I looked into this program, you need to determine how much printing you're going to do as you have to commit to a certain amount of printing you'll do (ink you'll buy).
The Xerox ink is expensive, so you DO pay for the printer that way. If you fall below the quota, they charge you $100/mo. At that rate, you'd pay for the printer in about 2 years anyway.
There is cheaper ink but you can't use it if you sign up for this program. Since you have to send in the monthly reports from the printer, you can't buy just the minimum amount of ink from Xerox and the rest generic - as the printer reports how much ink was consumed and your agreement specifies that ALL ink must be purchased from them. Not that they're wrong in doing this, they ARE supplying the printer for free, but just pointing out that it doesn't work out financially for all situations.
In our situation, we determined that we'd be better off just buying the printer. Pretty good printer overall, though.
I've got the Phaser 8200 that I use for producing our short-run marketing materials.
It's not really a laser printer (in that it doesn't use toner). It uses a solid ink technology - think 'melting large crayons.'
The quality is pretty good, but it depends on what you want to do. The unit we got has network printing built in, and will do doublesided printing automatically.
It is fairly cheap to operate. (you can get cheaper ink sticks at www.inktechnologies.com) and has a decent quality output. It doesn't do halftoning, but instead uses a diffusion style dot pattern to mix colors. For the most part that's not a problem, but don't expect to print areas of very light color without seeing dots. (like light gray panels, etc)
It will print on card-stock as well (but you have to manually feed it - which means you can't auto-doubleside print)
The print speed is pretty good, but if you haven't used it in a while, the warmup takes quite a few minutes (has to melt some of the ink).
Replacing the ink-sticks is fantastic. You just open it up and drop it in the slot. No mess. (again, think 'large block-like crayon')
The unit accepts Postscript or PCL and can even accept jobs via email or ftp (runs its own little ftp server, or can check a pop3 mailbox). There's a small web-server on the device that lets you check print status, get accounting (ink used, etc) and set other properties.
Some of the disadvantages: Since it's a solid ink - the color doesn't permeate the paper (like a professional print). If you fold the paper and there is an area of color there, the color will 'break' as the surface of the paper breaks (small white lines). Additionally, if you press hard enough, you can get it to smudge.
It only prints to within about.25 inch of the edge of 8.5x11 paper (sorry, don't run A4 so I don't have the measurements for that) - but when you run legal size paper, it only will print about 12" (leaving 1" top and bottom unprintable)
--
Overall I'm pretty happy with the printer, as it wasn't horribly expensive (as these things go).
I mentioned that you can get cheaper ink than directly from Xerox. So far the cheaper ink works fairly well, but I think it may have a little bit more dot-gain than the Xerox sticks did. This results in small lines getting just a little fatter. I'd have to switch back to the Xerox sticks to be sure, but I don't remember some of the recurring jobs I print looking exactly as they do now back when I was running the Xerox sticks. Your results might be different.
Can you give a better definition of what you mean by high volume.
500 flyers for the sunday service each week or 10,000 11x17 double-sided brochures every week.
Do you have any special requirements? Must print on paper type ______. Must handle these sizes? Doublesided printing in single pass? Do you care: postscript/PCL?
I would guess that it has to do with the fact that Apple is the sole supplier of Apple hardware. So a problem with Powerbook drives is more likely to affect a larger percentage of the total users than would an incompatibility between Windows and a particular brand of 3rd party UPS (as per your example).
Then again there's those of us that can run both sides of the fence effectively. I'm a graphic designer and can sling servlets/JSP/PHP/Perl/etc.
Unfortunately, most places don't believe we exist... so their postings are for someone to do one or the other. Luckily I have a job right now that I get to do both... but if anything happened to make me look for work, I'd probably have to choose to be just one.
"... you need to interbreed them. If they can produce male and female fertile offsprings, then they are same species."
I saw something on Animal Planet the other day where a baby Tiger-Lion mix was born and was fertile. They noted how this was extremely uncommon... but it seems that it can happen which means the above test isn't 100% accurate.
