink in Times Square.
The New York Times has had journalism problems since at least the mid 90's, and has been replaced in relevance by an ever increasing number of news sources. The US produces a great many things, but journalism is one area where the rest of the world has us beat.
My understanding is that this is an old idea, and the core method is definitely ablation not the negligible force of radiation pressure.
This system is intended to stop particles that are between 1 and 10 cm in diameter. Currently deployed technology allows for reliable ground tracking of debris that is approximately (supposedly) 10 cm, though proposed laser based tracking systems would detect debris in the 1 cm range. Presuming a 5x5x5 cube of solid steel, that's more like 1kg. Individual hobbyists are creating handheld personal laser strong enough to liquify bits of metal already. It's not too much of a stretch to think of a ground based laser in a housing the size of a building could be strong enough to get through the various atmospheres on a clear day and transfer that much energy to an object in LEO. And while the atmosphere is going to be fighting you every step of the way, at least the change in angle for refraction will tend to place the laser target at the front of the object. And aiming lasers and optical telescopes through atmospheric distortions is something that NASA has faced before, on their ground-based telescope initiatives. Lasers are how we aim things, and we're pretty good at it.
The goal is to get the perigree of the orbit low enough that it skims the upper atmosphere and loses energy on its own. A small change in velocity can lead to significant orbital eccentricity, and greater eccentricity generally leads to a lower perigree.
Obviously, I'm too tired to do the math right now. But it seems like you are dismissing the idea a little prematurely.
Getting approval requires a 12 month lead time through many layers of bureaucracy. 12 months ago, nobody knew if Android was going to take off.
Though, I have to say, citing Google as confirmation that Google's platform doesn't really have it's major problem is... you can see how that might be iffy.
According to this article, their authentication servers got overloaded, and they cut down the number of channels to reduce the authentication load while they bought more.
While I normally rally against evil corporations hiding the truth, somehow "we couldn't convince the higher-ups to buy enough servers until everything went to pot" seems like normal operating launch-day problems.
I have a NFC Mass transit card, and a NFC keycard for work. I have to put them in different parts of my wallet, or they interfere with eachother.
I can only imagine what will happen when we have 6 or 7 NFC cards for various tasks. We'll have to take them out and swipe them all, just to avoid the RF noise.
If I'm not mistaken, the Zune marketplace is just a poor rebranding of their previous Video Marketplace. You can continue to buy shows through the Zune marketplace just for your Xbox. You can also continue to play videos on the Xbox from your PC through your hard disk tab. And then of course there is Netflix on Xbox, which is better than their marketplace anyway.
I more meant expandable, really. People generally read about as much as they're going to read, though they always seem to be able to watch more or listen to more music.
Do you really think Edgar Allan Poe wasn't a pop-culture vampire cliche writer back in his day? Or that Shakespeare wrote all of his penis jokes for high-level art? Edgar Rice Burroughs survived on the book equivalent of the 80's television soap drama "Beauty and the Beast."
Everyone that you listed (except maybe Saramango) has seen major commercial and pop-culture success. Old pulp junk that sticks around becomes high art. In 20 years we will see Harry Potter and Twilight worship to the same degree that we see modern reverence for Lord of the Rings, Gone with the Wind, Tarzan, Heart of Darkness, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc.
1. Editing
Nice, but freelance editors are reasonably cheap. And let's not forget the Editors are also your censor.
2. Publicity
In theory, yes. In practice, Publishers tend to push the popular books, in a little bit of circular irony.
3. A route to brick-and-mortar retail
And printed paper editions, of course. But we're talking about when physical books go away. It's not like many authors can live off of revenue from paper copies right now.
4. Money to live off while the author is writing.
Hah. Maybe if the author is a celebrity writing an expose. Most of the writers I know don't get an up-front.
The flip side is that once all books are 99c, being 99c alone will not be enough in and of itself to draw users towards you. iPhone gaming, for example, have hundreds of thousands of 99c games, whose creators are lucky if they see $100 for their work.
Ultimately, reading time is largely noncompressable. A user may watch 10 times more movies if they're cheaper, but they're probably not going to read 10 times as many books. While I agree that ebook prices have to drop, I seriously doubt most authors will see the kind of income increase this person has. Most will just go from being ignored at $10, to being ignored at $1.
