Um, no- dye sub (wax) printers produce unbelievably fragile prints. You can scrape the wax right off the page with your fingernail, it creases easily, etc. Also, since it's a dye, and not a pigment, it fades within months.
They also suck up enormous amounts of energy and take a good 5-10 minutes (or longer) to warm up because it has to melt (and keep melted) all the damn wax and internal printer bits. Even with fairly sophisticated energy saving functions, the damn things still eat you out of house and home, and the melted wax has a smell that permeates the room. If you want to move the printer, you have to trigger a special cool-down mode and wait a good 30 minutes so that you don't spill wax inside the machine...
What are you talking about? I have none of those issues. Pictures from 5 years ago, not faded. It registers less than 1-3 watts in stand-by (but I unplug it anyway). When I start it up cold as in not plugged in, I could print in less than 30 seconds - now, I have no clue whether this is just waiting for the OS of the machine to start and selecting my picture or there is really some warm-up time. There is no wax coming off the page with a finger nail, I just scratched a picture - nothing, it is clear coated. There is no transit time, the little guy even has a handle to be portable! I never ever smelt wax from the thing.
You must be either talking about ancient machines or big ones which I'm unfamiliar with.
BTW, I'd call them first to confirm that it is a printer you are getting. Nothing on the page would suggest otherwise, but in those cases, it's always better to make sure it's not some part instead.
A search for color laser, in Google Shopping, sorted by price low to high reveals other options available around that price range. Probably not the latest models, but at that price, what the heck.
WTF. People still buying inkjets and bitching about it? Is lexmark STILL in business?
It's simple. Don't buy inkjets. Buy a laser that has decent sized laser cartridges. B/W if you print lots of text. Color tends to have small cartridges out of space considerations.
Besides the cost, with inkjets, you have clean the head constantly and if you don't use in a while (say you have a several week vacation or other trip), worry about the printer head drying out. Headaches and a fucking waste of time, imo.
And for photos, dye-subs. Even if they don't beat inkjets on dpi, my 300dpi dyesub beats any 1200x1200 in actual results. You JUST DON'T see the millions of dots with dyesub, it's all blended together, and because there is a clear coat, no smearing of the images, even if you lick your fingers and go across the picture right after it was printed. It looks as good or better than from professional print shop.
I don't even know why this argument is still going on after all these years. Inkjet was and always will be a half-assed home solution when the good solutions have matured and become considerably cheap. In the space of 5 years, I threw out just as many inkjets in the early 2000s with lots of printing problems aggravation. In the same space of time, I have had just 2 lasers and 1 dyesub, all still working (1 for b/w, other a color copier) and I probably printed out 10x the material with them because it was just easier.
How much would you pay for the computer Linus used?
That's an interesting thought.
But let's keep this on authors. A typewriter is a mechanical tool, the good ones were expensive and of good quality, and once you had one, there was no real reason to "upgrade." OTOH, authors today may go through a computer every 2-5 years on average, and may have more than one at a time. I don't see an author in the nearterm future only having one computer their entire career, unless it's a really short career.
Anti-virus/anti-malware always seems to be a shitty bandaid to a badly designed system. Even running Windows 7, with UAC on, non-administrative account 99.999% time, always a non-IE browser, and very strict on what I run as.exe and where I download them, ad-aware just found some wind32 trojan.
Also, people forget this is supposed to be a portable device, even a phone sometimes. Remember what most A/V does to your desktop? I don't run A/V on my notebook, and I actually do want a decent battery life on my phone, as hard as that is to believe.
However, I know there will be problems with the iPhone. I do wish its safari had the option of "noscript" and stronger adblock plus than its own system among other things. And that when you do use it for the first time, it would have a video on safe usage. You can't upgrade or improve the user, the weakest link, but at least you can try to lead that horse to water that is education.