Re: didn't mean to offend math majors
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
I wasn't trying to imply that math majors should be able to do arithmetic in their heads. I was using that example to illustrate that I'm aware that mathematical knowledge and the ability to do calculations in one's head are separate things. And that I wouldn't assume that because one cannot do math in one's head, it doesn't imply that they aren't smart, or don't understand mathematics.
My original point wasn't about doing math in one's head. It was that the other person seemed to be unaware that doing a (simple) calculation like that was even a possibility. I was using my wife as the example that even though she might not do something like that in her head, that she would recognize that it is entirely possible that someone could.
Fer cryin out loud, I knew slashdot was filled with techno-snobs
In this case that would be you.
I didn't make any generalizations about (as you put it) "Those stupid people who work for minimum wage". That was an assumption you were making about my post.
My post was that I simply had an experience with ONE person who happened to be a clerk (hence why I had the occasion to have this particular transaction involving money/math/making change)
I could have shared a story about moronic things I've done, or moronic things I've seen/heard from six-figure-salaried upper level management... BUT those wouldn't have been relevant to this topic (which incidentally is about making change).
The fact that you take one post from me to assume that I am saying "Gee, look how dumb all these people are" is more a statement about you than me.
For what it's worth, I don't hold cashiers in contempt. I also don't hold someone in contempt for not being able to do math in their head. My point wasn't about "Look. I can add/subtract better than this guy." It was about the fact that this person (again, not all cashiers in general - I feel I should be clear about this since you seem confused) seemed to be unaware that it is possible to even know the amount without the help of the computer. For example, I don't speak German, but I recognize that it is possible that other people could. I understand that speaking German is a knowable thing, even though I can't do it. Same way that doing math is a knowable thing, even if this guy (again, not all cashiers - do you understand) cannot do it.
By the way, in case I wasn't clear (as you seem a little confused): I wasn't talking about all cashiers (or all people making minimum wage - which is another association you made.) I was talking about one person who happened to be a cashier.
Maybe some of the other posts had a tone like you describe, but your reply was to mine, so in this instance your "defender-of-the-innocent" nobility is unwarranted.
Re:Yeah Right...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't blame people for not being able to do math in their head. I know some smart people that have trouble doing calculations without paper. My wife was a math major in college, and she sometimes has problems doing calculations in her head.
The thing that struck me about this guy was that it wasn't even that he couldn't do the math in his head... he wasn't even aware that there was something that he could do to arrive at the answer. It's as if he didn't know that math even existed.
Re:Yeah Right...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 5, Funny
One time at a grocery/conveneience store, I had a total come to something like $1.87
Wanting to minimize some of the change in my pocket, I gave the clerk $2.00 in bills and 12 cents.
The clerk tried to hand it back, saying "it's only $1.87"
I said, "yes, but this way, I'll get a quarter back in change."
He took the money, punched it into the cash register, and as he handed me back the quarter, he said "How did you know that?"
It's funny (in a VERY sad way) that to him, the cash register was this magic oracle that told him what to do, and that it didn't occur to him that what he was doing was even knowable without its use.
Not to belittle the store (as I'm anxiously awaiting the Windows version) but you can't expect that these numbers will remain constant once the newness wears off.
The first press release was that over 1 million sold in the first week. The second release was that over 2 million sold in 16 days. Using those numbers it would indicate that sales are slowing down, otherwise it should have been two million in 14 days.
Is this statistically accurate? No. My point is that two weeks is just WAY TOO SMALL a sample to determine the long term economic viability of this project.
I'd like to see it succeed, as I've felt the industry always needed something to replace the 45 single. Good luck to Apple, but to say "if they did this for a year" is one huge if.
version 3.2 is now available on their website for download for free.
It's not the most advanced, but learning the concepts is the important thing - not learning the exact intricacies of current software. By the time the author is out of school, the landscape of features will have changed anyway, but knowing the basics of how to animate and model will translate to any package.
I agree the spider owner was a wank... but this is human nature.
This is the exact reason we have things like traffic lights. Unfortunately, people just can't be trusted to act responsibly (in some situations) on their own.
