A co-worker where I used to work would charge a cap and then call someone's name ("Hey, Bob!"). He'd toss the cap as they were turning around and they'd catch a nice suprise. He always chose people who he could outrun.
I'm sorry, but when I moderate, I moderate the comment, not the poster. I don't give a fuck if the guy goes around all day posting about his love of raping babies; if his comment here is relevant, it will be moderated accordingly. Go take your thought police bullshit somewhere else.
I think you misunderstood the question. He is asking for a way to display multiple video feeds on one large display (in this case, a projector). But what he wants is more than a simple PIP function.
Re:They aren't as dangerous as before
on
Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
I can attest to this. SBC majorly sucks on toast. Just initiating for them to turn on the telephone service for the first time(translation: click "OK" at the call center) costs $50.
No. That's not how it's done at all. Actually, human beings still have to wire your cable pair to a line card in the CO, then configure the switch to add you. Billing needs to be set up. From start to finish, setting up a new line is probably between 1/2 to 1 man-hour's worth of work.
It's not clicking a button. While this may or may not justify a $50 setup fee (I don't think it does), there's more to it than that.
You beat me to it, but said it better than I would have.
This is the one thing that irritates the shit out of me. I can understand that there are people who regard abortion as murder. That is not an unreasonable position to take. I can further understand the opposition that would arise if stem cell research did depend on a supply of aborted fetuses. But this is a case where those who oppose IVF could find at least a little solace in the fact that the otherwise discarded embryos are being used to provide life and well-being to others.
It reminds me of the vegan who wears leather shoes. What a hypocrite, right? Well, maybe not. Many vegans own animal-derived products from the time before they chose the lifestyle. They feel that to throw them away without getting the full use out of them is a needless waste of that animal's life. What's the pointof that? Sure, they won't buy animal-derived products in the future, but that doesn't mean that they should waste what they already have. Along similar lines, I can understand if people are opposed to creating embryos for the sole purpose of getting stem cells. But I can't for the life of me understand those who prefer that the embryos be tossed in the trash.
We no longer just accept that corporations tell lies to the public. Now we also expect it...
I don't know of a time when it was any other way. In the 30s ~ 60s, the cigarette companies extolled the health virtues of their product. Every car company since the invention of the automobile has found a way to state that their brand was the most reliable (there's always a survey or study that will support whatever claim you want to make. One company might use JD Power short-term quality, another might use the long term numbers, still another will use the percentage of vehicles sold that are still registered today, still another will use their lame in-house surveys. In the end, they're all telling the "truth")
It's better that we expect it today, that simply means that the consumer is more aware and appropriately cynical. In any case, there was never a time when companies--or to use its evil counterpart--corporations were as straight as they could be with the public. I'm sure there's been exceptions, but for the most part, marketing is made of this stuff.
Well, yeah and nah. I do see the associations happen a lot (like in my example). But I also see it avoided ("other leading brand"). I'm curious as to how the decision gets made to mention or not.
Of course I can only speak for myself, but when numerous competitors mention the same market-leader in their advertising, I tend to deduce that the market-leader is the best.
Basically, the non-leaders should try to associate themselves with the leader while at the same time avoiding re-enforcement of the leader's high brand image. One ad I remember from long ago did this quite well. There was a little-leage game. The winning team was in mid-celebration when an ice chest was opened. It was full of Coke. One boy picks up the can and angrily says, "I thought we won..." Then the Pepsi logo. This is a different scenario from the Honda example in that it outright denegrates the competitor's brand (but with enough humor to avoid looking petty). With all the comparisons to Honda, the other car makers are implicitly acknowledging Honda's general desirability.
Again, I'm a layperson reflecting on how I react to different marketing ploys; feel free to formalize what I've just said or, umm, yeah.
I've always taken the opposite line of reasoning: That the runners-up avoid mentioning the name of the market-leader (saying, "the leading brand" or "...than other leading brands") so as not to imprint the consumer with their competitor's brand.
