Nobody has to worry about the development house laughing at them.
This same effect also opens the world up to all kinds of quality home porn.
Re:More music than you can legally afford
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 1
Are portable player and iPods common amongst the seasoned music-geek crowd?
Just curious... I haven't encountered a lot of music geeks. Just musicians and audiophiles... The musicians not caring about portable players, and the audiophiles would curse it as an impure listening experience:-)
The only people I know who like portable players at all are either very young (and broke) or they spend a bit of time in a gym.
My ideal portable music player would be a car player which would take usb memory keys or HDDs. It's tempting to try to put togehter a linux machine for it.
Re:More music than you can legally afford
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 1
You missed the comment written right under the $2100 price tag...
"Hmmm... Maybe it is possible. Of course more typical numbers would put 1250 50-minute albums on the device at 128kbps, purchased at an average of $10/album would be $12,500."
$2100 worth of music on a roughly $500 player? That only highlights the high price of the player. No biggie.
Now the more realistic encoding rates with the $12,500 price tag, that's more than most people can afford... Avid fans yeah, but there aren't enough people with collections that large who would want to encode them to an iPod to support the iPod market. The iPods are going to techie geeks, 20-somethings who want a good player for exercising and commuting, and teens who like to make themselves targets with far too much disposable income.
For the vast majority of iPod users with capacity problems, the problem isn't that their legally obtained collections of music are too large for the player. (admittedly, it could be the alternative uses for the player... Apple may have accidentally found a nice techno-boob friendly alternative to the floppy drive and/or CD-R)
Do you really think there's a large enough market for people with legal collections of >40GB of music to justify the need for a portable player with such a vast capacity?
I will say, as bitrates go up, the impracticality of the storage goes down.
The $5/album figure average was assuming some would be full price and some would be free.
More music than you can legally afford
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 1
Please, how on earth can anyone have 60GB or even 40GB of legal music?
Assuming 74 minute CDs burned at 256kbps, and purchased at $5/each, you'd have about 422 albums which would cost a total of about $2100.
Hmmm... Maybe it is possible. Of course more typical numbers would put 1250 50-minute albums on the device at 128kbps, purchased at an average of $10/album would be $12,500.
As you say though... lossless encoding... I guess there are future applications for this stuff.
Yeah, it's a running theory, but in this context... of the decay of the organism as a whole, it doesn't apply since the organism is not dependent on a single cell for its genetic information.
I figure it is either as I said, the people generating the SPAM might be making plenty of money, from the gullible people who hire them to send out the SPAM... or...
It could be something like this:
spamco: Hey, you know, you're pretty sharp. Do you want to come to a business meeting I'm holding with a few of my partners? victim: Smart, me? haha. What is this, Amway? spamco: No!, we all know better than that, this isn't network marketing or Amway or anything. victim: What is it then? spamco: We dupe people into buying a business where they dupe people into sending SPAM. victim: That's crazy. spamco: It works, I made 12 figures last year! victim: Really? Wow. spamco: All you need is a computer and you can do it from home. victim: This sounds too good to be true. spamco: I knew you were smart, but this is legit. victim: So I sell people this CD full of addresses which they use to SPAM people? spamco: yeah, the best part is that they don't really need to SPAM anyone, it doesn't even work, but they don't need to know that, they just need to find people who _think_ it works to buy into the system.
What I'm rather surprised about regarding SPAM is that so little of it even seems legitimate. Why don't we see SPAM for stuff like the guy who is trying to sell custom alcohol stils? William Shatner's greatest hits CD's? Coffee bean clubs? Magazine subscriptions? It's weird.
Anyways above are two models which would not require SPAM to work for SPAMmers to make money.
It must be effective enough, or nobody would do it.
I don't think that's necesarily true. It could be like T.V. advertising. It does little more than irritate people, but companies spend big bucks to put it out there.
Of course, they're not first-run movies, but there are no screaming kids, nobody kicking your seat, you can bring your own food and drinks, play a few rounds of ---Insert FPS here---, you can drink booze or smoke if you're so inclined, and you're supporting local businesses.
