I dunno. I sure as heck wanted to buy a Cadillac CTS after seeing Matrix Reloaded. Cadillac certainly payed for product placement (i.e. advertising), and the car was so cool looking that it fit the movie perfectly.
Never mind I was in no financial position to buy one, but man, if I had been 10-15 years further into my career...
Web Browser: Chrome, then Firefox when needed. lynx if it gets bad enough. Email Client: They all suck, but Thunderbird and alpine Terminal: xfce4-terminal, xterm when needed IDE: Don't need one. But please package cscope, xxdiff, and hexedit. diffuse would be helpful as well. File manager: I accidentally start this once in a while. Then I close it ASAP. Basic Text Editor: vim IRC/Messaging Client: pidgin, xchat, epicII, in that order PDF Reader: evince Office Suite: OpenOffice, because there's no other realistic choice outside of Google Docs or Office 365. Calendar: Lightning in Thunderbird, but it sucks. Would use Orage if it played nice with Exchange (sadly no choice in mail server at work), or if you could at least add calendar entries via an.ics file from the command line without restarting Orage. Video Player: Don't use. Music Player: Don't use. Photo Viewer: eog, because I don't know what else is out there. Not a great choice, admittedly. Screen recording: Don't use.
There simply isn't enough solar power delivered to the surface of the aircraft, even at 100% conversion efficiency, to move people and luggage using only available sunlight.
Google tells me direct illumination to a surface perpendicular to incoming full intensity sunlight is about 1.4 kW per square meter. Google also tells me that the wing surface area of a 747 is around 5500 square feet. Only half of the 747 wing is directly illuminated by sunlight at any given moment, but the surface of the fuselage could be covered with photocells as well, so 5500 square feet overall is probably a decent estimate for the directly illuminated surface area of the aircraft as a whole. And for hand-wavy purposes lets assume that the entire surface of the 747 is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight (i.e. a planar plane... pun totally intended). And that we have perfectly efficient photocells giving us 100% conversion efficiency. Running the math, this gives us around 715kW under bright direct sunlight, or about 959 horsepower -- the equivalent of 1.5 2012 Ford Shelby GT500's.
Each engine of a 747 generates around 15,000 horsepower at cruise, and around 30,000 at takeoff, and a 747 has four engines. So you need around 125 times the power generated by a perfectly efficient perfectly illuminated solar-powered 747 to get said plane off the ground, and around 65 times the power for cruising. And then you could only fly it in the middle of the day near the equator.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul area has a relatively high-tech (depending on your area of tech) employment base, with headquarters or significant offices for 3M, Medtronic, Cray, Silicon Graphics, Ceridian, Toro, Thomson Reuters, Target, Best Buy, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, St. Jude Medical, Polaris, Digi, Imation, CHS, Shutterfly, General Mills, Cargill, Seagate (though I think that operation was purchased by someone else), and Digital River. There's plenty of small tech-oriented business around here as well.
Come for the low unemployment and reasonable standard of living. Stay because your car won't start all winter.
I'd pay off my mortgage, remodel the house a little bit to make it more usable, and look around for a reasonable lightly used car to replace my wife's aging vehicle. Then I'd help my siblings (and my wife's) out by paying off mortgages, school debt, and the like. I'd set up some sort of financial structure to make sure that my wife and, should they come along, my children would live without financial stress for the rest of their lives after I pass away. And a goodly chunk right off the top would go to my church and another religious organization that was very important in my life.
After that, I'd take up a bit of travel. I'd take lots of guitar lessons and buy more music equipment than someone of my skills can reasonably justify. I'd set up an endowed foundation to perpetually help fund the type of charities and other organizations that I think need supporting. And maybe get back to taking dance lessons regularly. I'd go to more concerts, and pay for better seats and the occasional meet-and-greet. And I'd spend time developing an open-source project idea that I've had for several years. And I'd probably pay someone else to mow the lawn, tend to the flower garden, and clear the driveway of snow.
This article caused me to wade through my major metro area's online system to plan a trip between my new house, which is within blocks of a suburb park and ride facility, to my work, in the same town. By car this is a 10 minute trip, maybe, depending on the state of traffic lights.
