That's such a great idea. Lets get rid of communication because it's annoying to some. Lets make sure that someone who is doing research in a library is totally out of touch from their job. Just because you don't want to be disturbed in a theater a specializing surgeon who was considerate enough to put their phone on silent mode shouldn't be contactable.
The hospital does make sense, but not for peace and quiet. Maybe you've never been in a hospital but they are rather noisy for most of the day. People are told to turn off cell phones because they can possibly interfere with equipment (like pacemakers). But suppressing peoples phones would only make it worse in such an environment since most modern cell phones will actually increase their transmission power if they cannot obtain a signal.
For stopping annoying people with annoying cell phones I personally like Mr. Fishburns approach, public humiliation. Probably far more effective to publicly lambaste inconsiderate people. People will eventually remember to check if their phone is in silent mode after they have been harassed or have seen someone harassed. Same thing goes for these numbnuts that put the phone in silent mode but answer it and have a loud conversation about their friends new shoes.
As far as hospitals go maybe a different technological solution is in order. Just monitor the entrance for transmitting cell phones. As someone walks through the entrance. If someone enters with a active cell phone they can be reminded to turn it off. The only thing I'm not sure about is how often a idle cell phone actually transmits something detectable. If the interval is too long between transmissions you could shield the entrance hall causing the phones to try and reestablish the connection with a tower thus announcing itself to the previously mentioned monitoring device.
Who knows, maybe I'm just silly, not wanting to the punish considerate people or disrupt the potentially beneficial connectivity because of some morons.
In addition, the object doesn't need to slow down, and the sun's gravity will be helping all the way. I don't really see a payload of depleted uranium being (relatively) difficult to get to the sun unless you care how fast it gets there. Who cares if it takes 100 years?
Who cares? WHO CARES? I CARE!
Do you know what hitting a 100 year old depleted uranium capsule will do to insurance rates? I'm guessing that the rates on my lunar cruiser will be high enough as is by the time I'm 127 years old.
Why would they not repay what appears to be a relatively small amount of money and risk the public scandle? If this news was to weaken their stock chances are the board member will lose far more that what they took as a loan.
Maybe, just maybe they know something about their stock we don't. Like it's going to be worthless before August 14th and they are going to lose tons on their stock anyway.
Since the site is/.ed I can't look for details but there are several ways they can try to make this work:
First use a high resolution digital film projector, like the ones Lucas thought were going to be so widespread that Episode II could be shown on them exclusively.
Secondly, if Bungie is involved they could easily modify the game to change both the width of the field of view and the virtual lens size (if necessary). These two changes if possible would truly take advantage of the size and shape of the IMAX screen.
Third, big hardware. I'm not talking about a GeForce4 4600, I'm talking a high end workstation card. Sure you might lose some of the more advanced effects but if the card supported the higher resolutions and good AA it would probably look better than trying to push a consumer grade card.
Of course keep in mind that this is mostly - pull the ideas out of my ass conjecture.
"As it is now I have to name every picture with the date and the people depicted, then sort them into some arbitrary folder that more directly relates to me than to the overall family tree."
Yes, sometimes it pays to read the whole post before responding to it. That aside naming the file with all the information isn't ideal.
"1974 Kernel's 1st birthday party - bucket-o-grease restaurant - john jones, mary joens, grandma edna smith, grandpa enis smith and mr. slappy happy fingers.jpg" is one hell of a file name. It would also be a joy to try and archive this to a CDR and then later on try and guess what the rest of the file name is. Not to mention you couldn't add a note like "last picture of kernel with mary jones before she croaked". That ability to add notes can be quite useful in passing on family history.
I think what really bugs me is that ID3 tag support is pretty much universal, but EXIF is pretty much non-existent. Others in this thread have mentioned specific programs like gallery that support this or programs they've rolled themselves, but when you're archiving thousands of pictures and some tools work with you and some against you it's just not practical.
Actually I have noticed it, but outside of the Canon ZoomBrowser not many applications use it, I'm not sure many programs even leave it intact if you resave the image.
If your a hobbyist photographer that shoots a lot of color film (slide or print) a negative/slide scanner can save you time and money. Rather than bring your film to a lab to have it developed and printed you can use a automated film processor which will cut down turn around time and in the long run the cost of developing celluloid. A good slide/negative scanner will make it easy to preview your work before having prints enlarged and cropped saving more time and money.
