I use ODF to store documents; I only ever export.doc format when I need to share a file with someone who doesn't use OO. I only open.doc documents for editing when I've received them from somebody else.
There are million times more daily commuters and soccer moms than assholes like this guy, and they drive their commutes daily. That's why they have more accidents, not because they're more dangerous.
Bullshit.
They (soccer moms/dads) are more dangerous because they're dialing and talking on their fucking cellphones. They're more dangerous because they're reaching into the back seat to manipulate their rug-rats. They're more dangerous because they're adjusting their cosmetics in the rear-view mirror.
There is a difference between reckless driving and speeding, and the one does not imply the other. I can drive safely at 200MPH on the same freeway that you're driving unsafely at 60MPH; it all depends on the traffic. IME, the dangerous drivers aren't the speeders; they're the weavers, the cell-phone users (who don't have headsets), the parents with ankle-biters in the back seat, and the geriatrics. And I see an amazing number of motorcyclists taking tremendous risk weaving through traffic, but they'll weed themselves out of the gene pool.
But the biggest traffic risk? Traffic cops. They cause snarls when they pull people over, people reflexively stomp on their brakes when they see a cop (even when they aren't speeding); they're an all-around menace. Traffic cops should all be re-assigned to do real police work.
Life would be a lot less dangerous if cretins like this didn't insist on doing stupid shit in public.
Life would be a lot less dangerous if we illegalized all forms of motorized non-public transportation.
2. The GIMP only supports 8 bits per channel ...
Only item 2 above is a real showstopper
I agree with everything you said, but especially this. I can't consider GIMP seriously for editing my photos until it supports 16 bpc. Not that I'm all that great of a photographer, but that makes it even more important for me to not lose any detail in my prints.
Cinepaint supports 32 bpc, but it lacks most of the features that make GIMP 2 worth using; for the moment, Bibble is meeting my needs 90% of the time; noise ninja takes care of the most common editing that I'd normally use GIMP for. Still, I'm looking forward to the day when GIMP mainline supports 32 bpc; I still feel crippled by not having a decent photo editor on Linux.
If you're using XMLSchema, then ditch that crap and use RelaxNG, which is actually readable. There's a compact syntax that is even more user-friendly. As an example, the schema for:
Government is a weird institution, and the police are no exception: individually respectable, societally necessary, but organizationally corrupt. I guess all rot starts in the middle.
You're absolutely right. I'd like to offer another perspective. Mind you, I really hate authority figures, and I hate the institution of traffic cops as a waste of resources (and I therefore disagree that police are a societal necessity)... however, we have to consider the psychology of law enforcement. This is a group of people who almost uniformly interact only with criminals (in the broadest sense of the term). They're trained to be suspicious and domineering. The are authoritarian, both by training and more generally by nature. There's a lot of violence in their work, in training, in equipment, and in the exercise of their duties. They are largely convinced that they're the Good Guys, and so if someone opposes them then that person is, by definition, a Bad Guy. And if my father is any reasonable stick to measure cops in general by, then they're likely to have the opinion that The System lets off criminals on technicalities (undoing all of the hard work they've done), and that "societies deserve the police that they get" (the theory that police adapt their behavior to the environment in which they work).
So, I tend to not think of police as corrupt, per se, but rather as culture that sees itself as an embattled clan, a cadre of brothers, who have the authority of God on their side and, therefore, the Right. As such, they'll tend to defend each other over the lawless pinko anarchists. In other words, they're just defensive, and a lot of wrong gets done because of this.
instead of each of us picking one movie we like and potentially forcing the other person to suffer through it, we can find a movie that (in theory) we will both like.
If it weren't for my wife, my media consumption would consist entirely of science fiction and WWI/II movies; thanks to my wife, I've been exposed to a much broader swath of media genres -- some of which has been painful, and some of which I've regretted... but in the balance, I think I'm a better person for it. But, then, I possess an abundance of room for improvement.
Actually, this issue is something that bothers me. This increasing ability to narrow our exposure to data which we find unpleasant, to filter out the world so that we only see what we want to see, is vaguely disturbing. I see what I think are consequences of this increasingly in my own country, and evidence of it in the form of rising fundamentalism around the world. I'm afraid that I do it, too. It is limiting and dangerous, and increasingly easy to do.