So you are right, they were being stupid... but the fact that you opened it up for people to hit means that you're going to get your share of jerks who won't play by the rules and you need to account for that.
From the article: Schuster wouldn't comment on whether or not he has sent out any copyright infringement notices, and he said that some Internet patents have been frivolous -- but not his.
When the people responsible for reporting the news can't even bother to get their facts right, how can we expect that the average person on the street will get any understanding of these issues.
He wouldn't sent out copyright infringement notices, because it is a patent.
Actually, there is a pretty compelling reason for any business to have *some* sort of site - the yellow pages.
Rates to advertise in the yellow pages are pretty high for small businesses, but it *does* generate interest. A web site is a great way for a business to "extend" their yellow page ad. Yes, it only works for the percentage of people who have web access, but it still can be worth it.
Put your URL in your yellow page ad, and that way you can have a small ad that can expand to 10 (virtual) pages (for a certain percentage of your viewers). Most businesses that I've talked to that have yellow page ads were able to see that value very quickly... especially if compared to moving to a bigger yellow page ad.
According to their site, it can help you finish that hollywood screenplay you've wanted to write, but put off because of bad keyboard layouts. Yeah, that's what was stopping me.
Remember back in the **OLD** days when Atari, Commodore and Apple games weren't launched from the OS, they were loaded from a boot floppy because we really didn't have OS's back then? (Unless you purchased CP/M, of course.)
Well, Knoppix has demonstrated an absolutely ridiculous level of competence at autodetecting hardware, and since . Would the gaming industry consider the possibility of using Linux as a development platform in a trend back to using bootable disks for games?
For those systems, the interactive basic interpreter would probably be considered what most people thought of as the OS.
If I remember correctly, a number of C64 games were launched directly from the basic interpreter. LOAD "MYPROGRAM, 8, 1" or something like that.
As far as the Atari, the reason you directly booted into games was that with only 64k of memory in the system, you *needed* to displace the basic interpreter and free up 16k of RAM that it occupied. It still loaded a stub of the DOS (for disk access) and then would autoload any file named AUTORUN.SYS
Additionally, since the OS was ROM based, the systems were "instant on" (or very close). So shutting down the system to play a game (and vice versa) wasn't a huge deal.
Nowadays, I have a computer with 512Mb ram, and it takes a little bit to boot into the OS, so shutting down the system just to play a game seems stupid. As another poster pointed out, thats what consoles are for. For a general purpose computer, not being able to launch games alongside with other apps would be annoying.
This completely cuts out some of the actual usefulness of the current mail system.
I can compose an email on my Palm if I want to - without an internet connection and have it automatically send once it is connected.
As for the GIF/JPEG thing... there are blind users who use email. In order for them to use email, you'd need some sort of software that could extract the code from the image. If you have that, then you have the ability for spammers to still send you unsolicited info.
--
Not that the system for email can't stand revision, but making email into the web would be a step back.
I agree that the skills you point out are good to know... but I would disagree that they belong in an intro level book.
For the person who doesn't even know how to make a DB connection, teaching connection pooling is going to be a failure. They need to be able to build their own "Hello World"s so that they can get a basic understanding of what the pieces are, and what they do, and how to manipulate them.
Once they know the basics of building a dynamic site, THEN they can move on to performance enhancements. If anything, a mention of these topics as things you should learn would be appropriate, but I think if you include them, you lose the ability to use it as an introductory material.
Since microwaves don't take all that long to cook anyway, I don't see a huge need for it to start without me.
But if you're going to the trouble of networking your microwave, how about having it do something useful.
Put a barcode reader on it so that when I pull out the box of frozen Mac and Cheese, I can scan it and have it lookup the correct cook cycle for an oven of that wattage.
Or for these things that require XX minutes on low then XX on high... it could just figure that out by itself and set itself accordingly.
A small LCD display could even display instructions at certain points in the cycle (beeping to get my attention) "Remove cover and stir, then press the START button to continue cooking."