I don't recommend this as an alternative for people who shoot B&W since color developing is a process, B&W developing is an art. Additionally developing and printing B&W is easier from a technical stand point if not an artistic one and the hardware involved is cheaper.
Have you used any of the newer ink jets? I use a Epson Photo Stylus 870 with glossy inkjet paper to print snapshots from our Canon G1 and I have been quite happy with the results. If you consider that I take lots of pictures and then print out only the best ones the cost for ink and paper comes out cheaper than a roll of 35mm film and developing for the whole roll to get maybe 10-15 nice prints (smaller too).
Unless your doing fine art photography a good ink jet should be more than sufficient and quite economical. Personally I still don't feel digital photography is ready for fine art shooting. That aside I'm considering adding the new Nikon D100 body to my arsenal to compliment my N90s, N70 and 6006.
Photos fade, tear, warp, discolor and get soggy. I have personally begun building an archive of family photos by scanning them. I am using a HP 5300C scanner, not complete crap but its definately not a professional scanner but it gets the job done. I figure something is better than nothing.
I tend to save two copies of each image, one exactly as it is scanned, the other corrected and repaired if necessary.
I have found one piece of software that is fairly nifty, the Canon Zoom Browser EX that came with my Canon G1 digital camera. It lacks some of the features I wish it had and sure it has a very foofy interface but it works well for previewing a couple thousand images and organizing them.
I personally wish that there was a standard and widely used way of tagging each picture for archive and retrieval purposes. It would be nice to tag each picture with the date and names of people or scenes depicted in them. The ability to pull up every picture with great great great grandpappy in it would very handy. As it is now I have to name every picture with the date and the people depicted, then sort them into some arbitrary folder that more directly relates to me than to the overall family tree.
This is what I was looking for. I wasn't sure if it was being compiled by the xbox dev kit or not. So in reality this is more of a temporary set back for the project since undoubtably people will continue to reverse engineer the hardware and build libraries to replace the dev kit.
I wonder what tatics MS will try once there is a open dev kit for the hardware.
I swear my post made sense when I previewed it, but at least quote the entire sentence and take it in context. (I'm pretty tired now so this post may not make much sense either, apologies in advance if so)
I was not implying that you said open source/free software contributions have lesser value. What I was trying to say was if both a consultant and a customer spend money to create legal documents and take the time to read them over before beginning a consulting project why shouldn't a open/free community member do the same thing considering the work they contribute is just as valuable?
Regarding that second quote; it was an incomplete statement and you filled in the blanks well enough. Patents and copyrights are wielded as weapons these days. LZW/GIF and BT's claim on the hyperlink are good examples of unecessary patent bullying/abuse.
I'll concede that your point on FSF being more appropriate is valid considering the players. OSI was just the first thing to come to mind.
But I still stand behind my assertion that if you didn't take the time to understand the governance of the project its kind of hard to really complain after the fact. Don't get me wrong its obvious that this situation sucks. Additionally I totally understand the role of copyright in open source/free software since I admin a couple governed projects governed under Apache based license and have dealt with copyright assignment (get it up front before you let people contribute source). But no where in my mind do open source/free software contributions have lesser value than code written by someone under a consulting contract and I doubt many people take a consulting contract without understanding the terms (well at least I hope).
Even if we differ on these points I think we're all in agreement that copyright and patents are definately making it hard to maximize the efforts of open development communities.
This just illustrates why its important to understand the license governing a project before contributing to it. It is also the reason why the OSI keeps a list of approved licenses.
If you didn't take time to understand the license before contributing to the project, you can't complain that you don't like the result.
I'll concede that PC's can do an admirable job of decoding a DVD, but there is more to picture quality than reducing artifacts on playback. Personally I rather live with an occaisional artifact or visual gradient than live with a artificially soft image or one with washed out colors, both problem common to video cards with TV-out.
Personally I've yet to see a TV-out on a consumer video card that delivers a very clean image. This isn't to say they can't/don't exist, I just haven't seen one that looked particularly good on anything other than a 13" TV.
Even with a video card that delivers a strong, clean analog signal, unless it supports component output. At best it's only going to outperform the most budget oriented dedicated DVD players.
