Would you like your taxes low or would you like NASA funded properly? It doesn't seem like you can have both.
That's funny; last I checked there were more lines on this year's budget than one. I can think of lots of ways to achieve that. If we had back the >$100 billion we'll end up wasting on this frivolous war we could double NASA's budget for the next decade. If we stopped wasting $400 billion a year on the Department of Offense we could increase NASA's budget tenfold from here to eternity and still have enough left over to pay down the national debt, eliminate our dependence on oil, and probably cure cancer.
Now that I think about it, pretty fucking amazing all the things we are passing up just so we can maintain our ability to kill two simultaneous people anywhere, anytime. One wonders why the voters put up with it.
Really lasik is so cheap now that you don't even need a lump of cash anymore; a minor bolus will suffice. For me the argument holding me back isn't the price but the "in 10 years scenario." A decade ago (okay maybe more like 15 years) the state-of-the-art, cutting edge (pardon the pun) was RK, where apparently they would grind/slice by hand your poor lenses into submission. Issues with scarring and healing up were multiple, yet simultaneously there were those ranting and raving about how great this new technology was how they were never going back.
Sounds a little similar today.
I can't help but think that sometime in the very near future we'll all look back on LASIK in the same way that we now do on RK, i.e. as a laughable, medieval relic of the surgical past. Sometime soon, correcting to 20/10 with no cutting, residual artifacts, nighttime issues, etc. will be the order of the day.
Plus some guy mentioned they're running Win 3.1. Yegads!
If I've talked you into waiting I have two suggestions that might tide you over in the meantime. First, look into natural vision improvement. Depending on how myopic you are, you may be able to improve several diopters by yourself. Second, get yourself some Focus Night & Day contacts. These have literally changed my life, and made me completely indifferent to waiting however long it takes for them to work out the kinks in LASIK. Today's the 24th; you change them once a month; and literally I haven't touched, taken out, cleaned, or even really though about them (until now) for the last 23 days. You can sleep with them in, no problem, and your eyes don't feel horrible like they do if you slept with other contacts. I'm horribly blind (-8 diopters both eyes) but my lifestyle is just like it was back before I started losing my sight in 4th grade.
What are you talking about? It's a huge problem. The "conversion" is done in software, meaning you're tied to Wintel if you wish to use the player at all. But what's much worse is they're using a proprietary storage technology (memory stick) and a proprietary codec (ATRAC) that sounds much worse than MP3.
But worst of all is the complete lack of MP3 support! Unless they've come up with some brilliant, previously undiscovered lossless transcoding algorithm, all your MP3s are going to have to be recompressed in ATRAC. If you want an approximation how crappy this sounds--and I say approximation because, mind you, ATRAC is even worse-sounding than MP3--try encoding a song in LAME, dumping the MP3 to PCM, and then re-encoding it. It sounds like it was recorded underwater.
At my school (Berkeley) they're using something by Vernier, most likely this, to require login and password for WLAN access. It's pretty cool--anyone can get a DHCP lease but apparently the Vernier access manager maintains a dynamic routing table that drops all your traffic until you've authenticated. Since they've managed to link the access manager in with the strange Kerberos-ish auth mechanism our school uses ("CalNet") I've a feeling the system is quite flexible and could be easily integrated with class schedules to provide the solution you're looking for. (The literature says it supports all the usual suspects--Kerberos, LDAP, Radius, NT, etc. and those are flexible enough on their own to do it.)
I am 99.999% sure that pretty much everyone on this board is writing their posts on an Intel- or AMD-based machine (save a few Transmeta loners.) Both of whom are guilty guilty guilty of this so-called outsourcing treason. Not only did you all hypocritically vote with your dollar for said practices, but you didn't even pay the full damn dollar: you all benefitted from cheaper microprocessor costs that are the direct result of Intel and AMD exploiting foreign comparative advantage in chip design. Or Microsoft, in software design. Or Dell, in tech support services. The list goes on.
Sure, you can vote with your ballot for one or the other guy, but something (maybe the millions of dollars of tech-industry money between them) tells me that won't have much of an impact. What's really needed is to withold your $$ from companies that don't engage in these practices. I happen to think there aren't any, but who knows... mebbeso.
Interesting that they would choose two lossy media formats as models for comparison.
Hrm... nope, not interesting. They're referring to their ubiquity, nothing more. (Duh.) I would shudder to think how a lossy 3D modelling standard would work, but luckily I don't have to, since that's an idiocy.
What's marginally interesting is that they would name two standards that are encumbered in a thicket of patent disputes.
