I sell stuff on ebay. I had a guy from El Salvador win a bid on a hard drive I was selling. He has an "arrangement" with a shipper in Florida to get around the barriers, but otherwise that hard drive that cost him fifty bucks would end up damn close to 200 bucks by the time UPS (or the post office - they're both ridiculously priced) got their money and the tarrifs were covered. Unless I'm willing to get in a car and drive to El Salvador, the barriers to individual trade there are massive. Even sending shit to Canada is a pain in the butt - NAFTA only seems to really apply to the corporations (how surprising).
I'm a middle age child of the middle class - the very last gasp of the baby boomers. And it has never, ever, been my aspiration to spend a third of my life whittling away the hours in a fucking factory. I'm definitely not rich, don't care to be, yet even I can see how free(er) international trade would benefit me personally.
Why is it "globalisation" (a bad thing) when we're talking about trade, money and jobs, but "a revolution" (ie a good thing) when we're talking about the communications tools that have, in large part, facilitated that "globalisation?"
The problem isn't "globalisation" - it's an increasingly topheavy economic strata. And anything that enables individuals to subvert the oppressive upper economic layers (like americans selling used crap to el salvador, and salvadorians exploiting unoffical importation backdoors) helps us all.
Cuba has almost nothing. It's a pissant little nation with a militaristic leader and no military power to speak of. Can they feed themselves? Care for their people? Sure they do the best they can.
Cuba is a big black eye on US Imperialism - we owned the place, and over the next half century proceeded to piss it away. Previous administrations (and this one too) would rather push Cuba around because it doesn't have the military strength or alliances to challenge us. They're tightening their alliances with China... but then we get back to that whole "rising standard of living" and "trade sanctions" thing.
Method a: we refuse to deal with china. China remains a thid world country with no middle class, few trade partners, and a growing population of pissed off peasants. They have rockets, missiles, nuclear bombs - and then they revert to civil war. And unlike those poissant countries we're been meddling in for decades, "liberation" is not an option here, lest we lose NYC and LA in giant red clouds. Meanwhile we lose completely Japan, Taiwan, and dozens of other trade partners who now find themselves in the middle of a war zone.
Method b: we make china a trade partner, export as much of our culture as we can, and china becomes a nation of the fastest rising middle class in the world. Even if it's only a 30% middle class that's still more middle class citizens than there are people in the entire US. They pick the best of these new influences, and evolve their own governance through peaceful means - lest they face sanctions and risk losing all that new wealth and comfort.
Which way do you think is better for world stability?
China's affairs are their own. Everyone dies - even dynasties. Let them take the best from western culture and evolve their own ideals about liberty and freedom.
first project I ever worked on in my professional career - it was an early unit that had 32K of battery backed RAM to preserve the state of the system it was testing. For some strange reason the RAM contents were getting munged on powerdown - took me about an hour to figure out the machine was going flaky when it was shut off, so we put a comparator to drive the RST line - bingo, problem solved.
For the last ten years at least companies like MAXIM have been shipping zillions of WDT chips for use in embedded systems. They have all sorts of functionality and cost a dime. There's at least one in about every laptop. But because we have grown to expect our computers to be flaky and unreliable, there's no demand for robustness in desktop systems.
E=1/2CV^2
Most every PC power supply uses a switching convertor jsut like the one in a TV set (some even use the same control chips). They don't use bigass iron core transformers and they don't directly regulate to 12V or 5V or whatever - they use a DC bulk supply that is directly rectified from the AC line (yes, that's right, no transformer) and switch it down at high frequency (thus smaller transformers). A cheapass PC power supply might have (if you're lucky) 2x330uF of storage on this bulk supply - at 170VDC that's less than 10 joules, at 70% efficiency that's enough to drive 140W load maybe 50 mS.
All it would take to increase that to seconds is to add capacity to the bulk DC supply that's already part of every system. This would require getting larger caps to replace the cheap low value caps and a twenty cent varistor to limit inrush current so you don't blow the internal fuse simply by plugging it in.
They could even go to fullwave rectification on the input, use a 350VDC bulk supply instead of 170, and use 1/4th the capacity - a 2000uF/340VDC supply would have enough reserve to keep the entire system running a couple of seconds under "panic load." Stick a single 4700uF/450VDC cap in the "premium" power supply and you'd have a system that would be rock stable through just about anything.
The caps would cost $2-$5 instead of the twenty cent crap that's in there now; the sleep signal is already there, but no one uses it. Figure ten bucks to the end user and you have a system that will perform flawlessly through those little glitches and would have time enough to perform a proper shutdown on those rare glitches when the power didn't come back a second later.
