when what the world really needs is a better personal rocket launcher... for shooting rockets into other people.
Screw shooting rockets AT people; that's too quick and painless. What I want is a personal rocket launcher for launching people I don't like into space. It should preferably be adaptable for different environments- office chair, easy chair, etc.
Pretty easy, too. I don't give a crap about the survivability of anything- especially the passenger. Simplifies the design process;-)
How the hell is this insightful? Even a "talking head" reporter on TV wouldn't say this drivel.
Anyone else just immediately get the urge to metamoderate, every single day?
God, I am so SICK of the space opera that is NASA. I don't give a god damn FUCK about the shuttle, and the only reason the networks are covering it so closely is because if the shuttle does disintegrate (thus becoming a major repeat "disaster") they'd be caught with their pants down if they didn't.
Every local nightly news report the last couple of days has opened with "breaking news" about what Astronaut Bob is doing. "oh, he pulled on a piece of fabric." "Oh, he might have damaged something else." "oh, here's the crew, are they doomed? Let's ask them." "oh, here they are collecting trash from the station, how exciting."
I had to sit through a class at MIT rife with stupid ideas like this.
Just one? Siiigh, here I go, likely to get modded flamebait, but what the hell. I've talked to numerous MIT students (ranging from current undergrads, to PhD's) in several different fields (mechanical engineering, electronics, etc). I also worked for MIT (see below).
MIT is "rife", like many "top" schools, with professors who barely show up for the classes they supposedly "teach". TA's run the class, do the grading, and interact with the students. Meanwhile, the professors are busy doing the traditional MIT professor path: invent something, patent it, form a company, get rich off it. MIT has an entire office full of patent attorneys, called the Technology Licensing Office- where I worked for a bit. They measure revenue in hundreds of millions of dollars. MIT has turned into an R&D mill; the Media Lab is a perfect example. MIT's best and brightest from the Media Lab have turned out...a shag-rug-covered alarm clock that rolls off the table when you hit the snooze button. Slightly clever, very half-baked, and utterly lacking in anything even remotely approaching state of the art in -any- field. But it's from an MIT student, from the Media Lab no less, and their shit is gold and smells of rose blossoms- so it gets local, national, and international coverage, and nobody says "hey, this is just an alarm clock with two wheels and motors that turn on for a random bit of time". Ie, something a smart 8th grader could make.
I went to a college where I was on a first name basis with my CS professors, their significant others...even knew their kids, and I'd bump into them on campus at concerts and stuff. I could, during their fairly wide office hours, walk into their office, plop down on the couch, and ask them questions about the current homework assignment or project. I knew most of the kids in my classes (the largest, an "intro" level class, was 25 people). You know what? I actually learned stuff, and not just what was in my textbook.
Maybe if MIT professors actually taught their classes, class size would be smaller, students would feel more involved (and hence as questions more often during a lecture) and the quality of the lecture would be such that fewer questions would be necessary in the first place.
Some will argue that MIT's professors, focusing on research, are its strength. Except to undergrads, they'll never get even close to this state-of-the-art research. The professors who come up with truly revolutionary stuff are usually the furthest removed from students. "Top" schools all sell the same lie the armed forced do- "join us, work on cutting edge stuff!" Well, funny thing that you join, and find yourself cleaning lab equipment. Hey, it's a step up from cleaning toilets in the Air Force general's jet, I guess.
Want a perfect example of MIT's failure to educate its graduates with real-world, useful skills? The recent underwater vehicle competition where a bunch of barely-literate high school students from a poor texas immigrant community beat the MIT team.
I know you're joking, but I think a number of slashdot readers are thinking, "yeah, why can't they just shield them".
They'd have to be wearing quite a bit of lead shielding. Thousands of pounds, in fact. A fair chunk of cosmic radiation consists of ionizing, high-energy radiation.
Additional shielding, either for people or the entire craft, would require more fuel to accelerate to the necessary travel velocity- and more fuel to SLOW DOWN when you get there. The bits that were involved in landing couldn't be shielded, as the weight would make it a one-way trip (it pretty much is anyway).
A magnetic field to deflect said particles (aka like the earth's field) would require a lot of energy, which could only come from a nuclear source. Which would emit its own radiation, require its own shielding, etc...ie, would add weight to the craft.
