Fail. If my panels generate a surplus, I put that back on the grid and my neighbors use it. My neighbors paid for "transmission" that they didn't use because it was generated right here. Whatever I "stole" from the electric company by not paying for transmission, they "stole" back from my neighbors by charging for transmission that my neighbors didn't need.
The difficulty ripping blu-rays, the forced warnings and trailers, the bugginess of players... all suck.
However, I can easily say, if you are watching movies on a 120" projection screen, at 1080p and even at 720p, there is a significant improvement in picture quality. Just as standard def TV looked bad when shown on 42"+ TVs, DVDs (including upscaled) can look similarly bad on 120"+ screens. I've got an Oppo DVD player, known as one of the best upscalers out there. It does a good job and animated films look great projected. But for movies with real actors, a quality Blu-Ray film blows away a DVD on a large projection screen.
Projectors are so cheap these days (a good 720p projector can be had for about the same as a good 40-50" plasma) that I wouldn't be surprised to see many more people adopting projectors. There's something very different about sitting down to watch a movie with friends or family in front of a 10' screen compared to a 42" TV.
I'd love to see Blu-Ray without the cumbersome, anti-fair-use (aka anti-"toddler insurance") crap. But I want the format to succeed because nothing else offers video quality that holds a candle to it. Some people think we'll skip mass adoption of Blu-Ray and go straight to digital delivery... okay as long as your net connection stays up. If you've got backup power and a library of disks, you've still got a movie night when the power goes out in the middle of a snow storm. With a physical disk and a player, you're not at the whim of your ISP, cable, or fiber provider when you have people over for a movie.
That's what I did after 10 years in a nice IT job.
This depends on what your wife is skilled in, and if she wants to work. For us, I was burning out and ready for a change, my wife, recently having received her PhD., was ready to launch her own career. Both of us thought having one parent stay home with our new baby was the right thing to do, even if it mean watching the budget closer.
1.5 years later, I can honestly say I don't miss IT in the slightest. Except that I have a whole new respect for stay at home parents! It is more rewarding, and at the same time more challenging than the IT job ever was.
Hadn't seen it posted yet, so wanted to throw that out there.
So... you've got unused space. And you're looking for a reason to fill it up?
People (especially PHBs) think a resource that is not 100% utilized is going to waste.
However, consider which is more efficient: extra unused disk space, that is spare capacity with no strings attached... or, an elaborate pooling and sharing mechanism with much more management overhead and electricity use?
It's so true, disks are incredibly cheap these days. The unused space costs nothing (except if you could have gotten away with an even cheaper, smaller disk.)
Look at the amount of redundancy and resources that would be required if you were going to try to pool those PCs' storage together into some sort of hive:
How much redundancy is needed so that random computers can be powered down, or crashed, and the storage pool doesn't go offline? Even if most are left on at night, would you need a redundancy factor of 3 or more?
Electricy use goes up / the bill goes up, if you have to require most PCs to stay on to utilize this "free/spare" capacity
Do things like Service Pack updates or other patches that get pushed from a central server become much more complicated now because you cannot reboot more than a couple computers at once without the hive store going offline?
If you need a large pool of storage and a way to manage it centrally, use SAN or even NAS and consider VMs.
OTOH, if you want to keep it simple, bask in the cheapness of disks and high powered PCs these days and don't fret about "unused" capacity.
Trademarking the name Kentucky? That sounded too crazy to be true, even in the current greedy IP environment.
A later version of the KFC article on snopes makes no mention of Kentucky trademarking their name. Additionally, the wikipedia page on KFC mentions that the trademarking of the name Kentucky has been debunked.
I've teleworked over 5 years and received good raises every year. Telework had no impact, positive or negative, on promotions. They were based on performance, and keeping the customer happy. I was actually more organized working offsite, because 1) I could work without interuption and 2) I knew I had something to prove and that was fine with me, they granted a great perk and I stepped it up in return.
Getting paid is all about being valuable (and making sure your value is known.) It has nothing to do with keeping a seat warm in the office. I'd telework at my next job too, in fact I probably won't take a job that doesn't offer it as a perk.
Like anything, there are pros and cons. A general rule about GM crops is that the gene that confers special resistance, particularly if on a plasmid, is generally taxing to the strain of that crop.
