The take up of DVD and CD technologies has been driven by content. However, sales of "CD plus" technology (high resolution CD, DVD-audio) are going nowhere fast, despite the hype.
While these technologies will be nice to have for storage, I can't see that joe average is suddenly going to go out and re-buy their DVD collection.
I believe the average punter has a fairly good feel for what is 'good enough' and it won't take off.
I suspect that this is driven by Hollywood with its hand up Microsoft's bottom pulling the strings, wanting to move away from the CD and DVD debacle as soon as it can. Unfortunately the genie is out of the bag.
(mixed metaphors are the new black).
IAAD, and I am short sighted. I need glasses for pretty much everything. (cue formulaic joke).
The current technologies are primative, and if they go wrong, you are completely f@scked.
Also, we have no long term data on how these eye mods go as they get older. With case mods, you just go and get another case.
My eyes are not great, but I have glasses which can correct my vision to 6/5 (we think in metric). I am not prepared to take the risk of irrepairably damaging my eyesight just to ditch two of my four eyes. Don't do it.
[ As an aside, the ophthalmologists who do this sort of operation have a reputation as money grubbing shysters, and grossly oversell the benefits of the operation. All the ones I have met who do this sort of thing are pricks, and I wouldn't go near them. But don't let that put you off. ]
This may have more to do with clearing old inventory in retail channels ahead of the traditional educational back to school computer bonanza.
A well timed announcement of a really sexy new iMac in August will get everyone excited, without cannibalising sales of the present generation of stock.
I am a hospital doctor, and we only hire doctors who have either come from hospitals we know (and can trust) OR we give them a short set of multi-choice questions, and see a few patients with them.
We find that the quantitative test (MCQ) separates out the complete no-hopers (like your test, but probably a bit more reliable as there are 50 questions), and that the qualitative test (watching them work) helps differentiate the good candidates.
A better solution on the same lines would be a bluetooth phone and the new bluetooth frogpad which is available for pre-order - looks like the dog's knob.
Assuming the phone has GPRS, it would enable you to email your log to yourself, providing a good backup.
Not cheap, but a good geeky solution which justifies the purchase of a new toy (I've just ordered one!).
The prestigious (UK) universities often do not offer much support. My wife did her DPhil at a Oxford and got very little in the way of active support. A lot of these places just expect you to get on with it yourself, find your own funds etc.
A high percentage of the Americans in the same situation did not complete their research degrees (e.g. Bill Clinton) as they were so used to being spoon-fed.
I am doing a PhD in Australia at one of the two 'prestigious' universities here and have been pleased by the support I have got, but a lot of that may be down to choosing the right supervisor. A high profile supervisor often won't give you a lot of support, but having their name on your papers makes it easier to publish in better journals.
I would say the first question you need to decide whether you need to do a PhD which is pure research, or part taught.
As it sounds like you don't have much in the way of reesearch skills/ experience, you would probably be better going down the Masters route first, and then converting. This has the benefit of allowing you to bail out gracefully with at least some evidence of activity if it turns out to be not your scene.
While your post implies a certain US imperialism, I have found that my hard-won professional (medical) qualifications in one country (UK) have been worthless in another (Australia), and so it does make sense to get the degree in the country in which you intend to use it, if you can predict that (which you probably can't).
(so far: MSc, MBA, MRCP, FRCS, and am now halfway through PhD)
If I may politely disagree with both of you..... I think it may be your soundcards
I recently bought electrostatic headphones, (stax) complete with valve amplifier which are pretty much the headphone ultimate reference. I rip to flac and then use dbpower to go to LAME --preset standard.
The thing which I did which made a BIG difference was to buy a high quality second hand DAC (D to A converter) for $100 made by Meridian. Because hi-fi people are sad and lonely and spend all their money on new stuff, these DACs can be picked up dirt cheap - and you just pipe your SPDIF straight in.
When I was listening on crappy soundcards, I did find there was a big difference between flac and a well encoded mp3, so either a decent DAC makes a difference (or my hearing has become shite)
I thought I had read this article before, and then I realised, I had read it before...
