The Elves make Apple's glass? Interesting. I heard that HTC was in negotiations with them for a quantity of Mithril... something about really tough cases.
Schwarzenegger has an after market conversion hybrid for his Hummer. It uses a jet turbine to fill the battery. I recall reading the article in 2006 or 2007 in MIT Tech Review.
As Damnation Alley's Keegan once asked, "Yeah, but how is it on gas?"
Interesting that you should bring that up. George Barris and his crew spent three weeks modifying the Futura concept car for 20th Century Fox. No atomic turbine: it was powered by a 390 CuI reciprocating internal combustion engine. Not, apparently, the engine with which the vehicle originally shipped. Part of Barris' contract included the installation of a new drive train.
I read once that the high-speed chases they depicted in the TV series were actually run at over a hundred miles an hour for realism. If I remember right, they got special dispensation from the Governor their State in order to do that (I was only a kid then so I could be wrong.)
Oh just shutup you stupid corporate troll. No one likes to read your drivel nearly as much as you do.
I dunno... I think he's pretty much dead-on. Were you replying to the person to whom you thought you were replying?
I also dumped Comcast, and went to U-Verse as soon as I could, just because I got substantially better service for considerably less money, better tech support, and no billing errors. Delivered more than my rated line speed, so far as my Internet connection is concerned, with none of this "Power Boost" crap that Comcast foists on its customers, and I have a 2+ mbit/sec backchannel, which is actually useful. So far, no jerking me around with Comcast-style "network management" either (knock on wood.) I dumped Sprint and went to T-Mobile for the same reason (although I really didn't have much complaint with Sprint's phone service... it was everything else about them that thoroughly pissed me off.)
Like everyone around here is so fond of saying, "I voted with my dollars." So far it's worked out well. Neither AT&T nor T-Mobile has screwed up a bill. Not once. Yet Comcast and Sprint did it literally every month for the couple of years I had them, plus continuous rate increases with no improvement in service. Comcast nickel-and-dimed me up by almost 50% in the time I was with them. Both keep sending me junk mail, saying "We want you back!" with six month "special deals" and so forth. No thanks, I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount to a provider that doesn't screw with me.
Customer-service-wise, the first time I called U-Verse tech support (my residential gateway was having a problem) the girl (who was, apparently, from New Jersey) laughed and said "I'm sure you've already tried rebooting your gateway, so I won't bother asking you to do it again." They had a provisioning issue on my account, as it turned out, and she had no problem escalating me to someone that could help. About ten minutes later my gateway's status lights flickered green and all was well with the world.
Contrast that to Comcast: the last time I talked to their people about a network problem, it was a guy named "Bob" who said, "And how can I be helping you today." Bob. Yeah right. So, the next thing out of his mouth was, "Now I must ask you to reset your modem sir." Of course, I'd already tried and told him so, but he had a checklist, and by God he was going to follow it to the letter. Now, I had suffered a complete loss of connectivity, TV, phone and Internet, and this bright boy wants me to "reset my modem." That didn't help (naturally) so then he wanted me to bypass my hardware firewall and connect my computer directly to the Internet for "diagnostics." Incredible. I tried to point out that there was no signal on the line but he either didn't understand me or just didn't much care. Comcast bitches about spam generated by infected computers, and then has their tech support people tell users to bypass their firewalls. Brilliant. Just brilliant. By that point, I was just saying "sure, no problem" and otherwise ignoring him until he finally agreed that I needed to schedule a service call.
Now, I admit, I'm not in a one-horse area by any means, and I'm sure that AT&T can also be a pain in the ass if you are. But that's why it's important to live in an area that's broadband-competitive. Ideally all areas should be that way, but the big boys don't want that.
Additionally, the phone should be unlocked so you have alternatives other than buying another phone and starting over at square 1.
On T-Mobile, at least, after some number of months (six in my case, and I had a two-year contract) if you call and ask them they'll give you the unlock codes right over the phone and tell you how to do it. Don't know about other carriers' policies.
It doesn't matter in most cases. You can go online to any number of sites that will sell you a calculated unlock code for your handset for maybe ten bucks or so. I've unlocked half a dozen different handsets that way (all GSM phones, of course, not much point in "unlocking" a Sprint CDMA phone.)
How much do you think a text actually costs a company?
SMS? Nothing. They're part of the management packets transmitted between the phone and the towers anyway, and the bandwidth consumed is inconsequential.
