I'm also a 3 button mouse man. Well, okay the one with the tablet has more, but that one gets no use. For what I do, a normal mouse in the 15-20€ range is more than enough. True, I buy Logitech only and I could probably go cheaper.
I don't game, so... no excuse to buy really-expensive-high-resolution-mice.
Actually, for a normal law-abiding person... You could indeed publish everything you stated. Let's go over this:
transactions of my checking account: got salary, paid phone bill, paid electricity bill, paid rent, paid cellphone bill, paid isp bill, paid credit card bill, (...many more bills later..) saved up some money on savings account.
credits cards: buy food, buy gasoline, buy food, buy food, bought flowers for my wife,....
phone calls outgoing: called mom, called wife, called wife, called wife, called boss in the morning because I'd be late, called a computer store because my order hasn't arrived yet, called cleaning services to know if the carpet is ready,....
phone calls incoming: wife, wife, wife, sister wanting to know when her new graphic cards arrives, wife, wife....
e-mail: most work related stuff already goes to boss and/or coworkers and my wife wouldn't read it because she doesn't understand it anyway. Private mail? The jokes I forward and the petty news about the family? Please enjoy yourself, it's not really that interesting.
Now, I am exaggerating. I do agree with your "anniversary" example. That however is not how privacy is meant. If the FBI/NSA/KGB/Al'Quadia knows that you got her 25 red roses, she's not going to know. Privacy in this case really is from the big brother type. After all, if you bought your wife a Porsche on your credit card and she accidentally opens your statement, she'll know.... (Note: I do not advise to buy Porsches on credit cards) Those kind of "secrets" have nothing to do with privacy. Anybody else in the world could and may know, as long as it isn't your wife.
Well, true. For an input device, I wouldn't shell out 160€ either. Well, I did once: my wife is an artist and I thought she might enjoy doing some work digitally. So, I bought a Wacom for 500€. Turns out she never uses it.... Just like the iPod I gave her. She just doesn't like tech, I guess.
I mentioned in this thread before that some people spend 100€ on gaming mice. Compare to that, a 80€ Wacom is pretty much a steal;-) Especially that a tablet usually is technically more complex and includes a mouse in the first place.
Oh, come on... Be fair, I compared Wacom to the likes of Logitech and Microsoft. Trust isn't even in the same league... What about a 13.25£ tablet. That's about 4.5 times more expensive. We're now talking about products that are crap by definition....
Studying mathematics is not like studying history where the goal is to memorize as many facts as you can about a particular subject.
Never, ever say that to a historian. That's not at all what they do! Historians, try to interpret and reconstruct the past, including events of the past in context. "Why something happened." For example: you cannot understand WWII without understanding what happened before. You know what? For my high school history exams, I didn't have to memorize facts brutely. No, we were give a text about a certain period of time and with the knowledge we had acquired, we were required to write a dissertation analyzing the text within the historical context. Could be anything, from the excerpt of a propagandistic paper to an excerpt of a journal of 13 year old Jew.
In those classes it was possible to get an A without mentioning a single date. As long as your analysis of the events was good.
If you think that history is about memorizing facts, then you seriously misunderstood the point. Oh, and I want to point out the fact that I hated my history lessons, so I just defend historians because I know that history isn't about memorizing facts.
You can get a (new) computer for 160€? (According to xe.com that's 218$... I was a bit surprised by that.) Where? Also, keep in mind that we Euros talk prices with tax, so it needs to be a computer from 218$ with sales tax included.
That was hardly a good reason to stop reading any of the articles.
It indicates bad research. So, yes, it was a good reason to stop to read.
The cheapest digital tablet direct from WACOM costs a hundred bucks (99.95 U.S. Dollars).
As you have undoubtedly read in my other posts, that's not the cheapest one from Wacom. Why the Volito2 isn't available to US customers is beyond me. From my point of view, comparing a 20€ mouse to a 40€ tablet most certainly isn't "orders of a magnitude". It's not even close to two thirds you claim. Sure, you USians are out of luck, but the rest of the world can get affordable Wacom tablets. Well, at least my part of the world. For once it's the inverse because usually you get the cool toys for cheap.
et's use values from the manufacturer's online American-version store, rather than third-party distributors,
wacon-shop.net is the online shop of Wacom itself! It's not a thrid-party distributor. It links directly from the product page of Wacom when you click "Buy [product] online". When I ordered mine, it came with a full fledged Wacom bill. No mention of any third party whatsoever.
