Value of the addon != Increase in house price. The new owner has to want (and be willing and able to pay for) the solar augmentation. It might even be worthless to the new owner, who's not willing to deal with the maintenance.
Plus, there's depreciation, replacement cost for the panels and other materials, and so on. If he breaks even on this, either through sale or plain old energy generation, I'll be amazed.
Yup. 10 years in July, thanks very much. 12, if you count living together without the paperwork. All I'm saying is that "dating" and "staying married" are VERRRRY different skillsets.
I wouldn't give dating advice to ANYBODY at this point. Basic game's the same, but rules have changed too much (AIDS becoming an afterthought is particularly weird and annoying to me).
Quoth the parent: "Obama is naive, compassionate, charismatic, and idealistic - just the kind of change in leadership this country needs."
I concur on all counts, but you could've said the same thing about Carter and, omitting the "naive" term, JFK. One killed, one led one of the less effective presidencies of the twentieth century. Hmmm.
(Don't get me wrong: Carter's a fantastic EX-president, but if you're picking presidencies to emulate, his isn't one. I happen to think there are a LOT of similarities between this election and 1976, as well. The economy is in a weird spot, we're apparently losing our edge to an Asian superpower-to-be (Japan|China), and the stock market is set to go down or be flat for a while. If only I had a Vietnam analogy...)
Yeah, I thought hard about the OLPC, but am typing this on an eee. That 466MHz Geode in the OLPC really made me edgy, and since I could get an eee for the same price as a single OLPC through Buy 1 get 1... The rubber membrane keyboard on the OLPC didn't help. I could feel my fingernails detaching from my hands just thinking about it.
Not quite a no-brainer, but if you're getting an ultramobile on a budget, it's pretty close. That Everex with the 1.2GHz C7 bears watching.
Someone will have to explain how artificially limiting your market to those least able to pay makes ANY sense whatsoever.
Sell them in the US for $250, and let that drive your product for the first year. Asus shipped hundreds of thousands of the eee pc last quarter, so the market is there. Buy one get one was just a little more altruism than the market could bear.
OLPC is a terrific idea, but the implementation is an unmitigated mess.
For me, two things died over the last couple of years:
1) The ability to agree to disagree. You can't discuss politics in a group of anything but your closest friends. Not only is $MYSIDE correct, it's the only one that makes any sense whatsoever. Dissenting opinions need not apply. That's not healthy.
2) Any faith that the government, at any level, can do anything effectively. Katrina wasn't just a Federal failure, and one can argue there are even worse issues looming (mortgage bailout is S&Ls all over again, horrible problems in public schools and services, overweighted health insurance, I can keep going).
I think Zappa said that "government is the entertainment division of big business." It's beyond me how anybody can continue to believe the government is capable of anything beyond further screwing things up.
You might want to avoid discussing the unabridged version of The Stand up when you're advocating highly detailed, yet inarguably long-winded writing. Similarly, you probably want to avoid discussing Napoleon when arguing for a land war in Asia.
I'm not arguing, read what you want. Having said that, your literary paths and mine are unlikely to cross (probably to both our detriments).
There's a really good Straight Dope on the topic, but typically, they have several batches of numbers and several machines. Presumably, there are (very slight) biases for each machine and number set. Assuming they never get changed out, and that you know which machine and which set are used every time, and you can get a large enough sample, you probably could come up with a solution that would be better than randomizing the numbers. Possible, just highly unlikely.
Plus, if the prize pool is 50%, then you'll need a bunch of wins. In sports betting, for instance, the casino gets 10% off the top. So you may have as many wins as losses, but you'll still be down due to the vig. You need to pull off something like 55% just to break even. Lotteries would be a little different, as most sports bets are 11-10 bets (bet 11 to make 10, assuming there are no odds), while lottery wins are significantly more than that (bet 1 to win 300M, for instance).
I've run xp acceptably (no games, of course, some patience involved on various load times) on a 900MHz athlon. The clockspeeds are comparable, but we all know how little that matters.
RAM's going to be an issue, and I think the 2GB of "HD" is going to come back to bite them pretty quickly. At least on the eee, the OS and apps take up about 75% of that. I'm sure the damnsmalllinux guys are deeply amused.
