yeah, I don't recall how it was spelled (I know I have a box of them here somewhere, but they're behind all kinds of other youth memory crap), and I don't know if they were the Philips equivalents - but they appear similar to the Denshi Block stuff and they were good fun (no corroded bits that I ever encountered).
Both, at least, allowed anybody to build simple to reasonably-complex electronic devices without the need for either A. soldering or B. pushing the components into little metal strips of a 'base board', leading to all kinds of problems, especially at younger ages.
The major down side that I ran into was that whatever you built - it ended up rather big. The blocks where maybe 2cm on each side for the simple components (a speaker would be 3x3x1 block in size, etc.).
As most of your post hinges on the following... "Can you buy a new Windows PC without the crappy 3rd party software he talks about?" yes, yes you can. However...
"it doesn't change the experience that the bulk of PC users have" Seeing as most people do indeed actually purchase those PCs that have a crapload of OEM stuff tacked on - no, I can't change that experience.. they could, if they shopped for such.
"Could it be that the Control Panel is too confusing, or hard to find? Microsoft can fix a LOT of problems caused by 3rd party software by fixing their own UI, or at least designing it with 3rd party developer's needs in mind." This I can agree with, to an extent. Microsoft don't, unfortunately, have the luxury of doing things right from the beginning; just look at how many people complain about bits and pieces of Vista not working exactly like XP. But they missed the ball on, for example, Security Center. Although it will show you have anti-virus installed and working, it doesn't offer any 'Settings' button that will take you to, say, a list of common settings and an 'advanced settings' option that would take you to the vendor-specific configuration dialog.
However, even if it did, gut feeling tells me that i.e. Norton would happily integrate with that AND 1. add a taskbar icon 2. add a quicklaunch icon 3. add a desktop icon 4. add a start menu entry (top) 5. add a start meun > programs entry 6. add a startup 'welcome' dialog and lord knows what else that thing might do.
Perhaps that, too, is Microsoft's fault - seeing as they don't have a centralized location/etc., developers sought out locations on their own and hey-presto. But at some point those developers have to realize that they're perpetuating a complexity that is at the heart of many users' complaints.. and that it's not (solely) up to Microsoft to change this.. and that might have to start with the users not pointing at Microsoft foremost.
"Then, after all was finally said and done, using the thing was an amazingly frustrating experience, with seemingly endless offers/popups, some masquerading as os-level services, some more obvious overtures to purchase 3rd party software"
I'm sorry - but you are, then, saying that XP sucks because of (as far as I can tell) third party stuff?
Windows XP, without any fancy OEM stuff tacked on, doesn't nag you with seemingly endless offers - the only popups you'll get are the to some annoying 'help bubbles', which others find helpful, and you can turn off either way - the rest of your comment seems to entirely point to third party elements.
That's like saying OS X sucks because after you bought QuickTime 6 Pro and upgraded to OS X Tiger (which has QuickTime 7), QuickTime will once again nag you to upgrade to Pro every first time you run it - and while it's running, taunt you with greyed-out options that were once available to you but are no longer so... until you purchase the Pro upgrade -again-. ( For the curious - back up QuickTime 6, install Tiger, restore. Old stuff, but gosh - if we can blame third party solutions for XP 'sucking' then we can certainly blame same-party solutions for OS X 'sucking', no? )
Windows, in general, has plenty of attack vectors available to you to point out how crappy it is; there's really no need to drag third party stuff into the discussion.
but hold on... you're saying "move forward to something else (or back to XP)". Which 'something else' will magically support all their hardware (I won't bother with software, unless you want to go the Wine / Virtual machine route running XP; in which case - you didn't really move forward at all), then?
Although Vista may not support some hardware that XP did, I daresay that Mac, Linux, BSD support far less hardware (more out of the box, but add drivers/etc. for download).
So if you're saying that "It goes or it don't.", then 'moving forward' is hardly an option for most people -unless- their hardware happens to actually be supported.
anecdotal and to tie in with my subject: my capture card isn't supported in any Linux distro, nor any open source 'media center'-style app. I've asked if they could add support - they pointed the finger at the manufacturer. *shrug*
I'm all for sticking with XP if XP is what a user wants (I have Vista on only 1 machine, and only for development testing purposes), myself, for what it's worth. There's no point in getting Vista, imho, unless you're getting it with a new machine in the first place.
out of curiosity - which application and hardware compatibility issues are you referring to that are -not- the developer's / manufacturer's burden to correct?
If you think the situation of a third party posting videos and the (unintentional) subject of that video becoming targeted in one way or another is hypothetical, you've been living under a rock.
Especially in schools, kids are taking videos of eachother and uploading those to tons of places; and most of the people in those videos aren't too keen on it hitting the web. Not a "zomg the children!" thing - it just happens to be the most common form.