You might find the C/C++ crowd commonly accuse the Java or Ruby crowd of this overhead. Indeed, Java has a garbage collector designed to protect you from memory leaks and Ruby is an interpreted language that pays a mild additional overhead since it cannot be optimized upon compilation. But that's another debate altogether, it just is evident that the more you move away from actual machine language and assembly then more overhead you pay (generally).
Progression? Like chronological? "Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to solve problems in Lisp."
In fact, I would argue that the "overhead" is the best case scenario for the C/C++ type languages because these are usually measurements on programs written by people who know exactly what they are doing and furthermore have had multiple eyeballs look at that code over and over and over again. But is that speed really there for the average code. How many OS security flaws are still discovered because of incorrectly implemented pointers or function calls like malloc (checks and what not). And so, what about bugs that use resources.
But one thing code can never get away from, no matter how highly you're abstracting, is that the programmer has to know what they are doing. That's why it's a tool. There is no replacement for that. Photoshop can't make you an expert photographer either or turn crap photos into masterpieces. Why would anybody expect a programming language do the same for a programmer? It might hold your hand more and keep you out of trouble, but idiots always have ways to get around the idiot-proofing.
Um what? If the iPhone was nothing new, when it was released and even now, you wouldn't have competitors scrambling to catch up. If there was no innovation, there wouldn't be anything to catch up to.
No. This is the "he hit first"-argument, and it doesn't work in kindergarten either.
That argument works, in court, it's called self-defense. Kindergarten presupposes that if you do get hit first, you should run to the nearby authority figure, a solution that isn't always timely or practical in real life.
I like to imagine that drivers in North America are so horrible because of the hideously low level of skill needed to obtain a driving license along with the relatively affordable fines for things. If there were real mandatory training classes along with harsh punishments for driving unsafely I think that the level of driving would improve a lot. It is unlikely to happen with cars as seen currently but if they were to start a system like that for flying cars when invented they could change the culture of drivers then.
I would like to agree with driver licensing. But cops only stop for "speed" 90% of the time, when speed limits are already artificially low in most places to the point that you get bored driving. I see people not using turn signals all the time, communicating their intentions to other drivers, yet they never get a ticket.
I hope with the flying car, it would be computer controlled only. I don't think the general populace is ready to handle flying without crashing into other people's homes on a constant basis. Besides, it's much easier for AI to navigate the air path than a road.
Oh, that's right, I left them out in the garage in my flying car. You see, I was running Duke Nukem Forever in Hurd but the battery ran out of power so I set them aside to bring in and recharge at my tabletop cold fusion station. It's okay though, I'll have forever to enjoy them now that Ray Kurzweil's Singularity has happened.
If the population grows, the flying car has to happen one day, because the roads just get too congested otherwise. I see pictures of India's streets today and shudder when even 25% can and do own cars. China is already experiencing those problems. It's either that, or a real mass transit system like the Germans have, coupled with a revolutionary short distance personal transportation device, something that the Segway was rumored to be, but just wasn't. A bike would do, though a bit slow, a scooter like the original honda cub isn't bad either, but neither fold up enough to take on most busses, trains. It would also take an attitude adjustment on people's parts. The flying car just isn't reality because neither aerodynamic nor lift principles would be satisfactory for the human limitation involved, and anti-gravity would work, if such a thing existed. I would also suggest computer controlled road cars, but I'm not sure if the liability is worth it, if it's only suitable for highways, because, really, people are overall stupid drivers and technology (phones) is only making it worse so far.
DNF is just a game and technically feasible, they just were directionless and unhappy with everything they made. Hurd was superceded by Linux, so it's like complaining that an effective gas lamp was never invented when the lightbulb is already here.
Cold Fusion may be a pipe dream... but I hope they accompany these computer lenses with eyeglass counterparts. I don't like contacts, personally. I can see it happen, but I'd figure the computer power to get anything done would have to be miniaturized so much it'll be at least another 20 years... or that they have a terminal/server configuration where the lens/eyeglass acts as only a display wirelessly connected to a real computer elsewhere, be it on the person himself somewhere or on the internet.
