I just have to say that: 1. I was an EQ addict 2. I replaced my TV time with Game time...
Now I dont play EQ anymore, but I have returned to TV.. What was better?
This is exactly my point. I think the answer to your question of 'which is better' is "whatever works for you." As long as it doesn't keep you from going to work/class/school, and doesn't damage your health, that is. I think computer games get a bad rep, when they're really no better or worse than spending an equivalent amount of time watching TV, which many people do habitually anyway.
Or, you could have spent those 70 days doing something equally stupid.
The only problem I have with your logic -- or anyone that heavily criticizes people for spending too much time on any one activity -- is the assumption that if they did other activities, they would inherently have more value.
I know people that spend hours a day, pretty much all of their leisure time, watching sports on TV. Is that really any better or worse than playing WoW for an equivalent amount of time? I don't think so (especially given that ESPN costs more).
I'm willing to bet that most people who are on WoW, if Blizzard went under tomorrow, would find something equally useless to do in their spare time. This idea that people who play games are all going take up triathlon training or feed the homeless in their spare time, if games weren't available, is dumb. In all likelihood they'd just watch TV.
I'm not arguing that too much of anything can't really mess up your life -- when people stop going to class or work to play games (or watch TV, or whatever), it's a real problem. However I'm not sure that games are much worse in this regard than any of several "time wasters" that I can think of, it's just that you don't hear about the other ones.
Seriously -- this is one of the most incoherent summaries that I've read in a while.
"What happened next? The server crashed repeatedly. Why create content the servers can't handle? The very first time I read about this patch, I knew the servers would crash."
The mental image this creates for me is of some brain-damaged ex-geek -- their mind finally snapped from too much Bawlz and sleep deprivation -- safely locked up in a rubber room somewhere, gibbering spastically to themselves. They're having a delightful conversation, too bad they're the only one there.
I don't normally criticize Slashdot articles, because I figure that getting the information out is more important than spelling, grammar, or not sounding like a dyslexic fifth-grader. However this one was just so egregiously bad, I couldn't resist; it goes after some misguided sense of style at the expense of being informative, and that's just not good.
Check your version of iTunes. Also, check that you actually have 5 computers authorized on the account -- if you don't have five of them authorized, then the "Deauthorize All" option won't appear. (I suppose one can also assume that if the option isn't there, then perhaps you don't actually have all five authorizations taken up after all.)
If you really have five computers authorized (so that it's not letting you add an additional unit), are using the latest version of iTunes, and still can't "Deauthorize All," then that page also has the email form for you to send them a question. I've never sent them a question on iTunes, but my past dealings with Apple support have all been very positive.
OT: Anyone else fondly remember back when the tech support number for any Apple product was 1-800-SOS-APPL? That was before they started charging for support... (sigh) free lifetime technical support. We never knew how good we had it.
I'm not sure you need to play Devil's Advocate to espouse such a position at all. In fact I'm not even sure that it's controversial.
Early-90s x86 architecture was soundly trumped by the competing RISC designs, at least in every benchmark I ever saw back then. Intel responded not with any sort of real technical brilliance, it was instead more of a case of them just throwing money and grinding away at the problem, packing more and more transistors onto the chip, and ratcheting up the clock speed. At the same time, their marketing department came up with the "Intel Inside" branding campaign, and got people to associate Intel Processors with the Windows OS on an almost subliminal level. And as their volume increased, the economy-of-scale brought costs down to the point where no other architecture could compete.
I can't think of any time in recent history when x86 has really been tops in any sort of pure performance measurement (except raw clockspeed, perhaps), but it won because of apparent price/performance.
Yeah but saying "to the nearest five" doesn't accurately describe what to do when the number ends in a 3 or 7 (in this case, round up for 3 and down for 7).
The default setting is for iTunes to rip to MPEG-4 audio, compressed with the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) codec. This may be unplayable on your Linux box (I don't know if there's anything that plays it on Linux, I've never had to find out); however I don't think it's a strictly "proprietary" Apple format. At least it's an ISO standard, whether it's patent encumbered or not I'm not sure. There are not any DRM-like restrictions on these files, it's just a different audio encoding format, that apparently you're unable to play. It's used by default because it produces an (arguably) equivalent audio quality at smaller file sizes and bitrates than MP3. You can easily go into the Preferences menu and choose regular MP3 encoding, AIFF, WAV, or Apple Lossless (which is another codec that you're probably not going to be able to play on Linux). There's nothing evil going on here.
