Storage-wise, a 2-4Gb iPod wouldn't be a problem for me. My old-model 5Gb iPod, even with 500+ tracks on it, still hasn't exceeded 2.5Gb of content - and a lot of the tracks on it are just ones I 'kinda' like, rather than love. I can keep them on my iBook if I don't want to listen to them on the move.
And at $100 (probably UK 100, even though the exchange rate is now massively in the UK's favour - it should only be about 65) I can live with the battery issue.
(Although it'll probably only be OS X 10.3 compatible, which would rule me out as I'm still running 8.6/9.2 and have *no* compelling reason - and this is not open for debate for X-zealots, since my primary app on my elderly but beloved 450Ghz graphite clamshell iBook is Word 5.1 - to change...)
Walden O'Dell, head of Diebold Election Systems, wrote a letter to Republican contributors in August that said "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Maybe there really was much basis for his confidence....
Holy shit. They're really not bothered about hiding any more, are they?
Seriously, though, if this is true then you have to wonder if the US is a true democracy any more. When a vendor of pointless, overpriced, unaudited, easily corrupted 'voting machines' (why not just put a cross in a box like *every other western democracy*?) says something like this and is still supplying said machines for the 2004 elections, then there's clearly something very wrong at a most fundamental level. With this new software, you don't even have to faff about with hanging chads and Supreme Court verdicts - any vote you like can be handed to the party of your choice!
Do people in the US generally get to hear about this, or do only Wired and/. readers actually find out about it? I'm not even American, and it worries me!
I'd put up a link to the Evening Standard story I read yesterday, but their website sucks, so I can't find one...
But basically, the UK has approved the building of three offshore wind farms that will each provide the same power as a nuclear reactor (Sizewell B was the one named in terms of power output).
Wind's as unlimited a resource as deuterium, right? And a hell of a sight easier to draw power from.
Now, normally I'm all for fusion plants and cool high-tech stuff, but this just seems like another international money-sink. The fact the US is objecting to it being in France rather than Japan suggests A: petty, childish vendettas over the fact that France *dared* to defy the US over Iraq, and must now pay the price, or B: massive pork-barrel funding for American interests in the Japanese fusion industry, or C: both.
I don't even *like* the French, but really, fuck Bush. The sooner the world is rid of him and all his energy industry cronies fucking everybody else over for a dollar, the better. This is a man who is one step away from literally standing on a ledge pissing over people and telling them it's raining... and they're believing him! What's next? "That's not a human turd you just watched me shit out onto a plate, it's prime Texan beef! Now eat it up, yum! 'Cause if you don't, you're supporting TERRORISTS!" Christ...
Hilarious quote from his 'DRM is not wrong' article:
If we suddenly had a way to make perfect copies of objects as big as, say, cars, I imagine that thousands of shiny red Mustang convertible clones would instantly appear on the road. Most of us would find that wrong.
What? What? What? Being able to make perfect copies of objects the size of cars would, I think, be the greatest moment in the history of humanity! Hello!?! The end of hunger? The end of want? The end of shortages of essential, life-saving medicines? Barrels of clean water for the third world? Bueller? Bueller?
If we were in a position to do this (and how would it be *stealing* anything, anyway? The original is still in possession of the owner, so - guh! - it's copyright infringement at best;), then I think IP rights would be the last thing on anybody's mind, because *the capitalist system would be instantly destroyed*! Frankly, I'd welcome that. Capitalism may be the best of a bad bunch of socio-economic systems right now, but if something demonstrably better shows up, most people would take it in an instant.
Although maybe it's possible that he just really, *really* hates Mustangs.
The guy's an idiot. Even ignoring a ridiculous brain-dead analogy like replicated Mustangs, the fact he can compare OS X's few security holes (and I don't even *use* OS X - I'm no fan) to the gaping net that is Windows shows he must be blowing somebody to keep writing this garbage...
How about this? The hardware is really simple - you have a piece or thin cardboard that has these spots that are easy to punch out - you provide a simple jig that lines this card up with a printed list of names - you take the simplest of tools - a sharp object - and poke a hole in the cardboard next to the name you want. When you're done, you look at the piece of cardboard and if it looks ok you put it into a box where another simple machine is used to count it.
