I can't believe none of your replies noted the fact that while both the Hyundai and the BMW will get you from A to B, they are also BOTH compatible with ALL roads.
How many people went to Walmart the week before Christmas and bought one of these for someone else, thinking "wow, that's a cheap computer! Walmart has EVERYTHING these days." And then bought the latest fishing game and deer hunter game, and wrapped it up. Then, after Christmas the nephew or the kid next door comes over to fix the thing because bubba can't "download the huntin' game to the hard drive" (the only two computer-ish words he knows) and finds out his shiny new PC won't work with his huntin game.
Then, the PC mostly collects dust until late in the evenings until used to browse porn when everyone else goes to bed.
I'm sure it's been said before, but it's quite a delicate balancing act for the marketing department to sell a LINUX PC at WALMART. You really gotta make some assumptions that the people who would buy that really won't ever want to install a windows program and ONLY want it as an internet appliance. How many of these things have been returned?
Reminds me of the anecdote, told to me by someone who knew the guy it happened to:
Guy buys laptop from dude on ebay, sends money order. Guy gets laptop box in mail. Guy opens box, finds big flat rock. Guy realizes he is screwed.
I've never bought off ebay, believe it or not. I have, however, bought some A/V stuff from Amazon's marketplace and had very good experiences. Given the rise in the general uproar of "teh ebay suxxorz" I doubt I ever WILL buy from ebay.
"They" say that the technology found in the Mercedes S class sedans is always a forecast of the tech that will be found in the mundane sedans a few years down the road. The S class had ABS, stability control, air bag, cruise, all that stuff well before the chevys did.
I can tell you that the rich people (the people who don't really ask how much it costs, ever) like to have things Just So. They are particular. They like it when the house is ready for them when they get there. Because, they have more than one, and they are too busy to be bothered by the mundane things like adjusting the AC, finding the remote, turning on ALL of the lights in the house at the right time (because there are so many, you see). No, they need to have the AC set to the right temp before they get there. They want to pull out their PDA on their private jet and control things over the interweb while on the way there. They want *A* button to push when they walk in that will turn on the TV, and the TV signal better be nice and clear.
Home automation is big in the house equivalents of the Mercedes S Class, and in a few years it will be "standard" on the chevy houses as well. And, I've seen articles that many of the new houses built during the recent real estate boom had a lot of options like that available. Many were built with it on spec, which drove up the prices on a wide scale.
My opinion? Home automation will largely involve sensors that can tell when people are in the room or not, and it will adjust lighting, heating and AC accordingly, and automatically. It will involve a VAV type HVAC system that can cut off individual rooms and shunt energy only where it is needed. It will save a lot of energy and do things we all know we should but cant, wont, or don't remember to. Closing drapes on the east side of the house in the morning, on the west side in the afternoon. Cuts heat load. etc.
Flamebait? Come on, only the last sentence was flamebait. The rest was insightful with just a bit of troll!
Probably pretty insightful, actually. Google could very easily do all of that, especially in the areas where they've ALREADY mapped out everything at the street level. If they bundle that with free airtime and throw in the phone at a heavy discount as well, people would put up with it too.
Some of my best college memories are those friday and saturday nights playing duke 3d with my friends on our 4 port 10BaseT hub. It was on my P133 back in 96 and 97. Net.bat, config.sys, all that crap.
Yeah, we didn't have a "life" but we had fun not having it. We also networked mechwarrior2, doom, hexen, even got a mac working on the lan with PC's for mechwarrior.
Reminds me of an old "outer limits" episode where this astronomy-geek kid finds a seti-type signal which causes all teenagers to mutate in such a way to protect them from some change in the sun which would have otherwise killed them. Yeah, that's a long sentence.
The only solution is to not buy the crap. Period. That's why the two mp3 players I've bought so far are Creative products. They'll play stuff I put on them. For sure.
I also don't buy stuff from online music places, at least not yet. Haven't seen anything compelling.