This is different from the kind of Protected file I was talking about. When you download something from the iTMS, you get a ".m4p" file, which is an MPEG-4 audio file that's been encrypted and is tied to a specific computer and to that computer's iPods.
What would be evil is if iTunes required you to rip your files into the Protected AAC format, permanently tying them to your computer. It does not, and in fact iTunes doesn't even have the capability itself of producing Protected files from your own media -- the creation of such things is limited to Apple's (or Akamai's) iTMS servers. Therefore my point was a purely hypothetical one. At least, for now. (However some other people have tried to create systems where your music would be encoded into DRMed formats that were device-locked; Sony -- surprise, surprise -- comes to mind I believe.)
If you reread my comment, my point was that the FCC -- a government agency which is supposed to be acting in the public interest -- has become so subverted by the telecommunications companies, that it's effectively their own lobbying body. I.e., it serves the same function as the RIAA.
Perhaps there were more apt comparisons that I could have used, if the RIAA one caused confusion. I would liken the situation to how the late 19th and early 20th century railroad companies bought judges practically on the open market (for a good treatment of this read "The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street"), but I didn't think that would be as widely appreciated here.
Sounds good to me. Never happen, though. The FCC is effectively the "Public Division" of the large telecom companies. Kind of like how the recording companies have the RIAA to advocate for them? Well the telecos just subverted themselves a government agency to act on their collective behalf.
The FCC is toothless, and the telecommunications companies like it that way -- and they should, because the FCC has their collective dick in its mouth.
Interesting. That would be a pretty nice product, if it materialized.
Minolta's strength was always in their physical engineering -- glass and lenses, body construction, and control placement. Electronics... sometimes not so good. (Anyone who had the original Dimage 7 knows what I mean. That thing ran hotter than the surface of the sun and chewed through batteries like a St. Bernard though puppy chow.)
What will really be a shame to not have manufactured anymore are their G-series lenses. Those things were sweet; you can recognize them because of the white cases. They tended to be slightly less expensive on the used market than the Nikon ones, and much less than Canon (because the Canon ones have the motor in the lens). They also used to make a nice range of large-format and enlarger glass, although I suppose that stuff will be on the used market forever.
The iTunes DRM isn't obnoxious because most users don't have it applied to a large percentage of their music files. I have thousands of songs on my Mac at home, but only a small handful are "protected" ones. Why? Because most songs were ripped directly from CDs. I'm fairly certain that I'm a typical user in this regard.
But let's imagine for a moment that Apple changed iTunes so that it would only play music that was protected, and it would only rip music from a CD, into the protected format. Suddenly their "unobtrusive" DRM would become a real thorn in everone's collective side.
The iTMS DRM is only acceptable because it's something that most people run across occasionally -- when they really want a new song and don't mind paying a dollar for it, or they had a bunch of those free-song Pepsi caps. Imagine that implemented across your entire music library and I think you'd have a different opinion.
There are -- or were, anyway -- natural gas reservoirs in Texas and the Southern US that were as high as 6-7% helium by volume; enough so that it created a non-trivial difference in the energy density of the natural gas.
I don't think that's typical of most natural gas supplies, though. It might have just been a freaky geologic coincidence that we ended up with a lot of it there.
The government program to conserve helium was related to this -- the story I heard is that the natural gas producers sold their product by the therm, so to them the helium just made for a weaker product (more gas volume per therm). The government stepped in and ran the gas through a He recovery facility, and then pumped the helium into old salt mines for storage. The gas companies got a more pure product, and everyone got very cheap helium.
I don't have much information to substantiate this, and I don't know if those gas wells are still open or if that He recovery program is still going on. But it's my understanding that the biggest concentrations of helium in the world, and what has given us the very low price (some would say artificially low) it sells at now and has allowed for the development of MRI machines and the like, are natural gas reservoirs, and when they run out, so will the cheap helium.
