If you buy a motherboard from Asus for the Opteron using a Via chip set you now have no less than three companies involved in one major part of your system.
And what's wrong with that? That's exactly the combination that I have in my computer, and it works damn fine. Why does it matter who builds and designs the parts, as long as they work well together?
The only people receiving advertising from the drug companies should be doctors and only doctors.
Pharmaceutical companies do spend a tremendous amount of money wooing doctors, of course, and that's a problem in its own right. My father (a doctor) frequently gets invitations from pharmacos to attend whatever ultra-extravagant event they are having in order to "make the doctors aware" of some new pill that they're pushing. He (almost) invariably declines, because he's already aware of new drugs coming out (part of his job, after all) and doesn't want some company spending millions of dollars that could be better used toward research in order to try and make him think that their new chemical is some kind of amazing magic bullet.
A little bit off topic at this point, but I thought it might be worthwhile to show a side of pharmaceutical advertising that most people don't see.
What would you sell? Well, services, sure, and art, and anything too big to be built in a home fabricator, perhaps. But mainly I think that people would sell plans. I mean, it's not exactly easy to create an atom-by-atom diagram of a ham sandwich. Someone would have to make plans, for the machines to be any good, and I would expect that the higher-quality plans, the ones that produced higher-quality goods, would command a premium price. I could see a situation where people were perhaps entitled to certain government-designed basics, but anybody who was anybody would want their stuff customized, or at least different from your average run-of-the-mill.
Also I can see people selling raw materials. I mean, you have to get these atoms from somewhere. Transmetropolitan called them "base blocks," very dense chunks of basically undifferentiated matter that can be broken down and reconstituted into chairs and clothing and stuff like that.
A guy I knew once suggested something that sounds similar, but sort of takes it a step further: exchanging just the electrolyte. You go to the station and insert a pump, just like with current gasoline-powered vehicles. This pumps your expended electrolyte out of your battery, and then replaces it with fresh solution from the station's charging pool. Just like pumping gas, and no need to cart around heavy battery packs. If nothing else the fact that it is (to the consumer) exactly the same as the current refueling method sounds to me like a big win.
You can't have all the formats you want and inexpensive pricing. It just doesn't work like that.
The Rio Karma plays Mp3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and WMA out of the box, and costs $279. And despite complaints about its fragility, I at least have never had problems with it, despite it being in my pocket with me while I'm running, biking, and generally doing everything that I do. I highly reccomend it.
These things cost $500 and you can't even take your shit off of them? That's completely nuts, if you ask me. Man am I glad that I went with the Rio Karma.
The white earbuds aren't all that great anyway. The only reason to keep 'em is so that you can show off to the world the fact that you have an iPod. The best low-profile headphones around (in terms of bang for the buck) are the Sony Fontopia MDX-EX71SL in-ears, in my opinion. If you can get used to wearing headphones that are essentially silicone earplugs (no problem for me, I worked landscaping last summer and wore them all the time) then you'll probably be really pleased by the amount of detail they can put out, and the fact that they have pretty good noise-isolation characteristics is a nice bonus since you can listen to music over the ambient noise without having to crank the volume up to distortion levels. And they're black. Just make sure to get the SL version, there's an LP that looks the same but is lower in quality. And I guess that there's a WX series now, that's just like the SLs except in white, for the iPod Elite. Hunt around and you can probably find them online for $35 or so.
Or even a few hundred disposable cameras. Get everybody to buy one, or have some organization distributing them widely during the protest. Would make it much harder to stop the recording.
From what I've heard, this is pretty common, especially with ancient artifacts and suchlike. Frequently your average Statue of Isis or whatnot on display at a museum is actually just a high-quality cast of the original.
Those are some rediculous prices though. $350 for a metal truss and some wheels? They don't even do the labor of assembling it! I could build one of those for about $50 at the Home Depot and a few hours' work.
Absolutely true. And that's why Microsoft will, for a very small fee (less than $20, I think) replace your lost or damaged media. They won't give you a new ID# to go with it, however. I just did this through my OEM supplier for $25 when I needed to reinstall windows on a computer that I had long ago lost the OS disc for. So you're right, and the law *does* agree with you.
"'The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team,' DeGay explained, describing the system scheduled to be fielded by 2010."...okay...
Scene: A computer, with Firefox 2.0 running maximized on the desktop. The homepage is loading. The USER, your average geek, is waiting patiently for it to load.
A light-yellow bubble pops up on the screen. It obscures half of the interface. FOXY enters bubble right, looking like a cross between a red fox and a Pokémon.
USER: Eh what?
FOXY (Text): Hi! I'm Foxy!
