I agree, it is a nice idea in theory to charge every device with one charger, but electromagnetic fields are not very efficient and their amplitude decreases substantially with distance. Does this device "sense" when charging is complete and turn off by itself?
To the guy getting into his SUV, regular little black transformers for electronic devices typically cost about 5% of your electric bill, because they are ALWAYS ON, whether or not the device is on, these things burn electricity just sitting there plugged in, throwing off waste heat. Imagine this little charging plate taking 12% to 15% of your total electric bill, and this gets REALLY expensive if your local electric utility provides power via a nuclear power plant. Just ask anyone in the vicinity of Toledo Edison who gets its power from Davis-Besse Nuclear power plant. Chic-ching! Now multiply his by several billion people living in America, Japan, and Europe and you have a lot of wasted energy.
The slowing rotation may also be affected by a change in the Earth's center of gravity. I recall from my calculus based physics class that if the mass of a rotating object is translated from near the center of rotation further away from that center of rotation, an object slows its rotation. This is known as conservatin of angular momentum. Taking all that crude oil from the ground and burning it in our cars over 100 years has shifted some the Earth's mass from below the surface to the atmosphere. And since there was a phase change in moving this material from the ground to the atmosphere, this should make the effect a little more noticable as the CO2 can be further displaced high in the atmosphere. This may contribute to a thousands of a second decrease in the Earth's rotation. Of course, I'm sure this guy also didn't take into account the umpteen million metric tonnes of star dust slamming into the Earth every year, adding mass to the Earth and further decreasing the rate of rotation.
I don't know, I just a geeky chemist with wild ideas.
My 1992 Saturn SL2 has over 200K miles and still runs very well. Sure it needs some work, but it's lasted much longer than I thought an American car would last. I took very good care of this car, changed the oil every 3K miles with SYNTHETIC oil; it's been very good to me.
My new Saab 93 (a wholey owned division of General Motors) is also a very nice car. It has everything I've always wanted in a car, and no domestic car offered by any other GM division or Ford can match the features for the price. And I didn't have to go to the top to get what I wanted.
Seriously guy, I'm not trying to knock IBM, they make good products, but from my experience, Apple makes the longest lasting batteries in laptops, somehting like 4 hours between charges. I know this doesn't solve your immediate problems, but it will possibly solve your long term problem, depending on which software you rely on for your daily tasks.
Apple gives it users unprecedented freedom to rip, mix, burn. You are FREE to do whatever you want with YOUR CDs that you PURCHASE. Ripping MP3s from another Mac OS X box with iCommune is no different than using XNap, LimeWire, Kazaa, or other P2P file sharing software. The music industry already hates Apple for what it allows its users to do, and Apple has to draw the line between personal freedom and breaking the law.
and tell me this guy is not allowing millions of people to break the law. Don't get me wrong, the music industry charges way too much for music and other video content, but when MY freedom is threatened with a law and I hear that the Feds are going after the little guys now (200+songs downloaded), I'd think twice, and then again about sharing P2P in the future.
My first Macintosh was a PowerBook 520c with a 68LC040 processor running at 50MHz and the system bus running at 25MHz. This laptop is 8 years old and still works. I use it about once a month now to download/upload programs to my Hewlett Packard HP48 calculator. That old laptop has a REAL serial port on it where as the new Macs come with USB now.
My second Macintosh was a PowerMac G3 running at 500MHz. It is 5 years old this month. I added an IBM formatted 18GB UltraSCSI to it three years ago, and cranked the RAM from 128MB to 768MB. Just dropped in the HD, reformmated using Apple's disk utility and installed LinuxPPC 2000 on it. Ran great with Linux for one year, then Mac OS X was released and have been very happy with it ever since. This has been my experience with my PowerMac G3: it is rock solid stable with Mac OS X - no crashes, it is good hardware, you DO get what you pay for. I would recommend getting the top of the line tower configuration, you won't be sorry, and if you don't like it, sell it. Apples have good resale value.
Popular has never meant better - not if you are talking about true quality.
This is absolutely true from a geek/technical perspective, but from a busniess model perspective, it IS superior, ultimately, VHS was the product the consumer decided offered the most value for the money. This is absolutely the case with Wintel PCs today. Most people here on Slashdot would never want Wintel PC, sure, they'll have a "Lintel" (Linux/Intel) or a "LAMD" (Linux/AMD), or perhaps even Mac OS X like myself, and that's because we know that a bug-ridden security-flawed Borg mother ship-contacting OS is coupled with the cheapest metric assload of hi-tech chinese commodity PC parts inside. The consumer doesn't know or care about true technical details, the only process affecting the purchase is that the product has ALL these features, functions, and holy Batman, look at that low LOW price. What a bargain! I get an HP Pavilian with a built-in graphics card, built-in sound card, M$ Windows XP Home Edition, a free printer and monitor for $649 after rebates. The wife and kids will love me, and besides, PC programs are everywhere, on every street corner. You see? Cheap Wintel PCs are not technically superior to Linux PCs or Macs, but from the busniess model perspective, the consumer saw the most value in the Wintel PC, even if it does crash twice a day, that's what everyone is used to experiencing. The consumer, from his or her perspective, isn't missing a thing, and more importantly, it's become part of their way of life, they just press control-alt-delete when the need to, it's what they're used to doing.
NASA should use Asymetric Capacitors instead of nuclear pulsed power. It would be cheaper, provide nice constant acceleration, and of course hush those anti-nuclear foe who are afraid of what they don't understand. NASA patented a version of this propulsion system about one year ago this January. Here are the links:
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lifters.htm
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0211001 [PDF file attempting to explain how it works]
I've thought about using this software to analyze stocks to purchase, but never got around to looking at the information required for the software to give me an edge in the market. Looks promising though.
