One very simple use case is to have one personal number and one work/professional number. If in a country that has cheap voice plans (and free SMS), especially if it's no longer cheap only when calling within a network, then you can have them both for less than a single plan would cost in the US. If you can afford a data plan, you can have one I suppose without needing two of them.
If you live near a border or otherwise cross one often, that's another case where it makes sense to have two SIMs. Else you would need two phones or remove battery and swap SIM every time.
Google Voice is US only, maybe Canada. Skype is proprietary and needs data plan.. and you need to pay for placing calls to real phones? That was the original business model at least.
Wow. Are people that stupid? At the very least they should maintain tire pressure, it is dead easy to do so and not doing it is dangerous (to their own lives and those of others, not only the hardware)
Oil and coolant levels are "trickier" but I would do it when I regularly operated a car, though I was barely able to tie my laces together. What's next, not being able to peel a banana?
Battery swaps are another problem for EVs though, might require the use of a crane or similar.. there's some ridiculous weight there. Lifting an electrical bicycle is fun enough.
But Quake 3 clones like that tend to be less fun, less optimized versions of the real thing. May look too dark or something, sound effects worse, maps worse, runs slow on old PC, inequal quality, unfinished game, lack of players and even sometimes the little issue that people installing the game from distro's package manager will have an older version.
I'll have to try Xonotic 0.7, expecting it to barely run on open source driver, I expect to have to set the keyboard to qwerty before launching it so I can access console and weapons. Would be nice if it reaches version 1.0 some day - Quake 3 did in 1999.
You seem to describe a system that successfully feeds poor city dwellers. They don't need that much water for domestic use (no front/back yard if they're poor, no pools) and they somehow benefit from other people turning water into food.
I can't speak for mismanagement, waste and so on but the basic premise is sound. 1st world countries need agriculture to be subsidized, else it's not profitable and then we starve.
Walking eight hundred meters takes less than 10 minutes. It looks like enormous time and money were lost by being afraid of walking and of poor people.
(I meant "looking at someone entering their password". Though the word "something" is almost acceptable there, if the children and adolescent are button-pushing drones devoid of critical thinking)
This is obviously to get people hooked at a younger age and create a generation of even more dependant people. You used to be able to do classwork and homework with just paper, no tech giants involved, no e-mail sent to you by the teacher, no real time data of what everybody has done by the minute.. If you had to write an essay till Thursday, nobody would know before Thursday 2 AM that you've not written anything yet.
The pupils (I don't think you're a "student" at high school) will be tied to a keyboard or tablet for the most basic of interactions, and in the folowing years will be incapable to live without tech gadgets in direct reach at all time so smart phones and the reduced capability computer that are tablets will be virtually mandatory if you don't want to end up as beggar on the street, just like a car got mandatory in the second half of the 20th century. Google services and Android will profit (and a few competitors and fuckbook). Extreme consumerism will be unescapable. You will need more and more dirtily-made LCD displays and li-ion batteries to not get shunned.
The privacy is not limited to advertisers.. With such systems the teachers and parents will have too much data already, or even the pupils themselves. Data will leak in various ways (if only by way of copy-paste, screenshots, forwarding and looking at something entering their password) Then when you leave high school you have to take a conscious approach into not using Google services and such, else you will get data mined, as Google effectively promises it.
Did he? I'm under the impression that the notion was simply not formalized. Like "I don't care", "I didn't think about it, here's some BASIC listings / floppy / tape / 300 bps download". A theoretical and legal foundation was to be made and the randomness of History made it so R.M.S. Stallman did some of that. I wasn't around for the 1980s university computing and home computers with audio cassette, I lived through the 90s instead when Internet access was very rare or a US thing. It was the DOS/Windows era of freeware (and shareware) : "here's some binaries".
I miss the freeware somewhat on Linux. There were tons of little cool games and apps, which were the work of a single author. Things were simpler : the application didn't need to be maintained to work, it had no concept of networking, there was no modern "app store" - but the stuff had to be bundled on magazines's CD or go through floppy sneakernet. Free software (in opposition to freeware) really took off when there was affordable Internet access (i.e. DSL) and the general public got networking capabilities similar to the US university campus in the 80s (minus USENET, at the time it was on the way out and behind paywalls). It got more obviously and ever incrementally useful, e.g. when running Windows you could run Mozilla or Firefox to not get infected, then there were stuff like Media Player Classic (to escape Windows Media Player 7, which was a memorable "WTF?" moment to me), open source codecs, and some various stuff. All things that a lone wolf coder couldn't do anymore.