Ten bucks. Maybe. But there's no demand for it because no one knows they could expect better at an equally reasonable price. Reviews don't even test for such basic functionality - no one has a clue, and the industry doesn't want you to know better because they would rather keep those pennies of profit themselves.
And BTW if you are feeling particularly sporty all it takes is a parts order and courage with a soldering iron. I've installed photoflash caps in TV sets to bolster the power supply and it works wonders - the cheapass Philips in my living room had this treatment and it's outlived two others and has a rock solid picture. My ancient HP Vectra firewall PC with the 233mhz cpu and the mighty 100W internal power supply coasts right through brownouts that caused my "better" desktop system to restart... that is, before I fixed it, too.
Buddy of mine made tools to do this using FORTRAN, although it did still have its limits.
Seriously - I don't know the intricacies of compiler design but I do know he won the obfuscated c contest several years ago and now works on multiprocessing tools for some very high end uses (like rocket motor simulations for NASA) - all in c. Last time I asked about the project he wasn't using gcc for it because gcc lacks certain libraries he needs (or something like that) - but it is still c.
I would say linux or no, there are many people of "insane genius" addressing this issue. It's not like we didn't know this was coming a decade ago... I mean, just look at transputer. Everything old really is becoming new again.
It needs to be milspec in order for the military to use it, especially in a combat situation... Also, the military generally only does business with military contractors.... They are going to have to take your robot and freeze it, bake it, irradiate it, EMP it, and maybe even shoot at it. All at great taxpayer expense.
I wonder if they did all that to the bulletproof jackets parents are shipping their kids because there (allegedly) aren't enough in the field to go around?
I was scouring this thread looking for someone else to say this because I knew couldn't be the only one to realize it.
I have never understood this project. If they want to start with something at least equivalent to a five year old SGI graphics pipeline abd build from there, then I'd say go for it. But the specs on this card don't look any better than the stuff you get right OOTB with an intel chipset (which, after sufferng with this goddamned nvidia system for too long now, is the reason I'll not be buying another AMD system).
So is the whole point of this card just to pick up the slack for AMD?
Personally, I love Blade Runner but I think his music sounds too much of the same. If Yanni hadn't happened years later it probably woldn't bother me, but now every time I hear it all I think of is hackneyed cliches like the beach running scene in "Chariots of Fire" or Yanni on stage "jamming" with that soulless "na-na-na-na-na" song.
If you like Vangelis you need to hit Magnatune. They have a lot of electronic artists, many of whom I find much more interesting than Vangelis. Also check out Tangerine Dream (who I also find more interesting than Vangelis).
And of course you must get his collaboration with Yes-man Jon Anderson - not to mention Wakeman's solo stuff - which then leads us to Yes's catalog, Jethro Tull...
Have you watched the shit you're shoveling lately? It is awful. Face-down in bubbling warm shit awful. It's enough to make a brave man weep into a PA system.
I'm sorry, but this is a complete red herring. For one thing, if tv sucks so bad why do so many people get caught up in certain shows? Yeah, people are idiots - which brings me to the real point:
Three's Company
Mayberry RFD
Gilligan's Island
Gun-fucking-smoke
Hee-goddamned-Haw
The Little Rascals
TV has always had shows that suck. TV has such a great track record of sucking that the few times it hasn't sucked are memorialized in rarely seen specials. Rod Serling's shows; Seinfeld; Twin Peaks. It's so rare that American TV doesn't suck you could count all the great shows that have ever been on US broadcast TV on the fingers and toes of a single bloated TV viewer.
Re:TV episodes from BitTorrent
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I believe most people would rather have a legitimate copy of something rather than a pirate, and would even pay money for that legitimacy. The problem facing owners of digital media, is HOW MUCH money are they prepared to pay. If the cost is too great, $15 for a CD, people will quite happily justify piracy to themselves.
I think you may have an antiquated notion of "legitimate." If a tv program is shown over the air it is not "piracy" to record that show or even to rebroadcast it. The show has been run on the public airwaves - how is it "piracy" to enjoy the show again? Some of the corporate mindset might argue otherwise, but i think that in itself just furthers the point about antiquated notions.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but in the US an advert treats you like a moron who will buy anything cause a guy with white perfect teeth say's it will change your life.
Funny you should mention that, since one of the better ads on american tv (I think) is for a certain chewing gum that promises fresh teeth even through the most extreme happenings. They're hosted by a cute blonde with a british accent - sound familiar?
