...freeking hardware. It's precisely because windows is the dominant OS that other OS users are constantly forced to suck hind tit when it comes to hardware and drivers. Don't know about you, but that got old a long time ago.
Making IE "better" so that people stay on windows is just like giving an alcoholic another drink, you aren't doing them any favors in the long run. It's called being an "enabler". You are enabling Microsoft to keep postponing actually going to work and doing something worthwhile, and you are enabling the vast herds of MS users to stay dumbed down and to stay in the economic thrall of that criminal gang of bogus software peddlars.. The users aren't learning anything new, they aren't accomplishing anything new, all they are doing is continuuing the great sucking sound of peoples wallets emptying in the direction of a pack of already zillionaires, who long ago got a case of the eXtreme lazies. These poor people need to know THERE'S MORE BRANDS out there. You AREN'T helping them by giving them some crutch, by doing microsofts job for them. Would you keep people on one brand of car or camera or something? EGADS most people don't even know there's anything but windows and this is 2005, it's ABOUT TIME the vast herds started bingoing to HOW MUCH they have been getting ripped off by the convicted monopoly abuser.
..I don't think I'd sweat now. What with the advances in flash based memeory and tiny microdrives, I think they'll solve the storage problem to give users adequate space for more than 100 songs.
Everyone and their cuzzin Leroy has been wondering when Apple would finally resurrect a PDA, this is the closest yet (if true that is). And smartphones are getting there fast.
...the primary reason most solar panels can't be over charged via mirrors or anything like that. There is one company out there now that claims it can be done with there's, but most I have seen explicitly warn against it.
The good thing about them getting hot though is they are self cleaning with snow and ice, usually they heat up enough within a few hours to just melt all that stuff off, or just a light touch with a broom and it slides off easily.
Never did it, but always thought you might be able to run coils on the back of them to use for water heating, get two birds with one stone then.
..maybe you can keep track of your tabs then! hahaha! Anyway, the guy who did the coffee study has also been looking at tea. Just coffee has more antioxidants in it.
..lose their jobs in a crashed or semi crashed economy sell their homes at a loss, or it's just taken from them. Happend to millions in the great depression. Happened to I don't know how many across the rust belt the past 20 years as blue collar manufacturting jobs got offshored. In a large area it's not quite as bad, but smaller areas with a few key employers can be devasted when the factory closes. Then all the same sort of homes get dumped on the market while people desparately look for alternative work. I know several folks that happened to back during the mini crash following the huge oil price surges of the early OPEC days. when every other home on the block has a for sale sign, people really do lose equity. Stuff happens I guess. No one can really predict, all you can do is guess based on current realities and past history. Bubble economies (based on counting your future chickens before they are hatched mindsets) lead to crashes, they always have. Most people are maxed out now,we are at the lowest savings rate and highest debt rate ever,so they (still generalizing) couldn't stand much in the way of a long term layoff/unemployment and still keep their homes, much as they still would need a place to live..
Are building their infrastructure so that their internal economy can take over. They are WAY large enough to only really need raw materials and energy soon, they won't need to export much-just like the US in the 50s and 60s. The bulk of our trade then was internal. We existed more on an cooperative economy then, the same dollar travelled around the region, funding a plethora of jobs. Now the dollar funds one or two jobs, then a few government jobs, then overseas it goes to be invested there. And back then when we didn't do that as much is when we grew the largest middle class ever seen before in the planets history.
We are in a transition now, we'll see the results IF China and India can lock in their energy and materials supplies. China in particular is doing it the smart way, they either are signing government level 20 year contracts for energy (all we do is let middleman skimmers jack the price up), or are outright buying up oilfields and mines wherever the greenbacks they have horded are still good. And building POWER, any way they can, they understand that true wealth has to be produced,it has to be manufactured, mined or grown, that's IT, anything else is just static, it's wealth rearrangement, with social/economic entropy thrown into the mix. I'd say they have completely trounced the US and Europe when it comes to long range planning, they have been playing us for suckers and letting us build their infrastructure for them. So when that time comes-which it will-when the US market is not needed, they won't care. They will have over a billion people in their own market.
Yes, it will suck here bad, sometime in the upcoming decade is my best guess. You can't have a leveling without the high areas dropping. The part not talked about as much though that will really screw the pooch is that alternative cheaper level jobs are being "insourced" to highly illegal aliens. the IT world doesn't see it, but I guarantee you the blue collars are noticing it, and when the housing bubble crash comes with the resultant lowering of the entire economy there IS going to be some political backlash over both "sourcing" in and out.
