They put farscape in the absolute worst timeslot there is - friday night at 10pm. At that time the world is asleep or well on their way to oblivion.
Not to mention starting the new episodes in the middle of the northern hemisphere summer. Did they think people were going to stop going away for the weekend just because they put on some new Farscape episodes?
Sg-1 is on for like 16 hours a week. Farscape?
Another good point. No repeats of Farscape at all. Miss the 10pm Friday showing and you're out of luck.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would a network take their most expensive show and put it on in one of the worst time slots available? I guess that's why I'm not a TV exec.
Right wingers (at least American right wingers) believe the rules set down 200-some years ago by the founders of the United States have done a pretty good job for us and maybe we shouldn't constantly be trying to "fix" things that aren't demonstrably broken. Left wingers think they know better than all the people who came before them and that things should be done their way. (To be a bit more fair, the view from the left is more likely that situations have changed and that the rules should be changed to keep up.)
Clearly this is an oversimplification, but it captures the gist of the right/left thing. Conservative/right-winger: "There's a reason for tradition." Liberal/left-winger: "Change is good!"
I don't know about AT&T, but my cable company (Time Warner) offers connections to four or five different ISPs, so there is SOME competition. Each of the ISPs has slightly different plans and different prices. This doesn't mean they won't all put caps in place at the same time, but so far they seem to be operating independently.
All gnutella clients are not created equal. There have been a number of features implemented in some of the clients that dramatically reduce the query and response traffic. Unfortunately, not all client authors have implemented these features. And some people are still using very old clients that lack these optimizations. If everyone would get on board with query routing and ultrapeers (sic) the situation would improve greatly.
You're right, though, kazaa is still ahead of gnutella in terms of keeping down the unnecessary network traffic.
I think it started to go downhill when the hazards became almost as important as the opposing robot. I wanted to see robots do battle, not have the robots getting beaten up by the ring. It was particularly nasty for the lightweight bots that would get tossed across the box by the saws. They should have had the hazards on some random sequence and not had some guy on the controls gunning for every bot the wandered by.
BTW, I believe you can have large caliber projectile weapons, you just need to tether the projectile and reel it back in after firing.
I'm like you in this regard. My CD purchases have gone way up since MP3s became popular. There are several artists I'd never heard previously and now I own every CD they've released.
The quality of most of the MP3s on the file sharing networks is not adequate for anyone that really cares about the music. I look at them as samplers, nothing more.
All those MP3s being swapped may well be violations of copyright, but I'd be surprised if even 10% of them represented lost sales. Most of the people downloading these files weren't going to buy the CD anyway. And there are at least some people who are buying more as a result of the file swapping.
I recently had the compressor replaced in my SUV. It cost US$650, including labor, coolant, and a reconditioned compressor. This included the conversion from whatever the old Freon-based system was to the new non-ozone-destroying system. I used 4-60 cooling for a couple years before getting the A/C fixed. Given how hot it's been this summer, I'm glad I spent the $650.
Freezing? It's not like they're adding an air conditioner to the laptop. The water is simply used to transport the heat from the CPU (and probably the memory) to the back of the display where it can be dissipated. The only danger of freezing would be if you left the laptop out in a snow bank.
You don't have to subscribe to cable TV service to get the cable modem internet service, at least not in my area (which is Time Warner). They do charge a slightly higher fee -- $5 more per month. It would be $41/month if you didn't have cable TV service. That's for 2.5Mpbs/384kbps. And I do get that speed. They don't offer static IP addresses, but if you leave your system online all the time, in practice, the IP almost never changes.
In this area, DSL is $50/month for 1.5Mbps/128kbps, and still no static IP address. That's the advertised speed, of course. YMMV. The last time I looked into getting DSL, the best they were offering was 128kbps downstream. (I'm apparently a long way from the CO.)
Is Time Warner in Austin offering AOL and Earthlink as ISPs like they do here? I get mailings all the time from Earthlink wanting me to switch my cable modem service to them.
Road Runner has, so far, been the best ISP I've been with, but if they're going to start blocking ports and limiting service, it may be time to start looking for alternatives. I don't mind paying for the services I'm using, but this sounds like they aren't even giving you the option.
Yeah, but what happens when everyone on your block gets one of those wireless cable modem boxes? I'm not an expert at this, but my 802.11b wireless network has a rather limited number of channels, and even fewer if you want to use 11Mbps. I'd think if you have more than a couple of these in any neighborhood they're going to start stepping all over each other. It'll still work, but throughput will suffer. In densely populated areas it may slow to a crawl.