(although I now realise that you are not supposed to read the linked articles before posting comments - sorry)
Definitely the way to go: I used to use just laptops for the same problem - now I use my own laptop with VMWare - that way I can devleop stuff at work/ home/ university.
The other big plus is that if your virtual machine falls over in a big way, you just load up a new virtual machine, and away you go. It also solves the problem about testing with multiple client OS's.
I certainly agree that you need shedloads of memory - 1 Gig is the minimum to run a couple of guest VMs and a host OS without your machine swapping all the time.
I am thinking of something similar, and am planning to incorporate VOIP to replace the current PBX system, and also a security camera or two, as well as my slim devices mp3 server, but wanted to have plenty of bandwidth headroom (Yes it is a big house) so was wondering about GB Ethernet for possibly similar reasons.
my guess about why redhat is not offering indemnification is that it would be setting itself up as an easy target.
Maybe RH figures (not unreasonably) that it is better to let the big boys slug it out. I think if it were a choice between RH's lawyers and IBM's lawyers, I know who SCO would go for.
This may not be a complete disaster, as a it will provide a stimulation to the micropayment technologies, which could be useful to subsidise low cost environments such as open source content projects e.g. wikipedia.
The marginal cost to the really big (Fox, CNN) and/or publicly funded institutions (BBC) of providing web-based news is probably pretty low, and it is effectively a loss leader to bring people into their portal, so there is not really an incentive to charge, so I don't think free general news is disappearing any time soon.
Re:Pharmaceutical Industry?
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is certainly true, and there are many instances of big pharma promoting drugs for unlicensed usage, or made updiseases
The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g. Multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy.
This is the malignant end of astroturfing, and many of these supposedly educational sites have a message "this drug works and your doctor better give it to you".
Unfortunately these sort of 'infomercial'/'advertorial' websites do not come under any advertising control body, especially if they are produced at arms length by a 'charity/ self help group'.
I know GPs (Family Physicians) in affluent areas who spend a lot of their time fending off the 'worried well' who look up stuff on the internet. It is actually these people, rather than the true cyberchondriac (who are relatively easy to spot) who make our life difficult, as they haven't bothered to learn probability or epidemiology on their trawl through the websites.
Agree.
I have got a Kensington one where the mouse lead retracts into the body of the mouse, so it doesn't get tangled up with everything in my bag, although there are now some sexy cordless and optical/ bluetooth ones.
I now have a laptop bag (airline washbag I got from the one time I flew business) which has:
mouse
usb2 256MB key
usb2 40GB laptop HDD with music/backup
C-Pen (brilliant for research)
Headphones (Sennheiser PX100, upgrading shortly to etymotics 4P)
retractable telephone cord with adaptors
mains adapter
I use enough of these often enough to justify carrying them around, but see how you go. I have built in 802.11 and B/T, which helps. A decent set of headphones is essential. It stops people talking to you when you are trying to work.
This may be 'finalised' but it has got to get through both houses of parliament, and in the run up to a close election, with any luck the Senate (the upper house) will eviscerate the "DMCA by stealth" approach. At least they didn't get to shaft the Australian pharmaceutical scheme, which the US pharmas desperately wanted to do, as it is very cheap and fair.
A link to the Australian Broadcasting Council news story on the same item.
This certainly occurs, and I have been guilty myself, but it only happens because the IT people are so useless.
I would say that they are overworked, but they're not, they are just incompetent. (this is partly because health in the UK has yet to recognise IT as a core business skill, and pay accordingly)
It would be interesting to see if sales of CDR and DVDRs went up.
Also, what is to stop an informal, peer to peer wireless service starting up?
All the authorities probably want is to not be liable to the RIAA. They don't care whether you download songs or not, they just don't want the RIAA knocking at their door. They are also picking up the tab for all that bandwidth as well.
They probably realise that their students will get round it anyway, or if they don't, it doesn't say much for the ingenuity of UF students.
IAAD, and have just bought the toshiba (now heavily discounted) as a good notebook (PIII 1.33G seems faster than most 2.2GHz P4 notebooks I have played with + 1G RAM - I use vmware for development) and to play with the tablet.