The linux thing (and BSD and whatever) had been going on already, but nobody had spare computers worth a shit or just a spare hard drive to install even a bare command line Free Software OS on, outside of some very narrow geek circles. I did install linux from a magazine's CD in 1997 or such : installer was straight-forward and allowed me to resize the Windows 95 partition (great!, but probably easy since it was just FAT) but after installing and reboot.. Linux was unbootable, Windows 95 would boot in under a minute all the way through showing the full desktop then hang with the mouse cursor unmovable and nothing working. I got some flak for that. We deleted fucking everything (formatting the quarter-height 5.25" hard drive). That was the experience and I can't tell what was the distro (only I don't remember it was Slackware or Debian).
It is a bit braindead sometimes and confusing at first, but I got used to it. If anything, the separate buffer for ctrl-c/ctrl-ins/right-click is needed because it provides a buffer that won't get easily overwritten and that you may absolutely need in some cases.
I prefer living with it because it is very convenient, you can transfer stuff between browser, text editor, terminal etc. really fast.
I still watch divx/xvid, and the worst thing is the 128Kbit/s MP3 sound. Sometimes sligtly better, 128K AAC. I hope a streaming/download service will comes up that satisfies my needs.. I want low bitrate, low res video and high btirate stereo sound!
DVD is high bitrate and low res. Yes, the codec is old but with the max legal video birate you can afford with stereo or mono 48KHz sound, I'm sure it can look okay.
Oh, I guess you have a too big TV with too much processing enabled. I suppose that if you don't disable all that crap you're looking at upscaled macroblocks run through a sharpen filter. I remember seeing first a Blu Ray demo in store, there was a lot of sharpen and the Blu Ray was maybe MPEG2.. Yes, it looked like crap. Really total crap.
I am very concerned about the sound. The VCR has to be good at extracting the sound signal from old home tapes, sound must be degraded and muffled already. Then the recording of footage on a PC has to be done by someone who is not a complete idiot, with volume levels, gain set up accordingly, and not using a noisy sound input like the one on a random old motherboard.
250GB would be about good enough for a nice, somewhat sorted out music collection - not stored in MP3 128K. That doesn't leave room for junk/unsorted/low quality music files while you built it up, nor room for a pig OS, linux isos, and whatever other kinds of data. And then you still need a hard drive to back things up.
So if presented that choice I'll gladly pick the 3TB drive. Too bad if I have to wait a couple more seconds for the music player, the web browser etc. to launch. It's worth losing that speed, I don't do video editing and whatever high end 3D or real time audio or engineering stuff. Even for playing around with virtual machines, drive capacity is needed.
Yeah I could certainly use the 250GB ultra fast drive. If that means relying on a file server, external storage, or more or less personal "cloud" that simply means getting back to using a hard drive. "Regular" people tend to buy USB enclosed ones.
There a trend to have the browser window not render the window's title bar. Firefox and Chrome do that by default at least on Windows, as well as MS Internet Explorer. So a descriptive name in the URL can be a workaround for that. I do have a title bar that displays the full title, but my tab says "Coul...". I do think the descriptive URL is a good trend as well. It's better than "http://slashdot.org/0edc7435b234afbc23098cda148994e".
If the URL is automatically highlighted that makes it even more easy to lose the content of your middle click paste buffer. I've just seen Alt-D / Ctrl-L does that. Bummer. Best is to have a little button to clear the URL bar if that's what you want to do, I had a Firefox extension provide it and it's one of the few features included in dillo.
Or you can click at the end of the URL, press shift-home to select it all, press delete, type stuff. It still hijacks the middle mouse buffer. So the single clicking and using arrows and delete/backspace is needed as the only method that will preserve it, and that's sometimes useful if you wanted to paste the second half of a URL, after the domain name.
Priviledge separation, isn't that what users, groups and file permissions or ACLs are for?
By some measure, Windows 7 is still like Windows 95 because I can walk to a random Windows box and do whatever by clicking "Yes" on a UAC prompt. But that's the default setting. And we now have malware escaping sandboxes and defeating ASLR. Yes the OS is much better secured I guess. Still, I get some thrills sometimes, I walked to a Windows 7 box that just refused to run Windows Update no matter what (MSSE wouldn't install) so I concluded there was some unknown malware.
It is great, can have some uses but I won't install a rolling distro for general home users ; Ubuntu versions can also benefit from.debs or ppa for certain things and there's the GUI for installing proprietary drivers.