I don't have a solution, and maybe there isn't one. Perhaps, someday, we'll all live in virtual realities where all of the facts are shaped to what we want to believe, and we'll never have to interact with anybody who disagrees with us, and we'll find that this is the utopia that humans have been searching for.
In this case, the enemy of my enemy is still a nutjob.
However, the threat to civil liberties that Thompson presents is a greater evil than the merely monopolistic practices of Microsoft. So, I hope he loses, but costs Microsoft a lot of money in the process. And then, I hope that Microsoft finds that Thompson has a bunch of unlicensed Microsoft products on his computer. And then bankruptcy for all parties.
Half true, or perhaps one third. Hybrids also get better gas mileage because when stopped in stop-and-go city driving they use no fuel.
Three-quarters true, or perhaps five eighths. Hybrids also get better gas mileage because they're often using weaker engines than their same-size counterparts. The Honda Civic hybrid has a smaller 1.3 liter engine, and makes up the power difference with the electric motor. It also powers down up to three of the cylinders while breaking. Much of the savings come from a bunch of different tweaks to the overall system; on their own, they don't do much, but add them together and they boost the mileage.
A laser of this size is likely to provide a flash of light and sound
You base this prediction on what, exactly?
33kg is not a light weapon
Absolutely right, 33kg is not a light weapon. Luckily, TFA says that the laser weapon would weigh 15kg, which is much more manageable. An M107 sniper rifle (.50 cal) weighs about 17kg, loaded, and has a maximum effective range of about 1,800m. This is probably the weapon you would want to compare the laser to, and DARPA's laser would probably be pitched for the same uses. You're not going to be climbing up trees with this, but you could certainly set it up in an upper story in an urban environment.
We have them. Plenty of them. Just having them isn't enough if people don't vote for them. Spread the word, get people to look beyond the Republicrats, and then we have a chance to really shake things up.
We need to change the electoral college, first, and our first-past-the-post system of voting. As long as we have the voting system we have, America will always tend toward a two-party government. Our system encourages people not to vote for who they like, but for who, among those with the greatest chance of winning, they dislike the least.
As a centrist, I would prefer neither end of the spectrum in the congress - we don't need a few more far-lefts to outweight the far-rights, we need less of both!
As much as I hate extremists, they're the only ones who ever get anything done (or, rather, motivate anybody to get anything done). Centrists mostly just sit on the fence and waffle.
I think we need fewer centrists and more extremists from both sides, and we need to restructure congress so that it is more like the South Korean parlament, with fist-fights and lots of shouting. At least then they'd be entertaining.
The unemployment rate is below 5%. It doesn't get much better without forced labor!
Yup, thanks to creative accounting!
The method for calculating the "official" unemployment rate ignores large swaths of people. The numbers that the administration reports is the total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force. This leaves out all marginally attached workers, adds people employed part time only because of economic reasons (IE, they'd work full time if they could). "Marginally attached workers" are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. So, if you're not looking for a job because you're a Widget Assembly specialist, and the local Widget company closed the factory and put you out of a job, you're not counted in the "official" rate. You're also not counted if you're an aircraft engineer and you're working part time at a 7-11 because you can't find work as an aircraft engineer.
The stock market is at near record highs. It has never passed 13000. Right now the Dow is at 12,983.19. The stock market has never been better!
Furthermore, much of these profits aren't making their way down past the upper class. Wage growth is lagging behind inflation. Labor compensation is lower than it has been in 40 years. Since 2001, as a percentage of the GDP, labor compensation has decreased by 4%. Meanwhile, corporate profits are up by 4%. Yes, the Bush administration has been good for the rich.
Re oil prices:
And whose fault is that?
That's easy: George Bush. By creating instability in the middle east through needlessly invading Iraq. You know, the country that had absolutely nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden, the guy who was responsible for 9/11 and who still hasn't been caught. George Bush, who's gone above and beyond the call of duty to alienating Muslim's around the world with his antagonistic rhetoric, and increasing enrollment in terrorist organizations.
Anyway, drilling in Alaska wouldn't have any impact on the price of gas; not for another decade, at least.
How many Al Qaeda members did we kill yesterday?
I don't know. Do you? Do they carry around little Al Qaeda membership cards? Or are they de-facto terrorists by virtue of being muslim, or foreign?
