My experience so far with netflix streaming works more like this:
If you have something in particular to search for, you search it and add it to your queue. You might get lucky and find it to be available to stream, but the value of the disk-version of netflix is that you can search for something and get it sent to your house (and they have pretty much everything).
If you want to watch something but don't know what (or maybe just know what you are in the mood for), you start browsing the streaming options. There is a TON of content on there...sure you might not be able to find the exact thing you want, but there should be something there that interests you (certainly more than would be starting on the next 30 minutes on any normal cable TV subscription).
My assumption is that the flywheel would break apart soon after becoming unbalanced and it would explode in all directions tangent to the rotation. If it stays inside its mini bunker, the broken apart bits of carbon should spread the force over a larger area/time than being slammed by a solid disk. If it comes out of containment before exploding, it will probably stay within the compound (and small pieces would each be acted upon by air resistance which would dissipate much more power) while a big metal cylinder might actually roll off into your house.
Flywheels aren't new at all...but there was a lot of NIMBY paranoia about flywheels breaking loose and roaming the countryside. I can see how a giant steel cylinder rolling around with a ton of stored energy might be bad, but fail to see how that would occur when mounted underground in concrete with a vertical axis.
In the case of these things, there seem to be many small ones (less risk if one "escapes") and something tells me that carbon fiber disks that are carefully stabilized and levitated in a vacuum while spinning incredibly fast...would break into a thousand pieces the second they left containment rather than rolling down the street and through someone's house.
Yeah, I frequently use xkill (I don't have a shortcut for it but you can run it from a launcher which there is a shortcut for).
Works great except I have not found a way to abort it once you have initiated it (unless ctrl-c works...but I probably would have tried that)...so sometimes you run it and before you click, the window unhangs and closes itself and you have to find something you don't care about to click on (I usually just kill the panel and let the process restart).
I think the real key is that you are not charged for going over.
I really would prefer this method...For most things, I could deal with slow data (and wifi) for a few days at the end of the month when I run close to the cap. If I really need more that month (say I am traveling and using the phone as my sole point of contact), I should have the option to call them up and say "here's another $15, please uncap me for the rest of the month".
Most movies are not filmed 16:9--if you take a bluray and play it on your pixel perfect 1920x1080 display, your movie is going to have black bars unless it has been cropped.
Sure, TV is made to be broadcast in 16:9, but movies are usually filmed in even wider formats which means you would have black bars no matter what size display you used.
Personally, I hate the push to wide. It makes sense on laptops to the extent that you can keep the unit small while maximizing keyboard space (like my netbook) but so many non-entertainment computing tasks are vertical (and so few monitors actually have a pivot to portrait mode). At work, they have started replacing monitors with widescreen and I am not looking forward to it. A reasonably "large" looking widescreen display only has as much vertical space as a 5:4 17" monitor...This sucks ass for reading documents or working with long bits of code.
Yeah, of the people I am connected to, most of them are plenty up to date (and certainly almost all of the ones who made the attempt to connect to me are up to date).
I keep mine with an updated title...but don't really have a description. I can't bring myself to write one of those self-promotional 3 paragraph descriptions of how wonderful I am....It just seems so forced. I can manage it in a cover letter (especially since then I can focus on skills that are relevant to the position I am applying for) but writing that on a public site where almost anybody can see it?
Initially they didn't support video properly but now everything works with their firefox plugin (including my eeepc's integrated camera). Also, since I do live in the US, I have a google voice account and all of those features work fine in linux too. I have terrible phone service in my apartment so I actually make and receive most calls through my netbook (google voice has an option to ring calls in gchat as well as to your phone).
He is not talking about google voice, he is talking about google talk (gchat).
There is a voice and video client that works in browsers across platforms that is not country limited. Google voice has related functionality so I can see why he is confused, but most of the skype functionality (everything except landline calls outside the US) is handled without a google voice account.
Well, I think people generally use these contract break opportunities...to get into a new contract.
I see it all the time on slickdeals...someone starts a thread whenever a big enough change is found so that people can break their contract and get a new subsidized phone. You aren't "stuck" with a phone you can't use as there is a healthy market for both locked and unlocked phones on ebay.
