I didn't suggest for a moment that I don't wish to subsidize the highway system, only that a pay-for-service model makes more sense. However, public education is an interesting issue to ponder. A century ago, many kids left school after the first five or six years to join the workforce. During the Great Depression, there was considerable pressure to keep students in school until Grade 12, since it kept them from competing for scare jobs. Post-war affluence encouraged parents to send their children off to College where they spent another four years bouncing around the educational system. In a few cases, such extreme education makes sense. But years spent rotting in school "learning" the intricacies of Shakespearean poetry or Euclidean geometry doesn't help the average office worker, electrician or assembly line worker. It's useless fluff that pads out the school years, especially when you consider that the truly brilliant kids (who should be the heroes of the educational system) frequently find themselves bored to tears.
You seem to believe you will somehow pay less in taxes if this happens. Why, I have no idea. If anything, your taxes will go up to pay for the postage to send out the bills, so that the revenue from the tolls can be maximized.
I labor under the daft illusion that the government should rationalize taxation. That is, road taxes should pay for roads while warmongering taxes should foot the bill for bullets. You should stop placidly accepting your government's habit of randomly redistributing your taxes willy-nilly.
I rarely drive. Why should I subsidize the people who drive 100 miles a day to commute into the city from their faux-rural home? Toll roads are a great way to pass the cost along to those who benefit from the service. In fact, instead of a blanket tax, it makes sense to bill people for their annyal road use (assuming a perfect world with tamper-proof odometers, of course). It would encourage people to drive less and drive home the true cost of public infrastructure. We live in a strange political bubble where universal medicare is viewed as dangerously "socialist" (somehow invoking fears of dictators waving red flags), whereas multi-billion dollar tax funded road networks are seen as a panacea. Bloody odd.
It's hard to believe that major networks around the world have been unable to bring their traditional business model to the Internet until now. The elevator speech is incredibly simple: "Imagine that instead of broadcasting using radio waves, we use streaming video to reach people who have abandoned traditional broadcasting in favor of the Internet." Of course, it all boils down to copyright - the rights holders simply didn't want to their content streamed on the Internet because that prevents them from selling it for $1.99 an episode.
The weird thing is that I've seen networks in the USA, Canada and Europe that have started to stream shows without advertising. It makes absolutely no sense from a business perspective, unless they're attempting to build online viewership to woo advertisers - very much a case of trying to make up (non-existent) margin with high volume.
Antares' first big success was a sample auto-looping program called Infinity. It eliminated the pops and clicks that often resulted when repeating segments of a musical sound to allow it to play "forever." It's long forgotten now, but I used to run it on a stratospherically expensive Mac IIx system with a heap of Digidesign audio cards. It took a tedious job that I once despised and made it fun. The result was several very popular soundsets that I still hear used occasionally.
I'm glad to see this little company enjoying more mainstream success within the music industry. Yes, the effect is hopelessly overused. But that's good for the manufacturer, even though it's bad for the music.
The eee PC 701 was the prototypical first-gen netbook (awkwardly cramped 7" screen and as little as 2 GB flash memory). Machines like the eee PC 901 and Acer Aspire One were part of the extremely successful second-gen (8.9" screens, 8 GB to 32 GB flash memory or up to 160 GB HD + XP or a Vista Neutered option). The new chipset (along with 10" screenage) belongs to the third generation.
*Government caused the problem of your elderly and impoverished dad's TV no longer working, it is their responsibility to fix the problem.*
Errm, it's a flipping entertainment device, for goodness sake. While I appreciate your misguided pseudo-socialist effort to equip the nation's downtrodden with Chinese-made consumer electronics, it would be far better to spend that money on universal health care, the reduction of child hunger within the nation's borders and education. Perversely, the money's all borrowed anyway, so future generations of television addicts will be saddled with the debt. Sigh.
Easy. A video will make an annoying whirring sound like a Super 8 camera, drowning out the clever comments of your friends, family and kids in each and every video. What I find most bewildering about this proposed legislation is that they'd have to mandate a specific volume level for shutter sound. A typical "click" would be inaudible on a dance floor, in a subway car, on the bus or at a party. You'd have to duct tape a nice 100W amplifier and bookshelf speaker to the back of your camera in those situations. Come to think of it, you'd have to protect hearing-impaired citizens by affixing a 6 inch flashing strobe light on a bright orange pole where the flash mount resides on international versions of the same camera.