Say the chip supports it, and addressing the chip for WMA takes a dozen lines of code if that; then why -not- support it? As the summary says, that's just crippling the darn thing - and for what reason?
I can think of a few, most involving DRM; but Apple seems to think it perfectly reasonable to tell a user to burn a CD, then rip to MP3, if they want to listen to iTunes-DRM'd tracks on anything other than an iPod.. so surely telling the user that DRM'd WMA's will not play should suffice as far a 'tech support' goes there.
More likely, the chip vendor charges per feature used. They bake a chip that can do A, B, C, and D simply because that's cheaper than baking several different chips (do the math - there's may combinations.) Each thing it does that you license it for costs you $5 on top of a base price. So supporting A, B, D only saves you $5 per chip. That'll add up over a few hundred thousand.
Here I am, enjoying my drunken rave - having a great time, I even leave my phone at home.. no disturbances for me this new years' eve.. just me, my friends, that cute girl I met and jello shots.
A week later, I get fired, because my boss saw a video of it.. turns out the girl was his niece; go fig. Now what video? I don't know - I certainly didn't take any, let alone give it to him. Turns out that somebody else was shooting some video of their friends.. I don't know them, they don't know me, but I sure was in the background of their video.
Not everything is a "babysitter caught doing drugs", but may still be something you don't really want to share with the world for whatever reason; but you don't always have a say in this yourself.
So the solution is not so simple; unless you're saying that the real simple solution is to live puritan life 24/7 so that there is never a chance of anybody, anywhere, catching you doing things that might be perfectly acceptable in the situation you were in, but perhaps not so acceptable to your employer.. parents.. whoever/whatever.
The original/ForTwo, that is (though if I had cash laying around, I'd get a ForFour and a Sportster to go with it); it's already legal in the U.S. and should be officially offered (rather than 'grey market import') Q1 2008.
Or perhaps a Ford Ka, if you do need the 4/5 seats; though at that point, you almost might as well get a regular sedan/hatchback/whatever-as-long-as-it-isn't-an-SUV, imho.
There's many, many cars that are very safe, have a trunk, are cheap, economical, etc. The problem isn't that there aren't such cars; the problem is that people - at least in the U.S. - aren't buying them. Things like... - top speed being lower than 140mph (which is legal, where? oh, right, you were trying to get away from the crazed axe murderer) - acceleration from 0-60 not being lower than 4 seconds (which you need to do, when? ah yes, to accelerate out of the way of the runaway semi) - range being less than 100 miles (because gas stations are so hard to find? Oh right, you like taking your economical car to the Alaskan planes or Utah salt beds; I forgot) - because an SUV would crush you (good luck trying to crush a Smart, though I'm sure the people in the SUV will have a lesser headache - but let's face it.. chicken&egg problem? Makes me wonder why SUV drivers don't just all have MACK trucks by now; lest their explorer gets crushed by an expedition which gets crushed by an excursion and so forth and so on.) - looks. Yes, the typical reason why any economical car - especially electrics - are shot down in the U.S. And when one does look good - hey, fall back to the other 'reasons'.
It's funny watching Americans coming to live here (NL).. some of them are keen to hold on to their big cars. Why's that funny? Stand around in Amsterdam, The Hague, Groningen, Utrecht, etc. and watch one of them try to navigate the streets, or find a parking space. It's extra-hilarious when somebody in a 45km/h car (don't need a driver's license, just a 'moped/scooter' certificate; but obviously you can't go on highways with it) snags a spot that the engine compartment of their SUV wouldn't even fit in.
the problem with myminicity (and indeed most such sites before it) is that they do not consider it spamming. In fact, throwing that URL out as much as you can - on your blog, on forums, in your feeds, by IM and so forth and so on is the whole -point- of that site... as it is visits that cause the 'city' to grow.
Good luck finding rules on where a 'player' is allowed to post the URL(s). Even more luck to you finding a 'report abuse' page or contact address. Good luck getting any response whatsoever from contact@ ( if you do get something, by all means follow up here:\ )
I didn't mean to come across as saying that rootkits (personally I don't consider that SONY thing a rootkit, but I can see how it can certainly aid building actual rootkits via simple viruses/trojans. Then again, if you get one of those, you're mostly screwed anyway.). All I meant was that no company should be able to claim innocence / hide behind a third party software provider's code. They choose to use that code; be it in binary form or otherwise, and thus they should be the ones responsible.
Yes - You don't need to have 5.25" drive now to read back data that you stored onto an 'old' IDE drive 2 years ago. And that's a bad example because you can still get 5.25" drives. 200 years from now when we're working with crystalline storage methods, we won't have to read back from HDD platters.. just from the holographic storage drives that things were transferred to with the last generation of storage devices. Will we still have film projectors 200 years from now? Possibly not.
