Simply put, your friend isn't seeing any accidents in Edinburgh because there aren't very many cars and they're going slowly. And, yes, I've driven in both Texas and Edinburgh.
... but when exactly were you driving in Edinburgh if you're under the impression there aren't very many cars - the city's set to be the second in the UK (after London) to implement congestion charges it's so bad.
Arguably removing the challenges in specific aspects of a task does indeed make people worse at the task as a whole, which is I think what you meant here by 'inferior'
It's only anecdotal evidence and by no means hard and fast truth but a friend of mine recently commented with surprise that he hasn't seen a "wreck" (meaning road traffic accident) since he moved here (Edinburgh) from Texas where his experience was that they're a common occurence.
I'm sure there are (proportionally) just as many bad drivers here in Scotland as in Texas, so perhaps the difference is that the bad drivers here are challenged by having to master complex road junctions, manual transmissions etc. while those in TX are not. After all being made to think excercises your mind.
So in theory moderately bad Scottish drivers are made to think more on the road and get gradually better with practice, while the really bad ones just give up. Meanwhile bad drivers in Texas, (with nothing much more than the steering wheel to master) drive about on their nice simple straight line roads with the car in 'drive' and their minds elsewhere, and cheerfully plough their cars into each other at every sixth intersection.
or perhaps Con Edison just wanted to deploy a system now using tested technologies. Meanwhile in a more forward thinking and inventive nation (Scotland) commercial trials are underway of a system which uses the power lines themselves.
One more time folks, say it with me "the USA is not the entire world"
thanks but I think in your apparent frustration you've missed my point. without getting into the philosophical issues of what a 'sound' is, let's just say that I get that there were vibrations, that there was a medium to carry them, and that I see how those were interpreted into this hum, but given the audible hum necessarily consists of a very narrow range from the vibrations (constrained by the limitations of being within our range of hearing) together with the fact that there was nowhere that wasn't busily vibrating like this at the time, it's a pretty pointless excercise.
As 50 people have been refuted and corrected but you still don't seem to get it here goes:
for the record, when I started typing my post there were only about ten others, none of which had replies: the "50" was a guess based on the obvious nature of the "you can't make a sound in space" observation, and the speed at which people post ill thought out comments to/.
You might as well complain that X-ray or ultrasound images aren't valid because the human eye doesn't work in those frequencies
not so! both those examples produce results which give us a meaningful insight through our limited senses. Have you actually heard this sound? it's a nigh on featureless hum that tells us nothing.
utterly pointless imho: sometimes when an 11 year old asks a question it's better to just explain why their question misses the point than it is to try and answer it.
OK so as 50 people have already pointed out, sound can't exist in space because sound waves are vibrations and there are no air molecules in space for a 'sound' to vibrate, but has it occured to anyone else yet that there wasn't any space for this sound to exist in either?
If the big bang was the creation of the universe (aka everything), then it happened not in empty space, but in nothing so how is it even remotely meaningful to talk about the sound of the big bang when the event itself was (at the time) all that existed - there was nothing for it to make a sound into other than itself,
so what we're really talking about isn't the sound of the big bang at all but the frequency at which it is thought to have been resonnating? which that humming sound (I'd already heard it on Radio 4 when the Today programme ran this story this morning) doesn't really illustrate very well since our ears aren't sophisticated enough to hear 90% of it.
surely it would make more sense to look at a waveform diagram of this than turning it into a funny noise...
North America != The World
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
*sigh* face it folks North America lags at least five years behind the leading markets for mobile technology (Asia and Europe) where Bluetooth is not only not dead, but in the lpast year or so it's begun reaching beyond the early adopters to become pretty much mass market.
As a couple of other people have pointed out, this is likely to be spurred on faster now in Europe at least by increasing legislation about mobiles and driving, (which is already pushing up sales of Bluetooth headsets here in the UK) as well as the steady growth in mobile multimedia - and yes I know that in the States and Canada you guys just want a cheap phone for voice calls, but believe it or not elsewhere on the planet this stuff is really taking off.