I live serious rural now, on a huge farm, and no way would I move now to the big city. I don't make much, but I know I can continue to make *some* and food and water and shelter and heat are guaranteed, and I have some solar all paid off so electricity for the next 20 years or so is guaranteed. and while some might havbe been watching the big game on the widescreen or improving their score in some FPS, today I was skinning our new greenhouse. We just went from 9 months to 12 months growing season in a big way. what we can't eat, we sell, simple concept. No matter what the economy does, people will need to eat, and if fuel prices keep going up, locally produced means locally shipped = "cheaper" to buy.
now, most all add on hardware says XP READY! Then it will say VISTA READY! And it will still be the same dismal state of affairs with plug in stuff and hope it works. That is a major issue that will turn people off unless they have a tame linux geek handy and many hours of patience.
Housing is about to take a major hit, and it will affect all sorts of ways that money is used in the economy. That and derivatives. Double whammy bad mojo. Greenspan just re-warned about the housing bubble, and it barely made the news. When 1/3 of the homeowners in the US realise that they are sitting on a massive debt that is a lot more than what their equity will ever be, there will be severe ramifications for "new shiny" stuff in the market place, as necessities will take precedence. People are going to want to reduce expenses in order to keep trying to payoff what they already owe.
No idea* how that would translate into "investment' ideas (besides buying up mortgages after the crash at discount), but it might be hard for consumers to provide the retail cash ultimately needed to purchase all this new stuff, when what has already been purchased on credit needs to be paid.
There's a reason they changed the bankruptcy laws. The law, IIRC, goes into effect in October.
*cheaper alternative energy,local produced food, and affordable transportation come to mind though. I think all the shiny electronic and internet toy stuff will take a hit. Just a guess though.
I'm a unisolar fan when it comes to solar PV. They actually put thought into the frames as well as the solar part, both my flexible modules and the rigid framed ones I have are very tough built.
The FLX-11 models on the page are the ones I have that are flexible/portable for camping, etc.. They work as advertised. Not a tremendous amount of power, but enough for some smaller gadgets. You'll need to McGuyver your connections, they ship with normal ring connectors for screw posts on storage batts, but it's doable to make a 12 VDC cig lighter plug on the end, or whatever you need. Use geek skills and stuff there. NOTE: SOLAR PANELS ARE HOT IF THERE'S LIGHT OUT. As in watch careless handling, shorts, etc. The backing is quite tough, and it has grommets in the corner for handy attaching. Lightweight enough for travelling. If you notice, they make the 32 (numbers correspond to watts basically) model as well, correspondingly larger with more capacity. As to what I have run off a battery charged with one of them, old powerbook lappie, 12 VDC fluorescent light, small TV, multiband radio, FRS radio. It takes a LONG time to get a near flat large battery up to speed, and I never tried to use them for charging any drycells, so don't know there. There's no automatic shutoff, etc, with them, so you have to use your noodle.
anything that is legally free for the copying. once it has been downloaded on demand by a patron,(or a librarian after first checking license, etc) then the library caches it, so it can pull from the local repository instead of the net. OS disks, other softwares, music,e-books, vids, podcasts, whatever. The deal is, unlike a normal lending library, the patron pays a nominal media dupe fee and gets to KEEP the media.
- "sell the disks cheaper and make it up on volume sales."...that you don't understand? I am very familiar with how the industry operates. I have worked movies, tv shows, commercials and rock music before. Take it your direction the opposite way, why don't they charge 100$ for the disk? Won't they make just tons more money?
Oh ya, they WON'T.
I am saying that at 20$, a lot of people don't buy as many disks as they might be inclined to buy, in my case it is zero. Same as when VHS tapes came out at like 79$, I bought none, but once they hit 9.99$ I started buying them, and now with the MUCH reduced costs of media reproduction,(I dare anyone to dispute that) there is NO reason for them to charge more than a few bucks per disk other than thinking they can gouge people. Now they whine they aren't selling as many as they thought they would. Well DUH. I am just pointing out why this is so, from a joe working class perspective. Same with new music CDs, people just don't want to pay that frieght, whereas if it is priced more reasonable they would sell a lot more. Production cost for the original content is the same, the only difference would be pumping out more disks, which at factory mega levels is not that much more to go from one copy to 4 copies, it is maybe another 25cents apiece more cost in volume, (something like that, cheap).
I contend that if disks were priced more as an impulse item, much cheaper, which they could be, they would sell more and they ALREADY are selling *some* brand new DVDs at 2 dollars, proving it can be done. And a lot less people would be downloading unauthorised copies. Why bother when one could grab a handful legitmately for cheap at the store?