This means yes, the crop will succeed better due to natural selection in areas where the pesticide is applied.
However, the associated fitness cost means that it is to the organism's advantage to lose that genitic modification whenever it grows in the absense of pesticide. So that natural selection would often select for the original strain.
I may be too late to this story to get a reply, but I'll ask anyway: For just syncing bookmarks, how do you think Google's browser extension compares to http://del.icio.us? I started using that a long time ago to share bookmarks from a central web accessible place rather than having different local files to sync. It works well and offers tagging and searching by tag for each bookmark which can be very helpful.
Suprised I didn't see any del.icio.us references in this discussion. How do these to options compare? If you only need bookmark syncing, I'm leaning toward del.icio.us because I don't need to install a browser extension so it is browser agnostic.
I've written my congressman several times (Bartlet, R-MD). I don't think it accomplishes much. Each time, after weeks or months, I get a form letter back about the issue. The replies carefully take neither side or else lean to the side which caused me to write in the first place. They never address any of the specific concerns.
I've given up writing my congressman. Money talks much louder than any citizen's voice.
Add to this: I do not recall congress having actually declared war in quite some time. Now we have "police actions", etc., but not lawfully declared war. I don't think the "war time" argument should hold any water if we are not technically at war.
I tried KnoppMyth and then a straigh MythTV install on Debian Testing. I loved the idea. I got it to work sometimes. But once I got my new TV, I AM LOVING HDTV, and had to leave MythTV behind for now.
I have an HDTV tuner card for my PC, but trust me that it requires something like a 3GHz processor to to 720p at 30 FPS, regardless of the fact that HDTV is already MPEG2 encoded and I have a beefy video card.
Recording HDTV is easy since it is already encoded. Playing it back on a "quiet" PC has been the biggest obstacle I've seen so far and why I'm currently renting an awful Comcast/Motorola DVR instead. Even the Motorola STB is buggy and needs to be power cycled about once a week, but it has been far more reliable for me than MythTV sp far and it fits and is relatively quiet in my A/V stack.
I want MythTV to succeed! As an extensible platform, it has a lot of potential. But I think we're still a year or more out from quiet, small form factor, and HDTV capable when it comes to MythTV. Prove me wrong, please! I'd like to hear what I overlooked;-)
I tried KnoppMyth and then a straigh MythTV install on Debian Testing. I loved the idea. I got it to work sometimes. But once I got my new TV, I AM LOVING HDTV. I have an HDTV tuner card for my PC, but trust me that it requires something like a 3GHz processor to to 720p at 30 FPS, regardless of the fact that HDTV is already MPEG2 encoded and I have a beefy video card.
Recording HDTV is easy since it is already encoded. Playing it back on a "quiet" PC has been the biggest obstacle I've seen so far and why I'm currently renting an awful Comcast/Motorola DVR instead. Even the Motorola is buggy and needs to be power cycled about once a week, but it has been far more reliable for me than MythTV at this point and it fits and is relatively quiet in my A/V stack.
I want MythTV to succeed! As an extensible platform, it has a lot of potential. But I think we're still a year or more out from quiet, small form factor, and HDTV capable when it comes to MythTV.
Prove me wrong, please! I'd like to hear what I overlooked;-)
like the download flag and worse are things they want to avoid, but since the FCC was going to require it they didn't exactly have much choice
Sorry Kjella, I call BS. IIRC, the broadcast flag has been blocked -- the courts said the FCC overstepped their bounds and cannot require it.
Even had it not been blocked, the broadcast flag was going to be required on *NEW* equipment. It would not be illegal to own and use equipment from before the flag was made into law. Therefore, Tivo had complete choice. They didn't need to implement it before it was enacted by law. Nothing about the flag (had it even become law) would have required Tivo to retroactively implement it on customers equipment bought before the law was enacted.
I used to love my Tivo. I still think it is a great, GREAT, user interface. It beats the pants off my buggy Motorola STB from the cable company and also trounces MythTV in ease of setup. However, I have to agree with others here: Tivo the company has been making questionable decisions (remember pop-up ads while you fast forward?!) and is turning its back on its customers.
The offline bit is really great - if you need to go to a client, and want to take the buglist along with you, you're pretty screwed. But if you have this, there's a local copy you carry around, and it seamlessly integrates...very nice.