An exception that proves my point is the Honda Accord. I personally equate that brand with positive feelings. Why? Because every other car commercial touts how much roomier/faster/more efficient/cheaper/safer/prettier their model is than the Accord. So I get the feeling that the Accord is a de facto benchmark, seeing as how every carmaker compares themselves to Honda (or often, the Toyota Camry)
You took a Marketing class, I haven't. Maybe they cover what I'm talking about in Marketing 201?:-)
Furthermore, what the hell does this have to do with energy conservation? I'm still going to turn the fracking lights on when it gets dark; I don't look at the clock and go "hey, it's 7, time to turn on all the lights."
No, but you do look at the clock and say "hey, it's 11, time to go to bed." Well, with DST, there is less hours of dark between 7 and 11 than there are without DST. That's less light you use.
Whether this is a good reason to have DST... I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Now I'm pretty sure that when I was 8 I didn't go looking for a recoverable ramdrive. My memory is hazy here, but the only way I can think of knowing how to have done this was either from a tip in AmigaWORLD or from a book at the library. Sure as hell wasn't from the Internet. What I do remember though was that the clock on the A1000 didn't keep time with the computer off, so it never showed the right time. But when we installed the 1.5 M expansion board, it also came with the ability to keep the clock alive and a couple of other things. Maybe one of it's features was that the RAM didn't go poof during the CTL-A-A reboot? All I did was mess with the startup-sequence file (which I earlier mistyped as the system-startup file, It's been a decade.) Anyway, my experience with the computer was between the ages of 6 and 15 and now I'm 26, so I have forgotten a lot of things. Emulation, here I come...
As long as we're replying to sigs here, I did notice yours earlier in the thread... made may head explode. It reminds me of when people would say things like, "Look at the kitty, he thinks he's better than us" and I'd reply, "STOP ANTHROPOMORPHIZING THE FUCKING CAT... HE DOESN'T LIKE IT!"
By the way, I didn't make mine up, don't remember where I got it, but it was longer than that (and longer than 120 char.)
People who think DST is a good idea are like people who think setting their alarm clocks ten minutes later will improve the likelihood that they will get to work on time.
You kidding me?! That worked for me for a week or so, then I caught on. So I decided to make it 20. Again I was fooled for a week. And so it went until the damn thing said it was noon at 6 am. Yeah, for some reason, it stopped working after a while.
My idea for an alarm clock is one that randomly alters the true time between -10 to +30 min from the actual time. It would do this in the middle of the night, and when you woke up, you would know that the clock is wrong, but not by how much or in what direction. It would always be possible that you're be ten minutes late, so you'd have to assume you're always behind and hurry your lazy-ass up. That's what I need.
It was bad enough, in fact, that you could spot heavy Amiga users, even on other operating systems, because nearly all of them picked up the habit of constantly jiggling the mouse a little to make sure the machine hadn't locked up. As long as the pointer was moving, the machine was usually okay.... so every heavy user I knew always shook their mouse around a bit while waiting. It took me many years to drop the habit myself. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them are still doing it.
I think I finally ditched that habit a year or two ago! But now that you got me thinking about the mouse and the Amiga, where can I get that cool ZZZ cloud (Amiga's hourglass)?
I asked for a computer for Christmas when I was 6. All I knew was that my friend accross the street had one (C64) and he had cool games. So I ask for this computer and my dad spends the next month doing all sorts of research.
Christmas day the computer is set up in the living room. It looks NOTHING like what I had in mind. Where did the cartridge go? The keyboard was separate? All the computers at school (Apple IIe's) and my buddy's were integrated.
He also bought DeluxePaint with the system. When you booted from that disk, a CLI prompt came up and you had to type "DPaint" to get the program running. I solemnly committed this to memory, for all I knew, that was the password to make the drawing game work.
That computer served our family well for 10 years. I drew pictures at 6, used MusicStudio (Activision) at 8, animated at 10 (DeluxePaint III could do that), a friend and I did some video titling (DeluxeVideo), wrote all my papers in junior high and most of high school (ProWrite). My dad did his resumes on there. Mom did her weekly Kiwanis newsletter. I remember the shock at seeing others use WordPerfect. How the hell did they know what their printed page was going to look like?