I guess everyone has a different opinion on what place a computer has in a home theater. To me a HTPC is most useful as a computer thats integrated into a home theater, not as a replacement for other home theater components like a tv tuner or DVD player. A moderately priced stand alone DVD player will outperform video cards in terms of picture quality. PVRs are relatively cheap and quite functional as is.
So what am I driving at? For those lucky enough to have a high def capable TV there is a better solution if you want to integrate a computer. Don't try to replace reasonably priced components that will far out perform a computer (like a DVD player or PVR) instead get a vga -> component transcoder. Transcoders will work with any video card and/or operating system provided you can modify the scan and refresh rates. The best part is that you can run your computer at high definition resolutions! UT at 1080i anyone?
All is not lost if you don't have a high definition capable tv though. If your TV has component inputs and your video card is capable of outputing an interlaced signal with the proper scan and refresh rates you can use a transcoder instead of using a card with TV-out for higher image quality.
There are several transcoders available ranging from $100-300. Copper box sells transcoders from Audio Authority, Key Digital and RCA. Avsforum has lots of discussion in its HTPC forum regarding customer resolutions and scan rates.
Did anyone happen to catch 20/20 last night (Friday)? They had a piece about how radio stations take payola through indy promoters, blah blah blah. The interesting part was seeing Hillary Rosens fat head up there crying about how it costs the record labels so much and that there should be new laws to make it illegal, I'm just bawling my eyes out for them. I wonder how much of a discount consumers would see if such legistlation was put into place.
To be fair most the focus of the segment was mostly about how it prevents smaller labels/artists from getting radio play regardless of how good their music may be, which is a bad thing.
Personally I think its great that the RIAA is taking a stance against this. Lets see, first the RIAA pisses of geeks, then consumers, now they piss off the radio stations, if we get lucky they'll shoot themselves in the foot and piss off the artists and labels too.
27 years old, getting married June 7th, and its costing more than I'd like to admit.
I wonder if they're called consoles because they exist to comfort you as you hand out thosands of dollars to strangers that you'll only see for about 6 hours of your life.
The Viper (a relatively new steel coaster) at Six Flags Great Adventure is horrible in terms of comfort. The ride isn't that exciting and thanks to the design of the shoulder restraints most of the ride experience is liken to being repeatedly punched in the ear.
Your comment kind of simplifies the human bodies ability to withstand G forces. I just finished watching a whole program on the Discover Channel about crash testing and the effects of certain forces on the human body, so obviously I'm now a certified expert. Moving right along the program just reinforced what common sense would tell anyone who has been in any kind of accident: it's not just how hard you hit, it's how you hit, what position you're in when you hit, how many times you hit and the angle that you hit at.
The numbers you mentioned sound a bit off from what the program was stating in terms of what the human body could safely endure. They showed a man traveling at some thing like 630mph decelerate to zero in about a tenth of second, which worked out to roughly 45Gs horizontally. His lung(s?) collapsed and his retinas temporarily detached. He eventually recovered and managed to live another 45 years but its still not what I would consider a fun day at an amusement park.
The program also went on to state that the human body can only survive 15Gs of momentary force vertically before the spinal damage occurs. I wonder what 6Gs of sudden momentary lateral force would do to someone's neck.
It would also seem that human anatomy would play a big role in what forces and change in forces the human body could survive without damage. A person sitting perfectly upright may be able to survive a 6G load in one direction, but what happens when they are subjected to the same force with their body and head are shifted to one side from the previous 4G turn or loop? I sure as hell don't know, I doubt New Jersey state legislators know either.
Rider operators do not want to kill customers, just momentarily make customers think they are going to die. There are so many variables in play that any legislation that tries to "make these rides safer" is going to fail hopelessly. I'm all for making ride operators/builders prove that their machines are minimally dangerous but to put blanket limitations on them just doesn't seem to do anyone much good.
Maybe we'll see AIBOs actually used for something useful. A snip here, bolt there and maybe you can turn your aibo into the ultimate chimney sweep. Anyone have useful ideas for an AIBO other than as a toy?
Now that cellular service providers are required to have some sort of tracking system on their customers, they should look to at least make it useful.
Some cell phones are supposed to have little gps receivers in them and all phones have signal metering. Seems pretty easy to program the phones to record the position and the signal strength just prior to losing the signal and then transmit that data when the signal is restored. Then they could analyze the performance of different phones over a large area. (Of course all this should be optional for the customer to opt out of)
I wonder if 2 million phones continually doing data aquisition would be as valuable as 1 $270K station wagon at $15/mile.
