1) You're asserting a) as though it's a fact. Global warming is hardly well-enough understood that a computer can be clearly balanced out by some number of trees on the other side of the world.
2) But let's say it could be done. If we're telling people who can't afford "carbon-neutral" that they have to do without or the world will come to an end, don't you see something creepy about eco-celebrities bragging about how they're spending extra to break even on their private jets? On the CPU level it's harmless, if a little silly (you could buy an Intel and plant your own damn trees), but as a societal value, it's disturbing.
That link perfectly illustrates his point -- "Banned Book Week" revolves entirely around a tiny number of unverified reports of "challenge" of certain books by certain people. It has nothing to do with any meaningful censorship issues going on in the world, the censorship of search results by Google China being a bit more significant than some kid who was upset by the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn or To Kill A Mockingbird in 1993.
I'm certainly concerned about this stuff. (I'm reading this after returning from walking around the floor turning off lights in empty conference rooms.) But this "carbon-neutral" business, where those who can afford it can consume as much as they desire as long as they pay for it with offsets based on some extremely nebulous calculation, and those who can't have to do without -- reminds me of papal indulgences more than anything else. You can be a good person by sacrificing, or you can be a good person by giving money to a sanctioned recipient.
Since all of this directly follows from the stipulation that an award for excellence and innovation must offer excellence and innovation (except where the best effort in either category is zero), it seems much simpler to state the stipulations and treat the reader with the courtesy and respect of assuming they can perform simple expansion of the set of invariants that must be true.
I'm sure we all appreciate your cutting things as short as you did, but I'd suggest that your "stipulation that an award for excellence and innovation must offer excellence and innovation" is as crushingly obvious as whatever you declined to detail. At any rate, I'm still mystified that you chose the occasion of an award for a product with which you don't have the slightest familiarity to unveil your Grand Unified Theory of Awards.
It features a 17" widescreen 1280x720 progressive-scan HD display, breakout ports for VGA and component inputs, built-in Wi-Fi, and even an integrated keyboard -- all in a 14 pound, 2.8 inch thick enclosure.
Also note -- water-cooled! Which also explains the 14 pounds.
I remember when using beta versions of software seemed super-cutting-edge, and <1.0 software was something almost no users had ever seen.
Nowadays, thanks to Netcscape and Google, beta is the final state of software. And after years of Linux, an escalation to 0.20 is a perfectly reasonable user upgrade.
That was my first thought too, upon reading the MSNBC link.
My second thought, after reading the first paragraph, was that HP is lucky the story didn't turn out to be "HP Director Decapitates Chairman With Radio-Controlled Helicopter".
anyone think Gregor Mendel would have thought he was pioneering a multi-billion dollar industry with those peas?
Sure, but Mendel's work proceeded from a clear scientific question about the nature of heredity. He wan't just casting around for an experiment to do to justify the expense of a super-cool high-tech pea patch.
I have enough technology at work that I don't need much of it at home, so maybe I'm out of touch with what "the masses" have.
But are there really a significant number of people with the computer-large screen integration to make this program useful? The article brings that point in at the end, but I wonder how much overlap there is between the Media Center crowd and the non-P2P'ing-everything-anyway crowd.
The record time for a Microsoft patch is three days.
This seems to have gone over everyone's head on that story, but the reference to 'Quickest Patch Ever' was meant to be facetious, not a precise factual statement about Microsoft's entire history of patch issuance.
Seriously -- one has to wonder how much someone spending his first week of college (UCSB, no less!) driving hundreds of miles to protest Facebook over this needs Facebook in the first place.
If anything, I'm pretty impressed with how well the company has handled this.
"Tumor suppressor" is the term for genes that act as inhibitors in growth pathways. It's a somewhat misleading term, at least in the way it's used nowadays, but they're not claiming that this gene has some magical anti-cancer properties. (the submitter probbaly didn't realize that, though.)
That has very little to do with the immune respose issue you mention, which comes in significantly later, when tumors have actually started to form. The oncogene / tumor suppressor interactions are part of the balance that allows normal, but not abnormal, growth.
As if things weren't complicated enough, now we have free-as-in-speech, free-as-in-beer, and free-as-in-$5/hour..