1) I wasn't talking about analog radio... I was talking about a potential sales service for the digital radio services. Not sure how the extra info could be transmitted with analog.
-- Not sure how the "communication" back would work. I wouldn't envision sending the credit card info from the car. Even if it didn't "buy" the song right away. If I could hit a button and have the song put in a "shopping cart" - I could then go to the service's site when I'm at a computer and enter my CC and download.
Even a "smart radio" that would just remember the song "ID" and send it to my house via bluetooth when I pull in the garage would be cool. That way there wouldn't need to be ANY upstream communication as it would just use your computer's internet connection.
Of course, having a bluetooth enabled carwould be useful for having the car send me reminders for oil changes, download maintenence records relevant to my current mileage, etc.
The eMarker website seems to be down (gone?) so I can't check the list of available stations that keep compatible logs.
I would doubt that some of the stations I listen to are on the system as they're independently owned (not part of the ClearChannel megacorp).
Seeing that it's just a timestamp, you'd think that any station should be able to handle it, as long as they retain good logs.
Luckily I've been able to call the station up in the past, and they've been able to tell me the song, but only if I can call when the same DJ is on air (college radio). If I can't call until much later, then the chance of finding out the song diminishes.
The second part of the idea was that this would turn music into an impulse buy. Right now $15 CDs aren't impulse buys for me. I *really* need to know I'm going to like it before I drop cash. At $1 a song right then and there in my car, it's not that much different than going through the KrispyKreme drive-through.
... music through the air. [snip] I hear it's called 'radio' or something.
I know your post is meant as humor, but it reminded me of something I was thinking about on the way into work this morning.
I was listening to the radio and there was a song I liked - don't know the name, don't know by who. There was no DJ break at the time, and by the time there would be one, I would no longer be in the car... so not much chance of finding out who it was.
Now *THAT* would be something that I would like... potentially as a way of selling this new digital satellite radio crap.
When I hear a song... I can click the 'buy this song' button on the radio. It doesn't even need to download it to the car (though I suppose it could). It could just charge me a reasonable fee (maybe 0.75 - 1.00) and make a good MP3/OGG available for download in my "account" on the site.
That way, music would become an impulse buy. Same way they leave the candy bars next to the cash register at the supermarket.
See/Hear it... want it... buy it. (R) oh yeah. that would be the way.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked into this program, you need to determine how much printing you're going to do as you have to commit to a certain amount of printing you'll do (ink you'll buy).
The Xerox ink is expensive, so you DO pay for the printer that way. If you fall below the quota, they charge you $100/mo. At that rate, you'd pay for the printer in about 2 years anyway.
There is cheaper ink but you can't use it if you sign up for this program. Since you have to send in the monthly reports from the printer, you can't buy just the minimum amount of ink from Xerox and the rest generic - as the printer reports how much ink was consumed and your agreement specifies that ALL ink must be purchased from them. Not that they're wrong in doing this, they ARE supplying the printer for free, but just pointing out that it doesn't work out financially for all situations.
In our situation, we determined that we'd be better off just buying the printer. Pretty good printer overall, though.
I've got the Phaser 8200 that I use for producing our short-run marketing materials.
.25 inch of the edge of 8.5x11 paper (sorry, don't run A4 so I don't have the measurements for that) - but when you run legal size paper, it only will print about 12" (leaving 1" top and bottom unprintable)
It's not really a laser printer (in that it doesn't use toner). It uses a solid ink technology - think 'melting large crayons.'
The quality is pretty good, but it depends on what you want to do. The unit we got has network printing built in, and will do doublesided printing automatically.
It is fairly cheap to operate. (you can get cheaper ink sticks at www.inktechnologies.com) and has a decent quality output. It doesn't do halftoning, but instead uses a diffusion style dot pattern to mix colors. For the most part that's not a problem, but don't expect to print areas of very light color without seeing dots. (like light gray panels, etc)
It will print on card-stock as well (but you have to manually feed it - which means you can't auto-doubleside print)
The print speed is pretty good, but if you haven't used it in a while, the warmup takes quite a few minutes (has to melt some of the ink).