Whocares - because the formats used to store digital film aren't exactly H.264 or whatever fancyschmancy codec the copyright-infringent care about; google 'digital intermediate'. And yes, those formats do tend to change, but they all remain lossless and, again, things can be transferred with each generation. Will we still know what to do with film 200 years from now? Ahhh.. there's the kicker.. probably, yes.
This is also where the cost comes in - you have to keep upgrading to the latest formats and the latest storage devices to ensure that there will be no 'digital divide', so to speak.
With film, you don't incur this cost. It's lossy in an analog sense, but if somebody looks at a film reel 2,000 years from now - and we assume to still have the same visual system in our watersacks - it will be trivial for them to see, literally, that it is a series of pictures which, in succession, appear to animate. Even if there's no device to play them back then, it would be trivial to build one from scratch using very rudimentary knowledge. With digital, even if you have the latest format and the latest hardware to read the device it's stored on, it is non-trivial for the layman to read this file and be able to put it back into a picture; in fact, it tends to take people with intricate knowledge of the device and the storage format.
Personally I'm all for doing both, costs be damned, if the material is important enough. That said, do we really need to hold on to all material forevermore? Like a history book, it should be enough to retain the highlights (be they positive or negative), and not cling onto minutiae, as a society. Similarly, like family archives, those who believe something to be well worth the preservation for future generations (either within the family or civilization as a whole), will - or at least should - do so on their own and have history prove them right, or wrong.
I'm completely with you on the "nobody but the freakier people are going to notice", and they'll probably have gold-plated, gold-cable, etc. SACD players. Or, if they're really serious, they do away with the gold plating and have a goldsmith permanently goldsolder the wires right onto the board.
That said... the sampling frequency shouldn't be mixed with the signal frequency in the way you mention; e.g. 44.1KHz, divide by 2 (yay Nyquist), ~22KHz is the maximum frequency you can sample. ergo: 96KHz allows you to sample 48KHz signals and nobody can hear 48KHz anyway so what's the point. Ah, true, but... A 400Hz sine wave is now -also- sampled at the 96KHz level. Suddenly, that sine wave is looking twice as smooth.
Think of it like computer graphics. If you have a 320x240 15" display (12" by 9", non-widescreen 4:3), your pixel is going to be nearly 1mm on each side (12*25.4 / 320). A 1600x1200 display will have a pixel that is going to be much smaller, about 1/5th of a mm on each side (12*25.4 / 1600). Now you might not often find any reason to display a dot that is 1/5th of a millimeter at each side. However, if you were to display a large circle on the 320x240 display, it will be blocky. Do so on the 1600x1200 display, and it will appear to be much smoother.
Alternatively, find a piece of music that doesn't seem to do much over 22KHz, and band-limit it so that everything over 22KHz gets cut off anyway. Save this for later playback. Now actually downsample that to 22KHz. Now play back both files; see if you can tell the difference. Again, any high tones over 22KHz are gone anyway, so all you're hearing is the loss in fidelity of the lower-frequency ( 22KHz) signal.
Yes, MicroSD is still smaller. That said, Wikipedia (I guess you consulted Wikipedia) is incorrect in its leading summary. The card is not 0.7mm thick, it is about 1mm thick (0.95mm according to my vernier scale). Funnily enough, the table in the bottom of the Wikipedia article lists 1.0mm as well. The 0.7mm seems to come from the connector part.
So to adjust for your calculations... MicroSD = 15*11*1.0 = 165 Intel's thingy = 18*12*1.8 = 388.8
388.8 / 165 ~= 2.36
Anyway, the more important bit is that it does have the IDE controller already on it... go add the controller chip for the SD standard to a device and you'll add a nice bit of volume as well:)
Sure, why not? I think it's perfectly reasonably to warn not only the casual reader but even the administrators that what they're doing may not be the smartest thing in the world.
A major complaint with Vista is that it tends to pop up the UAC dialog for a lot of things - so people tend to run into it several times per day (personally it's only several times per week but, again, it's just a devtest machine for me right now.. though during setup I still only hit it a few times; just that the times I hit it were perhaps questionable..). If the frequency was much reduced, the complaints would easily go away.
The other part is that Windows users never really had to do any of this. Ask a Linux user how often they use sudo to automatically grant them the rights of another user; it's equivalent to a prompt except that you answered it pre-emptively: why yes, I would like to execute the following command with e.g. superuser privileges.
I have Vista running on one of my machines, as I need to be able to test on it.