Every few years, there is yet another theory that claims to be better suited for our models than Einstein's. Then they realize they overlooked something and find Einstein's idea fit better than ever.
This sentiment is rather old, I'm sure before and when Einstein came about, people were saying the same thing about Newtonian physics. Skepticism about new theories are fine, but I'm sure the science will come to a point where we do discover something better than Einstein's formulas in some areas.
BTW, my physics is really rusty, doesn't one of Einstein's equations devolve into a newtonian equation at slow speed? Which just shows that things are truly built on top of one another.
I don't think it has to be a $150 netbook. If all you are doing is regular internet surfing sans flash, an OLPC level book should be fine, and that was designed to be $100 years ago (although not quite reaching that level).
The problem with free is that people won't value it enough to take care of it. They'll just trash it and move onto the next thing. But a $50 or $100 netbook would be huge for customers. Anything else on that level is usually a crappy toy.
And just like Microsoft counts on people growing up on their OS, google could do the same here. Of course, I don't know if such a netbook will be worth it in the end in America, but definitely in third world countries.
It just occurs to me that, like so many other things, the government is simply incompetent at patents. They aren't like copyrights where you basically do the equivalent of a diff() between two works and come to a conclusion nor or they like trademarks which are also similiarly easy to evaluate.
People talk of fixing the patent system, but is it any fix at all? The really good stuff seems to be always "proprietary" and hidden anyway, and the goal of patent was to open knowledge in exchange for limited time monopolies - well, considering that society is different and much more fluid now, that you're hardly in a secretive guild, let alone one company your entire life, do patents satisfy the original purpose anymore?
And if they don't, why keep it around? Is it becoming too big a drag on commerce? I'm really curious what proponents have to say, because slashdot does tend to get one sided on issues.
A "byte" wasn't defined by th SI community at the time, "kilo", "mega", etcetera were. The CS community took over and twisted generally accepted terms for their own little niche. Not every scientific branch should be free to do that, just to fuck with their peers in all other fields.
In that the current google search is so good for the majority of users, that they are trying to grab at a few disatisfied straws. I can't really think of a way google search fails me, but perhaps if the results were presented a different way, I could see the clear-cut differences and improvements.
I think text search is pretty much there. The one thing I would appreciate is a better image search, and not relying on text of the image name, but being able to describe it, or sketch a rough outline, and for a search engine to recognize the content to some degree.
The researchers are looking into ways wireless carriers such as AT&T and Verizon can detect malware on devices and clean up the devices before they do further damage.
Last time a company had access to the contents of a device (Amazon -> Kindle), they caused a really big uproar.
The big industry writes them up just as protection from patent trolls and then collude to keep small competition out (ie Microsoft was threatening that Linux was stepping on its patents back in the day).
Patents were made to spawn innovation - bypassing secretive guilds by incentivizing the opening of knowledge to public domain in exchange for a limited time monopoly. Projects and society are way too fluid now to keep many inane details secret anyway. There needs to be a study of which types of patents coming in provide useful knowledge to the People, and which majority are just wastes dumps of text - and amend the system accordingly.
I would urge the USA to do this now, while it is the leading superpower in which others follow suit. It may have been to our advantage in the past, but not so in the future, imo.
Until there is my signature on a contract, I consider the EULA bullshit. You could put a sticker on the box saying that buying it, the company owns my house and car now, doesn't make it true.
Did the judge consider the possibility that the boy in question might be a momma's boy and deserved the online abuse? I find it hard to believe that this kid is well adjusted considering his mommy is willing to go to court to unmask his tormentors.
What does "deserved" mean? Did the boy in question do something that merited a punishment or is he simply guilty for being different or not part of the in crowd in some way.
I would like more details of the case, but harrassment, whether online or offline is not merited and to give would-be vigilantes license to act as judge and jury to decide in place of one is stupid.