Fact is, we are kicking major ass in Iraq and Afghanistan
It is certainly true that we're killing a lot of people, and some of them are bound to be insurgents. However, as we learned in Vietnam (you remember Vietnam, don't you?) you can carpet bomb a country into the stone age and kill thousands upon thousands of people, and still not win. I think that your definition of "winning" as killing a lot of Arabs is flawed.
Things are getting worse, not better, in Iraq, and Afganistan has even gotten worse in recent years. We wouldn't be in Iraq if it hadn't been for Bush's war mongering, and we could have a stabilized Afganistan if Bush hadn't gotten us over-committed. We're in a weak position militarily, because both N. Korea and Iran know we can't afford to invade either of them while we're mired in Iraq, and we don't get much support on the world stage because of Bush's unilateral posturing.
But, just because sucks as a president, it doesn't prove he's a crook who steals elections. That evidence is in the 2004 Ohio polling discrepancies and stories like this.
I don't understand people who can use web apps to replace all of their desktop apps.
Fewer and fewer people that I know even own a desktop computer any more; most have a set-up similar to my own: a couple of laptops and a file/print server in the basement. In fact, the only desktop use that I personally encounter any more is at work.
I regularly use my laptop when I don't have an internet connection, for whatever reason, and being dependent on some network storage would severely cramp my style. People synchronize their laptops with network storage for a reason.
Someday, when internet access is ubiquitous, I'll buy into replacing desktop apps with distributed (in whatever form) apps, but I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we're even close. And, to be frank, while Google has some outstanding applications, the word processor and spreadsheet aren't even close to adequate for non-trivial use.
you know the Lib party is pretty sound once you get past the "smoke pot" platform
Are you kidding? The "smoke pot" plank is the best thing they have going.
Seriously, though; if you buy into the Libertarian philosophy, you pretty much have to buy into it whole hog, or else you're just being a hypocrite. Since illegal drug use is a victimless crime (more victimless than, say, handgun ownership -- IMO), it is perfectly consistent with Libertarian ideals. And however much I disagree with Libertarians, IME they do tend to be consistent and have better than average rationality.
Well, you don't know me, so you can be forgiven (and pitied, but that's another issue)... but we've had a Dyson for the past couple of years, and it has been the best vacuum we've ever had. It seems to clean better, but I haven't done any empirical experiments. The things my wife and like most about the machine all have to do with user interface:
No bag. This was our first bagless vacuum, so I don't know if Dyson is better than others, but not having to change bags, and not having to track down and buy bags, rocks.
The design is outstanding... the canister detaches from the vacuum, and a trigger on the handle causes the bottom to drop open. You detach it, hold it over the trash, and pull the trigger.
It certainly fills up faster than our previous Panasonic vacuum, which had a bag, which makes me suspect that we're picking up more dirt.
There are dozens of little, well thought-out features, like the fact that the upper pin holding the cord twists out of the way and the whole coil comes off -- you still have to wind the cord back when you're done, but there's no unwinding.
The hose for the extension being built into the handle is really cool.
It is smart about turning off the suction and beater when the handle is in the full-upright position
Having a bagless system means you can see how full your vacuum is -- you don't have to guess
There are things we don't like about it (it can be tricky to get the canister to re-seat correctly; the hose-in-handle thing is cool, but it makes the resulting "wand" really big), but it is, by far, the best vacuum cleaner we've ever had, and when this one dies, we'll be buying another.
It's not "unwanted", people just don't want to pay the price. I'm more than half the people out there who have decided not to get it have decided such because of price and not one of the other reasons listed in TFA.
MicroSoft has, once again, done a great job of controlling public perception, including mine.
I have a PS2, and was on track to get the PS3; I chose instead to buy an XBox 360, because the price of the base system is $299, about half the price of a PS3. What a mistake.
The controller is cabled, so of course I had to buy a wireless controller for another $40 -- I knew about this and was expecting that extra cost. However, when I got the 360 home, I discovered that it comes with an RCA jack video hookup -- my entertainment system is entirely S-Video, so I had to drop another $40 on a proprietary XBox S-Video cable. Then, since you can't save any game data without either the memory card or the hard drive, I bought a memory card for $30. The kicker was when I discovered that you can't play regular XBox games without the hard drive! That's another $99 bucks for a paltry 20GB. So, by now I've spent $510 on the XBox system, and I didn't even get a high-density DVD (HD DVD or Blueray) drive out of it. I should have just spent the extra $90 and gotten a PS3, which comes with a hard drive, a Blueray drive, AND a wireless controller.
