This is why English has the option of including adjectives. The phrase "martian day" is a perfectly understandable alternative to the what-the-hell-does-it-mean "sol". Furthermore, given the fact that the unit "sol" is different lengths on different planets, and we'll have to specify "Venusian sol" when a long-term lander makes it to the surface of Venus, it's completely redundant.
Although I have an extensive library of VHS tapes for which I'll "always" need a VHS player, I stopped using it to record off of TV shortly after I bought a TiVo a few years ago. Feel free to substitute a MythTV system if you wish, but I know that I would already wouldn't miss having a VHS recorder.
My former boss has been predicting the death of physical media since the early days of the CD-ROM, when the internet started becoming commonplace. One of these years I'm convinced he's going to be proven right.
Consider the source... if you can understand them
on
Variety Declares VHS Dead
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I'll start listening to Variety about contemporary trends as soon as they drop that inane, out-dated hipster lingo that they use instead of the English language.
For my digital camera, I went with a non-SLR with a good optical zoom (Olympus SP-500UZ): it's small enough to keep handy while backpacking, but has just enough "real camera" features (e.g. manual focus, exposure adjustment) and good enough optics to take the kinds of pictures I want to be able to take. Still no match for my 35mm SLR with a 24mm lens for landscapes or super-deep close-ups, or with a one-touch 80-200 zoom for shots of active wildlife, though.
I guess you missed the part where I was comparing it to a film SLR, a comparison in which the life of that huge battery array sucks rotten eggs compared to the button cell the 35mm model lives for months on.
As for power consumption, I'm not sure what's holding you back?... They last a reasonable length of time. A battery grip like the "big ED" holds a pair of batteries so it's down to one change every couple of hours.
You sound like a Windows XP user bragging about how long he can go without rebooting.:)
I have a late-80's-vintage 35mm SLR that runs on a single button cell (i.e. no huge-ass "battery grip") for... hell, I can't even measure it in hours. Even when I was using it heavily, I'd go for months without changing it. I recently went on a 10-day backpacking trip recently, and thought for a long time whether to bring the 35mm SLR a couple lenses and a load of film, or the non-SLR digital a couple memory cards and a load of batteries. (I went with the latter.) If I'd owned a DSLR, it wouldn't even have been in the running, being heavier than both combined and requiring even more batteries. Like I said, there are a lot of good features to a digital camera (that's why I own one), and even more to a digital SLR. But trying to argue that their battery usage isn't a liability compared to a well-engineered film camera is just silly.
Don't get me wrong: I'd love to have a DSLR (especially one compatible with my old K-mount SLR lenses), but so far, the reasons not to buy one have out weighed the reasons to buy one. I'm sticking to my compact battery-sipping 35mm SLR and my "prosumer" non-SLR digital for now.
You seem to be assuming (for the sake of cranky pedantry) that "designed" is supposed to mean "the year they first sat down to begin work on it". Design work on the Shuttle was ongoing and continually revised through the entirety of the 1970s, with the design "finished" (in fact, they continued to revise it with each launcher that was constructed) not that long before the first launch. Despite the Shuttle's technological limitations, the fleet was not built entirely from 1960s tech (as you seem to be arguing).
Is there a reason these aren't built on standard parts and operating systems? If they ran their shuttles on something like Debian stable it would be a rock solid platform and probably end up saving them lots of money. Or am I missing something here.
Yeah, you're missing something. Such as the fact that the Shuttle was designed a quarter century ago, when Debian was so far from a stable release that Ian hadn't gotten the hange of long division yet, and still believed that Deb had cooties. "Standard parts" meant 8-bit CPUs with 64KB address spaces, and "standard operating systems" included CP/M, 4BSD, VMS, and an upstart known as PC-DOS. I can't really blame them for building something in-house instead.
Most ethnic Kazakhs (the culture Cohen is (mis)representing) are Muslims. That Russian Orthodox population consists largely of Russian immigrants. Making the assumption that the people in Kazakhstan are all Kazakhs seems to be typical of western myopia as well.:p
Personally I don't think he could make his point (if he has one) any clearer.
Of course he could. That's Satire 101. I've written a few parodies that few people "got", and looking back at them, it was pretty clear what my mistakes were. I incorrectly assumed that my audience was familiar with certain information or understood things that I figured were common sense. I surrounded my commentary with a bunch of unrelated material that didn't add to it, and distracted people from my real point.
That last one is Cohen's biggest mistake with this movie: obscuring his satire of western society by wrapping it in the equivalent of an SNL skit ridiculing Kazakhs. Unless he really is trying to slander them - a possibility I'm not ready to dismiss out of hand, since A) as a Jew he has an obvious motive to ridicule Muslims, and B) he seems content to let that accusation stand - that's off-topic, and distracts the people who don't know better into thinking that's the point of the movie. Even the material that focuses on the Americans who fall for his schtick is too easily viewed as just a bunch of stoopid pranking, appealing to the same low-brow mentality that gets off on Punk'd. If people are busy laughing at the dupes on the screen, they aren't thinking about what it says about our society in general (and themselves).