At first the online system told me the trip was impossible at the time of day I specified. So I dug deep into the site and pieced together what appears to be the only possible set of routes that connects these locations without sending me to the downtown core for connections. After much digging I found that, for all practical purposes, the route is indeed impossible. It appears that, due to one key route only running in the very early morning and late rush hour, it would take me around 36 hours to commute each way.
If I took the bus all the way to the downtown core then back to work I still can't do it, because the morning bus to my work stops running before I arrive downtown.
Could someone fill me in on the economics of nuclear power generation? I'd like to know what the usual payback period for a plant is, and how much it costs to operate a plant over that period.
Just doing some napkin figuring here, if the plant ran 24/7 at full capacity for a 20 year payback period, and assuming that operational costs are about the same as initial construction costs (i.e. using the $10 billion number from the summary, so $20 billion for construction and operation), that gives me a figure of about 5.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. Obviously the plant wouldn't run at full capacity for 20 years straight, but that does put something of a lower bound on the price of power generation, and it seems like a reasonable number given US electricity prices.
I'd also like to know how this compares to hydro, gas, coal, solar, wind, tidal, and any other generation method currently in use.
If I upgrade to 2G of RAM, it looks like I can upgrade to Lion, but not Mountain Lion. I was going to upgrade the RAM anyway because it seems to run a bit sluggish, but the Mini maxes out at 2G, which is the lower limit of Lion. So it may be a wash, performance-wise.
No, it will be a huge step backwards. Do not, under any circumstance, install Lion if you can possibly avoid it. Not only is 2GB not enough to run Lion in any reasonable manner, but even if you have more RAM than that, Lion is a molasses sucking pig. The last OS for any hardware I used that was that bad and that much of a step backwards from what came before it was... umm... Wow, can't think of one. Lion wins. Or, actually, loses.
Installing it was the worst single decision I've made regarding Apple software on my early 2008 MacBook Pro. I even did a clean install from official Apple USB media (i.e. the USB fob you had to pay extra for instead of just downloading it) and upgraded RAM to 4GB on account of Lion. Take it from myself and several of my coworkers who regretted every getting within 100 feet of Lion that it is best avoided. Mountain Lion didn't suck, but only by comparison to Lion. Mavericks is a little bit better yet, but still not nearly as snappy as Snow Leopard.
My gut reaction: Don't worry about Snow Leopard being out of date, even security-wise. A man-in-the-middle is rare in most environments, and Snow Leopard is already quickly diminishing in market share, so it's not terribly likely to be widely exploited. Compared to the every day pain you'll cause yourself by installing Lion or later, the tiny risk profile of running a vulnerable Snow Leopard is worth it, in my opinion.
Your observation jives with one of my own thoughts on the matter.
Many people have something which they incorporate as the center of their identity, be it their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual proclivities, their religion, their choice of operating system, their athletic team, their place of origin, their family, their career, their hobby, and so forth. People who have convinced themselves that their very identity is tied first and foremost to one aspect of life have an incredibly strong, even visceral, reaction to anyone who expresses anything less than complete agreement with them. There is a term for this: zealotry. A zealot is unable to distinguish disagreement with their view from a personal attack or even hatred, as their very identity is melded with that for which they are zealous.
One of the most zealous sets of people we see today (at least in my myopic U.S.-centric personal experience) are homosexuals. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but my observation seems to be that this particular group of people has made homosexuality the defining feature of their life. As such, even minor disagreement with the idea that homosexuality is completely normal results in a strong adverse reaction and accusations of fear and hatred.
Personally I am saddened by this, that people have focused so strongly on one aspect of their identity so intensely that they view themselves first and foremost as that thing, rather than as a person, complete and whole. This is unhealthy, and when widespread (as we see today most strongly in both political zealotry and the zealotry of homosexuality) we end up with a fractious society that struggles to engage in a civil exchange of ideas, and at its worst can lead to quite literal violence and bloodshed.
My sister's car was damaged when an SUV rear-ended me as I was stopped at a traffic light. The driver of the SUV did stop, but refused to identify herself and provide insurance information. I could tell by the driver's actions that she was about to flee, and quickly noted her license plate number, and sure enough she fled while I pleaded with her to reconsider what she was about to do.
It took about a month longer than it should have, but eventually the machinery of justice caught up with the driver, and my sister was made whole for her financial loss. If it hadn't been for a clear and visible license plate it is doubtful that any compensation would have ever been recovered.