The 360 the first, and last, MicroSoft gaming console I'm going to buy, unless Sony drops out of the business. Sony's no saint of a company, but I didn't save enough money on the 360 to make it worth the time, and effort, of having to track down all of the extra crap I had to buy to actually play a game. Saying that the 360 is cheaper than the PS3 is not exactly a lie, but when you factor in all of the extra cost of the XBox, the price difference isn't all that big. And if having a high-capacity DVD is important, then you don't save any money at all on the 360.
Linux seriously needs a good image manipulation tool such as the GIMP with 16-bit or even 32-bit per color channel support built-in. This is particularly important for operations like sharpening.
Krita can work in 16-bits per channel, and supports 32-bits per channel in some color spaces. I find it difficult to work with, lacks a lot of Gimp's features, and is very, very slow, but I'm impressed with the progress of development. I generally use Gimp to play around with a photo to get the right effect, and then open the photo in Krita and duplicate the effort in 16-bit mode to produce a printable image.
The point is that there is a decent image manipulation tool for Linux that does work in 16 and 32 bpp mode.
Yet I still note that JAVA developers of all flavor are perhaps the most in-demand (and highest paid) professionals in the Software development community. I still note a healthy and growing JAVA community. When I use 'stumble' to crash about the web, I see wonderfully designed JAVA Applets everywhere, fulfilling all sorts of purposes. I see IT shop after IT shop settling on JAVA as the tool of choice to solve problem after problem. Successfully.
Since I make my living as a Java developer, I'm not going to argue that Java is dead. However, please keep in mind that current dominance is not sufficient to disprove a trend. Remember that, unfortunately, a lot of technology decisions in business are made by people who aren't the best people to be making the decisions (but think that they are), and are often years behind the curve.
So why would I be better off under socialized medicine? I'd pay more, and if managed the way the government manages everything else they touch I'd get less. You all in the rest of the world like to point out how incompetent the US government is (and often with good reason), why do you think they'd be any better at running health care than they are at other things?
Common FUD, courtesy of the HMOs and the Republican party.
I'm not going to claim a direct causal relationship, but you might consider that the United States, with its vaunted privatized healthcare system, ranks 42nd in life expectancy among the countries of the world. When I did research on this a few years ago, 80% of the countries that came in with longer life expectancies than the US had some form of universal health care coverage.
On a more anecdotal note, I've waited hours in an emergency room in the US to get broken bones taken care of, so I call bullshit on claims of how the US medical system is oh-so-efficient and effective and superior to socialized systems. On top of that, since we have organizations (insurance companies, HMOs) actively working to penalize for and dissuade you from spending money on health care, I also call bullshit on any claim that you're getting the best care money can buy in the US.
Don't fix it if it ain't broke: up 292 days, 22:26 The reason for the short uptime, is PSU upgrades...
I can say the same thing about Gentoo, though. We hit 380 days of uptime on our Gentoo server the last time before we had to replace a hard drive. And, yes, that's with occasional, but fairly rare, software updates.
I'm baffled by the number of people who seem to have trouble with Gentoo. In my experience, as long as you keep the tilde keywords out of your make.conf and don't just blindly use "-U", Gentoo packages require fewer dependency upgrades than RPM. I use Gentoo on my servers and laptops, and CentOS (RPM) at work, and I have more trouble with updates triggering deep dependency cascades on the CentOS box than on the Gentoo boxes. Heck, I get uptimes in weeks on my laptop, and I've got "~x86" in there and upgrade that every couple of days or so on that.
Why isn't anyone discussing how his years of experience both managing a bank account the size of a small country's GDP and running a huge corporation would be beneficial/detrimental to him being a President?
Wow.
Ok: how about the fact that the OS he developed is a bloated, buggy piece of crap? How about the shitty security of the OS his company produces? How about the fact that his company has been -- for as long as I can remember -- unable to meet their deadlines? How about the fact that his company assumes that the customers are criminals, until proven innocent? How about the fact that his company seems to spend more time trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of the customers, than actually fixing things? How about the fact that the US is a democracy, and Microsoft is a dictatorship -- a dictatorship where you don't have to worry about pissing off other people in your industry? How about the fact that the company he ran has been convicted of a crime (being a monopoly)?