I'm not sure I see the point of even going to Mars in the first place; like Kennedy's moon trip, going to Mars will get us nothing. Things are just too impractical to get anything useful done on either planet. The futurists all argue, "well, SOME day it'll be practical". Wasn't this the same group that predicted we'd have, ten years ago, flying cars, transporters, faster than light travel, etc?
Then it is NOT real-time. You clearly don't understand the term.
From The Jargon File: "Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds)."
Good ol' Roland misapplied the term, or the article author did.
Up to several hundred clients, yes. Beyond that? Things don't look quite as cheery. Try connecting to a torrent with a thousand peers and a thousand seeds. A substantial part of your bandwidth- especially precious upstream bandwidth- is spent replying to peers. I blame the third party clients, mostly, for flooding peers with requests.
Mitnick went to jail for a couple years for computer crimes. He sold a book about it. He now makes at least six figures a year on the interview, lecture, and consulting circuits.
Would you mind explaining to me hwo Markoff's "tactics" weren't the best thing to happen to an otherwise unemployable "computer guy with criminal record"?
Here [Next] is [Next] my [Next] Mac [Next] Mini [Next] in [Next] a [Next] wall.
For everyone who just wants to skip to the chase and see "a Mac Mini in someone's kitchen wall", which is what I wanted to see (not pictures of an effing butter knife)...completed Mini in the wall.
Also, I think the entire W3C group has a simultaneous conniption with the author's use of "Clicky" to note an image that is also a link. That's the purpose, astoundingly, of a BLUE BORDER around an image...along with the cursor change, the tool tip, AND the display of a URL in the bottom of the browser window. I think it's probably worse than the usual "to see a picture of me and a llama, click here. To find out more about llamas, click here."
I know I had a conniption, thanks to the atrocious grammar....
Let's see, a robot that replaces your own sense of when you've had enough, somehow promotes "responsibility"?
Not only that, it runs a contest complete with photo galleries for which "team" or individuals are drunkest.
Combine this "contest" with its arbitrary estimate of blood alcohol level, abritrary estimate of "what's too much", no ID checking...I think we've got a great liability lawsuit in the making when someone this thing "serves" gets drunk and ends up walking off a rooftop or going for a drive and killing someone.
claiming that it already has a comprehensive human rights policy in place and that 'Cisco does not participate in any way in any censorship activities in the People's Republic of China
Oh, of course they don't. But I bet they help wash the dishes. Excerpt from the Chinese translation of the Cisco Stonewaller 3000:
Dishwashing function:
The Stonewaller 3000 features extensive "dishwashing" capabilities. For example, if you would like to block all "dishes" from a certain "dish maker", execute:
dishwash add [dishmaker's website URL] [peasant | party member | chairman] (allow||deny) [notify]
Note: notify sends notification upon use of "dirty" "dishes" to assist you in maintaining clean "cupboards".
------
On a more serious note- Cisco just has to maintain some plausible deniability. Clothing companies have this down pat. They set up a policy that looks great to consumers, and then promptly hire a subcontractor who runs sweat shops.
When a human rights company figures out what is going on, it's nearly impossible for them to come up with hard evidence management at the company knew about the subcontractor's sweat shops; the company releases a press release saying "gosh, we're so sorry, this is all the fault of our contractor." The contractor is fired, the contractor disappears off the face of the earth, and a new contractor with a different name pops up and suddenly out of the middle of nowhere, scores a big contract with a famous clothing company.
she wrote a whole article about how we're all doomed because of the impending Magnetic Field Revesal
a)the earth's magnetic field does reverse every so often, b)we're overdue (by a huge margin) and c)we probably would be slightly fucked, because during the flip, we'd have no protection from cosmic and solar radiation.
the future of media management is central to their strategy and was one of the driving forces behind the move
You've asserted this, but I see absolutely nothing to back up this statement- including in your blog entry to linked to. I haven't been able to think of a single reason myself- any media rights management technology, including hardware-based, would be equally easily introduced in both platforms.
What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed.
It is simplistic but correct. IBM couldn't deliver fast enough chips, and what they did make, they couldn't supply reliably enough. They've caused numerous embarassing product delays over the years. Apple most likely said "do something about it", IBM said "you're 2% of our PPC production, have a nice day", and Apple rang up Intel and AMD. Intel pretty clearly offered a better package- AMD doesn't have supply issues Apple would be concerned about, but doesn't have as deep pockets as AMD.
Oh, and yeah, there are a lot of dumb greenies who think it's still the '60s and all nuclear power is teh evil.