If Cohen doesn't understand how these things undercut this supposed satire of western society, then he's obviously not the brilliant satirist people are calling him.
I agree that Borat's character is dangerous and offensive humor, but if you can dig deeper you may find that Borat is actually a commentary on western culture, not middle eastern.
Deep down, maybe. But if you visited the cineplexes of America this weekend, you would find theaters full of people laughing... not at the subtle commentary about American society, but at Cohen's ugly ethnic stereotype of the stupid, unsophisticated, English-mangling foreigner. Maybe that's a legitimate artistic "statement", and I'll defend to the death his right to present it, but I sure hope Cohen doesn't imagine that he's opening many eyes with his 21st-century remake of the minstrel show. At some point it would help if he'd drop the damn schtick (i.e. do interviews out of character) and actually state his point.
I hope this was intended to be sarcastic, because there are large numbers of people out there still using Windows 2000, ME, and even 98. To say nothing of the huge installed base of XP (including pre-SP2 systems) that will still be in place a year from now. Granted, MS is certain to provide a patch for the versions that they're still supporting, but that's still going to depend on people installing it.
Halloween is already dying around here. 10 years ago, I used to get 70 or more kids at my door over the course of the evening. The numbers took a big dive in 2001, when parents started imagining terrorists behind every shrub, and they've been dwindling ever since. These days the parents seem to be taking their kids to the freakin' mall or their church (depending on which is their place of worship) instead of letting them visit their neighbors. I always hand out pretty good treats (candy and a comicbook of their choice), but I had only 15 kids show up this year (all after dark). I can't help wondering if we've already passed the sustainability point: low kid-traffic levels lead to more people not bothering to buy treats, so the kids give up on it. I can't imagine that keeping the big outdoor light on for another hour will help.
All I can say is that the designers of those systems are incredibly stupid. The transition dates have been changed many times since DST was first introduced, and will undoubtedly be changed again. They also vary by state and region. Hard programming the dates is just silly.
So is using 2-digit years when you have room for 4. Doesn't matter. They did it. Now, given that fact, do you have any productive suggestions for how to deal with all the VCRs out there that these stupid people shipped without firmware upgrade slots or consoles for reprogramming their DST logic?
For the record, there's no data that suggests a correlation between testosterone levels and homosexuality. In fact, physicans once tried to "treat" homosexuality with testosterone injections, and the subjects just became more homosexually active.
Even if they are going to ditch the clicky buttons for touch sensitive ones, it worked on the 3g
I thought the reason they ditched that design to return to clicky buttons on the 4G was the fact that the touch-sensitive "buttons" didn't work: too easy to "press" by accident when you merely handle the device, and made using the device almost impossible to use in the dark without fumbling across the wrong control. On a completely smooth surface, they'd be impossible to use in the dark.
I don't care if the buttons are separate from the wheel or not. I just hated the fact that the hair-trigger "buttons" on the 3G were too easily activated by accident.
I hope this doesn't mean a return to the 3G iPod's can't-use-it-without-looking-at-it and no-tactile-feedback interface. I had one of those, and hated it: because the control buttons only needed to be touched (not pushed), I routinely found it accidentally forwarding to the next track when I was just picking it up to pause it. Using it in the dark was tricky, because by the time I'd touched a control to activate the backlight... I'd already touched a control and it had paused or reversed or whatever. The current "click-wheel" interface eliminates most of that problem, because the buttons need to be pushed hard enough to click.
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This is why English has the option of including adjectives. The phrase "martian day" is a perfectly understandable alternative to the what-the-hell-does-it-mean "sol". Furthermore, given the fact that the unit "sol" is different lengths on different planets, and we'll have to specify "Venusian sol" when a long-term lander makes it to the surface of Venus, it's completely redundant.
Although I have an extensive library of VHS tapes for which I'll "always" need a VHS player, I stopped using it to record off of TV shortly after I bought a TiVo a few years ago. Feel free to substitute a MythTV system if you wish, but I know that I would already wouldn't miss having a VHS recorder.
My former boss has been predicting the death of physical media since the early days of the CD-ROM, when the internet started becoming commonplace. One of these years I'm convinced he's going to be proven right.
I'll start listening to Variety about contemporary trends as soon as they drop that inane, out-dated hipster lingo that they use instead of the English language.
Ballmer wants to be Steve Irwin?
1. Don't spend money on software.
2. Collect revenue for your services.
3. ????
4. Profit!
For my digital camera, I went with a non-SLR with a good optical zoom (Olympus SP-500UZ): it's small enough to keep handy while backpacking, but has just enough "real camera" features (e.g. manual focus, exposure adjustment) and good enough optics to take the kinds of pictures I want to be able to take. Still no match for my 35mm SLR with a 24mm lens for landscapes or super-deep close-ups, or with a one-touch 80-200 zoom for shots of active wildlife, though.