The way that helium can also be produced is through the liquefaction and distillation of air, but this is extremely expensive and energy-intensive (since there's not much of it in the air at any time, and air is a pain to liquefy). It's a lot easier to distill it from a heavy hydrocarbon, especially if it's in there at upwards of 5%. However before the helium deposits in the Texas natural gas wells were discovered, this is what was done. However He was orders of magnitude more expensive than it is now -- I've heard stories about people who worked with helium in labs, and they used to have big balloons caught escaping helium gas, and would take these filled balloons to recovery facilities for reliquefaction. I don't think that some of the radiology uses of liquid-He would be commercially viable if this was still the case.
This is really too bad. I've always been a fan of Minolta's photography products, dating back to when I used to work behind the counter in a photo store.
They were never as cheap as the low-end Nikon or Canon, but for a little bit more money you got a lot more features. I thought this was the case with their digital line as well.
I think where they failed was waiting so long to bring out a DSLR that was lens-compatible with their Maxxum series of film SLRs. They played around for a long time with the idea of DSLRs that used special digital lenses, a standard lens format that would be brand-neutral (not a bad concept, really). It required them to retool their factories completely, and in the meantime Nikon and Canon brought out DSLRs that were basically a chip shoved into their film bodies and used the film-series lenses. These were a lot more attractive to photographers and left Minolta photographers in the lurch for a number of years.
Frankly I think the Minolta 7D, the digital version of the Maxxum 7, was sweet -- it was just introduced too late and at too high a price to compete with Nikon. And the features it offered were a tough sell to an "average consumer" whose primary concern is price. (Image stabilization is not an easy feature to sell, altough I think it's a really good deal given that to get the same thing in Nikon or Canon you'd need all new lenses.) I guess I should hurry up and buy one.
I find it odd that they're selling out to Sony; Minolta's products always seemed to me like the anti-Sony: not a lot of proprietary accessories, inexpensive addons, etc. I would have thought that selling out to Kodak would be the logical step. I guess they got a better offer. I wonder if Sony will retain the digital-Maxxum series DSLRs, given that Sony doesn't have any DSLR history. There are a LOT of Maxxum users in Japan (I've heard that the Maxxum 9 is the most popular film camera for photojournalists there, versus the Nikon F5 in the states.) It seems silly not to continue with it, but Sony has never been constrained by the bounds of what I'd consider to be logical behavior.
I had been afraid this was going to happen though, ever since Konica and Minolta merged. It's really too bad, though. They made good gear, and I hope that Sigma and the other aftermarket manufacturers will continue to support their lineup in the future.
ISDN would have been called 'broadband,' it was just that it never got associated with the term, because basically nobody used it. And that was because the telephone company wanted an arm, a leg, half a kidney and your firstborn child for it.
It wasn't until the cable companies started offering data service that the word "broadband" came into use; and I even remember a time when people just talked about having "cable internet," in the same way that they talk about "cable TV." In fact, I would argue that the term "broadband" came about mostly because of the need for a generic word to refer to any high-speed data service to the home, and that wasn't necessary until there was more than one (DSL and cable).
I agree. The only thing I dislike is that Konqueror has an absurdly large default text size, which I haven't spent enough time with yet to figure out how to change. So every time I open it, I press Ctrl-Minus a few times to make it look "normal." Otherwise reading a slashdot page gives my neck whiplash, going from side to side on a 19" monitor over and over. (I have a 19" display that's only 1024x768...)
Just in case anyone else was wondering what the hell "Swedish Rounding" was (I'll be honest, my first thought had nothing to do with numbers), here's the deal:
One day I found a sign on the counter of check out explaining something called "swedish rounding". The explanation said something like they "round down prices ending in 1,2 to 0 and 6,7 to 5 and round up prices ending in 3,4 to 5 and 8,9 to 0." My head was spinning trying to figure out how that worked. I have since see the explanation more simply as 0,1,2 are rounded to zero, 3,4,5,6,7 are rounded to 5, and 8, 9 are rounded to 10.
I thought I'd point out another resource that won't be replaced, either, but that doesn't get mentioned very often: Helium.
I wasn't partiuclarly aware that this was a consumable resource until recently, but it is. Every cubic foot of helium gas that's released up into the atmosphere is basically lost forever -- it's so light that it just keeps going up and up, and eventually escapes our atmosphere.