The market is there, they just don't get it because they don't want to get it, they need to step away from expensive Hollywood and NYC digs and see how the rest of the nation lives. Hint to any of those setting the prices: the rest of the nation outside of a handful of large urban areas makes a lot less money at a median level(example, the hollywood/LA area "modest home" at a million is 150 grand in the heartland, and etc), so you can't charge as much as you might think based on what you might be able to afford. People in the rest of the nation just do not have as much "spare" cash for that stuff.
Nope, those people are out to lunch,and my theory is that they live in an environment where 20 dollars is chump change,almost nothing,so they think that way, wheras for the bulk of the customers they would like to reach it is a small but still serious chunk of cash.
At 20$ a DVD for a movie, I buy zero. If it was 5 movies for 20$ I would probably pick up a 5 pack once a month or so. And I see DVDs of very old stuff selling new for 2$ at Walmart, so I don't want hollyweird to say they couldn't sell the disks cheaper and make it up on volume sales. They are so out to lunch on pricing. Same with music basically. Now I don't download either (don't want to plus on dialup), but I would be in the market if they got real on hard media distribution and pricing. I've gone to mostly only used media I find cheap for sale.
Just am not going to pay those ridiculous prices for new music and movies for a plastic disk that costs pennies to mass produce.
The rate of change is what is more important in this scenario. Both polar regions tell the tale. It has dramatically sped up just in the past few years, it is not very gradual any longer. And it is a double whammy in those areas, once the ground areas switch from brilliant white reflect the heat ice and snow, to open exposed dark rock that absorbs the heat, it further increases the rate of radical change, ie, more ice melts right there. It goes faster and faster then. I was just an hour ago reading about greenlands massive glaciers, biologists and geologists are freaking out, they are melting so rapidly there that they keep finding new plants, etc growing, where just a few years ago it was totally barren. The problem is, if the polar regions radically melt, it slows or stops ocean thermal currents, which tend to make the 'moderate' climate areas where most humans live-moderate. If the gulf stream slows more from the arctic dumping melted icewater into it, it will make northern europe wicked cold, and cause the southern US to become unbearably hot and probably cause droughts followed by an increase in super hurricanes from the gulf regions not being able to shed excess heat.
this would just *suck*
If these changes were to take 1000 years (joe random big number), swell, we can gradually adapt to it, I wouldn't see any large problems with it,but if it takes a decade or two (joe random very small number) to drastically alter the climate, I doubt it will be pleasant. Unfortunately, the academic articles that have come out semi recently point to a profound and fast rate of change in both polar regions. This is just raw data, it is not disputable either. The rest of the planet is bound to follow.
The second and tangential part of the whole greenhouse gas debate is only partly of interest to global warming, but is primarily a health issue. The planet is becoming more urbanised, and urban areas become little micro climates and tend to trap poisonous gasses *right there*. I live rural and you can see it and smell it when you aren't used to it, whenever I am forced to go into atlanta it stinks and the air is foul, it is poisonous really, and THAT is 99% man made,and I doubt you'd get much in the way of scientific support to dispute that. If for only that reason alone, we should be pushing for alternatives to petroleum products and coal whenever possible, either replacements, more efficient use (dropping demand and burning cleaner) or by reducing the needs (better designed buildings with triple the insulation for example, etc).
guess I'd wager on a still occurring warming trend in those time frames. Reason is because the arctic in general has started melting, increasing the albedo effect, along with last weeks notice of the huge methane releases that have started in the siberian tundra. Another reason is that the oceans have been seriously degraded in the amount of carbon they can absorb. Warming and cooling are cyclical, but in this cycle it is headed towards warming. Man's contributions are just that, no less and no more.
We *are* releasing a ton of gasses, much more than can be reabsorbed, and two giant economies, india and china, are just the past few years really bumping up the volume on what they burn.
So combine that with the aforementioned geophysical realities, and it looks like more warming coming to me. How long it will last I don't know because of political wildcards. All you can do is guess, but there's only enough oil for some countries to have a robust middle class, not enough for all nations. Anyone can do the math there, it's not that hidden or weird or debateable any longer. There is x-amount projected global demand, with y amount proven reserves/refinery capacity, etc. They aren't the same number and x is a lot larger. That and other strategic minerals, etc. We just *may* have a tremendous global warfare period over natural resources and availability (some contend it has started already),and if this happens, the amount of fires started (call them megafires, as in regional sized) and resultant release of even more gasses plus extra heat that will get trapped WILL be catastrophic. and large wars have started over much less than large nations economic survival.
I think it pays to remember that "leaders" in these various very large nations by and large tend to be *quite mad*. I am pointing in all directions right now, no favorites. You cannot predict what they might do or how things might spiral out of control.