Dell wants the cheapest printers possible, they don't care what it costs to refill them. When Joe Schmoe consumer who doesn't know didly about computers goes looking and sees that they can get the faster celeron with a free printer and that they "only" have to spend $999 for a complete computer including printer and scanner. Its not till after they get it home that they realize the ink costs almost as much as a printer and the scanner makes everything look like it was shot with a webcam.
I think he was refering to the difference in the refill ink and the OEM ink. I don't doubt that there are refill inks that work as well as the OEM ones, but I've had first hand experience with refill ink that wasn't up to par.
My mother in law couldn't understand why her pictures lacked the punch that mine did, we both have epson printers. I started to run through some calibrations and realized that she was using refilled cartridges. Sure enough with a OEM cartridge the pictures looked great.
I did try to compensate for the difference in the inks using the drivers color matching but it never really approached even the default settings with the OEM cartridge. Using a predefined color chart like Pantone doesn't help if the printer can't be properly calibrated to compensate for the difference in the ink.
The real issues isn't to refill or not to, its the fact that manufacturers are doing the bait and switch. Lure you in with a cheap printer until you realize that the ink is incredibly expensive. Its industry wide collusion against consumers.
The first piece of code I ever QA'd back in the day, that was interesting. The long short of the story is my code went in, and people returning stuff were being credited with several million dollars instead of the $20 or $30 they were supposed to get. I was only working at this job for 2 weeks and when I heard about this problem I started gathering my stuff into a pile expecting to be fired on the spot.
Turns out my code was good someone had changed the configuration during the cutover and the other companies code was so poorly written it was subtracting the return amount from 0 in an unsigned int and putting that amount back in peoples account.
All said and done something along the lines of $3.5 trillion was accidentally refunded to people but they caught it early enough and were able to undo it. I heard that they only lost about $15K in actual funds (not including panic, man hours to fix, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
That's such a great idea. Lets get rid of communication because it's annoying to some. Lets make sure that someone who is doing research in a library is totally out of touch from their job. Just because you don't want to be disturbed in a theater a specializing surgeon who was considerate enough to put their phone on silent mode shouldn't be contactable.
The hospital does make sense, but not for peace and quiet. Maybe you've never been in a hospital but they are rather noisy for most of the day. People are told to turn off cell phones because they can possibly interfere with equipment (like pacemakers). But suppressing peoples phones would only make it worse in such an environment since most modern cell phones will actually increase their transmission power if they cannot obtain a signal.
For stopping annoying people with annoying cell phones I personally like Mr. Fishburns approach, public humiliation. Probably far more effective to publicly lambaste inconsiderate people. People will eventually remember to check if their phone is in silent mode after they have been harassed or have seen someone harassed. Same thing goes for these numbnuts that put the phone in silent mode but answer it and have a loud conversation about their friends new shoes.
As far as hospitals go maybe a different technological solution is in order. Just monitor the entrance for transmitting cell phones. As someone walks through the entrance. If someone enters with a active cell phone they can be reminded to turn it off. The only thing I'm not sure about is how often a idle cell phone actually transmits something detectable. If the interval is too long between transmissions you could shield the entrance hall causing the phones to try and reestablish the connection with a tower thus announcing itself to the previously mentioned monitoring device.
Who knows, maybe I'm just silly, not wanting to the punish considerate people or disrupt the potentially beneficial connectivity because of some morons.
In addition, the object doesn't need to slow down, and the sun's gravity will be helping all the way. I don't really see a payload of depleted uranium being (relatively) difficult to get to the sun unless you care how fast it gets there. Who cares if it takes 100 years?
Who cares? WHO CARES? I CARE!
Do you know what hitting a 100 year old depleted uranium capsule will do to insurance rates? I'm guessing that the rates on my lunar cruiser will be high enough as is by the time I'm 127 years old.
Hrm the pictures make it look like a tractor pull for geeks.
I wonder if they'll make it out my way.
Why would they not repay what appears to be a relatively small amount of money and risk the public scandle? If this news was to weaken their stock chances are the board member will lose far more that what they took as a loan.
Maybe, just maybe they know something about their stock we don't. Like it's going to be worthless before August 14th and they are going to lose tons on their stock anyway.