Although it's not as important to us as a civilization as copper, and will probably take longer to become scarce, it's not something that's partiularly easy to get. Right now we get most of our supply from the natural gas industry -- helium is present in natural gas but doesn't burn, and if not extracted from the gas prior to use just goes out the tailpipe. There are (or were) government-backed programs to extract and store the He prior to use of the natural gas, but I'm not sure if that's still going on.
We use an increasing amount of Helium in its liquid form as cooling, partiularly for MRI machines. I can only see this usage getting bigger in the future; plus, liquid He is one of the only ways to reliably get objects down to ultra-cold temperatures, which might become very important in the future. (Superconducting computers?) The point is that we really haven't exploited Helium very far, and yet we're 'burning' through it fairly quickly, along with the natural gas supply.
It's just another thing that when it's gone, it's gone. It may seem frivolous now, but when you consider the difficulty of synthesizing a hydrocarbon chain, it's not partiularly tough. Make me a mole of helium atoms cheaply on an industrial scale? Now that's difficult.
This is the same way in Connecticut and Maine. If you sell a particular brand, you need to take those bottles back. Conversely, you're not required to take back any brands that you don't sell.
The problem is if you buy a bunch of bottles of some weirdo brand, they're a pain in the butt to get rid of later, because no local place will take them. At my parents house there is a flat of glass root beer bottles that have been sitting around for almost a decade, because we can't figure out where they should go.
(And you can't put deposit bottles into the curbside recycling bin -- for reasons I don't quite understand, the guys on the truck will actually pick through the crap in your bin, and reject deposit bottles. I guess they really want you to get your 5 cents back.)
now if only I had a machine to sort out the pre and post-'82 pennies...
I bet that if you had a big vibratory tumbler, you could probably sort them by density. Over time, the more dense ones would tend to sink to the bottom and the less dense ones to the top. You'd just need to get a tumbler that was capable of working with a full load of pennies -- most of them that you'll find are made for cleaning brass pistol cartridges, and filled with a mix of chopped walnut shells, not copper.
They still exist. The last place I saw them was in several rest stations on the Maine and Massachusetts Turnpikes. You'd put in a penny (and several quarters) and turn a big wheel and it would squish out the penny into any one of several designs. The Maine ones have lobsters, the Massachusetts ones have Ted Kennedy. (Okay probably not.)
You used to occasionally see them in McDonalds, but that was a while (>10 years) ago.
When I was a kid we used to put pennies on the railroad tracks and wait for a freight train to go by; depending on the type of locomotive you could get ones that were squished out as much as a few inches long.
I agree. However on Windows I think Firefox is still the best.
On Mac you can use Safari with Pithhelmet and block most ads, and on Linux I use Konqueror, which in its latest incarnation (comes with KDE 3.5) uses Adblock -- the exact same one that Firefox does. Load it up with Filterset.G and you pretty much never see a graphical ad again.
I guess Gnome users are still stuck with Firefox, or at least I don't know of anything else that's better than it.
I definitely prefer Safari/Konqueror to Firefox's rendering, though I can't put my finger on exactly why. But when I'm stuck on Windows, I'll take Firefox to IE any day, obviously.
Are you also recommending that Firefox be distributed with Javascript disabled?
He may not be, but I am.
At the very least it should be shipped in a condition that prompts you on a per-site basis whether you want to run scripts or not.
90% of scripts are useless to the user. They don't do anything that markedly improves their experience, and could be silently removed without them caring. I'm talking about the ones used for tracking, to disguise URLs in the status bar, auto-changing advertisements, etc.
Frankly I can't understand why Firefox doesn't either ship with, or just incorporate into the main distribution, NoScript, Adblock and Flashblock. There's no excuse for it taking four downloads (well three, you can sort of take your pick between Adblock and Flashblock) to get a browsing experience that doesn't suck.
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I'm quoting you because you're AC:
I just have to say that:
1. I was an EQ addict
2. I replaced my TV time with Game time...
Now I dont play EQ anymore, but I have returned to TV..
What was better?