And no, I'm not referring to Vista's behavior of demanding Admin rights for a ton of things.. though I don't have a direct problem with that.. if somebody does, have them run as administrator. I'm only referring to popping up a big fat warning when you are (or something else is) about to do something to a critical system file where the change could very well leave the machine unbootable without a boot or rescue disc. As long as the machine can still boot on its own and load a smidgen of code that can restore whatever other system files - let an administrator play with those freely.. but files that completely prevent a bootup without external means should be very closely guarded.
what of the users who did lose valuable computer time due to this problem? The proverbial kid handing in their homework (or dissertation paper or whatever), for example. Apologizing and willing to pay for a third party tech support service (e.g. Geek Squad) is nice and all, but does that cover damages incurred? doubtful. Perhaps that EULA will finally get a test.
As for the bug itself... the installer code is NSIS script; quite powerful, but you do need to know what you're doing. Especially with a command such as "Delete", I can't help but wonder who failed to RTFM (TFM reads, as they point out, that "Delete" requires a full path to be safe or else it expects the path to be root) and instead made an -assumption- on how it would work.
Now, to their defense, NSIS is also a little inconsistent (RMDir needs/r to be recursive, but DeleteRegKey needs/ifempty to NOT be recursive; whatthe.) and I've wiped my entire root myself while developing an installer with it, although via a more complex bug.. NSIS simply doesn't have any built-in "you dumbass"-protection like most commercial installers.
Although I think it's nice of them to say that they're not blaming Windows for their own mistake, I do honestly think that Windows should protect such vital files at all cost - including against Administrator level process (e.g. a prompt "you dumbass - are you sure?" will do).
I agree with the parent.. presume one might summarize fair use in this case as "you are authorized to make copies for personal use".
The personal use copies are authorized.
The copies you share with the world are, well, not authorized.
So yes, the legal status of the copies changes depending on what you end up doing with them. Just like a baseball bat is a sports item one moment, then you whack somebody over the head with it and it's a murder weapon the next. Doesn't mean baseball bats will be made illegal.
That said - all that stuff is in legalese.. every single word counts and needs to be scrutinized.. the problem is that due how it's worded, it may end up slowly shifting to "personal use copies are not authorized". But I'm not a lawyer and so forth and so on.
Sure, the Church of Filet Mignon is bogus - nobody's going to argue with that, I'd imagine.
That said, say I believe there are 3 gods, and to honor those gods I must sing melodic song in their praise every morning at sunrise. Not too far-fetched, I hope.. however, I can't identify with any of the major religions out there. So if I were to end up in such a prison, they'd go over the list of 'recognized' religions, say mine's not on it, and tell me to stfu when I do my singing.
Remember the 'Jedi' religion answer on census inquiries in the UK, Australia and other countries? There was fairly massive response from that, with Jedi ranking -above- Buddhism and Hindu in New Zealand in a census poll. As it was a census poll only, that didn't automatically make it a 'recognized' religion - but be darned if any of the reports from the time mention how one might actually do such a thing. I can't even find where one might apply for 'recognized' religion, what the minimum requirements are, or anything of the sort.
But even without having a 'recognized' religion - who is to say my religion is less valid than e.g. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.?
"If god is in control of everything then why is it the most religious countries get hit with major earthquakes, flooding and tsunamis?"
Easy.. to test their faith.. see if they're truly worthy. Those that aren't religious are going to hell anyway.
That's the fun thing about most religions - you can easily explain everything away as a whim of a/the god(s). Something good happens? Praise God. Something bad happens? Maybe not praise God, but at least accept that it was 'His' will and he moves in mysterious ways for the greater good and all that.
Assume we take evolution as fact - then after discarding the whole Adam&Eve bit, the religious can easily drop back to "but God -designed- evolution". There's your ID right there.
In the end, even if you can explain every single thing except the "why did the big bang happen?" (assuming the big bang theory is the correct one), then the religious can still say "God made it, and therefore everything, happen".
Slashdot has covered these before as well, with the usual privacy concerns (omg they can see my schlong size! What if somebody posts pictures of hot young women from these scan on the interwebs? *starts bodyscan pr0n site*)
Besides, I would imagine that you, the sender, give implicit license to every node between you and the recipient to reproduce the bits for sending to the next node / to the recipient, and give implicit license to the recipient to reproduce the e-mail on-screen (if not in print) so that they can actually read it.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, I don't recall how it was spelled (I know I have a box of them here somewhere, but they're behind all kinds of other youth memory crap), and I don't know if they were the Philips equivalents - but they appear similar to the Denshi Block stuff and they were good fun (no corroded bits that I ever encountered).
Both, at least, allowed anybody to build simple to reasonably-complex electronic devices without the need for either A. soldering or B. pushing the components into little metal strips of a 'base board', leading to all kinds of problems, especially at younger ages.