For systems with hard drives (of whatever capacity), it's a fine idea. The Wii doesn't have a hard drive, just 512M of internal flash ram.
Probably ok for casual/flash-type games, likely less so for full blown titles. Nintendo's obviously going to have to figure something out here, as the industry is obviously moving to downloads for the exact reasons you mention.
Subscriptions for content never made sense, mostly because you can't stream much of anything over dialup. Once everybody got broadband, AOL got left behind.
Besides which, how much pull do you think the AOL folks had in TW after the.com bust? (hint: not much.). I understand that TW killing AOL didn't make TONS of sense, given TW's broadband lead, which could easily have been co-marketed, at least. Remember, though, AOL also had a crappy reputation for quality of service (horrific login times once the "all you can eat" system started, those damned "downloading new user experience" things), so it really wasn't something you wanted a part of in your new broadband venture.
Plus, at least according to the AOL book I read, the AOL guys got to be tremendous a-holes as it became apparent that they weren't selling connectivity so much as IPOs. Again, consider some mid-level retailer, say J Crew, signing an exclusive deal with AOLMarketplace back at the cusp of the.com explosion. AOL Deal -> Instant IPO -> Instant megaBucks for all concerned. Until AOL started demanding their cut, and things started to fall apart a bit.
AOL killed themselves. Case gets a lot of credit for the TW deal, but it's hard to say that AOL set their own schedule for demise. IMHO, of course.
Similar setup here, but running quite tolerably on a 1GHz C7, 1GB RAM, 150G SATA, dual 1680x1050 monitors off a PNY GeForce FX 5200 (I don't do any 3d, though). For my money, Gentoo is far preferable to Xubuntu, which always seems to have some issue for me. Couple of gotchas:
1) With that little horsepower, you want emerge to get all of it. You have two options: Either nice -n19 emerge (which takes forEVER, but you can theoretically multitask), or start the emerge, and leave the box alone for about a day.
2) Build the vast majority of what you want at once. If you break up the emerge into chunks, then you'll be sitting around monitoring chunkN so you can start chunkN+1, and it's like watching water boil. You'll miss some packages, but compiling a few won't drive you too nuts. For the intial compile, just accept the fact that emerge needs all the horsepower it can get.
3) Use openoffice-bin. For me, oo.o took about 5-6 hours to compile, and you'll re-incur that cost every time it upgrades. I don't use it that often, so I probably would have spent more time compiling it than actually using it. I have difficulty imagining there's THAT big a difference between oo-bin and compiled oo.
4) After you're done, you don't really need to be that lightweight. I happen to like Amarok, so I use it rather than audacious or any of the lighter weight mp3 players. (Having said that, you probably don't want Amarok to rescan your collection automatically. It's a bit of a beast.)
AFAIC, xfce is in just about the right spot. Pretty and configurable enough to get it to do what you want, but without the bloat and flashiness of kde or gnome. I don't know whether I'd give it to my parents, but it works really well for me.
... we have a 13 month old, and there WAS a study (again, lacking a cite) that said that kids who were in day care for 20 or fewer hours per week showed no differences from kids who were kept at home. After that, there was again no differences between the kids, so there wer really two groups: One in day care for 20 or fewer, one not.
That said, I have no idea where one would go for an unbiased study of these things. A couple of links for your viewing pleasure:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2D6143CF935A25754C0A9659C8B63 I suspect the parent's study is the one by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I didn't see that the article attaches NICHHD to a university. Although I'm not sure how that would alter my opinion of the study, now that I think about it.
Same link, another study from UMinn stating that kid's stress levels tend to rise during the day while in day care, but fall during the day while at home.
Here's the problem, IMHO. For iPod usage into crappy headphones, mp3@192 is just fine. So why bother pursuing anything better? There is some (minimal) effort to get flac onto my iPod, but even that's too much. Most of the bigger mp3 players (I'm talking the ones that manage your library, like Amarok) are DESIGNED so that the file type is not readily apparent.
At the same time, people who might know what they're talking about w.r.t. recording processes seem to imply that the source recordings suck anyway. I'm not taking that Dylan quote (paraphrase: "hasn't been a well recorded album in 20 years") as gospel, but he certainly knows more about recording than I do, so it's at least commentary from a knowledgeable source.