As an alternative, especially if read-only is the main use on the road, you can just make sure your laptop has MySQL, Bugzilla, and Apache. You can easily dump and import your Bugzilla database and take it on the road with you. I wouldn't even consider resync'ing the databases though.
Makes it easy to take your knowlegebase with you, as long as it's just for reference. And you get all the searching goodness.
Nah. This clearly looks like a defective design. I expect a class action lawsuit if Apple to doesn't replace units under warantee. Maybe they can come out with a 2.0 model. Accept returns of the originals, replace the cases (or polish them), dip them in acrylic, and sell them as refurbs to offset the cost of what is essentially a voluntary recall.
I own an iPod. I've considered a Mac Mini. I like Apple products but I don't own a Nano. On this issue, I can be fairly objective: If you need to buy a protective covering just to maintain this device's original functionality, the product is incomplete. Consumers have reasonable expectations about the durability of a product sized to fit in a pocket. Claiming, "buy a case" as a solution doesn't cut it.
Reread the parent to your reply. I love my Tivo. However, it does not have a CD or DVD burner, it does not do HD, it does not do radio... Tivo is a great, easy to use DVR for standard definition TV. HMO is neat to play with, but there are a lot of reasons enthusiasts might prefer Myth to Tivo. Hook your Tivo up to a nice Plasma screen and you will see one major reason. HD Tivos are currently priced well above what a Myth box could be put together for.
I love focus-follows-mouse in my window managers. But what I REALLY want is...
Focus-follows-focus!
I dunno how to implement it, maybe with a web cam. It would be nice to have text being typed automagically going into the terminal or application I'm looking at. Guess it might not work well for people who hunt-n-peck.
Uhh, they do. Every time I boot my system I get a Tyan [...]
Re-read the parent's comment. It said, while using the computer. You are not using your computer during boot, you are waiting for it get to a useful state. Also, some of the boot splash and BIOS splash screens can be disabled so you are not forced to view them. Grub sure can, just set the delay to 0 seconds.
sitting her at work there is a big DELL advertisement just below the screen
That's not even close to the same. The logo on the bezel does not reduce or obscure your screen realestate.
My Tivo has a Tivo logo on it. That's fine, it was there when I bought it and I was okay with it then. There was no advert during fast forward when I bought it. A logo on the case compared to something added later, that obscures my view and reduces the utility of my Tivo, are two totally different things.
he started or supported any bills that are important to you?
If he has, and you think that he will continue to do so, then by all means - vote for him.
Am I the only one who thinks there are far too many laws on the books already?
Seriously, common sense now seems to suggest that if you are Widget543Corp (TM) then you ought to control widget543corp.[com|org|net|us|tv|...]
Waaaay too often we're seeing claims that a name might cause "brand confusion" when really the company just wants to hoard a few letters in a particular configuration and all patterns containing them. It gets worse when those letters form regular dictionary words.
I've said it before... Slashdotters will eventually realize that just because Google runs Linux, doesn't guarantee they will stay "Good." It's one thing to say, "Don't be evil." Its a whole other thing to consistently do as you say.
Is the Earth heating up? Probably. Did humans accelerate or exacerbate it? Maybe.
One thing that cannot be rationalized away by the "our models aren't perfect" argument is Carbon dumping. At no point in the history of the Earth have so many tons of Carbon been dumped into the atmosphere in such a rapid amount of time. Not since people have walked the Earth anyway.
Global warming is worth scientific study. Questions of the validity of the theory shouldn't stand in the way of studying the effects of Carbon dumping. Or how to remediate those effects.
There seem to be a lot of comments about free markets working both ways.
If we had completely free markets, perhaps an equilibrium could be reached faster and in a way that would be beneficial to a large majority.
As labor and trade laws currently exist, we don't have free markets. Tariffs introduce inefficiencies and take the "fair" out of fair markets. There are two significant problems with the words 'fair market' and 'off shoring' being in the same context:
1. Foriegn countries seem to have no problem importing American jobs. However, their immigration laws are not so free. They are not so willing to import American labor. So it really is not a friction free market.
2. OSHA requirements, health care, and other costs to American companies are not enforced when they hire labor in other countries. Should they be? If not enforced, offshoring becomes an easy way to skirt labor laws.
