Consider Validation, a short film on Youtube that, in my opinion, is far more valuable than Dude Where's My Car could ever be. Sure, it's a single gem in a sea of junk - but then there's groups willing to sift through that junk to find the gems.
The other is a media pad, said to be smaller than a Kindle but with a bigger screen, that would let users listen to music, view photos, watch high-definition videos, and make calls over a Wi-Fi connection.
This is almost exactly what I've been waiting for, although I'd prefer it if I could get this thing without Verizon's taint. The netbook market is growing, and it was only a matter of time until Apple got around to putting in their entry.
Also, here's a thought: if you've already got one of those bluetooth headsets permanently embedded in your ear, your "phone" can be a bit larger - after all, it just needs to fit into your briefcase, backpack, cargo pockets or (given that this is Apple) purse or messenger bag (but I repeat myself). Why not make it a full-fledged netbook?
How can I possibly debate this issue with you or anyone else when the climate change camp gets to count both warmer and colder temperatures at the poles as favorable for their position?
You're looking for debate? Oh I'm sorry, this is doctoral level Earth Systems Science. Debate is down the corner to the left.
Seriously, thinking you can actually debate this topic without spending years of your life studying it is like thinking you can seriously debate whether P=NP just because you took a class on computation theory once.
But I would point out, that at least in hollywood, the tastes of the rich are doing precisely what you're suggesting - everyone from directors, script writers, actors and onwards are working on a basis which is very much like patronage for the vast majority of the content they produce.
If you actually read the bible, the koran or the torah, you will read a lot more about love and forgivness than you do about killing people you don't like.
I'm not sure what books you're reading, but as far as I know only the New Testament has much about "love" and "forgiveness". God of the Old Testament and the Torah is full of salt and vinegar, damning and cursing and calling upon his people to rape cities. I will admit that I don't know much about the Koran.
"Thou shalt not kill" isn't really open to interpretation. It is absolutely clear what it means.
Unfortunately, the Bible wasn't written in English. The Hebrew words used there do not necessarily mean "kill"; there is very good evidence that they might mean "murder". This makes perfect sense in the context of the rest of the Bible - after all, God calls on people to kill for Him all the time in the Old Testament.
Should we post all of our source code on Facebook, just to ensure transparency? That would just make us vulnerable, and vulnerable democracies get conquered.
If a bunch of undisciplined, underfunded hackers can make it work, why can't the army?
Besides, I think it would be a great psychological warfare tool - "If we were going to invade you, this is how we would do it. It doesn't matter that you know this, because you will be crushed." "If you attack us here, we will defend with these forces in these positions, plus other discretionary forces. We know this battle plan will defeat any attack."
You can do this yourself right now, with no need for fancy-pants implants. Just drink enough badly filtered beer, and the yeast in the debris at the bottom will eventually colonize your intestines. Once they're in there, they'll ferment the simple sugars you eat, turning them into alcohol directly in your intestines.
Of course, this might kill you. But at least you'd die drunk.
What I find amazing about the world today is that not only do employers feel the need to administer a personality test in order to find out how a potential employee thinks, but those potential employees feel the need to study for these tests, just so they don't get any questions wrong.
Not that I really think they're necessarily doing a good job now, but the Democrats definitely did not have control of the Senate in 2006. If you look at the composition of the Senate, you'll see that the Democrats controlled 49 seats and the Republicans also controlled 49 seats; the last two were the independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders. Joe Lieberman, despite being registered as an "Independent Democrat", sides quite frequently with the Republicans; indeed, he gave a speech supporting John McCain for president in 2008.
So that's 49 Republican votes, 49 Democrat, 1 independent who tends to vote Democrat and 1 independent who tends to vote Republican. The Republicans are generally better at getting all their people to vote the same way, which means they basically win ties like this. The Democrats definitely didn't have control of the Senate, and if you don't control the Senate, you don't control Congress.
Have you ever even seen one of those RedBox stands that one of the grandparent posters mentioned? It's essentially an entire Blockbuster store, put into the form factor of a vending machine.
Just think about it. They took the useful part of Blockbuster (renting out movies), and made it into something that can fit in your local grocery store, right next to the Coinstar. There's no way in hell Blockbuster can ever compete with that; the yearly salary of a single manager would probably buy one of those things outright. They're going out of business as soon as more people start franchising out RedBox.