The article said the laser is only 2000 watts. The Humvee shouldn't have any trouble generating that. The bigger question is how long is it going to take to burn off the explosive in a cluster bomb with a laser slightly more powerful than my hair dryer? It's an interesting concept, but I have to think they're going to need more than 2000 watts to make this work.
Those claims are clearly gross exaggerations intended to fool idiots and judges into thinking IE is an integral part of the OS. They define "IE" as every line of code exercised by IE in doing its thing, including mundane things like writing to the screen or saving a file. Then they discover if you pull out all the code for "fwrite" suddenly the system stops working. Duh! It's like claiming your car won't run without the windshield wipers, defining the windshield wipers as everything needed to make them work, including the battery. So you pull out the battery and, what do you know, the car won't start.
All these hybrid cars are based on econo boxes. The Prius has the same body as the Echo. It may be a different car with different features and build quality, but it's still going to be the same size. To be fair with the mileage comparison, you need to look at cars of roughly the same size. The Echo automatic is supposed to get 31 city, 38 highway. Split the difference and figure 34.5. With this mileage and using your assumptions on cost and number of miles driven, the difference in fuel cost is $287 a year. At that rate you're really never going to recover the additional initial cost.
You formula is incorrect. Your $1200/yr savings, at $1/gallon, says you're saving 1200 gallons a year. But at 38 MPG, you only use 316 gallons to go 12,000 miles. Did you get that formula the same place Jack got his beans?
At 38 MPG you'll use 316 gallons to go 12,000 miles. At 48 MPG you'll use 250 gallons to go 12,000 miles. That's a savings of 66 gallons a year. At $2/gallon, you'll have paid off that initial price differential in 26.5 years.
If, OTOH, you invested the $3500 at 4% simple interest, you'd earn more than enough to pay for the extra gas, and you'd still have $3500 as a downpayment on your next car.
You're wrong about how malls make their money. It's very common for the mall to get a cut of the gross, so increased sales for the stores means increased revenue for the mall. That's one of the reasons you see advertising for the mall itself. They want you in there buying.
But you can't have the captain of a ship not knowing anything about the ship. They need to know how fast it can go. How long it can go on a full tank. What tolerances and safty margins there are for bad weather. And a lot of similar stuff.
Yes, the captain needs to know how fast the ship can go and how far it will go on a tank of gas, but that doesn't mean he has to personally monitor the engine RPMs or the fuel flow. He can ask the guy in charge of the engine room, "How fast will this tub go?" Likewise, a project manager doesn't have to know how to code to ask the developer, "How long will this take?" Over time, the manager will develop a sense of how accurate the developer's estimates are and will compensate for the inaccuracies. None of this requires in depth knowledge of the skills needed to write even a single line of code.
You make it sound like software is the only business that produces inferior products, or at least does so for more than an economically brief moment. There are crappy products all over the place.
Have you eaten at McDonald's recently? Is that the best damn burger you've ever had or what? I don't know about you, but for me this falls into the "or what" category. But McDonald's is still selling millions of burgers every day. Why are people willing to pay for this less than stellar example of the burger arts? Because when you throw time and money into the equation -- not to mention Happy Meals -- McDonald's comes out a decent value.
Does Microsoft Excel have some serious flaws? (I don't really know because I don't use Excel much, but since it's software and we all know software is crap, I assume it must have at least a few.) Why do people still use it? Maybe because it's better than rooms full of mindless clerks sharpening pencils and filling out ledger books.
People use crappy software because it's still better than the alternative. I'm not trying to defend crappy software, but I do think a little perspective would be helpful. If NIST wanted to be fair, they should have also researched what it would have cost the economy if that buggy software didn't exist at all.
There are lots of devices in everyday life where the person controlling the device knows very well the performance characteristics, but knows next to nothing about how the device actually does what it does.
I'm willing to bet there are very few ten year olds who have any idea how a microwave oven works, yet most of them have no trouble at all making popcorn in them.
I know the performance characteristics of my home sound system, but I have only a vague clue what's going on inside all the equipment. "Well, the sound comes in this wire here, it runs around inside this big black box, then it comes out these wires and goes to these really big boxes that throw the music into the room."