Of course, not.... However, even the cheaper Wacoms are not bargain basement quality. I've bought a Graphire 4 for my sister. 80€ It is very nice and works very well. Sure a mouse is less expensive, but you cannot call 80€ "not affordable".
You can always get crap mice. Heck, ball-mice are still sold. My last Logitech mouse was around 20€, and that was one of the cheap ones. I know insane people (ehm, sorry, "Gamers") that shell out up to 100€ for a mouse.
Now, I do realise that Joe Sixpack won't shell out big money for his pointing devices, but he's hardly the person that optimizes his input-device usage. He's the person that (as described below in another post) clicks on a textfield, fills out the text, moves the mouse to click on another textfield.... all that instead of using tab.
The tablet prices I quoted came straight from Wacoms online shop. So, you don't even have to take my word for it.
I stopped reading after the first paragraph. A tablet? Orders of magnitude more expensive? What? A good mouse costs at least 20€ (Logitec/Microsoft), and a tablet costs a whopping 80€. A Voltio2 costs a whopping 40€. Both are Wacoms, I'm sure you can get cheaper elsewhere (Trust). Sure the Graphire Intuos3 A4, that I bought for my wife was 500€ back then (it still is), but not everyone needs that. Heck, my wife doesn't even need it!
Tablets have become very affordable, and if you like to use them, nothing stops you from buying one. Personally, I don't like them, but that my own inability to draw well that is at stake here;-)
Nah, redundancy just enhances your whiney-ness, making it effectively recursive and without a stop condition that makes you infinitely whiney. Perfect for a Mac fanboy;-) (1, Infinite Loop... and all...)
...of replacing the ipod battery is anyone surprised?
Bah, it doesn't really matter anyway. When I wanted to replace the battery of my Siemens S35i (a phone I really really liked), I found out that a new battery would cost 60€ That phone (perhaps not in the 600€ range back then) was also expensive, but after the years that it served it made no economic sense to shell out that much for a new battery.
In two years, the iPhones will start to fail because of battery. The "iPhone Lite" will be out and will have more and better features for about the double price of a new battery for your old iPhone.....
As my nick reveals, I'm a Corporate Troll^WDrone. I'd cut my right hand to get a job in R&D. The money is okay, but I made more as a teacher. *sigh* Wouldn't want to be a CxO either, but that was part of my point. You only get to these positions if you go along with the company, and fighting Microsoft or IBM ain't gonna get you there.
Well, you can become a CxO and fight Microsoft and IBM, but you'd have to start your own company;-) I did think doing that at one point in time, but the laws in my country are so biased in direction of craftmanships that in order to actually exchange a harddisk in a server for a customer, I'd need an electrician license. A license that is only obtained by studying thee years full time. I have a friggin Computer Science degree, but changing a harddisk is out for me. (At least not legally) So founding a company is out for me.
I'm sorry, we're straying offtopic....
To be on topic and in slashdot spirit: Vista iz da Sukc!
I'm sure a historian from 3007 who really wants to read your letters in the original Wordperfect software will be able to recreate a (for him, primitive) PC.
You are grossly overestimating the capabilities of future archaeologists. You assume that they will have the documentation of old formats, that are stored on old media, that can be read with old computers. Recreate a PC? Okay, no problem... However, they first have to know that the shiny disk they found is a CD, to be read with a 780 nm laser, and that the bits on it are a filesystem called ISO9660 that describe files, each of these files might be anything. In my case they are zip files, so now they have to know the decompression algorithm, inside they find more files, these files are Wordperfect format, which -of course- is not documented. (I didn't even start about endianity of the bits, and other technical subtleties)
So many points of failure....
This is entirely different from finding a scrap of paper with writings on it.... You assumed in your recreation statement, that our civilization would prevail. Nothing, but nothing guarantees that! A national archive might survive, partially or in totality even if our civilization disappears. Note that I say: *might*.... but at least if it does, the paper documents will be readable.
You might consider that my native language isn't English, and terms differ in my language.
You don't need to explain me how to become debt free.... I am debt free. (Okay, except a student loan at a ridiculous 2% rate that I can even deduct from my taxes.) That, and I make a budget on a yearly basis... I never buy consumer goods if I don't have enough money in my bank account. I take a lunchbox to work instead of buying a sandwich, etc, etc, etc... Why? Not because I'm poor, but because I want to have money on the side. Anything can happen in the future, and it is nice
For example, I keep a copy of DOS and Win3.1 ISOs (about 20MB total) and Norton Commander (3 floppy images!) on a DVDR, along with a copy of Virtual PC. This lets me recreate a Windows 3.1 virtual PC anytime I want.