The thing that gets me is that at work it is brightly lit (I am an ED physician) with lots of overhead flouro. I start using the tablet, and I get masses of glare. Great for meetings in rooms with no direct light (i.e. uplighters) where the PHBs live, but if we were to use this technology on the wards, it would be very fatigueing, unless they change the lighting.
If deputy Sheriff Howard wants to align copyright with anything, wouldn't it be more logical to align it with patents e.g. 20 years?
Bearing in mind the time value of money, this would not significantly affect the Net Present Value i.e. the business case of any project. It would have the opposite effect of driving innovation in arts in the same way that occurs in engineering/ medicine.
I feel an attack of dukenukemforeverphobia coming on....and I think my halflife2phobia is also playing up...
Unfortunately, doctors have told me that my dukenukemforeverphobia may be incurable, but halflife2phobia has a cure on the way, even though the secret formula has leaked out.
OK so 50 big ones would keep you and me in toys for a few weeks. But this is a venture capital firm and with poor interest rates, poor growth, property market about to go down the pan etc. this is just a reasonable gamble, for those with the money to play at this kind of table.
If SCO wins, God Forbid, they will have 20% of a company worth 5-10bn minimum.
Its like going to the races and putting on 50 million on a 40-1 outsider. Except that in this instance, by giving the horse 50 million, you increase its chance of winning substantially.
I agree - it's very rare to see anyone actually doing any serious writing with a Mont Blanc. In addition the italic nibs for a lot of these posh pens never seem to be great.
I am a doctor, so do a lot of writing, and am always losing pens, but no one has ever taken any of my Rotring Art Pen fountain pens.
German engineering, cheap - about $10 and near indestructable. I have bought about 20 in case they stop making them. I chop off the long stem bit, and put in a brass screw as a counterweight - pretty geeky huh doing my own pen mod?
Pelican ink (who used to make the Rotring ink) is the best, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
The take up of DVD and CD technologies has been driven by content. However, sales of "CD plus" technology (high resolution CD, DVD-audio) are going nowhere fast, despite the hype.
While these technologies will be nice to have for storage, I can't see that joe average is suddenly going to go out and re-buy their DVD collection.
I believe the average punter has a fairly good feel for what is 'good enough' and it won't take off.
I suspect that this is driven by Hollywood with its hand up Microsoft's bottom pulling the strings, wanting to move away from the CD and DVD debacle as soon as it can. Unfortunately the genie is out of the bag.
(mixed metaphors are the new black).
wrong.
IAAD, and I am short sighted. I need glasses for pretty much everything. (cue formulaic joke).
The current technologies are primative, and if they go wrong, you are completely f@scked.
Also, we have no long term data on how these eye mods go as they get older. With case mods, you just go and get another case.
My eyes are not great, but I have glasses which can correct my vision to 6/5 (we think in metric). I am not prepared to take the risk of irrepairably damaging my eyesight just to ditch two of my four eyes. Don't do it.
[ As an aside, the ophthalmologists who do this sort of operation have a reputation as money grubbing shysters, and grossly oversell the benefits of the operation. All the ones I have met who do this sort of thing are pricks, and I wouldn't go near them. But don't let that put you off. ]
This may have more to do with clearing old inventory in retail channels ahead of the traditional educational back to school computer bonanza.
A well timed announcement of a really sexy new iMac in August will get everyone excited, without cannibalising sales of the present generation of stock.
I am a hospital doctor, and we only hire doctors who have either come from hospitals we know (and can trust)
OR
we give them a short set of multi-choice questions, and see a few patients with them.
We find that the quantitative test (MCQ) separates out the complete no-hopers (like your test, but probably a bit more reliable as there are 50 questions), and that the qualitative test (watching them work) helps differentiate the good candidates.
A better solution on the same lines would be a bluetooth phone and the new bluetooth frogpad which is available for pre-order - looks like the dog's knob.
Assuming the phone has GPRS, it would enable you to email your log to yourself, providing a good backup.
Not cheap, but a good geeky solution which justifies the purchase of a new toy (I've just ordered one!).
The prestigious (UK) universities often do not offer much support. My wife did her DPhil at a Oxford and got very little in the way of active support. A lot of these places just expect you to get on with it yourself, find your own funds etc.