It looks like you're trying to view a web page! Would you like to:
View a step-by-step tutorial concerning the amazing new machine learning features in Firefox 2.0?
Open your three most frequently-viewed bookmarks in tabs? They are: www.xxxsexytoons.com, www.xxxsexyfarmanimals.com, and www.xxxsexygrandmas.com!
Shoot yourself in the head?
USER shoots self in head.
Seriously, if Firefox is going to incorporate any kind of machine learning features, the team ought to keep in mind Microsoft's mistakes. As a general rule, I'd say that anything that the user is required to interface with while trying to complete another task is a bad, bad idea. Any new features need to be as transparent as possible. Less is better. In fact, maybe none at all is best.
...a big, obvious button to turn all this machine-learning bloat off.
In my experience, computers are generally horrible at anticipating what I want to do. In a contest between a computer and a user, the computer never knows what the user wants better than the user does. Even if the computer happens to be right, it's still not worth getting all up in the user's interface about. Keep Firefox clean. That has always been my favorite thing about Firefox -- it lets me get to what I want to as fast as possible, and otherwise just stays out of my way.
Some doctors, at least, are already aware of this pitfall and have taken steps against it. My father, for instance, always wears a tie tack in order to keep his tie from dangling down onto (or into) his patients. I had always sort of assumed that this was a basic part of medical hygiene. Apparently not. Given the extremely simple solution (assuming that wearing a tie tack is effective) this could easily become something of a non-issue.
While your point is valid in general, I don't think it really applies to this guy's situation. You forget that he's buying all of these games for his kids, and if they haven't gotten to the point where they're paying for their own games, then I doubt that they've gotten to the point where they can see the wisdom of waiting a year for a game's price to come down, or where they are interested in playing a free substitute instead of whatever shiny new game their friends have. Just a thought.
Indeed. It reminds me of one of those damn science fairs where the kid who wins first place has a project that has obviously benefitted from a lot of assistance from one of his parents. Did the OOo people do a bit of dressing up on this logo? I mean, at the very least it's obvious that the coloring was done with a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy a motherboard from Asus for the Opteron using a Via chip set you now have no less than three companies involved in one major part of your system.
And what's wrong with that? That's exactly the combination that I have in my computer, and it works damn fine. Why does it matter who builds and designs the parts, as long as they work well together?
The only people receiving advertising from the drug companies should be doctors and only doctors.
Pharmaceutical companies do spend a tremendous amount of money wooing doctors, of course, and that's a problem in its own right. My father (a doctor) frequently gets invitations from pharmacos to attend whatever ultra-extravagant event they are having in order to "make the doctors aware" of some new pill that they're pushing. He (almost) invariably declines, because he's already aware of new drugs coming out (part of his job, after all) and doesn't want some company spending millions of dollars that could be better used toward research in order to try and make him think that their new chemical is some kind of amazing magic bullet.
A little bit off topic at this point, but I thought it might be worthwhile to show a side of pharmaceutical advertising that most people don't see.
What would you sell? Well, services, sure, and art, and anything too big to be built in a home fabricator, perhaps. But mainly I think that people would sell plans. I mean, it's not exactly easy to create an atom-by-atom diagram of a ham sandwich. Someone would have to make plans, for the machines to be any good, and I would expect that the higher-quality plans, the ones that produced higher-quality goods, would command a premium price. I could see a situation where people were perhaps entitled to certain government-designed basics, but anybody who was anybody would want their stuff customized, or at least different from your average run-of-the-mill.
Also I can see people selling raw materials. I mean, you have to get these atoms from somewhere. Transmetropolitan called them "base blocks," very dense chunks of basically undifferentiated matter that can be broken down and reconstituted into chairs and clothing and stuff like that.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
Who the hell moderated this "+5 Insightful?" It's clearly "+5 Funny."
A guy I knew once suggested something that sounds similar, but sort of takes it a step further: exchanging just the electrolyte. You go to the station and insert a pump, just like with current gasoline-powered vehicles. This pumps your expended electrolyte out of your battery, and then replaces it with fresh solution from the station's charging pool. Just like pumping gas, and no need to cart around heavy battery packs. If nothing else the fact that it is (to the consumer) exactly the same as the current refueling method sounds to me like a big win.
Privateer: Righteous Fire, opening cutscene.
...do I win a prize?
Right? Am I right?
You can't have all the formats you want and inexpensive pricing. It just doesn't work like that.
The Rio Karma plays Mp3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and WMA out of the box, and costs $279. And despite complaints about its fragility, I at least have never had problems with it, despite it being in my pocket with me while I'm running, biking, and generally doing everything that I do. I highly reccomend it.