My wife needed a song for something she was working on, and she bought it from walmart.com. Honestly I didn't know walmart had a music store???!?. Anyway, it was a.wma file. Red flag number 1. I do not, and do not plan to, and advise against, using.wma as a music file. Makes no sense to me, why not use mp3. Besides, ususally a.wma file will have DRM. It's like picking up a dirty needle off the beach. You don't know where it's been or what's in it, but it probably isn't good for you. (I use.wmv for video projects for emailing and putting on websites because it is fairly small, doesn't suck too bad, and everyone (in windows land) can play it.)
So she needed to play the.wma file on a different computer. She told me about her "plans" and I immediately said "It won't work, it has DRM". So later, she asked me to help her fix her mess. I tried to "convert" the wma into something marginally useful, but no dice. I didn't have all day to find out how to remove the evil from the.wma. So I said burn it onto a cd and play it, or rip it. For some reason that didn't work either until the next day, after it was too late. The cd actually WOULD NOT PLAY on any cd player in the house, until the next day. Evil I tell you.
I think she may have been cured from buying crap like that any more. I hope. She has bought stuff from itunes, and that is fairly easy to de-crapify.
I ran into this problem and solved it a couple of months ago. This is a problem that has been around for a while, and with some digging it isn't too hard to solve. Let me give you the rundown.
It's a "problem" with external USB hard drives, the free-agent and free-agent pro. They go to sleep in a way that is incompatible with Linux. The drives ARE compatible with linux if you have a kernel that can r/w NTFS or if you format the thing to a file system that linux prefers.
The drive hibernates and then when linux goes to wake it up it gets all bent out of shape and says the drive is dead or gone. Sometimes. Usually.
The fix is to turn off the hibernation. If you have the pro version it comes with a utility to do this. If you have a non-pro version you're halfway stuck. Either you gotta somehow find the pro-tools software, or contact seagate and they WILL show you where to DL it off their website. Do the online chat thing and they'll give it to you no problem. They were very nice about it, actually. Took me about 10 minutes to do that. The pro software works just fine on the non-pro drive to change the sleep time. It's a one-time fix.
I didn't run into this on a linux PC, I was using a free-agent on a Buffalo Linkstation NAS as a backup drive. The linkstation runs linux.... So.... It would hibernate and then when the LS would go to backup - BZZT! Error. Works GREAT now. I'm actually very happy with seagate, I've had to deal with them a couple times this year and it was actually pretty smooth. They have the longest warranty also, I believe.
So, how did it happen the way it did the first time? (moon 1.0)
With computing power on par with an 86 Chevy Citation and slide rules, how did we send living breathing men to the moon, and bring them back, without a hitch?
I'm not saying we didn't, just that either it wasn't that hard, or there is more to the story as to how hard it really was, or some reason why it's "so hard" now. It's been almost 40 years, I'm just asking why it hasn't been done since. Is it cost? Red tape? Why?
Is it one of those things where Kennedy's mandate allowed the US to throw everything plus the kitchen sink at it, so we pulled it off, but now the budget has been cut so much that the "big hammer" approach isn't feasible? Tech advances hasn't been in areas that have simplified anything critical enough to make space travel ubiquitous? The risk the first time was so high we'd never be allowed to do it that way now? All the above?
I used vista on someone elses computer and actually had to DO something on it (get files off quickly, over a small lan, due to a failing HD). I pretty much was able to get it done, but I remember it taking about 3x the clicking because the important parts were buried and obfuscated. Not in a hurry to use it on anything intentionally. Some day. I remember finally installing 98 a few years after it was out, because 95osr2 was "just fine, thank you".
We've had our kids vaccinated. They'll have all the required vaccines before they start kindergarten, per "the law", but they were not administered as aggressively as some pediatricians would encourage. By that I mean we didn't have the shots given as soon nor as many at a time as was possible. Why? Not at risk. Didn't see the need. Didn't want to make my kids go through it. (The mild symptoms that are possible due to the vaccine itself. My oldest daughter developed a mild case of chicken pox FROM the chicken pox vaccine.) Also we had a number of people who recommended against the combo shots (whatever they are called) that have a whole bunch of shots all at the same time. Apparently there are some who think doing a bunch at a time is bad. I don't recall what it is though, at the moment. It's been a few years.
There's nothing wrong with refusing to use a cell phone. You're not alone, and I'm sure you won't be alone for a long time. Why, in fact, there are people out there who STILL are refusing to drive cars and wire their houses for electricity and don't have indoor plumbing. They're even organized into an orderly society complete with rules, traditions and a strict religious code.