A high percentage of the Americans in the same situation did not complete their research degrees (e.g. Bill Clinton) as they were so used to being spoon-fed.
I am doing a PhD in Australia at one of the two 'prestigious' universities here and have been pleased by the support I have got, but a lot of that may be down to choosing the right supervisor. A high profile supervisor often won't give you a lot of support, but having their name on your papers makes it easier to publish in better journals.
I would say the first question you need to decide whether you need to do a PhD which is pure research, or part taught.
As it sounds like you don't have much in the way of reesearch skills/ experience, you would probably be better going down the Masters route first, and then converting. This has the benefit of allowing you to bail out gracefully with at least some evidence of activity if it turns out to be not your scene.
While your post implies a certain US imperialism, I have found that my hard-won professional (medical) qualifications in one country (UK) have been worthless in another (Australia), and so it does make sense to get the degree in the country in which you intend to use it, if you can predict that (which you probably can't).
(so far: MSc, MBA, MRCP, FRCS, and am now halfway through PhD)
If I may politely disagree with both of you..... I think it may be your soundcards
I recently bought electrostatic headphones, (stax) complete with valve amplifier which are pretty much the headphone ultimate reference.
I rip to flac and then use dbpower to go to LAME --preset standard.
The thing which I did which made a BIG difference was to buy a high quality second hand DAC (D to A converter) for $100 made by Meridian. Because hi-fi people are sad and lonely and spend all their money on new stuff, these DACs can be picked up dirt cheap - and you just pipe your SPDIF straight in.
When I was listening on crappy soundcards, I did find there was a big difference between flac and a well encoded mp3, so either a decent DAC makes a difference (or my hearing has become shite)
Recycling without attribution is the first casualty of bad journalism.
I thought I had read this article before, and then I realised, I had read it before...
(although I now realise that you are not supposed to read the linked articles before posting comments - sorry)
Definitely the way to go: I used to use just laptops for the same problem - now I use my own laptop with VMWare - that way I can devleop stuff at work/ home/ university.
The other big plus is that if your virtual machine falls over in a big way, you just load up a new virtual machine, and away you go.
It also solves the problem about testing with multiple client OS's.
I certainly agree that you need shedloads of memory - 1 Gig is the minimum to run a couple of guest VMs and a host OS without your machine swapping all the time.
I am thinking of something similar, and am planning to incorporate VOIP to replace the current PBX system, and also a security camera or two, as well as my slim devices mp3 server, but wanted to have plenty of bandwidth headroom (Yes it is a big house) so was wondering about GB Ethernet for possibly similar reasons.
my guess about why redhat is not offering indemnification is that it would be setting itself up as an easy target.
Maybe RH figures (not unreasonably) that it is better to let the big boys slug it out. I think if it were a choice between RH's lawyers and IBM's lawyers, I know who SCO would go for.
This may not be a complete disaster, as a it will provide a stimulation to the micropayment technologies, which could be useful to subsidise low cost environments such as open source content projects e.g. wikipedia.
The marginal cost to the really big (Fox, CNN) and/or publicly funded institutions (BBC) of providing web-based news is probably pretty low, and it is effectively a loss leader to bring people into their portal, so there is not really an incentive to charge, so I don't think free general news is disappearing any time soon.
This is certainly true, and there are many instances of big pharma promoting drugs for unlicensed usage, or made up diseases
The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g. Multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy. This is the malignant end of astroturfing, and many of these supposedly educational sites have a message "this drug works and your doctor better give it to you".
Unfortunately these sort of 'infomercial'/'advertorial' websites do not come under any advertising control body, especially if they are produced at arms length by a 'charity/ self help group'.
I know GPs (Family Physicians) in affluent areas who spend a lot of their time fending off the 'worried well' who look up stuff on the internet. It is actually these people, rather than the true cyberchondriac (who are relatively easy to spot) who make our life difficult, as they haven't bothered to learn probability or epidemiology on their trawl through the websites.
Agree.
I have got a Kensington one where the mouse lead retracts into the body of the mouse, so it doesn't get tangled up with everything in my bag, although there are now some sexy cordless and optical/ bluetooth ones.