Replacing the ink-sticks is fantastic. You just open it up and drop it in the slot. No mess. (again, think 'large block-like crayon')
The unit accepts Postscript or PCL and can even accept jobs via email or ftp (runs its own little ftp server, or can check a pop3 mailbox). There's a small web-server on the device that lets you check print status, get accounting (ink used, etc) and set other properties.
Some of the disadvantages:
Since it's a solid ink - the color doesn't permeate the paper (like a professional print). If you fold the paper and there is an area of color there, the color will 'break' as the surface of the paper breaks (small white lines). Additionally, if you press hard enough, you can get it to smudge.
It only prints to within about
--
Overall I'm pretty happy with the printer, as it wasn't horribly expensive (as these things go).
I mentioned that you can get cheaper ink than directly from Xerox. So far the cheaper ink works fairly well, but I think it may have a little bit more dot-gain than the Xerox sticks did. This results in small lines getting just a little fatter. I'd have to switch back to the Xerox sticks to be sure, but I don't remember some of the recurring jobs I print looking exactly as they do now back when I was running the Xerox sticks. Your results might be different.
Can you give a better definition of what you mean by high volume.
500 flyers for the sunday service each week
or
10,000 11x17 double-sided brochures every week.
Do you have any special requirements?
Must print on paper type ______.
Must handle these sizes?
Doublesided printing in single pass?
Do you care: postscript/PCL?
A little more info would be helpful.
I would guess that it has to do with the fact that Apple is the sole supplier of Apple hardware. So a problem with Powerbook drives is more likely to affect a larger percentage of the total users than would an incompatibility between Windows and a particular brand of 3rd party UPS (as per your example).
Then again there's those of us that can run both sides of the fence effectively. I'm a graphic designer and can sling servlets/JSP/PHP/Perl/etc.
... so their postings are for someone to do one or the other. Luckily I have a job right now that I get to do both ... but if anything happened to make me look for work, I'd probably have to choose to be just one.
Unfortunately, most places don't believe we exist
"... you need to interbreed them. If they can produce male and female fertile offsprings, then they are same species."
... but it seems that it can happen which means the above test isn't 100% accurate.
I saw something on Animal Planet the other day where a baby Tiger-Lion mix was born and was fertile. They noted how this was extremely uncommon
Karma Points Come Only For Geeky Slashdotters
(Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species)
I wasn't trying to imply that math majors should be able to do arithmetic in their heads. I was using that example to illustrate that I'm aware that mathematical knowledge and the ability to do calculations in one's head are separate things. And that I wouldn't assume that because one cannot do math in one's head, it doesn't imply that they aren't smart, or don't understand mathematics.
My original point wasn't about doing math in one's head. It was that the other person seemed to be unaware that doing a (simple) calculation like that was even a possibility. I was using my wife as the example that even though she might not do something like that in her head, that she would recognize that it is entirely possible that someone could.
Fer cryin out loud, I knew slashdot was filled with techno-snobs
... BUT those wouldn't have been relevant to this topic (which incidentally is about making change).
In this case that would be you.
I didn't make any generalizations about (as you put it) "Those stupid people who work for minimum wage". That was an assumption you were making about my post.
My post was that I simply had an experience with ONE person who happened to be a clerk (hence why I had the occasion to have this particular transaction involving money/math/making change)
I could have shared a story about moronic things I've done, or moronic things I've seen/heard from six-figure-salaried upper level management
The fact that you take one post from me to assume that I am saying "Gee, look how dumb all these people are" is more a statement about you than me.
For what it's worth, I don't hold cashiers in contempt. I also don't hold someone in contempt for not being able to do math in their head. My point wasn't about "Look. I can add/subtract better than this guy." It was about the fact that this person (again, not all cashiers in general - I feel I should be clear about this since you seem confused) seemed to be unaware that it is possible to even know the amount without the help of the computer. For example, I don't speak German, but I recognize that it is possible that other people could. I understand that speaking German is a knowable thing, even though I can't do it. Same way that doing math is a knowable thing, even if this guy (again, not all cashiers - do you understand) cannot do it.