I guess you missed the part where I was comparing it to a film SLR, a comparison in which the life of that huge battery array sucks rotten eggs compared to the button cell the 35mm model lives for months on.
I have a late-80's-vintage 35mm SLR that runs on a single button cell (i.e. no huge-ass "battery grip") for... hell, I can't even measure it in hours. Even when I was using it heavily, I'd go for months without changing it. I recently went on a 10-day backpacking trip recently, and thought for a long time whether to bring the 35mm SLR a couple lenses and a load of film, or the non-SLR digital a couple memory cards and a load of batteries. (I went with the latter.) If I'd owned a DSLR, it wouldn't even have been in the running, being heavier than both combined and requiring even more batteries. Like I said, there are a lot of good features to a digital camera (that's why I own one), and even more to a digital SLR. But trying to argue that their battery usage isn't a liability compared to a well-engineered film camera is just silly.
1 - price
2 - price
3 - price
4 - price
5 - price
6 - price
7 - price
8 - size
9 - power requirements
10 - no Kodachrome or T-max 3200
Don't get me wrong: I'd love to have a DSLR (especially one compatible with my old K-mount SLR lenses), but so far, the reasons not to buy one have out weighed the reasons to buy one. I'm sticking to my compact battery-sipping 35mm SLR and my "prosumer" non-SLR digital for now.
You seem to be assuming (for the sake of cranky pedantry) that "designed" is supposed to mean "the year they first sat down to begin work on it". Design work on the Shuttle was ongoing and continually revised through the entirety of the 1970s, with the design "finished" (in fact, they continued to revise it with each launcher that was constructed) not that long before the first launch. Despite the Shuttle's technological limitations, the fleet was not built entirely from 1960s tech (as you seem to be arguing).
Most ethnic Kazakhs (the culture Cohen is (mis)representing) are Muslims. That Russian Orthodox population consists largely of Russian immigrants. Making the assumption that the people in Kazakhstan are all Kazakhs seems to be typical of western myopia as well. :p
That last one is Cohen's biggest mistake with this movie: obscuring his satire of western society by wrapping it in the equivalent of an SNL skit ridiculing Kazakhs. Unless he really is trying to slander them - a possibility I'm not ready to dismiss out of hand, since A) as a Jew he has an obvious motive to ridicule Muslims, and B) he seems content to let that accusation stand - that's off-topic, and distracts the people who don't know better into thinking that's the point of the movie. Even the material that focuses on the Americans who fall for his schtick is too easily viewed as just a bunch of stoopid pranking, appealing to the same low-brow mentality that gets off on Punk'd. If people are busy laughing at the dupes on the screen, they aren't thinking about what it says about our society in general (and themselves).
If Cohen doesn't understand how these things undercut this supposed satire of western society, then he's obviously not the brilliant satirist people are calling him.
I hope this was intended to be sarcastic, because there are large numbers of people out there still using Windows 2000, ME, and even 98. To say nothing of the huge installed base of XP (including pre-SP2 systems) that will still be in place a year from now. Granted, MS is certain to provide a patch for the versions that they're still supporting, but that's still going to depend on people installing it.
Halloween is already dying around here. 10 years ago, I used to get 70 or more kids at my door over the course of the evening. The numbers took a big dive in 2001, when parents started imagining terrorists behind every shrub, and they've been dwindling ever since. These days the parents seem to be taking their kids to the freakin' mall or their church (depending on which is their place of worship) instead of letting them visit their neighbors. I always hand out pretty good treats (candy and a comicbook of their choice), but I had only 15 kids show up this year (all after dark). I can't help wondering if we've already passed the sustainability point: low kid-traffic levels lead to more people not bothering to buy treats, so the kids give up on it. I can't imagine that keeping the big outdoor light on for another hour will help.
Once upon a time, I would have answered 3.1. Later I would've said 95-98. But lately, my answer is X windows.
I've been asking my brother-in-law at Motorola for this for ages. Thanks, Randy! :)
For the record, there's no data that suggests a correlation between testosterone levels and homosexuality. In fact, physicans once tried to "treat" homosexuality with testosterone injections, and the subjects just became more homosexually active.
I don't care if the buttons are separate from the wheel or not. I just hated the fact that the hair-trigger "buttons" on the 3G were too easily activated by accident.
I hope this doesn't mean a return to the 3G iPod's can't-use-it-without-looking-at-it and no-tactile-feedback interface. I had one of those, and hated it: because the control buttons only needed to be touched (not pushed), I routinely found it accidentally forwarding to the next track when I was just picking it up to pause it. Using it in the dark was tricky, because by the time I'd touched a control to activate the backlight... I'd already touched a control and it had paused or reversed or whatever. The current "click-wheel" interface eliminates most of that problem, because the buttons need to be pushed hard enough to click.