Man. There are more reasons for Gates to not be president than I have time to write about. But that would be rich, wouldn't it? Talk about America being run by corporations. We've got enough trouble with no-bid contracts in the US without putting another crook in office.
Slashdot Mirror
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They (soccer moms/dads) are more dangerous because they're dialing and talking on their fucking cellphones. They're more dangerous because they're reaching into the back seat to manipulate their rug-rats. They're more dangerous because they're adjusting their cosmetics in the rear-view mirror.
There is a difference between reckless driving and speeding, and the one does not imply the other. I can drive safely at 200MPH on the same freeway that you're driving unsafely at 60MPH; it all depends on the traffic. IME, the dangerous drivers aren't the speeders; they're the weavers, the cell-phone users (who don't have headsets), the parents with ankle-biters in the back seat, and the geriatrics. And I see an amazing number of motorcyclists taking tremendous risk weaving through traffic, but they'll weed themselves out of the gene pool.
But the biggest traffic risk? Traffic cops. They cause snarls when they pull people over, people reflexively stomp on their brakes when they see a cop (even when they aren't speeding); they're an all-around menace. Traffic cops should all be re-assigned to do real police work.
Life would be a lot less dangerous if we illegalized all forms of motorized non-public transportation.--- SER
I agree with everything you said, but especially this. I can't consider GIMP seriously for editing my photos until it supports 16 bpc. Not that I'm all that great of a photographer, but that makes it even more important for me to not lose any detail in my prints.
Cinepaint supports 32 bpc, but it lacks most of the features that make GIMP 2 worth using; for the moment, Bibble is meeting my needs 90% of the time; noise ninja takes care of the most common editing that I'd normally use GIMP for. Still, I'm looking forward to the day when GIMP mainline supports 32 bpc; I still feel crippled by not having a decent photo editor on Linux.
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You're absolutely right. I'd like to offer another perspective. Mind you, I really hate authority figures, and I hate the institution of traffic cops as a waste of resources (and I therefore disagree that police are a societal necessity)... however, we have to consider the psychology of law enforcement. This is a group of people who almost uniformly interact only with criminals (in the broadest sense of the term). They're trained to be suspicious and domineering. The are authoritarian, both by training and more generally by nature. There's a lot of violence in their work, in training, in equipment, and in the exercise of their duties. They are largely convinced that they're the Good Guys, and so if someone opposes them then that person is, by definition, a Bad Guy. And if my father is any reasonable stick to measure cops in general by, then they're likely to have the opinion that The System lets off criminals on technicalities (undoing all of the hard work they've done), and that "societies deserve the police that they get" (the theory that police adapt their behavior to the environment in which they work).
So, I tend to not think of police as corrupt, per se, but rather as culture that sees itself as an embattled clan, a cadre of brothers, who have the authority of God on their side and, therefore, the Right. As such, they'll tend to defend each other over the lawless pinko anarchists. In other words, they're just defensive, and a lot of wrong gets done because of this.
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If it weren't for my wife, my media consumption would consist entirely of science fiction and WWI/II movies; thanks to my wife, I've been exposed to a much broader swath of media genres -- some of which has been painful, and some of which I've regretted... but in the balance, I think I'm a better person for it. But, then, I possess an abundance of room for improvement.
Actually, this issue is something that bothers me. This increasing ability to narrow our exposure to data which we find unpleasant, to filter out the world so that we only see what we want to see, is vaguely disturbing. I see what I think are consequences of this increasingly in my own country, and evidence of it in the form of rising fundamentalism around the world. I'm afraid that I do it, too. It is limiting and dangerous, and increasingly easy to do.
I don't have a solution, and maybe there isn't one. Perhaps, someday, we'll all live in virtual realities where all of the facts are shaped to what we want to believe, and we'll never have to interact with anybody who disagrees with us, and we'll find that this is the utopia that humans have been searching for.
Maybe.
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However, the threat to civil liberties that Thompson presents is a greater evil than the merely monopolistic practices of Microsoft. So, I hope he loses, but costs Microsoft a lot of money in the process. And then, I hope that Microsoft finds that Thompson has a bunch of unlicensed Microsoft products on his computer. And then bankruptcy for all parties.
But, I think we're better off if Thompson loses.