Or, even easier, you could simply use a pen to mark an X in the box next to your preferred candidate, and have the resulting ballots placed in a locked box before being counted by volunteers, with the option of a recount by different volunteers if any candidate suspects foul play. Full paper trail, no machines involved, total accountability at all stages. It works perfectly well in most western democracies, but then there wouldn't be multi-million dollar contracts for overpriced 'voting machines' if this were used in the US. (Maybe Bic and Parker could get into a bidding war over the pens.)
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain..."
But does it have God's perfect theme tune, which is what the original was? A superb piece of music, as stirring in Battlestar Galactica as it was in Revenge of the Mutant Camels...
Are you deaf, sir? RMC's theme tune was only like Galactica's in that it involved music notes!
The Mondrian hotel, LA...
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I was once lucky enough to go on a junket to LA as part of a visit to Warner Bros. All expenses paid, yadda yadda. The hotel I was staying at was the Mondrian, which if you haven't heard of it (which to be honest I hadn't before going) is a multiple-star, high-rolling place. (The trendy Skybar where George Clooney is fond of a tipple is part of it and I had pointed out to me some apparently famous person who I didn't recognise - one of TLC, I think - in the lobby.)
Very nice place, it had to be said. The room - well, suite - I was staying in was the size of my flat back home.
The problems came when it was time to check out. Although Warners were paying the basic expenses, additional ones (phone calls, room service, etc) were expected to be covered by us.
Now, I hadn't touched the minibar (there was a convenience store just down the street for booze and snacks), the premium cable had been left alone because Warners had taken me out every night, I had no girlfriend (hey, I'm a/. reader!) so there hadn't been any phone calls, I hadn't made any calls for room service, I hadn't connected my laptop to the internet, I hadn't thrown the TV out of the window or taken a big shit in the middle of the living room requiring special cleaning... hell, I even left a decent tip.
Go to reception to check out? I'm handed a bill for $95 dollars of assorted 'additional services'.
Needless to say, I went ballistic and all the charges magically vanished. But it was a lesson in how places like that operate. They obviously assume that guests have all their expenses met by somebody else, so couldn't care less if a wodge of charges are added to the bill.
Now, I know that if I'd presented those expenses to *my* employer expecting them to be paid, they would have laughed in my face and told me to fuck off...
The only reason the US can get away with this is because the owner of the phone pays for both incoming and outgoing calls.
Okay. (I'm assuming you're talking about mobile phones here.) Let me get this straight.
If you call somebody on your mobile phone... you pay.
If somebody calls you on your mobile phone... you pay.
If somebody using a mobile phone calls you on your mobile phone... both of you pay.
Boy, are you getting screwed! And I thought mobile rates in the UK were a rip-off! No wonder the phone companies over there are so reluctant to change - they must be raking it in!
Although the pic shows it's a walking wheelchair, I was hoping for an Asimo-type bot that would save the pretty Japanese girl from a burning building, give a thumbs-up to the cameras and then down a bottle of Olde Fortran before activating its death ray eyes and going on a killing spree. Oh my, yes...
Sinclair ZX Spectrum (the machine that the UK games industry was founded on)
Apple Mac+ (when the Mac actually became *useable*)
Commodore 64
IBM PC
Apple ][
Atari ST (if you were musically inclined in the '80s and '90s)
Psion Series 3 (the first palmtop that you could actually do anything useful with)
Altair
Apple iMac DV (computer as form *and* function, not just grey box)
Commodore Amiga
...at the thought of a tennis court's-worth of tightly-packed IBM processors all running Linux. Blow the dust off your TI-85 and work out the total per-processor fee SCO will be demanding for that lot!
I actually used to use AllTheWeb a lot, until I migrated to Google and (as of now) stayed there.
Over the years, I've had a sort of progression of search engines - when I first got Web access at work I used Lycos and Yahoo, because somebody told me that was how you found stuff on the internet. When Lycos had a redesign and became horribly slow, clunky and overburdened with irrelevancies, and I realised that Yahoo just plain sucked, I moved to AltaVista. When *that* had a redesign and turned into an ad service, I moved to AllTheWeb. The reason I switched to Google is simply because it gives the best results, it's fast, and it has no interest in becoming a 'portal'. Fuck portals! I want what *I* want, not what some corporation is taking money to push at me.