I did try Ubuntu 14.04's mini.iso in a virtualbox, it booted to the menu then failed to load the installer. I was not impressed:D. So I'll have to wait till it works (or maybe try PXE boot). I don't want to install xubuntu or lubuntu and clean up after them
That isn't helpful, XP is a modern operating system. It has user accounts, processes and all that stuff. It misses a desktop compositor but do we have to care about windows flying around?
In fact I would like linux to catch up. Using LXDE makes it relatively close to XP in speed and stability, MATE is a slower but decent, but it could use some more driver quality and importantly I hope there'll finally be a way to fix backwards compatibility and game availability, which go hand in hand.
Get me right, I know that XP has to be abandoned and advocate for it , I tell people to use Mint and do all updates (almost security only) that show up. The updates are pleasant instead of being a hassle. Though as usual I need to wait again. Wait for Mint 17 to be out, since Mint 16 will be deprecated despite coming out in last November.
If you put excessive cheap energy during the day (maybe not using any at your home, while you're at work) and then consume quite some at evening and night when it is relatively expensive and in short supply.. Then it would only logical to pay for power even if you put 3x more on the grid than you used. That's an example number out of my hat, in case the situation is severe.
If you don't do that the coal companies, power utility companies, home users without panel are those suffering. Yes we're supposed to hate the coal companies and I do hate them I guess, but they're pissed off by wholesale electricity prices collapsing during peak renewable production. That's your "disruption of energy markets", the economics of coal power are getting threatened. It would be fine except the system depends on that coal power to be here at night or otherwise when solar production is low. Natural gas has less problems at this because they can be turned off/turn on swiftly, and have lower capital costs I think.
Solar and renewable production increase would make more sense if home owners of solar panels could be charged or paid with a small granularity and they were encouraged to use the power when they produce it (let's say, laundry and dish water get started on afternoon). But such things would be a bitch to implement and it's paradoxical.. We'd want to incentize home users not to sell their electricity.
Even if the installation bill is cheap.. you need to buy a house to put the panels on:). So that depends on the area as well as income or wealth. But maybe the low middle class can afford it.. Now you're depending on subprime mortgages and remote suburbia again. Coal companies can get pissed, but the banks and oil companies will like it fine.
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One very simple use case is to have one personal number and one work/professional number. If in a country that has cheap voice plans (and free SMS), especially if it's no longer cheap only when calling within a network, then you can have them both for less than a single plan would cost in the US.
If you can afford a data plan, you can have one I suppose without needing two of them.
If you live near a border or otherwise cross one often, that's another case where it makes sense to have two SIMs. Else you would need two phones or remove battery and swap SIM every time.
Google Voice is US only, maybe Canada.
Skype is proprietary and needs data plan.. and you need to pay for placing calls to real phones? That was the original business model at least.
Wow. Are people that stupid? At the very least they should maintain tire pressure, it is dead easy to do so and not doing it is dangerous (to their own lives and those of others, not only the hardware)
Oil and coolant levels are "trickier" but I would do it when I regularly operated a car, though I was barely able to tie my laces together. What's next, not being able to peel a banana?
Battery swaps are another problem for EVs though, might require the use of a crane or similar.. there's some ridiculous weight there. Lifting an electrical bicycle is fun enough.
But Quake 3 clones like that tend to be less fun, less optimized versions of the real thing. May look too dark or something, sound effects worse, maps worse, runs slow on old PC, inequal quality, unfinished game, lack of players and even sometimes the little issue that people installing the game from distro's package manager will have an older version.
I'll have to try Xonotic 0.7, expecting it to barely run on open source driver, I expect to have to set the keyboard to qwerty before launching it so I can access console and weapons. Would be nice if it reaches version 1.0 some day - Quake 3 did in 1999.
You seem to describe a system that successfully feeds poor city dwellers. They don't need that much water for domestic use (no front/back yard if they're poor, no pools) and they somehow benefit from other people turning water into food.
I can't speak for mismanagement, waste and so on but the basic premise is sound. 1st world countries need agriculture to be subsidized, else it's not profitable and then we starve.
That's a failure of basic grammar.
Walking eight hundred meters takes less than 10 minutes. It looks like enormous time and money were lost by being afraid of walking and of poor people.
Yet in Europe many people choose to commute by car so they can live in a house, and temporary workers may be forced to own one.
And at night stars may be not visible thanks to light pollution.
(I meant "looking at someone entering their password". Though the word "something" is almost acceptable there, if the children and adolescent are button-pushing drones devoid of critical thinking)
This is obviously to get people hooked at a younger age and create a generation of even more dependant people.