Since the site is /.ed I can't look for details but there are several ways they can try to make this work:
First use a high resolution digital film projector, like the ones Lucas thought were going to be so widespread that Episode II could be shown on them exclusively.
Secondly, if Bungie is involved they could easily modify the game to change both the width of the field of view and the virtual lens size (if necessary). These two changes if possible would truly take advantage of the size and shape of the IMAX screen.
Third, big hardware. I'm not talking about a GeForce4 4600, I'm talking a high end workstation card. Sure you might lose some of the more advanced effects but if the card supported the higher resolutions and good AA it would probably look better than trying to push a consumer grade card.
Of course keep in mind that this is mostly - pull the ideas out of my ass conjecture.
My parents battled a severe case of PacMan fever.
I guess I'm showing my age.
"As it is now I have to name every picture with the date and the people depicted, then sort them into some arbitrary folder that more directly relates to me than to the overall family tree."
Yes, sometimes it pays to read the whole post before responding to it. That aside naming the file with all the information isn't ideal.
"1974 Kernel's 1st birthday party - bucket-o-grease restaurant - john jones, mary joens, grandma edna smith, grandpa enis smith and mr. slappy happy fingers.jpg" is one hell of a file name. It would also be a joy to try and archive this to a CDR and then later on try and guess what the rest of the file name is. Not to mention you couldn't add a note like "last picture of kernel with mary jones before she croaked". That ability to add notes can be quite useful in passing on family history.
I think what really bugs me is that ID3 tag support is pretty much universal, but EXIF is pretty much non-existent. Others in this thread have mentioned specific programs like gallery that support this or programs they've rolled themselves, but when you're archiving thousands of pictures and some tools work with you and some against you it's just not practical.
Actually I have noticed it, but outside of the Canon ZoomBrowser not many applications use it, I'm not sure many programs even leave it intact if you resave the image.
If your a hobbyist photographer that shoots a lot of color film (slide or print) a negative/slide scanner can save you time and money. Rather than bring your film to a lab to have it developed and printed you can use a automated film processor which will cut down turn around time and in the long run the cost of developing celluloid. A good slide/negative scanner will make it easy to preview your work before having prints enlarged and cropped saving more time and money.
I don't recommend this as an alternative for people who shoot B&W since color developing is a process, B&W developing is an art. Additionally developing and printing B&W is easier from a technical stand point if not an artistic one and the hardware involved is cheaper.
Have you used any of the newer ink jets? I use a Epson Photo Stylus 870 with glossy inkjet paper to print snapshots from our Canon G1 and I have been quite happy with the results. If you consider that I take lots of pictures and then print out only the best ones the cost for ink and paper comes out cheaper than a roll of 35mm film and developing for the whole roll to get maybe 10-15 nice prints (smaller too).
Unless your doing fine art photography a good ink jet should be more than sufficient and quite economical. Personally I still don't feel digital photography is ready for fine art shooting. That aside I'm considering adding the new Nikon D100 body to my arsenal to compliment my N90s, N70 and 6006.
Photos fade, tear, warp, discolor and get soggy. I have personally begun building an archive of family photos by scanning them. I am using a HP 5300C scanner, not complete crap but its definately not a professional scanner but it gets the job done. I figure something is better than nothing.
I tend to save two copies of each image, one exactly as it is scanned, the other corrected and repaired if necessary.
I have found one piece of software that is fairly nifty, the Canon Zoom Browser EX that came with my Canon G1 digital camera. It lacks some of the features I wish it had and sure it has a very foofy interface but it works well for previewing a couple thousand images and organizing them.
I personally wish that there was a standard and widely used way of tagging each picture for archive and retrieval purposes. It would be nice to tag each picture with the date and names of people or scenes depicted in them. The ability to pull up every picture with great great great grandpappy in it would very handy. As it is now I have to name every picture with the date and the people depicted, then sort them into some arbitrary folder that more directly relates to me than to the overall family tree.
This is what I was looking for. I wasn't sure if it was being compiled by the xbox dev kit or not. So in reality this is more of a temporary set back for the project since undoubtably people will continue to reverse engineer the hardware and build libraries to replace the dev kit.
I wonder what tatics MS will try once there is a open dev kit for the hardware.