I like that you've posted 5 comments on Slashdot in four years, and fully 40% of them are complaining about this one incident. That guy must have really pissed you off:)
PS What are you doing with a grad. degree (assumed PhD) in CS and not programming?
Yeah but an even cooler joke would be throwing something up that everyone thinks is an April Fool's joke, and then doing it for real. A meta-April Fool's joke, if you will.
This is definitely not nearly as far off the deep-end as, say, PigeonRank, for example. It's not even really very funny. And it sounds a little outrageous, but not a lot. I'm 50-50 on the fence as the whether this is real or not. (It seems like it would be rare for NYTimes, Reuters, and CNet to all get suckered, for example.)
Universities are blocking BitTorrent because it's consuming gigantic quantities of bandwidth. 13% of Internet2 bandwidth is P2P traffic, for example--and more than half that is BitTorrent (32 terabytes). And this is on an academic, educational network. Somehow I doubt all those data are DNA sequences and radiotelemetry:) Let's be completely unrealistic for a moment and posit those are all legal, noninfringing file transfers. It's still not in my university's charter to finance me downloading the latest Moe show of etree. It's just not. And given I go to the University of California (currently broke), it's one of the first things they should be cutting down on.
Notebook/laptop is really a bit of a misnomer, this machine sits squarely in the "desktop replacement" segment of the market. HP ZD7000 is another example. If you think of this thing as a notebook, sure it sounds like a joke, but you're failing to recognize that the old laptop-desktop dichotomy isn't valid anymore. These machines are actually quite useful. Lots of people don't ever actually take their laptop on the road, but they also don't want the big footprint of a desktop. Or they're like me, a student, and so the only time they transport their laptop is in a suitcase, to and from home. They need a smidge of portability, nothing more. (Some of these machines don't even have onboard batteries.) Desktop replacements make perfect sense. They're cheaper--you don't have to pay for the space-efficiency premium of a good notebook--and you're not stuck typing on a cramped keyboard, squinting at a miniscule screen and listening to tinny music from miniscule onboard speakers.
Exactly. Anybody can learn to tune a guitar in 5 minutes if you can pick out one of (E,A,D,G,B). Alternative tunings definitely open up a whole new world in terms of emotion and sound to good guitar players, especially acoustic. But most players are discouraged from it because a) it's a pain in the ass, b) you can't really play a gig in 7 different tunings unless you have a guitar tech, and c) it kills your strings. At least a) and b) have been solved.
(If you want an example of the beauty that can result when someone bites the bullet and experiments with alternative tunings, I can think of no better example than Nick Drake. I don't think it's a coincidence that he is said to have sucked live.;)
You can pick one of these up on eBay for 25 bucks. In fact, I'm sitting in my school's library right now typing on the one I bought last week. Highly recommended; it worked out of the box in XP and (shockingly) Fedora Core 1. As in plug and play.
Trade dress infringment bars you from making identical-looking products ("packaging, color, and label," if you want the legalese.) And only in some cases. I don't saying anything about what the player should look like, rather how it should function. Probably because I didn't. If someone took all those features and put them inside a wooden egg, there wouldn't be a damn thing Apple could do about it.
When is somebody going to wake up and engineer a blatant ripoff of these things to sell without the "Apple tax"? They could probably come in $100 cheaper. I realize Dell, Rio, et al. have released a host of knockoffs, but for reasons that escape me no one has ever gotten it right:
Lightweight, metallic case
Teeny form factor
USB2 or FireWire interface
Backlit LCD
Easy navigation/interface
And so on. It seems like every player on the market gets maybe four of the five, except for Apple, which nails all of them. And Apple crushes the market. I ran into the exact same thing last month when I was shopping for a laptop: want one that has the best 3D graphics card (ATI MR 9600 Pro), thin profile, light weight, beautiful LCD widescreen, WiFi, bluetooth, metallic case, etc? You have but one choice, my friend. I realize maybe Apple has a brilliant, one-of-a-kind group of innovators dreawming up all these great products. But it shouldn't take a world-class engineering team, or even a particularly brilliant one, to simply knock off all their products and give Apple a little healthy competition.