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I think we need fewer centrists and more extremists from both sides, and we need to restructure congress so that it is more like the South Korean parlament, with fist-fights and lots of shouting. At least then they'd be entertaining.
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The method for calculating the "official" unemployment rate ignores large swaths of people. The numbers that the administration reports is the total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force. This leaves out all marginally attached workers, adds people employed part time only because of economic reasons (IE, they'd work full time if they could). "Marginally attached workers" are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. So, if you're not looking for a job because you're a Widget Assembly specialist, and the local Widget company closed the factory and put you out of a job, you're not counted in the "official" rate. You're also not counted if you're an aircraft engineer and you're working part time at a 7-11 because you can't find work as an aircraft engineer.
That's good news for America's wealthy elite! Here's some news for you: the stock market is not the economy.Furthermore, much of these profits aren't making their way down past the upper class. Wage growth is lagging behind inflation. Labor compensation is lower than it has been in 40 years. Since 2001, as a percentage of the GDP, labor compensation has decreased by 4%. Meanwhile, corporate profits are up by 4%. Yes, the Bush administration has been good for the rich.
Re oil prices:
That's easy: George Bush. By creating instability in the middle east through needlessly invading Iraq. You know, the country that had absolutely nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden, the guy who was responsible for 9/11 and who still hasn't been caught. George Bush, who's gone above and beyond the call of duty to alienating Muslim's around the world with his antagonistic rhetoric, and increasing enrollment in terrorist organizations.Anyway, drilling in Alaska wouldn't have any impact on the price of gas; not for another decade, at least.
I don't know. Do you? Do they carry around little Al Qaeda membership cards? Or are they de-facto terrorists by virtue of being muslim, or foreign? It is certainly true that we're killing a lot of people, and some of them are bound to be insurgents. However, as we learned in Vietnam (you remember Vietnam, don't you?) you can carpet bomb a country into the stone age and kill thousands upon thousands of people, and still not win. I think that your definition of "winning" as killing a lot of Arabs is flawed.Things are getting worse, not better, in Iraq, and Afganistan has even gotten worse in recent years. We wouldn't be in Iraq if it hadn't been for Bush's war mongering, and we could have a stabilized Afganistan if Bush hadn't gotten us over-committed. We're in a weak position militarily, because both N. Korea and Iran know we can't afford to invade either of them while we're mired in Iraq, and we don't get much support on the world stage because of Bush's unilateral posturing.
But, just because sucks as a president, it doesn't prove he's a crook who steals elections. That evidence is in the 2004 Ohio polling discrepancies and stories like this.
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Fewer and fewer people that I know even own a desktop computer any more; most have a set-up similar to my own: a couple of laptops and a file/print server in the basement. In fact, the only desktop use that I personally encounter any more is at work.
I regularly use my laptop when I don't have an internet connection, for whatever reason, and being dependent on some network storage would severely cramp my style. People synchronize their laptops with network storage for a reason.
Someday, when internet access is ubiquitous, I'll buy into replacing desktop apps with distributed (in whatever form) apps, but I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we're even close. And, to be frank, while Google has some outstanding applications, the word processor and spreadsheet aren't even close to adequate for non-trivial use.
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Are you kidding? The "smoke pot" plank is the best thing they have going.
Seriously, though; if you buy into the Libertarian philosophy, you pretty much have to buy into it whole hog, or else you're just being a hypocrite. Since illegal drug use is a victimless crime (more victimless than, say, handgun ownership -- IMO), it is perfectly consistent with Libertarian ideals. And however much I disagree with Libertarians, IME they do tend to be consistent and have better than average rationality.
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Well, you don't know me, so you can be forgiven (and pitied, but that's another issue)... but we've had a Dyson for the past couple of years, and it has been the best vacuum we've ever had. It seems to clean better, but I haven't done any empirical experiments. The things my wife and like most about the machine all have to do with user interface:
- No bag. This was our first bagless vacuum, so I don't know if Dyson is better than others, but not having to change bags, and not having to track down and buy bags, rocks.
- The design is outstanding... the canister detaches from the vacuum, and a trigger on the handle causes the bottom to drop open. You detach it, hold it over the trash, and pull the trigger.
- It certainly fills up faster than our previous Panasonic vacuum, which had a bag, which makes me suspect that we're picking up more dirt.