I tend to think at best, just for a SWAG, we have to go on past planetary history. We usually wind up with major wars fought by major powers with whatever the major weapons of that time period were. It has eventually always happened. I see nothing that convinces me todays humans are any better than yesterdays humans in that regard. So the combination of lame hoomannz and natural cyclical warming trends should indicate for the next generation or more we will have _more warming_.
There is a solution to this problem of tracking your tasks, I use it every day. It is in two steps:
Have one (1) boss.
Have one (1) girlfriend
that's it! whenever you are within earshot of either of those two people, THEY will tell you exactly what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. The why they keep secret on a "need to know" basis..... They are completely capable of accounting for your time 24/7, so you don't have to sweat it!
they are letting someone else do all the early market analysis and R&D. they still get to see it though, after all they are a search engine company and have the ability to stay up on all aspects of business and technology, quite easily. They are *leveraging* the ability they have (tier one level to be fair) to collect and collate mass quantities of data. They can then pick and choose the good bits that look worthwhile, and reject the rest. So therefore they get a lot of expensive free and more stable stuff by staying one step below the bleeding edge. Le$$ risky, too.
...on "technical issues" when it only runs (natively) on Windows? "Technically" every whitebox shop out there is full-up with windows boxes that are completely hosed, despite this being the year 2005, despite all the AV and firewall products available, despite all the various patches, updates and industry recommendations to people, despite MS throwing billions at it over the years and who knows how much in terms of man years of coding effort. "Technically" just about every geek out there has to fix friends and relatives windows boxes all the time. "Technically" every iteration of windows and IE was supposed to "fix" this. And somehow automagically this new effort will be "the fix"?
Let's run that by some vegas and london oddsmakers, shall we?
You could have a new 42 inch laserplasmaquantum HDTV with surround sound but if you try to use it with two pieces of twisted coat hanger and some tinfoil for your input the total results will most likely not be "technically" all that great.
exactly what I thought when I read the headline. The timing is too exact. It would have to be somewhat x86 compatable though you would think, else they wouldn't be developing on it now, they'd wait at least for prototype chips.
...they still sucked rubber donkey dong! If you had reel to reel though you could make an even worse copy! -> screech scratch scraww twang thump crash CLICK whirr, screech scratch scraw/me, been there, got the tour T shirts
Err, uhh...anyway, I think the main problem is perception by the mass entertainment media executives, the guys who make the final say-so on these decisions. Ya know, Joe Sony, Frank Paramount, Fred **AA, Harvey moovee star, Seymour rock star, whatever. Them dudes, the guys who really want all this drm nonsense.
There is one critical difference with these guys, they are millionaires already and most of us *ain't*.
They actually think what they charge is fair, cheap, and have NO IDEA why people think it's a ripoff and seek to make cheap copies. To them, 20$ a plastic disk is chump change, it's as close to "free" in their minds as it can get. They leave 20$ as a tip for a coffee and orange juice and bagel. They can't relate. No clue. Zee-roo.
And they won't ever get it, either. You'd have to drag them off and slam them on reality working class island someplace for a year to get them to come close to having a clue.
IF they had consistently dropped prices at the retail level to follow tech advances that made reproducable media cheaper,and then cheaper, then cheaper again, they would never have had much of a "piracy" problem. They DIDN'T though, and got used to mega profits. Not just ordinary profits, YEEE HAWW FAT CITY sized profits, and for some reason they think that should not only continue, but to increase, for the SAME EXACT PRODUCT. CDs should be one dollah at the store. DVDs two bux. And I don't want to hear it can't be done either, you can waltz into any walmart and get a DVD for 2$ now of some old movie or TV show, seen it with me own eyeballs and bought a Flash Gordon and a few more like that. Making copies is CHEAP, so at the retail level it needs to be CHEAP. They cannot keep the same pricing for basically the same crap, and expect to see the market stay the same or for people to stay "loyal". Just ain't gonna happen, was doomed from the start when they never dropped prices. Tech got better, it got cheaper to make product, yet they actually increased prices over the years. Of course people will notice that and use "anti price gouging circumvention methods". It's obvious as crap the lame government won't step in and demand an end to price gouging (LAWS, same as the anti piracy laws, NOT ENFORCED MUCH), they can't even get them to quit payola, and that has been around for what, like 50 years now?
Industry collusion, clueless on pricing, lame bribed off government. that's what we have now. obvious as anything. So the people ripped off give them a mostly "we're number ONE!!1!" middle digit salute. This is basic human nature here, it's not even all that advanced marketing or economics. People hate to get gouged is the real bottom line that these execs need to "leverage" into their "business strategy".