Microsoft earned its monopoly in the BUSINESS world, not the CONSUMER world. I just started working for a chemical company that relies entirely on Micro$oft for EVERYTHING. THAT is all anyone knows! People are paid to process forms, move information around, order supplies, write memos, calculate financials, and doing minor calculations using Micro$oft Excel. These people don't have a choice in using what they want, they are TOLD "You use this to get the job done, and you'll like it!" At the end of the day, they go home to the family and little johnny and sally want help with a report for school. Well, you think, all I know is M$ Office so I'll go steal M$ Office from work and install it on my computer and use THAT to get the report done. The average person don't give a flying duck WHAT they use to get the job done, as long as it just works, which has been the current state of affairs in the PC world every since Bill Gates of Borg introduced Windows 9X/Me/2000/XP. People get used to what they SEE AT WORK and they don't want to change. Certain nuances of a program get "standardized". There is no telling these people Linux is better, or Mac OS X is better. The only thing they KNOW is Micro$oft, however evil it is, people don't have time (they have lives, families, multiple jobs) to learn something new. To them it's like using a complicated appliance and M$ has them bullshitted into thinking that their entire WORLD will come crumbling down around them if they go with some other OS or Office program. Better not use that, you won't be able to read [insert favorite document type here]. Another example, my mother went and bought a Hewlett Packard PC with Windows XP on it; SHE HATES IT ALREADY, but it's the ONLY THING SHE KNOWS HOW TO USE.
Linux is a great OS, stable as hell, ditto for Mac OS X. What Linux needs to offer that is not available in other operating systems is a user interface that is completely comfingurable from an idiots perspective. Average Joe Smith and Jane Doe are not going to mess around in emacs and writing config files. The operating system should have user interfaces that take advantage of the profession in which it's being used. For business people, use more icons for drag and drop, for science nerds and geeks, use the command line. Mac OS X goes in this direction but one can't really modify the UI that much, you're still locked into Apple's Aqua. There have to be psychological studies of how people in certain professions process information. Building a user interface on top of or rebuilding the desktop is a good start. What I'm getting at is that the user should be able to create a UI that works best for them, just like we all saw in Star Trek TNG on the bridge at the LCARS stations; they were specific to who was working at them. Build a Linux operating system that comes with KDE, Gnome, Business GUI Standard 1, Business GUI Standard 2, Engineering Standard 1, Chemistry Standard 2, you get the idea. It all comes down to making a GUI to run on top of the operating system. The work still gets done, it's just that the UI is optimized for the person using the computer at that time. When THIS ALONE will improve worker efficiency and increase profits for companies by decreasing dependence on M$ and better worker performance, then M$ will be dethroned.
This reminds of the Volterra-Lotka Predator-Prey System:
dx/dt = Ax - Bxy
dy/dt = Dxy - Cy
where A, B, C, and D are positive constants. The change in human population is dx/dt and the change in the hurricane's size and power is dy/dt. As humans encounter the hurricane, Bxy, their population decreases. As the hurricane encounters and EATS humans, Dxy, its size and power GROWS! Since humans occupy much of the Earth's surface, the hurricanes are going to have one hell of a feeding fest! Maybe that's how Jupiter's "Red Storm Cloud" came to be, it just ate the most populated dominate lifeform there, and as excrement, spits out small orbiting bodies that we concidently identify as MOONS! A recent "new moon" discovery supports this concretely solid hypothesis. By Jove, Another Moon!
Well, I feel so much better now that I solved another great mystery of the universe! I just love the interconnectedness of Nature.
Macs are less expensive to own over the long term than PC's. The main factor that affects this is the power usage/requirements of the computer.
Check out ArsTechnica.com here to see a comparison of PowerPC and Intel pwer requirements:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-1.ht ml
http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/3q02/powerpc.htm l
Guy, I'm tellin' ya, you get what you pay for. Mercedes Benz isn't the fast car in the automarket, but they are one of the nicest; same analogy goes for Apple; not the fastest, but one of the nicest. Your Mac OS X box (not iMac) will grow with you for several years. My Blue and White 500MHz G3 is plenty fast enough for playing Quake and cruising the internet.
It will probably flash "You've got mail" or something else in Morse code using that glow in the dark blue LED.
What about games released for Timex/Sinclair 1000?
on
Top Ten Shameful Games
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· Score: 4, Interesting
They didn't mention Frogger and Flight Simulator for the Timex/Sinclair 1000 / Sinclair ZX81! Unngh! Man oh man did I hate loading in those games from cassette, hoping the input level wasn't too low or too high, otherwise I wasted 15 minutes attempting to load the programs. Then there was that aweful monocolor BLACK and WHITE ONLY graphics, the membrane keyboard that was SMALLER than my hand, the 4 Megehurts Zilog Z80A. And you couldn't pound on the keyboard too hard during game play, you'd dislodge the 16K RAM Pack from the back expansion port, killing your game, and wasting another 15 minutes loading it back in from cassette. Ah...the good'ol glory days of computing I will tell to my grandchildren.
Speculation about ambulance crews using crash data is just hype - no ambulance is equipped to do that, nor would I want an EMT to spend time decoding the crash data instead of, say, saving my life. The article repeatedly suggests that crash data would be used to enhance safety, without ever specifying how that is supposed to occur.
EMT's will never spend the time to check a cars data recorder. An EMT's responsibility is to save human life FIRST. The responsibility of recording accident data will be the Police, the Sheriff, or State Highway Patrol. They are always the ones seen at the scene of an accident recording data, taking notes, pictures, and taking statements from witnesses.