There's an ad campaign for Hewlett Packard printers that is based entirely upon one special effect. The effect is so cool I find myself smiling every time I see one. It won't make me buy an HP printer, but it will make me watch the ad and even look forward to the next one.
Last night "The Apprentice" devoted an entire show to a project involving Pepsi. To launch a new product called "Pepsi Edge" the teams had to design a new bottle and ad campaign to go with it, then present it to about 100 of Pepsi's marketing team. Thirty minutes of people talking about Pepsi, hyping Pepsi, drinking Pepsi and bouncing off the walls - then off to the boardroom where someone who didn't love his Pepsi enough was fired. Pepsi commercials, Pepsi bottles, Pepsi cups, Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi...
Last week it was designing an ad campaign for Levi's jeans. The Donald even brought out his latest trophy-wife-to-be to give us all a closeup of how great her ass looks in Levi's. And the poor folks who forgot "Levis is all about making your ass look great" got fired.
You could cut out every second of commercials, but to cut out the sponsor you'd cut the entire "heart" of the show. Hell, you wouldn't even have a show.
Last Sunday it was "American Dreams," where Dad gave Son a shiny new '66 Mustang to welcome hm home from 'Nam. Mustang ads on the TV, Mustang billboards; uncle wants a Mustang for Christmas. Again, you'd cut out half the show getting rid of the sponsor.
Now, why would any of these production companies (and their sponsors) NOT want these programs "shared?"
You're talking about issues that are completely subjective as well as completely obvious to the purchaser. Of course there are differences in the picture between models and brands - but this doesn't mean the most expensive brands will always have the most appeal to the purchaser.
When picking a tv set it pretty much comes down to "I like the looks of that one." If it's a tube set, crank up the volume and see how the picture behaves. If you can see it shudder in rhythm with the sound, it's got a crap power supply and it's time to pick another model. If a CRT set's got a stable picture at high volume, put a blanket on top of it and partially restrict the airflow, and leave it on 24/7 for a few days. If it smokes, take it back and try again. If it survives the first month under stress, it'll probably last as long as the picture tube.
PC boards are manufactured on automated assembly lines by machines. Very little of the work outside loading the machines and tending the reflow ovens is actually done by humans.
Quality, in this case, comes from testing. You test devices as much as you need to get your scores up, then ship the unit. This offends the heck out of a lot of old school engineers, but it's still a fact of modern life. Testing individual chips adds pennies to each device; testing the pc boards much more, then repairing them and retesting adds more still. At a certain point it becomes cheaper just to expect x% of your product to be returned under warranty, bin it, and ship a new (also untested) replacement. This is the tact increasingly taken by manufacturers including biggies like Dell and (especially since the takeover by emachines) Gateway. Cutting back on quality means cutting back on labor costs in testing, not so much cutting back on materials costs.
Buying a high end tv or stereo is pretty much the same these days: very little differentiation comes from what's on the inside. If you're willing to do your own Q&A before the warranty expires, brand matters almost nothing.
This, BTW, is the primary reason so many folks like "vintage" things. These things were made before quality became a mathematical afterthought, and devices that have survived intact all these years represent the cream of their respective crops.
But where do they go? One small aprt of this motherboard set isn't available, but the rest is better documented and supported in linux than ANY other chipset I know. Speaking as someone who still has a few raw nerves over an nvidia purchase, I have to say this is trivial. Compare the documentation intel provides on its chipsets to those provided by ANY other major manufacturer and intel looks mighty damn friendly to the OSS community.
Vote with your feet? So you think it's a threat to say "well, rather than click on your wireless license I'll just go BUY a different wireless card to go in this laptop?" Or are you talking about buying a laptop NOT based on an intel chipset?
If that were the case, I'd say it's going to be much harder to vote with those feet after you've shot them off.
I don't know that I'd call it "a cheap ploy", or even "mediocre". Personally, I wish there were more "games" that let people recreate historical events for themselves, and scored them on how accurately they recreated the event. Imagine that...learning history while playing a game. Personally I like the idea of using games for something more than just passing the time.
I agree completely. And this game could be more than just exploitation if only they allow some depth...
Allow the player to be one of the bodyguards. See if you can prevent jfk from being shot dead and still live yourself.
Allow the player to be the driver. See what the driver might have seen, see if you can do anything differently.
Allow the player to be on the grassy knoll, in the crowd, or looking over Lee harvey's shoulder
Allow the player to be the gunman from ANY position overlooking the scene.
Basically, if it's just about being the trigger man in the same position as the official version and seeing how many holes you can dump into JFK, I don't see any redeeming value in it at all - not even from a gameplay perspective. Letting the player be the gunman from only the perspective of official history does nothing at all to rebuke conspiracy theories - it's just cheap (and a ripoff even at ten dollars) exploitation.