They change terms often enough that you can always own a subsidized version of "this year's" phone and usually "last year's" phone commands enough of a price out of contract that you get the new phone for free.
Pretty sure there are oodles of people who buy a macbook (with free ipod) prior to heading off to college and become long term home apple users.
It seemed pretty much par for the course in college that a significant amount of people didn't own a TV. In the dorms, everyone watched movies on computers and a lot of people kept doing that for all 4 years. It is petty not to include the bluray drives since there are tons of people who would pay for the upgrade to use them (same for travel use).
The ipad is a toy while the android phone is a tool.
Apple makes really nice toys, the ipad looks cool, it feels slick, and some of its biggest selling points are essentially ways to goof off/kill time.
The phone is far more utilitarian. You always have this thing with you (since it fits in your pocket) and you can add features to it that make it more useful (oh, there is a 2 hour wait at this restaurant? well what is nearby?...Is there a bus that will take me there?) but you are willing to allow a little clunkyness or imperfect design. Android phones sync perfectly with google's shit which is what a lot of people already use to communicate on real computers and when it comes to non-entertainment apps, it basically matches the iphone exactly. It does all of this while being available in whatever form factor you need to fit in your pocket/purse/phone holder or compensate for your poor eyesight or lack of small movement precision in your fingers (and at a multitude of pricepoints).
Well...people who care about the quality of their photos often use something like flickr. Not that I don't put my nice photos on facebook too...I just don't expect much and prefer quick loading files that I can flip through as fast as my eye can register that it is another random facebook pic that I don't care about. I would imagine facebook trims all metadata as a way to speed up loading (millions of pictures turns into a lot of metadata considering how much stuff some cameras include)
Sites like flickr (and picassa) preserve the exif because it can be useful to others...if I am taking some cool shots on a nature walk, I might intend to geotag them so that other people can find them. At the same time, if I am taking pictures of things/people where the location is unimportant (and likely to be my home/studio/workplace/school/etc), I probably do not want it geotagged. I think there just needs to be more awareness of the fact that images are geotagged combined with an easier way to remove that geotagging. Starting without it kind of sucks as there is no good way to add it later...but I can't imagine it would be too hard to design an interface (with changable default settings) that pops up on your smartphone whenever a photo is about to leave the device and asks if you want to strip metadata.
Dropbox is great and a lot of the stuff people are suggesting defeats the purpose (a dropbox account with a lone truecrypt volume kills the web access and auto-versioning/recovery, etc.).
I put some semi-important private stuff on there without worry...when I travel out of the country, I usually do a scan of my passport+everything in my wallet (front and back) and toss the PDF in dropbox. This might be a bit of an issue if someone hacked into my account (but I prefer it to sending myself an email that traverses the web to who knows where), but I don't really care if someone can subpoena dropbox for my drivers license and credit cards.
I probably wouldn't keep my plans for world domination on there, but it is great to always have a current copy of my resume available online and synced between computers...I certainly never had any expectation that dropbox couldn't somehow get to my files.
The people who write about this kind of stuff usually fail to understand this. As a tech writer, it is probable that you and everybody you know has everything fancy things like HDTVs and you are naturally invested and interested in new tech.
The truth is, a lot of people don't even have TVs where blu-ray would matter, even if they did care about the difference between really good (DVD) and super good (blu-ray). My parents only bought an HDTV last year, which made everything look better already...so until they get used to that, why go blu-ray? When I come home at night and see people in my apartment building's windows, I see quite a lot of tube TVs still going strong (remember, analog broadcast is dead but the cable companies are keeping it alive and well).
Sure, all of my friends have HDTVs but I am young, tech savvy, and by the time we graduated college and moved into new apartments, you couldn't buy anything else. However, judging by the number of people content with pretty mediocre panels and crappy built in speakers--I wouldn't guess any of them care about quality all that much (not to mention the people who watch stretch-to-fit content without thinking anything looks wrong).
In one building, he rented a second room on another floor (and later in a neighboring building that is connected on the ground level) that he used as a home office. This cut out the commute but convinced the toddler that you were gone.
Later he moved into a building where he bought several merged units (common in condo buildings around here) which meant his single apartment had multiple outside entrances.