Long live Google, free and independent of Microsoft - and anyone else.
"Hey, everyone, y'know, Tom and Crow and I were talkin' about how the kids today don't know squat about sodium."
"I couldn't have put it better myself, Mike. Why, the shocking lack of sodium taught in schools today is... shocking!"
"That's right, Crow. So we asked ourselves, how, HOW! do we reach kids today about sodium?"
"How, how, HOW?"
"Through the rock 'n' roll music that the kids seem to love."
"Hit it!"
"Sodium, so-ho-di-u-huh-hummmm..."
On a non-MST3K note, this is good news. Say 'nuclear reactor' to most people today, and they think of a big concrete sphere that can go 'Poot!' at any moment and crack open, spurting deadly radiation into the air, killing everyone on the planet in five minutes. Small, safe reactors that *work* might start to help ease down the paranoia.
It's the kind of ridiculous fear that kept holding up space probes using radioisotope generators from being launched over the last couple of decades. "Oh, that space probe is *nuclear*? Stop it, stop it at once! If anything goes wrong it'll crash into the ocean and KILL US ALL!" Never mind that the generators were designed so that they *couldn't* go critical until they were already well out of Earth's orbit...
Yeah, right - like I'm going to take seriously a bald man dressed like a monk who puts light bulbs in his mouth...
This is weak FUD even by MS standards, isn't it? They must be shit-scared of iTMS and the threat it poses to their plans to make Windows Media (with all its accompanying DRM) the de facto standard for, well, everything if they're going on the attack like this.
Whether there's anything to this or not I don't know, but I met up with an old friend of mine a couple of weeks ago who is now a director of a UK record label. (Chah! All my old friends are now earning much more money than me, but...)
Anyway, after a couple of hours of general catch-up chat we moved onto technology. We're both Mac users, so that was the way the conversation went. He mentioned that he'd been at a wedding reception with some guy from Sony, who told him about Sony's portable video player, and then started talking about working with Apple on hardware - until he realised the champagne had opened his mouth too much and promptly shut up.
Could all be bollocks, of course, but I can't imagine why my friend would make it up. It could have just been something to do with QuickTime, as well. But it'd be interesting if there were something in the hardware story, though!
Before we have an uncontrolled explosion of crap, much like the internet, we need to declare a World Department of Space Exploration that is in charge of scheduling launches, arrivals, and trajectories.
[Oblig Trek reference]
And we can call it the 'United Earth Space Probe Agency', or UESPA for short. Eventually, the name will be changed to 'Starfleet'.
Well, at least the BBC plan to do *something* interesting with my licence fee. That's good to know. At the moment, I don't watch *any* BBC shows regularly (I might put on Jonathan Ross if he's got a decent guest) and I'm just hanging around waiting for the new season of 24 to start on BBC2.
(Mind you, I'm not watching anything regularly on C4 or Sky either, and as for ITV... ha! As if!)
Of course, watching less TV hasn't improved my life any, because I have broadband with which to devour my time and destroy my brain instead.;)
It makes me sick to think that the fastest high end machines will end up on the desks of management types running Word for OSX. With a cursor blinking all day at the speed of light.
While the tech guys who might actually need such horsepower will have 5-year-old boxes.
Face it, having such a box on your desk is like having a 4WD in the driveway that has never had mud on it.
Is the PD's hair pointy? Not yet, but it's sure going that way!
Damn, that's a shame. I still use my Series 5 for work (I'm a journalist) as a quick, convenient and above all *light* way to transcribe interviews while on the train back home. Pull out the Flash card, stick it in my USB reader, transfer it to the iBook, run it through Five-To-Mac, job's a good 'un.
Psion lost the plot when they started making machines (hello, Series 7) that were too big to slip into a pocket. They rather lost their USP - a small machine that you can touch-type on - after that, so it's little wonder that they started drowning. Another great British success story...
It's pretty hard to screen your calls when they block caller ID.