Nuclear power is "still in the 60's" when it was OK to run a company, filling up your back lot with industrial waste, until you ran out of space, or went out of business, found somewhere to hide it/dump it, or all of the above. The name of the game in industry is "make our waste someone else's problem" or "make it go away". Dump it into the local river, into the sea, in a pit, or throw it up into the air...and hope nobody notices. This is precisely how current nuclear plants handle their waste; they drop barrel after barrel into concrete bunkers filled with water in their back yard, thinking some day it'll just disappear, or they can fold the company and run, leaving the government with the god-aweful mess (hint: metal containers, water...)
Right now, the US Government believes that the solution to the problem is to make it Nevada's problem (or is it New Mexico, I forget?), but either way, it's just another variant of "throw it somewhere out of sight".
When we have a way to make power and take the waste products and make them harmless in SUBSTANCE (not in CONTAINMENT), give me a buzz and I'll stand outside on the street with a pro-nuclear sign. Until then, I'm not willing to support a technology which will be guaranteed to be a major liability or outright disaster in a few hundred years.
Since the sidebar was the only thing that would load:
"linux support - get penguin powered" [...] "training - for linux administration and web development" [...] "development - apps for linux, unix, windows and the web"
How shocking that a company which sells training, support, and development services for both Linux and Windows would come out with an inflammatory article.
Why, they couldn't possibly have ulterior motives! Nothing like a bit of viral marketing.
Bhwhaahahahahaha. No. It's Apple's core model with students, among others. If it is such a dead horse, why does it retain its market value rather well used? The only problem with iBooks was that whole effing logic board thing.
In fact their entire (oh! all six?) portable line is stale and going nowhere fast.
Is that why sales were up 75% overall, 35% on Macintosh systems (which are something like 2/3rds laptop computers) from last year?
Likely to ensure that any developers living under a rock do find out about it
Thanks, Captain Obvious. The entire computer industry knew about it within a day- it was pretty much the biggest news all summer.
Apple's either got a lot of them, or not "loaning" them out very well, if they have to resort to cold-calling developers. We're aware of the possibilities; I stated them; all you did was parrot me. You just gave a duplicate opinion, not any actual original thought.
The bigger issue is that developers have to sign an NDA. I presume that includes discussing the machine, its internals, and so on.
Also, as a side note- I received a call a couple of days ago from a woman in the Developer Connection group (I love those Irish accents, rowr:-)...but the accent wasn't enough for me to say yes to leasing the intel developer machine.
"Have you heard about our offer for development systems to ADC Select members?"
"Yep." Who hasn't? People under rocks?:-)
"Are you interested in taking advantage of the offer?"
"Nope, sorry."
Question is, why are they having to do this? Is reception to the development system lukewarm? Did they make a whole bunch, and are just being aggressive about getting 'em out to people? (which would be a good idea). I guess $1k isn't bad at all if you're a serious developer (I'm not).
To sum up: normal finger tips are not 1" in diameter.
"Spin is a polite way of saying, 'lying'". I forget who said that, but I think it was during a Charlie Rose interview. The guy said that after decades of "spin", we accept, both as consumers and voters, the most outlandish concepts.
"I know how to run a business, that means I'd make a great governor" was one Mitt Romney used, except that his hard-hitting my-way-or-the-highway style pissed off the entire statehouse, and he hasn't accomplished a single thing he promised he would. That style works great in business when you're the head of a mega-powerful takeover/investment firm like Bain. Works great on a personal level too when you're rich, white, and a powerful businessman (and before anyone gets too uppity, I had a close friend who worked at Bain for several years. Romney's a dick.) It does not work on a political level where you are one of three branches of a government (you're not "the boss", by any stretch of the imagination), surrounded by "the enemy" in a "liberal" state with a lot of other entrenched egos who see you as nothing but a johnny-come-lately looking to get into the white house.
Marketers have for decades hinted at crap like "If you don't use our toothpaste, she won't fuck you". Why are you surprised they claim a 1" cube is "fingertip"? It's shown in photos with a male hand, which from the proportions is itself enormous. They're trying their damnedest...
It's tiny, and impressively so; it makes the Shuffle kind of look like the 2001 Monolith. Why can't they just say "it's really really small"? If I had been in their shoes, I would have just shown it next to the quarter and said "about the size of a quarter". Credibility in marketing is a powerful thing, at least to me.