Ummm.. so GM food that may or may not prove safe over the long term for human consumption is OK just because it doesn't violate your privacy? Dying of cancer is alright, just so long as the government doesn't find out about it?
I'm not anti-GM, but that seems a bit silly to me. I haven't bought a new CD in many years, don't pay for TV, use a credit card only for online stuff, don't use a shopper card and pay with cash for just about everything - how about you?
Automobile "black boxes" only record a minimal set of data, and only keep it for a short period of time.
Speaking as someone with pretty deep roots in the auto industry, I have to disagree wth you. Especially with newer systems, there's a great deal of data preserved because it helps the controller "tune" parameters and because the controller needs to constantly check its own calibration. Even the top speed your car has ever travelled, when (an RTC is trivially easy, after all), how the brakes are performing, if the airbag has been deployed or the intertia switch has interrupted the fuel supply - all that is kept in "permanent" memory... and lots more... until it is explicitly cleared via human intervention.
(it wouldn't be useful in proving you ran from a crime).
That may be a viable option at the moment, but what do you do when everything includes an RFID tag?
carry a hammer. remove the tags at the store. Wrap them in foil.
Who cares? If you on't want the store to know what you bought, first step is to cut those credit cards in half. How many people flailing about their hands in this thread wouldn't even consider giving up their credit cards or their checking account?
This is the same chicken little response people had to bar codes in the 70's, and even to self-serve gas stations in the 80's.
As an almost permanent recluse, I find it hilarious. I rarely even answer the phone because it's most often a sales pitch. I rarely open my mail because I simply don't care. Short of a true psychopath you won't find many people more asocial than myself and yet I fear RFID tags about as much as I worry about being hit by a meteor.
Nuking the tag when you get home isn't sufficient, because you've already given away information simply by buying the product in the first place.
So I guess you never saw a bar code?
If you're seriously worried about this kind of stuff you better close those bank accounts ASAP, stop shopping at Von's, Wal-Mart or any other major chain retailer, and cancel the pay TV, the telephone, the magazine subscriptions, the electricity and anything else with your name on it. They've all been sharing your information for years.
..."Here you go. Mail is evil. Pass it
on. Hey, mail blows. Fax it to a friend."
So how do you feel about genetically engineered food crops? Surgery? The internet?
Greater technology always brings with it a greater risk of abuse. The same technology that gives your mechanic the ability to repair the very sophisticated car with the 400hp engine that gets 20MPG can jsut as easily be used by the police or insurance company to determine how fast you were going when you wrapped it around a pole, or to run from the scene of a crime.
So avoid products with RFID tags. Or buy a hammer. Drive a tenty year old car, or spend 200 bucks on an OBD tool that will let you clear the memory in your car. of course, that's going to make it harder for the mechanic to fidn the problem when it starts missing in cold weather...
I had to go to the library to do some research last night. It bugged me that I wanted to watch "West Wing" and couldn't. So while I was there I hit up usenet to grab LAST week's show which I also missed.
I was surprised to discover that, as of 7PM CST, last night's show (which would not be seen here for another hour) had been posted 11 hours earlier, most likely from an HD capture in euroupe. So, I got both shows. While I was at it I also grabbed the last couple Enterprise eps (620x320-ish avi), but I'm sure everyone here already knows about those.
If I had been on a "real" computer instead of my underpowered laptop, I could have watched last night's west wing (hi-def cap, but 480x480 svcd) an hour before it even aired in the US. I thought about getting a tuner, too - but why bother to do it myself when I can get it from someone else even quicker?
Don't take it too much for granted that next mp3 player will remain backward compatible. MP3 is still a licensed technology, and the people who own that technology don't have to keep licensing "free" versions - they could lock it up in drm just as easy as microsoft could lock up wma, and then you'd have nowhere to go to replace that $50 silver disc player when the buttons finally stop working.
If you want free you better find one of those silver disk players that can handle ogg or some other free format. Ogg sounds better, anyway. Sounds like... victory.
(for the record, since file-sharing, my music purchasing has gone from 1-2 CDs per month to 3-4 CDs per week).
And what label are all these CDs you are buying?
Way to go! Give the lobbyists even more money to bribe congress and senators into chipping away even more of our collective rights. Aren't you a steaming pile of integrity!...or...something.