I recently had a problem with an autodialler - I'm in the UK, so I don't know if these are illegal here or not. But I do know they are bloody annoying, especially when they call every five minutes for about an hour each evening. No message, just an immediate hang-up. Since they were withholding their number, I couldn't even call them up to yell at them. And that's saying nothing about all the other junk calls I was getting - double glazing, conservatories, loans, mortgages, the lot.
Eventually I complained to my phone company (NTL), who told me about a little-known service they offer - blocking any calls that have withheld their number. Free service, takes a couple of days to activate, and can be switched on or off with a keypad code.
Not one unsolicited call since. Brilliant.
"Most expensive series the BBC had made"? Nuh-uh!
on
Blakes Seven To Return
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· Score: 1
Blake's 7 took over a drama slot from the long-running police series Z-Cars. Which meant it had the same per-episode budget as Z-Cars, because that's how the BBC worked back then - '50 minute weekly drama series = £X per week'. Now I remember Z-Cars (showing my age), and it was not exactly packed with action and special effects...
While I'm sure the Visual Effects and Set Design departments were stoked at being able to do a sci-fi series that wasn't Doctor Who for a change, I doubt they were as keen on doing it on Z-Cars' budget! Hence the spaceships made from hairdryers and walls that wobbled if people touched them.
Fortunately, however cheap the sets, props and effects may have been, the stories and imagination put into them made up for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Storage-wise, a 2-4Gb iPod wouldn't be a problem for me. My old-model 5Gb iPod, even with 500+ tracks on it, still hasn't exceeded 2.5Gb of content - and a lot of the tracks on it are just ones I 'kinda' like, rather than love. I can keep them on my iBook if I don't want to listen to them on the move.
And at $100 (probably UK 100, even though the exchange rate is now massively in the UK's favour - it should only be about 65) I can live with the battery issue.
(Although it'll probably only be OS X 10.3 compatible, which would rule me out as I'm still running 8.6/9.2 and have *no* compelling reason - and this is not open for debate for X-zealots, since my primary app on my elderly but beloved 450Ghz graphite clamshell iBook is Word 5.1 - to change...)
Holy shit. They're really not bothered about hiding any more, are they?
Seriously, though, if this is true then you have to wonder if the US is a true democracy any more. When a vendor of pointless, overpriced, unaudited, easily corrupted 'voting machines' (why not just put a cross in a box like *every other western democracy*?) says something like this and is still supplying said machines for the 2004 elections, then there's clearly something very wrong at a most fundamental level. With this new software, you don't even have to faff about with hanging chads and Supreme Court verdicts - any vote you like can be handed to the party of your choice!
Do people in the US generally get to hear about this, or do only Wired and /. readers actually find out about it? I'm not even American, and it worries me!
But basically, the UK has approved the building of three offshore wind farms that will each provide the same power as a nuclear reactor (Sizewell B was the one named in terms of power output).
Wind's as unlimited a resource as deuterium, right? And a hell of a sight easier to draw power from.
Now, normally I'm all for fusion plants and cool high-tech stuff, but this just seems like another international money-sink. The fact the US is objecting to it being in France rather than Japan suggests A: petty, childish vendettas over the fact that France *dared* to defy the US over Iraq, and must now pay the price, or B: massive pork-barrel funding for American interests in the Japanese fusion industry, or C: both.
I don't even *like* the French, but really, fuck Bush. The sooner the world is rid of him and all his energy industry cronies fucking everybody else over for a dollar, the better. This is a man who is one step away from literally standing on a ledge pissing over people and telling them it's raining... and they're believing him! What's next? "That's not a human turd you just watched me shit out onto a plate, it's prime Texan beef! Now eat it up, yum! 'Cause if you don't, you're supporting TERRORISTS!" Christ...
If we suddenly had a way to make perfect copies of objects as big as, say, cars, I imagine that thousands of shiny red Mustang convertible clones would instantly appear on the road. Most of us would find that wrong.
What? What? What? Being able to make perfect copies of objects the size of cars would, I think, be the greatest moment in the history of humanity! Hello!?! The end of hunger? The end of want? The end of shortages of essential, life-saving medicines? Barrels of clean water for the third world? Bueller? Bueller?