The major down side that I ran into was that whatever you built - it ended up rather big. The blocks where maybe 2cm on each side for the simple components (a speaker would be 3x3x1 block in size, etc.).
As most of your post hinges on the following...
"Can you buy a new Windows PC without the crappy 3rd party software he talks about?"
yes, yes you can. However...
"it doesn't change the experience that the bulk of PC users have"
Seeing as most people do indeed actually purchase those PCs that have a crapload of OEM stuff tacked on - no, I can't change that experience.. they could, if they shopped for such.
"Could it be that the Control Panel is too confusing, or hard to find? Microsoft can fix a LOT of problems caused by 3rd party software by fixing their own UI, or at least designing it with 3rd party developer's needs in mind."
This I can agree with, to an extent. Microsoft don't, unfortunately, have the luxury of doing things right from the beginning; just look at how many people complain about bits and pieces of Vista not working exactly like XP. But they missed the ball on, for example, Security Center. Although it will show you have anti-virus installed and working, it doesn't offer any 'Settings' button that will take you to, say, a list of common settings and an 'advanced settings' option that would take you to the vendor-specific configuration dialog.
However, even if it did, gut feeling tells me that i.e. Norton would happily integrate with that AND
1. add a taskbar icon
2. add a quicklaunch icon
3. add a desktop icon
4. add a start menu entry (top)
5. add a start meun > programs entry
6. add a startup 'welcome' dialog
and lord knows what else that thing might do.
Perhaps that, too, is Microsoft's fault - seeing as they don't have a centralized location/etc., developers sought out locations on their own and hey-presto. But at some point those developers have to realize that they're perpetuating a complexity that is at the heart of many users' complaints.. and that it's not (solely) up to Microsoft to change this.. and that might have to start with the users not pointing at Microsoft foremost.
"Then, after all was finally said and done, using the thing was an amazingly frustrating experience, with seemingly endless offers/popups, some masquerading as os-level services, some more obvious overtures to purchase 3rd party software"
I'm sorry - but you are, then, saying that XP sucks because of (as far as I can tell) third party stuff?
Windows XP, without any fancy OEM stuff tacked on, doesn't nag you with seemingly endless offers - the only popups you'll get are the to some annoying 'help bubbles', which others find helpful, and you can turn off either way - the rest of your comment seems to entirely point to third party elements.
That's like saying OS X sucks because after you bought QuickTime 6 Pro and upgraded to OS X Tiger (which has QuickTime 7), QuickTime will once again nag you to upgrade to Pro every first time you run it - and while it's running, taunt you with greyed-out options that were once available to you but are no longer so... until you purchase the Pro upgrade -again-.
( For the curious - back up QuickTime 6, install Tiger, restore. Old stuff, but gosh - if we can blame third party solutions for XP 'sucking' then we can certainly blame same-party solutions for OS X 'sucking', no? )
Windows, in general, has plenty of attack vectors available to you to point out how crappy it is; there's really no need to drag third party stuff into the discussion.
but hold on... you're saying "move forward to something else (or back to XP)". Which 'something else' will magically support all their hardware (I won't bother with software, unless you want to go the Wine / Virtual machine route running XP; in which case - you didn't really move forward at all), then?
Although Vista may not support some hardware that XP did, I daresay that Mac, Linux, BSD support far less hardware (more out of the box, but add drivers/etc. for download).
So if you're saying that "It goes or it don't.", then 'moving forward' is hardly an option for most people -unless- their hardware happens to actually be supported.
anecdotal and to tie in with my subject: my capture card isn't supported in any Linux distro, nor any open source 'media center'-style app. I've asked if they could add support - they pointed the finger at the manufacturer. *shrug*
I'm all for sticking with XP if XP is what a user wants (I have Vista on only 1 machine, and only for development testing purposes), myself, for what it's worth. There's no point in getting Vista, imho, unless you're getting it with a new machine in the first place.
out of curiosity - which application and hardware compatibility issues are you referring to that are -not- the developer's / manufacturer's burden to correct?
If you think the situation of a third party posting videos and the (unintentional) subject of that video becoming targeted in one way or another is hypothetical, you've been living under a rock.
Especially in schools, kids are taking videos of eachother and uploading those to tons of places; and most of the people in those videos aren't too keen on it hitting the web. Not a "zomg the children!" thing - it just happens to be the most common form.
Here you go - December 31st, 2007:
http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.cms.support.viewStory.cls?cid=42116&sid=1&fid=1
That's from a teacher who took it in good spirit - as did the parents and the staff.
