I agree completely; most people I know who are "hardcore" linux users spend time tweaking their systems, but it's usually just to the point of getting all their hardware working, and then maybe glitzing it up a little bit, usually by downloading a theme they think looks cool. The thousands of fancy customization options usually get left behind, and completely reconfiguring how applications look and run is totally beyond what they care to do. The linux users want to *USE* linux, not waste hours and hours digging into arcane details to reach some potential "perfect setup".
Windows can be tweaked too, but definitely much less-so, and there isn't much support about it either. I don't know anything about tweaking MacOS, other than the fact that i've never seen anyone using a recent version of MacOS that looked like it had been customized any significant extent.
A command and conquer MMORPG would be kinda cool actually... I dunno how it'd be possible, it might end up being kinda lame like C&C Renegade, but a sorta world-wide warfare would be sweet, especially if the world actually changed and there were tangible results from blowing stuff up and taking places over....
Yeah it seemed like for a very long time, making the RAM upgrade to 512mb would provide significant performance gains, even for a home user, but above that it started to tail off in terms of noticable improvement.
Nowadays, considering using firefox for a couple days without closing it, and with dozens of tabs open, makes firefox alone chew up 400mb or more, having a gig or so probably helps too.
With regards to photo/video editing, I would presume that unless individual frames and individual photos are bigger than your free physical memory, the actual speed limiting factor would be bus bandwidth, memory bandwidth, the specifics of the CPU cache, and most importantly, HDD speed. It doesn't matter if you can fit dozens of frames in RAM if you have to crawl at a snails pace to get them there! (oh, and raw CPU speed, of course, can't forget about that.)
well, part of the thing is, most people talking on cellphones *don't* talk at normal volume. I agree that if they're being quiet then it's not that big a deal, especially considering the ambient noise level of most restaurants, but generally, the volume does start to ramp up:(
How's the battery life using it as a phone and an mp3 player? I'd be worried about listening to my tunes all day and then having to make an important call and having no battery life yet.
I'm curious to know how it's working out for you in that respect!
I wonder if there'll be a backup/external battery pack for it. I had one for my ipod before some reject busted my car window to steal it. With the non-replaceable battery, it would be really nice to be able to throw a few AA's into a pack to get an extra few hours in an emergency.
when sometime in the future, the entire global economy doesn't seem to be based entirely on advertising. Imagine what would HAPPEN if companies decided that advertising didn't work anymore...
-how would TV networks afford to do anything? -how would 75% of the websites out there stay in business? and so on...
I'm sure it'll never happen, because the human race does seem to be sheepish enough to succumb to advertisements, but it's still an interesting thought experiment to wonder what'll happen when/if the paradigm does decide to shift and suddenly people began to doubt the overall effectiveness of all this extreme product placement and advertisement...
Breaking in *speakers* is completely true; they often will sound better if you run them reasonably hard for a few hours or days, because the speaker cone material and the surrounds and all that will loosen up a little and get more flexible and this does tend to improve the quality of the sound. This isn't mojo, this is really real. Speaker CABLES, on the other hand... yeah... lol
most of the expensive guitar cables have pretty darn good warranties too; it's well worth spending the extra $20 or so on the cable and being basically guaranteed to be able to exchange it if/when it breaks.
Monster instrument cables are definitely dripping with hype mojo but they're still pretty affordable and have the great warranty. Mogami cables are even more ridiculous but I'm pretty sure they exchange too...
The way I see it, it might be answered by the fact (based loosely on your assertions about public school sucking) that to most young people over the last 10 years or so, being smart is not "cool".
It's way cooler to sit around playing video games, or to be the jock, or to slack off in school and sit with your buddies and disrupt the class, and to generally not succeed in education. The people who care enough to learn and aren't weak minded enough to give in to "cool" and hence actually try and succeed and advance their learning, get bullied and made fun of and harrassed for being nerds or geeks or weird.
The end result is that you get a ton of people who, when you talk to them, clearly had some brains up there, but they've been so dumbed down by their 'friends' that they have no chance of succeeding.