I added my numbers to the Canadian Direct Marketer's internal "Do not call" list years ago and saw a dramatic decrease in calls and unsolicited mail. I added my numbers to the new federal list a few days after it was unveiled, and the calls from local hearing aid companies and carpet cleaners dried up. The system works.
Where it falls down is that there's no effective way for the Canadian government to regulate foreign calls, so we still receive the dreaded 000-000-00000 "You've won a cruise!" recordings and occasional offers to reduce the interest rate on credit cards we don't have. Parliament should approve the use of JTF2 to shut down those operations - it would take mere minutes and word would get around pretty quickly.:)
"a team of experimentalists from China believe they have finally found a resolution."
Here on earth, we have special words for 'experimentalists.' We refer to them as researchers or scientists. And they're not 'finding resolutions,' they're testing hypotheses.
You would prefer that Apple's product development teams to work overtime over Christmas with less control over their release cycle? You must work Microsoft. WTF, indeed.:)
I'm glad to see Apple stepping away from a massive release of new products every January. While it was exciting from a geek perspective, it was awfully timed. Introducing a slate of cool new gadgets just after Christmas was a marketing nightmare for Apple - hundreds of thousands of new iPod owners would be upset to learn that their new player was suddenly "last year's model," and many other Apple enthusiasts would simply put off their purchases until after the Christmas season in anticipation of "one more thing" in January. That can't have been good news for retailers who ramp up inventory in the months leading up to xmas. Now, Apple has more control over their release cycle. They can keep their products under wrap until they're ready to unveil them to the world, and can stagger releases for maximum coverage.
Mmm. And I now use OpenOffice in a business environment. Works fine. I write code in a non-MS editor, edit graphics in a non-MS editor and play non-MS games while listening to music using a non-MS media player. Nothing's handcuffing people to Microsoft anymore except for the fact that there isn't a competitive "plug and play" commercial OS. Linux is still too scary for the great unwashed masses.
It is strange that MTS doesn't monitor extreme spikes in phone use. They claim that they don't have the resources to monitor anomalies, but it should be relatively straightforward to write a report that queries billing totals that are n times a customer's long term average. After all, few companies would see a legitimate spike of 20 or 30x normal billing from month to month. What it boils down to is that MTS doesn't want to be responsible for identifying fraudulent billing (lest the victim use that as grounds to get the charges waived), and the easiest way to avoid legal responsibility is to bury their heads in the sand.
In the real world, we refer to "that plasma problem Columbia had" as a gaping hole. It had nothing to do with the fit of the shuttle and everything to do with a nasty and unpredictable projectile striking the ship.
What the op was referring to is the fact that the interior of a spacecraft is worlds away from the fit and finish of a mass-produced commercial jetliner. Every component of the shuttle was built in very small numbers - they're essentially prototype vehicles, hence the ridiculous cost of each ship. Any engineer will tell you that prototypes are the coolest part of any project, because they're 3 dimensional reflections of the imagination of a vast team.Of course, imagination is often flawed and in need of some Rube Goldbergesque fixes. Hence the rolls of duct tape taken along on every flight of these beautiful prototypes...
A few more touchscreen problems: (1) My monitor is about 36 inches from me, raised to eye height. I can't comfortably reach it.
(2) I can move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other with a mouse by rotating my wrist. The same act with a touchscreen would require 20 inches of horizontal movement, plus the time to extend my hand from the keyboard to the screen.
(3) A touchpanel adds another optically imperfect layer in front of the screen. I simply want the clearest image possible, sans additional electroconductive layers, protective coatings and finger slime
Touchscreens make sense for a very limited range of applications - airport kiosks, bank machines, and personal music players. There's a reason that the iPod Touch/iPhone are extremely small. They hit the sweet spot for touch interfaces - the devices are too small to incorporate a decent keyboard and small enough that one can quickly touch any point on the screen with small (and therefore quick) movements. Scale that up past about 7" diagonal and things disintegrate quickly from an ergonomic perspective.