Now.... You can do that now. However, in 100 years, will this be possible? You do not know what the future brings. Let's not even talk about 1000 years and beyond. Now; you backed this stuff up on a DVD and you die tomorrow. Your kids keep the data, and when they die a historian specialising on the 20th century wants to analyse the daily life of 20th century person. VMWare is long dead, you backed it up... Sure, but his platform can't run it. We're at least 10 operating system versions later, and they run on an new platform. x86 is long forgotten and they moved to quantum computers.
Perhaps the guy is lucky, and can run an emulator in an emulator in an emulator in an emulator what you backed up. Perhaps....
I have to this day zip files containing Wordperfect 5.1 files of the letters with a girl I was penpal with (and to whom I ultimately lost my virginity, but that is another story). Those letters, documenting life in the mid eighties to mid nineties might be interesting to a historian someday. (Historians love the daily lives of long dead people). Will they be able to read it, in 100 years? I don't know, especially in a proprietary format like Wordpefect.
I think it's morally reprehensible to not separate an idiot from their money.
...
But it's not like it's a big secret what the interest rates on credit cards are.
I find the first thing you say extremely offensive because some people are not idiots at all, but do not understand how debt works. I've been lucky to have a dad that's an economist and he explained me the finer points of debt. My wife, absolutely non-math inclined had no idea how debt works. You see, if you're lucky, people learn how percents work in high school and the most common example is: when a pair of shoes is 139$ and they are 30% off, how much do they cost? Easy: 139$*(1-0.30)=97.3$. That is how most people feel interests work. Not so with debts! Interests are cumulated over time. It's called compound interest, and many people do not understand how it works. Yes, credit cards also work that way! (If you don't pay them off every month)
Try to imagine the looks of my wife when I explained that if we bought the house she liked, we'd be paying it 3x over thirty years.
So, sure... the interests are known, but if you do not have the background to understand these interests, they might as well be hidden.
We on slashdot pretty much all have a s strong mathematical background, and are capable of understanding these things. Many people get lost at the words "compound interests", people that are no idiots but have strengths that we do not have and can't even imagine to have.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if it's a good idea. The BBC is not a good example: it is paid by UK residents. I get their content "for free".
I'm also a 3 button mouse man. Well, okay the one with the tablet has more, but that one gets no use. For what I do, a normal mouse in the 15-20€ range is more than enough. True, I buy Logitech only and I could probably go cheaper.
I don't game, so... no excuse to buy really-expensive-high-resolution-mice.
The Wikipedia ACPI article is better and doesn't shove crappy adds down your throat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI
True, but do you occasionally donate to Wikipedia? At least I have a clear conscience, because as a matter of fact: I do.
Now, I am exaggerating. I do agree with your "anniversary" example. That however is not how privacy is meant. If the FBI/NSA/KGB/Al'Quadia knows that you got her 25 red roses, she's not going to know. Privacy in this case really is from the big brother type. After all, if you bought your wife a Porsche on your credit card and she accidentally opens your statement, she'll know.... (Note: I do not advise to buy Porsches on credit cards) Those kind of "secrets" have nothing to do with privacy. Anybody else in the world could and may know, as long as it isn't your wife.
Well, true. For an input device, I wouldn't shell out 160€ either. Well, I did once: my wife is an artist and I thought she might enjoy doing some work digitally. So, I bought a Wacom for 500€. Turns out she never uses it.... Just like the iPod I gave her. She just doesn't like tech, I guess.
I mentioned in this thread before that some people spend 100€ on gaming mice. Compare to that, a 80€ Wacom is pretty much a steal ;-) Especially that a tablet usually is technically more complex and includes a mouse in the first place.
Oh, come on... Be fair, I compared Wacom to the likes of Logitech and Microsoft. Trust isn't even in the same league... What about a 13.25£ tablet. That's about 4.5 times more expensive. We're now talking about products that are crap by definition....
Studying mathematics is not like studying history where the goal is to memorize as many facts as you can about a particular subject.
Never, ever say that to a historian. That's not at all what they do! Historians, try to interpret and reconstruct the past, including events of the past in context. "Why something happened." For example: you cannot understand WWII without understanding what happened before. You know what? For my high school history exams, I didn't have to memorize facts brutely. No, we were give a text about a certain period of time and with the knowledge we had acquired, we were required to write a dissertation analyzing the text within the historical context. Could be anything, from the excerpt of a propagandistic paper to an excerpt of a journal of 13 year old Jew.