- There are dozens of little, well thought-out features, like the fact that the upper pin holding the cord twists out of the way and the whole coil comes off -- you still have to wind the cord back when you're done, but there's no unwinding.
- The hose for the extension being built into the handle is really cool.
- It is smart about turning off the suction and beater when the handle is in the full-upright position
- Having a bagless system means you can see how full your vacuum is -- you don't have to guess
There are things we don't like about it (it can be tricky to get the canister to re-seat correctly; the hose-in-handle thing is cool, but it makes the resulting "wand" really big), but it is, by far, the best vacuum cleaner we've ever had, and when this one dies, we'll be buying another.--- SER
That's a tough choice, though, when you're pitching to the /. crowd: go for the geeky media reference, or the geeky science reference?
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I have a PS2, and was on track to get the PS3; I chose instead to buy an XBox 360, because the price of the base system is $299, about half the price of a PS3. What a mistake.
The controller is cabled, so of course I had to buy a wireless controller for another $40 -- I knew about this and was expecting that extra cost. However, when I got the 360 home, I discovered that it comes with an RCA jack video hookup -- my entertainment system is entirely S-Video, so I had to drop another $40 on a proprietary XBox S-Video cable. Then, since you can't save any game data without either the memory card or the hard drive, I bought a memory card for $30. The kicker was when I discovered that you can't play regular XBox games without the hard drive! That's another $99 bucks for a paltry 20GB. So, by now I've spent $510 on the XBox system, and I didn't even get a high-density DVD (HD DVD or Blueray) drive out of it. I should have just spent the extra $90 and gotten a PS3, which comes with a hard drive, a Blueray drive, AND a wireless controller.
The 360 the first, and last, MicroSoft gaming console I'm going to buy, unless Sony drops out of the business. Sony's no saint of a company, but I didn't save enough money on the 360 to make it worth the time, and effort, of having to track down all of the extra crap I had to buy to actually play a game. Saying that the 360 is cheaper than the PS3 is not exactly a lie, but when you factor in all of the extra cost of the XBox, the price difference isn't all that big. And if having a high-capacity DVD is important, then you don't save any money at all on the 360.
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The point is that there is a decent image manipulation tool for Linux that does work in 16 and 32 bpp mode.
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A-fricken'-men.
Mod parent up. Pleeeease.
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"An infinite number of Linux drivers were created this week."
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I'm not going to claim a direct causal relationship, but you might consider that the United States, with its vaunted privatized healthcare system, ranks 42nd in life expectancy among the countries of the world. When I did research on this a few years ago, 80% of the countries that came in with longer life expectancies than the US had some form of universal health care coverage.
On a more anecdotal note, I've waited hours in an emergency room in the US to get broken bones taken care of, so I call bullshit on claims of how the US medical system is oh-so-efficient and effective and superior to socialized systems. On top of that, since we have organizations (insurance companies, HMOs) actively working to penalize for and dissuade you from spending money on health care, I also call bullshit on any claim that you're getting the best care money can buy in the US.
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I'm baffled by the number of people who seem to have trouble with Gentoo. In my experience, as long as you keep the tilde keywords out of your make.conf and don't just blindly use "-U", Gentoo packages require fewer dependency upgrades than RPM. I use Gentoo on my servers and laptops, and CentOS (RPM) at work, and I have more trouble with updates triggering deep dependency cascades on the CentOS box than on the Gentoo boxes. Heck, I get uptimes in weeks on my laptop, and I've got "~x86" in there and upgrade that every couple of days or so on that.
I must just be exceptionally smart. Or lucky.
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Ok: how about the fact that the OS he developed is a bloated, buggy piece of crap? How about the shitty security of the OS his company produces? How about the fact that his company has been -- for as long as I can remember -- unable to meet their deadlines? How about the fact that his company assumes that the customers are criminals, until proven innocent? How about the fact that his company seems to spend more time trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of the customers, than actually fixing things? How about the fact that the US is a democracy, and Microsoft is a dictatorship -- a dictatorship where you don't have to worry about pissing off other people in your industry? How about the fact that the company he ran has been convicted of a crime (being a monopoly)?
Man. There are more reasons for Gates to not be president than I have time to write about. But that would be rich, wouldn't it? Talk about America being run by corporations. We've got enough trouble with no-bid contracts in the US without putting another crook in office.
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