One day in 2nd or 3rd grade I couldn't *wait* to get home. Dad was bringing home the 1.5M RAM upgrade. My memory may falter here, but I remember it being the size of a motherboard today. But of course it was huge, it was 1.5M! This took the total memory to 2M even (We had the 256K upgrade as well). Before that upgrade, I couldn't animate more than a few dozen frames, now there was no limit. The best part was the RAMDisk, which I could now use. With 2M there was plenty of room to copy the entire Workbench disk to RAM and run the system off of that. I used to play around with system-startup (Amiga's AUTOEXEC.BAT) a lot and one of the things I did was to make it automatically copy the entire WB disk to RAM and run from there. This way, when the computer froze, I could often just to a CTRL-A-A to do a "warm-reboot" and it would start up nearly instantly! This was a major discovery for me.
I still have that machine in a box somewhere. I'm afraid to try to get it running again, I can't imagine that all those floppies that were so frequently used are still readable 20 years after their creation.
I think my dad paid $2500 or so for that machine and I can't imagine anything that has been so worthwhile. He made a damned good choice.
Seriously, do you really think that if they moved to unlimited upload speeds, every user in America would be saturating their upstream pipe?
No. I do think that a large enough chunk of people would, though. What happens to a P2P program when you give it more upload speed? Same thing Windows does when you give it more memory. There are enough people out there who are saturating there u/l as it is, and would saturate whatever the speed provided.
I pay $40/mo for a 3+ mbs line. ***$40***. Obviously my ISP is not expecting me use that speed constantly. The current situation is optimized for consumer internet use, which is what a large majority of people use it for.
I don't know whether or not it's evil (media company consolidation points to yes) or just short-sightedness (never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), but they could have kept the Internet a viable two-way communication medium if they wanted to.
You're absolutely right. I would attribute their current solution (capping) as a simple (incompetent) way of achieve their goal. If the ISPs instead had a daily/weekly/monthly volume cap or some sort of hybrid between the two schemes, then those vacation photos could be posted and the ISP wouldn't have to worry about all the P2P eroding their profit.
They most definetly do use fiber. The CATV companies have nodes in each neighorhood that splits that area's internet traffic off the coax and onto the fiber which takes it back to their office. I'm pretty sure they use the fiber for the On Demand-type services and maybe even all the data now. I am not a CATV tech and I'm not sure exactly what their infrastructer is like, but I do know that the cable modem traffic is not shared among an entire town.
Bandwidth is not free, people. Home servers that need more than 256 kbps upload speed generally use the bandwidth on a consistent basis. The service you get residentially is extremely cheap compared to business-class circuits, and this is why. You get the speed benefit (down) of a fat pipe but you won't get the volume that a more expensive circuit would offer. This is not because your ISP is evil, simply because, gasp!, they intend to make a profit.
I know there are better ways to control the aggregate amount of bandwidth being consumed, but this is a simple way of doing it that is acceptable by a huge percentage of the consumers buying cable or DSL service. Those who really would like to have parity between their down and up speeds are exactly the customers ISPs don't want on residential service. They will lose money on you.
There's nothing evil about that.
(I know the parent poster didn't say they're being evil, but that's the general impression I get on these threads sometimes.)
It should also be noted that there is no connection whatsoever between the the statements/actions of either company and there is no point in the above sentence being in the article summary.
No point? It was a contrasting statement. I did not know that Sony had made that decision, as much I as I did not know about Nintendo's plans for this "router." (bridge). I found it interesting that these two console manufacturers are seemingly choosing different strategies. I did not see an implication in the summary that one decision lead to or affected the other.
But, how do you know that there is no connection whatsoever? You know this? If I were a marketing guy at Nintendo, and I had been planning to announce this funcionality on a certain date, then found out that a competitor had just announced something related--and indeed opposite--my company's strategy, I would make the announcement sooner. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it is certainly plausible and for that reason... "It should be noted"
Actually, the objects of reference would tend to make the far-away object appear smaller. Also, as a sibling poster noted, the illusion dissapears when you stand on your head.