With the current trends, the gap between "big theatre" prices and "home theatre" quality is only going to narrow... I'm sure somewhere Blockbuster et. al. probably rent projectors these days... if not, they will soon.
I've been told once that most muggings are by opportunist transients... guys who just happen to be passing through and see an easy target.
So one day, you might be walking down a sunny, friendly street and you'll realize that while the kid's birthday party down the road went into the house... you're all alone with that strange person who happens to be walking towards you on the sidewalk.
About the S.O. plan, it's a good point, I always figured my girlfriend had more sense. There was this one time we were in a European city where we didn't speak the language, we were just out for a walk at night, but we were in the old city. We took a couple wrong turns and wound up on some residential streets I didn't partiuclarly like.
She said "let's go this way"... I replied, "I'd rather not, let's just go left"... to which she said "but we've already been that way"... finally I said... "we're alone at night in a strange city, speaking English with a North American accent, and you want to go down a graffiti'd unlit alley just outside the tourist district? No, let's get back to the main strip."
Fortunately nobody was in earshot, otherwise I'd have to weigh the odds of us two debating in the streets against just walking down the dark alley so as to not look like a victim.
Later I reminded her that since we can barely speak the language.. we can't tell the difference between "do you want to buy some crack" and "I'll cut you to ribbons"
My rough guidelines. 1. try not to look like a tourist or victim. 2. Unless absolutely necessary, never carry anything you'd hesitate to hand to a mugger... and if you must carry something, carry it separately from your valuables. 3. if you're in a place where you don't speak the language or have a distinct accent, avoid responding verbally to anyone asking for anything.
Point #2 covers the geek thing. If you can't afford to lose your notebook computer/ipod/whaveever, then you probably shouldn't be carrying it with you.
Oh, and travelling by car... never put anything in your trunk unless you're just about to move the car... and if it is really valuable, carry it with you.
Here in Canada I've been told it is shoot-to-kill. The reason being that if a police officer even draws their gun, they have to go through about 5 hours of paperwork and meetings to explain why they thought their life or somebody else's life was in immediate danger.
Now the point is... if you're only allowed to draw your gun when somebody's life is in danger, how on earth could you argue that shooting some guy in the leg was appropriate?
I think concealed weapons are generally a bad idea... it goes along the lines of "don't bring a knife to a fist fight... you might get yourself killed." If the thief finds out you have a gun, the thief might think their life is in danger... you might have no choice but to draw that gun.
In your argument, you are implying that swap is somehow an intermediate between primary (RAM) and secondary (HDD) storage, but swap is HDD, and while it might be more efficient HDD, it's still the same old relatively slow storage medium.
There's a relationship between swap and cache which you seem to be neglecting.
Some stuff in RAM is so thoroughly unused that for performance, you'd be better off dynamically allocating the RAM to cache than to have the RAM sit idle.
There isn't much of a problem per se, you're just not using your RAM efficiently.
Libraries, data or other memory pages which are accessed infrequently will stay in active RAM, when in theory, it would be better if the RAM were acting as a HDD cache.
In practice, it depends on how agressively your swapping is tuned. A super non-aggressive swap algorithm should give you faster disk access and and a lot more available RAM.
Try adding swap and tuning your swap characeristics. You'll run out of memory less often and you probably won't notice any other differences.
Another way to look at it is... RAM is your primary storage. Your HDD is your secondary storage. By eliminating swap, you're putting unnecessary demands on your secondary storage by artificially favouring rarely accessed information. E.g. if you're reading your mail in X, you'd be better off storing your mail file in RAM than the libraries which allow acroread to print on pink paper, or your gpm shell application.
People find price-points. Notebooks are a bad example because 15 years ago, they weren't very practical.
When mono LCD came out, nobody wanted plasma. When colour LCD reached about the $3k mark, nobody wanted monochome. When NiMH batteries came out, nobody wanted NiCd... so are you willing to shave $200 off the price of your notebook to cut your battery life by 70% replacing your LiIon batteries with NiCd?