Anyone caught submitting slide shows featuring minimal content smeared over 43 colorful but vapid pages should be punished. I recommend death by stoning, preferably using a truckload of rusty 486s and a pallet or two of 14" monitors instead of boulders. As for the clever soul who deemed the content on the front page, I can only assume he/she/it is blind and suffering the after-effects of a decades-old untreated case of syphilis.
No. Wait. This must be a sign that slashdot has been secretly acquired by Condé Nast. I anxiously await the premiere issue of Linux Vogue. Sigh.
I agree. I said that XP is the only other OS (apart from Linpus) that is fully supported, although it seems Ubuntu Netbook Remix is 99% there. I investigated Ubuntu when I wiped the drive but I was put off by reported issues with the fan and audio problems when resuming from sleep.
I just got an Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD and their bizarre Linpus Lite distro installed. It runs fine, but I torched it in favor of Win XP by the end of the evening, simply because XP was the only other OS that fully supported the hardware. As far as performance goes, the thing actually runs OK under XP (format as FAT32). The big drawback is that the Intel SSD is brutally slow when writing, so the trick to getting good performance is to disable unnecessary writes and caching wherever possible in the OS.
Honestly, it makes more sense to spend the extra $50 to get the Asipre One with larger battery, 160GB HD and pre-installed Windows for almost everybody. The keyboard is 89%, which is large enough for me to touch type on without issues, although the touchpad has to be one of the most craptacular pointing devices ever incorporated in a notebook - the buttons are located beside it - one on the left, one on the right. Nasty.
The vast majority of our "irreplaceable" personal data will be completely meaningless in a couple of decades. Personal conceit leads us to preserve everything "for our kids and grand kids." However, your grand kids probably don't need fuzzy snapshots of you with a skanky ex-girlfriend on your lap, or a hundred photos of some long-forgotten dog. The best approach is to create and document a "best of" collection of videos and photo. Preserve it in multiple locations and recopy it onto new media as it becomes available. Come to think of it, this is much the same comment I had last time this question slithered onto the/. front page...
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I didn't suggest for a moment that I don't wish to subsidize the highway system, only that a pay-for-service model makes more sense. However, public education is an interesting issue to ponder. A century ago, many kids left school after the first five or six years to join the workforce. During the Great Depression, there was considerable pressure to keep students in school until Grade 12, since it kept them from competing for scare jobs. Post-war affluence encouraged parents to send their children off to College where they spent another four years bouncing around the educational system. In a few cases, such extreme education makes sense. But years spent rotting in school "learning" the intricacies of Shakespearean poetry or Euclidean geometry doesn't help the average office worker, electrician or assembly line worker. It's useless fluff that pads out the school years, especially when you consider that the truly brilliant kids (who should be the heroes of the educational system) frequently find themselves bored to tears.
Um, I pay for the privilege of riding the train. It works exactly like a toll highway, in fact. Those who use it, pay for it. Now what was your point?
I labor under the daft illusion that the government should rationalize taxation. That is, road taxes should pay for roads while warmongering taxes should foot the bill for bullets. You should stop placidly accepting your government's habit of randomly redistributing your taxes willy-nilly.
I rarely drive. Why should I subsidize the people who drive 100 miles a day to commute into the city from their faux-rural home? Toll roads are a great way to pass the cost along to those who benefit from the service. In fact, instead of a blanket tax, it makes sense to bill people for their annyal road use (assuming a perfect world with tamper-proof odometers, of course). It would encourage people to drive less and drive home the true cost of public infrastructure. We live in a strange political bubble where universal medicare is viewed as dangerously "socialist" (somehow invoking fears of dictators waving red flags), whereas multi-billion dollar tax funded road networks are seen as a panacea. Bloody odd.
It's hard to believe that major networks around the world have been unable to bring their traditional business model to the Internet until now. The elevator speech is incredibly simple: "Imagine that instead of broadcasting using radio waves, we use streaming video to reach people who have abandoned traditional broadcasting in favor of the Internet." Of course, it all boils down to copyright - the rights holders simply didn't want to their content streamed on the Internet because that prevents them from selling it for $1.99 an episode.