Re:A phone should do one thing, and only thing...
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
geez you north americans really are in the stone age, monochrome screens on phone handsets?!? ha!
I'm not sure how this works in the states but here in the UK handsets which "only work" on one network are usually only limited by firmware lock-ins and these can usually be unlocked pretty simply.
I seem to remember it being a minor issue that people raised when we got number portability here a few years back, but I don't remember ever hearing of anyone being iretrievably locked in to one carrier by their hardware.
Besides, one of the biggest advantages portability gives the user (I've found) isn't actually moving carriers at all but rather having that bit more leverage with your existing carrier: I've twice threatened to move when my network (O2) have pissed me off and both times they bent over backwards to keep the account (freebe handset/line rental etc.)
hm... can't help you there but the guys over at Low End Mac probably can - try subscribing to their "G list" if it isn't covered in an article somewhere
OK this is kinda redundant and I figure you were trolling anyway but what the hey, my karma can stand it...
still waiting for their copies of 10.2 to boot up
hardly: I haven't had to reboot my old 266 G3 (stock configuration apart from two new HDs and a memory upgrade) apart from for OS upgrades since I installed X - on those rare occasions the boot time under Jaguar is perfectly respectable especially for what is after all an antique!
shame Panther won't run on it, but I guess I've more than had my money's worth, and besides it's not like it'll instantly stop running the moment Panther's released.
I'd like you to listen sometime to the difference between well mixed computer produced music and poorly mixed, poorly sequenced computer produced music. It is UNCANNY
oh believe me I have and I totally get your point there.
It is a fallacy that using better tools eliminates the need for skilled labor
Personally I don't believe it is quite that simple in this case: nor did I mean to say that skilled labour had been replaced entirely: there will always be a market for skilled labour in this (and pretty much any) field, however sufficiently advanced and well programmed tools enable unskilled users (that is unskilled in a given discipline) to perform tasks almost as well as a 'craftsman' or at least well enough for the purpose - in this case getting original music into a reasonably polished consumable form.
Just having access to the hardware and software isn't going to do it. How many new "van Goghs" do we have since the advent of Photoshop?
This really isn't a very valid comparison: you're quite right that having creative software on a computer doesn't make you any good at "being creative", but we're not talking about making the music, we're talking about producing professional qiuality recordings of it.
Preparing a great work of art for display was undoubtably a skilled process if done using traditional methods. Similarly I'm sure that a technician making an album in a traditional recording studio has to be very skilled, but the point is that computers and software have reached the stage where we can bypass the need for that skill, freeing the artists themselves to produce finished works of musical art.
I was going with the fact that this is the news arm of the self same organisation the article is about, I realise this doesn't make it a cast-iron certainty, but I figure it's a safe enough bet not to need seasoning;)
I've been using a g4 400mhz powerbook with gentooppc for a couple of years(osx is way too slow)
er, no it isn't.
I use the same system (G4/400 Ti) as my main machine and have been running X on it since new. Admittedly back then the OS (10.0) was a tad sluggish but I kept it running the latest versions and performance just stopped being an issue after the first couple of updates.
Maybe you should install an up-to-date version of OS X and see if running the machine with the right OS stops it from cooking your nads? 'cus it sounds like either gentoo is making it run hot, or you (and your girlfriend) are abnormally heat sensitive.
*puts hand up* and I wouldn't go back if you paid me: I've been using OS X (on some excellent Apple hardware) for two years now (which if you do the math, makes me a pretty die-hard Amigan: I suck with it until 2001! upgrading both the hard and software all that time) And while there are a couple of things about the 'mig that I do miss, on ballance OS X and Apple's hardware knock it firmly into the history books from an end user perspective.
Perhaps if the platform had survived its passage through the corporate alimentary tract of Commodore's disintegration, Escom's collapse and Gateway's asset stripping excercises as anything more than a forgotten brand name and some obsolete patents then it'd be worth considering as an option, but the sad truth is that it didn't.