This is exactly my point. I think the answer to your question of 'which is better' is "whatever works for you." As long as it doesn't keep you from going to work/class/school, and doesn't damage your health, that is. I think computer games get a bad rep, when they're really no better or worse than spending an equivalent amount of time watching TV, which many people do habitually anyway.
Or, you could have spent those 70 days doing something equally stupid.
The only problem I have with your logic -- or anyone that heavily criticizes people for spending too much time on any one activity -- is the assumption that if they did other activities, they would inherently have more value.
I know people that spend hours a day, pretty much all of their leisure time, watching sports on TV. Is that really any better or worse than playing WoW for an equivalent amount of time? I don't think so (especially given that ESPN costs more).
I'm willing to bet that most people who are on WoW, if Blizzard went under tomorrow, would find something equally useless to do in their spare time. This idea that people who play games are all going take up triathlon training or feed the homeless in their spare time, if games weren't available, is dumb. In all likelihood they'd just watch TV.
I'm not arguing that too much of anything can't really mess up your life -- when people stop going to class or work to play games (or watch TV, or whatever), it's a real problem. However I'm not sure that games are much worse in this regard than any of several "time wasters" that I can think of, it's just that you don't hear about the other ones.
Seriously -- this is one of the most incoherent summaries that I've read in a while.
"What happened next? The server crashed repeatedly. Why create content the servers can't handle? The very first time I read about this patch, I knew the servers would crash."
The mental image this creates for me is of some brain-damaged ex-geek -- their mind finally snapped from too much Bawlz and sleep deprivation -- safely locked up in a rubber room somewhere, gibbering spastically to themselves. They're having a delightful conversation, too bad they're the only one there.
I don't normally criticize Slashdot articles, because I figure that getting the information out is more important than spelling, grammar, or not sounding like a dyslexic fifth-grader. However this one was just so egregiously bad, I couldn't resist; it goes after some misguided sense of style at the expense of being informative, and that's just not good.
Check your version of iTunes. Also, check that you actually have 5 computers authorized on the account -- if you don't have five of them authorized, then the "Deauthorize All" option won't appear. (I suppose one can also assume that if the option isn't there, then perhaps you don't actually have all five authorizations taken up after all.)
t horization/
Here is the Apple support page:
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/musicstore/au
If you really have five computers authorized (so that it's not letting you add an additional unit), are using the latest version of iTunes, and still can't "Deauthorize All," then that page also has the email form for you to send them a question. I've never sent them a question on iTunes, but my past dealings with Apple support have all been very positive.
OT: Anyone else fondly remember back when the tech support number for any Apple product was 1-800-SOS-APPL? That was before they started charging for support... (sigh) free lifetime technical support. We never knew how good we had it.
Luckily the good folks in the Russian Mob give you both!
I'm not sure you need to play Devil's Advocate to espouse such a position at all. In fact I'm not even sure that it's controversial.
Early-90s x86 architecture was soundly trumped by the competing RISC designs, at least in every benchmark I ever saw back then. Intel responded not with any sort of real technical brilliance, it was instead more of a case of them just throwing money and grinding away at the problem, packing more and more transistors onto the chip, and ratcheting up the clock speed. At the same time, their marketing department came up with the "Intel Inside" branding campaign, and got people to associate Intel Processors with the Windows OS on an almost subliminal level. And as their volume increased, the economy-of-scale brought costs down to the point where no other architecture could compete.
I can't think of any time in recent history when x86 has really been tops in any sort of pure performance measurement (except raw clockspeed, perhaps), but it won because of apparent price/performance.
Yeah but saying "to the nearest five" doesn't accurately describe what to do when the number ends in a 3 or 7 (in this case, round up for 3 and down for 7).
The default setting is for iTunes to rip to MPEG-4 audio, compressed with the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) codec. This may be unplayable on your Linux box (I don't know if there's anything that plays it on Linux, I've never had to find out); however I don't think it's a strictly "proprietary" Apple format. At least it's an ISO standard, whether it's patent encumbered or not I'm not sure. There are not any DRM-like restrictions on these files, it's just a different audio encoding format, that apparently you're unable to play. It's used by default because it produces an (arguably) equivalent audio quality at smaller file sizes and bitrates than MP3. You can easily go into the Preferences menu and choose regular MP3 encoding, AIFF, WAV, or Apple Lossless (which is another codec that you're probably not going to be able to play on Linux). There's nothing evil going on here.