From the article, it seems like the main thrust was a socialism witch hunt. Of course, what they don't tell you is that most oppressive socialist regimes in the past 100 years, and indeed most of the oppressive governments in general, were elected democratically. WW2 Germany, Russia, China has elections...
Boy it's reassuring that our elected officials are setting the rules on what our elected officials are to be called.
The iPad is currently the cheapest tablet on the market, and the iPhone is basically at parity with other handsets. In this case, Apple's app store software revenue lock ensures that they can sell hardware at a smaller margin than they otherwise would be able to. The volume of hardware they sell helps keep research, development, and marketing costs low on a per-unit basis. They also have vertical integration with physical apple stores, and cuts of wireless revenue.
In short, their hardware / software combination of today, due to clever alternative streams of revenue generation, definitely works in their advantage.
There were some physically gorgeous MP3 players back in the day. Creative's Zen line has consistently "out prettied" Apple's for some time now. What Apple brings to the table is that their devices are easier to use than everyone else's. iPods never had MP3 playback capability, file management, etc. What they had was a minimalist UI on top of a databased backend that gave quick, easy, and simple access to people's songs.
And that's why Apple is winning right now. The iPad is REPLACING a lot of computers as people's basic computing device. It's not faster than a laptop, it's not more useful than a netbook, it doesn't have the gaming capabilities of a desktop. But what it does have is a quick, unambiguous interface that is light years simpler than the current computing metaphor.
And maybe you're the kind of driver that still loves their manual transmission car, but most people drive an automatic for a reason. If you don't understand why most people drive an automatic, or why most people see a computing platform as an impediment to getting things done rather than an end unto themselves, we'll never get app-store freedom.
Sure, suspend the students that accused him of being a pedophile and a rapist, if the allegations are entirely unfounded. But according to the article, one of the students was expelled for claiming he was "bipolar." Considering the vast number of people who are entirely or somewhat bipolar, and how it has little or no social stigma attached to it, how is that somehow worse and deserving of more punishment than calling someone a pedophile?
We have an energy surplus at night, due to things like nuclear facilities that run at the same output no matter the demand. Really, we need to expand our power system to handle larger peak energy during the day, when everyone is running their air conditioners. Expanding into more nuclear is politically difficult. Gas and Coal are polluting. Solar would help us during the day, when power usage is highest.
So no, no one energy source can be our only generation point. But solar could definitely help when it is needed most.
I've always wanted an app that did a live video / audio feed to a remote recording server. Unless a password is inserted in 30 minutes, the feed automatically transfers to a pre-defined public place, like Facebook.
Any sort of trouble gets automatically posted, and shown to the public. When bad things happen, there is a public record that is likely to be found by investigators. This would work equally well for abusive police officers, and dissuading random stalkers on the street (your face is already online, want to give the police a reason to find it?)
I work in the industry. Nearly everyone I know who has been in this industry for 5 years or more are familiar with Old Man Murray. They remain legendary because of the Time-To-Crate metric is still at least thought of by everyone in the industry. But they're historically significant because of their unique style of vitriolic humor, which was widely read and widely followed at the time.
OMM was as significant in its day as Zero Punctuation is today. If Belinda Carlisle deserves a wikipedia entry for being significant in the past and dead in the present, then so does Old Man Murray.
Actually, while "military action" was authorized by congress in both cases, neither of our current "military actions" are legally declared wars under US law. And one of those two military actions was "declared" over in August.
Aiding the enemy was a law created to stop soldiers from doing things like giving guns to the Germans during World War 2. The sort of thing that directly will get Americans killed.
In this case "Aiding the enemy" is being broadly interpreted as exposing anything that our military doesn't want exposed. We're not even talking about detailed attack plans or other secret information that provides genuine strategic advantage, and the documents themselves show that the "enemy" already has a good understanding of US patterns.
We've gone from "Aiding the Enemy" as direct action to directly help the enemy kill Americans, to broadly releasing information to everyone in an attempt to expose misinformation. In other words, actual direct intent to help the enemy is no longer a requirement. QED, anything viewed as negative to the US military effort can also be viewed as a capital offence. That should *not* be applied to Manning.