By the way, in case I wasn't clear (as you seem a little confused): I wasn't talking about all cashiers (or all people making minimum wage - which is another association you made.) I was talking about one person who happened to be a cashier.
Maybe some of the other posts had a tone like you describe, but your reply was to mine, so in this instance your "defender-of-the-innocent" nobility is unwarranted.
I don't blame people for not being able to do math in their head. I know some smart people that have trouble doing calculations without paper. My wife was a math major in college, and she sometimes has problems doing calculations in her head.
... he wasn't even aware that there was something that he could do to arrive at the answer. It's as if he didn't know that math even existed.
The thing that struck me about this guy was that it wasn't even that he couldn't do the math in his head
One time at a grocery/conveneience store, I had a total come to something like $1.87
Wanting to minimize some of the change in my pocket, I gave the clerk $2.00 in bills and 12 cents.
The clerk tried to hand it back, saying "it's only $1.87"
I said, "yes, but this way, I'll get a quarter back in change."
He took the money, punched it into the cash register, and as he handed me back the quarter, he said "How did you know that?"
It's funny (in a VERY sad way) that to him, the cash register was this magic oracle that told him what to do, and that it didn't occur to him that what he was doing was even knowable without its use.
Not to belittle the store (as I'm anxiously awaiting the Windows version) but you can't expect that these numbers will remain constant once the newness wears off.
.
The first press release was that over 1 million sold in the first week. The second release was that over 2 million sold in 16 days. Using those numbers it would indicate that sales are slowing down, otherwise it should have been two million in 14 days.
Is this statistically accurate? No. My point is that two weeks is just WAY TOO SMALL a sample to determine the long term economic viability of this project.
I'd like to see it succeed, as I've felt the industry always needed something to replace the 45 single. Good luck to Apple, but to say "if they did this for a year" is one huge if
version 3.2 is now available on their website for download for free.
It's not the most advanced, but learning the concepts is the important thing - not learning the exact intricacies of current software. By the time the author is out of school, the landscape of features will have changed anyway, but knowing the basics of how to animate and model will translate to any package.
I agree the spider owner was a wank ... but this is human nature.
... but the fact that you opened it up for people to hit means that you're going to get your share of jerks who won't play by the rules and you need to account for that.
This is the exact reason we have things like traffic lights. Unfortunately, people just can't be trusted to act responsibly (in some situations) on their own.
So you are right, they were being stupid
When the people responsible for reporting the news can't even bother to get their facts right, how can we expect that the average person on the street will get any understanding of these issues.
He wouldn't sent out copyright infringement notices, because it is a patent.
Actually, there is a pretty compelling reason for any business to have *some* sort of site - the yellow pages.
... especially if compared to moving to a bigger yellow page ad.
Rates to advertise in the yellow pages are pretty high for small businesses, but it *does* generate interest. A web site is a great way for a business to "extend" their yellow page ad. Yes, it only works for the percentage of people who have web access, but it still can be worth it.
Put your URL in your yellow page ad, and that way you can have a small ad that can expand to 10 (virtual) pages (for a certain percentage of your viewers). Most businesses that I've talked to that have yellow page ads were able to see that value very quickly
Maybe you need the alphaboard.
According to their site, it can help you finish that hollywood screenplay you've wanted to write, but put off because of bad keyboard layouts. Yeah, that's what was stopping me.
I'm not going to argue that anime doesn't have a geek fanbase, but your reasoning is logically flawed.
what you are saying is:
Anime fanbase is largely geek
Therefore, most geeks like anime.
That's not necessarily true.
See this example.
The people who work at my desk are largely geeks.
Therefore, most geeks work at my desk.
See the flaw.
For those systems, the interactive basic interpreter would probably be considered what most people thought of as the OS.
If I remember correctly, a number of C64 games were launched directly from the basic interpreter.
LOAD "MYPROGRAM, 8, 1"
or something like that.