Consider the first point. If an Indian can do the same quality job at $15k/yr as an American for $65k/yr then it may be in a businesses best interest to offshore the job. If $15k/yr is a very comfortable salary for an Indian, and affords a high quality of life, some small portion of Americans might choose to immigrate or at least relocate to India for a while... where it feasible. Removing even a small portion of the talented labor pool from America could keep salaries for those remaining in the U.S. from going into a tailspin.
If markets were truely free. Off shoring might impose far less disruption. Markets are not free.
Slashdot Mirror
Fail. If my panels generate a surplus, I put that back on the grid and my neighbors use it. My neighbors paid for "transmission" that they didn't use because it was generated right here. Whatever I "stole" from the electric company by not paying for transmission, they "stole" back from my neighbors by charging for transmission that my neighbors didn't need.
The difficulty ripping blu-rays, the forced warnings and trailers, the bugginess of players... all suck.
However, I can easily say, if you are watching movies on a 120" projection screen, at 1080p and even at 720p, there is a significant improvement in picture quality. Just as standard def TV looked bad when shown on 42"+ TVs, DVDs (including upscaled) can look similarly bad on 120"+ screens. I've got an Oppo DVD player, known as one of the best upscalers out there. It does a good job and animated films look great projected. But for movies with real actors, a quality Blu-Ray film blows away a DVD on a large projection screen.
Projectors are so cheap these days (a good 720p projector can be had for about the same as a good 40-50" plasma) that I wouldn't be surprised to see many more people adopting projectors. There's something very different about sitting down to watch a movie with friends or family in front of a 10' screen compared to a 42" TV.
I'd love to see Blu-Ray without the cumbersome, anti-fair-use (aka anti-"toddler insurance") crap. But I want the format to succeed because nothing else offers video quality that holds a candle to it. Some people think we'll skip mass adoption of Blu-Ray and go straight to digital delivery... okay as long as your net connection stays up. If you've got backup power and a library of disks, you've still got a movie night when the power goes out in the middle of a snow storm. With a physical disk and a player, you're not at the whim of your ISP, cable, or fiber provider when you have people over for a movie.
Only thing needed would have been for that artist's rendering of the plane to hit somebody in the balls and we're there TODAY!
That's what I did after 10 years in a nice IT job.
This depends on what your wife is skilled in, and if she wants to work. For us, I was burning out and ready for a change, my wife, recently having received her PhD., was ready to launch her own career. Both of us thought having one parent stay home with our new baby was the right thing to do, even if it mean watching the budget closer.
1.5 years later, I can honestly say I don't miss IT in the slightest. Except that I have a whole new respect for stay at home parents! It is more rewarding, and at the same time more challenging than the IT job ever was.
Hadn't seen it posted yet, so wanted to throw that out there.
People (especially PHBs) think a resource that is not 100% utilized is going to waste.
However, consider which is more efficient: extra unused disk space, that is spare capacity with no strings attached ... or, an elaborate pooling and sharing mechanism with much more management overhead and electricity use?
It's so true, disks are incredibly cheap these days. The unused space costs nothing (except if you could have gotten away with an even cheaper, smaller disk.)
Look at the amount of redundancy and resources that would be required if you were going to try to pool those PCs' storage together into some sort of hive:
- How much redundancy is needed so that random computers can be powered down, or crashed, and the storage pool doesn't go offline? Even if most are left on at night, would you need a redundancy factor of 3 or more?
- Electricy use goes up / the bill goes up, if you have to require most PCs to stay on to utilize this "free/spare" capacity
- Do things like Service Pack updates or other patches that get pushed from a central server become much more complicated now because you cannot reboot more than a couple computers at once without the hive store going offline?
If you need a large pool of storage and a way to manage it centrally, use SAN or even NAS and consider VMs.OTOH, if you want to keep it simple, bask in the cheapness of disks and high powered PCs these days and don't fret about "unused" capacity.
A later version of the KFC article on snopes makes no mention of Kentucky trademarking their name. Additionally, the wikipedia page on KFC mentions that the trademarking of the name Kentucky has been debunked.
Very cool. Thanks!