This is different from the kind of Protected file I was talking about. When you download something from the iTMS, you get a ".m4p" file, which is an MPEG-4 audio file that's been encrypted and is tied to a specific computer and to that computer's iPods.
What would be evil is if iTunes required you to rip your files into the Protected AAC format, permanently tying them to your computer. It does not, and in fact iTunes doesn't even have the capability itself of producing Protected files from your own media -- the creation of such things is limited to Apple's (or Akamai's) iTMS servers. Therefore my point was a purely hypothetical one. At least, for now. (However some other people have tried to create systems where your music would be encoded into DRMed formats that were device-locked; Sony -- surprise, surprise -- comes to mind I believe.)
I am quite aware of that.
If you reread my comment, my point was that the FCC -- a government agency which is supposed to be acting in the public interest -- has become so subverted by the telecommunications companies, that it's effectively their own lobbying body. I.e., it serves the same function as the RIAA.
Perhaps there were more apt comparisons that I could have used, if the RIAA one caused confusion. I would liken the situation to how the late 19th and early 20th century railroad companies bought judges practically on the open market (for a good treatment of this read "The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street"), but I didn't think that would be as widely appreciated here.
Sounds good to me. Never happen, though. The FCC is effectively the "Public Division" of the large telecom companies. Kind of like how the recording companies have the RIAA to advocate for them? Well the telecos just subverted themselves a government agency to act on their collective behalf.
The FCC is toothless, and the telecommunications companies like it that way -- and they should, because the FCC has their collective dick in its mouth.
Interesting. That would be a pretty nice product, if it materialized.
... sometimes not so good. (Anyone who had the original Dimage 7 knows what I mean. That thing ran hotter than the surface of the sun and chewed through batteries like a St. Bernard though puppy chow.)
Minolta's strength was always in their physical engineering -- glass and lenses, body construction, and control placement. Electronics
What will really be a shame to not have manufactured anymore are their G-series lenses. Those things were sweet; you can recognize them because of the white cases. They tended to be slightly less expensive on the used market than the Nikon ones, and much less than Canon (because the Canon ones have the motor in the lens). They also used to make a nice range of large-format and enlarger glass, although I suppose that stuff will be on the used market forever.
The iTunes DRM isn't obnoxious because most users don't have it applied to a large percentage of their music files. I have thousands of songs on my Mac at home, but only a small handful are "protected" ones. Why? Because most songs were ripped directly from CDs. I'm fairly certain that I'm a typical user in this regard.
But let's imagine for a moment that Apple changed iTunes so that it would only play music that was protected, and it would only rip music from a CD, into the protected format. Suddenly their "unobtrusive" DRM would become a real thorn in everone's collective side.
The iTMS DRM is only acceptable because it's something that most people run across occasionally -- when they really want a new song and don't mind paying a dollar for it, or they had a bunch of those free-song Pepsi caps. Imagine that implemented across your entire music library and I think you'd have a different opinion.
There are -- or were, anyway -- natural gas reservoirs in Texas and the Southern US that were as high as 6-7% helium by volume; enough so that it created a non-trivial difference in the energy density of the natural gas.
I don't think that's typical of most natural gas supplies, though. It might have just been a freaky geologic coincidence that we ended up with a lot of it there.
The government program to conserve helium was related to this -- the story I heard is that the natural gas producers sold their product by the therm, so to them the helium just made for a weaker product (more gas volume per therm). The government stepped in and ran the gas through a He recovery facility, and then pumped the helium into old salt mines for storage. The gas companies got a more pure product, and everyone got very cheap helium.
I don't have much information to substantiate this, and I don't know if those gas wells are still open or if that He recovery program is still going on. But it's my understanding that the biggest concentrations of helium in the world, and what has given us the very low price (some would say artificially low) it sells at now and has allowed for the development of MRI machines and the like, are natural gas reservoirs, and when they run out, so will the cheap helium.