What I find hard to believe is that is that the person who made the comments has any balls at all considering they went all the way to court to protect their identity, rather than say it to a person's face. Are there a place for anonymous comments? Yes, defitely, to fight a system mostly. For bullying or harrassment? No.
Not that I agree with this retarded group's findings. The whole "Can't sustain development without being able to sell proprietary licenses" is bunk. Plenty of opensource projects thrive without being able to sell proprietary licenses. Linux springs to mind.
Let's get real - the EC and EU, while I don't agree with their bloated bureacracy MOST OF THE TIME, actually try to protect consumers sometimes.
This, opposed to USA regulatory bodies, which seems to have lost most of their bite and are owned (by proxy of politicians owned by interests) by the very corporations they seek to regulate.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? I have none of those issues. Pictures from 5 years ago, not faded. It registers less than 1-3 watts in stand-by (but I unplug it anyway). When I start it up cold as in not plugged in, I could print in less than 30 seconds - now, I have no clue whether this is just waiting for the OS of the machine to start and selecting my picture or there is really some warm-up time. There is no wax coming off the page with a finger nail, I just scratched a picture - nothing, it is clear coated. There is no transit time, the little guy even has a handle to be portable! I never ever smelt wax from the thing.
You must be either talking about ancient machines or big ones which I'm unfamiliar with.
Mine is a previous generation of this Sony (otherwise mostly same):
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-DPP-FP97-Picture-3-5-Inch-Tilt-Adjustable/dp/B0022NHQBY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=office-products&qid=1259906998&sr=8-1
For 8x10 prints, there's Hi-Touch, which from their 4x6 printers I tried, were similiar to my experience on my Sony.
Good thing I was clearly talking about dye sublimation printers then, and not lasers.
BTW, I'd call them first to confirm that it is a printer you are getting. Nothing on the page would suggest otherwise, but in those cases, it's always better to make sure it's not some part instead.
Here, a color laser for $25 + in domestic US under $25 shipping, so less than $50:
http://www.itpartsdepot.com/products/HP/NEW/Q7825A.html
ITpartsdepot has a good rating according to Google:
http://www.google.com/products/reviews?fq=color+laser&cid=fffffaa9e5017d14&sort=1&cat=merchants
A search for color laser, in Google Shopping, sorted by price low to high reveals other options available around that price range. Probably not the latest models, but at that price, what the heck.
WTF. People still buying inkjets and bitching about it? Is lexmark STILL in business?
It's simple. Don't buy inkjets. Buy a laser that has decent sized laser cartridges. B/W if you print lots of text. Color tends to have small cartridges out of space considerations.
Besides the cost, with inkjets, you have clean the head constantly and if you don't use in a while (say you have a several week vacation or other trip), worry about the printer head drying out. Headaches and a fucking waste of time, imo.
And for photos, dye-subs. Even if they don't beat inkjets on dpi, my 300dpi dyesub beats any 1200x1200 in actual results. You JUST DON'T see the millions of dots with dyesub, it's all blended together, and because there is a clear coat, no smearing of the images, even if you lick your fingers and go across the picture right after it was printed. It looks as good or better than from professional print shop.
I don't even know why this argument is still going on after all these years. Inkjet was and always will be a half-assed home solution when the good solutions have matured and become considerably cheap. In the space of 5 years, I threw out just as many inkjets in the early 2000s with lots of printing problems aggravation. In the same space of time, I have had just 2 lasers and 1 dyesub, all still working (1 for b/w, other a color copier) and I probably printed out 10x the material with them because it was just easier.
That's an interesting thought.
But let's keep this on authors. A typewriter is a mechanical tool, the good ones were expensive and of good quality, and once you had one, there was no real reason to "upgrade." OTOH, authors today may go through a computer every 2-5 years on average, and may have more than one at a time. I don't see an author in the nearterm future only having one computer their entire career, unless it's a really short career.
Anti-virus/anti-malware always seems to be a shitty bandaid to a badly designed system. Even running Windows 7, with UAC on, non-administrative account 99.999% time, always a non-IE browser, and very strict on what I run as .exe and where I download them, ad-aware just found some wind32 trojan.