I now have a laptop bag (airline washbag I got from the one time I flew business) which has:
- mouse
- usb2 256MB key
- usb2 40GB laptop HDD with music/backup
- C-Pen (brilliant for research)
- Headphones (Sennheiser PX100, upgrading shortly to etymotics 4P)
- retractable telephone cord with adaptors
- mains adapter
I use enough of these often enough to justify carrying them around, but see how you go. I have built in 802.11 and B/T, which helps. A decent set of headphones is essential. It stops people talking to you when you are trying to work.This may be 'finalised' but it has got to get through both houses of parliament, and in the run up to a close election, with any luck the Senate (the upper house) will eviscerate the "DMCA by stealth" approach. At least they didn't get to shaft the Australian pharmaceutical scheme, which the US pharmas desperately wanted to do, as it is very cheap and fair.
A link to the Australian Broadcasting Council news story on the same item.
This certainly occurs, and I have been guilty myself, but it only happens because the IT people are so useless.
I would say that they are overworked, but they're not, they are just incompetent. (this is partly because health in the UK has yet to recognise IT as a core business skill, and pay accordingly)
Actually, pharmaceutical companies do create'diseases' to sell more of their products.
Isn't corporate capitalism wonderful?
It would be interesting to see if sales of CDR and DVDRs went up.
Also, what is to stop an informal, peer to peer wireless service starting up?
All the authorities probably want is to not be liable to the RIAA. They don't care whether you download songs or not, they just don't want the RIAA knocking at their door. They are also picking up the tab for all that bandwidth as well.
They probably realise that their students will get round it anyway, or if they don't, it doesn't say much for the ingenuity of UF students.
I have been with RedHat since 5.1, and so the question becomes: Debian or Suse?
I need a very stable predictable platform, so maybe Debian, now it has a better intaller for a non-ubergeek like me, is the way to go.
IAAD, and have just bought the toshiba (now heavily discounted) as a good notebook (PIII 1.33G seems faster than most 2.2GHz P4 notebooks I have played with + 1G RAM - I use vmware for development) and to play with the tablet.
The thing that gets me is that at work it is brightly lit (I am an ED physician) with lots of overhead flouro. I start using the tablet, and I get masses of glare. Great for meetings in rooms with no direct light (i.e. uplighters) where the PHBs live, but if we were to use this technology on the wards, it would be very fatigueing, unless they change the lighting.
Anyone else found the same?
If deputy Sheriff Howard wants to align copyright with anything, wouldn't it be more logical to align it with patents e.g. 20 years?
Bearing in mind the time value of money, this would not significantly affect the Net Present Value i.e. the business case of any project.
It would have the opposite effect of driving innovation in arts in the same way that occurs in engineering/ medicine.
I feel an attack of dukenukemforeverphobia coming on....and I think my halflife2phobia is also playing up...
Unfortunately, doctors have told me that my dukenukemforeverphobia may be incurable, but halflife2phobia has a cure on the way, even though the secret formula has leaked out.
OK so 50 big ones would keep you and me in toys for a few weeks. But this is a venture capital firm and with poor interest rates, poor growth, property market about to go down the pan etc. this is just a reasonable gamble, for those with the money to play at this kind of table.
If SCO wins, God Forbid, they will have 20% of a company worth 5-10bn minimum.
Its like going to the races and putting on 50 million on a 40-1 outsider. Except that in this instance, by giving the horse 50 million, you increase its chance of winning substantially.
I thought they were all in prison. Well one of them anyway.
Anyway why hasn't Richard E Grant of the legendary Withnail and I got the role?
I agree - it's very rare to see anyone actually doing any serious writing with a Mont Blanc. In addition the italic nibs for a lot of these posh pens never seem to be great.
I am a doctor, so do a lot of writing, and am always losing pens, but no one has ever taken any of my Rotring Art Pen fountain pens.
German engineering, cheap - about $10 and near indestructable. I have bought about 20 in case they stop making them. I chop off the long stem bit, and put in a brass screw as a counterweight - pretty geeky huh doing my own pen mod?
Pelican ink (who used to make the Rotring ink) is the best, IMHO.