I swear my post made sense when I previewed it, but at least quote the entire sentence and take it in context. (I'm pretty tired now so this post may not make much sense either, apologies in advance if so)
I was not implying that you said open source/free software contributions have lesser value. What I was trying to say was if both a consultant and a customer spend money to create legal documents and take the time to read them over before beginning a consulting project why shouldn't a open/free community member do the same thing considering the work they contribute is just as valuable?
Regarding that second quote; it was an incomplete statement and you filled in the blanks well enough. Patents and copyrights are wielded as weapons these days. LZW/GIF and BT's claim on the hyperlink are good examples of unecessary patent bullying/abuse.
I'll concede that your point on FSF being more appropriate is valid considering the players. OSI was just the first thing to come to mind.
But I still stand behind my assertion that if you didn't take the time to understand the governance of the project its kind of hard to really complain after the fact. Don't get me wrong its obvious that this situation sucks. Additionally I totally understand the role of copyright in open source/free software since I admin a couple governed projects governed under Apache based license and have dealt with copyright assignment (get it up front before you let people contribute source). But no where in my mind do open source/free software contributions have lesser value than code written by someone under a consulting contract and I doubt many people take a consulting contract without understanding the terms (well at least I hope).
Even if we differ on these points I think we're all in agreement that copyright and patents are definately making it hard to maximize the efforts of open development communities.
This just illustrates why its important to understand the license governing a project before contributing to it. It is also the reason why the OSI keeps a list of approved licenses.
If you didn't take time to understand the license before contributing to the project, you can't complain that you don't like the result.
I'll concede that PC's can do an admirable job of decoding a DVD, but there is more to picture quality than reducing artifacts on playback. Personally I rather live with an occaisional artifact or visual gradient than live with a artificially soft image or one with washed out colors, both problem common to video cards with TV-out.
Personally I've yet to see a TV-out on a consumer video card that delivers a very clean image. This isn't to say they can't/don't exist, I just haven't seen one that looked particularly good on anything other than a 13" TV.
Even with a video card that delivers a strong, clean analog signal, unless it supports component output. At best it's only going to outperform the most budget oriented dedicated DVD players.
I guess everyone has a different opinion on what place a computer has in a home theater. To me a HTPC is most useful as a computer thats integrated into a home theater, not as a replacement for other home theater components like a tv tuner or DVD player. A moderately priced stand alone DVD player will outperform video cards in terms of picture quality. PVRs are relatively cheap and quite functional as is.
So what am I driving at? For those lucky enough to have a high def capable TV there is a better solution if you want to integrate a computer. Don't try to replace reasonably priced components that will far out perform a computer (like a DVD player or PVR) instead get a vga -> component transcoder. Transcoders will work with any video card and/or operating system provided you can modify the scan and refresh rates. The best part is that you can run your computer at high definition resolutions! UT at 1080i anyone?
All is not lost if you don't have a high definition capable tv though. If your TV has component inputs and your video card is capable of outputing an interlaced signal with the proper scan and refresh rates you can use a transcoder instead of using a card with TV-out for higher image quality.
There are several transcoders available ranging from $100-300. Copper box sells transcoders from Audio Authority, Key Digital and RCA. Avsforum has lots of discussion in its HTPC forum regarding customer resolutions and scan rates.
Did anyone happen to catch 20/20 last night (Friday)? They had a piece about how radio stations take payola through indy promoters, blah blah blah. The interesting part was seeing Hillary Rosens fat head up there crying about how it costs the record labels so much and that there should be new laws to make it illegal, I'm just bawling my eyes out for them. I wonder how much of a discount consumers would see if such legistlation was put into place.
To be fair most the focus of the segment was mostly about how it prevents smaller labels/artists from getting radio play regardless of how good their music may be, which is a bad thing.
Personally I think its great that the RIAA is taking a stance against this. Lets see, first the RIAA pisses of geeks, then consumers, now they piss off the radio stations, if we get lucky they'll shoot themselves in the foot and piss off the artists and labels too.
Hrm apparently I'm a geek cliche.
27 years old, getting married June 7th, and its costing more than I'd like to admit.
I wonder if they're called consoles because they exist to comfort you as you hand out thosands of dollars to strangers that you'll only see for about 6 hours of your life.