When it was time to go to work, he would close the hallway door between the spare bedroom/home office and the rest of the home, grab his coat, kiss his kids goodbye, and walk down the hall back into his home.
Sure the kids figured it out eventually...but by then they were old enough to understand that they should leave him alone while working.
A good IT manager would get their users what they need so that they don't have to attempt to do it themselves.
It shouldn't be hard to get some shared calendar services running on an extra box somewhere...so I think we have already determined that this hospital does not have a "good IT manager"
I have one of those lenovo wireless keyboards with trackball. It is great for controlling my XBMC box (especially when I hit \ to drop out of XBMC and go do some browsing)
I would still consider something like this though. My keyboard can't control my TV or receiver so I still need another remote or two. I have an older harmony but the interface is a little laggy compared to the original remotes and I have yet to get an IR dongle for my ion-based XBMC box.
If this can do the basic TV functions (honestly the only thing I use is the power switch...all my content comes from XBMC unless it is some live televised coverage that I want to see) and assuming that the programmable IR can also be made to turn on and control the volume on my receiver...this would be better than the harmony.
Nah, it was an integrated curriculum so A, B, and C were a contiguous sequence. You might do some algebra, then some basic geometry, then some further algebra, and then move into trig...
Seemed funny that they keep pushing the integrated stuff (lots of word problems and applications) as far back as middle school...but when it is time to move toward calculus, it jumps right back to straight textbooks.
Can someone clear up what they mean by Algebra II?
In my school I remember taking basically Math A, Math B, Math C, Pre-Calc, Calculus....it was pretty obvious what part was geometry, but I have no idea what delineates Algebra I vs Algebra II (although IIRC they were all required so unless Algebra II is really pre-calc...my school was already requiring it).
They are actually useful. Of course you can replicate it for free...get two pairs of glasses at the theater, pop the left lens out of one and replace it with the right lens from the other pair.
I wish slashdot would have a "collapse this" button. It would help avoid this or exit out of any other off topic discussion.
I usually read in Nested mode with threshold 1...it would be great if I could click on an arrow next to somebody post (like the GP) and anything nested below it would be hidden.
I could skip out on any comments or meta-comments on the troll (including this comment) and cut back to the story. Since this is slashdot...I might like to get back to discussion of something like how this effects the GSM tech and the benefits of additional spectrum to LTE rollout rather than getting into some crap about about "big business bad" "troll more" (and those who want to talk politics with the troll can just choose not to collapse the section).
This is a very significant difference. It seems like it basically amounts to a bug in the installer that will get sorted out soon. This is *very* different from them having a kill switch that they can engage to prevent you from playing the game.
The summary makes it sound like he was happily playing the game, decided to make some asshat posts in the forums, and then could not access the game anymore as a result. The story itself is barely newsworthy...bug in a new game prevents installer from working.
The person who looks you up on facebook or googles your name is probably working from a resume and cover letter. Most places, the people you interview with won't see anything more than that.
The HR person who processes your background check and actually looks at the forms where you listed weird history things, is quite possibly someone you never met in the interview process and is probably not going to go google all of your aliases out of curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have something in particular to search for, you search it and add it to your queue. You might get lucky and find it to be available to stream, but the value of the disk-version of netflix is that you can search for something and get it sent to your house (and they have pretty much everything).
If you want to watch something but don't know what (or maybe just know what you are in the mood for), you start browsing the streaming options. There is a TON of content on there...sure you might not be able to find the exact thing you want, but there should be something there that interests you (certainly more than would be starting on the next 30 minutes on any normal cable TV subscription).
My assumption is that the flywheel would break apart soon after becoming unbalanced and it would explode in all directions tangent to the rotation. If it stays inside its mini bunker, the broken apart bits of carbon should spread the force over a larger area/time than being slammed by a solid disk. If it comes out of containment before exploding, it will probably stay within the compound (and small pieces would each be acted upon by air resistance which would dissipate much more power) while a big metal cylinder might actually roll off into your house.
In the case of these things, there seem to be many small ones (less risk if one "escapes") and something tells me that carbon fiber disks that are carefully stabilized and levitated in a vacuum while spinning incredibly fast...would break into a thousand pieces the second they left containment rather than rolling down the street and through someone's house.