What remains of the Amiga (with or without the Boing! ball, and leaving aside the interminable in-fighting) is such a fragmented collection of kludges and patches running on out-dated and/or cobbled together hardware that it's just no fun to use any more: it's great fun to play with, but I never got anything actually done on my old machine toward the end because I was forever having to tweak the system.
What I want from a system (and what it turns out I really loved about the Amiga) is a tightly integrated combination of well designed hard and software from a single vendor: there's only one company that offers that these days and it aint based in Snoqualmie.
well for starters Apple's 17" PowerBook isn't a TiBook - it's Aluminium.
I'm happy you're drooling, but I think from the looks of the thing you're in a minority - this is a decidedly unimpressive copy-cat reaction, same old same old: Apple inovates, everyone else imitates.
Re:You guys are in a dream world
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 1
"A fast, cheap, and easily upgradable box might be exactly what consumers want"
You know what, I don't think it is. It may be what most/.ers want but that's not the same thing is it?
What most consumers want from a computer is the same as they want from any other appliance, reliability and/or the reassurance of a recognised brand are pretty high on the list - I don't think the iBox offered either and as such I doubt it posed any kind of real threat to Apple in terms of sales revenue, since it was marketed suarely at people who weren't prepared to cough up for a real Mac.
The law suit seems to have been motivated by one of Apple's Authorised Repair outfits breaking their contract and in doing so depleting stocks of spare parts, without that incentive I doubt Apple would have batted a corporate eyelid at this.
Slashdot Mirror
well it's another theory I suppose...
... but when exactly were you driving in Edinburgh if you're under the impression there aren't very many cars - the city's set to be the second in the UK (after London) to implement congestion charges it's so bad.
Simply put, your friend isn't seeing any accidents in Edinburgh because there aren't very many cars and they're going slowly. And, yes, I've driven in both Texas and Edinburgh.
Arguably removing the challenges in specific aspects of a task does indeed make people worse at the task as a whole, which is I think what you meant here by 'inferior'
It's only anecdotal evidence and by no means hard and fast truth but a friend of mine recently commented with surprise that he hasn't seen a "wreck" (meaning road traffic accident) since he moved here (Edinburgh) from Texas where his experience was that they're a common occurence.
I'm sure there are (proportionally) just as many bad drivers here in Scotland as in Texas, so perhaps the difference is that the bad drivers here are challenged by having to master complex road junctions, manual transmissions etc. while those in TX are not. After all being made to think excercises your mind.
So in theory moderately bad Scottish drivers are made to think more on the road and get gradually better with practice, while the really bad ones just give up. Meanwhile bad drivers in Texas, (with nothing much more than the steering wheel to master) drive about on their nice simple straight line roads with the car in 'drive' and their minds elsewhere, and cheerfully plough their cars into each other at every sixth intersection.
just a theory...
or perhaps Con Edison just wanted to deploy a system now using tested technologies. Meanwhile in a more forward thinking and inventive nation (Scotland) commercial trials are underway of a system which uses the power lines themselves.
One more time folks, say it with me "the USA is not the entire world"
Where can I buy one?
Amazingly enough: here, here, or here
seems some things just never die
(and no I'm not still using one myself as my main machine, but you did ask...)
available by Apple's Site and Software Update (respectively)
um, since both updates can be downloaded by either route it's not 'respectively', even in parenthesis.
thanks but I think in your apparent frustration you've missed my point. without getting into the philosophical issues of what a 'sound' is, let's just say that I get that there were vibrations, that there was a medium to carry them, and that I see how those were interpreted into this hum, but given the audible hum necessarily consists of a very narrow range from the vibrations (constrained by the limitations of being within our range of hearing) together with the fact that there was nowhere that wasn't busily vibrating like this at the time, it's a pretty pointless excercise.
/.
