Closed centralized platforms are winning. Email is dying.
E-mail is not dying, I expect that its growth is not necessarily increasing at the same rate as before, but it's certainly not contracting.
Besides, as has been proven, many technologies don't die off just because new ones are added. At work I still occasionally receive paper intra-office memos that aren't mass-distribution. We still have a FAX machine and routinely use it to both receive and send. We all still have landline telephones at our desks through our private, carrier-grade phone system, and there are only a handful of us that have forwarded our desk phones to our cells. We still send and receive via postal mail, and hell, in some countries one can still send a telegraph that's hand-courier delivered.
Facebook right now is the most popular Compuserve or AOL, or even Myspace. It will fade in time as they make missteps and as peoples' interests change.
First part is that a car company has to satisfy the new-car buyer. That means the car must meet the needs of the first buyer and that the buyer be happy up to and including the end of their ownership in the car. Some new-car buyers will drive a car for a couple of years or through the end of payments and then sell, so those customers need the car to have strong resale value in the 2-7 year range.
Other customers will drive a car until it's not economically viable to repair, and those customers want to get their purchase-price value out of the car, and basically want everything to wear out at the same time, so that it demonstrates that the car was well and truly done, not that one component failed leaving an otherwise good car ready for the scrapyard. I suspect that many Tesla buyers will be the latter, wanting the car to last a long time in a good state, without much regard to resale value.
Second part is what a self-imposed quality initiative can do. Hyundai forced themselves to recognize a ten year, 100,000 mile powertrain warranty with an inexpensive upgrade to bumper-to-bumper if memory serves, while their competitors were generally only offering three year, 36,000 mile warranties. This forced Hyundai to design and build better cars to keep the warranty costs from eating them alive, and combined with fairly low prices, convinced a lot of buyers, especially first-time-new-car buyers to take the risk even with a car that might need more service. In return they've brought their quality WAAAY up, and have shown trust to their customers to help ensure repeat business in the process.
Tesla could well be trying this with the customers-of-means that might be considering their first luxurious car- demonstrate that the car costs very little to operate, demonstrate that it has all of the tech of the other entry-to-mid-level luxury cars, and has the warranty and lack of need for service to boot. If that car satisfies its buyers then they'll be much more likely to show brand loyalty down the road.
You are making the assumption that his garage is connected to his house and that he has an insulated garage door.
And you all are making the assumption that he even has a garage. Yes, it's uncommon, but possible, and it's also possible that the owner of such a car would want to be able to leave the car outside if needed, like if the garage were being used for a project for a few nights.
Heh. I've got a cheap netbook up in the family room to use in the evenings, and I'm sitting on a reclining Lazboy and it's really not as comfortable as one would think. I find using computers, even portable computers, at desks or tables to be much more conducive to getting results.
Or save a whole bunch of money and go to the junkyard to get the high-backed bucket passenger front seat from a comfortable car. Build a base for it to sit on, and use that base as the means for attaching the shelf for the keyboard and pointer.
Go with the passenger seat because it's usually less worn. If you're feeling inventive you can go with a powered seat, but those are usually biased toward the driver rather than the passenger.
If omitting something that's largely cosmetic turns the building in to a death-ray, then the design of the building is fundamentally flawed. Someone down the road migth decide to revitalize the building by removing the sun shields, which would spawn the problem all over again.
If your building can hurt people because non-architects can take away some nonstructural bolt-ons, then your building has a design fault.
Buildings are often modified as tastes change, if something is as simple to remove as these sun shields proved to be, then it's not unreasonable to assume that in the future, after the building is older and the purpose of the shields long-since forgotten, that someone would restyle the exterior and remove them, creating this problem again.
Still I suppose, at least it's not brutalism. *shudders*
I actually like the look of the AT&T Long Lines Building. I think the term is too all-encompassing, and that there needs to be more than one category when structures identified as Brutalist vary so significantly. Hell, even older Romanesque buildings could qualify based on the use of hard materials with few windows, but either way, comparing the Boston City Hall with the AT&T Long Lines Building one sees quite a difference.
I look at it that nothing is free. We pay for what's "free" in other-than-currency means, but we still pay. Advertising and the subscriber's or reader's looking at it has been a way to pay for "free" newspapers for well over a hundred years. Attempting to adapt it to the world wide web model was no surprise.
And for those that want to argue that FOSS is truly free, anyone that has spent hours and hours of their time attempting to get something to work that would have worked out-of-the-box with a commercial solution definitely know the price of free software. We still pay it, mind you, but that price exists.