Slashdot Mirror
...freeking hardware. It's precisely because windows is the dominant OS that other OS users are constantly forced to suck hind tit when it comes to hardware and drivers. Don't know about you, but that got old a long time ago.
Making IE "better" so that people stay on windows is just like giving an alcoholic another drink, you aren't doing them any favors in the long run. It's called being an "enabler". You are enabling Microsoft to keep postponing actually going to work and doing something worthwhile, and you are enabling the vast herds of MS users to stay dumbed down and to stay in the economic thrall of that criminal gang of bogus software peddlars.. The users aren't learning anything new, they aren't accomplishing anything new, all they are doing is continuuing the great sucking sound of peoples wallets emptying in the direction of a pack of already zillionaires, who long ago got a case of the eXtreme lazies. These poor people need to know THERE'S MORE BRANDS out there. You AREN'T helping them by giving them some crutch, by doing microsofts job for them. Would you keep people on one brand of car or camera or something? EGADS most people don't even know there's anything but windows and this is 2005, it's ABOUT TIME the vast herds started bingoing to HOW MUCH they have been getting ripped off by the convicted monopoly abuser.
..I don't think I'd sweat now. What with the advances in flash based memeory and tiny microdrives, I think they'll solve the storage problem to give users adequate space for more than 100 songs.
Everyone and their cuzzin Leroy has been wondering when Apple would finally resurrect a PDA, this is the closest yet (if true that is). And smartphones are getting there fast.
..call up your home computer and stream your songs from there, if you had unlimited data or some good plan like that.
theres, theirs, sheesh...
need a new word, one size fits all, "thares" and just be done with it
...the primary reason most solar panels can't be over charged via mirrors or anything like that. There is one company out there now that claims it can be done with there's, but most I have seen explicitly warn against it.
The good thing about them getting hot though is they are self cleaning with snow and ice, usually they heat up enough within a few hours to just melt all that stuff off, or just a light touch with a broom and it slides off easily.
Never did it, but always thought you might be able to run coils on the back of them to use for water heating, get two birds with one stone then.
..maybe you can keep track of your tabs then! hahaha! Anyway, the guy who did the coffee study has also been looking at tea. Just coffee has more antioxidants in it.
..lose their jobs in a crashed or semi crashed economy sell their homes at a loss, or it's just taken from them. Happend to millions in the great depression. Happened to I don't know how many across the rust belt the past 20 years as blue collar manufacturting jobs got offshored. In a large area it's not quite as bad, but smaller areas with a few key employers can be devasted when the factory closes. Then all the same sort of homes get dumped on the market while people desparately look for alternative work. I know several folks that happened to back during the mini crash following the huge oil price surges of the early OPEC days. when every other home on the block has a for sale sign, people really do lose equity. Stuff happens I guess. No one can really predict, all you can do is guess based on current realities and past history. Bubble economies (based on counting your future chickens before they are hatched mindsets) lead to crashes, they always have. Most people are maxed out now,we are at the lowest savings rate and highest debt rate ever,so they (still generalizing) couldn't stand much in the way of a long term layoff/unemployment and still keep their homes, much as they still would need a place to live..
Are building their infrastructure so that their internal economy can take over. They are WAY large enough to only really need raw materials and energy soon, they won't need to export much-just like the US in the 50s and 60s. The bulk of our trade then was internal. We existed more on an cooperative economy then, the same dollar travelled around the region, funding a plethora of jobs. Now the dollar funds one or two jobs, then a few government jobs, then overseas it goes to be invested there. And back then when we didn't do that as much is when we grew the largest middle class ever seen before in the planets history.
We are in a transition now, we'll see the results IF China and India can lock in their energy and materials supplies. China in particular is doing it the smart way, they either are signing government level 20 year contracts for energy (all we do is let middleman skimmers jack the price up), or are outright buying up oilfields and mines wherever the greenbacks they have horded are still good. And building POWER, any way they can, they understand that true wealth has to be produced,it has to be manufactured, mined or grown, that's IT, anything else is just static, it's wealth rearrangement, with social/economic entropy thrown into the mix. I'd say they have completely trounced the US and Europe when it comes to long range planning, they have been playing us for suckers and letting us build their infrastructure for them. So when that time comes-which it will-when the US market is not needed, they won't care. They will have over a billion people in their own market.
Yes, it will suck here bad, sometime in the upcoming decade is my best guess. You can't have a leveling without the high areas dropping. The part not talked about as much though that will really screw the pooch is that alternative cheaper level jobs are being "insourced" to highly illegal aliens. the IT world doesn't see it, but I guarantee you the blue collars are noticing it, and when the housing bubble crash comes with the resultant lowering of the entire economy there IS going to be some political backlash over both "sourcing" in and out.