So... going through life thinking that being smart sucks, you're gonna end up probably not going to grad school.
Presumably a lot of water would have splashed all over the place.... wouldn't it be possible that the evaporation of all that water in the presumably warm daytime sun could cause a longer-term, if less concentrated, vapor of arsenic?
or would the arsenic tend not to become gaseous? I don't know much about the specific evaporation modes of it...
besides, if you can't afford 2 cents a minute to talk to someone on a land line 12,000 miles away, or free if they're on the same software, then you probably have bigger issues....
yeah i'm running an HP laptop with vista on it too.. it's not too bad when it's running, but I have noticed that bootup time is ridiculously long, and shutdown time(!) is even more ridiculously long, on the order of almost two minutes from selecting "shut down" to actually turning off. The performance logs show all kinds of 'performance issues' during the shutdown process, but no hints on what to do to solve the issue.
"Solar powered iPod shuffles with atomic clocks"... is that the best metaphor they could come up with?!
how media-friendly can you get, damn....
Why not just say that they are high-precision devices that are coordinated from the ground, and that they updated the ground software to something newer and more maintainable? Why do they have to mention a completely unrelated Apple product?
Lol how big are the newspapers YOU read? 1 Meter resolution would mean that the average human being would be barely 2 pixels, much less a number on a newspaper page...
The only situation in which porn is really a bad thing is when no one has ever taught the kid about how life really is, what sex actually is, and things of that nature. A kid whose first introduction to sex is by seeing porn either by themselves or being introduced to it by a friend, has a good chance of getting some sort of warped ideas; either insecurity about their own bodies (men and women both!) or by getting unrealistic and messed up assumptions about what sex is actually like.
However, if you teach a kid about respecting people, self esteem, and how to treat people, and at least a little bit about how relationships actually work, then if they see porn, then they'll have the context in which to understand it. They'll just take it for the entertainment that it's supposed to be, and they'll know not to apply what they 'learn' from porn to real life. Even the sick shit; if the kid knows that some people are 'in' to really weird shit, and that in a controlled environment even the weird shit is okay, then the worst that'll happen to the kid is that he'll get a good laugh and be like "ew I NEVER want to do that". Or he'll be interested by it, and will have been raised in an emotionally supportive environment and will hopefully understand how to be safe.
In some ways, highly conservative families might actually be right in thinking that porn is dangerous for kids; their OWN kids at least. I would tend to believe that many of the families that bitch about how dangerous porn is, probably don't have an open and honest communication with their kids about sexuality, and so when (not if) their kids see the porn, they're going to probably have problems because of it. They're creating their own nightmare scenario.
It is pretty sad though. It would be nice if humanity would grow up and realize that porn is a heck of a lot of fun and that there are other things to be concerned about besides some cock and balls and boobies.
It seems like a little bit of work is left to make it as completely automated as you would need to have it just "always work" on any platform or device, but it seems like they're already working on that...
Other than that though, that's pretty awesome... I'm sure there's more instances where it doesn't look right than what they showed, but it's definitely cool how well it works as it stands!
I can imagine it would be extremely useful for ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends; just load up all their photos of them and their ex, wave the magic eraser, and *boom* you don't have to delete all your old vacation shots;)
I wonder how well it would work for the porn industry too; nice automatic resizing of breasts without ruining the picture! Fetishists will be SO happy!:)
A book called The Millennial project was released several years ago that describes skin-tight space suits in very clear and specific terms, dicussing how a tight material is sufficient to handle the pressure, and how just a chest plate might be useful to provide radiation protection and protection from micrometeors and the like. I believe it described the use of tungsten..
It's a really interesting book, talks about a lot of other technology, and seems pretty darn reasonable about most of it too.
teachers are overpaid? since when? maybe in universities you get certain teachers who have tenure and whatnot, and don't do any work to deserve their position or pay, but throughout my entire k-12 education, and most of college too, I never had a teacher who didn't, over the course of each year, bitch at least once about the miserably pathetic pay and benefit they get for their jobs.. that kinda tells you something...