Their purchasing determines what is profitable on the internet.
Their attention span determines the type of information that will be profitable.
You, the old school user, are maybe 1% of the net. You are irrelevant except as a niche market.
They are comfortable with TV, "rides" and planned, advertising-funded adventures in alternate realities to distract from their depressing existences as corporate serfs.
They (or rather, what they will buy) will determine the content of the internet. Not you.
What do they like?
* Television
* Fast food
* Coca-Cola
* Movies like X-Men
* Disco
* Corn dogs
That is your future, internet. You are only ruled by the nerds at night.
Even if it had its core inside, you can't start a runaway fission reaction by throwing the thing into a fire. They needed high-performance switching electronics to even achieve the kind of precision necessary to start a successful detonation. An atomic bomb is just a normal bomb unless the fissile material is held at critical mass for some time.
Yes. They're actually damn tricky things to detonate, that is, if you want any sort of useful yield. And they pulled it off back in 1945: the state of the art in military electronics was a far cry from what it is today.
That would ring more true if it weren't for a number of other broken arrow incidents where bombs with fissible material almost exploded, including the one outside of Goldsboro, NC where two bombs fell out of a plane and one of them deployed its parachute (something which is only supposed to happen if it is going to detonate). We've had several similar situations where fail-safes didn't work properly and we were very close to disaster.
Yes, but there's about three miles between a fail-safe that "doesn't work properly" and a fail-safe that doesn't work. It's not like there's just a single safety mechanism in these things. If the fail-safes prevent the weapon from detonating... then they worked, even if one or more of them individually did not.
Oh, I'm not assuming someone is correct or not, I'm talking about market share. They are quickly growing in the computer market and we all know how popular their iPod and iPhones are. Apple strictly designs their devices to be their way, if developers don't like it then tough luck.
Granted, many of the people who buy their products don't think they care about stability as much as popularity, but they wouldn't even know it existed if it didn't work well enough to be popular in the first place.
Yes, you're right about that. Still, Apple is doing the world a disservice, as far as I'm concerned. This from the company that, a couple of decades ago, stood for freedom and creativity, or at least claimed they did. Well, they still say that but you'd have to be suffering some sort of induced delusion, some alteration to your perception of reality, to believe it.
Interestingly though, Android is growing at a substantially greater pace. That tells me that there are one HELL of a lot of people that don't give a rat's ass for Apple's shininess, and are, in fact, interested in the best bang for the buck. That ought to tell the carriers something. T-Mobile, in fact, was one that I thought did get it, but apparently I was wrong. Yes, I know that T-Mobile is nothing other than Germany's own entrenched monopoly, Deutsche Telekom, so I shouldn't have expected too much from them.
Still, Android marketing has long focused on all the things that it can do that Apple products cannot... now they're telling us that we should forget all of that? That we're better off if they have the same power than Apple has always maintained over its iPhone customers, better off accepting the same limitations? Just so they can "manage" their network? God, the bullshit is flowing now. This is about minimizing infrastructure outlay, and pushing ad-laden, locked-down CRAP on us. Nobody, it seems, can resist the allure of an alternate revenue stream, even if one's customers are already paying for a service. This is not like broadcast TV folks. I remember having Comcast's DVR for a short while... damn thing had advertising all over and was designed so that a single misstep with the remote would make you click on one and bring it full-screen. I don't know if they still do that (this was a few years ago) but I got rid of it pretty fast.
Funny that. And here's the iPhone, which theoretically won't allow "badly written" applications to be installed, and which has still successfully buried AT&T's network on many occasions. For different reasons, I suppose, but it all comes down to carriers not spending enough to make their networks perform as advertised (maybe that's the problem... they shouldn't be allowed to advertise, then we would have no cause for complaint. "But you promised!" "No we didn't." "Yes, you DID." "You didn't read it right." "What?"
It improves stability and makes things easier to control
Does it? What happens if the customer doesn't care about that, and wants his phone to be under his control? You're assuming that Apple's position is the correct one. It isn't for me, and not for a whole bunch of other Slashdotters too, I might add.
Sounds like a win-win to me. I don't see the problem.
Maybe this time. I'm actually very surprised T-Mobile didn't just have their legal department send him a cease and desist or outright sue him, or even possibly get him charged with some ridiculous law. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it turned out for the better, but how often do you think that happens?