I've teleworked over 5 years and received good raises every year. Telework had no impact, positive or negative, on promotions. They were based on performance, and keeping the customer happy. I was actually more organized working offsite, because 1) I could work without interuption and 2) I knew I had something to prove and that was fine with me, they granted a great perk and I stepped it up in return.
Getting paid is all about being valuable (and making sure your value is known.) It has nothing to do with keeping a seat warm in the office. I'd telework at my next job too, in fact I probably won't take a job that doesn't offer it as a perk.
This means yes, the crop will succeed better due to natural selection in areas where the pesticide is applied.
However, the associated fitness cost means that it is to the organism's advantage to lose that genitic modification whenever it grows in the absense of pesticide. So that natural selection would often select for the original strain.
Suprised I didn't see any del.icio.us references in this discussion. How do these to options compare? If you only need bookmark syncing, I'm leaning toward del.icio.us because I don't need to install a browser extension so it is browser agnostic.
I've written my congressman several times (Bartlet, R-MD). I don't think it accomplishes much. Each time, after weeks or months, I get a form letter back about the issue. The replies carefully take neither side or else lean to the side which caused me to write in the first place. They never address any of the specific concerns. I've given up writing my congressman. Money talks much louder than any citizen's voice.
Add to this: I do not recall congress having actually declared war in quite some time. Now we have "police actions", etc., but not lawfully declared war. I don't think the "war time" argument should hold any water if we are not technically at war.
I tried KnoppMyth and then a straigh MythTV install on Debian Testing. I loved the idea. I got it to work sometimes. But once I got my new TV, I AM LOVING HDTV, and had to leave MythTV behind for now.
I have an HDTV tuner card for my PC, but trust me that it requires something like a 3GHz processor to to 720p at 30 FPS, regardless of the fact that HDTV is already MPEG2 encoded and I have a beefy video card.
Recording HDTV is easy since it is already encoded. Playing it back on a "quiet" PC has been the biggest obstacle I've seen so far and why I'm currently renting an awful Comcast/Motorola DVR instead. Even the Motorola STB is buggy and needs to be power cycled about once a week, but it has been far more reliable for me than MythTV sp far and it fits and is relatively quiet in my A/V stack.
I want MythTV to succeed! As an extensible platform, it has a lot of potential. But I think we're still a year or more out from quiet, small form factor, and HDTV capable when it comes to MythTV. Prove me wrong, please! I'd like to hear what I overlooked ;-)
I tried KnoppMyth and then a straigh MythTV install on Debian Testing. I loved the idea. I got it to work sometimes. But once I got my new TV, I AM LOVING HDTV. I have an HDTV tuner card for my PC, but trust me that it requires something like a 3GHz processor to to 720p at 30 FPS, regardless of the fact that HDTV is already MPEG2 encoded and I have a beefy video card. Recording HDTV is easy since it is already encoded. Playing it back on a "quiet" PC has been the biggest obstacle I've seen so far and why I'm currently renting an awful Comcast/Motorola DVR instead. Even the Motorola is buggy and needs to be power cycled about once a week, but it has been far more reliable for me than MythTV at this point and it fits and is relatively quiet in my A/V stack. I want MythTV to succeed! As an extensible platform, it has a lot of potential. But I think we're still a year or more out from quiet, small form factor, and HDTV capable when it comes to MythTV. Prove me wrong, please! I'd like to hear what I overlooked ;-)
Sorry Kjella, I call BS. IIRC, the broadcast flag has been blocked -- the courts said the FCC overstepped their bounds and cannot require it.
Even had it not been blocked, the broadcast flag was going to be required on *NEW* equipment. It would not be illegal to own and use equipment from before the flag was made into law. Therefore, Tivo had complete choice. They didn't need to implement it before it was enacted by law. Nothing about the flag (had it even become law) would have required Tivo to retroactively implement it on customers equipment bought before the law was enacted.
I used to love my Tivo. I still think it is a great, GREAT, user interface. It beats the pants off my buggy Motorola STB from the cable company and also trounces MythTV in ease of setup. However, I have to agree with others here: Tivo the company has been making questionable decisions (remember pop-up ads while you fast forward?!) and is turning its back on its customers.
As an alternative, especially if read-only is the main use on the road, you can just make sure your laptop has MySQL, Bugzilla, and Apache. You can easily dump and import your Bugzilla database and take it on the road with you. I wouldn't even consider resync'ing the databases though.