In those classes it was possible to get an A without mentioning a single date. As long as your analysis of the events was good.
If you think that history is about memorizing facts, then you seriously misunderstood the point. Oh, and I want to point out the fact that I hated my history lessons, so I just defend historians because I know that history isn't about memorizing facts.
You can get a (new) computer for 160€? (According to xe.com that's 218$... I was a bit surprised by that.) Where? Also, keep in mind that we Euros talk prices with tax, so it needs to be a computer from 218$ with sales tax included.
That was hardly a good reason to stop reading any of the articles.
It indicates bad research. So, yes, it was a good reason to stop to read.
The cheapest digital tablet direct from WACOM costs a hundred bucks (99.95 U.S. Dollars).
As you have undoubtedly read in my other posts, that's not the cheapest one from Wacom. Why the Volito2 isn't available to US customers is beyond me. From my point of view, comparing a 20€ mouse to a 40€ tablet most certainly isn't "orders of a magnitude". It's not even close to two thirds you claim. Sure, you USians are out of luck, but the rest of the world can get affordable Wacom tablets. Well, at least my part of the world. For once it's the inverse because usually you get the cool toys for cheap.
et's use values from the manufacturer's online American-version store, rather than third-party distributors,
wacon-shop.net is the online shop of Wacom itself! It's not a thrid-party distributor. It links directly from the product page of Wacom when you click "Buy [product] online". When I ordered mine, it came with a full fledged Wacom bill. No mention of any third party whatsoever.
Of course, not.... However, even the cheaper Wacoms are not bargain basement quality. I've bought a Graphire 4 for my sister. 80€ It is very nice and works very well. Sure a mouse is less expensive, but you cannot call 80€ "not affordable".
Dollar sign? Do you mean one of the following signs: €, £ or ¥. I am not familiar with this "Dollar" thing. Is that used in some third world country?
You can always get crap mice. Heck, ball-mice are still sold. My last Logitech mouse was around 20€, and that was one of the cheap ones. I know insane people (ehm, sorry, "Gamers") that shell out up to 100€ for a mouse.
Now, I do realise that Joe Sixpack won't shell out big money for his pointing devices, but he's hardly the person that optimizes his input-device usage. He's the person that (as described below in another post) clicks on a textfield, fills out the text, moves the mouse to click on another textfield.... all that instead of using tab.
The tablet prices I quoted came straight from Wacoms online shop. So, you don't even have to take my word for it.
I stopped reading after the first paragraph. A tablet? Orders of magnitude more expensive? What? A good mouse costs at least 20€ (Logitec/Microsoft), and a tablet costs a whopping 80€. A Voltio2 costs a whopping 40€. Both are Wacoms, I'm sure you can get cheaper elsewhere (Trust). Sure the Graphire Intuos3 A4, that I bought for my wife was 500€ back then (it still is), but not everyone needs that. Heck, my wife doesn't even need it!
Tablets have become very affordable, and if you like to use them, nothing stops you from buying one. Personally, I don't like them, but that my own inability to draw well that is at stake here ;-)
Nah, redundancy just enhances your whiney-ness, making it effectively recursive and without a stop condition that makes you infinitely whiney. Perfect for a Mac fanboy ;-) (1, Infinite Loop... and all...)
You do justice to your nickname.
...of replacing the ipod battery is anyone surprised?Bah, it doesn't really matter anyway. When I wanted to replace the battery of my Siemens S35i (a phone I really really liked), I found out that a new battery would cost 60€ That phone (perhaps not in the 600€ range back then) was also expensive, but after the years that it served it made no economic sense to shell out that much for a new battery.
In two years, the iPhones will start to fail because of battery. The "iPhone Lite" will be out and will have more and better features for about the double price of a new battery for your old iPhone.....
Wouldn't that make you an unwashed hippy and thus unfit for being a CxO? ;-)
As my nick reveals, I'm a Corporate Troll^WDrone. I'd cut my right hand to get a job in R&D. The money is okay, but I made more as a teacher. *sigh* Wouldn't want to be a CxO either, but that was part of my point. You only get to these positions if you go along with the company, and fighting Microsoft or IBM ain't gonna get you there.
Well, you can become a CxO and fight Microsoft and IBM, but you'd have to start your own company ;-) I did think doing that at one point in time, but the laws in my country are so biased in direction of craftmanships that in order to actually exchange a harddisk in a server for a customer, I'd need an electrician license. A license that is only obtained by studying thee years full time. I have a friggin Computer Science degree, but changing a harddisk is out for me. (At least not legally) So founding a company is out for me.