The way that helium can also be produced is through the liquefaction and distillation of air, but this is extremely expensive and energy-intensive (since there's not much of it in the air at any time, and air is a pain to liquefy). It's a lot easier to distill it from a heavy hydrocarbon, especially if it's in there at upwards of 5%. However before the helium deposits in the Texas natural gas wells were discovered, this is what was done. However He was orders of magnitude more expensive than it is now -- I've heard stories about people who worked with helium in labs, and they used to have big balloons caught escaping helium gas, and would take these filled balloons to recovery facilities for reliquefaction. I don't think that some of the radiology uses of liquid-He would be commercially viable if this was still the case.
This is really too bad. I've always been a fan of Minolta's photography products, dating back to when I used to work behind the counter in a photo store.
They were never as cheap as the low-end Nikon or Canon, but for a little bit more money you got a lot more features. I thought this was the case with their digital line as well.
I think where they failed was waiting so long to bring out a DSLR that was lens-compatible with their Maxxum series of film SLRs. They played around for a long time with the idea of DSLRs that used special digital lenses, a standard lens format that would be brand-neutral (not a bad concept, really). It required them to retool their factories completely, and in the meantime Nikon and Canon brought out DSLRs that were basically a chip shoved into their film bodies and used the film-series lenses. These were a lot more attractive to photographers and left Minolta photographers in the lurch for a number of years.
Frankly I think the Minolta 7D, the digital version of the Maxxum 7, was sweet -- it was just introduced too late and at too high a price to compete with Nikon. And the features it offered were a tough sell to an "average consumer" whose primary concern is price. (Image stabilization is not an easy feature to sell, altough I think it's a really good deal given that to get the same thing in Nikon or Canon you'd need all new lenses.) I guess I should hurry up and buy one.
I find it odd that they're selling out to Sony; Minolta's products always seemed to me like the anti-Sony: not a lot of proprietary accessories, inexpensive addons, etc. I would have thought that selling out to Kodak would be the logical step. I guess they got a better offer. I wonder if Sony will retain the digital-Maxxum series DSLRs, given that Sony doesn't have any DSLR history. There are a LOT of Maxxum users in Japan (I've heard that the Maxxum 9 is the most popular film camera for photojournalists there, versus the Nikon F5 in the states.) It seems silly not to continue with it, but Sony has never been constrained by the bounds of what I'd consider to be logical behavior.
I had been afraid this was going to happen though, ever since Konica and Minolta merged. It's really too bad, though. They made good gear, and I hope that Sigma and the other aftermarket manufacturers will continue to support their lineup in the future.
ISDN would have been called 'broadband,' it was just that it never got associated with the term, because basically nobody used it. And that was because the telephone company wanted an arm, a leg, half a kidney and your firstborn child for it.
It wasn't until the cable companies started offering data service that the word "broadband" came into use; and I even remember a time when people just talked about having "cable internet," in the same way that they talk about "cable TV." In fact, I would argue that the term "broadband" came about mostly because of the need for a generic word to refer to any high-speed data service to the home, and that wasn't necessary until there was more than one (DSL and cable).
I agree. The only thing I dislike is that Konqueror has an absurdly large default text size, which I haven't spent enough time with yet to figure out how to change. So every time I open it, I press Ctrl-Minus a few times to make it look "normal." Otherwise reading a slashdot page gives my neck whiplash, going from side to side on a 19" monitor over and over. (I have a 19" display that's only 1024x768...)
So have it report itself to sites as Internet Explorer, or as nothing at all.
Just in case anyone else was wondering what the hell "Swedish Rounding" was (I'll be honest, my first thought had nothing to do with numbers), here's the deal:
h -rounding-world-famous-in-new.html
One day I found a sign on the counter of check out explaining something called "swedish rounding". The explanation said something like they "round down prices ending in 1,2 to 0 and 6,7 to 5 and round up prices ending in 3,4 to 5 and 8,9 to 0." My head was spinning trying to figure out how that worked. I have since see the explanation more simply as 0,1,2 are rounded to zero, 3,4,5,6,7 are rounded to 5, and 8, 9 are rounded to 10.
from this blog: http://michaelandrews.blogspot.com/2005/07/swedis
I thought I'd point out another resource that won't be replaced, either, but that doesn't get mentioned very often: Helium.