Works great except I have not found a way to abort it once you have initiated it (unless ctrl-c works...but I probably would have tried that)...so sometimes you run it and before you click, the window unhangs and closes itself and you have to find something you don't care about to click on (I usually just kill the panel and let the process restart).
I really would prefer this method...For most things, I could deal with slow data (and wifi) for a few days at the end of the month when I run close to the cap. If I really need more that month (say I am traveling and using the phone as my sole point of contact), I should have the option to call them up and say "here's another $15, please uncap me for the rest of the month".
Most movies are not filmed 16:9--if you take a bluray and play it on your pixel perfect 1920x1080 display, your movie is going to have black bars unless it has been cropped.
Sure, TV is made to be broadcast in 16:9, but movies are usually filmed in even wider formats which means you would have black bars no matter what size display you used.
Personally, I hate the push to wide. It makes sense on laptops to the extent that you can keep the unit small while maximizing keyboard space (like my netbook) but so many non-entertainment computing tasks are vertical (and so few monitors actually have a pivot to portrait mode). At work, they have started replacing monitors with widescreen and I am not looking forward to it. A reasonably "large" looking widescreen display only has as much vertical space as a 5:4 17" monitor...This sucks ass for reading documents or working with long bits of code.
I keep mine with an updated title...but don't really have a description. I can't bring myself to write one of those self-promotional 3 paragraph descriptions of how wonderful I am....It just seems so forced. I can manage it in a cover letter (especially since then I can focus on skills that are relevant to the position I am applying for) but writing that on a public site where almost anybody can see it?
Initially they didn't support video properly but now everything works with their firefox plugin (including my eeepc's integrated camera). Also, since I do live in the US, I have a google voice account and all of those features work fine in linux too. I have terrible phone service in my apartment so I actually make and receive most calls through my netbook (google voice has an option to ring calls in gchat as well as to your phone).
There is a voice and video client that works in browsers across platforms that is not country limited. Google voice has related functionality so I can see why he is confused, but most of the skype functionality (everything except landline calls outside the US) is handled without a google voice account.
I see it all the time on slickdeals...someone starts a thread whenever a big enough change is found so that people can break their contract and get a new subsidized phone. You aren't "stuck" with a phone you can't use as there is a healthy market for both locked and unlocked phones on ebay.
They change terms often enough that you can always own a subsidized version of "this year's" phone and usually "last year's" phone commands enough of a price out of contract that you get the new phone for free.
It seemed pretty much par for the course in college that a significant amount of people didn't own a TV. In the dorms, everyone watched movies on computers and a lot of people kept doing that for all 4 years. It is petty not to include the bluray drives since there are tons of people who would pay for the upgrade to use them (same for travel use).
The ipad is a toy while the android phone is a tool.
Apple makes really nice toys, the ipad looks cool, it feels slick, and some of its biggest selling points are essentially ways to goof off/kill time.
The phone is far more utilitarian. You always have this thing with you (since it fits in your pocket) and you can add features to it that make it more useful (oh, there is a 2 hour wait at this restaurant? well what is nearby?...Is there a bus that will take me there?) but you are willing to allow a little clunkyness or imperfect design. Android phones sync perfectly with google's shit which is what a lot of people already use to communicate on real computers and when it comes to non-entertainment apps, it basically matches the iphone exactly. It does all of this while being available in whatever form factor you need to fit in your pocket/purse/phone holder or compensate for your poor eyesight or lack of small movement precision in your fingers (and at a multitude of pricepoints).
I see a future apple product!
Sites like flickr (and picassa) preserve the exif because it can be useful to others...if I am taking some cool shots on a nature walk, I might intend to geotag them so that other people can find them. At the same time, if I am taking pictures of things/people where the location is unimportant (and likely to be my home/studio/workplace/school/etc), I probably do not want it geotagged. I think there just needs to be more awareness of the fact that images are geotagged combined with an easier way to remove that geotagging. Starting without it kind of sucks as there is no good way to add it later...but I can't imagine it would be too hard to design an interface (with changable default settings) that pops up on your smartphone whenever a photo is about to leave the device and asks if you want to strip metadata.