My theory? (And by theory, I mean hypothesis) We perceive the sky to be "farther away" at the horizon and "closer to us" above our heads. And since the moon is "in" this sky, the fact that it is exactly the same size at the horizon as it is above our heads makes it appear that it is larger at the horizon because we perceive the sky there to be farther away.
I was doing some work in a local hospital a year ago, riding the elevator up when I was quite startled to see a robot get on at the next floor. When the doors closed, I started to get very nervous.
I mean, they're strong, 'cause they're made of metal.
Anyway the system at that hospital had equipment up in the elevator control room that the robot would communicate with. The robot could call an elevator and would even know not to get on if there were too many people already on, as the robot equipment in the control room had access to the weight sensors on the elevator equipment. Pretty fun to follow that guy around all day instead of working...
That's probobly why they didn't name it, "Super Duper Accurate and Exact Precision Model of the Universe".
Welcome to science, where no matter how far you come along, there's always a ways more to go. Today's models are flawed, but not nearly as much as yesterday's. And even if the Dark Matter mysteries or older-than-time star mysteries are resolved, I'm sure there will be other mysteries we have yet to discover. These simulations are a part of that process.
Slashdot Mirror
A co-worker where I used to work would charge a cap and then call someone's name ("Hey, Bob!"). He'd toss the cap as they were turning around and they'd catch a nice suprise. He always chose people who he could outrun.
Good point.
I'm sorry, but when I moderate, I moderate the comment, not the poster. I don't give a fuck if the guy goes around all day posting about his love of raping babies; if his comment here is relevant, it will be moderated accordingly. Go take your thought police bullshit somewhere else.
I think you misunderstood the question. He is asking for a way to display multiple video feeds on one large display (in this case, a projector). But what he wants is more than a simple PIP function.
No. That's not how it's done at all. Actually, human beings still have to wire your cable pair to a line card in the CO, then configure the switch to add you. Billing needs to be set up. From start to finish, setting up a new line is probably between 1/2 to 1 man-hour's worth of work.
It's not clicking a button. While this may or may not justify a $50 setup fee (I don't think it does), there's more to it than that.
I just paid $1.632 for the album on AllofMP3.com!
This is the one thing that irritates the shit out of me. I can understand that there are people who regard abortion as murder. That is not an unreasonable position to take. I can further understand the opposition that would arise if stem cell research did depend on a supply of aborted fetuses. But this is a case where those who oppose IVF could find at least a little solace in the fact that the otherwise discarded embryos are being used to provide life and well-being to others.
It reminds me of the vegan who wears leather shoes. What a hypocrite, right? Well, maybe not. Many vegans own animal-derived products from the time before they chose the lifestyle. They feel that to throw them away without getting the full use out of them is a needless waste of that animal's life. What's the pointof that? Sure, they won't buy animal-derived products in the future, but that doesn't mean that they should waste what they already have. Along similar lines, I can understand if people are opposed to creating embryos for the sole purpose of getting stem cells. But I can't for the life of me understand those who prefer that the embryos be tossed in the trash.
I don't know of a time when it was any other way. In the 30s ~ 60s, the cigarette companies extolled the health virtues of their product. Every car company since the invention of the automobile has found a way to state that their brand was the most reliable (there's always a survey or study that will support whatever claim you want to make. One company might use JD Power short-term quality, another might use the long term numbers, still another will use the percentage of vehicles sold that are still registered today, still another will use their lame in-house surveys. In the end, they're all telling the "truth")
It's better that we expect it today, that simply means that the consumer is more aware and appropriately cynical. In any case, there was never a time when companies--or to use its evil counterpart--corporations were as straight as they could be with the public. I'm sure there's been exceptions, but for the most part, marketing is made of this stuff.
It's not new.
Of course I can only speak for myself, but when numerous competitors mention the same market-leader in their advertising, I tend to deduce that the market-leader is the best.
Basically, the non-leaders should try to associate themselves with the leader while at the same time avoiding re-enforcement of the leader's high brand image. One ad I remember from long ago did this quite well. There was a little-leage game. The winning team was in mid-celebration when an ice chest was opened. It was full of Coke. One boy picks up the can and angrily says, "I thought we won..." Then the Pepsi logo. This is a different scenario from the Honda example in that it outright denegrates the competitor's brand (but with enough humor to avoid looking petty). With all the comparisons to Honda, the other car makers are implicitly acknowledging Honda's general desirability.