Up until about 5 years ago, technology in Notebooks could be seen as "sucking less intolerably" rather than "improving". 5 years ago, people started to say, "no, that screen is big enough", "no, 2 hour battery life is enough", "no, I don't need the full speed of a desktop... office apps will run fine for me"
Now you have the option of a moderate notebook for $1k+, a super-portable notebook for $3k+, a super big and powerful notebook for $3k+, or a super-tough notebook for $4k+.
The price will continue to drop until some dramatic new killer feature brings it up. E.g. paper-like display quality, or multi-day battery life.
>1) You are still burning nitrogen, which creates NOx emissions (bad).
And how does H2 solve the nox problem? Are you going to have a dedicated O2 tank as well?
I don't think the burning is the problem, it's the combustion... Even if you were burning gasoline to generate steam, you'd be better off, it would burn much more cleanly than in an internal combustion engine.
"Hydrogen economy" style solutions have all typically been fuel cells... which doesn't have the same problems as combustion. I don't know of an IC hydrogen engine, but I don't doubt it would spew some bad stuff.
Even a gasoline fuel cell would be better than a gasoline IC engine... Chrysler was working on that for a little while, but I think the environmentalists screamed too loudly that it doesn't solve the extraction and transportation environmental issues... but I thought it was an awesome idea.
One step better would be biodiesel fuel-cells. There's some research going on with diesel fuel cells (just type \"diesel fuel cell\" in Google) but I haven't seen anyone specifically targeting biodiesel. There could be some devilish problem with the system I'm not aware of, but what would be nice is that you can use the existing diesel infrastructure to fuel-up consumer vehicles, while at the same time advancing electric fuel cell technology, reducing emissions and leaving the door open for a simple fuel conversion to biodiesel.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has to worry about the development house laughing at them.
This same effect also opens the world up to all kinds of quality home porn.
Are portable player and iPods common amongst the seasoned music-geek crowd?
Just curious... I haven't encountered a lot of music geeks. Just musicians and audiophiles... The musicians not caring about portable players, and the audiophiles would curse it as an impure listening experience :-)
The only people I know who like portable players at all are either very young (and broke) or they spend a bit of time in a gym.
My ideal portable music player would be a car player which would take usb memory keys or HDDs. It's tempting to try to put togehter a linux machine for it.
You missed the comment written right under the $2100 price tag...
"Hmmm... Maybe it is possible. Of course more typical numbers would put 1250 50-minute albums on the device at 128kbps, purchased at an average of $10/album would be $12,500."
$2100 worth of music on a roughly $500 player? That only highlights the high price of the player. No biggie.
Now the more realistic encoding rates with the $12,500 price tag, that's more than most people can afford... Avid fans yeah, but there aren't enough people with collections that large who would want to encode them to an iPod to support the iPod market. The iPods are going to techie geeks, 20-somethings who want a good player for exercising and commuting, and teens who like to make themselves targets with far too much disposable income.
For the vast majority of iPod users with capacity problems, the problem isn't that their legally obtained collections of music are too large for the player. (admittedly, it could be the alternative uses for the player... Apple may have accidentally found a nice techno-boob friendly alternative to the floppy drive and/or CD-R)
Do you really think there's a large enough market for people with legal collections of >40GB of music to justify the need for a portable player with such a vast capacity?
I will say, as bitrates go up, the impracticality of the storage goes down.
The $5/album figure average was assuming some would be full price and some would be free.
Please, how on earth can anyone have 60GB or even 40GB of legal music?
Assuming 74 minute CDs burned at 256kbps, and purchased at $5/each, you'd have about 422 albums which would cost a total of about $2100.
Hmmm... Maybe it is possible. Of course more typical numbers would put 1250 50-minute albums on the device at 128kbps, purchased at an average of $10/album would be $12,500.
As you say though... lossless encoding... I guess there are future applications for this stuff.
I think he means that nobody will tell his email buddy that he's dead.
It's a shame because accidentally touching the middle button over a terminal window can be a F*-ing disaster.