I've actually noticed the opposite about a lot of SUV's lately.... you stand next to them and they're freaking HUGE, but when you get into them, there's really not that much extra room. Maybe a bit of extra leg room, but you kinda wonder what happened to the rest of the space.... especially when you start trying to carry stuff in them.
I think the problem is all the fancy curves and styling ends up making it hard to actually use any of the real space in the car.... hence you have a monstrosity of a car that can't even hold as much as my 2000 taurus does...
I agree with a lot of what you said, I just have to chip in that for someone working a minimum wage job (or even, in my case, a job that's significantly above minimum wage but still depressingly low), $129 *IS* a lot of money.... at the federal minimum wage, after tax, that could end up being almost a weeks pay, which is pretty painful for someone on a budget:(
Well, I must say, in defense of some of those call centers (not ALL of them are bad), seriously, what the fuck are they supposed to do when the customers don't even understand what "click" or "menu" means. Or when they just don't "get" the most fundamental concepts of working with a computer... It's pretty sad when you realize that the customer doesn't even know what an icon is, or what a window is, or that they can't even distinguish between the left and right mouse buttons.
All that happens is that the call center tech has no hope of solving the problem due to the lack of even the slightest understanding on behalf of the customer, and the customer sits there pissed off because the 'guy on the phone is stupid', and then they answer a survey saying that they hate pc call centers.
Obviously this isn't what happens every time, and yeah obviously a lot of call centers DO suck, but seriously, you gotta factor the fact that a lot of computer users are completely fucking retarded, and look at their dissatisfaction from that respect too...
Slashdot Mirror
If I had mod points, I'd definitely mod you up...
I agree completely; most people I know who are "hardcore" linux users spend time tweaking their systems, but it's usually just to the point of getting all their hardware working, and then maybe glitzing it up a little bit, usually by downloading a theme they think looks cool. The thousands of fancy customization options usually get left behind, and completely reconfiguring how applications look and run is totally beyond what they care to do. The linux users want to *USE* linux, not waste hours and hours digging into arcane details to reach some potential "perfect setup".
Windows can be tweaked too, but definitely much less-so, and there isn't much support about it either. I don't know anything about tweaking MacOS, other than the fact that i've never seen anyone using a recent version of MacOS that looked like it had been customized any significant extent.
A command and conquer MMORPG would be kinda cool actually ... I dunno how it'd be possible, it might end up being kinda lame like C&C Renegade, but a sorta world-wide warfare would be sweet, especially if the world actually changed and there were tangible results from blowing stuff up and taking places over....
:(
alas, it'll never happen
I have an unopened beer sitting in front of me, and I had the very same question, so don't blame the booze! ;)
Yeah it seemed like for a very long time, making the RAM upgrade to 512mb would provide significant performance gains, even for a home user, but above that it started to tail off in terms of noticable improvement.
Nowadays, considering using firefox for a couple days without closing it, and with dozens of tabs open, makes firefox alone chew up 400mb or more, having a gig or so probably helps too.
With regards to photo/video editing, I would presume that unless individual frames and individual photos are bigger than your free physical memory, the actual speed limiting factor would be bus bandwidth, memory bandwidth, the specifics of the CPU cache, and most importantly, HDD speed. It doesn't matter if you can fit dozens of frames in RAM if you have to crawl at a snails pace to get them there! (oh, and raw CPU speed, of course, can't forget about that.)
well, part of the thing is, most people talking on cellphones *don't* talk at normal volume. I agree that if they're being quiet then it's not that big a deal, especially considering the ambient noise level of most restaurants, but generally, the volume does start to ramp up :(
How's the battery life using it as a phone and an mp3 player? I'd be worried about listening to my tunes all day and then having to make an important call and having no battery life yet.
I'm curious to know how it's working out for you in that respect!