Again, I'm a layperson reflecting on how I react to different marketing ploys; feel free to formalize what I've just said or, umm, yeah.
An exception that proves my point is the Honda Accord. I personally equate that brand with positive feelings. Why? Because every other car commercial touts how much roomier/faster/more efficient/cheaper/safer/prettier their model is than the Accord. So I get the feeling that the Accord is a de facto benchmark, seeing as how every carmaker compares themselves to Honda (or often, the Toyota Camry)
You took a Marketing class, I haven't. Maybe they cover what I'm talking about in Marketing 201? :-)
Let me know.
Sequence C is the control.
No, but you do look at the clock and say "hey, it's 11, time to go to bed." Well, with DST, there is less hours of dark between 7 and 11 than there are without DST. That's less light you use.
Whether this is a good reason to have DST... I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
(-1, Jealous)
Now I'm pretty sure that when I was 8 I didn't go looking for a recoverable ramdrive. My memory is hazy here, but the only way I can think of knowing how to have done this was either from a tip in AmigaWORLD or from a book at the library. Sure as hell wasn't from the Internet. What I do remember though was that the clock on the A1000 didn't keep time with the computer off, so it never showed the right time. But when we installed the 1.5 M expansion board, it also came with the ability to keep the clock alive and a couple of other things. Maybe one of it's features was that the RAM didn't go poof during the CTL-A-A reboot? All I did was mess with the startup-sequence file (which I earlier mistyped as the system-startup file, It's been a decade.) Anyway, my experience with the computer was between the ages of 6 and 15 and now I'm 26, so I have forgotten a lot of things. Emulation, here I come...
As long as we're replying to sigs here, I did notice yours earlier in the thread... made may head explode. It reminds me of when people would say things like, "Look at the kitty, he thinks he's better than us" and I'd reply, "STOP ANTHROPOMORPHIZING THE FUCKING CAT... HE DOESN'T LIKE IT!"
By the way, I didn't make mine up, don't remember where I got it, but it was longer than that (and longer than 120 char.)
You kidding me?! That worked for me for a week or so, then I caught on. So I decided to make it 20. Again I was fooled for a week. And so it went until the damn thing said it was noon at 6 am. Yeah, for some reason, it stopped working after a while.
My idea for an alarm clock is one that randomly alters the true time between -10 to +30 min from the actual time. It would do this in the middle of the night, and when you woke up, you would know that the clock is wrong, but not by how much or in what direction. It would always be possible that you're be ten minutes late, so you'd have to assume you're always behind and hurry your lazy-ass up. That's what I need.
I think I finally ditched that habit a year or two ago! But now that you got me thinking about the mouse and the Amiga, where can I get that cool ZZZ cloud (Amiga's hourglass)?
I asked for a computer for Christmas when I was 6. All I knew was that my friend accross the street had one (C64) and he had cool games. So I ask for this computer and my dad spends the next month doing all sorts of research.
Christmas day the computer is set up in the living room. It looks NOTHING like what I had in mind. Where did the cartridge go? The keyboard was separate? All the computers at school (Apple IIe's) and my buddy's were integrated.
He also bought DeluxePaint with the system. When you booted from that disk, a CLI prompt came up and you had to type "DPaint" to get the program running. I solemnly committed this to memory, for all I knew, that was the password to make the drawing game work.
That computer served our family well for 10 years. I drew pictures at 6, used MusicStudio (Activision) at 8, animated at 10 (DeluxePaint III could do that), a friend and I did some video titling (DeluxeVideo), wrote all my papers in junior high and most of high school (ProWrite). My dad did his resumes on there. Mom did her weekly Kiwanis newsletter. I remember the shock at seeing others use WordPerfect. How the hell did they know what their printed page was going to look like?