November 14, 2007:
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Nov14/0,4670,ODDCheerleadingTeacher,00.html
That teacher didn't fare so well. After criticism from parents, staff put her on administrative leave. She eventually handed in her resignation.
"Why not?"
Say the chip supports it, and addressing the chip for WMA takes a dozen lines of code if that; then why -not- support it? As the summary says, that's just crippling the darn thing - and for what reason?
I can think of a few, most involving DRM; but Apple seems to think it perfectly reasonable to tell a user to burn a CD, then rip to MP3, if they want to listen to iTunes-DRM'd tracks on anything other than an iPod.. so surely telling the user that DRM'd WMA's will not play should suffice as far a 'tech support' goes there.
More likely, the chip vendor charges per feature used. They bake a chip that can do A, B, C, and D simply because that's cheaper than baking several different chips (do the math - there's may combinations.) Each thing it does that you license it for costs you $5 on top of a base price. So supporting A, B, D only saves you $5 per chip. That'll add up over a few hundred thousand.
they do? If they do, that's news to me;
http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+drm+license
who says it was me (I) who put that video up?
Here I am, enjoying my drunken rave - having a great time, I even leave my phone at home.. no disturbances for me this new years' eve.. just me, my friends, that cute girl I met and jello shots.
A week later, I get fired, because my boss saw a video of it.. turns out the girl was his niece; go fig. Now what video? I don't know - I certainly didn't take any, let alone give it to him. Turns out that somebody else was shooting some video of their friends.. I don't know them, they don't know me, but I sure was in the background of their video.
Not everything is a "babysitter caught doing drugs", but may still be something you don't really want to share with the world for whatever reason; but you don't always have a say in this yourself.
So the solution is not so simple; unless you're saying that the real simple solution is to live puritan life 24/7 so that there is never a chance of anybody, anywhere, catching you doing things that might be perfectly acceptable in the situation you were in, but perhaps not so acceptable to your employer.. parents.. whoever/whatever.
The original/ForTwo, that is (though if I had cash laying around, I'd get a ForFour and a Sportster to go with it); it's already legal in the U.S. and should be officially offered (rather than 'grey market import') Q1 2008.
Or perhaps a Ford Ka, if you do need the 4/5 seats; though at that point, you almost might as well get a regular sedan/hatchback/whatever-as-long-as-it-isn't-an-SUV, imho.
There's many, many cars that are very safe, have a trunk, are cheap, economical, etc. The problem isn't that there aren't such cars; the problem is that people - at least in the U.S. - aren't buying them. Things like...
- top speed being lower than 140mph (which is legal, where? oh, right, you were trying to get away from the crazed axe murderer)
- acceleration from 0-60 not being lower than 4 seconds (which you need to do, when? ah yes, to accelerate out of the way of the runaway semi)
- range being less than 100 miles (because gas stations are so hard to find? Oh right, you like taking your economical car to the Alaskan planes or Utah salt beds; I forgot)
- because an SUV would crush you (good luck trying to crush a Smart, though I'm sure the people in the SUV will have a lesser headache - but let's face it.. chicken&egg problem? Makes me wonder why SUV drivers don't just all have MACK trucks by now; lest their explorer gets crushed by an expedition which gets crushed by an excursion and so forth and so on.)
- looks. Yes, the typical reason why any economical car - especially electrics - are shot down in the U.S. And when one does look good - hey, fall back to the other 'reasons'.
It's funny watching Americans coming to live here (NL).. some of them are keen to hold on to their big cars. Why's that funny? Stand around in Amsterdam, The Hague, Groningen, Utrecht, etc. and watch one of them try to navigate the streets, or find a parking space. It's extra-hilarious when somebody in a 45km/h car (don't need a driver's license, just a 'moped/scooter' certificate; but obviously you can't go on highways with it) snags a spot that the engine compartment of their SUV wouldn't even fit in.
the problem with myminicity (and indeed most such sites before it) is that they do not consider it spamming. In fact, throwing that URL out as much as you can - on your blog, on forums, in your feeds, by IM and so forth and so on is the whole -point- of that site... as it is visits that cause the 'city' to grow.
:\ )
Good luck finding rules on where a 'player' is allowed to post the URL(s). Even more luck to you finding a 'report abuse' page or contact address. Good luck getting any response whatsoever from contact@ ( if you do get something, by all means follow up here
I didn't mean to come across as saying that rootkits (personally I don't consider that SONY thing a rootkit, but I can see how it can certainly aid building actual rootkits via simple viruses/trojans. Then again, if you get one of those, you're mostly screwed anyway.). All I meant was that no company should be able to claim innocence / hide behind a third party software provider's code. They choose to use that code; be it in binary form or otherwise, and thus they should be the ones responsible.