The XP ACPI implementation is much, much further along than the Linux's is, or may ever be. When implemented fully, ACPI can do all sorts of nifty things like shutting down individual peripherals to save power, even if they're on the USB bus (do a search for "usb 'selective suspend'" and see how many hits for Linux you get), throttle the CPU (now superceded by SpeedStep et. al), etc. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, Unix simply was never designed with this type of role in mind. It takes tons of tweaking to get a Unix system to mimic the same basic features found out-of-the-box in Windows, things like HDD spindown, intilligent CPU throttling (cpudynd does not count), etc. Even then everything is wont to thrash your disk with reckless abandon
One wonders why these literal rocket scientists didn't just get a software programmable Linux or PalmOS based wrist-computer and hack together a Mars-time display application into it?
Dude, this is freakin' NASA we're talking about here. As in, you know, the agency that never once in its illustrious history found a project it couldn't pork up, underbudget, and overrun by at least 3x projected cost. I mean... duh.:)
Actually those arches etc are there because they're examples of generic European architecture, which can be found in any (or no) EU country. If you put the Eiffel Tower or the Reichstag on the 20, you'd have yet another cultural jihad about French/German arrogance and everything would be a mess. So, we get bland, unrecognizable engravings that have no character whatsoever:) That's also why "EURO" is written on each bill in the latin and greek alphabets--every member country must be represented.
Getting totally backstabbed by my Tradewars 2002 corp. partner after finally getting a Class M planet with a citadel, huge treasury, planetary defense system, and cherried-out ISS ranks high on my list. Even better, after I logged in and found myself sitting in an escape pod in the middle of nowhere, the sysop chatted me just to say he watched the whole thing happen live. Fuckers. That and entering those wonderful "no-exit" sector clusters.
And Apple is over there just drooling for my cash.
Yeah, well, you would be too if you could successfully charge your customers 100% markup over comparable x86 hardware and have them lining up begging to pay it.
Well then I wish you well on your ~ 6 year sojourn into entertainmentless wilderness, because as I recall it only took about 4 years before a lot of movies started only coming out on DVD and not on VHS. This despite VHS having 15 years of momentum behind it.
Exactly right. "Bought my own office building in our second year" is a dead giveaway--a year-two cash outlay of probably several hundred thousand, plus the ability to sell said multimillion-dollar asset at a loss one year later, are pretty clear indications that this was not your average, "cash strapped" startup. If I had millions in the bank, I would certianly be employing this guy's foolproof, trial-and-error method of starting a business as well:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'll fire that baby up just as soon as the Windows XP torrent finishes.
Would you like your taxes low or would you like NASA funded properly? It doesn't seem like you can have both.
That's funny; last I checked there were more lines on this year's budget than one. I can think of lots of ways to achieve that. If we had back the >$100 billion we'll end up wasting on this frivolous war we could double NASA's budget for the next decade. If we stopped wasting $400 billion a year on the Department of Offense we could increase NASA's budget tenfold from here to eternity and still have enough left over to pay down the national debt, eliminate our dependence on oil, and probably cure cancer.
Now that I think about it, pretty fucking amazing all the things we are passing up just so we can maintain our ability to kill two simultaneous people anywhere, anytime. One wonders why the voters put up with it.
Really lasik is so cheap now that you don't even need a lump of cash anymore; a minor bolus will suffice. For me the argument holding me back isn't the price but the "in 10 years scenario." A decade ago (okay maybe more like 15 years) the state-of-the-art, cutting edge (pardon the pun) was RK, where apparently they would grind/slice by hand your poor lenses into submission. Issues with scarring and healing up were multiple, yet simultaneously there were those ranting and raving about how great this new technology was how they were never going back.
Sounds a little similar today.
I can't help but think that sometime in the very near future we'll all look back on LASIK in the same way that we now do on RK, i.e. as a laughable, medieval relic of the surgical past. Sometime soon, correcting to 20/10 with no cutting, residual artifacts, nighttime issues, etc. will be the order of the day.
Plus some guy mentioned they're running Win 3.1. Yegads!
If I've talked you into waiting I have two suggestions that might tide you over in the meantime. First, look into natural vision improvement. Depending on how myopic you are, you may be able to improve several diopters by yourself. Second, get yourself some Focus Night & Day contacts. These have literally changed my life, and made me completely indifferent to waiting however long it takes for them to work out the kinks in LASIK. Today's the 24th; you change them once a month; and literally I haven't touched, taken out, cleaned, or even really though about them (until now) for the last 23 days. You can sleep with them in, no problem, and your eyes don't feel horrible like they do if you slept with other contacts. I'm horribly blind (-8 diopters both eyes) but my lifestyle is just like it was back before I started losing my sight in 4th grade.
Ah ha! You've got `em, you cunning sleuth, you.
/etc/shadow over to a Chinese person.
/. about this very pertinent, sensitive and telling piece of information.