Also, people forget this is supposed to be a portable device, even a phone sometimes. Remember what most A/V does to your desktop? I don't run A/V on my notebook, and I actually do want a decent battery life on my phone, as hard as that is to believe.
However, I know there will be problems with the iPhone. I do wish its safari had the option of "noscript" and stronger adblock plus than its own system among other things. And that when you do use it for the first time, it would have a video on safe usage. You can't upgrade or improve the user, the weakest link, but at least you can try to lead that horse to water that is education.
Progression? Like chronological? "Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to solve problems in Lisp."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)
In fact, I would argue that the "overhead" is the best case scenario for the C/C++ type languages because these are usually measurements on programs written by people who know exactly what they are doing and furthermore have had multiple eyeballs look at that code over and over and over again. But is that speed really there for the average code. How many OS security flaws are still discovered because of incorrectly implemented pointers or function calls like malloc (checks and what not). And so, what about bugs that use resources.
But one thing code can never get away from, no matter how highly you're abstracting, is that the programmer has to know what they are doing. That's why it's a tool. There is no replacement for that. Photoshop can't make you an expert photographer either or turn crap photos into masterpieces. Why would anybody expect a programming language do the same for a programmer? It might hold your hand more and keep you out of trouble, but idiots always have ways to get around the idiot-proofing.
Microsoft has been doing the same for years now. Anyone that believes corporate propaganda should go out and get some fresh air.
Um what? If the iPhone was nothing new, when it was released and even now, you wouldn't have competitors scrambling to catch up. If there was no innovation, there wouldn't be anything to catch up to.
That argument works, in court, it's called self-defense. Kindergarten presupposes that if you do get hit first, you should run to the nearby authority figure, a solution that isn't always timely or practical in real life.
I would like to agree with driver licensing. But cops only stop for "speed" 90% of the time, when speed limits are already artificially low in most places to the point that you get bored driving. I see people not using turn signals all the time, communicating their intentions to other drivers, yet they never get a ticket.
I hope with the flying car, it would be computer controlled only. I don't think the general populace is ready to handle flying without crashing into other people's homes on a constant basis. Besides, it's much easier for AI to navigate the air path than a road.
If the population grows, the flying car has to happen one day, because the roads just get too congested otherwise. I see pictures of India's streets today and shudder when even 25% can and do own cars. China is already experiencing those problems. It's either that, or a real mass transit system like the Germans have, coupled with a revolutionary short distance personal transportation device, something that the Segway was rumored to be, but just wasn't. A bike would do, though a bit slow, a scooter like the original honda cub isn't bad either, but neither fold up enough to take on most busses, trains. It would also take an attitude adjustment on people's parts. The flying car just isn't reality because neither aerodynamic nor lift principles would be satisfactory for the human limitation involved, and anti-gravity would work, if such a thing existed. I would also suggest computer controlled road cars, but I'm not sure if the liability is worth it, if it's only suitable for highways, because, really, people are overall stupid drivers and technology (phones) is only making it worse so far.
DNF is just a game and technically feasible, they just were directionless and unhappy with everything they made. Hurd was superceded by Linux, so it's like complaining that an effective gas lamp was never invented when the lightbulb is already here.
Cold Fusion may be a pipe dream... but I hope they accompany these computer lenses with eyeglass counterparts. I don't like contacts, personally. I can see it happen, but I'd figure the computer power to get anything done would have to be miniaturized so much it'll be at least another 20 years... or that they have a terminal/server configuration where the lens/eyeglass acts as only a display wirelessly connected to a real computer elsewhere, be it on the person himself somewhere or on the internet.
Yeah: http://yfrog.com/b9sciencevsfaithbigp
This sentiment is rather old, I'm sure before and when Einstein came about, people were saying the same thing about Newtonian physics. Skepticism about new theories are fine, but I'm sure the science will come to a point where we do discover something better than Einstein's formulas in some areas.