I live serious rural now, on a huge farm, and no way would I move now to the big city. I don't make much, but I know I can continue to make *some* and food and water and shelter and heat are guaranteed, and I have some solar all paid off so electricity for the next 20 years or so is guaranteed. and while some might havbe been watching the big game on the widescreen or improving their score in some FPS, today I was skinning our new greenhouse. We just went from 9 months to 12 months growing season in a big way. what we can't eat, we sell, simple concept. No matter what the economy does, people will need to eat, and if fuel prices keep going up, locally produced means locally shipped = "cheaper" to buy.
I like covering the options.
now, most all add on hardware says XP READY! Then it will say VISTA READY! And it will still be the same dismal state of affairs with plug in stuff and hope it works. That is a major issue that will turn people off unless they have a tame linux geek handy and many hours of patience.
Housing is about to take a major hit, and it will affect all sorts of ways that money is used in the economy. That and derivatives. Double whammy bad mojo. Greenspan just re-warned about the housing bubble, and it barely made the news. When 1/3 of the homeowners in the US realise that they are sitting on a massive debt that is a lot more than what their equity will ever be, there will be severe ramifications for "new shiny" stuff in the market place, as necessities will take precedence. People are going to want to reduce expenses in order to keep trying to payoff what they already owe.
No idea* how that would translate into "investment' ideas (besides buying up mortgages after the crash at discount), but it might be hard for consumers to provide the retail cash ultimately needed to purchase all this new stuff, when what has already been purchased on credit needs to be paid.
There's a reason they changed the bankruptcy laws. The law, IIRC, goes into effect in October.
*cheaper alternative energy,local produced food, and affordable transportation come to mind though. I think all the shiny electronic and internet toy stuff will take a hit. Just a guess though.
http://www.uni-solar.com/cons_products_marine.html
I'm a unisolar fan when it comes to solar PV. They actually put thought into the frames as well as the solar part, both my flexible modules and the rigid framed ones I have are very tough built.
The FLX-11 models on the page are the ones I have that are flexible/portable for camping, etc.. They work as advertised. Not a tremendous amount of power, but enough for some smaller gadgets. You'll need to McGuyver your connections, they ship with normal ring connectors for screw posts on storage batts, but it's doable to make a 12 VDC cig lighter plug on the end, or whatever you need. Use geek skills and stuff there. NOTE: SOLAR PANELS ARE HOT IF THERE'S LIGHT OUT. As in watch careless handling, shorts, etc. The backing is quite tough, and it has grommets in the corner for handy attaching. Lightweight enough for travelling. If you notice, they make the 32 (numbers correspond to watts basically) model as well, correspondingly larger with more capacity. As to what I have run off a battery charged with one of them, old powerbook lappie, 12 VDC fluorescent light, small TV, multiband radio, FRS radio. It takes a LONG time to get a near flat large battery up to speed, and I never tried to use them for charging any drycells, so don't know there. There's no automatic shutoff, etc, with them, so you have to use your noodle.
..."games" would be more appropriate.
anything that is legally free for the copying. once it has been downloaded on demand by a patron,(or a librarian after first checking license, etc) then the library caches it, so it can pull from the local repository instead of the net. OS disks, other softwares, music,e-books, vids, podcasts, whatever. The deal is, unlike a normal lending library, the patron pays a nominal media dupe fee and gets to KEEP the media.
I like this "Thanks to the Internet there are so many more fish in the content sea..." right on!
- "sell the disks cheaper and make it up on volume sales."...that you don't understand? I am very familiar with how the industry operates. I have worked movies, tv shows, commercials and rock music before. Take it your direction the opposite way, why don't they charge 100$ for the disk? Won't they make just tons more money?
Oh ya, they WON'T.
I am saying that at 20$, a lot of people don't buy as many disks as they might be inclined to buy, in my case it is zero. Same as when VHS tapes came out at like 79$, I bought none, but once they hit 9.99$ I started buying them, and now with the MUCH reduced costs of media reproduction,(I dare anyone to dispute that) there is NO reason for them to charge more than a few bucks per disk other than thinking they can gouge people. Now they whine they aren't selling as many as they thought they would. Well DUH. I am just pointing out why this is so, from a joe working class perspective. Same with new music CDs, people just don't want to pay that frieght, whereas if it is priced more reasonable they would sell a lot more. Production cost for the original content is the same, the only difference would be pumping out more disks, which at factory mega levels is not that much more to go from one copy to 4 copies, it is maybe another 25cents apiece more cost in volume, (something like that, cheap).