Good developers knows that displays should be limited to 80 columns by 24 rows. In extreme cases 132 columns can be used, but it tends to make users all huffy.
While overall I liked SC2 better than SC1, I too missed the strategy game aspect of SC1, for much the same reason -- it was a quick strategy game instead of a long RPG-like adventure. SC2's humor was spot-on, so that was a huge bonus.
I remember not having a code-wheel to use to start up SC1, but my college roommates and I knew that "PARTY" was one of the answers to the startup challenge screen, so whenever we'd want to play it was "cd \games\starcon", "starcon", followed by repetitions of "party", "party", "party", then F3, until the game let us in.
Also, the SC1 music emitted by the old Radio Shack "Game Blaster" was better than that from the Sound Blaster that I replaced it with -- I can still feel the melee music in my bones 23 years later.
I have no idea if that's enough shielding to matter. However, if true, would we also see higher error rates in daytime when the body of the Earth isn't standing between the server and the Sun?
Am I the only one who doesn't want brighter whites, and would even go so far as to avoid them?
On my smartphone, computer monitors, laptops, and even my old CRT monitors and TV I keep the brightness turned down. When I have opportunity to see LED TVs at my parent's place or elsewhere they always seem eye-piercingly bright, to the point where I don't care to watch them. The same goes for any LED based TV in a store -- or basically anywhere. This was one of the main reasons I was looking forward to eventually purchasing a plasma TV (instead of an LED TV) to replace my CRT TV.
Truer whites I'm all for, but brighter whites do nothing at all for me.
Thank you for mentioning this! I purchased Tracktion 3 for the Mac a number of years ago because its workflow and interface mapped better onto my brain than any alternative I could find (well, at least those I could demo for free, which was quite a few). However I was disappointed when Tracktion appeared to become an abandoned and unmaintained product, and it kept losing bits of usefulness with each OS X release. To be honest I'd given up on it and considered it to be lost money. But if it's back I'm *definitely* going in for the new version -- particularly as even the non-upgrade price is now around 20-25% of what I paid for the previous version (and an even better ratio on the upgrade price).
I initially looked at it for the purpose of MIDI sequencing, and that's what I based my purchase decision on. However I never used it for that purpose but instead have done a small number of multitracked board recordings from my live sound-guy gigs. Back before the bit-rot it did an absolute bang-up job for those projects.
But, anyway, given there's a new version and it would appear that active development has resumed, I'll definitely recommend checking it out. I mean, there's free demos for Windows, Mac, and Linux -- with certainly enough going on in the demo to determine whether it fits your style of operating and is worth purchasing.
Nothing was lost? All the work that the government workers could have been doing during the shutdown was lost.
You mean all that work that was so important that it was deemed non-essential?
All the revenue from the National Parks were lost.
Which amounts to what, maybe a grand total of a couple million, nationwide? Maybe? The federal government burns through that in seconds.
Two weeks food inspections, drug inspections, VA claims processing were lost.
And yet safe food and drugs were still being produced, shipped, and sold. The lost value-add was... umm...? And a few VA claims are paid out to drug companies and the like about two weeks late -- yawn.
Worldwide confidence in the US and the US dollar was lost. US credit rating was compromised with the possibility of higher interest rates on new deficit.
Wake me up when people stop loaning the U.S. federal government money, charge it higher rates, or stop keeping their wealth in dollars. If anything those first two effects can't come soon enough, to put the brakes on the spending spree that's selling out of every taxpayer, particularly the younger ones who will labor under the burden of paying that debt for most of their life. I say throw the retiring Baby Boomers to the wolves -- they spent their trust fund on federal baubles for decades, and now it's time to pay the piper. That fable about the ant and the grasshopper has more than a little merit.
Scientific tests will have to be thrown out and restarted.
So this was all a job creation program for scientists, you're saying? After all, they can look forward to redoing all that work. Sounds just about as effective as the previous economic stimuli to me!
There is no doubt in my mind that my father will be unable to cope with this change and be completely frustrated trying to run his fantasy football team this year. This of course means "support" calls to me, who has no interest in sports, fantasy or otherwise.