You used to be able to do classwork and homework with just paper, no tech giants involved, no e-mail sent to you by the teacher, no real time data of what everybody has done by the minute.. If you had to write an essay till Thursday, nobody would know before Thursday 2 AM that you've not written anything yet.
The pupils (I don't think you're a "student" at high school) will be tied to a keyboard or tablet for the most basic of interactions, and in the folowing years will be incapable to live without tech gadgets in direct reach at all time so smart phones and the reduced capability computer that are tablets will be virtually mandatory if you don't want to end up as beggar on the street, just like a car got mandatory in the second half of the 20th century. Google services and Android will profit (and a few competitors and fuckbook). Extreme consumerism will be unescapable. You will need more and more dirtily-made LCD displays and li-ion batteries to not get shunned.
The privacy is not limited to advertisers.. With such systems the teachers and parents will have too much data already, or even the pupils themselves. Data will leak in various ways (if only by way of copy-paste, screenshots, forwarding and looking at something entering their password)
Then when you leave high school you have to take a conscious approach into not using Google services and such, else you will get data mined, as Google effectively promises it.
Did he? I'm under the impression that the notion was simply not formalized. Like "I don't care", "I didn't think about it, here's some BASIC listings / floppy / tape / 300 bps download". A theoretical and legal foundation was to be made and the randomness of History made it so R.M.S. Stallman did some of that.
I wasn't around for the 1980s university computing and home computers with audio cassette, I lived through the 90s instead when Internet access was very rare or a US thing. It was the DOS/Windows era of freeware (and shareware) : "here's some binaries".
I miss the freeware somewhat on Linux. There were tons of little cool games and apps, which were the work of a single author. Things were simpler : the application didn't need to be maintained to work, it had no concept of networking, there was no modern "app store" - but the stuff had to be bundled on magazines's CD or go through floppy sneakernet.
Free software (in opposition to freeware) really took off when there was affordable Internet access (i.e. DSL) and the general public got networking capabilities similar to the US university campus in the 80s (minus USENET, at the time it was on the way out and behind paywalls). It got more obviously and ever incrementally useful, e.g. when running Windows you could run Mozilla or Firefox to not get infected, then there were stuff like Media Player Classic (to escape Windows Media Player 7, which was a memorable "WTF?" moment to me), open source codecs, and some various stuff. All things that a lone wolf coder couldn't do anymore.
The linux thing (and BSD and whatever) had been going on already, but nobody had spare computers worth a shit or just a spare hard drive to install even a bare command line Free Software OS on, outside of some very narrow geek circles.
I did install linux from a magazine's CD in 1997 or such : installer was straight-forward and allowed me to resize the Windows 95 partition (great!, but probably easy since it was just FAT) but after installing and reboot.. Linux was unbootable, Windows 95 would boot in under a minute all the way through showing the full desktop then hang with the mouse cursor unmovable and nothing working. I got some flak for that. We deleted fucking everything (formatting the quarter-height 5.25" hard drive). That was the experience and I can't tell what was the distro (only I don't remember it was Slackware or Debian).
It is a bit braindead sometimes and confusing at first, but I got used to it.
If anything, the separate buffer for ctrl-c/ctrl-ins/right-click is needed because it provides a buffer that won't get easily overwritten and that you may absolutely need in some cases.
I prefer living with it because it is very convenient, you can transfer stuff between browser, text editor, terminal etc. really fast.
I still watch divx/xvid, and the worst thing is the 128Kbit/s MP3 sound. Sometimes sligtly better, 128K AAC.
I hope a streaming/download service will comes up that satisfies my needs.. I want low bitrate, low res video and high btirate stereo sound!
DVD is high bitrate and low res. Yes, the codec is old but with the max legal video birate you can afford with stereo or mono 48KHz sound, I'm sure it can look okay.
Oh, I guess you have a too big TV with too much processing enabled. I suppose that if you don't disable all that crap you're looking at upscaled macroblocks run through a sharpen filter. I remember seeing first a Blu Ray demo in store, there was a lot of sharpen and the Blu Ray was maybe MPEG2.. Yes, it looked like crap. Really total crap.
I am very concerned about the sound. The VCR has to be good at extracting the sound signal from old home tapes, sound must be degraded and muffled already. Then the recording of footage on a PC has to be done by someone who is not a complete idiot, with volume levels, gain set up accordingly, and not using a noisy sound input like the one on a random old motherboard.
Thanks, that was interesting.
250GB would be about good enough for a nice, somewhat sorted out music collection - not stored in MP3 128K.