Slashdot Mirror
I sell stuff on ebay. I had a guy from El Salvador win a bid on a hard drive I was selling. He has an "arrangement" with a shipper in Florida to get around the barriers, but otherwise that hard drive that cost him fifty bucks would end up damn close to 200 bucks by the time UPS (or the post office - they're both ridiculously priced) got their money and the tarrifs were covered. Unless I'm willing to get in a car and drive to El Salvador, the barriers to individual trade there are massive. Even sending shit to Canada is a pain in the butt - NAFTA only seems to really apply to the corporations (how surprising).
I'm a middle age child of the middle class - the very last gasp of the baby boomers. And it has never, ever, been my aspiration to spend a third of my life whittling away the hours in a fucking factory. I'm definitely not rich, don't care to be, yet even I can see how free(er) international trade would benefit me personally.
Why is it "globalisation" (a bad thing) when we're talking about trade, money and jobs, but "a revolution" (ie a good thing) when we're talking about the communications tools that have, in large part, facilitated that "globalisation?"
The problem isn't "globalisation" - it's an increasingly topheavy economic strata. And anything that enables individuals to subvert the oppressive upper economic layers (like americans selling used crap to el salvador, and salvadorians exploiting unoffical importation backdoors) helps us all.
Cuba has almost nothing. It's a pissant little nation with a militaristic leader and no military power to speak of. Can they feed themselves? Care for their people? Sure they do the best they can.
Cuba is a big black eye on US Imperialism - we owned the place, and over the next half century proceeded to piss it away. Previous administrations (and this one too) would rather push Cuba around because it doesn't have the military strength or alliances to challenge us. They're tightening their alliances with China... but then we get back to that whole "rising standard of living" and "trade sanctions" thing.
Let's see what happens when Castro drops...
Method a: we refuse to deal with china. China remains a thid world country with no middle class, few trade partners, and a growing population of pissed off peasants. They have rockets, missiles, nuclear bombs - and then they revert to civil war. And unlike those poissant countries we're been meddling in for decades, "liberation" is not an option here, lest we lose NYC and LA in giant red clouds. Meanwhile we lose completely Japan, Taiwan, and dozens of other trade partners who now find themselves in the middle of a war zone.
Method b: we make china a trade partner, export as much of our culture as we can, and china becomes a nation of the fastest rising middle class in the world. Even if it's only a 30% middle class that's still more middle class citizens than there are people in the entire US. They pick the best of these new influences, and evolve their own governance through peaceful means - lest they face sanctions and risk losing all that new wealth and comfort.
Which way do you think is better for world stability?
China's affairs are their own. Everyone dies - even dynasties. Let them take the best from western culture and evolve their own ideals about liberty and freedom.
first project I ever worked on in my professional career - it was an early unit that had 32K of battery backed RAM to preserve the state of the system it was testing. For some strange reason the RAM contents were getting munged on powerdown - took me about an hour to figure out the machine was going flaky when it was shut off, so we put a comparator to drive the RST line - bingo, problem solved.
For the last ten years at least companies like MAXIM have been shipping zillions of WDT chips for use in embedded systems. They have all sorts of functionality and cost a dime. There's at least one in about every laptop. But because we have grown to expect our computers to be flaky and unreliable, there's no demand for robustness in desktop systems.
E=1/2CV^2
Most every PC power supply uses a switching convertor jsut like the one in a TV set (some even use the same control chips). They don't use bigass iron core transformers and they don't directly regulate to 12V or 5V or whatever - they use a DC bulk supply that is directly rectified from the AC line (yes, that's right, no transformer) and switch it down at high frequency (thus smaller transformers). A cheapass PC power supply might have (if you're lucky) 2x330uF of storage on this bulk supply - at 170VDC that's less than 10 joules, at 70% efficiency that's enough to drive 140W load maybe 50 mS.
All it would take to increase that to seconds is to add capacity to the bulk DC supply that's already part of every system. This would require getting larger caps to replace the cheap low value caps and a twenty cent varistor to limit inrush current so you don't blow the internal fuse simply by plugging it in.
They could even go to fullwave rectification on the input, use a 350VDC bulk supply instead of 170, and use 1/4th the capacity - a 2000uF/340VDC supply would have enough reserve to keep the entire system running a couple of seconds under "panic load." Stick a single 4700uF/450VDC cap in the "premium" power supply and you'd have a system that would be rock stable through just about anything.
The caps would cost $2-$5 instead of the twenty cent crap that's in there now; the sleep signal is already there, but no one uses it. Figure ten bucks to the end user and you have a system that will perform flawlessly through those little glitches and would have time enough to perform a proper shutdown on those rare glitches when the power didn't come back a second later.