"Wait, wait," you exclaim, "the fantasy football section hasn't changed. Well, much, at least." Maybe, but my father has trouble with concepts like drag-and-drop, and is one of the stereotypical older users with whom you can expect to have this type of conversation: "Q: Which web browser are you using?" "A: Google. Or maybe Yahoo? You know, the usual one.", "Q: Sorry, which program do you use to go to Google, or Yahoo?" "A: The Internet". Coping with user interface changes is definitely not among his aptitudes, and this redesign is going to make for a long year of confusion and grumbling.
I don't have much to add other than I'm hugely excited for both Star Control and Battlezone. SC1 and SC2 were bedrock mainstays of my college days, and the hover-tank Battlezone released in 1998 was phenomenal.
I've since moved on to play and enjoy The Ur-Quan Masters, but even shortly after SC2's heyday and before UQM was available, I remember paying for a legit download of the PC version of the game (late '98, early '99?). If we could get network mode Melee, I'd be tickled pink. If there were a persistent universe game (ala EVE) formed out of the Star Control franchise I'd lock myself away in a room and never see the light of day again.
However I've never found a comparable game to the '98 Battlezone. The gameplay was terrifically fun, fairly easy to get started, the copy protection was a reasonable compromise (need one disc present among all the computers playing on the LAN), and I cannot remember a single stability, usability, or gameplay bug. I could very much see wasting away many hours if that were updated and brought to market again.
Geez. Mr. Pegoraro barely gets a word in here and there. And on top of that the whole interview gets bogged down in uninteresting irrelevant crap about circumventing paywalls and AdBlock. What could have been an interesting interview with Mr. Pegoraro regarding the paper to phosphors transition of the news industry was squandered with Roblimo telling us how cool and smart he is.
I don't often complain about/., but this is the interview quality I'd expect coming from an average high school freshman. Completely not worth your time to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. I sure as heck wanted to buy a Cadillac CTS after seeing Matrix Reloaded. Cadillac certainly payed for product placement (i.e. advertising), and the car was so cool looking that it fit the movie perfectly.
Never mind I was in no financial position to buy one, but man, if I had been 10-15 years further into my career...
Sounds like Panasonic owes Scott Adams some royalties:
http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-...
Here's what I use regularly:
Web Browser: Chrome, then Firefox when needed. lynx if it gets bad enough. .ics file from the command line without restarting Orage.
Email Client: They all suck, but Thunderbird and alpine
Terminal: xfce4-terminal, xterm when needed
IDE: Don't need one. But please package cscope, xxdiff, and hexedit. diffuse would be helpful as well.
File manager: I accidentally start this once in a while. Then I close it ASAP.
Basic Text Editor: vim
IRC/Messaging Client: pidgin, xchat, epicII, in that order
PDF Reader: evince
Office Suite: OpenOffice, because there's no other realistic choice outside of Google Docs or Office 365.
Calendar: Lightning in Thunderbird, but it sucks. Would use Orage if it played nice with Exchange (sadly no choice in mail server at work), or if you could at least add calendar entries via an
Video Player: Don't use.
Music Player: Don't use.
Photo Viewer: eog, because I don't know what else is out there. Not a great choice, admittedly.
Screen recording: Don't use.
Exactly. I ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations on this 3.5 years ago in another Slashdot thread. https://slashdot.org/comments....
And because we're presumably too lazy to click that link, I'll paste it below for your reading pleasure...
This is why: http://what-if.xkcd.com/17/ [xkcd.com]
There simply isn't enough solar power delivered to the surface of the aircraft, even at 100% conversion efficiency, to move people and luggage using only available sunlight.
Google tells me direct illumination to a surface perpendicular to incoming full intensity sunlight is about 1.4 kW per square meter. Google also tells me that the wing surface area of a 747 is around 5500 square feet. Only half of the 747 wing is directly illuminated by sunlight at any given moment, but the surface of the fuselage could be covered with photocells as well, so 5500 square feet overall is probably a decent estimate for the directly illuminated surface area of the aircraft as a whole. And for hand-wavy purposes lets assume that the entire surface of the 747 is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight (i.e. a planar plane... pun totally intended). And that we have perfectly efficient photocells giving us 100% conversion efficiency. Running the math, this gives us around 715kW under bright direct sunlight, or about 959 horsepower -- the equivalent of 1.5 2012 Ford Shelby GT500's.