Incidentally, if a digitalnetizengeezerologism like "The Four Horsemen" has caught on so poorly that you need to link to some netidinoWiredsaur's email from 1995, it's probably not worth hanging on to.
I can't stand Windows, I'd would far prefer if my job let me have Linux running Crossover Office (or better yet, a Mac). But this line about stability is like the other ancient myth about running on older hardware -- it was true in 1998, when Linux users were running vi in an xterm on fvwm, and it's true today if you run vi in an xterm on fvwm, but once you start using all the stuff that's Finally Ready For The Desktop, the stability problems and bloat are at least as severe as Windows.
The problem with the Cube, as I recall, was that it was priced at a point that just made no sense. For the same money (more or less, so idiot savants with a perfect recollection of Apple pricing please don't nitpick unless I'm way off), you could buy a tower with significantly better specs. The Cube was cool looking, but not that cool.
Anyway, Forbes had a story on 50 Cent a few weeks ago where they talked about how he's working out a branding deal with Apple for a new low-priced model. (I submitted the story here but it was rejected in favor of Somebody Said Something Bad About Vista.)
Coral Cache link -- I love the Slashdotter FireFox extension! (And kudos to Theodore Gray for a really nice poster.)
As long as I'm posting, I'm reminded of the article I read recently about how some public school was so poorly funded that their periodic table was from 1996 and didn't have the very newest element! Whatever the financial situation in the school, I found it at least as alarming that "activists" thought that was seriously holding back high school chemistry education, let alone that a reporter and editor (WSJ, no less, IIRC) agreed with them.
This thing was *so* ludicrously overhyped that there was no way it couldn't be a disappointment. That it turned out to be classic "good advertising kills a bad product" was icing on the cake.
Somebody here hit it right on the nose five years ago -- during the dot-com boom there were rich stupid dorks with money to spend on something like this. But not in 2001.
Five years later, I've never seen one in person, and I live in one of the two or three most tech-heavy cities in the world. The Segway may well be fun, but it doesn't look at all fun to me in pictures and the company has never bothered to market them intensively enough to show me otherwise.
As skeptics pointed out from day one, the Segway has no advantage for commuting or transportation over cheaper, simpler existing devices (feet, bicycles, handicapped scooters) in real-world situations.
1) One might argue that net neutrality wouldn't be a net cost to customers but it's hardly a "blatant lie" to suggest it would. At this point, one can only make guesses as to how market forces would net out in either situation.
2) Even if that claim were obviously false, the submitter's argument against it is a total non-sequitur.
3) People who write "seems to stupid to actually be real" shouldn't throw stupid.
Q. I don't have a job. What can I do
to help? . .
The third way is to donate through PayPal. We could really use the money (we quit our jobs last Monday).
I like the comforting assurance they provide with their contact information: "We also promise not to make fun of you regardless of how ridiculous your ideas might be."
That's probably the highest-returning investment on not casting out the mote in one's brethren's eye in all the time since Jesus coined the phrase.
Slashdot Mirror
1) You're asserting a) as though it's a fact. Global warming is hardly well-enough understood that a computer can be clearly balanced out by some number of trees on the other side of the world.
2) But let's say it could be done. If we're telling people who can't afford "carbon-neutral" that they have to do without or the world will come to an end, don't you see something creepy about eco-celebrities bragging about how they're spending extra to break even on their private jets? On the CPU level it's harmless, if a little silly (you could buy an Intel and plant your own damn trees), but as a societal value, it's disturbing.
That link perfectly illustrates his point -- "Banned Book Week" revolves entirely around a tiny number of unverified reports of "challenge" of certain books by certain people. It has nothing to do with any meaningful censorship issues going on in the world, the censorship of search results by Google China being a bit more significant than some kid who was upset by the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn or To Kill A Mockingbird in 1993.
I'm certainly concerned about this stuff. (I'm reading this after returning from walking around the floor turning off lights in empty conference rooms.) But this "carbon-neutral" business, where those who can afford it can consume as much as they desire as long as they pay for it with offsets based on some extremely nebulous calculation, and those who can't have to do without -- reminds me of papal indulgences more than anything else. You can be a good person by sacrificing, or you can be a good person by giving money to a sanctioned recipient.