The original iPhone is limited to iOS 3.1.3. iPhone 3G goes to 4.2 (and definitely suffers for it). Oddly enough, the two systems have identical processors, space, and mostly identical internal chipsets (with the exception of the 3G communications chipset, a GPS chipset, and one of the random controllers), and generally behave the same under load. Cutting off original iPhones from the 4 line was really just a marketing decision to push new phones. Similarly, the iPhone 3G being EOL'ed at 4.2 doesn't seem to have any technical basis, judging by the 4.3 beta release.
That's an interesting perspective, considering some of the amazing consumer video cameras that have come out over the past few years. 1080p30 is now standard. But more than that, the color saturation and reproduction has gotten much better, movement tear is less common, and compression artifacting on your source feed is basically gone. Camcorders are moving into using 3-color chips. Good optical anti-shake still requires about a $500 price point camera (since that technology is pretty mature at this point), but digital anti-shake has gone from godawfully blurry to just a bit blurry.
Heck, 6 years ago most consumer grade cameras were interlaced. INTERLACED!
And on the high-end, the Reds have come out and taken professional production by storm. A video camera with high enough quality to take out single frames and use them as stills for full-size / full color fashion magazine covers? Add in the low-light cameras that will happily shoot at dusk or night with professional grade output, and we are truly living in the future.
The same has been true of iPhones. Programmers and designers generally over-estimate what you can get out of a piece of hardware, and it runs slower than it should. New rev of the hardware comes out, and the slow-feeling apps now feel crisp. Everyone starts developing for the new platform, and repeat.
Sure, it will "run" on an iPad 1. But given a few years, and the iPad 1 owners will be a small minority, and everyone will expect apps that push the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
This was on the front page, on the right side, just below the fold. I believe they have since rotated in a movies section.
I do agree completely, though, that the NY Times is better than a lot of the papers and news sources here in the US. USA Today is terrible, and just recycles everything from Reuters. CNN has lost their way in their bid to fill 24 hours a day on a 2-hour a day budget. And Fox sets a standard.
But we're on a world news standard now. News.bbc.co.uk and guardian.co.uk are excellent. Google news is a great aggregator, bringing in dozens of sources on any topic you might be interested in. And the opposite, news specialization, leads to great sites like Human Rights Watch, Groklaw, etc. Compared to a lot of the available news sources, the NY Times might as well be The Sun.
While I agree all of that is valid, how is any of that related to the New York Times? There is a story about the dresses Lindsay Lohan wears to her court dates on the New York Times home page right now. There are also lots of fluffy pop stories like "Proud to be Japanese" and how to find a drink in Times Square.
The New York Times has had journalism problems since at least the mid 90's, and has been replaced in relevance by an ever increasing number of news sources. The US produces a great many things, but journalism is one area where the rest of the world has us beat.
My understanding is that this is an old idea, and the core method is definitely ablation not the negligible force of radiation pressure.
This system is intended to stop particles that are between 1 and 10 cm in diameter. Currently deployed technology allows for reliable ground tracking of debris that is approximately (supposedly) 10 cm, though proposed laser based tracking systems would detect debris in the 1 cm range. Presuming a 5x5x5 cube of solid steel, that's more like 1kg. Individual hobbyists are creating handheld personal laser strong enough to liquify bits of metal already. It's not too much of a stretch to think of a ground based laser in a housing the size of a building could be strong enough to get through the various atmospheres on a clear day and transfer that much energy to an object in LEO. And while the atmosphere is going to be fighting you every step of the way, at least the change in angle for refraction will tend to place the laser target at the front of the object. And aiming lasers and optical telescopes through atmospheric distortions is something that NASA has faced before, on their ground-based telescope initiatives. Lasers are how we aim things, and we're pretty good at it.
The goal is to get the perigree of the orbit low enough that it skims the upper atmosphere and loses energy on its own. A small change in velocity can lead to significant orbital eccentricity, and greater eccentricity generally leads to a lower perigree.
Obviously, I'm too tired to do the math right now. But it seems like you are dismissing the idea a little prematurely.
Getting approval requires a 12 month lead time through many layers of bureaucracy. 12 months ago, nobody knew if Android was going to take off.
Though, I have to say, citing Google as confirmation that Google's platform doesn't really have it's major problem is... you can see how that might be iffy.
According to this article, their authentication servers got overloaded, and they cut down the number of channels to reduce the authentication load while they bought more.