There is absolutely no reason a manager needs to know anything at all about headers or procedure calls. The only thing most of them need to know about COM and OO is that they're software related so they'll sign off on training requests.
I'll agree with your point about the marketing VP. Most of the ones I've met couldn't lead the way out of an elevator.
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I suggest three states: The People's Bayside Republic, Los Angeles (excluding The Valley), and Old California (composed of the rest of the state).
Another good point. No repeats of Farscape at all. Miss the 10pm Friday showing and you're out of luck.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would a network take their most expensive show and put it on in one of the worst time slots available? I guess that's why I'm not a TV exec.
Right wingers (at least American right wingers) believe the rules set down 200-some years ago by the founders of the United States have done a pretty good job for us and maybe we shouldn't constantly be trying to "fix" things that aren't demonstrably broken. Left wingers think they know better than all the people who came before them and that things should be done their way. (To be a bit more fair, the view from the left is more likely that situations have changed and that the rules should be changed to keep up.)
Clearly this is an oversimplification, but it captures the gist of the right/left thing. Conservative/right-winger: "There's a reason for tradition." Liberal/left-winger: "Change is good!"
I don't know about AT&T, but my cable company (Time Warner) offers connections to four or five different ISPs, so there is SOME competition. Each of the ISPs has slightly different plans and different prices. This doesn't mean they won't all put caps in place at the same time, but so far they seem to be operating independently.
All gnutella clients are not created equal. There have been a number of features implemented in some of the clients that dramatically reduce the query and response traffic. Unfortunately, not all client authors have implemented these features. And some people are still using very old clients that lack these optimizations. If everyone would get on board with query routing and ultrapeers (sic) the situation would improve greatly.
You're right, though, kazaa is still ahead of gnutella in terms of keeping down the unnecessary network traffic.
I think it started to go downhill when the hazards became almost as important as the opposing robot. I wanted to see robots do battle, not have the robots getting beaten up by the ring. It was particularly nasty for the lightweight bots that would get tossed across the box by the saws. They should have had the hazards on some random sequence and not had some guy on the controls gunning for every bot the wandered by.
BTW, I believe you can have large caliber projectile weapons, you just need to tether the projectile and reel it back in after firing.
I'm like you in this regard. My CD purchases have gone way up since MP3s became popular. There are several artists I'd never heard previously and now I own every CD they've released.
The quality of most of the MP3s on the file sharing networks is not adequate for anyone that really cares about the music. I look at them as samplers, nothing more.
All those MP3s being swapped may well be violations of copyright, but I'd be surprised if even 10% of them represented lost sales. Most of the people downloading these files weren't going to buy the CD anyway. And there are at least some people who are buying more as a result of the file swapping.
I recently had the compressor replaced in my SUV. It cost US$650, including labor, coolant, and a reconditioned compressor. This included the conversion from whatever the old Freon-based system was to the new non-ozone-destroying system. I used 4-60 cooling for a couple years before getting the A/C fixed. Given how hot it's been this summer, I'm glad I spent the $650.
Freezing? It's not like they're adding an air conditioner to the laptop. The water is simply used to transport the heat from the CPU (and probably the memory) to the back of the display where it can be dissipated. The only danger of freezing would be if you left the laptop out in a snow bank.
You don't have to subscribe to cable TV service to get the cable modem internet service, at least not in my area (which is Time Warner). They do charge a slightly higher fee -- $5 more per month. It would be $41/month if you didn't have cable TV service. That's for 2.5Mpbs/384kbps. And I do get that speed. They don't offer static IP addresses, but if you leave your system online all the time, in practice, the IP almost never changes.
In this area, DSL is $50/month for 1.5Mbps/128kbps, and still no static IP address. That's the advertised speed, of course. YMMV. The last time I looked into getting DSL, the best they were offering was 128kbps downstream. (I'm apparently a long way from the CO.)
Is Time Warner in Austin offering AOL and Earthlink as ISPs like they do here? I get mailings all the time from Earthlink wanting me to switch my cable modem service to them.
Road Runner has, so far, been the best ISP I've been with, but if they're going to start blocking ports and limiting service, it may be time to start looking for alternatives. I don't mind paying for the services I'm using, but this sounds like they aren't even giving you the option.