One day in 2nd or 3rd grade I couldn't *wait* to get home. Dad was bringing home the 1.5M RAM upgrade. My memory may falter here, but I remember it being the size of a motherboard today. But of course it was huge, it was 1.5M! This took the total memory to 2M even (We had the 256K upgrade as well). Before that upgrade, I couldn't animate more than a few dozen frames, now there was no limit. The best part was the RAMDisk, which I could now use. With 2M there was plenty of room to copy the entire Workbench disk to RAM and run the system off of that. I used to play around with system-startup (Amiga's AUTOEXEC.BAT) a lot and one of the things I did was to make it automatically copy the entire WB disk to RAM and run from there. This way, when the computer froze, I could often just to a CTRL-A-A to do a "warm-reboot" and it would start up nearly instantly! This was a major discovery for me.
I still have that machine in a box somewhere. I'm afraid to try to get it running again, I can't imagine that all those floppies that were so frequently used are still readable 20 years after their creation.
I think my dad paid $2500 or so for that machine and I can't imagine anything that has been so worthwhile. He made a damned good choice.
No. I do think that a large enough chunk of people would, though. What happens to a P2P program when you give it more upload speed? Same thing Windows does when you give it more memory. There are enough people out there who are saturating there u/l as it is, and would saturate whatever the speed provided.
I pay $40/mo for a 3+ mbs line. ***$40***. Obviously my ISP is not expecting me use that speed constantly. The current situation is optimized for consumer internet use, which is what a large majority of people use it for.
I don't know whether or not it's evil (media company consolidation points to yes) or just short-sightedness (never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), but they could have kept the Internet a viable two-way communication medium if they wanted to.
You're absolutely right. I would attribute their current solution (capping) as a simple (incompetent) way of achieve their goal. If the ISPs instead had a daily/weekly/monthly volume cap or some sort of hybrid between the two schemes, then those vacation photos could be posted and the ISP wouldn't have to worry about all the P2P eroding their profit.
They most definetly do use fiber. The CATV companies have nodes in each neighorhood that splits that area's internet traffic off the coax and onto the fiber which takes it back to their office. I'm pretty sure they use the fiber for the On Demand-type services and maybe even all the data now. I am not a CATV tech and I'm not sure exactly what their infrastructer is like, but I do know that the cable modem traffic is not shared among an entire town.
I know there are better ways to control the aggregate amount of bandwidth being consumed, but this is a simple way of doing it that is acceptable by a huge percentage of the consumers buying cable or DSL service. Those who really would like to have parity between their down and up speeds are exactly the customers ISPs don't want on residential service. They will lose money on you.
There's nothing evil about that.
(I know the parent poster didn't say they're being evil, but that's the general impression I get on these threads sometimes.)
No point? It was a contrasting statement. I did not know that Sony had made that decision, as much I as I did not know about Nintendo's plans for this "router." (bridge). I found it interesting that these two console manufacturers are seemingly choosing different strategies. I did not see an implication in the summary that one decision lead to or affected the other.
But, how do you know that there is no connection whatsoever? You know this? If I were a marketing guy at Nintendo, and I had been planning to announce this funcionality on a certain date, then found out that a competitor had just announced something related--and indeed opposite--my company's strategy, I would make the announcement sooner. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it is certainly plausible and for that reason... "It should be noted"
My theory? (And by theory, I mean hypothesis) We perceive the sky to be "farther away" at the horizon and "closer to us" above our heads. And since the moon is "in" this sky, the fact that it is exactly the same size at the horizon as it is above our heads makes it appear that it is larger at the horizon because we perceive the sky there to be farther away.
I mean, they're strong, 'cause they're made of metal.
Anyway the system at that hospital had equipment up in the elevator control room that the robot would communicate with. The robot could call an elevator and would even know not to get on if there were too many people already on, as the robot equipment in the control room had access to the weight sensors on the elevator equipment. Pretty fun to follow that guy around all day instead of working...
Welcome to science, where no matter how far you come along, there's always a ways more to go. Today's models are flawed, but not nearly as much as yesterday's. And even if the Dark Matter mysteries or older-than-time star mysteries are resolved, I'm sure there will be other mysteries we have yet to discover. These simulations are a part of that process.
That shot out Coke(R)? I wish!