If we were in a position to do this (and how would it be *stealing* anything, anyway? The original is still in possession of the owner, so - guh! - it's copyright infringement at best ;), then I think IP rights would be the last thing on anybody's mind, because *the capitalist system would be instantly destroyed*! Frankly, I'd welcome that. Capitalism may be the best of a bad bunch of socio-economic systems right now, but if something demonstrably better shows up, most people would take it in an instant.
Although maybe it's possible that he just really, *really* hates Mustangs.
The guy's an idiot. Even ignoring a ridiculous brain-dead analogy like replicated Mustangs, the fact he can compare OS X's few security holes (and I don't even *use* OS X - I'm no fan) to the gaping net that is Windows shows he must be blowing somebody to keep writing this garbage...
Or, even easier, you could simply use a pen to mark an X in the box next to your preferred candidate, and have the resulting ballots placed in a locked box before being counted by volunteers, with the option of a recount by different volunteers if any candidate suspects foul play. Full paper trail, no machines involved, total accountability at all stages. It works perfectly well in most western democracies, but then there wouldn't be multi-million dollar contracts for overpriced 'voting machines' if this were used in the US. (Maybe Bic and Parker could get into a bidding war over the pens.)
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain..."
Are you deaf, sir? RMC's theme tune was only like Galactica's in that it involved music notes!
Very nice place, it had to be said. The room - well, suite - I was staying in was the size of my flat back home.
The problems came when it was time to check out. Although Warners were paying the basic expenses, additional ones (phone calls, room service, etc) were expected to be covered by us.
Now, I hadn't touched the minibar (there was a convenience store just down the street for booze and snacks), the premium cable had been left alone because Warners had taken me out every night, I had no girlfriend (hey, I'm a /. reader!) so there hadn't been any phone calls, I hadn't made any calls for room service, I hadn't connected my laptop to the internet, I hadn't thrown the TV out of the window or taken a big shit in the middle of the living room requiring special cleaning... hell, I even left a decent tip.
Go to reception to check out? I'm handed a bill for $95 dollars of assorted 'additional services'.
Needless to say, I went ballistic and all the charges magically vanished. But it was a lesson in how places like that operate. They obviously assume that guests have all their expenses met by somebody else, so couldn't care less if a wodge of charges are added to the bill.
Now, I know that if I'd presented those expenses to *my* employer expecting them to be paid, they would have laughed in my face and told me to fuck off...
Okay. (I'm assuming you're talking about mobile phones here.) Let me get this straight.
If you call somebody on your mobile phone... you pay.
If somebody calls you on your mobile phone... you pay.
If somebody using a mobile phone calls you on your mobile phone... both of you pay.
Boy, are you getting screwed! And I thought mobile rates in the UK were a rip-off! No wonder the phone companies over there are so reluctant to change - they must be raking it in!
Although the pic shows it's a walking wheelchair, I was hoping for an Asimo-type bot that would save the pretty Japanese girl from a burning building, give a thumbs-up to the cameras and then down a bottle of Olde Fortran before activating its death ray eyes and going on a killing spree. Oh my, yes...
Sinclair ZX Spectrum (the machine that the UK games industry was founded on)
Apple Mac+ (when the Mac actually became *useable*)
Commodore 64
IBM PC
Apple ][
Atari ST (if you were musically inclined in the '80s and '90s)
Psion Series 3 (the first palmtop that you could actually do anything useful with)
Altair
Apple iMac DV (computer as form *and* function, not just grey box)
Commodore Amiga
...at the thought of a tennis court's-worth of tightly-packed IBM processors all running Linux. Blow the dust off your TI-85 and work out the total per-processor fee SCO will be demanding for that lot!
Over the years, I've had a sort of progression of search engines - when I first got Web access at work I used Lycos and Yahoo, because somebody told me that was how you found stuff on the internet. When Lycos had a redesign and became horribly slow, clunky and overburdened with irrelevancies, and I realised that Yahoo just plain sucked, I moved to AltaVista. When *that* had a redesign and turned into an ad service, I moved to AllTheWeb. The reason I switched to Google is simply because it gives the best results, it's fast, and it has no interest in becoming a 'portal'. Fuck portals! I want what *I* want, not what some corporation is taking money to push at me.