The problem with the show as I (and I assume, you) originally viewed it was that Fox showed the series out of order - the episode we saw had no context. We didn't know anything about the characters, universe, or meta-story.
No. The problem is that most of Whedon's characters all sound, talk and behave the same way across every series he's touched. He writes dialog full of cutesy banter to cover for characters which couldn't possibly be more one dimensional if they tried, and plots which are so predictable, by the ten minute mark you have a fairly good idea on where the episode is going.
I'd basically sum Firefly up as "Buffy in Space, minus the vampires and teenage drama."
What pisses me off the most about cookies is that they accumulate. Why?
Take a look in your cookies pref page / file. Look at the expiration dates. I've found a huge percentage of sites, especially advertisers, use a date at least 10 years in the future.
I'm unlikely to be using the same computer in 3-4 years, much less 10. Some sites even go for "2040". WTF? What's the point? If I don't visit your site within 6 months, I'm unlikely to gripe too much about having to reenter a username/password...so why are you making my system store a cookie for you for a couple decades?
No one notices a few Kilowatts disappearing. Except ricers.
I'm sorry, but you're completely full of shit. Every time my A/C compressor clicks on while I'm driving, I can tell; I drive a manual, and if I'm paying enough attention, I can tell especially if revs are low (ie 2k).
Vapour phase airconditioning uses direct power from the engine, which often has an output of 100+ Kilowatts.
You are making the assumption that the engine produces its power evenly across the band, which is outright garbage. Most engines make much more horsepower at high engine speed; better engines tend to keep making that power the closer they approach redline (at high engine speeds, resistance in exhaust and intake paths kills horsepower because volumetric efficiency drops).
The engine will not make NEARLY as much power down at ranges people typically use; ie 2000 to 3000 RPMs. Example- the current Ford Mustang engine (no, I don't drive one- just the first chart I could find) makes 250HP at 5,000RPM+. At 2,500 RPM, it makes 100HP. The chart started at 2,500; numbers probably drop to 50HP at 2000. Suddenly, an AC compressor that uses several HP becomes a two-digit percentage of total engine output. While humans suck at absolute measurements, we can be -really- good at picking up on the finest relative differences.
Also, maximum claimed horsepower is often under ideal circumstances; ie cool air temps, engine cold/warm not at full operating temp, lightweight oil, and at sea level. It's also always on a perfectly functioning engine; ie fresh air cleaner, ignition bits are all new, perfect compression in all cylinders, etc.
I'd have to hunch over and squint through my contacts at a little screen, or, a big screen that lasts 30 min without a power cord.
My 17" powerbook will play over 2 and a half hours of divx video set to "slow" processor speed, using VLC to play it...and supposedly I've only got 4 out of the 5 Ahr (the battery is original, and about 2 years old I think).
Incidentally, almost universal opinion is that Madlax is one of the worst anime titles to come along in quite a while. Animation is poor, the music is horrible, the plot line is boring and confusing at the same time, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw shooting rockets AT people; that's too quick and painless. What I want is a personal rocket launcher for launching people I don't like into space. It should preferably be adaptable for different environments- office chair, easy chair, etc.
Pretty easy, too. I don't give a crap about the survivability of anything- especially the passenger. Simplifies the design process ;-)
How the hell is this insightful? Even a "talking head" reporter on TV wouldn't say this drivel.
Anyone else just immediately get the urge to metamoderate, every single day?
God, I am so SICK of the space opera that is NASA. I don't give a god damn FUCK about the shuttle, and the only reason the networks are covering it so closely is because if the shuttle does disintegrate (thus becoming a major repeat "disaster") they'd be caught with their pants down if they didn't.
Every local nightly news report the last couple of days has opened with "breaking news" about what Astronaut Bob is doing. "oh, he pulled on a piece of fabric." "Oh, he might have damaged something else." "oh, here's the crew, are they doomed? Let's ask them." "oh, here they are collecting trash from the station, how exciting."
Just one? Siiigh, here I go, likely to get modded flamebait, but what the hell. I've talked to numerous MIT students (ranging from current undergrads, to PhD's) in several different fields (mechanical engineering, electronics, etc). I also worked for MIT (see below).