That doesn't leave room for junk/unsorted/low quality music files while you built it up, nor room for a pig OS, linux isos, and whatever other kinds of data. And then you still need a hard drive to back things up.
So if presented that choice I'll gladly pick the 3TB drive. Too bad if I have to wait a couple more seconds for the music player, the web browser etc. to launch. It's worth losing that speed, I don't do video editing and whatever high end 3D or real time audio or engineering stuff.
Even for playing around with virtual machines, drive capacity is needed.
Yeah I could certainly use the 250GB ultra fast drive. If that means relying on a file server, external storage, or more or less personal "cloud" that simply means getting back to using a hard drive. "Regular" people tend to buy USB enclosed ones.
There a trend to have the browser window not render the window's title bar. Firefox and Chrome do that by default at least on Windows, as well as MS Internet Explorer.
So a descriptive name in the URL can be a workaround for that. I do have a title bar that displays the full title, but my tab says "Coul...". I do think the descriptive URL is a good trend as well. It's better than "http://slashdot.org/0edc7435b234afbc23098cda148994e".
If the URL is automatically highlighted that makes it even more easy to lose the content of your middle click paste buffer.
I've just seen Alt-D / Ctrl-L does that. Bummer. Best is to have a little button to clear the URL bar if that's what you want to do, I had a Firefox extension provide it and it's one of the few features included in dillo.
Or you can click at the end of the URL, press shift-home to select it all, press delete, type stuff. It still hijacks the middle mouse buffer. So the single clicking and using arrows and delete/backspace is needed as the only method that will preserve it, and that's sometimes useful if you wanted to paste the second half of a URL, after the domain name.
oh it works now, go figure.
Priviledge separation, isn't that what users, groups and file permissions or ACLs are for?
By some measure, Windows 7 is still like Windows 95 because I can walk to a random Windows box and do whatever by clicking "Yes" on a UAC prompt. But that's the default setting.
And we now have malware escaping sandboxes and defeating ASLR. Yes the OS is much better secured I guess. Still, I get some thrills sometimes, I walked to a Windows 7 box that just refused to run Windows Update no matter what (MSSE wouldn't install) so I concluded there was some unknown malware.
It is great, can have some uses but I won't install a rolling distro for general home users ; Ubuntu versions can also benefit from .debs or ppa for certain things and there's the GUI for installing proprietary drivers.
I did try Ubuntu 14.04's mini.iso in a virtualbox, it booted to the menu then failed to load the installer. I was not impressed :D. So I'll have to wait till it works (or maybe try PXE boot). I don't want to install xubuntu or lubuntu and clean up after them
That isn't helpful, XP is a modern operating system. It has user accounts, processes and all that stuff. It misses a desktop compositor but do we have to care about windows flying around?
In fact I would like linux to catch up. Using LXDE makes it relatively close to XP in speed and stability, MATE is a slower but decent, but it could use some more driver quality and importantly I hope there'll finally be a way to fix backwards compatibility and game availability, which go hand in hand.
Get me right, I know that XP has to be abandoned and advocate for it , I tell people to use Mint and do all updates (almost security only) that show up. The updates are pleasant instead of being a hassle. Though as usual I need to wait again. Wait for Mint 17 to be out, since Mint 16 will be deprecated despite coming out in last November.
If you put excessive cheap energy during the day (maybe not using any at your home, while you're at work) and then consume quite some at evening and night when it is relatively expensive and in short supply.. Then it would only logical to pay for power even if you put 3x more on the grid than you used. That's an example number out of my hat, in case the situation is severe.
If you don't do that the coal companies, power utility companies, home users without panel are those suffering. Yes we're supposed to hate the coal companies and I do hate them I guess, but they're pissed off by wholesale electricity prices collapsing during peak renewable production. That's your "disruption of energy markets", the economics of coal power are getting threatened. It would be fine except the system depends on that coal power to be here at night or otherwise when solar production is low.
Natural gas has less problems at this because they can be turned off/turn on swiftly, and have lower capital costs I think.
Solar and renewable production increase would make more sense if home owners of solar panels could be charged or paid with a small granularity and they were encouraged to use the power when they produce it (let's say, laundry and dish water get started on afternoon). But such things would be a bitch to implement and it's paradoxical.. We'd want to incentize home users not to sell their electricity.
Even if the installation bill is cheap.. you need to buy a house to put the panels on :). So that depends on the area as well as income or wealth. But maybe the low middle class can afford it.. Now you're depending on subprime mortgages and remote suburbia again. Coal companies can get pissed, but the banks and oil companies will like it fine.