Long live Google, free and independent of Microsoft - and anyone else.
"IT'S A FAAAAAAAAAAAKE!"
"I couldn't have put it better myself, Mike. Why, the shocking lack of sodium taught in schools today is... shocking!"
"That's right, Crow. So we asked ourselves, how, HOW! do we reach kids today about sodium?"
"How, how, HOW?"
"Through the rock 'n' roll music that the kids seem to love."
"Hit it!"
"Sodium, so-ho-di-u-huh-hummmm..."
On a non-MST3K note, this is good news. Say 'nuclear reactor' to most people today, and they think of a big concrete sphere that can go 'Poot!' at any moment and crack open, spurting deadly radiation into the air, killing everyone on the planet in five minutes. Small, safe reactors that *work* might start to help ease down the paranoia.
It's the kind of ridiculous fear that kept holding up space probes using radioisotope generators from being launched over the last couple of decades. "Oh, that space probe is *nuclear*? Stop it, stop it at once! If anything goes wrong it'll crash into the ocean and KILL US ALL!" Never mind that the generators were designed so that they *couldn't* go critical until they were already well out of Earth's orbit...
This is weak FUD even by MS standards, isn't it? They must be shit-scared of iTMS and the threat it poses to their plans to make Windows Media (with all its accompanying DRM) the de facto standard for, well, everything if they're going on the attack like this.
Anyway, after a couple of hours of general catch-up chat we moved onto technology. We're both Mac users, so that was the way the conversation went. He mentioned that he'd been at a wedding reception with some guy from Sony, who told him about Sony's portable video player, and then started talking about working with Apple on hardware - until he realised the champagne had opened his mouth too much and promptly shut up.
Could all be bollocks, of course, but I can't imagine why my friend would make it up. It could have just been something to do with QuickTime, as well. But it'd be interesting if there were something in the hardware story, though!
[Oblig Trek reference]
And we can call it the 'United Earth Space Probe Agency', or UESPA for short. Eventually, the name will be changed to 'Starfleet'.
Nope. Only if I change address, and I'm not planning to do that any time soon.
In the UK, once you've got your licence, that's it - you don't have to renew it until you're 70, IIRC.
They'd have a job swiping my licence, as well. I'm British, and my licence is the old type. All paper, no barcode, no photo!
(Mind you, I'm not watching anything regularly on C4 or Sky either, and as for ITV... ha! As if!)
Of course, watching less TV hasn't improved my life any, because I have broadband with which to devour my time and destroy my brain instead. ;)
While the tech guys who might actually need such horsepower will have 5-year-old boxes.
Face it, having such a box on your desk is like having a 4WD in the driveway that has never had mud on it.
Is the PD's hair pointy? Not yet, but it's sure going that way!
Psion lost the plot when they started making machines (hello, Series 7) that were too big to slip into a pocket. They rather lost their USP - a small machine that you can touch-type on - after that, so it's little wonder that they started drowning. Another great British success story...
...does it *have* to have the voice of Majel Barrett?
I recently had a problem with an autodialler - I'm in the UK, so I don't know if these are illegal here or not. But I do know they are bloody annoying, especially when they call every five minutes for about an hour each evening. No message, just an immediate hang-up. Since they were withholding their number, I couldn't even call them up to yell at them. And that's saying nothing about all the other junk calls I was getting - double glazing, conservatories, loans, mortgages, the lot.
Eventually I complained to my phone company (NTL), who told me about a little-known service they offer - blocking any calls that have withheld their number. Free service, takes a couple of days to activate, and can be switched on or off with a keypad code.
Not one unsolicited call since. Brilliant.
While I'm sure the Visual Effects and Set Design departments were stoked at being able to do a sci-fi series that wasn't Doctor Who for a change, I doubt they were as keen on doing it on Z-Cars' budget! Hence the spaceships made from hairdryers and walls that wobbled if people touched them.
Fortunately, however cheap the sets, props and effects may have been, the stories and imagination put into them made up for it.