Each engine of a 747 generates around 15,000 horsepower at cruise, and around 30,000 at takeoff, and a 747 has four engines. So you need around 125 times the power generated by a perfectly efficient perfectly illuminated solar-powered 747 to get said plane off the ground, and around 65 times the power for cruising. And then you could only fly it in the middle of the day near the equator.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul area has a relatively high-tech (depending on your area of tech) employment base, with headquarters or significant offices for 3M, Medtronic, Cray, Silicon Graphics, Ceridian, Toro, Thomson Reuters, Target, Best Buy, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, St. Jude Medical, Polaris, Digi, Imation, CHS, Shutterfly, General Mills, Cargill, Seagate (though I think that operation was purchased by someone else), and Digital River. There's plenty of small tech-oriented business around here as well.
Come for the low unemployment and reasonable standard of living. Stay because your car won't start all winter.
I'd pay off my mortgage, remodel the house a little bit to make it more usable, and look around for a reasonable lightly used car to replace my wife's aging vehicle. Then I'd help my siblings (and my wife's) out by paying off mortgages, school debt, and the like. I'd set up some sort of financial structure to make sure that my wife and, should they come along, my children would live without financial stress for the rest of their lives after I pass away. And a goodly chunk right off the top would go to my church and another religious organization that was very important in my life.
After that, I'd take up a bit of travel. I'd take lots of guitar lessons and buy more music equipment than someone of my skills can reasonably justify. I'd set up an endowed foundation to perpetually help fund the type of charities and other organizations that I think need supporting. And maybe get back to taking dance lessons regularly. I'd go to more concerts, and pay for better seats and the occasional meet-and-greet. And I'd spend time developing an open-source project idea that I've had for several years. And I'd probably pay someone else to mow the lawn, tend to the flower garden, and clear the driveway of snow.
The Japanese Space Agency is already on it!
Astronaut bringing test underwear back to Earth: http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...
This article caused me to wade through my major metro area's online system to plan a trip between my new house, which is within blocks of a suburb park and ride facility, to my work, in the same town. By car this is a 10 minute trip, maybe, depending on the state of traffic lights.
At first the online system told me the trip was impossible at the time of day I specified. So I dug deep into the site and pieced together what appears to be the only possible set of routes that connects these locations without sending me to the downtown core for connections. After much digging I found that, for all practical purposes, the route is indeed impossible. It appears that, due to one key route only running in the very early morning and late rush hour, it would take me around 36 hours to commute each way.
If I took the bus all the way to the downtown core then back to work I still can't do it, because the morning bus to my work stops running before I arrive downtown.
Yeah. Not happening.
Could someone fill me in on the economics of nuclear power generation? I'd like to know what the usual payback period for a plant is, and how much it costs to operate a plant over that period.
Just doing some napkin figuring here, if the plant ran 24/7 at full capacity for a 20 year payback period, and assuming that operational costs are about the same as initial construction costs (i.e. using the $10 billion number from the summary, so $20 billion for construction and operation), that gives me a figure of about 5.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. Obviously the plant wouldn't run at full capacity for 20 years straight, but that does put something of a lower bound on the price of power generation, and it seems like a reasonable number given US electricity prices.
I'd also like to know how this compares to hydro, gas, coal, solar, wind, tidal, and any other generation method currently in use.
Most Aussies have screens that rotate mate.
Clockwise, or anti-clockwise?
If I upgrade to 2G of RAM, it looks like I can upgrade to Lion, but not Mountain Lion. I was going to upgrade the RAM anyway because it seems to run a bit sluggish, but the Mini maxes out at 2G, which is the lower limit of Lion. So it may be a wash, performance-wise.
No, it will be a huge step backwards. Do not, under any circumstance, install Lion if you can possibly avoid it. Not only is 2GB not enough to run Lion in any reasonable manner, but even if you have more RAM than that, Lion is a molasses sucking pig. The last OS for any hardware I used that was that bad and that much of a step backwards from what came before it was... umm... Wow, can't think of one. Lion wins. Or, actually, loses.
Installing it was the worst single decision I've made regarding Apple software on my early 2008 MacBook Pro. I even did a clean install from official Apple USB media (i.e. the USB fob you had to pay extra for instead of just downloading it) and upgraded RAM to 4GB on account of Lion. Take it from myself and several of my coworkers who regretted every getting within 100 feet of Lion that it is best avoided. Mountain Lion didn't suck, but only by comparison to Lion. Mavericks is a little bit better yet, but still not nearly as snappy as Snow Leopard.