At a time far in the future, I can see intelligent computers in cars that can estimate the damage to the car, the occupants, the likelyhood of certain injuries from impacting a stationary object or a moving object, all based on accelerometers and change in inertia and utilizing digital compasses. I think that the car's computer will automatically call for help, sending the pertinent vehicle crash data with the likely injuries sustained from an accident, and requesting either an ambulance, rescue squad, or the lifeflight helicopter. The technology for this system exists now, but it would be VERY expensive, and would require standardization of data recorders and transfer protocols.
My first memory was from between birth to 6 months in age. The only thing I remember was sitting in something that restrained me and being in a white kitchen. When I was older, like 30, I asked my mother if our family had ever lived in a house with a white kitchen. Indeed, she said that for the first 6 months I was on this planet we lived in ONLY ONE HOUSE that had a white kitchen. Of course I didn't know at the time I was in a kitchen but the memory persists to this day of which I can discuss. I also have a memory/sensation of floating is a reddish/orange/brownish light that I think is earlier than the "kitchen memory" and have never discussed with anyone for fear of being laughed at. This could be a memory of the birthing process or after (babies are supposedly born with their eyes shut), I simply don't know what to make of it. The only thing that I know for sure is that in 1994 had my I.Q. (intelligence quotient) and M.Q. (memory quotient) clocked; my visual memory was in "the very superior range" (140+) according to the Wechsler Adult Memory Scale. Unfortunately my auditory memory is in the "average range" (100-110). I suppose I'll never make a good lawyer, however, I make a pretty good scientist.
I know that from discussing my I.Q. and M.Q. results with a Psychologist that childhood memories are almost always influenced by environmental factors. From birth to age 6, I can recall almost everything. From age 7 to 10, I remember NOTHING, which is when I was stressed from my parents fighting and arguing that lead to divorce.
Incidently, I knew from about age 4 that I would pursue science as a career throughout my life. I was facisnated to hear "what scientsists were discovering". It was in high school that I learned that Chemistry was my calling. I've always been a good number cruncher, from Calculus, through Linear Algebra and Diff(icult) EQ(uations), to Numerical Analysis. Certain "professions" are born, not made. Personality definitely determines one's successful and happy career path in life, I'm sure of it.
Well I suppose if you're a skier this is great news. And I'm a skier, so I'm really happy about this news. There's nothing wrong with this guy's "focus". I'm sure you'd think differently about Micro$oft releasing some new [useful] software that the Slashdot readership thinks should be FREE and open source. Obviously, Bill Gates and his goons are a little out of focus.
Chemistry is changing as a career too. It used to be a similar situation with chemists: get your degree, get into a good company, makes lots of dough, good job security, cruise into retirement. But nowadays, companies want Bachelor degrees for management and hire technicians with 2 year associate degrees for doing the bench chemisty. Have a Masters or Ph.D.? Well, you just priced yourself right out of a job. If you're going to get a graduate degree in a technicial field, you have to graduate from the best schools to MAKE A LOT of money. Why? The big companies send their recruiters to the big schools. Why? These schools have stict enrollment requirements. Why? The schools get better students and the companies get better workers. Also, if your graduate advisor has a good program in engineering or science, he's likely to have a boat load in federal grants, and patents, and connections to big industry.
If you are truely passionate about what you do, income can be relatively unimportant. I've noticed that many companies want people with a variety of experience, doing a little of this and a little of that, so that they can shift you around to different job classifications as market conditions dictate, or even, terminate you if necessary.
If you want to remain in Engineering or Science with a masters degree, find a small company who needs a talented person who can grow with the company, just don't expect that you'll be driving a Volvo, BMW, or Audi sedan, settle for a Saturn instead.
Another note, there are no more stable professional jobs where you start a job and retire 30 years later, unless you work a union job ON THE LINE for an automaker. Job security does not exist anymore, for anyone.
Think about starting your own company as an engineering consultant, or selling some kind of product or service.
I attended the University of Akron (http://www.uakron.edu/) a while back. M$ Office for Windows was $10/student, M$ Office for Mac OS X was $20/student. No manuals or box, just a CD in a plastic sleeve. That's right folks, M$ can sell Office for this price and still make a profit to continue it's monopoly. Give the POOR students a break, get them locked into M$ habbits and worries about "compatibility" and it'll sustain the monopoly. Regretably I use M$ Office, mostly for compatibility with the business world. Though I've written my resume using TextEdit and saved it in Adobe PDF format from that built-in feature of Mac OS X, I still get recruiters requesting my resume in M$ Word format. Damned mindless M$ drone bastards.
And while we're on the subject of secret M$ licensing agreetments, the University of Akron removed ALL Apple Macintoshes from EVERY computer lab on campus during the summer of 2001 and went with Gateway running Windows ME. Apple still sells Macs on campus, but the university REFUSES to support Macintosh. Need help connecting your Mac to the University servers? You're SOL. The computer help center simply refuses all questions related to Apple Macintosh. Sounds like some wierd politics going on. I wonder which university administrator got paid a healthy bonus for pushing Apple out.
One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face was beeing able to print research articles to the laboratory laser printer from my apartment over a dial-up connection. All I needed was the laser printer's IP address and Mac OS X was happy. Pissed him off to no end (LMAO).
C'mon, it's Xmas, keep that good'ol Scrooge and Grinch spirit and mod me down as Score:-5, Troll.