As 50 people have been refuted and corrected but you still don't seem to get it here goes:
for the record, when I started typing my post there were only about ten others, none of which had replies: the "50" was a guess based on the obvious nature of the "you can't make a sound in space" observation, and the speed at which people post ill thought out comments to
You might as well complain that X-ray or ultrasound images aren't valid because the human eye doesn't work in those frequencies
not so! both those examples produce results which give us a meaningful insight through our limited senses. Have you actually heard this sound? it's a nigh on featureless hum that tells us nothing.
utterly pointless imho: sometimes when an 11 year old asks a question it's better to just explain why their question misses the point than it is to try and answer it.
OK so as 50 people have already pointed out, sound can't exist in space because sound waves are vibrations and there are no air molecules in space for a 'sound' to vibrate, but has it occured to anyone else yet that there wasn't any space for this sound to exist in either?
If the big bang was the creation of the universe (aka everything), then it happened not in empty space, but in nothing so how is it even remotely meaningful to talk about the sound of the big bang when the event itself was (at the time) all that existed - there was nothing for it to make a sound into other than itself,
so what we're really talking about isn't the sound of the big bang at all but the frequency at which it is thought to have been resonnating? which that humming sound (I'd already heard it on Radio 4 when the Today programme ran this story this morning) doesn't really illustrate very well since our ears aren't sophisticated enough to hear 90% of it.
surely it would make more sense to look at a waveform diagram of this than turning it into a funny noise...
*sigh* face it folks North America lags at least five years behind the leading markets for mobile technology (Asia and Europe) where Bluetooth is not only not dead, but in the lpast year or so it's begun reaching beyond the early adopters to become pretty much mass market.
As a couple of other people have pointed out, this is likely to be spurred on faster now in Europe at least by increasing legislation about mobiles and driving, (which is already pushing up sales of Bluetooth headsets here in the UK) as well as the steady growth in mobile multimedia - and yes I know that in the States and Canada you guys just want a cheap phone for voice calls, but believe it or not elsewhere on the planet this stuff is really taking off.
geez you north americans really are in the stone age, monochrome screens on phone handsets?!? ha!
I'm not sure how this works in the states but here in the UK handsets which "only work" on one network are usually only limited by firmware lock-ins and these can usually be unlocked pretty simply.
I seem to remember it being a minor issue that people raised when we got number portability here a few years back, but I don't remember ever hearing of anyone being iretrievably locked in to one carrier by their hardware.
Besides, one of the biggest advantages portability gives the user (I've found) isn't actually moving carriers at all but rather having that bit more leverage with your existing carrier: I've twice threatened to move when my network (O2) have pissed me off and both times they bent over backwards to keep the account (freebe handset/line rental etc.)
hm... can't help you there but the guys over at Low End Mac probably can - try subscribing to their "G list" if it isn't covered in an article somewhere
ha!
now you see this guy is actually funny!
OK this is kinda redundant and I figure you were trolling anyway but what the hey, my karma can stand it...
still waiting for their copies of 10.2 to boot up
hardly: I haven't had to reboot my old 266 G3 (stock configuration apart from two new HDs and a memory upgrade) apart from for OS upgrades since I installed X - on those rare occasions the boot time under Jaguar is perfectly respectable especially for what is after all an antique!
shame Panther won't run on it, but I guess I've more than had my money's worth, and besides it's not like it'll instantly stop running the moment Panther's released.
I'd like you to listen sometime to the difference between well mixed computer produced music and poorly mixed, poorly sequenced computer produced music. It is UNCANNY
oh believe me I have and I totally get your point there.
It is a fallacy that using better tools eliminates the need for skilled labor
Personally I don't believe it is quite that simple in this case: nor did I mean to say that skilled labour had been replaced entirely: there will always be a market for skilled labour in this (and pretty much any) field, however sufficiently advanced and well programmed tools enable unskilled users (that is unskilled in a given discipline) to perform tasks almost as well as a 'craftsman' or at least well enough for the purpose - in this case getting original music into a reasonably polished consumable form.