That would be a remarkably stupid (and entirely Apple-like, I might add) decision. The guy made an honest mistake, and T-Mobile had the with the realize that. If they'd gone ahead and sued him, it would certainly push a lot of developers (and potential developers) away from Android, which would hardly be to T-Mobile's benefit. Plus which, unless they could prove that the dev was doing this on purpose (and I didn't hear anything like that) it wouldn't be a winning move.
Improving infrastructure made sense when the American empire was in an ascendant period. Now that it's on the wane the most profitable course of action is to skim as much cream as we can until it collapses.
That's a silly comment. Americans still have more disposable income, to this day, than their European counterparts (although you're right, that's changing and not for the better.) Regardless, there's still plenty of money to be made, so it's not that they can't make that investment and still be very, very profitable. It's just that they've learned from the best (the likes of SBC and others of their ilk) that it's best to invest as little they can get away with so they can be very, very, very, very profitable. The cellular market is still in its ascendancy: more and more people are going totally wireless and dropping their landlines. Wireless doesn't have to contend with the billions of miles of wire that the traditional landline providers do, so the reality is, they can afford it. They just don't want to because they're greedy-ass American corporate types, that's all.
If you really want to know the solution for IM apps screwing with cell towers, it isn't taking away IM apps. It's making SMS cheaper.
SMS is fucking free so far as the carriers costs are concerned. But they can't see their way to giving up that revenue stream (and it's substantial, especially if you go over your limit, and how many of us know teenagers who do that regularly.)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's glass is elevensile.
The Elves make Apple's glass? Interesting. I heard that HTC was in negotiations with them for a quantity of Mithril ... something about really tough cases.
...suckers that got sold an mechanically inferior product.
Not to mention an grammatically dubious sentence ;)
Oh, go crack some more coconuts.
Schwarzenegger has an after market conversion hybrid for his Hummer. It uses a jet turbine to fill the battery. I recall reading the article in 2006 or 2007 in MIT Tech Review.
As Damnation Alley's Keegan once asked, "Yeah, but how is it on gas?"
The Batmobile was pretty quiet.
Interesting that you should bring that up. George Barris and his crew spent three weeks modifying the Futura concept car for 20th Century Fox. No atomic turbine: it was powered by a 390 CuI reciprocating internal combustion engine. Not, apparently, the engine with which the vehicle originally shipped. Part of Barris' contract included the installation of a new drive train.
I read once that the high-speed chases they depicted in the TV series were actually run at over a hundred miles an hour for realism. If I remember right, they got special dispensation from the Governor their State in order to do that (I was only a kid then so I could be wrong.)
This is the ALL TIME stupidest use for a computer i have ever seen and the most useless Slashdot article as well
Definitely some kind of record.
Actually USB ports can provide up to 500mA. So yeah assuming that was the case, 2.5W / usb port. So the guy built himself a 75W heating plate.
It would have been easier to tap off one the power supply lines. But then, I suppose, he wouldn't have ended up on Slashdot.
I wonder how many parsecs it takes to cook a whole turkey with this.
Only point five past lightspeed.
Oh just shutup you stupid corporate troll. No one likes to read your drivel nearly as much as you do.
I dunno ... I think he's pretty much dead-on. Were you replying to the person to whom you thought you were replying?
... it was everything else about them that thoroughly pissed me off.)
I also dumped Comcast, and went to U-Verse as soon as I could, just because I got substantially better service for considerably less money, better tech support, and no billing errors. Delivered more than my rated line speed, so far as my Internet connection is concerned, with none of this "Power Boost" crap that Comcast foists on its customers, and I have a 2+ mbit/sec backchannel, which is actually useful. So far, no jerking me around with Comcast-style "network management" either (knock on wood.) I dumped Sprint and went to T-Mobile for the same reason (although I really didn't have much complaint with Sprint's phone service
Like everyone around here is so fond of saying, "I voted with my dollars." So far it's worked out well. Neither AT&T nor T-Mobile has screwed up a bill. Not once. Yet Comcast and Sprint did it literally every month for the couple of years I had them, plus continuous rate increases with no improvement in service. Comcast nickel-and-dimed me up by almost 50% in the time I was with them. Both keep sending me junk mail, saying "We want you back!" with six month "special deals" and so forth. No thanks, I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount to a provider that doesn't screw with me.