Heh. The screenwriter that took L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth and turned it into a movie later apologized too; apparently he met a hot girl that turned out to be a scientologist and she convinced him to do the screenplay, and his libido obliged.
But since we can cram a LOT into today's smartphones VERY CHEAPLY, why not do so, and depend less on the network infrastructure, not clog up the 'tubes so much, etc?
I agree, and I don't have any visual impairment to speak of. That's almost more a storage-density matter though, rather than a processing power issue.
I want a good nonvisual UI because of driving. I think that this push for touchscreens in cars is foolhardy at best, outright hazardous at worst. We need to get away from interfaces for secondary functions in cars (radio, HVAC, etc) that require eyes to use.
Further multifunction integration into a single package, and more conversion chips (DACs, etc) as multifunction.
From a practical perspective for a personal computing device there will always be a lower limit on what's useful. Think of the Star Trek: TNG communicator or the Dick Tracy watch, anything made small still has to have a good user interface. In the Star Trek example the UI is entirely voice activated, so we'll either have to rethink our UI, or attempt to cram a more recognizable UI into a smaller device like how the Android-powered smartwatches did it.
I don't think that it's unreasonable to split the UI from the main computing device though. Take the watch or comm example- one could have the equivalent of a graphical dumb terminal in the form of a tablet that wirelessly connects to the smartwatch or smartfob or whatever format we go with.
A teacher of mine was a quadriplegic, minor arm movement, but no fingers/hands, and nothing in the lower half of his body.
Beyond this treatment actually sickening and/or killing the patient, what is the worst that could happen, from a safety point of view? I know that's in-part the point of the study, but many of those individuals that are this badly injured (or worse, no motion below the neck would probably gladly trade the risk of death for getting their bodies to work again.
This doesn't even stike me as an "Unlimited vs Unmetered", argument, this strikes me as a, "for live, personal, in-person client use vs for server-type or impersonal use" argument.
Back when I had a cablemodem in 1997, I knew that if I was caught hosting services I could have my service shut off requiring me to sign up for a business-grade account. They weren't terribly picky though, so basically so long as I didn't host a web server on port 80 and didn't have tons of incoming mail on port 25 I was probably alright, and since my connection was never shut off it was indeed alright. Later I had a business-grade DSL line/account with full reverse-resolve and several static IPs, and I could literally do anything that the law didn't prohibit me from doing. I had DNS with reverse resolve, web, mail, FTP, etc, and it was never an issue at all. It cost a little more than a residential account, but not significantly more.
Unfortunately the definition of speech is broad enough to allow that horrible picture to apply. Hell, at this point if simply spending money equals free speech, than just about anything else can too.
The important thing is that no one is required to offer a forum, excepting some of the rules regarding fair distribution of political advertising in advance of an election. Since even nasty traffic is still traffic though, it's not in the forum's interest to curtail such behavior unless it actively drives away use.
If someone wants to make an offensive graphic and host it somewhere, fine. But why would anyone running a controversial site allow posting such?
Because like it or not, traffic is traffic, and even controversial or offensive content will drive traffic. Now everyone will go over to Jezebel (still part of Gawker, right?) to see what's going on.
Some will argue that we're seeing outliers, but I don't think that's so. The Internet in is quasi-anonymity is the ultimate Ring of Gyges, allowing one to express how one truly feels without having to be identified. Even on Slashdot, where anonymity is somewhat disparaged (ie Anonymous Coward) we still use handles, alises that shield our full identites from casual knowledge, though it's generally not hard to pierce that veil if one really needs to.
People act civilly because society forces them to. If society isn't able to force them to then they would probably act much more like their online personas. Even trolls, in their efforts to stir up trouble, and probably showing more of their true selves than they realize.
It's always amused me when people are hypocrites. It also always saddens me when these hypocrites are in a position to do something terrible because of their hypocrisy.
It also strikes me as specious, at best, that they're complaining about a project that's arguably the most timely and successful-out-the-gate in the history of the American space program, if not humanity's combined space programs.
But I guess that when one can afford to buy a senator, one makes that senator bark whatever line one wants regardless of its veracity or even sense.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
·
· Score: 1
Okay, I'll bite...
In what way do copyrights infringe on freedom of speech or on private property rights? There is no limit to this essay, take all of the time and length you need.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
·
· Score: 1
You see, I don't actually have a problem with an author writing a book that's so good that it supports them for the rest of their lives. If it's truly that good then they deserve to make that money.