Yeah, but what happens when everyone on your block gets one of those wireless cable modem boxes? I'm not an expert at this, but my 802.11b wireless network has a rather limited number of channels, and even fewer if you want to use 11Mbps. I'd think if you have more than a couple of these in any neighborhood they're going to start stepping all over each other. It'll still work, but throughput will suffer. In densely populated areas it may slow to a crawl.
The article said the laser is only 2000 watts. The Humvee shouldn't have any trouble generating that. The bigger question is how long is it going to take to burn off the explosive in a cluster bomb with a laser slightly more powerful than my hair dryer? It's an interesting concept, but I have to think they're going to need more than 2000 watts to make this work.
Those claims are clearly gross exaggerations intended to fool idiots and judges into thinking IE is an integral part of the OS. They define "IE" as every line of code exercised by IE in doing its thing, including mundane things like writing to the screen or saving a file. Then they discover if you pull out all the code for "fwrite" suddenly the system stops working. Duh! It's like claiming your car won't run without the windshield wipers, defining the windshield wipers as everything needed to make them work, including the battery. So you pull out the battery and, what do you know, the car won't start.
All these hybrid cars are based on econo boxes. The Prius has the same body as the Echo. It may be a different car with different features and build quality, but it's still going to be the same size. To be fair with the mileage comparison, you need to look at cars of roughly the same size. The Echo automatic is supposed to get 31 city, 38 highway. Split the difference and figure 34.5. With this mileage and using your assumptions on cost and number of miles driven, the difference in fuel cost is $287 a year. At that rate you're really never going to recover the additional initial cost.
Both the Toyota and the Honda use NiMH batteries, not lead acid. They're about as neutral on the environment as you can get.
You formula is incorrect. Your $1200/yr savings, at $1/gallon, says you're saving 1200 gallons a year. But at 38 MPG, you only use 316 gallons to go 12,000 miles. Did you get that formula the same place Jack got his beans?
At 38 MPG you'll use 316 gallons to go 12,000 miles. At 48 MPG you'll use 250 gallons to go 12,000 miles. That's a savings of 66 gallons a year. At $2/gallon, you'll have paid off that initial price differential in 26.5 years.
If, OTOH, you invested the $3500 at 4% simple interest, you'd earn more than enough to pay for the extra gas, and you'd still have $3500 as a downpayment on your next car.
You're wrong about how malls make their money. It's very common for the mall to get a cut of the gross, so increased sales for the stores means increased revenue for the mall. That's one of the reasons you see advertising for the mall itself. They want you in there buying.
I'm on board for that ballgag idea. Anybody who talks during the movie can legally be tied to their chair and have a ballgag applied. All in favor?
No you're not; you'll be stone dead in a moment. You're not fooling anyone.
You make it sound like software is the only business that produces inferior products, or at least does so for more than an economically brief moment. There are crappy products all over the place.
Have you eaten at McDonald's recently? Is that the best damn burger you've ever had or what? I don't know about you, but for me this falls into the "or what" category. But McDonald's is still selling millions of burgers every day. Why are people willing to pay for this less than stellar example of the burger arts? Because when you throw time and money into the equation -- not to mention Happy Meals -- McDonald's comes out a decent value.
Does Microsoft Excel have some serious flaws? (I don't really know because I don't use Excel much, but since it's software and we all know software is crap, I assume it must have at least a few.) Why do people still use it? Maybe because it's better than rooms full of mindless clerks sharpening pencils and filling out ledger books.
People use crappy software because it's still better than the alternative. I'm not trying to defend crappy software, but I do think a little perspective would be helpful. If NIST wanted to be fair, they should have also researched what it would have cost the economy if that buggy software didn't exist at all.
And having counterfeit bills in many different colors would change the situation... how?
There are lots of devices in everyday life where the person controlling the device knows very well the performance characteristics, but knows next to nothing about how the device actually does what it does.
I'm willing to bet there are very few ten year olds who have any idea how a microwave oven works, yet most of them have no trouble at all making popcorn in them.
I know the performance characteristics of my home sound system, but I have only a vague clue what's going on inside all the equipment. "Well, the sound comes in this wire here, it runs around inside this big black box, then it comes out these wires and goes to these really big boxes that throw the music into the room."
There is absolutely no reason a manager needs to know anything at all about headers or procedure calls. The only thing most of them need to know about COM and OO is that they're software related so they'll sign off on training requests.
I'll agree with your point about the marketing VP. Most of the ones I've met couldn't lead the way out of an elevator.
And the colors on the new bills will help the blind... how?