Customer-service-wise, the first time I called U-Verse tech support (my residential gateway was having a problem) the girl (who was, apparently, from New Jersey) laughed and said "I'm sure you've already tried rebooting your gateway, so I won't bother asking you to do it again." They had a provisioning issue on my account, as it turned out, and she had no problem escalating me to someone that could help. About ten minutes later my gateway's status lights flickered green and all was well with the world.
Contrast that to Comcast: the last time I talked to their people about a network problem, it was a guy named "Bob" who said, "And how can I be helping you today." Bob. Yeah right. So, the next thing out of his mouth was, "Now I must ask you to reset your modem sir." Of course, I'd already tried and told him so, but he had a checklist, and by God he was going to follow it to the letter. Now, I had suffered a complete loss of connectivity, TV, phone and Internet, and this bright boy wants me to "reset my modem." That didn't help (naturally) so then he wanted me to bypass my hardware firewall and connect my computer directly to the Internet for "diagnostics." Incredible. I tried to point out that there was no signal on the line but he either didn't understand me or just didn't much care. Comcast bitches about spam generated by infected computers, and then has their tech support people tell users to bypass their firewalls. Brilliant. Just brilliant. By that point, I was just saying "sure, no problem" and otherwise ignoring him until he finally agreed that I needed to schedule a service call.
Now, I admit, I'm not in a one-horse area by any means, and I'm sure that AT&T can also be a pain in the ass if you are. But that's why it's important to live in an area that's broadband-competitive. Ideally all areas should be that way, but the big boys don't want that.
Additionally, the phone should be unlocked so you have alternatives other than buying another phone and starting over at square 1.
On T-Mobile, at least, after some number of months (six in my case, and I had a two-year contract) if you call and ask them they'll give you the unlock codes right over the phone and tell you how to do it. Don't know about other carriers' policies.
It doesn't matter in most cases. You can go online to any number of sites that will sell you a calculated unlock code for your handset for maybe ten bucks or so. I've unlocked half a dozen different handsets that way (all GSM phones, of course, not much point in "unlocking" a Sprint CDMA phone.)
How much do you think a text actually costs a company?
SMS? Nothing. They're part of the management packets transmitted between the phone and the towers anyway, and the bandwidth consumed is inconsequential.
I'll believe that when I see Slashdot lose vertical hold.
You kids who don't understand that, stay off my lawn!
Murdoch: We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Sorry, internet: this is your new audience.
Their purchasing determines what is profitable on the internet.
Their attention span determines the type of information that will be profitable.
You, the old school user, are maybe 1% of the net. You are irrelevant except as a niche market.
They are comfortable with TV, "rides" and planned, advertising-funded adventures in alternate realities to distract from their depressing existences as corporate serfs.
They (or rather, what they will buy) will determine the content of the internet. Not you.
What do they like?
* Television * Fast food * Coca-Cola * Movies like X-Men * Disco * Corn dogs
That is your future, internet. You are only ruled by the nerds at night.
Soma! Soma! Soma! Soma! Soma!
Even if it had its core inside, you can't start a runaway fission reaction by throwing the thing into a fire. They needed high-performance switching electronics to even achieve the kind of precision necessary to start a successful detonation. An atomic bomb is just a normal bomb unless the fissile material is held at critical mass for some time.
Yes. They're actually damn tricky things to detonate, that is, if you want any sort of useful yield. And they pulled it off back in 1945: the state of the art in military electronics was a far cry from what it is today.
... although large amounts of conventional explosives accelerating all that fissile material into the atmosphere might not be such a good thing...
True, but that's a dirty bomb, not a thermonuclear weapon.
That would ring more true if it weren't for a number of other broken arrow incidents where bombs with fissible material almost exploded, including the one outside of Goldsboro, NC where two bombs fell out of a plane and one of them deployed its parachute (something which is only supposed to happen if it is going to detonate). We've had several similar situations where fail-safes didn't work properly and we were very close to disaster.
Yes, but there's about three miles between a fail-safe that "doesn't work properly" and a fail-safe that doesn't work. It's not like there's just a single safety mechanism in these things. If the fail-safes prevent the weapon from detonating ... then they worked, even if one or more of them individually did not.
I must admit, zombies reeking havoc was an amusing mental image.
Well, I never really thought about it that way: I guess I always assumed that zombies were malodorous.
It's really okay for you to just tell him he used it wrong.
Yes, but then again most people that have corollary allegory disease don't know about it until it's too late.
Well, I for sure haven't. out of interest... have you really? cause that sounds like the weirdest thing to "accidentally do". :P
Who says I did it accidentally?