I wonder if there'll be a backup/external battery pack for it. I had one for my ipod before some reject busted my car window to steal it. With the non-replaceable battery, it would be really nice to be able to throw a few AA's into a pack to get an extra few hours in an emergency.
when sometime in the future, the entire global economy doesn't seem to be based entirely on advertising. Imagine what would HAPPEN if companies decided that advertising didn't work anymore...
-how would TV networks afford to do anything?
-how would 75% of the websites out there stay in business?
and so on...
I'm sure it'll never happen, because the human race does seem to be sheepish enough to succumb to advertisements, but it's still an interesting thought experiment to wonder what'll happen when/if the paradigm does decide to shift and suddenly people began to doubt the overall effectiveness of all this extreme product placement and advertisement...
Breaking in *speakers* is completely true; they often will sound better if you run them reasonably hard for a few hours or days, because the speaker cone material and the surrounds and all that will loosen up a little and get more flexible and this does tend to improve the quality of the sound. This isn't mojo, this is really real. Speaker CABLES, on the other hand... yeah... lol
most of the expensive guitar cables have pretty darn good warranties too; it's well worth spending the extra $20 or so on the cable and being basically guaranteed to be able to exchange it if/when it breaks.
Monster instrument cables are definitely dripping with hype mojo but they're still pretty affordable and have the great warranty. Mogami cables are even more ridiculous but I'm pretty sure they exchange too...
The way I see it, it might be answered by the fact (based loosely on your assertions about public school sucking) that to most young people over the last 10 years or so, being smart is not "cool".
It's way cooler to sit around playing video games, or to be the jock, or to slack off in school and sit with your buddies and disrupt the class, and to generally not succeed in education. The people who care enough to learn and aren't weak minded enough to give in to "cool" and hence actually try and succeed and advance their learning, get bullied and made fun of and harrassed for being nerds or geeks or weird.
The end result is that you get a ton of people who, when you talk to them, clearly had some brains up there, but they've been so dumbed down by their 'friends' that they have no chance of succeeding.
So... going through life thinking that being smart sucks, you're gonna end up probably not going to grad school.
Presumably a lot of water would have splashed all over the place.... wouldn't it be possible that the evaporation of all that water in the presumably warm daytime sun could cause a longer-term, if less concentrated, vapor of arsenic?
or would the arsenic tend not to become gaseous? I don't know much about the specific evaporation modes of it...
Seriously...
besides, if you can't afford 2 cents a minute to talk to someone on a land line 12,000 miles away, or free if they're on the same software, then you probably have bigger issues....
yeah i'm running an HP laptop with vista on it too.. it's not too bad when it's running, but I have noticed that bootup time is ridiculously long, and shutdown time(!) is even more ridiculously long, on the order of almost two minutes from selecting "shut down" to actually turning off. The performance logs show all kinds of 'performance issues' during the shutdown process, but no hints on what to do to solve the issue.
oh well!
That assumes someone would A) install vista, and B) want to steal a laptop with vista on it.
;)
neither are likely
I'm not, actually, although that was my first ever post tagged as a troll :D
Seriously though... why flying ipod shuffles? I just don't understand hat that has to do with anything.
oh well.
"Solar powered iPod shuffles with atomic clocks" ... is that the best metaphor they could come up with?!
how media-friendly can you get, damn....
Why not just say that they are high-precision devices that are coordinated from the ground, and that they updated the ground software to something newer and more maintainable? Why do they have to mention a completely unrelated Apple product?
*sigh*
Lol how big are the newspapers YOU read? 1 Meter resolution would mean that the average human being would be barely 2 pixels, much less a number on a newspaper page...
You pretty much said what I was going to say...
The only situation in which porn is really a bad thing is when no one has ever taught the kid about how life really is, what sex actually is, and things of that nature. A kid whose first introduction to sex is by seeing porn either by themselves or being introduced to it by a friend, has a good chance of getting some sort of warped ideas; either insecurity about their own bodies (men and women both!) or by getting unrealistic and messed up assumptions about what sex is actually like.