The weird thing is that I've seen networks in the USA, Canada and Europe that have started to stream shows without advertising. It makes absolutely no sense from a business perspective, unless they're attempting to build online viewership to woo advertisers - very much a case of trying to make up (non-existent) margin with high volume.
Antares' first big success was a sample auto-looping program called Infinity. It eliminated the pops and clicks that often resulted when repeating segments of a musical sound to allow it to play "forever." It's long forgotten now, but I used to run it on a stratospherically expensive Mac IIx system with a heap of Digidesign audio cards. It took a tedious job that I once despised and made it fun. The result was several very popular soundsets that I still hear used occasionally.
I'm glad to see this little company enjoying more mainstream success within the music industry. Yes, the effect is hopelessly overused. But that's good for the manufacturer, even though it's bad for the music.
The eee PC 701 was the prototypical first-gen netbook (awkwardly cramped 7" screen and as little as 2 GB flash memory). Machines like the eee PC 901 and Acer Aspire One were part of the extremely successful second-gen (8.9" screens, 8 GB to 32 GB flash memory or up to 160 GB HD + XP or a Vista Neutered option). The new chipset (along with 10" screenage) belongs to the third generation.
I rue the day a colorblind co-worker unwittingly annihilates your production server. :)
*Government caused the problem of your elderly and impoverished dad's TV no longer working, it is their responsibility to fix the problem.*
Errm, it's a flipping entertainment device, for goodness sake. While I appreciate your misguided pseudo-socialist effort to equip the nation's downtrodden with Chinese-made consumer electronics, it would be far better to spend that money on universal health care, the reduction of child hunger within the nation's borders and education. Perversely, the money's all borrowed anyway, so future generations of television addicts will be saddled with the debt. Sigh.
Easy. A video will make an annoying whirring sound like a Super 8 camera, drowning out the clever comments of your friends, family and kids in each and every video. What I find most bewildering about this proposed legislation is that they'd have to mandate a specific volume level for shutter sound. A typical "click" would be inaudible on a dance floor, in a subway car, on the bus or at a party. You'd have to duct tape a nice 100W amplifier and bookshelf speaker to the back of your camera in those situations. Come to think of it, you'd have to protect hearing-impaired citizens by affixing a 6 inch flashing strobe light on a bright orange pole where the flash mount resides on international versions of the same camera.
Hmm. Are you alluding to the dominance of computers or humans?
I added my numbers to the Canadian Direct Marketer's internal "Do not call" list years ago and saw a dramatic decrease in calls and unsolicited mail. I added my numbers to the new federal list a few days after it was unveiled, and the calls from local hearing aid companies and carpet cleaners dried up. The system works.
Where it falls down is that there's no effective way for the Canadian government to regulate foreign calls, so we still receive the dreaded 000-000-00000 "You've won a cruise!" recordings and occasional offers to reduce the interest rate on credit cards we don't have. Parliament should approve the use of JTF2 to shut down those operations - it would take mere minutes and word would get around pretty quickly. :)
"a team of experimentalists from China believe they have finally found a resolution."
Here on earth, we have special words for 'experimentalists.' We refer to them as researchers or scientists. And they're not 'finding resolutions,' they're testing hypotheses.
You first, Tharg.
You would prefer that Apple's product development teams to work overtime over Christmas with less control over their release cycle? You must work Microsoft. WTF, indeed. :)
I'm glad to see Apple stepping away from a massive release of new products every January. While it was exciting from a geek perspective, it was awfully timed. Introducing a slate of cool new gadgets just after Christmas was a marketing nightmare for Apple - hundreds of thousands of new iPod owners would be upset to learn that their new player was suddenly "last year's model," and many other Apple enthusiasts would simply put off their purchases until after the Christmas season in anticipation of "one more thing" in January. That can't have been good news for retailers who ramp up inventory in the months leading up to xmas. Now, Apple has more control over their release cycle. They can keep their products under wrap until they're ready to unveil them to the world, and can stagger releases for maximum coverage.
Don't share your brilliant ideas in class projects. You don't need to submit something novel or patentable for a school project.
Mmm. And I now use OpenOffice in a business environment. Works fine. I write code in a non-MS editor, edit graphics in a non-MS editor and play non-MS games while listening to music using a non-MS media player. Nothing's handcuffing people to Microsoft anymore except for the fact that there isn't a competitive "plug and play" commercial OS. Linux is still too scary for the great unwashed masses.