BTW, my physics is really rusty, doesn't one of Einstein's equations devolve into a newtonian equation at slow speed? Which just shows that things are truly built on top of one another.
I don't think it has to be a $150 netbook. If all you are doing is regular internet surfing sans flash, an OLPC level book should be fine, and that was designed to be $100 years ago (although not quite reaching that level).
The problem with free is that people won't value it enough to take care of it. They'll just trash it and move onto the next thing. But a $50 or $100 netbook would be huge for customers. Anything else on that level is usually a crappy toy.
And just like Microsoft counts on people growing up on their OS, google could do the same here. Of course, I don't know if such a netbook will be worth it in the end in America, but definitely in third world countries.
It just occurs to me that, like so many other things, the government is simply incompetent at patents. They aren't like copyrights where you basically do the equivalent of a diff() between two works and come to a conclusion nor or they like trademarks which are also similiarly easy to evaluate.
People talk of fixing the patent system, but is it any fix at all? The really good stuff seems to be always "proprietary" and hidden anyway, and the goal of patent was to open knowledge in exchange for limited time monopolies - well, considering that society is different and much more fluid now, that you're hardly in a secretive guild, let alone one company your entire life, do patents satisfy the original purpose anymore?
And if they don't, why keep it around? Is it becoming too big a drag on commerce? I'm really curious what proponents have to say, because slashdot does tend to get one sided on issues.
A "byte" wasn't defined by th SI community at the time, "kilo", "mega", etcetera were. The CS community took over and twisted generally accepted terms for their own little niche. Not every scientific branch should be free to do that, just to fuck with their peers in all other fields.
In that the current google search is so good for the majority of users, that they are trying to grab at a few disatisfied straws. I can't really think of a way google search fails me, but perhaps if the results were presented a different way, I could see the clear-cut differences and improvements.
I think text search is pretty much there. The one thing I would appreciate is a better image search, and not relying on text of the image name, but being able to describe it, or sketch a rough outline, and for a search engine to recognize the content to some degree.
Last time a company had access to the contents of a device (Amazon -> Kindle), they caused a really big uproar.
The big industry writes them up just as protection from patent trolls and then collude to keep small competition out (ie Microsoft was threatening that Linux was stepping on its patents back in the day).
Patents were made to spawn innovation - bypassing secretive guilds by incentivizing the opening of knowledge to public domain in exchange for a limited time monopoly. Projects and society are way too fluid now to keep many inane details secret anyway. There needs to be a study of which types of patents coming in provide useful knowledge to the People, and which majority are just wastes dumps of text - and amend the system accordingly.
I would urge the USA to do this now, while it is the leading superpower in which others follow suit. It may have been to our advantage in the past, but not so in the future, imo.
Until there is my signature on a contract, I consider the EULA bullshit. You could put a sticker on the box saying that buying it, the company owns my house and car now, doesn't make it true.
What does "deserved" mean? Did the boy in question do something that merited a punishment or is he simply guilty for being different or not part of the in crowd in some way.
I would like more details of the case, but harrassment, whether online or offline is not merited and to give would-be vigilantes license to act as judge and jury to decide in place of one is stupid.
What I find hard to believe is that is that the person who made the comments has any balls at all considering they went all the way to court to protect their identity, rather than say it to a person's face. Are there a place for anonymous comments? Yes, defitely, to fight a system mostly. For bullying or harrassment? No.
Let's get real - the EC and EU, while I don't agree with their bloated bureacracy MOST OF THE TIME, actually try to protect consumers sometimes.
This, opposed to USA regulatory bodies, which seems to have lost most of their bite and are owned (by proxy of politicians owned by interests) by the very corporations they seek to regulate.
I just tried it. Pretty good! Thanks.
I thought wifi was too risky, at least according to the mythbusters, in an airplane because not every wifi card, etc. could be tested?
Wouldn't it be safer just to offer an ethernet port at every seat?