I know respect is one of those intangible things you're not supposed to put a value on, but I really doubt that the respect of the military half of your co-workers is worth $111k per year.
The market for a stick of SDRAM isn't your nephew who's rebuilding your old box for a server, it's the company who has multiple thousands of dollars sunk into a machine/os combination that is increasingly obsolete, but for which there is no available substitute. If you lose a stick of ram from that box, replacing it at $110 is cheaper than re-investing in your irreplaceable software/hardware combination.
I can kind of understand that, but on the other hand I can't imagine how preying on the desperate and unprepared makes for a good business plan. Which is probably why they're going out of business.
The Circuit City near my house had those great big "Going out of business, massive discounts" signs up, so I decided to go inside and take a look.
There was nothing I couldn't find for cheaper online, even including the price of S&H.
I was quite surprised, though, to find some plain, 256 MB sticks of PC133 SDRAM (you know, the stuff that came before DDR). It was some plain Circuit City branded stuff. I was mildly pleased to see that that Circuit City catered to people with old computers.
Then I saw the price tag. They were trying to sell it for $109.
One hundred and nine dollars. For technology that's fifteen years old, and has been mostly obsolete for the last five.
What the fuck.
I was so appalled by this that I actually asked one of their sales associates why they were charging such an unreasonable price for obsolete hardware. He responded in true Slashdot fashion, with a car analogy: "It's like the way people pay lots of money for an old car - it's old, but good!".
So yeah. They're going out of business because, apparently, nobody there knows anything about anything.
Err yeah. 64% of the voting age population in 1960 would be, according to the 1960 census, roughly 117,302,00 people. 56.8% of the population in 2009, according to the estimate you can find on Wikipedia, is about 173,915,352 people.
That's nearly sixty million more people voting now than in 1960. Sixty million. This is a very large number. Sure, the percentage of voters has gone down to terrible levels - but we've still got 60,000,000 more people voting.
I don't know exactly when you bought that, but nowadays such a laptop is about one step above the bottom end, and given that it's a Dell Inspiron it probably was that way when you bought it. From the graphics card, I'd say you probably bought it two or three years ago; as such, it's an older, lower end computer. You shouldn't expect too much of it.
That being said, it's crippled for most purposes by that 1 GB of ram - on anything but a high-end laptop, memory is shared with the video card. You've actually got anything from 512 MB to 896 MB of usable ram. Spend $50 or so on two or even four gigabytes of laptop RAM (make sure you get the right type), and you might even be able to play TF2. You'll definitely notice a permanent speed difference.
This list is entirely without any redeeming value. More than half of the "coolest" products are new versions of operating systems and applications (OMG they released Fedora 9! I may wet myself with glee!), and the rest of it includes useless things like what appears to be a Twitter clone and something IBM's branded as Lotus. Hell, they put Android on there, and that's a hardware platform that doesn't even have a killer app yet.
Ubuntu's on it twice for goodness' sakes! And the second time is the long-term service distribution, which is about as exciting as growing grass!
Normally I don't complain about the stuff that makes it to the front page, but this list is just a complete waste of absolutely everyone's time.
I do tech support at a small company, and most of the people there have never seen the ribbon interface before. For some reason, I can usually find stuff in it faster than they can, even though I've used MSO for a total of maybe two years and most of them have been using some version of MSO for their entire professional lives. I'm doing tech support for them, so I guess this is my job, but it was astonishing to me how I could figure out where the functionality they wanted was in a few seconds, after they'd been scratching their heads for minutes. These are intelligent people, not the sort of users that just memorize a couple of clicks; in fact, they're perfectly capable of figuring out most other software. It seemed like the Ribbon UI wasn't leveraging their experience with the old UI at all - rather, I got the impression that the ribbon paradigm was entirely at right-angles to what they expected, like it required a different mode of thought that they did not have but for some reason I do.
Of course, when I had that thought, it became clear to me what was going on. I'm sure Microsoft did acceptance testing for this new interface, with focus groups and all that, but it seems to me that they missed something. Fundamentally, in order to use the ribbon properly, you need to think like a programmer and not a normal user. I don't know why this happens, but from my experience (the plural of anecdote is data, after all:) ) I've found that people in more programming oriented areas have less trouble with the ribbon than everyone else.