The Viper (a relatively new steel coaster) at Six Flags Great Adventure is horrible in terms of comfort. The ride isn't that exciting and thanks to the design of the shoulder restraints most of the ride experience is liken to being repeatedly punched in the ear.
Your comment kind of simplifies the human bodies ability to withstand G forces. I just finished watching a whole program on the Discover Channel about crash testing and the effects of certain forces on the human body, so obviously I'm now a certified expert. Moving right along the program just reinforced what common sense would tell anyone who has been in any kind of accident: it's not just how hard you hit, it's how you hit, what position you're in when you hit, how many times you hit and the angle that you hit at.
The numbers you mentioned sound a bit off from what the program was stating in terms of what the human body could safely endure. They showed a man traveling at some thing like 630mph decelerate to zero in about a tenth of second, which worked out to roughly 45Gs horizontally. His lung(s?) collapsed and his retinas temporarily detached. He eventually recovered and managed to live another 45 years but its still not what I would consider a fun day at an amusement park.
The program also went on to state that the human body can only survive 15Gs of momentary force vertically before the spinal damage occurs. I wonder what 6Gs of sudden momentary lateral force would do to someone's neck.
It would also seem that human anatomy would play a big role in what forces and change in forces the human body could survive without damage. A person sitting perfectly upright may be able to survive a 6G load in one direction, but what happens when they are subjected to the same force with their body and head are shifted to one side from the previous 4G turn or loop? I sure as hell don't know, I doubt New Jersey state legislators know either.
Rider operators do not want to kill customers, just momentarily make customers think they are going to die. There are so many variables in play that any legislation that tries to "make these rides safer" is going to fail hopelessly. I'm all for making ride operators/builders prove that their machines are minimally dangerous but to put blanket limitations on them just doesn't seem to do anyone much good.
Maybe we'll see AIBOs actually used for something useful. A snip here, bolt there and maybe you can turn your aibo into the ultimate chimney sweep. Anyone have useful ideas for an AIBO other than as a toy?
Now that cellular service providers are required to have some sort of tracking system on their customers, they should look to at least make it useful.
Some cell phones are supposed to have little gps receivers in them and all phones have signal metering. Seems pretty easy to program the phones to record the position and the signal strength just prior to losing the signal and then transmit that data when the signal is restored. Then they could analyze the performance of different phones over a large area. (Of course all this should be optional for the customer to opt out of)
I wonder if 2 million phones continually doing data aquisition would be as valuable as 1 $270K station wagon at $15/mile.
Dell wants the cheapest printers possible, they don't care what it costs to refill them. When Joe Schmoe consumer who doesn't know didly about computers goes looking and sees that they can get the faster celeron with a free printer and that they "only" have to spend $999 for a complete computer including printer and scanner. Its not till after they get it home that they realize the ink costs almost as much as a printer and the scanner makes everything look like it was shot with a webcam.
I think he was refering to the difference in the refill ink and the OEM ink. I don't doubt that there are refill inks that work as well as the OEM ones, but I've had first hand experience with refill ink that wasn't up to par.
My mother in law couldn't understand why her pictures lacked the punch that mine did, we both have epson printers. I started to run through some calibrations and realized that she was using refilled cartridges. Sure enough with a OEM cartridge the pictures looked great.
I did try to compensate for the difference in the inks using the drivers color matching but it never really approached even the default settings with the OEM cartridge. Using a predefined color chart like Pantone doesn't help if the printer can't be properly calibrated to compensate for the difference in the ink.
The real issues isn't to refill or not to, its the fact that manufacturers are doing the bait and switch. Lure you in with a cheap printer until you realize that the ink is incredibly expensive. Its industry wide collusion against consumers.
Eh I've seen worse.
The first piece of code I ever QA'd back in the day, that was interesting. The long short of the story is my code went in, and people returning stuff were being credited with several million dollars instead of the $20 or $30 they were supposed to get. I was only working at this job for 2 weeks and when I heard about this problem I started gathering my stuff into a pile expecting to be fired on the spot.
Turns out my code was good someone had changed the configuration during the cutover and the other companies code was so poorly written it was subtracting the return amount from 0 in an unsigned int and putting that amount back in peoples account.
All said and done something along the lines of $3.5 trillion was accidentally refunded to people but they caught it early enough and were able to undo it. I heard that they only lost about $15K in actual funds (not including panic, man hours to fix, etc).