Plus, Dylan is as likely to have as much control over that process as anyone. You seriously think that $popGroup is going to pay attention to their mastering? You seriously think that Rush (see links elsewhere in this thread) is HAPPY about getting their sound clipped? Most bands don't care, and the bands that do (or bloody well ought to) apparently don't have full control over the process.
I love music. It's the industry that's driving me insane. DRM, bad artists, bad recordings, bad (flac-less) portable options. I'm well aware exceptions exist. It's ok. I've got plenty of back catalog to work through. I am, however, worried about music in the future. I just don't see upside in any of the current business models.
Not trolling. Genuinely curious. I keep hearing people declaring the death of education, but nobody appears to have any solutions. Surely (taken en masse) the kids of today are no dumber (or smarter) than those of previous generations, yet public perception seems to imply that this generation cannot learn effectively. That's a scary proposition.
Another question: My parents taught overseas, where two year contracts are the norm. If somebody stinks, their contracts aren't renewed. Is there a problem with implementing something like this stateside? Again, just curious.
I converted my parents and in-laws, put a link on the desktop that says "browser," and haven't heard word one since. I doubt they know they're using Firefox, and I KNOW they don't care.
I'm curious about what's going on w.r.t. Hurd dev, but not curious enough to actually delve through the changelogs. Anybody involved care to summarize what's up?
More importantly, is there still a point to its development? I'm no kernel hacker, but I'm sure there are things that the current kernel can't do well.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/opinion/04tue1.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin
NYT editorial, so take grains of salt depending on your political slant, but...
Yeesh.
Value of the addon != Increase in house price. The new owner has to want (and be willing and able to pay for) the solar augmentation. It might even be worthless to the new owner, who's not willing to deal with the maintenance.
Plus, there's depreciation, replacement cost for the panels and other materials, and so on. If he breaks even on this, either through sale or plain old energy generation, I'll be amazed.
Thanks.
I'm just starting to muck about with Rails, and am interested in where, exactly, it fails miserably. Not trolling, just curious.
Thanks.
Yup. 10 years in July, thanks very much. 12, if you count living together without the paperwork. All I'm saying is that "dating" and "staying married" are VERRRRY different skillsets.
I wouldn't give dating advice to ANYBODY at this point. Basic game's the same, but rules have changed too much (AIDS becoming an afterthought is particularly weird and annoying to me).
Whatever. Just saying.
Getting romance advice from a married person is like getting irrigation advice from a Bedouin. You MUST be kidding me.
No award for you!
Quoth the parent:
"Obama is naive, compassionate, charismatic, and idealistic - just the kind of change in leadership this country needs."
I concur on all counts, but you could've said the same thing about Carter and, omitting the "naive" term, JFK. One killed, one led one of the less effective presidencies of the twentieth century. Hmmm.
(Don't get me wrong: Carter's a fantastic EX-president, but if you're picking presidencies to emulate, his isn't one. I happen to think there are a LOT of similarities between this election and 1976, as well. The economy is in a weird spot, we're apparently losing our edge to an Asian superpower-to-be (Japan|China), and the stock market is set to go down or be flat for a while. If only I had a Vietnam analogy...)
Yeah, I thought hard about the OLPC, but am typing this on an eee. That 466MHz Geode in the OLPC really made me edgy, and since I could get an eee for the same price as a single OLPC through Buy 1 get 1... The rubber membrane keyboard on the OLPC didn't help. I could feel my fingernails detaching from my hands just thinking about it.
Not quite a no-brainer, but if you're getting an ultramobile on a budget, it's pretty close. That Everex with the 1.2GHz C7 bears watching.
Someone will have to explain how artificially limiting your market to those least able to pay makes ANY sense whatsoever.
Sell them in the US for $250, and let that drive your product for the first year. Asus shipped hundreds of thousands of the eee pc last quarter, so the market is there. Buy one get one was just a little more altruism than the market could bear.
OLPC is a terrific idea, but the implementation is an unmitigated mess.