I'm sorry, we're straying offtopic....
To be on topic and in slashdot spirit: Vista iz da Sukc!
Of course I knew.... I've been on slashdot.org long enough, and I heard it before in the mid-80s when my dad worked in IT at a bank.
Get that first coffee (better: a whole pot of coffee) and the day will look brighter (okay, better avoid bright light, but you understand what I mean)
And exactly that stance will make that you'll never become the CEO of the company your work for....
Recreating old platforms is trivial
...
I'm sure a historian from 3007 who really wants to read your letters in the original Wordperfect software will be able to recreate a (for him, primitive) PC.
You are grossly overestimating the capabilities of future archaeologists. You assume that they will have the documentation of old formats, that are stored on old media, that can be read with old computers. Recreate a PC? Okay, no problem... However, they first have to know that the shiny disk they found is a CD, to be read with a 780 nm laser, and that the bits on it are a filesystem called ISO9660 that describe files, each of these files might be anything. In my case they are zip files, so now they have to know the decompression algorithm, inside they find more files, these files are Wordperfect format, which -of course- is not documented. (I didn't even start about endianity of the bits, and other technical subtleties)
So many points of failure....
This is entirely different from finding a scrap of paper with writings on it.... You assumed in your recreation statement, that our civilization would prevail. Nothing, but nothing guarantees that! A national archive might survive, partially or in totality even if our civilization disappears. Note that I say: *might*.... but at least if it does, the paper documents will be readable.
...(Damn preview)... nice to have something on the side.
You might consider that my native language isn't English, and terms differ in my language.
You don't need to explain me how to become debt free.... I am debt free. (Okay, except a student loan at a ridiculous 2% rate that I can even deduct from my taxes.) That, and I make a budget on a yearly basis... I never buy consumer goods if I don't have enough money in my bank account. I take a lunchbox to work instead of buying a sandwich, etc, etc, etc... Why? Not because I'm poor, but because I want to have money on the side. Anything can happen in the future, and it is nice
For example, I keep a copy of DOS and Win3.1 ISOs (about 20MB total) and Norton Commander (3 floppy images!) on a DVDR, along with a copy of Virtual PC. This lets me recreate a Windows 3.1 virtual PC anytime I want.
Now.... You can do that now. However, in 100 years, will this be possible? You do not know what the future brings. Let's not even talk about 1000 years and beyond. Now; you backed this stuff up on a DVD and you die tomorrow. Your kids keep the data, and when they die a historian specialising on the 20th century wants to analyse the daily life of 20th century person. VMWare is long dead, you backed it up... Sure, but his platform can't run it. We're at least 10 operating system versions later, and they run on an new platform. x86 is long forgotten and they moved to quantum computers.
Perhaps the guy is lucky, and can run an emulator in an emulator in an emulator in an emulator what you backed up. Perhaps....
I have to this day zip files containing Wordperfect 5.1 files of the letters with a girl I was penpal with (and to whom I ultimately lost my virginity, but that is another story). Those letters, documenting life in the mid eighties to mid nineties might be interesting to a historian someday. (Historians love the daily lives of long dead people). Will they be able to read it, in 100 years? I don't know, especially in a proprietary format like Wordpefect.
I think it's morally reprehensible to not separate an idiot from their money.
...
But it's not like it's a big secret what the interest rates on credit cards are.
I find the first thing you say extremely offensive because some people are not idiots at all, but do not understand how debt works. I've been lucky to have a dad that's an economist and he explained me the finer points of debt. My wife, absolutely non-math inclined had no idea how debt works. You see, if you're lucky, people learn how percents work in high school and the most common example is: when a pair of shoes is 139$ and they are 30% off, how much do they cost? Easy: 139$*(1-0.30)=97.3$. That is how most people feel interests work. Not so with debts! Interests are cumulated over time. It's called compound interest, and many people do not understand how it works. Yes, credit cards also work that way! (If you don't pay them off every month)
Try to imagine the looks of my wife when I explained that if we bought the house she liked, we'd be paying it 3x over thirty years.
So, sure... the interests are known, but if you do not have the background to understand these interests, they might as well be hidden.
We on slashdot pretty much all have a s strong mathematical background, and are capable of understanding these things. Many people get lost at the words "compound interests", people that are no idiots but have strengths that we do not have and can't even imagine to have.