Maybe this is just confirmation bias or something, but the fact remains that almost everyone in the company wishes we had 2k3.
"Unibody" or more informatively (I'll spare you the wiki link), a style of monocoque construction where the metal is stressed and connected in such a way that it reinforces itself. Kinda neat really, but not quite "unit-body". That would be different.
Why did you "spare" us the wiki link? Is it perhaps because, at the moment, unit body construction redirects directly to monocoque? The opening paragraphs of the WP article, in fact, make it clear that unibody, unit-body, and monocoque are all terms for the same thing. The author does know what he's talking about, and probably better than you do.
Since you mention the wikipedia article, I would think what happened here is that you looked up the phrase, saw that your primary argument has absolutely no substance, and still used it.
- Because despite the propaganda from various cell phones makers, there's more and more evidence coming out that tends to show it's not very healthy to carry one over you for long stretches of time.
No, there isn't. This is parallel to the cycle that happens to most complementary and alternative medicine with regard to peer reviewed evidence - there are a bunch of small studies that seem to show a slight effect, and then there's one large study that shows no effect. Then there's more and more small studies that seem to show a slight effect, followed by a large study that shows none. There's "more and more evidence" because those small, sometimes badly-run studies are influenced by publication bias - nobody's going to finish and write up a small study that shows no result.
Basically, there is no real evidence that implies a link between any sort of bad health and carrying a cell phone. There's no known physical mechanism by which this could happen, and there's no feasible theoretical mechanism.
You can't go by reviews either. Reviewers have already talked them selves in to how good the game will be, reviews are far too positively biased for Big Hits(tm).
Yeah, that's why I watch Zero Punctuation for game reviews. Yahtzee already hates everything, so he only actually likes very few games, and those few games are generally excellent. The problem is, he only does one per week. Also, he doesn't do anything stupid like rate something so large and complex as a game on a five or ten point scale, which I appreciate but some people don't.
I don't get it. When I took AI, everyone in my class said the book was "dry" - but it's got all sorts of little jokes. Every chapter is opened with a silly little quote along the lines of:
Chapter 1: in which we try to explain why we consider AI to be a subject most worthy of study, and in which we try to decide what exactly it is, this being a good thing to decide before embarking"
The problem in the chapter is sometimes humorous, too; the chapter on probabilities is basically about whether or not the author has a cavity, given that he has a toothache and that the dentists "nasty probe" catches on his tooth. There's also several silly asides in every chapter.
It's a textbook, not a Terry Pratchett novel. I think the authors did quite well in terms of making it an interesting book. If you think this book is dry, I'd like to see what textbooks you're normally reading.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider Validation, a short film on Youtube that, in my opinion, is far more valuable than Dude Where's My Car could ever be. Sure, it's a single gem in a sea of junk - but then there's groups willing to sift through that junk to find the gems.
This is almost exactly what I've been waiting for, although I'd prefer it if I could get this thing without Verizon's taint. The netbook market is growing, and it was only a matter of time until Apple got around to putting in their entry.
Also, here's a thought: if you've already got one of those bluetooth headsets permanently embedded in your ear, your "phone" can be a bit larger - after all, it just needs to fit into your briefcase, backpack, cargo pockets or (given that this is Apple) purse or messenger bag (but I repeat myself). Why not make it a full-fledged netbook?
You're looking for debate? Oh I'm sorry, this is doctoral level Earth Systems Science. Debate is down the corner to the left. Seriously, thinking you can actually debate this topic without spending years of your life studying it is like thinking you can seriously debate whether P=NP just because you took a class on computation theory once.
Indeed! And sometimes you get a producer like Jon Peters, who has more control over a work than any patron ever did, and demands giant mechanical spiders in both Superman and Sandman films.
I'm not sure what books you're reading, but as far as I know only the New Testament has much about "love" and "forgiveness". God of the Old Testament and the Torah is full of salt and vinegar, damning and cursing and calling upon his people to rape cities. I will admit that I don't know much about the Koran.
Unfortunately, the Bible wasn't written in English. The Hebrew words used there do not necessarily mean "kill"; there is very good evidence that they might mean "murder". This makes perfect sense in the context of the rest of the Bible - after all, God calls on people to kill for Him all the time in the Old Testament.