No, cock roaches are just as "evolved" as the bumble bee. Your Pentium III will be equivalent to a prion, perhaps an amoeba, or a damaged/diseased sperm cell forever searching to impregnate the first cell it "sees".
while wearing a cowboy hat and looking like a man on a mission. I can just see it now [scratching chin David Letterman style] and it went sorta like this [harps playing David Letterman style]...Dinosaur roams free, picking up little bobby and sally and placing them on its back for family photomemorabilia. Suddenly, the dinosaur starts convulsing, partially recovers, then starts killing anything that moves. One little boy and his father escape death by reenacting that Jurassic Park scene where the scientist holds the little boy's mouth while standing still inches away from the T-Rex (The don't move, it can't see you if you don't move scene). Afterwards, an investigation reveals the Windows operating system running the dinosaur was attempting to contact the Borg Mother Ship to send-in the registration. Since contact could not be established, the the "Random Crash Routine" was invoked, and well, the rest was history and mayhem.
First of all, where is the journal reference? And more specifically, I expect to READ the reference as a full paper in JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine with STATISTICAL ANALYSIS.
If I recall correctly, the brain itself learns at a very early age, like from birth to age 3, to "use" the organs it has for sensory input. Assuming the human ear is normally functioning, the brain learns to selectively filter specific frequency ranges from background noise, otherwise, we couldn't distinguish speech from the noise in a crowded room, hence the problems people experience with hearing loss (in old age).
I agree that listening to MP3's that I've burned to CD using iTunes in Mac OS X is not as pleasant as listening to the REAL CD, but that first burn is usually a preliminary sampling of the music to decide if I want to purchase the real CD, otherwise it goes to the circular file. Being that I have a $10,000 stereo system, I have no use for MP3 other than to determine if I want to purchase the CD. Why go to the music store and put-on headphones that were left out in public for people to sneeze on, and pick up with their rhinovirus and booger-coated fingers? Then there's all that oil and wax build-up that absorbs into that soft, supple, foam that rests so comfortably against your ear.
If the ear and the brain were calibrated from birth on MP3-quality sound, then MP3's probably would not be so "harsh" and uncomfortable to listen to for long periods of time. And I would argue that someone whose ear and brain were calibrated from birth might find listening to uncompressed sound distressing, taxing if you will, due to neuronal overload from all the "inaudible frequencies" not present in MP3. Hell they might even develop pseudo-autistic symptoms or some other stress-related neurological symptoms.
I think the argument can go both ways in this case, but solid hard evidence needs to support the author's statements.
And we all know that in about two to three months that the RIAA will start marketing advertisements saying not only that downloading MP3 is ILLEGAL, making your own MP3 are morally and ethically WRONG, but it's also BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH. So buy the real deal folks, pay the $20/CD and keep the economy going strong!
Animated GIFs and Macromedia flash advertisements take TIME to load on my very limited bandwidth (26600). Yes, I know, dial-up connections SUCK big time. I removed macromedia flash from my Mac OS X (10.1.5) by digging around in the System folder, and no, it's not located in the User folders. Animated GIFs and flash crap take TOO long to load in. If a site I frequent wants to load in text only advertisements in a dedicated column, area, portion of the web page, I'm cool with that, but will absolutely NOT, NEVER EVER view animated bullshit on my screen. Mozilla is a God-send when configured to block popup bullshit and selective image blocking from certain servers. As soon as these advertising idiots get a clue that MY TIME is more precious than wasting it on stupid tricks to distract my attention, then I'll be a little more forgiving of the websites that advertise.
Besides, who else here thinks the average Joe, Aunt Sue, or Grandma can figure out how to block popups?
FYI: I don't go to websites where popup advertisements run amok. But then again the way I have Mozilla configured, I would NEVER know if a website did use popups.
The problem with the web nowadays is that it's become too commercialized. All I want to see is plain old text, reading it at 100 mph. Businesses expect and demand that customers view advertisements. If they can't remain in business without adverisements, then that business NEVER offered much of ANYTHING worth significant value to anyone and doesn't deserve to remina in business. Of course, they can always have a webpage that demands $19.95 to show me what wares or services they sell. And we all know how far that idea will go.
I use a Hewlett Packard HP48 calculator for a PDA because it has everything I need. Back when HP made handhelds (ALL HP calculators and handhelds are discontinued), it supplied a disk with the Mac/PC serial connection kit with FREE HP48 programs and utilities. I used HP's Appointment Calendar program written RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp) and frequently transferred the data file to and from my PowerBook 520c using the BBEdit text editor to modify the appointments. I did the same thing for a third party Rolodex program called 'Roldx', written by some Brittish guy. This was the perfect toy for any math or science geek. I also had a VERY cool Periodic Table of the Elements installed. When I needed to take notes, I used a another third party text editor that wrote data files as standard ASCII text, then zipped them through the serial cable to the PowerBook. I still use my HP48 calculator nearly every day, AND it's very kind on batteries.
It's too bad HP discontinued their calculators. The problem was is that they were built too well and last forever. I'd still buy more if they ever came back (original HP48). I have yet to see a device with this flexibility and versatility with similar battery life.
I suppose the perfect PDA would combine what I wrote above, with the convience of the Apple Newton Handwriting recognition (with user-definable hand strokes; I will NOT learn Graffiti or any other chicken scratching to enter info into a PDA), the iPod's automatic battery charging when connected to the firewire/USB port on a Macintosh/PC, and intelligent syncing between other devices through radio frequencies (cell phone names and numbers).
An easy way to circumvent the copy protection is to write some code that recognizes a CD is copy protected. Then instead of attempting to read the CD as a data disk, it would read it as an audio disk. And instead of "reading" the audio disk at 1X speed, it would read it at 16X, 32X, 40X or whatever speed, then convert the analog audio back to digital. As we all know, if it can be heard, it can be captured. The best part about this method is that there is no hacking, cracking, etc... just sped up analog audio that is converted back to digital for FREE distibution on the internet in MP3 format.