However, if you teach a kid about respecting people, self esteem, and how to treat people, and at least a little bit about how relationships actually work, then if they see porn, then they'll have the context in which to understand it. They'll just take it for the entertainment that it's supposed to be, and they'll know not to apply what they 'learn' from porn to real life. Even the sick shit; if the kid knows that some people are 'in' to really weird shit, and that in a controlled environment even the weird shit is okay, then the worst that'll happen to the kid is that he'll get a good laugh and be like "ew I NEVER want to do that". Or he'll be interested by it, and will have been raised in an emotionally supportive environment and will hopefully understand how to be safe.
In some ways, highly conservative families might actually be right in thinking that porn is dangerous for kids; their OWN kids at least. I would tend to believe that many of the families that bitch about how dangerous porn is, probably don't have an open and honest communication with their kids about sexuality, and so when (not if) their kids see the porn, they're going to probably have problems because of it. They're creating their own nightmare scenario.
It is pretty sad though. It would be nice if humanity would grow up and realize that porn is a heck of a lot of fun and that there are other things to be concerned about besides some cock and balls and boobies.
It seems like a little bit of work is left to make it as completely automated as you would need to have it just "always work" on any platform or device, but it seems like they're already working on that...
;)
:)
Other than that though, that's pretty awesome... I'm sure there's more instances where it doesn't look right than what they showed, but it's definitely cool how well it works as it stands!
I can imagine it would be extremely useful for ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends; just load up all their photos of them and their ex, wave the magic eraser, and *boom* you don't have to delete all your old vacation shots
I wonder how well it would work for the porn industry too; nice automatic resizing of breasts without ruining the picture! Fetishists will be SO happy!
A book called The Millennial project was released several years ago that describes skin-tight space suits in very clear and specific terms, dicussing how a tight material is sufficient to handle the pressure, and how just a chest plate might be useful to provide radiation protection and protection from micrometeors and the like. I believe it described the use of tungsten..
n g-Galaxy-Eight/dp/0316771635
It's a really interesting book, talks about a lot of other technology, and seems pretty darn reasonable about most of it too.
http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizi
I think what he was referring to is the fact that e. coli is a bacteria, not a virus....
teachers are overpaid? since when? maybe in universities you get certain teachers who have tenure and whatnot, and don't do any work to deserve their position or pay, but throughout my entire k-12 education, and most of college too, I never had a teacher who didn't, over the course of each year, bitch at least once about the miserably pathetic pay and benefit they get for their jobs.. that kinda tells you something...
I've actually noticed the opposite about a lot of SUV's lately.... you stand next to them and they're freaking HUGE, but when you get into them, there's really not that much extra room. Maybe a bit of extra leg room, but you kinda wonder what happened to the rest of the space.... especially when you start trying to carry stuff in them.
I think the problem is all the fancy curves and styling ends up making it hard to actually use any of the real space in the car.... hence you have a monstrosity of a car that can't even hold as much as my 2000 taurus does...
I agree with a lot of what you said, I just have to chip in that for someone working a minimum wage job (or even, in my case, a job that's significantly above minimum wage but still depressingly low), $129 *IS* a lot of money.... at the federal minimum wage, after tax, that could end up being almost a weeks pay, which is pretty painful for someone on a budget :(
Well, I must say, in defense of some of those call centers (not ALL of them are bad), seriously, what the fuck are they supposed to do when the customers don't even understand what "click" or "menu" means. Or when they just don't "get" the most fundamental concepts of working with a computer... It's pretty sad when you realize that the customer doesn't even know what an icon is, or what a window is, or that they can't even distinguish between the left and right mouse buttons.
All that happens is that the call center tech has no hope of solving the problem due to the lack of even the slightest understanding on behalf of the customer, and the customer sits there pissed off because the 'guy on the phone is stupid', and then they answer a survey saying that they hate pc call centers.
Obviously this isn't what happens every time, and yeah obviously a lot of call centers DO suck, but seriously, you gotta factor the fact that a lot of computer users are completely fucking retarded, and look at their dissatisfaction from that respect too...
(rant over. sorry!)