However, my "analogy" falls apart quickly, because I know for a fact that many Amish use cell phones...
The correct strategy was for them to ignore personal copying and go after commercial piracy, but they were too big a control freak to do that.
That, and two other things: Create content people want to buy - and in a way they want to buy it. If they had found a way to monetize a digital content distribution system, perhaps something where individual songs could be purchased for a very reasonable price. They could have even developed a portable electronic music file playing device, and made it so good it became a cultural lexicon like "kleenex" and "band-aid".
This is about eCommerce sites. So, what if it's a site like www.buyfuzzybunniesrightnow.com? Perhaps the dumb sites that dumb people go to can implement a "assume all users are this or that" kind of mentality. True power users that THINK will shop elsewhere.
This smells like a twisted, extrapolated implementation of some kind of net neutrality. Call it Net Lobotomy?
Hmmm... New business idea - invent the equipment to actually write.WAV info onto the road. Yeah, yeah, I know the Japanese evidently did something to put the musical notes on the road, but was it easy? The article said engineers did it on two stretches of road, but that seems very prototypish to me. How long did it take? I'm thinking - huge paving type machine with a USB port in the cab and a touch screen. Pick the sound, enter some parameters, start carving away.
Next up - RIAA letters to states for copyright infringement, DRM in tires.
I can hear it now: "I told you we were lost! I can plainly hear we're in Techno Town, and we are supposed to be in Bluegrass-Ville! Pull over and get directions!"
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of people saying the universe is really something like 10 dimensions.
.WAV living in an MP3!
But, we live in 3, and are constrained in one direction in the 4th (time).
So, the universe is compressed, and the quantum weirdness is a (digital?) artifact resulting from the compression.
It's like we're an mp3, and it works well until you look too closely and then the weirdness and approximations start to show up.
I feel like I'm a
I can't believe none of your replies noted the fact that while both the Hyundai and the BMW will get you from A to B, they are also BOTH compatible with ALL roads.
How many people went to Walmart the week before Christmas and bought one of these for someone else, thinking "wow, that's a cheap computer! Walmart has EVERYTHING these days." And then bought the latest fishing game and deer hunter game, and wrapped it up. Then, after Christmas the nephew or the kid next door comes over to fix the thing because bubba can't "download the huntin' game to the hard drive" (the only two computer-ish words he knows) and finds out his shiny new PC won't work with his huntin game.
Then, the PC mostly collects dust until late in the evenings until used to browse porn when everyone else goes to bed.
I'm sure it's been said before, but it's quite a delicate balancing act for the marketing department to sell a LINUX PC at WALMART. You really gotta make some assumptions that the people who would buy that really won't ever want to install a windows program and ONLY want it as an internet appliance. How many of these things have been returned?
Reminds me of the anecdote, told to me by someone who knew the guy it happened to:
Guy buys laptop from dude on ebay, sends money order. Guy gets laptop box in mail. Guy opens box, finds big flat rock. Guy realizes he is screwed.
I've never bought off ebay, believe it or not. I have, however, bought some A/V stuff from Amazon's marketplace and had very good experiences. Given the rise in the general uproar of "teh ebay suxxorz" I doubt I ever WILL buy from ebay.
"They" say that the technology found in the Mercedes S class sedans is always a forecast of the tech that will be found in the mundane sedans a few years down the road. The S class had ABS, stability control, air bag, cruise, all that stuff well before the chevys did.
I can tell you that the rich people (the people who don't really ask how much it costs, ever) like to have things Just So. They are particular. They like it when the house is ready for them when they get there. Because, they have more than one, and they are too busy to be bothered by the mundane things like adjusting the AC, finding the remote, turning on ALL of the lights in the house at the right time (because there are so many, you see). No, they need to have the AC set to the right temp before they get there. They want to pull out their PDA on their private jet and control things over the interweb while on the way there. They want *A* button to push when they walk in that will turn on the TV, and the TV signal better be nice and clear.