I'm sure we all appreciate your cutting things as short as you did, but I'd suggest that your "stipulation that an award for excellence and innovation must offer excellence and innovation" is as crushingly obvious as whatever you declined to detail. At any rate, I'm still mystified that you chose the occasion of an award for a product with which you don't have the slightest familiarity to unveil your Grand Unified Theory of Awards.
I got as far as "Page 1 of 15" (And not the Tom's Hardware sort of "page" either!) and gave up, which I suppose strengthens their point.
Agreed, but what he *did* say -- "I have no idea what dtrace does, but it might deserve the award or it might suck!" -- is even sillier.
Also note -- water-cooled! Which also explains the 14 pounds.
Nowadays, thanks to Netcscape and Google, beta is the final state of software. And after years of Linux, an escalation to 0.20 is a perfectly reasonable user upgrade.
1) Typically LBO purchasers are getting their money either from bonds or from a pool of private equity, not from a bank loan.
2) Again typically, the plan is to sell off unproductive parts of the company, cut costs, or increase value with some other short-term plan.
3) If there were some obvious decline facing Freescale, it would already be priced into the stock.
4) As someone else has pointed out, this is a huge company that isn't a familiar name only because it doesn't make branded consumer products.
My second thought, after reading the first paragraph, was that HP is lucky the story didn't turn out to be "HP Director Decapitates Chairman With Radio-Controlled Helicopter".
Sure, but Mendel's work proceeded from a clear scientific question about the nature of heredity. He wan't just casting around for an experiment to do to justify the expense of a super-cool high-tech pea patch.
But are there really a significant number of people with the computer-large screen integration to make this program useful? The article brings that point in at the end, but I wonder how much overlap there is between the Media Center crowd and the non-P2P'ing-everything-anyway crowd.
This seems to have gone over everyone's head on that story, but the reference to 'Quickest Patch Ever' was meant to be facetious, not a precise factual statement about Microsoft's entire history of patch issuance.
Seriously -- one has to wonder how much someone spending his first week of college (UCSB, no less!) driving hundreds of miles to protest Facebook over this needs Facebook in the first place.
If anything, I'm pretty impressed with how well the company has handled this.
That has very little to do with the immune respose issue you mention, which comes in significantly later, when tumors have actually started to form. The oncogene / tumor suppressor interactions are part of the balance that allows normal, but not abnormal, growth.
As if things weren't complicated enough, now we have free-as-in-speech, free-as-in-beer, and free-as-in-$5/hour..
Incidentally, if a digitalnetizengeezerologism like "The Four Horsemen" has caught on so poorly that you need to link to some netidinoWiredsaur's email from 1995, it's probably not worth hanging on to.
I can't stand Windows, I'd would far prefer if my job let me have Linux running Crossover Office (or better yet, a Mac). But this line about stability is like the other ancient myth about running on older hardware -- it was true in 1998, when Linux users were running vi in an xterm on fvwm, and it's true today if you run vi in an xterm on fvwm, but once you start using all the stuff that's Finally Ready For The Desktop, the stability problems and bloat are at least as severe as Windows.
Anyway, Forbes had a story on 50 Cent a few weeks ago where they talked about how he's working out a branding deal with Apple for a new low-priced model. (I submitted the story here but it was rejected in favor of Somebody Said Something Bad About Vista.)
As for me, that's what I go to the dentist for. Apparently Richard Nixon has resigned! And Car and Driver has pictures of the new Gremlin!
As long as I'm posting, I'm reminded of the article I read recently about how some public school was so poorly funded that their periodic table was from 1996 and didn't have the very newest element! Whatever the financial situation in the school, I found it at least as alarming that "activists" thought that was seriously holding back high school chemistry education, let alone that a reporter and editor (WSJ, no less, IIRC) agreed with them.
1) One might argue that net neutrality wouldn't be a net cost to customers but it's hardly a "blatant lie" to suggest it would. At this point, one can only make guesses as to how market forces would net out in either situation.
2) Even if that claim were obviously false, the submitter's argument against it is a total non-sequitur.
3) People who write "seems to stupid to actually be real" shouldn't throw stupid.
That's probably the highest-returning investment on not casting out the mote in one's brethren's eye in all the time since Jesus coined the phrase.
Not to mention -- the funniest, least overrated and most underrated!