For me, two things died over the last couple of years:
1) The ability to agree to disagree. You can't discuss politics in a group of anything but your closest friends. Not only is $MYSIDE correct, it's the only one that makes any sense whatsoever. Dissenting opinions need not apply. That's not healthy.
2) Any faith that the government, at any level, can do anything effectively. Katrina wasn't just a Federal failure, and one can argue there are even worse issues looming (mortgage bailout is S&Ls all over again, horrible problems in public schools and services, overweighted health insurance, I can keep going).
I think Zappa said that "government is the entertainment division of big business." It's beyond me how anybody can continue to believe the government is capable of anything beyond further screwing things up.
You might want to avoid discussing the unabridged version of The Stand up when you're advocating highly detailed, yet inarguably long-winded writing. Similarly, you probably want to avoid discussing Napoleon when arguing for a land war in Asia.
I'm not arguing, read what you want. Having said that, your literary paths and mine are unlikely to cross (probably to both our detriments).
I'm just saying. I don't care about $5/month, but if those guys win, and I'm still at this $@#%ing desk, that'll be bad.
It's not gambling, it's "gloating ex-co-worker insurance."
There's a really good Straight Dope on the topic, but typically, they have several batches of numbers and several machines. Presumably, there are (very slight) biases for each machine and number set. Assuming they never get changed out, and that you know which machine and which set are used every time, and you can get a large enough sample, you probably could come up with a solution that would be better than randomizing the numbers. Possible, just highly unlikely.
Plus, if the prize pool is 50%, then you'll need a bunch of wins. In sports betting, for instance, the casino gets 10% off the top. So you may have as many wins as losses, but you'll still be down due to the vig. You need to pull off something like 55% just to break even. Lotteries would be a little different, as most sports bets are 11-10 bets (bet 11 to make 10, assuming there are no odds), while lottery wins are significantly more than that (bet 1 to win 300M, for instance).
I've run xp acceptably (no games, of course, some patience involved on various load times) on a 900MHz athlon. The clockspeeds are comparable, but we all know how little that matters.
RAM's going to be an issue, and I think the 2GB of "HD" is going to come back to bite them pretty quickly. At least on the eee, the OS and apps take up about 75% of that. I'm sure the damnsmalllinux guys are deeply amused.
For systems with hard drives (of whatever capacity), it's a fine idea. The Wii doesn't have a hard drive, just 512M of internal flash ram.
Probably ok for casual/flash-type games, likely less so for full blown titles. Nintendo's obviously going to have to figure something out here, as the industry is obviously moving to downloads for the exact reasons you mention.
(plus, they get to keep the retailer's profit)
Not trolling, curious, and not about to set up a page just for the fun of it.
I am curious, but yellow.
Subscriptions for content never made sense, mostly because you can't stream much of anything over dialup. Once everybody got broadband, AOL got left behind.
.com bust? (hint: not much.). I understand that TW killing AOL didn't make TONS of sense, given TW's broadband lead, which could easily have been co-marketed, at least. Remember, though, AOL also had a crappy reputation for quality of service (horrific login times once the "all you can eat" system started, those damned "downloading new user experience" things), so it really wasn't something you wanted a part of in your new broadband venture.
.com explosion. AOL Deal -> Instant IPO -> Instant megaBucks for all concerned. Until AOL started demanding their cut, and things started to fall apart a bit.
Besides which, how much pull do you think the AOL folks had in TW after the
Plus, at least according to the AOL book I read, the AOL guys got to be tremendous a-holes as it became apparent that they weren't selling connectivity so much as IPOs. Again, consider some mid-level retailer, say J Crew, signing an exclusive deal with AOLMarketplace back at the cusp of the
AOL killed themselves. Case gets a lot of credit for the TW deal, but it's hard to say that AOL set their own schedule for demise. IMHO, of course.
Similar setup here, but running quite tolerably on a 1GHz C7, 1GB RAM, 150G SATA, dual 1680x1050 monitors off a PNY GeForce FX 5200 (I don't do any 3d, though). For my money, Gentoo is far preferable to Xubuntu, which always seems to have some issue for me. Couple of gotchas:
1) With that little horsepower, you want emerge to get all of it. You have two options: Either nice -n19 emerge (which takes forEVER, but you can theoretically multitask), or start the emerge, and leave the box alone for about a day.