I think it is a lazy mouse-oriented method of copying and pasting. Sadly, Windows can get by with the keyboard better than most X environments.
Yeah, it's a running theory, but in this context... of the decay of the organism as a whole, it doesn't apply since the organism is not dependent on a single cell for its genetic information.
I figure it is either as I said, the people generating the SPAM might be making plenty of money, from the gullible people who hire them to send out the SPAM... or...
It could be something like this:
What I'm rather surprised about regarding SPAM is that so little of it even seems legitimate. Why don't we see SPAM for stuff like the guy who is trying to sell custom alcohol stils? William Shatner's greatest hits CD's? Coffee bean clubs? Magazine subscriptions? It's weird.
Anyways above are two models which would not require SPAM to work for SPAMmers to make money.
Subject says it all...
<environmentally friendly solutions>
A housekeeper, wrinkled shirts, the t-shirt, the golf shirt, permanent press and diligent hanging, less restrictive dress codes for men.
</environmentally friendly solutions>
It must be effective enough, or nobody would do it.
I don't think that's necesarily true. It could be like T.V. advertising. It does little more than irritate people, but companies spend big bucks to put it out there.
( $14 CDN + $9/(drink+popcorn) ) * 4 people ~= $92
It is getting close to the price of renting a home theatre and having somebody coming over to set it up for you:
http://www.megacityone.com/
Of course, they're not first-run movies, but there are no screaming kids, nobody kicking your seat, you can bring your own food and drinks, play a few rounds of ---Insert FPS here---, you can drink booze or smoke if you're so inclined, and you're supporting local businesses.
With the current trends, the gap between "big theatre" prices and "home theatre" quality is only going to narrow... I'm sure somewhere Blockbuster et. al. probably rent projectors these days... if not, they will soon.
Muggers will cluster in that in-between zone.
I've been told once that most muggings are by opportunist transients... guys who just happen to be passing through and see an easy target.
So one day, you might be walking down a sunny, friendly street and you'll realize that while the kid's birthday party down the road went into the house... you're all alone with that strange person who happens to be walking towards you on the sidewalk.
About the S.O. plan, it's a good point, I always figured my girlfriend had more sense. There was this one time we were in a European city where we didn't speak the language, we were just out for a walk at night, but we were in the old city. We took a couple wrong turns and wound up on some residential streets I didn't partiuclarly like.
She said "let's go this way"... I replied, "I'd rather not, let's just go left"... to which she said "but we've already been that way"... finally I said... "we're alone at night in a strange city, speaking English with a North American accent, and you want to go down a graffiti'd unlit alley just outside the tourist district? No, let's get back to the main strip."
Fortunately nobody was in earshot, otherwise I'd have to weigh the odds of us two debating in the streets against just walking down the dark alley so as to not look like a victim.
Later I reminded her that since we can barely speak the language.. we can't tell the difference between "do you want to buy some crack" and "I'll cut you to ribbons"
My rough guidelines. 1. try not to look like a tourist or victim. 2. Unless absolutely necessary, never carry anything you'd hesitate to hand to a mugger... and if you must carry something, carry it separately from your valuables. 3. if you're in a place where you don't speak the language or have a distinct accent, avoid responding verbally to anyone asking for anything.
Point #2 covers the geek thing. If you can't afford to lose your notebook computer/ipod/whaveever, then you probably shouldn't be carrying it with you.
Oh, and travelling by car... never put anything in your trunk unless you're just about to move the car... and if it is really valuable, carry it with you.
...that's what happens when your police force starts a lucrative donut franchise.
Here in Canada I've been told it is shoot-to-kill. The reason being that if a police officer even draws their gun, they have to go through about 5 hours of paperwork and meetings to explain why they thought their life or somebody else's life was in immediate danger.
Now the point is... if you're only allowed to draw your gun when somebody's life is in danger, how on earth could you argue that shooting some guy in the leg was appropriate?