It will be a cold day in Hell before I hand my
Thank you so very much for enlightening me and the rest of
What are you talking about? It's a huge problem. The "conversion" is done in software, meaning you're tied to Wintel if you wish to use the player at all. But what's much worse is they're using a proprietary storage technology (memory stick) and a proprietary codec (ATRAC) that sounds much worse than MP3.
But worst of all is the complete lack of MP3 support! Unless they've come up with some brilliant, previously undiscovered lossless transcoding algorithm, all your MP3s are going to have to be recompressed in ATRAC. If you want an approximation how crappy this sounds--and I say approximation because, mind you, ATRAC is even worse-sounding than MP3--try encoding a song in LAME, dumping the MP3 to PCM, and then re-encoding it. It sounds like it was recorded underwater.
At my school (Berkeley) they're using something by Vernier, most likely this, to require login and password for WLAN access. It's pretty cool--anyone can get a DHCP lease but apparently the Vernier access manager maintains a dynamic routing table that drops all your traffic until you've authenticated. Since they've managed to link the access manager in with the strange Kerberos-ish auth mechanism our school uses ("CalNet") I've a feeling the system is quite flexible and could be easily integrated with class schedules to provide the solution you're looking for. (The literature says it supports all the usual suspects--Kerberos, LDAP, Radius, NT, etc. and those are flexible enough on their own to do it.)
I am 99.999% sure that pretty much everyone on this board is writing their posts on an Intel- or AMD-based machine (save a few Transmeta loners.) Both of whom are guilty guilty guilty of this so-called outsourcing treason. Not only did you all hypocritically vote with your dollar for said practices, but you didn't even pay the full damn dollar: you all benefitted from cheaper microprocessor costs that are the direct result of Intel and AMD exploiting foreign comparative advantage in chip design. Or Microsoft, in software design. Or Dell, in tech support services. The list goes on.
Sure, you can vote with your ballot for one or the other guy, but something (maybe the millions of dollars of tech-industry money between them) tells me that won't have much of an impact. What's really needed is to withold your $$ from companies that don't engage in these practices. I happen to think there aren't any, but who knows... mebbeso.
Interesting that they would choose two lossy media formats as models for comparison.
Hrm... nope, not interesting. They're referring to their ubiquity, nothing more. (Duh.) I would shudder to think how a lossy 3D modelling standard would work, but luckily I don't have to, since that's an idiocy.
What's marginally interesting is that they would name two standards that are encumbered in a thicket of patent disputes.
I like that you've posted 5 comments on Slashdot in four years, and fully 40% of them are complaining about this one incident. That guy must have really pissed you off :)
PS What are you doing with a grad. degree (assumed PhD) in CS and not programming?
Yeah but an even cooler joke would be throwing something up that everyone thinks is an April Fool's joke, and then doing it for real. A meta-April Fool's joke, if you will.
This is definitely not nearly as far off the deep-end as, say, PigeonRank, for example. It's not even really very funny. And it sounds a little outrageous, but not a lot. I'm 50-50 on the fence as the whether this is real or not. (It seems like it would be rare for NYTimes, Reuters, and CNet to all get suckered, for example.)
Universities are blocking BitTorrent because it's consuming gigantic quantities of bandwidth. 13% of Internet2 bandwidth is P2P traffic, for example--and more than half that is BitTorrent (32 terabytes). And this is on an academic, educational network. Somehow I doubt all those data are DNA sequences and radiotelemetry :) Let's be completely unrealistic for a moment and posit those are all legal, noninfringing file transfers. It's still not in my university's charter to finance me downloading the latest Moe show of etree. It's just not. And given I go to the University of California (currently broke), it's one of the first things they should be cutting down on.
Notebook/laptop is really a bit of a misnomer, this machine sits squarely in the "desktop replacement" segment of the market. HP ZD7000 is another example. If you think of this thing as a notebook, sure it sounds like a joke, but you're failing to recognize that the old laptop-desktop dichotomy isn't valid anymore. These machines are actually quite useful. Lots of people don't ever actually take their laptop on the road, but they also don't want the big footprint of a desktop. Or they're like me, a student, and so the only time they transport their laptop is in a suitcase, to and from home. They need a smidge of portability, nothing more. (Some of these machines don't even have onboard batteries.) Desktop replacements make perfect sense. They're cheaper--you don't have to pay for the space-efficiency premium of a good notebook--and you're not stuck typing on a cramped keyboard, squinting at a miniscule screen and listening to tinny music from miniscule onboard speakers.