Home automation is big in the house equivalents of the Mercedes S Class, and in a few years it will be "standard" on the chevy houses as well. And, I've seen articles that many of the new houses built during the recent real estate boom had a lot of options like that available. Many were built with it on spec, which drove up the prices on a wide scale.
My opinion? Home automation will largely involve sensors that can tell when people are in the room or not, and it will adjust lighting, heating and AC accordingly, and automatically. It will involve a VAV type HVAC system that can cut off individual rooms and shunt energy only where it is needed. It will save a lot of energy and do things we all know we should but cant, wont, or don't remember to. Closing drapes on the east side of the house in the morning, on the west side in the afternoon. Cuts heat load. etc.
Flamebait? Come on, only the last sentence was flamebait. The rest was insightful with just a bit of troll!
Probably pretty insightful, actually. Google could very easily do all of that, especially in the areas where they've ALREADY mapped out everything at the street level. If they bundle that with free airtime and throw in the phone at a heavy discount as well, people would put up with it too.
Some of my best college memories are those friday and saturday nights playing duke 3d with my friends on our 4 port 10BaseT hub. It was on my P133 back in 96 and 97. Net.bat, config.sys, all that crap.
Yeah, we didn't have a "life" but we had fun not having it. We also networked mechwarrior2, doom, hexen, even got a mac working on the lan with PC's for mechwarrior.
But, Duke was the funnest. By far.
Reminds me of an old "outer limits" episode where this astronomy-geek kid finds a seti-type signal which causes all teenagers to mutate in such a way to protect them from some change in the sun which would have otherwise killed them. Yeah, that's a long sentence.
They might stick a radio beacon on it, or perhaps some kind of $1 flea market LED blinker thing.
The only solution is to not buy the crap. Period. That's why the two mp3 players I've bought so far are Creative products. They'll play stuff I put on them. For sure.
.wma file. Red flag number 1. I do not, and do not plan to, and advise against, using .wma as a music file. Makes no sense to me, why not use mp3. Besides, ususally a .wma file will have DRM. It's like picking up a dirty needle off the beach. You don't know where it's been or what's in it, but it probably isn't good for you. (I use .wmv for video projects for emailing and putting on websites because it is fairly small, doesn't suck too bad, and everyone (in windows land) can play it.)
.wma file on a different computer. She told me about her "plans" and I immediately said "It won't work, it has DRM". So later, she asked me to help her fix her mess. I tried to "convert" the wma into something marginally useful, but no dice. I didn't have all day to find out how to remove the evil from the .wma. So I said burn it onto a cd and play it, or rip it. For some reason that didn't work either until the next day, after it was too late. The cd actually WOULD NOT PLAY on any cd player in the house, until the next day. Evil I tell you.
I also don't buy stuff from online music places, at least not yet. Haven't seen anything compelling.
My wife needed a song for something she was working on, and she bought it from walmart.com. Honestly I didn't know walmart had a music store???!?. Anyway, it was a
So she needed to play the
I think she may have been cured from buying crap like that any more. I hope. She has bought stuff from itunes, and that is fairly easy to de-crapify.
I ran into this problem and solved it a couple of months ago. This is a problem that has been around for a while, and with some digging it isn't too hard to solve. Let me give you the rundown.
It's a "problem" with external USB hard drives, the free-agent and free-agent pro. They go to sleep in a way that is incompatible with Linux. The drives ARE compatible with linux if you have a kernel that can r/w NTFS or if you format the thing to a file system that linux prefers.
The drive hibernates and then when linux goes to wake it up it gets all bent out of shape and says the drive is dead or gone. Sometimes. Usually.
The fix is to turn off the hibernation. If you have the pro version it comes with a utility to do this. If you have a non-pro version you're halfway stuck. Either you gotta somehow find the pro-tools software, or contact seagate and they WILL show you where to DL it off their website. Do the online chat thing and they'll give it to you no problem. They were very nice about it, actually. Took me about 10 minutes to do that. The pro software works just fine on the non-pro drive to change the sleep time. It's a one-time fix.
I didn't run into this on a linux PC, I was using a free-agent on a Buffalo Linkstation NAS as a backup drive. The linkstation runs linux.... So.... It would hibernate and then when the LS would go to backup - BZZT! Error. Works GREAT now. I'm actually very happy with seagate, I've had to deal with them a couple times this year and it was actually pretty smooth. They have the longest warranty also, I believe.