My gut reaction: Don't worry about Snow Leopard being out of date, even security-wise. A man-in-the-middle is rare in most environments, and Snow Leopard is already quickly diminishing in market share, so it's not terribly likely to be widely exploited. Compared to the every day pain you'll cause yourself by installing Lion or later, the tiny risk profile of running a vulnerable Snow Leopard is worth it, in my opinion.
Your observation jives with one of my own thoughts on the matter.
Many people have something which they incorporate as the center of their identity, be it their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual proclivities, their religion, their choice of operating system, their athletic team, their place of origin, their family, their career, their hobby, and so forth. People who have convinced themselves that their very identity is tied first and foremost to one aspect of life have an incredibly strong, even visceral, reaction to anyone who expresses anything less than complete agreement with them. There is a term for this: zealotry. A zealot is unable to distinguish disagreement with their view from a personal attack or even hatred, as their very identity is melded with that for which they are zealous.
One of the most zealous sets of people we see today (at least in my myopic U.S.-centric personal experience) are homosexuals. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but my observation seems to be that this particular group of people has made homosexuality the defining feature of their life. As such, even minor disagreement with the idea that homosexuality is completely normal results in a strong adverse reaction and accusations of fear and hatred.
Personally I am saddened by this, that people have focused so strongly on one aspect of their identity so intensely that they view themselves first and foremost as that thing, rather than as a person, complete and whole. This is unhealthy, and when widespread (as we see today most strongly in both political zealotry and the zealotry of homosexuality) we end up with a fractious society that struggles to engage in a civil exchange of ideas, and at its worst can lead to quite literal violence and bloodshed.
I certainly hope not.
My sister's car was damaged when an SUV rear-ended me as I was stopped at a traffic light. The driver of the SUV did stop, but refused to identify herself and provide insurance information. I could tell by the driver's actions that she was about to flee, and quickly noted her license plate number, and sure enough she fled while I pleaded with her to reconsider what she was about to do.
It took about a month longer than it should have, but eventually the machinery of justice caught up with the driver, and my sister was made whole for her financial loss. If it hadn't been for a clear and visible license plate it is doubtful that any compensation would have ever been recovered.
Good developers knows that displays should be limited to 80 columns by 24 rows. In extreme cases 132 columns can be used, but it tends to make users all huffy.
The choice of font can be left up to the user.
While overall I liked SC2 better than SC1, I too missed the strategy game aspect of SC1, for much the same reason -- it was a quick strategy game instead of a long RPG-like adventure. SC2's humor was spot-on, so that was a huge bonus.
I remember not having a code-wheel to use to start up SC1, but my college roommates and I knew that "PARTY" was one of the answers to the startup challenge screen, so whenever we'd want to play it was "cd \games\starcon", "starcon", followed by repetitions of "party", "party", "party", then F3, until the game let us in.
Also, the SC1 music emitted by the old Radio Shack "Game Blaster" was better than that from the Sound Blaster that I replaced it with -- I can still feel the melee music in my bones 23 years later.
I have no idea if that's enough shielding to matter. However, if true, would we also see higher error rates in daytime when the body of the Earth isn't standing between the server and the Sun?
Sorry, I had LED's on the brain, but meant LCDs. If you would be so kind, please s/LED/LCD/g
Am I the only one who doesn't want brighter whites, and would even go so far as to avoid them?
On my smartphone, computer monitors, laptops, and even my old CRT monitors and TV I keep the brightness turned down. When I have opportunity to see LED TVs at my parent's place or elsewhere they always seem eye-piercingly bright, to the point where I don't care to watch them. The same goes for any LED based TV in a store -- or basically anywhere. This was one of the main reasons I was looking forward to eventually purchasing a plasma TV (instead of an LED TV) to replace my CRT TV.
Truer whites I'm all for, but brighter whites do nothing at all for me.
Thank you for mentioning this! I purchased Tracktion 3 for the Mac a number of years ago because its workflow and interface mapped better onto my brain than any alternative I could find (well, at least those I could demo for free, which was quite a few). However I was disappointed when Tracktion appeared to become an abandoned and unmaintained product, and it kept losing bits of usefulness with each OS X release. To be honest I'd given up on it and considered it to be lost money. But if it's back I'm *definitely* going in for the new version -- particularly as even the non-upgrade price is now around 20-25% of what I paid for the previous version (and an even better ratio on the upgrade price).