I put some semi-important private stuff on there without worry...when I travel out of the country, I usually do a scan of my passport+everything in my wallet (front and back) and toss the PDF in dropbox. This might be a bit of an issue if someone hacked into my account (but I prefer it to sending myself an email that traverses the web to who knows where), but I don't really care if someone can subpoena dropbox for my drivers license and credit cards.
I probably wouldn't keep my plans for world domination on there, but it is great to always have a current copy of my resume available online and synced between computers...I certainly never had any expectation that dropbox couldn't somehow get to my files.
The people who write about this kind of stuff usually fail to understand this. As a tech writer, it is probable that you and everybody you know has everything fancy things like HDTVs and you are naturally invested and interested in new tech.
The truth is, a lot of people don't even have TVs where blu-ray would matter, even if they did care about the difference between really good (DVD) and super good (blu-ray). My parents only bought an HDTV last year, which made everything look better already...so until they get used to that, why go blu-ray? When I come home at night and see people in my apartment building's windows, I see quite a lot of tube TVs still going strong (remember, analog broadcast is dead but the cable companies are keeping it alive and well).
Sure, all of my friends have HDTVs but I am young, tech savvy, and by the time we graduated college and moved into new apartments, you couldn't buy anything else. However, judging by the number of people content with pretty mediocre panels and crappy built in speakers--I wouldn't guess any of them care about quality all that much (not to mention the people who watch stretch-to-fit content without thinking anything looks wrong).
In one building, he rented a second room on another floor (and later in a neighboring building that is connected on the ground level) that he used as a home office. This cut out the commute but convinced the toddler that you were gone.
Later he moved into a building where he bought several merged units (common in condo buildings around here) which meant his single apartment had multiple outside entrances.
When it was time to go to work, he would close the hallway door between the spare bedroom/home office and the rest of the home, grab his coat, kiss his kids goodbye, and walk down the hall back into his home.
Sure the kids figured it out eventually...but by then they were old enough to understand that they should leave him alone while working.
It shouldn't be hard to get some shared calendar services running on an extra box somewhere...so I think we have already determined that this hospital does not have a "good IT manager"
I would still consider something like this though. My keyboard can't control my TV or receiver so I still need another remote or two. I have an older harmony but the interface is a little laggy compared to the original remotes and I have yet to get an IR dongle for my ion-based XBMC box.
If this can do the basic TV functions (honestly the only thing I use is the power switch...all my content comes from XBMC unless it is some live televised coverage that I want to see) and assuming that the programmable IR can also be made to turn on and control the volume on my receiver...this would be better than the harmony.
Seemed funny that they keep pushing the integrated stuff (lots of word problems and applications) as far back as middle school...but when it is time to move toward calculus, it jumps right back to straight textbooks.
In my school I remember taking basically Math A, Math B, Math C, Pre-Calc, Calculus....it was pretty obvious what part was geometry, but I have no idea what delineates Algebra I vs Algebra II (although IIRC they were all required so unless Algebra II is really pre-calc...my school was already requiring it).
They are actually useful. Of course you can replicate it for free...get two pairs of glasses at the theater, pop the left lens out of one and replace it with the right lens from the other pair.
I usually read in Nested mode with threshold 1...it would be great if I could click on an arrow next to somebody post (like the GP) and anything nested below it would be hidden.
I could skip out on any comments or meta-comments on the troll (including this comment) and cut back to the story. Since this is slashdot...I might like to get back to discussion of something like how this effects the GSM tech and the benefits of additional spectrum to LTE rollout rather than getting into some crap about about "big business bad" "troll more" (and those who want to talk politics with the troll can just choose not to collapse the section).
This is a very significant difference. It seems like it basically amounts to a bug in the installer that will get sorted out soon. This is *very* different from them having a kill switch that they can engage to prevent you from playing the game.
The summary makes it sound like he was happily playing the game, decided to make some asshat posts in the forums, and then could not access the game anymore as a result. The story itself is barely newsworthy...bug in a new game prevents installer from working.
The person who looks you up on facebook or googles your name is probably working from a resume and cover letter. Most places, the people you interview with won't see anything more than that.
The HR person who processes your background check and actually looks at the forms where you listed weird history things, is quite possibly someone you never met in the interview process and is probably not going to go google all of your aliases out of curiosity.