Exactly. Anybody can learn to tune a guitar in 5 minutes if you can pick out one of (E,A,D,G,B). Alternative tunings definitely open up a whole new world in terms of emotion and sound to good guitar players, especially acoustic. But most players are discouraged from it because a) it's a pain in the ass, b) you can't really play a gig in 7 different tunings unless you have a guitar tech, and c) it kills your strings. At least a) and b) have been solved.
;)
(If you want an example of the beauty that can result when someone bites the bullet and experiments with alternative tunings, I can think of no better example than Nick Drake. I don't think it's a coincidence that he is said to have sucked live.
You can pick one of these up on eBay for 25 bucks. In fact, I'm sitting in my school's library right now typing on the one I bought last week. Highly recommended; it worked out of the box in XP and (shockingly) Fedora Core 1. As in plug and play.
:)
Man we've come a long ways since Slackware 96
Trade dress infringment bars you from making identical-looking products ("packaging, color, and label," if you want the legalese.) And only in some cases. I don't saying anything about what the player should look like, rather how it should function. Probably because I didn't. If someone took all those features and put them inside a wooden egg, there wouldn't be a damn thing Apple could do about it.
YANAL, so please, don't quit your day job.
- Lightweight, metallic case
- Teeny form factor
- USB2 or FireWire interface
- Backlit LCD
- Easy navigation/interface
And so on. It seems like every player on the market gets maybe four of the five, except for Apple, which nails all of them. And Apple crushes the market. I ran into the exact same thing last month when I was shopping for a laptop: want one that has the best 3D graphics card (ATI MR 9600 Pro), thin profile, light weight, beautiful LCD widescreen, WiFi, bluetooth, metallic case, etc? You have but one choice, my friend. I realize maybe Apple has a brilliant, one-of-a-kind group of innovators dreawming up all these great products. But it shouldn't take a world-class engineering team, or even a particularly brilliant one, to simply knock off all their products and give Apple a little healthy competition.The XP ACPI implementation is much, much further along than the Linux's is, or may ever be. When implemented fully, ACPI can do all sorts of nifty things like shutting down individual peripherals to save power, even if they're on the USB bus (do a search for "usb 'selective suspend'" and see how many hits for Linux you get), throttle the CPU (now superceded by SpeedStep et. al), etc. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, Unix simply was never designed with this type of role in mind. It takes tons of tweaking to get a Unix system to mimic the same basic features found out-of-the-box in Windows, things like HDD spindown, intilligent CPU throttling (cpudynd does not count), etc. Even then everything is wont to thrash your disk with reckless abandon
One wonders why these literal rocket scientists didn't just get a software programmable Linux or PalmOS based wrist-computer and hack together a Mars-time display application into it?
:)
Dude, this is freakin' NASA we're talking about here. As in, you know, the agency that never once in its illustrious history found a project it couldn't pork up, underbudget, and overrun by at least 3x projected cost. I mean... duh.
Actually those arches etc are there because they're examples of generic European architecture, which can be found in any (or no) EU country. If you put the Eiffel Tower or the Reichstag on the 20, you'd have yet another cultural jihad about French/German arrogance and everything would be a mess. So, we get bland, unrecognizable engravings that have no character whatsoever :) That's also why "EURO" is written on each bill in the latin and greek alphabets--every member country must be represented.
Getting totally backstabbed by my Tradewars 2002 corp. partner after finally getting a Class M planet with a citadel, huge treasury, planetary defense system, and cherried-out ISS ranks high on my list. Even better, after I logged in and found myself sitting in an escape pod in the middle of nowhere, the sysop chatted me just to say he watched the whole thing happen live. Fuckers. That and entering those wonderful "no-exit" sector clusters.
And Apple is over there just drooling for my cash.
Yeah, well, you would be too if you could successfully charge your customers 100% markup over comparable x86 hardware and have them lining up begging to pay it.
EFI == Electronic Fuel Injection
Uhm... 1.
Well then I wish you well on your ~ 6 year sojourn into entertainmentless wilderness, because as I recall it only took about 4 years before a lot of movies started only coming out on DVD and not on VHS. This despite VHS having 15 years of momentum behind it.
Exactly right. "Bought my own office building in our second year" is a dead giveaway--a year-two cash outlay of probably several hundred thousand, plus the ability to sell said multimillion-dollar asset at a loss one year later, are pretty clear indications that this was not your average, "cash strapped" startup. If I had millions in the bank, I would certianly be employing this guy's foolproof, trial-and-error method of starting a business as well :)