Oh, I'm not assuming someone is correct or not, I'm talking about market share. They are quickly growing in the computer market and we all know how popular their iPod and iPhones are. Apple strictly designs their devices to be their way, if developers don't like it then tough luck. Granted, many of the people who buy their products don't think they care about stability as much as popularity, but they wouldn't even know it existed if it didn't work well enough to be popular in the first place.
Yes, you're right about that. Still, Apple is doing the world a disservice, as far as I'm concerned. This from the company that, a couple of decades ago, stood for freedom and creativity, or at least claimed they did. Well, they still say that but you'd have to be suffering some sort of induced delusion, some alteration to your perception of reality, to believe it.
... now they're telling us that we should forget all of that? That we're better off if they have the same power than Apple has always maintained over its iPhone customers, better off accepting the same limitations? Just so they can "manage" their network? God, the bullshit is flowing now. This is about minimizing infrastructure outlay, and pushing ad-laden, locked-down CRAP on us. Nobody, it seems, can resist the allure of an alternate revenue stream, even if one's customers are already paying for a service. This is not like broadcast TV folks. I remember having Comcast's DVR for a short while ... damn thing had advertising all over and was designed so that a single misstep with the remote would make you click on one and bring it full-screen. I don't know if they still do that (this was a few years ago) but I got rid of it pretty fast.
... they shouldn't be allowed to advertise, then we would have no cause for complaint. "But you promised!" "No we didn't." "Yes, you DID." "You didn't read it right." "What?"
Interestingly though, Android is growing at a substantially greater pace. That tells me that there are one HELL of a lot of people that don't give a rat's ass for Apple's shininess, and are, in fact, interested in the best bang for the buck. That ought to tell the carriers something. T-Mobile, in fact, was one that I thought did get it, but apparently I was wrong. Yes, I know that T-Mobile is nothing other than Germany's own entrenched monopoly, Deutsche Telekom, so I shouldn't have expected too much from them.
Still, Android marketing has long focused on all the things that it can do that Apple products cannot
Funny that. And here's the iPhone, which theoretically won't allow "badly written" applications to be installed, and which has still successfully buried AT&T's network on many occasions. For different reasons, I suppose, but it all comes down to carriers not spending enough to make their networks perform as advertised (maybe that's the problem
that I haven't either.
It improves stability and makes things easier to control
Does it? What happens if the customer doesn't care about that, and wants his phone to be under his control? You're assuming that Apple's position is the correct one. It isn't for me, and not for a whole bunch of other Slashdotters too, I might add.
Maybe this time. I'm actually very surprised T-Mobile didn't just have their legal department send him a cease and desist or outright sue him, or even possibly get him charged with some ridiculous law. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it turned out for the better, but how often do you think that happens?
That would be a remarkably stupid (and entirely Apple-like, I might add) decision. The guy made an honest mistake, and T-Mobile had the with the realize that. If they'd gone ahead and sued him, it would certainly push a lot of developers (and potential developers) away from Android, which would hardly be to T-Mobile's benefit. Plus which, unless they could prove that the dev was doing this on purpose (and I didn't hear anything like that) it wouldn't be a winning move.
Improving infrastructure made sense when the American empire was in an ascendant period. Now that it's on the wane the most profitable course of action is to skim as much cream as we can until it collapses.
That's a silly comment. Americans still have more disposable income, to this day, than their European counterparts (although you're right, that's changing and not for the better.) Regardless, there's still plenty of money to be made, so it's not that they can't make that investment and still be very, very profitable. It's just that they've learned from the best (the likes of SBC and others of their ilk) that it's best to invest as little they can get away with so they can be very, very, very, very profitable. The cellular market is still in its ascendancy: more and more people are going totally wireless and dropping their landlines. Wireless doesn't have to contend with the billions of miles of wire that the traditional landline providers do, so the reality is, they can afford it. They just don't want to because they're greedy-ass American corporate types, that's all.
If you really want to know the solution for IM apps screwing with cell towers, it isn't taking away IM apps. It's making SMS cheaper.
SMS is fucking free so far as the carriers costs are concerned. But they can't see their way to giving up that revenue stream (and it's substantial, especially if you go over your limit, and how many of us know teenagers who do that regularly.)
And if the ocean was made of taffy we could just walk our way to China.
Dude, have you ever tried walking on taffy? It's not as easy as it sounds.