I think concealed weapons are generally a bad idea... it goes along the lines of "don't bring a knife to a fist fight... you might get yourself killed." If the thief finds out you have a gun, the thief might think their life is in danger... you might have no choice but to draw that gun.
...the guy stole your knife.
Unless he looked like something out of the Android's Dungeon... then he would just look like a geek with lots of disposable income.
In your argument, you are implying that swap is somehow an intermediate between primary (RAM) and secondary (HDD) storage, but swap is HDD, and while it might be more efficient HDD, it's still the same old relatively slow storage medium.
There's a relationship between swap and cache which you seem to be neglecting.
Some stuff in RAM is so thoroughly unused that for performance, you'd be better off dynamically allocating the RAM to cache than to have the RAM sit idle.
There isn't much of a problem per se, you're just not using your RAM efficiently.
Libraries, data or other memory pages which are accessed infrequently will stay in active RAM, when in theory, it would be better if the RAM were acting as a HDD cache.
In practice, it depends on how agressively your swapping is tuned. A super non-aggressive swap algorithm should give you faster disk access and and a lot more available RAM.
Try adding swap and tuning your swap characeristics. You'll run out of memory less often and you probably won't notice any other differences.
Another way to look at it is... RAM is your primary storage. Your HDD is your secondary storage. By eliminating swap, you're putting unnecessary demands on your secondary storage by artificially favouring rarely accessed information. E.g. if you're reading your mail in X, you'd be better off storing your mail file in RAM than the libraries which allow acroread to print on pink paper, or your gpm shell application.
The influence of Three's Company can be seen in most American sitcoms. Three's Company of course being lifted script for script from a British show.
People find price-points. Notebooks are a bad example because 15 years ago, they weren't very practical.
When mono LCD came out, nobody wanted plasma. When colour LCD reached about the $3k mark, nobody wanted monochome. When NiMH batteries came out, nobody wanted NiCd... so are you willing to shave $200 off the price of your notebook to cut your battery life by 70% replacing your LiIon batteries with NiCd?
Up until about 5 years ago, technology in Notebooks could be seen as "sucking less intolerably" rather than "improving". 5 years ago, people started to say, "no, that screen is big enough", "no, 2 hour battery life is enough", "no, I don't need the full speed of a desktop... office apps will run fine for me"
Now you have the option of a moderate notebook for $1k+, a super-portable notebook for $3k+, a super big and powerful notebook for $3k+, or a super-tough notebook for $4k+.
The price will continue to drop until some dramatic new killer feature brings it up. E.g. paper-like display quality, or multi-day battery life.
...and here I was envisioning a seedy lair of suited distributors smoking cigarettes while reclining on black leather couches.
>1) You are still burning nitrogen, which creates NOx emissions (bad).
And how does H2 solve the nox problem? Are you going to have a dedicated O2 tank as well?
I don't think the burning is the problem, it's the combustion... Even if you were burning gasoline to generate steam, you'd be better off, it would burn much more cleanly than in an internal combustion engine.
"Hydrogen economy" style solutions have all typically been fuel cells... which doesn't have the same problems as combustion. I don't know of an IC hydrogen engine, but I don't doubt it would spew some bad stuff.
Even a gasoline fuel cell would be better than a gasoline IC engine... Chrysler was working on that for a little while, but I think the environmentalists screamed too loudly that it doesn't solve the extraction and transportation environmental issues... but I thought it was an awesome idea.
One step better would be biodiesel fuel-cells. There's some research going on with diesel fuel cells (just type \"diesel fuel cell\" in Google) but I haven't seen anyone specifically targeting biodiesel. There could be some devilish problem with the system I'm not aware of, but what would be nice is that you can use the existing diesel infrastructure to fuel-up consumer vehicles, while at the same time advancing electric fuel cell technology, reducing emissions and leaving the door open for a simple fuel conversion to biodiesel.
I could of course be very wrong.
Just a guess, but I think they're shooting for a market somewhere between tablet PCs and PDAs.
It could be a military training ground where they teach soldiers how to deal with civilian kooks.
The motion sensors were bait.