It is strange that MTS doesn't monitor extreme spikes in phone use. They claim that they don't have the resources to monitor anomalies, but it should be relatively straightforward to write a report that queries billing totals that are n times a customer's long term average. After all, few companies would see a legitimate spike of 20 or 30x normal billing from month to month. What it boils down to is that MTS doesn't want to be responsible for identifying fraudulent billing (lest the victim use that as grounds to get the charges waived), and the easiest way to avoid legal responsibility is to bury their heads in the sand.
In the real world, we refer to "that plasma problem Columbia had" as a gaping hole. It had nothing to do with the fit of the shuttle and everything to do with a nasty and unpredictable projectile striking the ship.
What the op was referring to is the fact that the interior of a spacecraft is worlds away from the fit and finish of a mass-produced commercial jetliner. Every component of the shuttle was built in very small numbers - they're essentially prototype vehicles, hence the ridiculous cost of each ship. Any engineer will tell you that prototypes are the coolest part of any project, because they're 3 dimensional reflections of the imagination of a vast team.Of course, imagination is often flawed and in need of some Rube Goldbergesque fixes. Hence the rolls of duct tape taken along on every flight of these beautiful prototypes...
A few more touchscreen problems: (1) My monitor is about 36 inches from me, raised to eye height. I can't comfortably reach it.
(2) I can move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other with a mouse by rotating my wrist. The same act with a touchscreen would require 20 inches of horizontal movement, plus the time to extend my hand from the keyboard to the screen.
(3) A touchpanel adds another optically imperfect layer in front of the screen. I simply want the clearest image possible, sans additional electroconductive layers, protective coatings and finger slime
Touchscreens make sense for a very limited range of applications - airport kiosks, bank machines, and personal music players. There's a reason that the iPod Touch/iPhone are extremely small. They hit the sweet spot for touch interfaces - the devices are too small to incorporate a decent keyboard and small enough that one can quickly touch any point on the screen with small (and therefore quick) movements. Scale that up past about 7" diagonal and things disintegrate quickly from an ergonomic perspective.
Anyone caught submitting slide shows featuring minimal content smeared over 43 colorful but vapid pages should be punished. I recommend death by stoning, preferably using a truckload of rusty 486s and a pallet or two of 14" monitors instead of boulders. As for the clever soul who deemed the content on the front page, I can only assume he/she/it is blind and suffering the after-effects of a decades-old untreated case of syphilis.
No. Wait. This must be a sign that slashdot has been secretly acquired by Condé Nast. I anxiously await the premiere issue of Linux Vogue. Sigh.
I agree. I said that XP is the only other OS (apart from Linpus) that is fully supported, although it seems Ubuntu Netbook Remix is 99% there. I investigated Ubuntu when I wiped the drive but I was put off by reported issues with the fan and audio problems when resuming from sleep.
I just got an Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD and their bizarre Linpus Lite distro installed. It runs fine, but I torched it in favor of Win XP by the end of the evening, simply because XP was the only other OS that fully supported the hardware. As far as performance goes, the thing actually runs OK under XP (format as FAT32). The big drawback is that the Intel SSD is brutally slow when writing, so the trick to getting good performance is to disable unnecessary writes and caching wherever possible in the OS.
Honestly, it makes more sense to spend the extra $50 to get the Asipre One with larger battery, 160GB HD and pre-installed Windows for almost everybody. The keyboard is 89%, which is large enough for me to touch type on without issues, although the touchpad has to be one of the most craptacular pointing devices ever incorporated in a notebook - the buttons are located beside it - one on the left, one on the right. Nasty.
The vast majority of our "irreplaceable" personal data will be completely meaningless in a couple of decades. Personal conceit leads us to preserve everything "for our kids and grand kids." However, your grand kids probably don't need fuzzy snapshots of you with a skanky ex-girlfriend on your lap, or a hundred photos of some long-forgotten dog. The best approach is to create and document a "best of" collection of videos and photo. Preserve it in multiple locations and recopy it onto new media as it becomes available. Come to think of it, this is much the same comment I had last time this question slithered onto the /. front page...