..did with XCP, then Adobe doesn't get to claim innocence for whatever the heck the Omniture code is doing.
..in that order.
Yes - You don't need to have 5.25" drive now to read back data that you stored onto an 'old' IDE drive 2 years ago. And that's a bad example because you can still get 5.25" drives. 200 years from now when we're working with crystalline storage methods, we won't have to read back from HDD platters.. just from the holographic storage drives that things were transferred to with the last generation of storage devices.
Will we still have film projectors 200 years from now? Possibly not.
Whocares - because the formats used to store digital film aren't exactly H.264 or whatever fancyschmancy codec the copyright-infringent care about; google 'digital intermediate'. And yes, those formats do tend to change, but they all remain lossless and, again, things can be transferred with each generation.
Will we still know what to do with film 200 years from now? Ahhh.. there's the kicker.. probably, yes.
This is also where the cost comes in - you have to keep upgrading to the latest formats and the latest storage devices to ensure that there will be no 'digital divide', so to speak.
With film, you don't incur this cost. It's lossy in an analog sense, but if somebody looks at a film reel 2,000 years from now - and we assume to still have the same visual system in our watersacks - it will be trivial for them to see, literally, that it is a series of pictures which, in succession, appear to animate. Even if there's no device to play them back then, it would be trivial to build one from scratch using very rudimentary knowledge.
With digital, even if you have the latest format and the latest hardware to read the device it's stored on, it is non-trivial for the layman to read this file and be able to put it back into a picture; in fact, it tends to take people with intricate knowledge of the device and the storage format.
Personally I'm all for doing both, costs be damned, if the material is important enough. That said, do we really need to hold on to all material forevermore? Like a history book, it should be enough to retain the highlights (be they positive or negative), and not cling onto minutiae, as a society. Similarly, like family archives, those who believe something to be well worth the preservation for future generations (either within the family or civilization as a whole), will - or at least should - do so on their own and have history prove them right, or wrong.
I'm completely with you on the "nobody but the freakier people are going to notice", and they'll probably have gold-plated, gold-cable, etc. SACD players. Or, if they're really serious, they do away with the gold plating and have a goldsmith permanently goldsolder the wires right onto the board.
That said... the sampling frequency shouldn't be mixed with the signal frequency in the way you mention; e.g. 44.1KHz, divide by 2 (yay Nyquist), ~22KHz is the maximum frequency you can sample. ergo: 96KHz allows you to sample 48KHz signals and nobody can hear 48KHz anyway so what's the point.
Ah, true, but...
A 400Hz sine wave is now -also- sampled at the 96KHz level. Suddenly, that sine wave is looking twice as smooth.
Think of it like computer graphics. If you have a 320x240 15" display (12" by 9", non-widescreen 4:3), your pixel is going to be nearly 1mm on each side (12*25.4 / 320). A 1600x1200 display will have a pixel that is going to be much smaller, about 1/5th of a mm on each side (12*25.4 / 1600). Now you might not often find any reason to display a dot that is 1/5th of a millimeter at each side. However, if you were to display a large circle on the 320x240 display, it will be blocky. Do so on the 1600x1200 display, and it will appear to be much smoother.
Alternatively, find a piece of music that doesn't seem to do much over 22KHz, and band-limit it so that everything over 22KHz gets cut off anyway. Save this for later playback. Now actually downsample that to 22KHz. Now play back both files; see if you can tell the difference. Again, any high tones over 22KHz are gone anyway, so all you're hearing is the loss in fidelity of the lower-frequency ( 22KHz) signal.
Yes, MicroSD is still smaller. That said, Wikipedia (I guess you consulted Wikipedia) is incorrect in its leading summary. The card is not 0.7mm thick, it is about 1mm thick (0.95mm according to my vernier scale). Funnily enough, the table in the bottom of the Wikipedia article lists 1.0mm as well. The 0.7mm seems to come from the connector part.
:)
So to adjust for your calculations...
MicroSD = 15*11*1.0 = 165
Intel's thingy = 18*12*1.8 = 388.8
388.8 / 165 ~= 2.36
Anyway, the more important bit is that it does have the IDE controller already on it... go add the controller chip for the SD standard to a device and you'll add a nice bit of volume as well
Sure, why not? I think it's perfectly reasonably to warn not only the casual reader but even the administrators that what they're doing may not be the smartest thing in the world.
A major complaint with Vista is that it tends to pop up the UAC dialog for a lot of things - so people tend to run into it several times per day (personally it's only several times per week but, again, it's just a devtest machine for me right now.. though during setup I still only hit it a few times; just that the times I hit it were perhaps questionable..).
If the frequency was much reduced, the complaints would easily go away.