While I normally rally against evil corporations hiding the truth, somehow "we couldn't convince the higher-ups to buy enough servers until everything went to pot" seems like normal operating launch-day problems.
I have a NFC Mass transit card, and a NFC keycard for work. I have to put them in different parts of my wallet, or they interfere with eachother.
I can only imagine what will happen when we have 6 or 7 NFC cards for various tasks. We'll have to take them out and swipe them all, just to avoid the RF noise.
If I'm not mistaken, the Zune marketplace is just a poor rebranding of their previous Video Marketplace. You can continue to buy shows through the Zune marketplace just for your Xbox. You can also continue to play videos on the Xbox from your PC through your hard disk tab. And then of course there is Netflix on Xbox, which is better than their marketplace anyway.
I more meant expandable, really. People generally read about as much as they're going to read, though they always seem to be able to watch more or listen to more music.
Do you really think Edgar Allan Poe wasn't a pop-culture vampire cliche writer back in his day? Or that Shakespeare wrote all of his penis jokes for high-level art? Edgar Rice Burroughs survived on the book equivalent of the 80's television soap drama "Beauty and the Beast."
Everyone that you listed (except maybe Saramango) has seen major commercial and pop-culture success. Old pulp junk that sticks around becomes high art. In 20 years we will see Harry Potter and Twilight worship to the same degree that we see modern reverence for Lord of the Rings, Gone with the Wind, Tarzan, Heart of Darkness, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc.
1. Editing
Nice, but freelance editors are reasonably cheap. And let's not forget the Editors are also your censor.
2. Publicity
In theory, yes. In practice, Publishers tend to push the popular books, in a little bit of circular irony.
3. A route to brick-and-mortar retail
And printed paper editions, of course. But we're talking about when physical books go away. It's not like many authors can live off of revenue from paper copies right now.
4. Money to live off while the author is writing.
Hah. Maybe if the author is a celebrity writing an expose. Most of the writers I know don't get an up-front.
The flip side is that once all books are 99c, being 99c alone will not be enough in and of itself to draw users towards you. iPhone gaming, for example, have hundreds of thousands of 99c games, whose creators are lucky if they see $100 for their work.
Ultimately, reading time is largely noncompressable. A user may watch 10 times more movies if they're cheaper, but they're probably not going to read 10 times as many books. While I agree that ebook prices have to drop, I seriously doubt most authors will see the kind of income increase this person has. Most will just go from being ignored at $10, to being ignored at $1.
From the article, it seems like the main thrust was a socialism witch hunt. Of course, what they don't tell you is that most oppressive socialist regimes in the past 100 years, and indeed most of the oppressive governments in general, were elected democratically. WW2 Germany, Russia, China has elections...
Boy it's reassuring that our elected officials are setting the rules on what our elected officials are to be called.
I had always thought it was provided by Microsoft.
Admittedly, I was on a Mac at the time. But even I knew what Trunpet Winsock was, and that everyone needed to use it.
Donated. Good luck, sir.
The iPad is currently the cheapest tablet on the market, and the iPhone is basically at parity with other handsets. In this case, Apple's app store software revenue lock ensures that they can sell hardware at a smaller margin than they otherwise would be able to. The volume of hardware they sell helps keep research, development, and marketing costs low on a per-unit basis. They also have vertical integration with physical apple stores, and cuts of wireless revenue.
In short, their hardware / software combination of today, due to clever alternative streams of revenue generation, definitely works in their advantage.
There were some physically gorgeous MP3 players back in the day. Creative's Zen line has consistently "out prettied" Apple's for some time now. What Apple brings to the table is that their devices are easier to use than everyone else's. iPods never had MP3 playback capability, file management, etc. What they had was a minimalist UI on top of a databased backend that gave quick, easy, and simple access to people's songs.
And that's why Apple is winning right now. The iPad is REPLACING a lot of computers as people's basic computing device. It's not faster than a laptop, it's not more useful than a netbook, it doesn't have the gaming capabilities of a desktop. But what it does have is a quick, unambiguous interface that is light years simpler than the current computing metaphor.
And maybe you're the kind of driver that still loves their manual transmission car, but most people drive an automatic for a reason. If you don't understand why most people drive an automatic, or why most people see a computing platform as an impediment to getting things done rather than an end unto themselves, we'll never get app-store freedom.