MIT is "rife", like many "top" schools, with professors who barely show up for the classes they supposedly "teach". TA's run the class, do the grading, and interact with the students. Meanwhile, the professors are busy doing the traditional MIT professor path: invent something, patent it, form a company, get rich off it. MIT has an entire office full of patent attorneys, called the Technology Licensing Office- where I worked for a bit. They measure revenue in hundreds of millions of dollars. MIT has turned into an R&D mill; the Media Lab is a perfect example. MIT's best and brightest from the Media Lab have turned out...a shag-rug-covered alarm clock that rolls off the table when you hit the snooze button. Slightly clever, very half-baked, and utterly lacking in anything even remotely approaching state of the art in -any- field. But it's from an MIT student, from the Media Lab no less, and their shit is gold and smells of rose blossoms- so it gets local, national, and international coverage, and nobody says "hey, this is just an alarm clock with two wheels and motors that turn on for a random bit of time". Ie, something a smart 8th grader could make.
I went to a college where I was on a first name basis with my CS professors, their significant others...even knew their kids, and I'd bump into them on campus at concerts and stuff. I could, during their fairly wide office hours, walk into their office, plop down on the couch, and ask them questions about the current homework assignment or project. I knew most of the kids in my classes (the largest, an "intro" level class, was 25 people). You know what? I actually learned stuff, and not just what was in my textbook.
Maybe if MIT professors actually taught their classes, class size would be smaller, students would feel more involved (and hence as questions more often during a lecture) and the quality of the lecture would be such that fewer questions would be necessary in the first place.
Some will argue that MIT's professors, focusing on research, are its strength. Except to undergrads, they'll never get even close to this state-of-the-art research. The professors who come up with truly revolutionary stuff are usually the furthest removed from students. "Top" schools all sell the same lie the armed forced do- "join us, work on cutting edge stuff!" Well, funny thing that you join, and find yourself cleaning lab equipment. Hey, it's a step up from cleaning toilets in the Air Force general's jet, I guess.
Want a perfect example of MIT's failure to educate its graduates with real-world, useful skills? The recent underwater vehicle competition where a bunch of barely-literate high school students from a poor texas immigrant community beat the MIT team.
I know you're joking, but I think a number of slashdot readers are thinking, "yeah, why can't they just shield them".
I'm not sure I see the point of even going to Mars in the first place; like Kennedy's moon trip, going to Mars will get us nothing. Things are just too impractical to get anything useful done on either planet. The futurists all argue, "well, SOME day it'll be practical". Wasn't this the same group that predicted we'd have, ten years ago, flying cars, transporters, faster than light travel, etc?
Then it is NOT real-time. You clearly don't understand the term.
From The Jargon File: "Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds)."
Good ol' Roland misapplied the term, or the article author did.
Up to several hundred clients, yes. Beyond that? Things don't look quite as cheery. Try connecting to a torrent with a thousand peers and a thousand seeds. A substantial part of your bandwidth- especially precious upstream bandwidth- is spent replying to peers. I blame the third party clients, mostly, for flooding peers with requests.
Mitnick went to jail for a couple years for computer crimes. He sold a book about it. He now makes at least six figures a year on the interview, lecture, and consulting circuits.
Would you mind explaining to me hwo Markoff's "tactics" weren't the best thing to happen to an otherwise unemployable "computer guy with criminal record"?
Here [Next] is [Next] my [Next] Mac [Next] Mini [Next] in [Next] a [Next] wall.
For everyone who just wants to skip to the chase and see "a Mac Mini in someone's kitchen wall", which is what I wanted to see (not pictures of an effing butter knife)...completed Mini in the wall.
Also, I think the entire W3C group has a simultaneous conniption with the author's use of "Clicky" to note an image that is also a link. That's the purpose, astoundingly, of a BLUE BORDER around an image...along with the cursor change, the tool tip, AND the display of a URL in the bottom of the browser window. I think it's probably worse than the usual "to see a picture of me and a llama, click here. To find out more about llamas, click here."
I know I had a conniption, thanks to the atrocious grammar....
Not only that, it runs a contest complete with photo galleries for which "team" or individuals are drunkest.
Combine this "contest" with its arbitrary estimate of blood alcohol level, abritrary estimate of "what's too much", no ID checking...I think we've got a great liability lawsuit in the making when someone this thing "serves" gets drunk and ends up walking off a rooftop or going for a drive and killing someone.
Oh, of course they don't. But I bet they help wash the dishes. Excerpt from the Chinese translation of the Cisco Stonewaller 3000:
Dishwashing function:
The Stonewaller 3000 features extensive "dishwashing" capabilities. For example, if you would like to block all "dishes" from a certain "dish maker", execute:
dishwash add [dishmaker's website URL] [peasant | party member | chairman] (allow||deny) [notify]
Note: notify sends notification upon use of "dirty" "dishes" to assist you in maintaining clean "cupboards".