The other part is that Windows users never really had to do any of this. Ask a Linux user how often they use sudo to automatically grant them the rights of another user; it's equivalent to a prompt except that you answered it pre-emptively: why yes, I would like to execute the following command with e.g. superuser privileges.
I have Vista running on one of my machines, as I need to be able to test on it.
And no, I'm not referring to Vista's behavior of demanding Admin rights for a ton of things.. though I don't have a direct problem with that.. if somebody does, have them run as administrator.
I'm only referring to popping up a big fat warning when you are (or something else is) about to do something to a critical system file where the change could very well leave the machine unbootable without a boot or rescue disc. As long as the machine can still boot on its own and load a smidgen of code that can restore whatever other system files - let an administrator play with those freely.. but files that completely prevent a bootup without external means should be very closely guarded.
what of the users who did lose valuable computer time due to this problem? The proverbial kid handing in their homework (or dissertation paper or whatever), for example. Apologizing and willing to pay for a third party tech support service (e.g. Geek Squad) is nice and all, but does that cover damages incurred? doubtful. Perhaps that EULA will finally get a test.
/r to be recursive, but DeleteRegKey needs /ifempty to NOT be recursive; whatthe.) and I've wiped my entire root myself while developing an installer with it, although via a more complex bug.. NSIS simply doesn't have any built-in "you dumbass"-protection like most commercial installers.
As for the bug itself... the installer code is NSIS script; quite powerful, but you do need to know what you're doing. Especially with a command such as "Delete", I can't help but wonder who failed to RTFM (TFM reads, as they point out, that "Delete" requires a full path to be safe or else it expects the path to be root) and instead made an -assumption- on how it would work.
Now, to their defense, NSIS is also a little inconsistent (RMDir needs
Although I think it's nice of them to say that they're not blaming Windows for their own mistake, I do honestly think that Windows should protect such vital files at all cost - including against Administrator level process (e.g. a prompt "you dumbass - are you sure?" will do).
I agree with the parent.. presume one might summarize fair use in this case as "you are authorized to make copies for personal use".
The personal use copies are authorized.
The copies you share with the world are, well, not authorized.
So yes, the legal status of the copies changes depending on what you end up doing with them. Just like a baseball bat is a sports item one moment, then you whack somebody over the head with it and it's a murder weapon the next. Doesn't mean baseball bats will be made illegal.
That said - all that stuff is in legalese.. every single word counts and needs to be scrutinized.. the problem is that due how it's worded, it may end up slowly shifting to "personal use copies are not authorized". But I'm not a lawyer and so forth and so on.
Sure, the Church of Filet Mignon is bogus - nobody's going to argue with that, I'd imagine.
That said, say I believe there are 3 gods, and to honor those gods I must sing melodic song in their praise every morning at sunrise. Not too far-fetched, I hope.. however, I can't identify with any of the major religions out there. So if I were to end up in such a prison, they'd go over the list of 'recognized' religions, say mine's not on it, and tell me to stfu when I do my singing.
Remember the 'Jedi' religion answer on census inquiries in the UK, Australia and other countries? There was fairly massive response from that, with Jedi ranking -above- Buddhism and Hindu in New Zealand in a census poll. As it was a census poll only, that didn't automatically make it a 'recognized' religion - but be darned if any of the reports from the time mention how one might actually do such a thing. I can't even find where one might apply for 'recognized' religion, what the minimum requirements are, or anything of the sort.
But even without having a 'recognized' religion - who is to say my religion is less valid than e.g. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.?
"If god is in control of everything then why is it the most religious countries get hit with major earthquakes, flooding and tsunamis?"
Easy.. to test their faith.. see if they're truly worthy. Those that aren't religious are going to hell anyway.
That's the fun thing about most religions - you can easily explain everything away as a whim of a/the god(s). Something good happens? Praise God. Something bad happens? Maybe not praise God, but at least accept that it was 'His' will and he moves in mysterious ways for the greater good and all that.
Assume we take evolution as fact - then after discarding the whole Adam&Eve bit, the religious can easily drop back to "but God -designed- evolution". There's your ID right there.
In the end, even if you can explain every single thing except the "why did the big bang happen?" (assuming the big bang theory is the correct one), then the religious can still say "God made it, and therefore everything, happen".
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3199
http://www.google.nl/search?q=body+scan+schiphol
Slashdot has covered these before as well, with the usual privacy concerns (omg they can see my schlong size! What if somebody posts pictures of hot young women from these scan on the interwebs? *starts bodyscan pr0n site*)
Besides, I would imagine that you, the sender, give implicit license to every node between you and the recipient to reproduce the bits for sending to the next node / to the recipient, and give implicit license to the recipient to reproduce the e-mail on-screen (if not in print) so that they can actually read it.