Ten bucks. Maybe. But there's no demand for it because no one knows they could expect better at an equally reasonable price. Reviews don't even test for such basic functionality - no one has a clue, and the industry doesn't want you to know better because they would rather keep those pennies of profit themselves.
And BTW if you are feeling particularly sporty all it takes is a parts order and courage with a soldering iron. I've installed photoflash caps in TV sets to bolster the power supply and it works wonders - the cheapass Philips in my living room had this treatment and it's outlived two others and has a rock solid picture. My ancient HP Vectra firewall PC with the 233mhz cpu and the mighty 100W internal power supply coasts right through brownouts that caused my "better" desktop system to restart... that is, before I fixed it, too.
Buddy of mine made tools to do this using FORTRAN, although it did still have its limits.
Seriously - I don't know the intricacies of compiler design but I do know he won the obfuscated c contest several years ago and now works on multiprocessing tools for some very high end uses (like rocket motor simulations for NASA) - all in c. Last time I asked about the project he wasn't using gcc for it because gcc lacks certain libraries he needs (or something like that) - but it is still c.
I would say linux or no, there are many people of "insane genius" addressing this issue. It's not like we didn't know this was coming a decade ago... I mean, just look at transputer. Everything old really is becoming new again.
I wonder if they did all that to the bulletproof jackets parents are shipping their kids because there (allegedly) aren't enough in the field to go around?
I was scouring this thread looking for someone else to say this because I knew couldn't be the only one to realize it.
I have never understood this project. If they want to start with something at least equivalent to a five year old SGI graphics pipeline abd build from there, then I'd say go for it. But the specs on this card don't look any better than the stuff you get right OOTB with an intel chipset (which, after sufferng with this goddamned nvidia system for too long now, is the reason I'll not be buying another AMD system).
So is the whole point of this card just to pick up the slack for AMD?
It's about genre. ie "Progress."
r essive.
Jethro Tull -> "Prog Rock"
Yes -> "Prog Rock"
Vangelis -> Proggressive... something.
Tangerine Dream -> Even-more-distantly-related-to-rock-and-very-prog
The part about Ian had totally escaped me until you mentioned it. Coincidence? Or Freudian slip?
It's not a "they" it's a "him." Vangelis O Papathanassiou - I think you can see why he just uses "Vangelis."
Anyone who wants to collect his 'entire' back catalog has their work cut out.
Personally, I love Blade Runner but I think his music sounds too much of the same. If Yanni hadn't happened years later it probably woldn't bother me, but now every time I hear it all I think of is hackneyed cliches like the beach running scene in "Chariots of Fire" or Yanni on stage "jamming" with that soulless "na-na-na-na-na" song.
If you like Vangelis you need to hit Magnatune. They have a lot of electronic artists, many of whom I find much more interesting than Vangelis. Also check out Tangerine Dream (who I also find more interesting than Vangelis).
And of course you must get his collaboration with Yes-man Jon Anderson - not to mention Wakeman's solo stuff - which then leads us to Yes's catalog, Jethro Tull...
I'm sorry, but this is a complete red herring. For one thing, if tv sucks so bad why do so many people get caught up in certain shows? Yeah, people are idiots - which brings me to the real point:
Three's Company
Mayberry RFD
Gilligan's Island
Gun-fucking-smoke
Hee-goddamned-Haw
The Little Rascals
TV has always had shows that suck. TV has such a great track record of sucking that the few times it hasn't sucked are memorialized in rarely seen specials. Rod Serling's shows; Seinfeld; Twin Peaks. It's so rare that American TV doesn't suck you could count all the great shows that have ever been on US broadcast TV on the fingers and toes of a single bloated TV viewer.
I think you may have an antiquated notion of "legitimate." If a tv program is shown over the air it is not "piracy" to record that show or even to rebroadcast it. The show has been run on the public airwaves - how is it "piracy" to enjoy the show again? Some of the corporate mindset might argue otherwise, but i think that in itself just furthers the point about antiquated notions.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but in the US an advert treats you like a moron who will buy anything cause a guy with white perfect teeth say's it will change your life.
Funny you should mention that, since one of the better ads on american tv (I think) is for a certain chewing gum that promises fresh teeth even through the most extreme happenings. They're hosted by a cute blonde with a british accent - sound familiar?
There's an ad campaign for Hewlett Packard printers that is based entirely upon one special effect. The effect is so cool I find myself smiling every time I see one. It won't make me buy an HP printer, but it will make me watch the ad and even look forward to the next one.