------
On a more serious note- Cisco just has to maintain some plausible deniability. Clothing companies have this down pat. They set up a policy that looks great to consumers, and then promptly hire a subcontractor who runs sweat shops.
When a human rights company figures out what is going on, it's nearly impossible for them to come up with hard evidence management at the company knew about the subcontractor's sweat shops; the company releases a press release saying "gosh, we're so sorry, this is all the fault of our contractor." The contractor is fired, the contractor disappears off the face of the earth, and a new contractor with a different name pops up and suddenly out of the middle of nowhere, scores a big contract with a famous clothing company.
a)the earth's magnetic field does reverse every so often, b)we're overdue (by a huge margin) and c)we probably would be slightly fucked, because during the flip, we'd have no protection from cosmic and solar radiation.
NOVA
Wikipedia Article on Geomagnetic Reversal
As for the aliens- yep, she's off her rocker on that one, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You've asserted this, but I see absolutely nothing to back up this statement- including in your blog entry to linked to. I haven't been able to think of a single reason myself- any media rights management technology, including hardware-based, would be equally easily introduced in both platforms.
What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed.
It is simplistic but correct. IBM couldn't deliver fast enough chips, and what they did make, they couldn't supply reliably enough. They've caused numerous embarassing product delays over the years. Apple most likely said "do something about it", IBM said "you're 2% of our PPC production, have a nice day", and Apple rang up Intel and AMD. Intel pretty clearly offered a better package- AMD doesn't have supply issues Apple would be concerned about, but doesn't have as deep pockets as AMD.
Nuclear power is "still in the 60's" when it was OK to run a company, filling up your back lot with industrial waste, until you ran out of space, or went out of business, found somewhere to hide it/dump it, or all of the above. The name of the game in industry is "make our waste someone else's problem" or "make it go away". Dump it into the local river, into the sea, in a pit, or throw it up into the air...and hope nobody notices. This is precisely how current nuclear plants handle their waste; they drop barrel after barrel into concrete bunkers filled with water in their back yard, thinking some day it'll just disappear, or they can fold the company and run, leaving the government with the god-aweful mess (hint: metal containers, water...)
Right now, the US Government believes that the solution to the problem is to make it Nevada's problem (or is it New Mexico, I forget?), but either way, it's just another variant of "throw it somewhere out of sight".
When we have a way to make power and take the waste products and make them harmless in SUBSTANCE (not in CONTAINMENT), give me a buzz and I'll stand outside on the street with a pro-nuclear sign. Until then, I'm not willing to support a technology which will be guaranteed to be a major liability or outright disaster in a few hundred years.
Since the sidebar was the only thing that would load:
"linux support - get penguin powered" [...] "training - for linux administration and web development" [...] "development - apps for linux, unix, windows and the web"
How shocking that a company which sells training, support, and development services for both Linux and Windows would come out with an inflammatory article.
Why, they couldn't possibly have ulterior motives! Nothing like a bit of viral marketing.
Bhwhaahahahahaha. No. It's Apple's core model with students, among others. If it is such a dead horse, why does it retain its market value rather well used? The only problem with iBooks was that whole effing logic board thing.
In fact their entire (oh! all six?) portable line is stale and going nowhere fast.
Is that why sales were up 75% overall, 35% on Macintosh systems (which are something like 2/3rds laptop computers) from last year?
Thanks, Captain Obvious. The entire computer industry knew about it within a day- it was pretty much the biggest news all summer.
Apple's either got a lot of them, or not "loaning" them out very well, if they have to resort to cold-calling developers. We're aware of the possibilities; I stated them; all you did was parrot me. You just gave a duplicate opinion, not any actual original thought.
Also, as a side note- I received a call a couple of days ago from a woman in the Developer Connection group (I love those Irish accents, rowr :-)...but the accent wasn't enough for me to say yes to leasing the intel developer machine.
"Have you heard about our offer for development systems to ADC Select members?"
"Yep." Who hasn't? People under rocks? :-)
"Are you interested in taking advantage of the offer?"
"Nope, sorry."
Question is, why are they having to do this? Is reception to the development system lukewarm? Did they make a whole bunch, and are just being aggressive about getting 'em out to people? (which would be a good idea). I guess $1k isn't bad at all if you're a serious developer (I'm not).