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I agree, it is a nice idea in theory to charge every device with one charger, but electromagnetic fields are not very efficient and their amplitude decreases substantially with distance. Does this device "sense" when charging is complete and turn off by itself?
To the guy getting into his SUV, regular little black transformers for electronic devices typically cost about 5% of your electric bill, because they are ALWAYS ON, whether or not the device is on, these things burn electricity just sitting there plugged in, throwing off waste heat. Imagine this little charging plate taking 12% to 15% of your total electric bill, and this gets REALLY expensive if your local electric utility provides power via a nuclear power plant. Just ask anyone in the vicinity of Toledo Edison who gets its power from Davis-Besse Nuclear power plant. Chic-ching! Now multiply his by several billion people living in America, Japan, and Europe and you have a lot of wasted energy.
The slowing rotation may also be affected by a change in the Earth's center of gravity. I recall from my calculus based physics class that if the mass of a rotating object is translated from near the center of rotation further away from that center of rotation, an object slows its rotation. This is known as conservatin of angular momentum. Taking all that crude oil from the ground and burning it in our cars over 100 years has shifted some the Earth's mass from below the surface to the atmosphere. And since there was a phase change in moving this material from the ground to the atmosphere, this should make the effect a little more noticable as the CO2 can be further displaced high in the atmosphere. This may contribute to a thousands of a second decrease in the Earth's rotation. Of course, I'm sure this guy also didn't take into account the umpteen million metric tonnes of star dust slamming into the Earth every year, adding mass to the Earth and further decreasing the rate of rotation.
I don't know, I just a geeky chemist with wild ideas.
My 1992 Saturn SL2 has over 200K miles and still runs very well. Sure it needs some work, but it's lasted much longer than I thought an American car would last. I took very good care of this car, changed the oil every 3K miles with SYNTHETIC oil; it's been very good to me.
My new Saab 93 (a wholey owned division of General Motors) is also a very nice car. It has everything I've always wanted in a car, and no domestic car offered by any other GM division or Ford can match the features for the price. And I didn't have to go to the top to get what I wanted.
Seriously guy, I'm not trying to knock IBM, they make good products, but from my experience, Apple makes the longest lasting batteries in laptops, somehting like 4 hours between charges. I know this doesn't solve your immediate problems, but it will possibly solve your long term problem, depending on which software you rely on for your daily tasks.
Apple gives it users unprecedented freedom to rip, mix, burn. You are FREE to do whatever you want with YOUR CDs that you PURCHASE. Ripping MP3s from another Mac OS X box with iCommune is no different than using XNap, LimeWire, Kazaa, or other P2P file sharing software. The music industry already hates Apple for what it allows its users to do, and Apple has to draw the line between personal freedom and breaking the law.
6 5.ENR:
n c_1
READ THIS LAW:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.22
and story here on CNet:
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-982121.html?tag=fd_
and tell me this guy is not allowing millions of people to break the law. Don't get me wrong, the music industry charges way too much for music and other video content, but when MY freedom is threatened with a law and I hear that the Feds are going after the little guys now (200+songs downloaded), I'd think twice, and then again about sharing P2P in the future.
My first Macintosh was a PowerBook 520c with a 68LC040 processor running at 50MHz and the system bus running at 25MHz. This laptop is 8 years old and still works. I use it about once a month now to download/upload programs to my Hewlett Packard HP48 calculator. That old laptop has a REAL serial port on it where as the new Macs come with USB now.
My second Macintosh was a PowerMac G3 running at 500MHz. It is 5 years old this month. I added an IBM formatted 18GB UltraSCSI to it three years ago, and cranked the RAM from 128MB to 768MB. Just dropped in the HD, reformmated using Apple's disk utility and installed LinuxPPC 2000 on it. Ran great with Linux for one year, then Mac OS X was released and have been very happy with it ever since. This has been my experience with my PowerMac G3: it is rock solid stable with Mac OS X - no crashes, it is good hardware, you DO get what you pay for. I would recommend getting the top of the line tower configuration, you won't be sorry, and if you don't like it, sell it. Apples have good resale value.
Popular has never meant better - not if you are talking about true quality.
This is absolutely true from a geek/technical perspective, but from a busniess model perspective, it IS superior, ultimately, VHS was the product the consumer decided offered the most value for the money. This is absolutely the case with Wintel PCs today. Most people here on Slashdot would never want Wintel PC, sure, they'll have a "Lintel" (Linux/Intel) or a "LAMD" (Linux/AMD), or perhaps even Mac OS X like myself, and that's because we know that a bug-ridden security-flawed Borg mother ship-contacting OS is coupled with the cheapest metric assload of hi-tech chinese commodity PC parts inside. The consumer doesn't know or care about true technical details, the only process affecting the purchase is that the product has ALL these features, functions, and holy Batman, look at that low LOW price. What a bargain! I get an HP Pavilian with a built-in graphics card, built-in sound card, M$ Windows XP Home Edition, a free printer and monitor for $649 after rebates. The wife and kids will love me, and besides, PC programs are everywhere, on every street corner. You see? Cheap Wintel PCs are not technically superior to Linux PCs or Macs, but from the busniess model perspective, the consumer saw the most value in the Wintel PC, even if it does crash twice a day, that's what everyone is used to experiencing. The consumer, from his or her perspective, isn't missing a thing, and more importantly, it's become part of their way of life, they just press control-alt-delete when the need to, it's what they're used to doing.
NASA should use Asymetric Capacitors instead of nuclear pulsed power. It would be cheaper, provide nice constant acceleration, and of course hush those anti-nuclear foe who are afraid of what they don't understand. NASA patented a version of this propulsion system about one year ago this January. Here are the links:
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lifters.htm
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0211001 [PDF file attempting to explain how it works]
can be located here:
http://www.knowledgeminer.net/
I've thought about using this software to analyze stocks to purchase, but never got around to looking at the information required for the software to give me an edge in the market. Looks promising though.