These things cost $500 and you can't even take your shit off of them? That's completely nuts, if you ask me. Man am I glad that I went with the Rio Karma.
Remember, theres two sides to every coating.
Unless you're coating a moebius strip...
The white earbuds aren't all that great anyway. The only reason to keep 'em is so that you can show off to the world the fact that you have an iPod. The best low-profile headphones around (in terms of bang for the buck) are the Sony Fontopia MDX-EX71SL in-ears, in my opinion. If you can get used to wearing headphones that are essentially silicone earplugs (no problem for me, I worked landscaping last summer and wore them all the time) then you'll probably be really pleased by the amount of detail they can put out, and the fact that they have pretty good noise-isolation characteristics is a nice bonus since you can listen to music over the ambient noise without having to crank the volume up to distortion levels. And they're black. Just make sure to get the SL version, there's an LP that looks the same but is lower in quality. And I guess that there's a WX series now, that's just like the SLs except in white, for the iPod Elite. Hunt around and you can probably find them online for $35 or so.
Or even a few hundred disposable cameras. Get everybody to buy one, or have some organization distributing them widely during the protest. Would make it much harder to stop the recording.
From what I've heard, this is pretty common, especially with ancient artifacts and suchlike. Frequently your average Statue of Isis or whatnot on display at a museum is actually just a high-quality cast of the original.
Those are some rediculous prices though. $350 for a metal truss and some wheels? They don't even do the labor of assembling it! I could build one of those for about $50 at the Home Depot and a few hours' work.
Absolutely true. And that's why Microsoft will, for a very small fee (less than $20, I think) replace your lost or damaged media. They won't give you a new ID# to go with it, however. I just did this through my OEM supplier for $25 when I needed to reinstall windows on a computer that I had long ago lost the OS disc for. So you're right, and the law *does* agree with you.
"'The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team,' DeGay explained, describing the system scheduled to be fielded by 2010." ...okay...
"Religion is ignored in gaming, or if it is portrayed, it's wildly caricatured."
What isn't wildly caricatured about video games?
Yes, but my 30-year-old bike gets even better mileage, and goes faster to boot. Plus it's quieter, cheaper, and helps get me in shape.
Scene: A computer, with Firefox 2.0 running maximized on the desktop. The homepage is loading. The USER, your average geek, is waiting patiently for it to load.
A light-yellow bubble pops up on the screen. It obscures half of the interface. FOXY enters bubble right, looking like a cross between a red fox and a Pokémon.
USER: Eh what?
FOXY (Text): Hi! I'm Foxy!
It looks like you're trying to view a web page! Would you like to:
USER shoots self in head.
Seriously, if Firefox is going to incorporate any kind of machine learning features, the team ought to keep in mind Microsoft's mistakes. As a general rule, I'd say that anything that the user is required to interface with while trying to complete another task is a bad, bad idea. Any new features need to be as transparent as possible. Less is better. In fact, maybe none at all is best.
...a big, obvious button to turn all this machine-learning bloat off.
In my experience, computers are generally horrible at anticipating what I want to do. In a contest between a computer and a user, the computer never knows what the user wants better than the user does. Even if the computer happens to be right, it's still not worth getting all up in the user's interface about. Keep Firefox clean. That has always been my favorite thing about Firefox -- it lets me get to what I want to as fast as possible, and otherwise just stays out of my way.
And in addition to the diaper bag with a laptop, carry a laptop case full of dirty diapers!
Some doctors, at least, are already aware of this pitfall and have taken steps against it. My father, for instance, always wears a tie tack in order to keep his tie from dangling down onto (or into) his patients. I had always sort of assumed that this was a basic part of medical hygiene. Apparently not. Given the extremely simple solution (assuming that wearing a tie tack is effective) this could easily become something of a non-issue.
So it's true, then! The editors really don't read their own site!
While your point is valid in general, I don't think it really applies to this guy's situation. You forget that he's buying all of these games for his kids, and if they haven't gotten to the point where they're paying for their own games, then I doubt that they've gotten to the point where they can see the wisdom of waiting a year for a game's price to come down, or where they are interested in playing a free substitute instead of whatever shiny new game their friends have. Just a thought.
It doesn't look too bad. It looks a lot like Morrowind, really. Shame about the spec requirements, considering that.
Indeed. It reminds me of one of those damn science fairs where the kid who wins first place has a project that has obviously benefitted from a lot of assistance from one of his parents. Did the OOo people do a bit of dressing up on this logo? I mean, at the very least it's obvious that the coloring was done with a computer.