Makes it easy to take your knowlegebase with you, as long as it's just for reference. And you get all the searching goodness.
Nah. This clearly looks like a defective design. I expect a class action lawsuit if Apple to doesn't replace units under warantee. Maybe they can come out with a 2.0 model. Accept returns of the originals, replace the cases (or polish them), dip them in acrylic, and sell them as refurbs to offset the cost of what is essentially a voluntary recall.
I own an iPod. I've considered a Mac Mini. I like Apple products but I don't own a Nano. On this issue, I can be fairly objective: If you need to buy a protective covering just to maintain this device's original functionality, the product is incomplete. Consumers have reasonable expectations about the durability of a product sized to fit in a pocket. Claiming, "buy a case" as a solution doesn't cut it.
Reread the parent to your reply. I love my Tivo. However, it does not have a CD or DVD burner, it does not do HD, it does not do radio... Tivo is a great, easy to use DVR for standard definition TV. HMO is neat to play with, but there are a lot of reasons enthusiasts might prefer Myth to Tivo. Hook your Tivo up to a nice Plasma screen and you will see one major reason. HD Tivos are currently priced well above what a Myth box could be put together for.
I love focus-follows-mouse in my window managers. But what I REALLY want is...
Focus-follows-focus!
I dunno how to implement it, maybe with a web cam. It would be nice to have text being typed automagically going into the terminal or application I'm looking at. Guess it might not work well for people who hunt-n-peck.
Re-read the parent's comment. It said, while using the computer. You are not using your computer during boot, you are waiting for it get to a useful state. Also, some of the boot splash and BIOS splash screens can be disabled so you are not forced to view them. Grub sure can, just set the delay to 0 seconds.
sitting her at work there is a big DELL advertisement just below the screen
That's not even close to the same. The logo on the bezel does not reduce or obscure your screen realestate.
My Tivo has a Tivo logo on it. That's fine, it was there when I bought it and I was okay with it then. There was no advert during fast forward when I bought it. A logo on the case compared to something added later, that obscures my view and reduces the utility of my Tivo, are two totally different things.
Nice troll though.
Am I the only one who thinks there are far too many laws on the books already?
Waaaay too often we're seeing claims that a name might cause "brand confusion" when really the company just wants to hoard a few letters in a particular configuration and all patterns containing them. It gets worse when those letters form regular dictionary words.
I've said it before... Slashdotters will eventually realize that just because Google runs Linux, doesn't guarantee they will stay "Good." It's one thing to say, "Don't be evil." Its a whole other thing to consistently do as you say.
I agree with some of your points, but this particular one struck me as funny:
Outdated History Books
Sounds so 1984 I guess. ;-)
One thing that cannot be rationalized away by the "our models aren't perfect" argument is Carbon dumping. At no point in the history of the Earth have so many tons of Carbon been dumped into the atmosphere in such a rapid amount of time. Not since people have walked the Earth anyway.
Global warming is worth scientific study. Questions of the validity of the theory shouldn't stand in the way of studying the effects of Carbon dumping. Or how to remediate those effects.
If we had completely free markets, perhaps an equilibrium could be reached faster and in a way that would be beneficial to a large majority.
As labor and trade laws currently exist, we don't have free markets. Tariffs introduce inefficiencies and take the "fair" out of fair markets. There are two significant problems with the words 'fair market' and 'off shoring' being in the same context:
1. Foriegn countries seem to have no problem importing American jobs. However, their immigration laws are not so free. They are not so willing to import American labor. So it really is not a friction free market.
2. OSHA requirements, health care, and other costs to American companies are not enforced when they hire labor in other countries. Should they be? If not enforced, offshoring becomes an easy way to skirt labor laws.
Consider the first point. If an Indian can do the same quality job at $15k/yr as an American for $65k/yr then it may be in a businesses best interest to offshore the job. If $15k/yr is a very comfortable salary for an Indian, and affords a high quality of life, some small portion of Americans might choose to immigrate or at least relocate to India for a while... where it feasible. Removing even a small portion of the talented labor pool from America could keep salaries for those remaining in the U.S. from going into a tailspin.
If markets were truely free. Off shoring might impose far less disruption. Markets are not free.