If a bunch of undisciplined, underfunded hackers can make it work, why can't the army?
Besides, I think it would be a great psychological warfare tool - "If we were going to invade you, this is how we would do it. It doesn't matter that you know this, because you will be crushed." "If you attack us here, we will defend with these forces in these positions, plus other discretionary forces. We know this battle plan will defeat any attack."
You can do this yourself right now, with no need for fancy-pants implants. Just drink enough badly filtered beer, and the yeast in the debris at the bottom will eventually colonize your intestines. Once they're in there, they'll ferment the simple sugars you eat, turning them into alcohol directly in your intestines.
Of course, this might kill you. But at least you'd die drunk.
What I find amazing about the world today is that not only do employers feel the need to administer a personality test in order to find out how a potential employee thinks, but those potential employees feel the need to study for these tests, just so they don't get any questions wrong.
Not that I really think they're necessarily doing a good job now, but the Democrats definitely did not have control of the Senate in 2006. If you look at the composition of the Senate, you'll see that the Democrats controlled 49 seats and the Republicans also controlled 49 seats; the last two were the independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders. Joe Lieberman, despite being registered as an "Independent Democrat", sides quite frequently with the Republicans; indeed, he gave a speech supporting John McCain for president in 2008.
So that's 49 Republican votes, 49 Democrat, 1 independent who tends to vote Democrat and 1 independent who tends to vote Republican. The Republicans are generally better at getting all their people to vote the same way, which means they basically win ties like this. The Democrats definitely didn't have control of the Senate, and if you don't control the Senate, you don't control Congress.
Have you ever even seen one of those RedBox stands that one of the grandparent posters mentioned? It's essentially an entire Blockbuster store, put into the form factor of a vending machine. Just think about it. They took the useful part of Blockbuster (renting out movies), and made it into something that can fit in your local grocery store, right next to the Coinstar. There's no way in hell Blockbuster can ever compete with that; the yearly salary of a single manager would probably buy one of those things outright. They're going out of business as soon as more people start franchising out RedBox.
I know respect is one of those intangible things you're not supposed to put a value on, but I really doubt that the respect of the military half of your co-workers is worth $111k per year.
I can kind of understand that, but on the other hand I can't imagine how preying on the desperate and unprepared makes for a good business plan. Which is probably why they're going out of business.
The Circuit City near my house had those great big "Going out of business, massive discounts" signs up, so I decided to go inside and take a look.
There was nothing I couldn't find for cheaper online, even including the price of S&H.
I was quite surprised, though, to find some plain, 256 MB sticks of PC133 SDRAM (you know, the stuff that came before DDR). It was some plain Circuit City branded stuff. I was mildly pleased to see that that Circuit City catered to people with old computers.
Then I saw the price tag. They were trying to sell it for $109.
One hundred and nine dollars. For technology that's fifteen years old, and has been mostly obsolete for the last five.
What the fuck.
I was so appalled by this that I actually asked one of their sales associates why they were charging such an unreasonable price for obsolete hardware. He responded in true Slashdot fashion, with a car analogy: "It's like the way people pay lots of money for an old car - it's old, but good!".
So yeah. They're going out of business because, apparently, nobody there knows anything about anything.
Exactly! This is Slashdot, so leave the BBCode to the forums and use HTML like a real nerd!
Err yeah. 64% of the voting age population in 1960 would be, according to the 1960 census, roughly 117,302,00 people. 56.8% of the population in 2009, according to the estimate you can find on Wikipedia, is about 173,915,352 people.
That's nearly sixty million more people voting now than in 1960. Sixty million. This is a very large number. Sure, the percentage of voters has gone down to terrible levels - but we've still got 60,000,000 more people voting.
I don't know exactly when you bought that, but nowadays such a laptop is about one step above the bottom end, and given that it's a Dell Inspiron it probably was that way when you bought it. From the graphics card, I'd say you probably bought it two or three years ago; as such, it's an older, lower end computer. You shouldn't expect too much of it.
That being said, it's crippled for most purposes by that 1 GB of ram - on anything but a high-end laptop, memory is shared with the video card. You've actually got anything from 512 MB to 896 MB of usable ram. Spend $50 or so on two or even four gigabytes of laptop RAM (make sure you get the right type), and you might even be able to play TF2. You'll definitely notice a permanent speed difference.