As far as the Atari, the reason you directly booted into games was that with only 64k of memory in the system, you *needed* to displace the basic interpreter and free up 16k of RAM that it occupied. It still loaded a stub of the DOS (for disk access) and then would autoload any file named AUTORUN.SYS
Additionally, since the OS was ROM based, the systems were "instant on" (or very close). So shutting down the system to play a game (and vice versa) wasn't a huge deal.
Nowadays, I have a computer with 512Mb ram, and it takes a little bit to boot into the OS, so shutting down the system just to play a game seems stupid. As another poster pointed out, thats what consoles are for. For a general purpose computer, not being able to launch games alongside with other apps would be annoying.
This completely cuts out some of the actual usefulness of the current mail system.
... there are blind users who use email. In order for them to use email, you'd need some sort of software that could extract the code from the image. If you have that, then you have the ability for spammers to still send you unsolicited info.
I can compose an email on my Palm if I want to - without an internet connection and have it automatically send once it is connected.
As for the GIF/JPEG thing
--
Not that the system for email can't stand revision, but making email into the web would be a step back.
I agree that the skills you point out are good to know ... but I would disagree that they belong in an intro level book.
For the person who doesn't even know how to make a DB connection, teaching connection pooling is going to be a failure. They need to be able to build their own "Hello World"s so that they can get a basic understanding of what the pieces are, and what they do, and how to manipulate them.
Once they know the basics of building a dynamic site, THEN they can move on to performance enhancements. If anything, a mention of these topics as things you should learn would be appropriate, but I think if you include them, you lose the ability to use it as an introductory material.
Since microwaves don't take all that long to cook anyway, I don't see a huge need for it to start without me.
... it could just figure that out by itself and set itself accordingly.
But if you're going to the trouble of networking your microwave, how about having it do something useful.
Put a barcode reader on it so that when I pull out the box of frozen Mac and Cheese, I can scan it and have it lookup the correct cook cycle for an oven of that wattage.
Or for these things that require XX minutes on low then XX on high
A small LCD display could even display instructions at certain points in the cycle (beeping to get my attention) "Remove cover and stir, then press the START button to continue cooking."
1) I wasn't talking about analog radio ... I was talking about a potential sales service for the digital radio services. Not sure how the extra info could be transmitted with analog.
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Not sure how the "communication" back would work. I wouldn't envision sending the credit card info from the car. Even if it didn't "buy" the song right away. If I could hit a button and have the song put in a "shopping cart" - I could then go to the service's site when I'm at a computer and enter my CC and download.
Even a "smart radio" that would just remember the song "ID" and send it to my house via bluetooth when I pull in the garage would be cool. That way there wouldn't need to be ANY upstream communication as it would just use your computer's internet connection.
Of course, having a bluetooth enabled carwould be useful for having the car send me reminders for oil changes, download maintenence records relevant to my current mileage, etc.
The eMarker website seems to be down (gone?) so I can't check the list of available stations that keep compatible logs.
I would doubt that some of the stations I listen to are on the system as they're independently owned (not part of the ClearChannel megacorp).
Seeing that it's just a timestamp, you'd think that any station should be able to handle it, as long as they retain good logs.
Luckily I've been able to call the station up in the past, and they've been able to tell me the song, but only if I can call when the same DJ is on air (college radio). If I can't call until much later, then the chance of finding out the song diminishes.
The second part of the idea was that this would turn music into an impulse buy. Right now $15 CDs aren't impulse buys for me. I *really* need to know I'm going to like it before I drop cash. At $1 a song right then and there in my car, it's not that much different than going through the KrispyKreme drive-through.
I know your post is meant as humor, but it reminded me of something I was thinking about on the way into work this morning.
I was listening to the radio and there was a song I liked - don't know the name, don't know by who. There was no DJ break at the time, and by the time there would be one, I would no longer be in the car
Now *THAT* would be something that I would like
When I hear a song
That way, music would become an impulse buy. Same way they leave the candy bars next to the cash register at the supermarket.
See/Hear it
oh yeah. that would be the way.