Last night "The Apprentice" devoted an entire show to a project involving Pepsi. To launch a new product called "Pepsi Edge" the teams had to design a new bottle and ad campaign to go with it, then present it to about 100 of Pepsi's marketing team. Thirty minutes of people talking about Pepsi, hyping Pepsi, drinking Pepsi and bouncing off the walls - then off to the boardroom where someone who didn't love his Pepsi enough was fired. Pepsi commercials, Pepsi bottles, Pepsi cups, Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi...
Last week it was designing an ad campaign for Levi's jeans. The Donald even brought out his latest trophy-wife-to-be to give us all a closeup of how great her ass looks in Levi's. And the poor folks who forgot "Levis is all about making your ass look great" got fired.
You could cut out every second of commercials, but to cut out the sponsor you'd cut the entire "heart" of the show. Hell, you wouldn't even have a show.
Last Sunday it was "American Dreams," where Dad gave Son a shiny new '66 Mustang to welcome hm home from 'Nam. Mustang ads on the TV, Mustang billboards; uncle wants a Mustang for Christmas. Again, you'd cut out half the show getting rid of the sponsor.
Now, why would any of these production companies (and their sponsors) NOT want these programs "shared?"
You're talking about issues that are completely subjective as well as completely obvious to the purchaser. Of course there are differences in the picture between models and brands - but this doesn't mean the most expensive brands will always have the most appeal to the purchaser.
When picking a tv set it pretty much comes down to "I like the looks of that one." If it's a tube set, crank up the volume and see how the picture behaves. If you can see it shudder in rhythm with the sound, it's got a crap power supply and it's time to pick another model. If a CRT set's got a stable picture at high volume, put a blanket on top of it and partially restrict the airflow, and leave it on 24/7 for a few days. If it smokes, take it back and try again. If it survives the first month under stress, it'll probably last as long as the picture tube.
PC boards are manufactured on automated assembly lines by machines. Very little of the work outside loading the machines and tending the reflow ovens is actually done by humans.
Quality, in this case, comes from testing. You test devices as much as you need to get your scores up, then ship the unit. This offends the heck out of a lot of old school engineers, but it's still a fact of modern life. Testing individual chips adds pennies to each device; testing the pc boards much more, then repairing them and retesting adds more still. At a certain point it becomes cheaper just to expect x% of your product to be returned under warranty, bin it, and ship a new (also untested) replacement. This is the tact increasingly taken by manufacturers including biggies like Dell and (especially since the takeover by emachines) Gateway. Cutting back on quality means cutting back on labor costs in testing, not so much cutting back on materials costs.
Buying a high end tv or stereo is pretty much the same these days: very little differentiation comes from what's on the inside. If you're willing to do your own Q&A before the warranty expires, brand matters almost nothing.
This, BTW, is the primary reason so many folks like "vintage" things. These things were made before quality became a mathematical afterthought, and devices that have survived intact all these years represent the cream of their respective crops.
You don't need foam cushions to enjoy a little cousin action..
And all those folks who said "slashdot doesn't have a defined community mentality..."
Sure can't tell it from here. Seems apparent Apple isn't the only evil corporation with a bunch of brainwshed zealots carefully guarding the door.
"Momma always said..."
I said pretty much the same thing a few days ago and was instantly modded to troll. Not once, but three times making the same point.
Sun doesn't have a good record on this, and (no matter how many times you quote RMS) "opening" the source doesn't make it truly open.
Uh oh, now I've done it again. let's see how long it takes to get modded down this time...
But where do they go? One small aprt of this motherboard set isn't available, but the rest is better documented and supported in linux than ANY other chipset I know. Speaking as someone who still has a few raw nerves over an nvidia purchase, I have to say this is trivial. Compare the documentation intel provides on its chipsets to those provided by ANY other major manufacturer and intel looks mighty damn friendly to the OSS community.
Vote with your feet? So you think it's a threat to say "well, rather than click on your wireless license I'll just go BUY a different wireless card to go in this laptop?" Or are you talking about buying a laptop NOT based on an intel chipset?
If that were the case, I'd say it's going to be much harder to vote with those feet after you've shot them off.
I agree completely. And this game could be more than just exploitation if only they allow some depth...
Allow the player to be one of the bodyguards. See if you can prevent jfk from being shot dead and still live yourself.
Allow the player to be the driver. See what the driver might have seen, see if you can do anything differently.
Allow the player to be on the grassy knoll, in the crowd, or looking over Lee harvey's shoulder
Allow the player to be the gunman from ANY position overlooking the scene. Basically, if it's just about being the trigger man in the same position as the official version and seeing how many holes you can dump into JFK, I don't see any redeeming value in it at all - not even from a gameplay perspective. Letting the player be the gunman from only the perspective of official history does nothing at all to rebuke conspiracy theories - it's just cheap (and a ripoff even at ten dollars) exploitation.