I contend that if disks were priced more as an impulse item, much cheaper, which they could be, they would sell more and they ALREADY are selling *some* brand new DVDs at 2 dollars, proving it can be done. And a lot less people would be downloading unauthorised copies. Why bother when one could grab a handful legitmately for cheap at the store?
The market is there, they just don't get it because they don't want to get it, they need to step away from expensive Hollywood and NYC digs and see how the rest of the nation lives. Hint to any of those setting the prices: the rest of the nation outside of a handful of large urban areas makes a lot less money at a median level(example, the hollywood/LA area "modest home" at a million is 150 grand in the heartland, and etc), so you can't charge as much as you might think based on what you might be able to afford. People in the rest of the nation just do not have as much "spare" cash for that stuff.
Nope, those people are out to lunch,and my theory is that they live in an environment where 20 dollars is chump change,almost nothing,so they think that way, wheras for the bulk of the customers they would like to reach it is a small but still serious chunk of cash.
At 20$ a DVD for a movie, I buy zero. If it was 5 movies for 20$ I would probably pick up a 5 pack once a month or so. And I see DVDs of very old stuff selling new for 2$ at Walmart, so I don't want hollyweird to say they couldn't sell the disks cheaper and make it up on volume sales. They are so out to lunch on pricing. Same with music basically. Now I don't download either (don't want to plus on dialup), but I would be in the market if they got real on hard media distribution and pricing. I've gone to mostly only used media I find cheap for sale.
Just am not going to pay those ridiculous prices for new music and movies for a plastic disk that costs pennies to mass produce.
The rate of change is what is more important in this scenario. Both polar regions tell the tale. It has dramatically sped up just in the past few years, it is not very gradual any longer. And it is a double whammy in those areas, once the ground areas switch from brilliant white reflect the heat ice and snow, to open exposed dark rock that absorbs the heat, it further increases the rate of radical change, ie, more ice melts right there. It goes faster and faster then. I was just an hour ago reading about greenlands massive glaciers, biologists and geologists are freaking out, they are melting so rapidly there that they keep finding new plants, etc growing, where just a few years ago it was totally barren. The problem is, if the polar regions radically melt, it slows or stops ocean thermal currents, which tend to make the 'moderate' climate areas where most humans live-moderate. If the gulf stream slows more from the arctic dumping melted icewater into it, it will make northern europe wicked cold, and cause the southern US to become unbearably hot and probably cause droughts followed by an increase in super hurricanes from the gulf regions not being able to shed excess heat.
this would just *suck*
If these changes were to take 1000 years (joe random big number), swell, we can gradually adapt to it, I wouldn't see any large problems with it,but if it takes a decade or two (joe random very small number) to drastically alter the climate, I doubt it will be pleasant. Unfortunately, the academic articles that have come out semi recently point to a profound and fast rate of change in both polar regions. This is just raw data, it is not disputable either. The rest of the planet is bound to follow.
The second and tangential part of the whole greenhouse gas debate is only partly of interest to global warming, but is primarily a health issue. The planet is becoming more urbanised, and urban areas become little micro climates and tend to trap poisonous gasses *right there*. I live rural and you can see it and smell it when you aren't used to it, whenever I am forced to go into atlanta it stinks and the air is foul, it is poisonous really, and THAT is 99% man made,and I doubt you'd get much in the way of scientific support to dispute that. If for only that reason alone, we should be pushing for alternatives to petroleum products and coal whenever possible, either replacements, more efficient use (dropping demand and burning cleaner) or by reducing the needs (better designed buildings with triple the insulation for example, etc).
We *are* releasing a ton of gasses, much more than can be reabsorbed, and two giant economies, india and china, are just the past few years really bumping up the volume on what they burn.
So combine that with the aforementioned geophysical realities, and it looks like more warming coming to me. How long it will last I don't know because of political wildcards. All you can do is guess, but there's only enough oil for some countries to have a robust middle class, not enough for all nations. Anyone can do the math there, it's not that hidden or weird or debateable any longer. There is x-amount projected global demand, with y amount proven reserves/refinery capacity, etc. They aren't the same number and x is a lot larger. That and other strategic minerals, etc. We just *may* have a tremendous global warfare period over natural resources and availability (some contend it has started already),and if this happens, the amount of fires started (call them megafires, as in regional sized) and resultant release of even more gasses plus extra heat that will get trapped WILL be catastrophic. and large wars have started over much less than large nations economic survival.
I think it pays to remember that "leaders" in these various very large nations by and large tend to be *quite mad*. I am pointing in all directions right now, no favorites. You cannot predict what they might do or how things might spiral out of control.