Microsoft earned its monopoly in the BUSINESS world, not the CONSUMER world. I just started working for a chemical company that relies entirely on Micro$oft for EVERYTHING. THAT is all anyone knows! People are paid to process forms, move information around, order supplies, write memos, calculate financials, and doing minor calculations using Micro$oft Excel. These people don't have a choice in using what they want, they are TOLD "You use this to get the job done, and you'll like it!" At the end of the day, they go home to the family and little johnny and sally want help with a report for school. Well, you think, all I know is M$ Office so I'll go steal M$ Office from work and install it on my computer and use THAT to get the report done. The average person don't give a flying duck WHAT they use to get the job done, as long as it just works, which has been the current state of affairs in the PC world every since Bill Gates of Borg introduced Windows 9X/Me/2000/XP. People get used to what they SEE AT WORK and they don't want to change. Certain nuances of a program get "standardized". There is no telling these people Linux is better, or Mac OS X is better. The only thing they KNOW is Micro$oft, however evil it is, people don't have time (they have lives, families, multiple jobs) to learn something new. To them it's like using a complicated appliance and M$ has them bullshitted into thinking that their entire WORLD will come crumbling down around them if they go with some other OS or Office program. Better not use that, you won't be able to read [insert favorite document type here]. Another example, my mother went and bought a Hewlett Packard PC with Windows XP on it; SHE HATES IT ALREADY, but it's the ONLY THING SHE KNOWS HOW TO USE.
Linux is a great OS, stable as hell, ditto for Mac OS X. What Linux needs to offer that is not available in other operating systems is a user interface that is completely comfingurable from an idiots perspective. Average Joe Smith and Jane Doe are not going to mess around in emacs and writing config files. The operating system should have user interfaces that take advantage of the profession in which it's being used. For business people, use more icons for drag and drop, for science nerds and geeks, use the command line. Mac OS X goes in this direction but one can't really modify the UI that much, you're still locked into Apple's Aqua. There have to be psychological studies of how people in certain professions process information. Building a user interface on top of or rebuilding the desktop is a good start. What I'm getting at is that the user should be able to create a UI that works best for them, just like we all saw in Star Trek TNG on the bridge at the LCARS stations; they were specific to who was working at them. Build a Linux operating system that comes with KDE, Gnome, Business GUI Standard 1, Business GUI Standard 2, Engineering Standard 1, Chemistry Standard 2, you get the idea. It all comes down to making a GUI to run on top of the operating system. The work still gets done, it's just that the UI is optimized for the person using the computer at that time. When THIS ALONE will improve worker efficiency and increase profits for companies by decreasing dependence on M$ and better worker performance, then M$ will be dethroned.
This reminds of the Volterra-Lotka Predator-Prey System:
dx/dt = Ax - Bxy
dy/dt = Dxy - Cy
where A, B, C, and D are positive constants. The change in human population is dx/dt and the change in the hurricane's size and power is dy/dt. As humans encounter the hurricane, Bxy, their population decreases. As the hurricane encounters and EATS humans, Dxy, its size and power GROWS! Since humans occupy much of the Earth's surface, the hurricanes are going to have one hell of a feeding fest! Maybe that's how Jupiter's "Red Storm Cloud" came to be, it just ate the most populated dominate lifeform there, and as excrement, spits out small orbiting bodies that we concidently identify as MOONS! A recent "new moon" discovery supports this concretely solid hypothesis. By Jove, Another Moon!
Well, I feel so much better now that I solved another great mystery of the universe! I just love the interconnectedness of Nature.
Macs are less expensive to own over the long term than PC's. The main factor that affects this is the power usage/requirements of the computer.
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Check out ArsTechnica.com here to see a comparison of PowerPC and Intel pwer requirements:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-1.h
http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/3q02/powerpc.ht
Guy, I'm tellin' ya, you get what you pay for. Mercedes Benz isn't the fast car in the automarket, but they are one of the nicest; same analogy goes for Apple; not the fastest, but one of the nicest. Your Mac OS X box (not iMac) will grow with you for several years. My Blue and White 500MHz G3 is plenty fast enough for playing Quake and cruising the internet.
It will probably flash "You've got mail" or something else in Morse code using that glow in the dark blue LED.
They didn't mention Frogger and Flight Simulator for the Timex/Sinclair 1000 / Sinclair ZX81! Unngh! Man oh man did I hate loading in those games from cassette, hoping the input level wasn't too low or too high, otherwise I wasted 15 minutes attempting to load the programs. Then there was that aweful monocolor BLACK and WHITE ONLY graphics, the membrane keyboard that was SMALLER than my hand, the 4 Megehurts Zilog Z80A. And you couldn't pound on the keyboard too hard during game play, you'd dislodge the 16K RAM Pack from the back expansion port, killing your game, and wasting another 15 minutes loading it back in from cassette. Ah...the good'ol glory days of computing I will tell to my grandchildren.
Speculation about ambulance crews using crash data is just hype - no ambulance is equipped to do that, nor would I want an EMT to spend time decoding the crash data instead of, say, saving my life. The article repeatedly suggests that crash data would be used to enhance safety, without ever specifying how that is supposed to occur.
EMT's will never spend the time to check a cars data recorder. An EMT's responsibility is to save human life FIRST. The responsibility of recording accident data will be the Police, the Sheriff, or State Highway Patrol. They are always the ones seen at the scene of an accident recording data, taking notes, pictures, and taking statements from witnesses.