I'm not anti-GM, but that seems a bit silly to me. I haven't bought a new CD in many years, don't pay for TV, use a credit card only for online stuff, don't use a shopper card and pay with cash for just about everything - how about you?
Automobile "black boxes" only record a minimal set of data, and only keep it for a short period of time.
Speaking as someone with pretty deep roots in the auto industry, I have to disagree wth you. Especially with newer systems, there's a great deal of data preserved because it helps the controller "tune" parameters and because the controller needs to constantly check its own calibration. Even the top speed your car has ever travelled, when (an RTC is trivially easy, after all), how the brakes are performing, if the airbag has been deployed or the intertia switch has interrupted the fuel supply - all that is kept in "permanent" memory... and lots more... until it is explicitly cleared via human intervention.
(it wouldn't be useful in proving you ran from a crime).
Actually, it would and it has.
So avoid products with RFID tags
That may be a viable option at the moment, but what do you do when everything includes an RFID tag?
carry a hammer. remove the tags at the store. Wrap them in foil.Who cares? If you on't want the store to know what you bought, first step is to cut those credit cards in half. How many people flailing about their hands in this thread wouldn't even consider giving up their credit cards or their checking account?
This is the same chicken little response people had to bar codes in the 70's, and even to self-serve gas stations in the 80's.
As an almost permanent recluse, I find it hilarious. I rarely even answer the phone because it's most often a sales pitch. I rarely open my mail because I simply don't care. Short of a true psychopath you won't find many people more asocial than myself and yet I fear RFID tags about as much as I worry about being hit by a meteor.
Nuking the tag when you get home isn't sufficient, because you've already given away information simply by buying the product in the first place.
So I guess you never saw a bar code?
If you're seriously worried about this kind of stuff you better close those bank accounts ASAP, stop shopping at Von's, Wal-Mart or any other major chain retailer, and cancel the pay TV, the telephone, the magazine subscriptions, the electricity and anything else with your name on it. They've all been sharing your information for years.
"Why does this dummy have a bucket on its head?"
"Because we're blind to their tyranny."
"Then shouldn't you be wearing the bucket?"
So how do you feel about genetically engineered food crops? Surgery? The internet?
Greater technology always brings with it a greater risk of abuse. The same technology that gives your mechanic the ability to repair the very sophisticated car with the 400hp engine that gets 20MPG can jsut as easily be used by the police or insurance company to determine how fast you were going when you wrapped it around a pole, or to run from the scene of a crime.
So avoid products with RFID tags. Or buy a hammer. Drive a tenty year old car, or spend 200 bucks on an OBD tool that will let you clear the memory in your car. of course, that's going to make it harder for the mechanic to fidn the problem when it starts missing in cold weather...
If you're on a fast link you probably won't notice a problem. Those of us on modems get to see it a LOT.
I had to go to the library to do some research last night. It bugged me that I wanted to watch "West Wing" and couldn't. So while I was there I hit up usenet to grab LAST week's show which I also missed.
I was surprised to discover that, as of 7PM CST, last night's show (which would not be seen here for another hour) had been posted 11 hours earlier, most likely from an HD capture in euroupe. So, I got both shows. While I was at it I also grabbed the last couple Enterprise eps (620x320-ish avi), but I'm sure everyone here already knows about those.
If I had been on a "real" computer instead of my underpowered laptop, I could have watched last night's west wing (hi-def cap, but 480x480 svcd) an hour before it even aired in the US. I thought about getting a tuner, too - but why bother to do it myself when I can get it from someone else even quicker?
Slashdot will fix the fucking site so all us firefox/mozilla users won't have to reload every other goddamned page.
Don't take it too much for granted that next mp3 player will remain backward compatible. MP3 is still a licensed technology, and the people who own that technology don't have to keep licensing "free" versions - they could lock it up in drm just as easy as microsoft could lock up wma, and then you'd have nowhere to go to replace that $50 silver disc player when the buttons finally stop working.
If you want free you better find one of those silver disk players that can handle ogg or some other free format. Ogg sounds better, anyway. Sounds like... victory.
(for the record, since file-sharing, my music purchasing has gone from 1-2 CDs per month to 3-4 CDs per week).
...or ...something.
And what label are all these CDs you are buying?
Way to go! Give the lobbyists even more money to bribe congress and senators into chipping away even more of our collective rights. Aren't you a steaming pile of integrity!