Just having access to the hardware and software isn't going to do it. How many new "van Goghs" do we have since the advent of Photoshop?
This really isn't a very valid comparison: you're quite right that having creative software on a computer doesn't make you any good at "being creative", but we're not talking about making the music, we're talking about producing professional qiuality recordings of it.
Preparing a great work of art for display was undoubtably a skilled process if done using traditional methods. Similarly I'm sure that a technician making an album in a traditional recording studio has to be very skilled, but the point is that computers and software have reached the stage where we can bypass the need for that skill, freeing the artists themselves to produce finished works of musical art.
not my reason but by all means if you think so.
;)
I was going with the fact that this is the news arm of the self same organisation the article is about, I realise this doesn't make it a cast-iron certainty, but I figure it's a safe enough bet not to need seasoning
indeed it is, but the Beeb are carrying the same story which means no salt pinches required
(incidentally what does the politics of a paper have to do with the veracity of its entertainment coverage?)
I've been using a g4 400mhz powerbook with gentooppc for a couple of years(osx is way too slow)
er, no it isn't.
I use the same system (G4/400 Ti) as my main machine and have been running X on it since new. Admittedly back then the OS (10.0) was a tad sluggish but I kept it running the latest versions and performance just stopped being an issue after the first couple of updates.
Maybe you should install an up-to-date version of OS X and see if running the machine with the right OS stops it from cooking your nads? 'cus it sounds like either gentoo is making it run hot, or you (and your girlfriend) are abnormally heat sensitive.
how many people here are old amiga freaks?
:)
put your hands up
*puts hand up* and I wouldn't go back if you paid me: I've been using OS X (on some excellent Apple hardware) for two years now (which if you do the math, makes me a pretty die-hard Amigan: I suck with it until 2001! upgrading both the hard and software all that time) And while there are a couple of things about the 'mig that I do miss, on ballance OS X and Apple's hardware knock it firmly into the history books from an end user perspective.
Perhaps if the platform had survived its passage through the corporate alimentary tract of Commodore's disintegration, Escom's collapse and Gateway's asset stripping excercises as anything more than a forgotten brand name and some obsolete patents then it'd be worth considering as an option, but the sad truth is that it didn't.
What remains of the Amiga (with or without the Boing! ball, and leaving aside the interminable in-fighting) is such a fragmented collection of kludges and patches running on out-dated and/or cobbled together hardware that it's just no fun to use any more: it's great fun to play with, but I never got anything actually done on my old machine toward the end because I was forever having to tweak the system.
What I want from a system (and what it turns out I really loved about the Amiga) is a tightly integrated combination of well designed hard and software from a single vendor: there's only one company that offers that these days and it aint based in Snoqualmie.
Cretin 'kr-eh-tin' One who makes angry anonymous slashdot postings about subjects they patently don't understand.
well said!
:(
I can't believe it took until this far down the thread for someone to point it out though.
This looks like a TiBook killer for sure
well for starters Apple's 17" PowerBook isn't a TiBook - it's Aluminium.
I'm happy you're drooling, but I think from the looks of the thing you're in a minority - this is a decidedly unimpressive copy-cat reaction, same old same old: Apple inovates, everyone else imitates.
"A fast, cheap, and easily upgradable box might be exactly what consumers want"
/.ers want but that's not the same thing is it?
You know what, I don't think it is. It may be what most
What most consumers want from a computer is the same as they want from any other appliance, reliability and/or the reassurance of a recognised brand are pretty high on the list - I don't think the iBox offered either and as such I doubt it posed any kind of real threat to Apple in terms of sales revenue, since it was marketed suarely at people who weren't prepared to cough up for a real Mac.
The law suit seems to have been motivated by one of Apple's Authorised Repair outfits breaking their contract and in doing so depleting stocks of spare parts, without that incentive I doubt Apple would have batted a corporate eyelid at this.
it's simple: Apple may only have 3% market share, but it easily has a 93% 'mind share' :)