At a time far in the future, I can see intelligent computers in cars that can estimate the damage to the car, the occupants, the likelyhood of certain injuries from impacting a stationary object or a moving object, all based on accelerometers and change in inertia and utilizing digital compasses. I think that the car's computer will automatically call for help, sending the pertinent vehicle crash data with the likely injuries sustained from an accident, and requesting either an ambulance, rescue squad, or the lifeflight helicopter. The technology for this system exists now, but it would be VERY expensive, and would require standardization of data recorders and transfer protocols.
My first memory was from between birth to 6 months in age. The only thing I remember was sitting in something that restrained me and being in a white kitchen. When I was older, like 30, I asked my mother if our family had ever lived in a house with a white kitchen. Indeed, she said that for the first 6 months I was on this planet we lived in ONLY ONE HOUSE that had a white kitchen. Of course I didn't know at the time I was in a kitchen but the memory persists to this day of which I can discuss. I also have a memory/sensation of floating is a reddish/orange/brownish light that I think is earlier than the "kitchen memory" and have never discussed with anyone for fear of being laughed at. This could be a memory of the birthing process or after (babies are supposedly born with their eyes shut), I simply don't know what to make of it. The only thing that I know for sure is that in 1994 had my I.Q. (intelligence quotient) and M.Q. (memory quotient) clocked; my visual memory was in "the very superior range" (140+) according to the Wechsler Adult Memory Scale. Unfortunately my auditory memory is in the "average range" (100-110). I suppose I'll never make a good lawyer, however, I make a pretty good scientist.
I know that from discussing my I.Q. and M.Q. results with a Psychologist that childhood memories are almost always influenced by environmental factors. From birth to age 6, I can recall almost everything. From age 7 to 10, I remember NOTHING, which is when I was stressed from my parents fighting and arguing that lead to divorce.
Incidently, I knew from about age 4 that I would pursue science as a career throughout my life. I was facisnated to hear "what scientsists were discovering". It was in high school that I learned that Chemistry was my calling. I've always been a good number cruncher, from Calculus, through Linear Algebra and Diff(icult) EQ(uations), to Numerical Analysis. Certain "professions" are born, not made. Personality definitely determines one's successful and happy career path in life, I'm sure of it.
Well I suppose if you're a skier this is great news. And I'm a skier, so I'm really happy about this news. There's nothing wrong with this guy's "focus". I'm sure you'd think differently about Micro$oft releasing some new [useful] software that the Slashdot readership thinks should be FREE and open source. Obviously, Bill Gates and his goons are a little out of focus.
Chemistry is changing as a career too. It used to be a similar situation with chemists: get your degree, get into a good company, makes lots of dough, good job security, cruise into retirement. But nowadays, companies want Bachelor degrees for management and hire technicians with 2 year associate degrees for doing the bench chemisty. Have a Masters or Ph.D.? Well, you just priced yourself right out of a job. If you're going to get a graduate degree in a technicial field, you have to graduate from the best schools to MAKE A LOT of money. Why? The big companies send their recruiters to the big schools. Why? These schools have stict enrollment requirements. Why? The schools get better students and the companies get better workers. Also, if your graduate advisor has a good program in engineering or science, he's likely to have a boat load in federal grants, and patents, and connections to big industry.
If you are truely passionate about what you do, income can be relatively unimportant. I've noticed that many companies want people with a variety of experience, doing a little of this and a little of that, so that they can shift you around to different job classifications as market conditions dictate, or even, terminate you if necessary.
If you want to remain in Engineering or Science with a masters degree, find a small company who needs a talented person who can grow with the company, just don't expect that you'll be driving a Volvo, BMW, or Audi sedan, settle for a Saturn instead.
Another note, there are no more stable professional jobs where you start a job and retire 30 years later, unless you work a union job ON THE LINE for an automaker. Job security does not exist anymore, for anyone.
Think about starting your own company as an engineering consultant, or selling some kind of product or service.
I attended the University of Akron (http://www.uakron.edu/) a while back. M$ Office for Windows was $10/student, M$ Office for Mac OS X was $20/student. No manuals or box, just a CD in a plastic sleeve. That's right folks, M$ can sell Office for this price and still make a profit to continue it's monopoly. Give the POOR students a break, get them locked into M$ habbits and worries about "compatibility" and it'll sustain the monopoly. Regretably I use M$ Office, mostly for compatibility with the business world. Though I've written my resume using TextEdit and saved it in Adobe PDF format from that built-in feature of Mac OS X, I still get recruiters requesting my resume in M$ Word format. Damned mindless M$ drone bastards.
And while we're on the subject of secret M$ licensing agreetments, the University of Akron removed ALL Apple Macintoshes from EVERY computer lab on campus during the summer of 2001 and went with Gateway running Windows ME. Apple still sells Macs on campus, but the university REFUSES to support Macintosh. Need help connecting your Mac to the University servers? You're SOL. The computer help center simply refuses all questions related to Apple Macintosh. Sounds like some wierd politics going on. I wonder which university administrator got paid a healthy bonus for pushing Apple out.
One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face was beeing able to print research articles to the laboratory laser printer from my apartment over a dial-up connection. All I needed was the laser printer's IP address and Mac OS X was happy. Pissed him off to no end (LMAO).
C'mon, it's Xmas, keep that good'ol Scrooge and Grinch spirit and mod me down as Score:-5, Troll.