I tend to think at best, just for a SWAG, we have to go on past planetary history. We usually wind up with major wars fought by major powers with whatever the major weapons of that time period were. It has eventually always happened. I see nothing that convinces me todays humans are any better than yesterdays humans in that regard. So the combination of lame hoomannz and natural cyclical warming trends should indicate for the next generation or more we will have _more warming_.
Have one (1) boss.
Have one (1) girlfriend
that's it! whenever you are within earshot of either of those two people, THEY will tell you exactly what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. The why they keep secret on a "need to know" basis..... They are completely capable of accounting for your time 24/7, so you don't have to sweat it!
%^(
they are letting someone else do all the early market analysis and R&D. they still get to see it though, after all they are a search engine company and have the ability to stay up on all aspects of business and technology, quite easily. They are *leveraging* the ability they have (tier one level to be fair) to collect and collate mass quantities of data. They can then pick and choose the good bits that look worthwhile, and reject the rest. So therefore they get a lot of expensive free and more stable stuff by staying one step below the bleeding edge. Le$$ risky, too.
I was just reading a press release about some new dvd being released to commemorate the blues brothers movie, 25 years.
How ya feel now?
are you going to do a linux and mac client?
someone had to ask....
...on "technical issues" when it only runs (natively) on Windows? "Technically" every whitebox shop out there is full-up with windows boxes that are completely hosed, despite this being the year 2005, despite all the AV and firewall products available, despite all the various patches, updates and industry recommendations to people, despite MS throwing billions at it over the years and who knows how much in terms of man years of coding effort. "Technically" just about every geek out there has to fix friends and relatives windows boxes all the time. "Technically" every iteration of windows and IE was supposed to "fix" this. And somehow automagically this new effort will be "the fix"?
Let's run that by some vegas and london oddsmakers, shall we?
You could have a new 42 inch laserplasmaquantum HDTV with surround sound but if you try to use it with two pieces of twisted coat hanger and some tinfoil for your input the total results will most likely not be "technically" all that great.
exactly what I thought when I read the headline. The timing is too exact. It would have to be somewhat x86 compatable though you would think, else they wouldn't be developing on it now, they'd wait at least for prototype chips.
...they still sucked rubber donkey dong! If you had reel to reel though you could make an even worse copy! -> screech scratch scraww twang thump crash CLICK whirr, screech scratch scraw /me, been there, got the tour T shirts
Err, uhh...anyway, I think the main problem is perception by the mass entertainment media executives, the guys who make the final say-so on these decisions. Ya know, Joe Sony, Frank Paramount, Fred **AA, Harvey moovee star, Seymour rock star, whatever. Them dudes, the guys who really want all this drm nonsense.
There is one critical difference with these guys, they are millionaires already and most of us *ain't*.
They actually think what they charge is fair, cheap, and have NO IDEA why people think it's a ripoff and seek to make cheap copies. To them, 20$ a plastic disk is chump change, it's as close to "free" in their minds as it can get. They leave 20$ as a tip for a coffee and orange juice and bagel. They can't relate. No clue. Zee-roo.
And they won't ever get it, either. You'd have to drag them off and slam them on reality working class island someplace for a year to get them to come close to having a clue.
IF they had consistently dropped prices at the retail level to follow tech advances that made reproducable media cheaper,and then cheaper, then cheaper again, they would never have had much of a "piracy" problem. They DIDN'T though, and got used to mega profits. Not just ordinary profits, YEEE HAWW FAT CITY sized profits, and for some reason they think that should not only continue, but to increase, for the SAME EXACT PRODUCT. CDs should be one dollah at the store. DVDs two bux. And I don't want to hear it can't be done either, you can waltz into any walmart and get a DVD for 2$ now of some old movie or TV show, seen it with me own eyeballs and bought a Flash Gordon and a few more like that. Making copies is CHEAP, so at the retail level it needs to be CHEAP. They cannot keep the same pricing for basically the same crap, and expect to see the market stay the same or for people to stay "loyal". Just ain't gonna happen, was doomed from the start when they never dropped prices. Tech got better, it got cheaper to make product, yet they actually increased prices over the years. Of course people will notice that and use "anti price gouging circumvention methods". It's obvious as crap the lame government won't step in and demand an end to price gouging (LAWS, same as the anti piracy laws, NOT ENFORCED MUCH), they can't even get them to quit payola, and that has been around for what, like 50 years now?
Industry collusion, clueless on pricing, lame bribed off government. that's what we have now. obvious as anything. So the people ripped off give them a mostly "we're number ONE!!1!" middle digit salute. This is basic human nature here, it's not even all that advanced marketing or economics. People hate to get gouged is the real bottom line that these execs need to "leverage" into their "business strategy".