So, how did it happen the way it did the first time? (moon 1.0)
With computing power on par with an 86 Chevy Citation and slide rules, how did we send living breathing men to the moon, and bring them back, without a hitch?
I'm not saying we didn't, just that either it wasn't that hard, or there is more to the story as to how hard it really was, or some reason why it's "so hard" now. It's been almost 40 years, I'm just asking why it hasn't been done since. Is it cost? Red tape? Why?
Is it one of those things where Kennedy's mandate allowed the US to throw everything plus the kitchen sink at it, so we pulled it off, but now the budget has been cut so much that the "big hammer" approach isn't feasible? Tech advances hasn't been in areas that have simplified anything critical enough to make space travel ubiquitous? The risk the first time was so high we'd never be allowed to do it that way now? All the above?
I used vista on someone elses computer and actually had to DO something on it (get files off quickly, over a small lan, due to a failing HD). I pretty much was able to get it done, but I remember it taking about 3x the clicking because the important parts were buried and obfuscated. Not in a hurry to use it on anything intentionally. Some day. I remember finally installing 98 a few years after it was out, because 95osr2 was "just fine, thank you".
The question would be "why didn't I get a buffalo?"
We've had our kids vaccinated. They'll have all the required vaccines before they start kindergarten, per "the law", but they were not administered as aggressively as some pediatricians would encourage. By that I mean we didn't have the shots given as soon nor as many at a time as was possible. Why? Not at risk. Didn't see the need. Didn't want to make my kids go through it. (The mild symptoms that are possible due to the vaccine itself. My oldest daughter developed a mild case of chicken pox FROM the chicken pox vaccine.) Also we had a number of people who recommended against the combo shots (whatever they are called) that have a whole bunch of shots all at the same time. Apparently there are some who think doing a bunch at a time is bad. I don't recall what it is though, at the moment. It's been a few years.
I agree. I do a lot of work at a laptop, and have no external monitor or keyboard. I compensate by slouching and fidgeting a lot.
+1 Brilliantly Insightful and Informative
There's nothing wrong with refusing to use a cell phone. You're not alone, and I'm sure you won't be alone for a long time. Why, in fact, there are people out there who STILL are refusing to drive cars and wire their houses for electricity and don't have indoor plumbing. They're even organized into an orderly society complete with rules, traditions and a strict religious code.
However, my "analogy" falls apart quickly, because I know for a fact that many Amish use cell phones...
Sorry.
My non-Microsoft web browser has spell checking built in. Helps a lot, you should try it. www.firefox.com
This is a killer idea. It also makes me think of solar sails and space travel. Hmmmm.... Star Trek.
Nothing like free energy.
That, and two other things: Create content people want to buy - and in a way they want to buy it. If they had found a way to monetize a digital content distribution system, perhaps something where individual songs could be purchased for a very reasonable price. They could have even developed a portable electronic music file playing device, and made it so good it became a cultural lexicon like "kleenex" and "band-aid".
Hmmm... What if. What if, indeed.
Walmart? My local Wally World has ipods AND zunes AND various stuff from Creative and Phillips and others, maybe Magnetbox IIRC.
This is about eCommerce sites. So, what if it's a site like www.buyfuzzybunniesrightnow.com? Perhaps the dumb sites that dumb people go to can implement a "assume all users are this or that" kind of mentality. True power users that THINK will shop elsewhere.
This smells like a twisted, extrapolated implementation of some kind of net neutrality. Call it Net Lobotomy?
Hmmm... New business idea - invent the equipment to actually write .WAV info onto the road. Yeah, yeah, I know the Japanese evidently did something to put the musical notes on the road, but was it easy? The article said engineers did it on two stretches of road, but that seems very prototypish to me. How long did it take? I'm thinking - huge paving type machine with a USB port in the cab and a touch screen. Pick the sound, enter some parameters, start carving away.
Next up - RIAA letters to states for copyright infringement, DRM in tires.
I can hear it now: "I told you we were lost! I can plainly hear we're in Techno Town, and we are supposed to be in Bluegrass-Ville! Pull over and get directions!"