I initially looked at it for the purpose of MIDI sequencing, and that's what I based my purchase decision on. However I never used it for that purpose but instead have done a small number of multitracked board recordings from my live sound-guy gigs. Back before the bit-rot it did an absolute bang-up job for those projects.
But, anyway, given there's a new version and it would appear that active development has resumed, I'll definitely recommend checking it out. I mean, there's free demos for Windows, Mac, and Linux -- with certainly enough going on in the demo to determine whether it fits your style of operating and is worth purchasing.
Direct links: http://www.tracktion.com/ and http://www.tracktion.com/linux/
Nothing was lost? All the work that the government workers could have been doing during the shutdown was lost.
You mean all that work that was so important that it was deemed non-essential?
All the revenue from the National Parks were lost.
Which amounts to what, maybe a grand total of a couple million, nationwide? Maybe? The federal government burns through that in seconds.
Two weeks food inspections, drug inspections, VA claims processing were lost.
And yet safe food and drugs were still being produced, shipped, and sold. The lost value-add was... umm...? And a few VA claims are paid out to drug companies and the like about two weeks late -- yawn.
Worldwide confidence in the US and the US dollar was lost. US credit rating was compromised with the possibility of higher interest rates on new deficit.
Wake me up when people stop loaning the U.S. federal government money, charge it higher rates, or stop keeping their wealth in dollars. If anything those first two effects can't come soon enough, to put the brakes on the spending spree that's selling out of every taxpayer, particularly the younger ones who will labor under the burden of paying that debt for most of their life. I say throw the retiring Baby Boomers to the wolves -- they spent their trust fund on federal baubles for decades, and now it's time to pay the piper. That fable about the ant and the grasshopper has more than a little merit.
Scientific tests will have to be thrown out and restarted.
So this was all a job creation program for scientists, you're saying? After all, they can look forward to redoing all that work. Sounds just about as effective as the previous economic stimuli to me!
And nothing of value was lost. Or gained.
as an union will not stand for BS like that.
You're completely correct. A union would demand entirely different BS, and make you pay them for the privilege of dealing with it.
This makes me terribly sad.
There is no doubt in my mind that my father will be unable to cope with this change and be completely frustrated trying to run his fantasy football team this year. This of course means "support" calls to me, who has no interest in sports, fantasy or otherwise.
"Wait, wait," you exclaim, "the fantasy football section hasn't changed. Well, much, at least." Maybe, but my father has trouble with concepts like drag-and-drop, and is one of the stereotypical older users with whom you can expect to have this type of conversation: "Q: Which web browser are you using?" "A: Google. Or maybe Yahoo? You know, the usual one.", "Q: Sorry, which program do you use to go to Google, or Yahoo?" "A: The Internet". Coping with user interface changes is definitely not among his aptitudes, and this redesign is going to make for a long year of confusion and grumbling.
*sigh*
I don't have much to add other than I'm hugely excited for both Star Control and Battlezone. SC1 and SC2 were bedrock mainstays of my college days, and the hover-tank Battlezone released in 1998 was phenomenal.
I've since moved on to play and enjoy The Ur-Quan Masters, but even shortly after SC2's heyday and before UQM was available, I remember paying for a legit download of the PC version of the game (late '98, early '99?). If we could get network mode Melee, I'd be tickled pink. If there were a persistent universe game (ala EVE) formed out of the Star Control franchise I'd lock myself away in a room and never see the light of day again.
However I've never found a comparable game to the '98 Battlezone. The gameplay was terrifically fun, fairly easy to get started, the copy protection was a reasonable compromise (need one disc present among all the computers playing on the LAN), and I cannot remember a single stability, usability, or gameplay bug. I could very much see wasting away many hours if that were updated and brought to market again.
Geez. Mr. Pegoraro barely gets a word in here and there. And on top of that the whole interview gets bogged down in uninteresting irrelevant crap about circumventing paywalls and AdBlock. What could have been an interesting interview with Mr. Pegoraro regarding the paper to phosphors transition of the news industry was squandered with Roblimo telling us how cool and smart he is.
I don't often complain about /., but this is the interview quality I'd expect coming from an average high school freshman. Completely not worth your time to watch.