2) Build the vast majority of what you want at once. If you break up the emerge into chunks, then you'll be sitting around monitoring chunkN so you can start chunkN+1, and it's like watching water boil. You'll miss some packages, but compiling a few won't drive you too nuts. For the intial compile, just accept the fact that emerge needs all the horsepower it can get.
3) Use openoffice-bin. For me, oo.o took about 5-6 hours to compile, and you'll re-incur that cost every time it upgrades. I don't use it that often, so I probably would have spent more time compiling it than actually using it. I have difficulty imagining there's THAT big a difference between oo-bin and compiled oo.
4) After you're done, you don't really need to be that lightweight. I happen to like Amarok, so I use it rather than audacious or any of the lighter weight mp3 players. (Having said that, you probably don't want Amarok to rescan your collection automatically. It's a bit of a beast.)
AFAIC, xfce is in just about the right spot. Pretty and configurable enough to get it to do what you want, but without the bloat and flashiness of kde or gnome. I don't know whether I'd give it to my parents, but it works really well for me.
... we have a 13 month old, and there WAS a study (again, lacking a cite) that said that kids who were in day care for 20 or fewer hours per week showed no differences from kids who were kept at home. After that, there was again no differences between the kids, so there wer really two groups: One in day care for 20 or fewer, one not.
That said, I have no idea where one would go for an unbiased study of these things. A couple of links for your viewing pleasure:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2D6143CF935A25754C0A9659C8B63
I suspect the parent's study is the one by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I didn't see that the article attaches NICHHD to a university. Although I'm not sure how that would alter my opinion of the study, now that I think about it.
Same link, another study from UMinn stating that kid's stress levels tend to rise during the day while in day care, but fall during the day while at home.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051101/news_1n1earlyed.html
A study showing that negative social effects are most pronounced when the kids are in day care for more than 45 hours a week, which seems pretty extreme.
In short, I dunno either. Go Buddhist. There's a middle path here somewhere.
Here's the problem, IMHO. For iPod usage into crappy headphones, mp3@192 is just fine. So why bother pursuing anything better? There is some (minimal) effort to get flac onto my iPod, but even that's too much. Most of the bigger mp3 players (I'm talking the ones that manage your library, like Amarok) are DESIGNED so that the file type is not readily apparent.
At the same time, people who might know what they're talking about w.r.t. recording processes seem to imply that the source recordings suck anyway. I'm not taking that Dylan quote (paraphrase: "hasn't been a well recorded album in 20 years") as gospel, but he certainly knows more about recording than I do, so it's at least commentary from a knowledgeable source.
Plus, Dylan is as likely to have as much control over that process as anyone. You seriously think that $popGroup is going to pay attention to their mastering? You seriously think that Rush (see links elsewhere in this thread) is HAPPY about getting their sound clipped? Most bands don't care, and the bands that do (or bloody well ought to) apparently don't have full control over the process.
I love music. It's the industry that's driving me insane. DRM, bad artists, bad recordings, bad (flac-less) portable options. I'm well aware exceptions exist. It's ok. I've got plenty of back catalog to work through. I am, however, worried about music in the future. I just don't see upside in any of the current business models.
Not trolling. Genuinely curious. I keep hearing people declaring the death of education, but nobody appears to have any solutions. Surely (taken en masse) the kids of today are no dumber (or smarter) than those of previous generations, yet public perception seems to imply that this generation cannot learn effectively. That's a scary proposition.
Another question: My parents taught overseas, where two year contracts are the norm. If somebody stinks, their contracts aren't renewed. Is there a problem with implementing something like this stateside? Again, just curious.
I converted my parents and in-laws, put a link on the desktop that says "browser," and haven't heard word one since. I doubt they know they're using Firefox, and I KNOW they don't care.
And I concur: The "leak" needs fixing.
I'm curious about what's going on w.r.t. Hurd dev, but not curious enough to actually delve through the changelogs. Anybody involved care to summarize what's up?
More importantly, is there still a point to its development? I'm no kernel hacker, but I'm sure there are things that the current kernel can't do well.
Thanks.
... a guy could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
- Maj. T.J. 'King' Kong (dec.)