"Spin is a polite way of saying, 'lying'". I forget who said that, but I think it was during a Charlie Rose interview. The guy said that after decades of "spin", we accept, both as consumers and voters, the most outlandish concepts.
"I know how to run a business, that means I'd make a great governor" was one Mitt Romney used, except that his hard-hitting my-way-or-the-highway style pissed off the entire statehouse, and he hasn't accomplished a single thing he promised he would. That style works great in business when you're the head of a mega-powerful takeover/investment firm like Bain. Works great on a personal level too when you're rich, white, and a powerful businessman (and before anyone gets too uppity, I had a close friend who worked at Bain for several years. Romney's a dick.) It does not work on a political level where you are one of three branches of a government (you're not "the boss", by any stretch of the imagination), surrounded by "the enemy" in a "liberal" state with a lot of other entrenched egos who see you as nothing but a johnny-come-lately looking to get into the white house.
Marketers have for decades hinted at crap like "If you don't use our toothpaste, she won't fuck you". Why are you surprised they claim a 1" cube is "fingertip"? It's shown in photos with a male hand, which from the proportions is itself enormous. They're trying their damnedest...
It's tiny, and impressively so; it makes the Shuffle kind of look like the 2001 Monolith. Why can't they just say "it's really really small"? If I had been in their shoes, I would have just shown it next to the quarter and said "about the size of a quarter". Credibility in marketing is a powerful thing, at least to me.
No. The problem is that most of Whedon's characters all sound, talk and behave the same way across every series he's touched. He writes dialog full of cutesy banter to cover for characters which couldn't possibly be more one dimensional if they tried, and plots which are so predictable, by the ten minute mark you have a fairly good idea on where the episode is going.
I'd basically sum Firefly up as "Buffy in Space, minus the vampires and teenage drama."
Take a look in your cookies pref page / file. Look at the expiration dates. I've found a huge percentage of sites, especially advertisers, use a date at least 10 years in the future.
I'm unlikely to be using the same computer in 3-4 years, much less 10. Some sites even go for "2040". WTF? What's the point? If I don't visit your site within 6 months, I'm unlikely to gripe too much about having to reenter a username/password...so why are you making my system store a cookie for you for a couple decades?
I'm sorry, but you're completely full of shit. Every time my A/C compressor clicks on while I'm driving, I can tell; I drive a manual, and if I'm paying enough attention, I can tell especially if revs are low (ie 2k).
Vapour phase airconditioning uses direct power from the engine, which often has an output of 100+ Kilowatts.
You are making the assumption that the engine produces its power evenly across the band, which is outright garbage. Most engines make much more horsepower at high engine speed; better engines tend to keep making that power the closer they approach redline (at high engine speeds, resistance in exhaust and intake paths kills horsepower because volumetric efficiency drops).
The engine will not make NEARLY as much power down at ranges people typically use; ie 2000 to 3000 RPMs. Example- the current Ford Mustang engine (no, I don't drive one- just the first chart I could find) makes 250HP at 5,000RPM+. At 2,500 RPM, it makes 100HP. The chart started at 2,500; numbers probably drop to 50HP at 2000. Suddenly, an AC compressor that uses several HP becomes a two-digit percentage of total engine output. While humans suck at absolute measurements, we can be -really- good at picking up on the finest relative differences.
Also, maximum claimed horsepower is often under ideal circumstances; ie cool air temps, engine cold/warm not at full operating temp, lightweight oil, and at sea level. It's also always on a perfectly functioning engine; ie fresh air cleaner, ignition bits are all new, perfect compression in all cylinders, etc.
My 17" powerbook will play over 2 and a half hours of divx video set to "slow" processor speed, using VLC to play it...and supposedly I've only got 4 out of the 5 Ahr (the battery is original, and about 2 years old I think).
Wouldn't it be terribly ironic if the country that brought the world Volvos, ended up bringing us killer robots as well?
They can't fool me. I saw that "smash the inferior human's head" manuever it did early on in the clip!
#1, can the language- I think the parent should have been modded down on that alone.
#2:
Ken P. IT/MIS Automation Consultant
Pretty funny hearing an automation consultant speaking on this subject.
That's because it's from the same people.
Incidentally, almost universal opinion is that Madlax is one of the worst anime titles to come along in quite a while. Animation is poor, the music is horrible, the plot line is boring and confusing at the same time, etc.