I know! Uranium sucks! It's still so energetic, nobody wants to have it near their house. If only there were some way of extracting all that energy.
Nah, I'm sure that even if we could do it, people would just freak out and start screaming "Chernobyl! Chernobyl!" for no reason.
... your post was more informative than the article.
I know that's a pretty low bar to pass, but you still deserve congratulations.
Yeah, I meant to just say "platform". It seems the sheer, concentrated stupid in the article is contagious.
This list is entirely without any redeeming value. More than half of the "coolest" products are new versions of operating systems and applications (OMG they released Fedora 9! I may wet myself with glee!), and the rest of it includes useless things like what appears to be a Twitter clone and something IBM's branded as Lotus. Hell, they put Android on there, and that's a hardware platform that doesn't even have a killer app yet.
Ubuntu's on it twice for goodness' sakes! And the second time is the long-term service distribution, which is about as exciting as growing grass!
Normally I don't complain about the stuff that makes it to the front page, but this list is just a complete waste of absolutely everyone's time.
I do tech support at a small company, and most of the people there have never seen the ribbon interface before. For some reason, I can usually find stuff in it faster than they can, even though I've used MSO for a total of maybe two years and most of them have been using some version of MSO for their entire professional lives. I'm doing tech support for them, so I guess this is my job, but it was astonishing to me how I could figure out where the functionality they wanted was in a few seconds, after they'd been scratching their heads for minutes. These are intelligent people, not the sort of users that just memorize a couple of clicks; in fact, they're perfectly capable of figuring out most other software. It seemed like the Ribbon UI wasn't leveraging their experience with the old UI at all - rather, I got the impression that the ribbon paradigm was entirely at right-angles to what they expected, like it required a different mode of thought that they did not have but for some reason I do.
Of course, when I had that thought, it became clear to me what was going on. I'm sure Microsoft did acceptance testing for this new interface, with focus groups and all that, but it seems to me that they missed something. Fundamentally, in order to use the ribbon properly, you need to think like a programmer and not a normal user. I don't know why this happens, but from my experience (the plural of anecdote is data, after all :) ) I've found that people in more programming oriented areas have less trouble with the ribbon than everyone else.
Maybe this is just confirmation bias or something, but the fact remains that almost everyone in the company wishes we had 2k3.
Why did you "spare" us the wiki link? Is it perhaps because, at the moment, unit body construction redirects directly to monocoque? The opening paragraphs of the WP article, in fact, make it clear that unibody, unit-body, and monocoque are all terms for the same thing. The author does know what he's talking about, and probably better than you do.
Since you mention the wikipedia article, I would think what happened here is that you looked up the phrase, saw that your primary argument has absolutely no substance, and still used it.
No, there isn't. This is parallel to the cycle that happens to most complementary and alternative medicine with regard to peer reviewed evidence - there are a bunch of small studies that seem to show a slight effect, and then there's one large study that shows no effect. Then there's more and more small studies that seem to show a slight effect, followed by a large study that shows none. There's "more and more evidence" because those small, sometimes badly-run studies are influenced by publication bias - nobody's going to finish and write up a small study that shows no result.
Basically, there is no real evidence that implies a link between any sort of bad health and carrying a cell phone. There's no known physical mechanism by which this could happen, and there's no feasible theoretical mechanism.
Yeah, that's why I watch Zero Punctuation for game reviews. Yahtzee already hates everything, so he only actually likes very few games, and those few games are generally excellent. The problem is, he only does one per week. Also, he doesn't do anything stupid like rate something so large and complex as a game on a five or ten point scale, which I appreciate but some people don't.
I don't get it. When I took AI, everyone in my class said the book was "dry" - but it's got all sorts of little jokes. Every chapter is opened with a silly little quote along the lines of:
The problem in the chapter is sometimes humorous, too; the chapter on probabilities is basically about whether or not the author has a cavity, given that he has a toothache and that the dentists "nasty probe" catches on his tooth. There's also several silly asides in every chapter.
It's a textbook, not a Terry Pratchett novel. I think the authors did quite well in terms of making it an interesting book. If you think this book is dry, I'd like to see what textbooks you're normally reading.