Sure, suspend the students that accused him of being a pedophile and a rapist, if the allegations are entirely unfounded. But according to the article, one of the students was expelled for claiming he was "bipolar." Considering the vast number of people who are entirely or somewhat bipolar, and how it has little or no social stigma attached to it, how is that somehow worse and deserving of more punishment than calling someone a pedophile?
We have an energy surplus at night, due to things like nuclear facilities that run at the same output no matter the demand. Really, we need to expand our power system to handle larger peak energy during the day, when everyone is running their air conditioners. Expanding into more nuclear is politically difficult. Gas and Coal are polluting. Solar would help us during the day, when power usage is highest.
So no, no one energy source can be our only generation point. But solar could definitely help when it is needed most.
I've always wanted an app that did a live video / audio feed to a remote recording server. Unless a password is inserted in 30 minutes, the feed automatically transfers to a pre-defined public place, like Facebook.
Any sort of trouble gets automatically posted, and shown to the public. When bad things happen, there is a public record that is likely to be found by investigators. This would work equally well for abusive police officers, and dissuading random stalkers on the street (your face is already online, want to give the police a reason to find it?)
I work in the industry. Nearly everyone I know who has been in this industry for 5 years or more are familiar with Old Man Murray. They remain legendary because of the Time-To-Crate metric is still at least thought of by everyone in the industry. But they're historically significant because of their unique style of vitriolic humor, which was widely read and widely followed at the time.
OMM was as significant in its day as Zero Punctuation is today. If Belinda Carlisle deserves a wikipedia entry for being significant in the past and dead in the present, then so does Old Man Murray.
Actually, while "military action" was authorized by congress in both cases, neither of our current "military actions" are legally declared wars under US law. And one of those two military actions was "declared" over in August.
Aiding the enemy was a law created to stop soldiers from doing things like giving guns to the Germans during World War 2. The sort of thing that directly will get Americans killed.
In this case "Aiding the enemy" is being broadly interpreted as exposing anything that our military doesn't want exposed. We're not even talking about detailed attack plans or other secret information that provides genuine strategic advantage, and the documents themselves show that the "enemy" already has a good understanding of US patterns.
We've gone from "Aiding the Enemy" as direct action to directly help the enemy kill Americans, to broadly releasing information to everyone in an attempt to expose misinformation. In other words, actual direct intent to help the enemy is no longer a requirement. QED, anything viewed as negative to the US military effort can also be viewed as a capital offence. That should *not* be applied to Manning.
The original iPhone is limited to iOS 3.1.3. iPhone 3G goes to 4.2 (and definitely suffers for it). Oddly enough, the two systems have identical processors, space, and mostly identical internal chipsets (with the exception of the 3G communications chipset, a GPS chipset, and one of the random controllers), and generally behave the same under load. Cutting off original iPhones from the 4 line was really just a marketing decision to push new phones. Similarly, the iPhone 3G being EOL'ed at 4.2 doesn't seem to have any technical basis, judging by the 4.3 beta release.
You'll notice that US 4G equipment is also not bleeding edge. Or even defined as 4G.
That's an interesting perspective, considering some of the amazing consumer video cameras that have come out over the past few years. 1080p30 is now standard. But more than that, the color saturation and reproduction has gotten much better, movement tear is less common, and compression artifacting on your source feed is basically gone. Camcorders are moving into using 3-color chips. Good optical anti-shake still requires about a $500 price point camera (since that technology is pretty mature at this point), but digital anti-shake has gone from godawfully blurry to just a bit blurry.
Heck, 6 years ago most consumer grade cameras were interlaced. INTERLACED!
And on the high-end, the Reds have come out and taken professional production by storm. A video camera with high enough quality to take out single frames and use them as stills for full-size / full color fashion magazine covers? Add in the low-light cameras that will happily shoot at dusk or night with professional grade output, and we are truly living in the future.
The same has been true of iPhones. Programmers and designers generally over-estimate what you can get out of a piece of hardware, and it runs slower than it should. New rev of the hardware comes out, and the slow-feeling apps now feel crisp. Everyone starts developing for the new platform, and repeat.
Sure, it will "run" on an iPad 1. But given a few years, and the iPad 1 owners will be a small minority, and everyone will expect apps that push the hardware.