No, cock roaches are just as "evolved" as the bumble bee. Your Pentium III will be equivalent to a prion, perhaps an amoeba, or a damaged/diseased sperm cell forever searching to impregnate the first cell it "sees".
while wearing a cowboy hat and looking like a man on a mission. I can just see it now [scratching chin David Letterman style] and it went sorta like this [harps playing David Letterman style]...Dinosaur roams free, picking up little bobby and sally and placing them on its back for family photomemorabilia. Suddenly, the dinosaur starts convulsing, partially recovers, then starts killing anything that moves. One little boy and his father escape death by reenacting that Jurassic Park scene where the scientist holds the little boy's mouth while standing still inches away from the T-Rex (The don't move, it can't see you if you don't move scene). Afterwards, an investigation reveals the Windows operating system running the dinosaur was attempting to contact the Borg Mother Ship to send-in the registration. Since contact could not be established, the the "Random Crash Routine" was invoked, and well, the rest was history and mayhem.
First of all, where is the journal reference? And more specifically, I expect to READ the reference as a full paper in JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine with STATISTICAL ANALYSIS.
If I recall correctly, the brain itself learns at a very early age, like from birth to age 3, to "use" the organs it has for sensory input. Assuming the human ear is normally functioning, the brain learns to selectively filter specific frequency ranges from background noise, otherwise, we couldn't distinguish speech from the noise in a crowded room, hence the problems people experience with hearing loss (in old age).
I agree that listening to MP3's that I've burned to CD using iTunes in Mac OS X is not as pleasant as listening to the REAL CD, but that first burn is usually a preliminary sampling of the music to decide if I want to purchase the real CD, otherwise it goes to the circular file. Being that I have a $10,000 stereo system, I have no use for MP3 other than to determine if I want to purchase the CD. Why go to the music store and put-on headphones that were left out in public for people to sneeze on, and pick up with their rhinovirus and booger-coated fingers? Then there's all that oil and wax build-up that absorbs into that soft, supple, foam that rests so comfortably against your ear.
If the ear and the brain were calibrated from birth on MP3-quality sound, then MP3's probably would not be so "harsh" and uncomfortable to listen to for long periods of time. And I would argue that someone whose ear and brain were calibrated from birth might find listening to uncompressed sound distressing, taxing if you will, due to neuronal overload from all the "inaudible frequencies" not present in MP3. Hell they might even develop pseudo-autistic symptoms or some other stress-related neurological symptoms.
I think the argument can go both ways in this case, but solid hard evidence needs to support the author's statements.
And we all know that in about two to three months that the RIAA will start marketing advertisements saying not only that downloading MP3 is ILLEGAL, making your own MP3 are morally and ethically WRONG, but it's also BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH. So buy the real deal folks, pay the $20/CD and keep the economy going strong!
WRONG!
Animated GIFs and Macromedia flash advertisements take TIME to load on my very limited bandwidth (26600). Yes, I know, dial-up connections SUCK big time. I removed macromedia flash from my Mac OS X (10.1.5) by digging around in the System folder, and no, it's not located in the User folders. Animated GIFs and flash crap take TOO long to load in. If a site I frequent wants to load in text only advertisements in a dedicated column, area, portion of the web page, I'm cool with that, but will absolutely NOT, NEVER EVER view animated bullshit on my screen. Mozilla is a God-send when configured to block popup bullshit and selective image blocking from certain servers. As soon as these advertising idiots get a clue that MY TIME is more precious than wasting it on stupid tricks to distract my attention, then I'll be a little more forgiving of the websites that advertise.
Besides, who else here thinks the average Joe, Aunt Sue, or Grandma can figure out how to block popups?
FYI: I don't go to websites where popup advertisements run amok. But then again the way I have Mozilla configured, I would NEVER know if a website did use popups.
The problem with the web nowadays is that it's become too commercialized. All I want to see is plain old text, reading it at 100 mph. Businesses expect and demand that customers view advertisements. If they can't remain in business without adverisements, then that business NEVER offered much of ANYTHING worth significant value to anyone and doesn't deserve to remina in business. Of course, they can always have a webpage that demands $19.95 to show me what wares or services they sell. And we all know how far that idea will go.
I use a Hewlett Packard HP48 calculator for a PDA because it has everything I need. Back when HP made handhelds (ALL HP calculators and handhelds are discontinued), it supplied a disk with the Mac/PC serial connection kit with FREE HP48 programs and utilities. I used HP's Appointment Calendar program written RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp) and frequently transferred the data file to and from my PowerBook 520c using the BBEdit text editor to modify the appointments. I did the same thing for a third party Rolodex program called 'Roldx', written by some Brittish guy. This was the perfect toy for any math or science geek. I also had a VERY cool Periodic Table of the Elements installed. When I needed to take notes, I used a another third party text editor that wrote data files as standard ASCII text, then zipped them through the serial cable to the PowerBook. I still use my HP48 calculator nearly every day, AND it's very kind on batteries.
It's too bad HP discontinued their calculators. The problem was is that they were built too well and last forever. I'd still buy more if they ever came back (original HP48). I have yet to see a device with this flexibility and versatility with similar battery life.
I suppose the perfect PDA would combine what I wrote above, with the convience of the Apple Newton Handwriting recognition (with user-definable hand strokes; I will NOT learn Graffiti or any other chicken scratching to enter info into a PDA), the iPod's automatic battery charging when connected to the firewire/USB port on a Macintosh/PC, and intelligent syncing between other devices through radio frequencies (cell phone names and numbers).
An easy way to circumvent the copy protection is to write some code that recognizes a CD is copy protected. Then instead of attempting to read the CD as a data disk, it would read it as an audio disk. And instead of "reading" the audio disk at 1X speed, it would read it at 16X, 32X, 40X or whatever speed, then convert the analog audio back to digital. As we all know, if it can be heard, it can be captured. The best part about this method is that there is no hacking, cracking, etc... just sped up analog audio that is converted back to digital for FREE distibution on the internet in MP3 format.