I wasn't partiuclarly aware that this was a consumable resource until recently, but it is. Every cubic foot of helium gas that's released up into the atmosphere is basically lost forever -- it's so light that it just keeps going up and up, and eventually escapes our atmosphere.
Although it's not as important to us as a civilization as copper, and will probably take longer to become scarce, it's not something that's partiularly easy to get. Right now we get most of our supply from the natural gas industry -- helium is present in natural gas but doesn't burn, and if not extracted from the gas prior to use just goes out the tailpipe. There are (or were) government-backed programs to extract and store the He prior to use of the natural gas, but I'm not sure if that's still going on.
We use an increasing amount of Helium in its liquid form as cooling, partiularly for MRI machines. I can only see this usage getting bigger in the future; plus, liquid He is one of the only ways to reliably get objects down to ultra-cold temperatures, which might become very important in the future. (Superconducting computers?) The point is that we really haven't exploited Helium very far, and yet we're 'burning' through it fairly quickly, along with the natural gas supply.
It's just another thing that when it's gone, it's gone. It may seem frivolous now, but when you consider the difficulty of synthesizing a hydrocarbon chain, it's not partiularly tough. Make me a mole of helium atoms cheaply on an industrial scale? Now that's difficult.
This is the same way in Connecticut and Maine. If you sell a particular brand, you need to take those bottles back. Conversely, you're not required to take back any brands that you don't sell.
The problem is if you buy a bunch of bottles of some weirdo brand, they're a pain in the butt to get rid of later, because no local place will take them. At my parents house there is a flat of glass root beer bottles that have been sitting around for almost a decade, because we can't figure out where they should go.
(And you can't put deposit bottles into the curbside recycling bin -- for reasons I don't quite understand, the guys on the truck will actually pick through the crap in your bin, and reject deposit bottles. I guess they really want you to get your 5 cents back.)
now if only I had a machine to sort out the pre and post-'82 pennies...
I bet that if you had a big vibratory tumbler, you could probably sort them by density. Over time, the more dense ones would tend to sink to the bottom and the less dense ones to the top. You'd just need to get a tumbler that was capable of working with a full load of pennies -- most of them that you'll find are made for cleaning brass pistol cartridges, and filled with a mix of chopped walnut shells, not copper.
They still exist. The last place I saw them was in several rest stations on the Maine and Massachusetts Turnpikes. You'd put in a penny (and several quarters) and turn a big wheel and it would squish out the penny into any one of several designs. The Maine ones have lobsters, the Massachusetts ones have Ted Kennedy. (Okay probably not.)
You used to occasionally see them in McDonalds, but that was a while (>10 years) ago.
When I was a kid we used to put pennies on the railroad tracks and wait for a freight train to go by; depending on the type of locomotive you could get ones that were squished out as much as a few inches long.
I agree. However on Windows I think Firefox is still the best.
On Mac you can use Safari with Pithhelmet and block most ads, and on Linux I use Konqueror, which in its latest incarnation (comes with KDE 3.5) uses Adblock -- the exact same one that Firefox does. Load it up with Filterset.G and you pretty much never see a graphical ad again.
I guess Gnome users are still stuck with Firefox, or at least I don't know of anything else that's better than it.
I definitely prefer Safari/Konqueror to Firefox's rendering, though I can't put my finger on exactly why. But when I'm stuck on Windows, I'll take Firefox to IE any day, obviously.
Are you also recommending that Firefox be distributed with Javascript disabled?
He may not be, but I am.
At the very least it should be shipped in a condition that prompts you on a per-site basis whether you want to run scripts or not.
90% of scripts are useless to the user. They don't do anything that markedly improves their experience, and could be silently removed without them caring. I'm talking about the ones used for tracking, to disguise URLs in the status bar, auto-changing advertisements, etc.
Frankly I can't understand why Firefox doesn't either ship with, or just incorporate into the main distribution, NoScript, Adblock and Flashblock. There's no excuse for it taking four downloads (well three, you can sort of take your pick between Adblock and Flashblock) to get a browsing experience that doesn't suck.
I have a friend who describes the American political scene as two armies in trenches, shooting at straw men in no-man's-land.
Pretty much. Although, occasionally we shoot at real people, too.