How many authors does that really apply to? I can think of Margaret Mitchell and J.D. Salinger, as those that literally only wrote one work and lived many, many years past th release of that work. I'm sure there are others, but it's not exactly a big group compared to those that write well and continue to write well.
I think this as an idea is a much bigger problem than it is in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did the chicken coop have two doors?
.
.
Becauase if it had four doors, it'd be a chicken sedan!
No, you see, they're trying to change how we perceive it, not reinforce the current perception...
Probably '86 - '88, when Paul Hogan fleetingly made a particular self-reliant stereotype popular.
E-mail is not dying, I expect that its growth is not necessarily increasing at the same rate as before, but it's certainly not contracting.
Besides, as has been proven, many technologies don't die off just because new ones are added. At work I still occasionally receive paper intra-office memos that aren't mass-distribution. We still have a FAX machine and routinely use it to both receive and send. We all still have landline telephones at our desks through our private, carrier-grade phone system, and there are only a handful of us that have forwarded our desk phones to our cells. We still send and receive via postal mail, and hell, in some countries one can still send a telegraph that's hand-courier delivered.
Facebook right now is the most popular Compuserve or AOL, or even Myspace. It will fade in time as they make missteps and as peoples' interests change.
I see it as two parts, really...
First part is that a car company has to satisfy the new-car buyer. That means the car must meet the needs of the first buyer and that the buyer be happy up to and including the end of their ownership in the car. Some new-car buyers will drive a car for a couple of years or through the end of payments and then sell, so those customers need the car to have strong resale value in the 2-7 year range.
Other customers will drive a car until it's not economically viable to repair, and those customers want to get their purchase-price value out of the car, and basically want everything to wear out at the same time, so that it demonstrates that the car was well and truly done, not that one component failed leaving an otherwise good car ready for the scrapyard. I suspect that many Tesla buyers will be the latter, wanting the car to last a long time in a good state, without much regard to resale value.
Second part is what a self-imposed quality initiative can do. Hyundai forced themselves to recognize a ten year, 100,000 mile powertrain warranty with an inexpensive upgrade to bumper-to-bumper if memory serves, while their competitors were generally only offering three year, 36,000 mile warranties. This forced Hyundai to design and build better cars to keep the warranty costs from eating them alive, and combined with fairly low prices, convinced a lot of buyers, especially first-time-new-car buyers to take the risk even with a car that might need more service. In return they've brought their quality WAAAY up, and have shown trust to their customers to help ensure repeat business in the process.
Tesla could well be trying this with the customers-of-means that might be considering their first luxurious car- demonstrate that the car costs very little to operate, demonstrate that it has all of the tech of the other entry-to-mid-level luxury cars, and has the warranty and lack of need for service to boot. If that car satisfies its buyers then they'll be much more likely to show brand loyalty down the road.
And you all are making the assumption that he even has a garage. Yes, it's uncommon, but possible, and it's also possible that the owner of such a car would want to be able to leave the car outside if needed, like if the garage were being used for a project for a few nights.
Heh. I've got a cheap netbook up in the family room to use in the evenings, and I'm sitting on a reclining Lazboy and it's really not as comfortable as one would think. I find using computers, even portable computers, at desks or tables to be much more conducive to getting results.
Or save a whole bunch of money and go to the junkyard to get the high-backed bucket passenger front seat from a comfortable car. Build a base for it to sit on, and use that base as the means for attaching the shelf for the keyboard and pointer.
Go with the passenger seat because it's usually less worn. If you're feeling inventive you can go with a powered seat, but those are usually biased toward the driver rather than the passenger.
Someone never studied how shale and other rocks cleave...
Mind you, it's certainly desirable to stuy other forms of cleavage...
If omitting something that's largely cosmetic turns the building in to a death-ray, then the design of the building is fundamentally flawed. Someone down the road migth decide to revitalize the building by removing the sun shields, which would spawn the problem all over again.
If your building can hurt people because non-architects can take away some nonstructural bolt-ons, then your building has a design fault.
Buildings are often modified as tastes change, if something is as simple to remove as these sun shields proved to be, then it's not unreasonable to assume that in the future, after the building is older and the purpose of the shields long-since forgotten, that someone would restyle the exterior and remove them, creating this problem again.
I actually like the look of the AT&T Long Lines Building. I think the term is too all-encompassing, and that there needs to be more than one category when structures identified as Brutalist vary so significantly. Hell, even older Romanesque buildings could qualify based on the use of hard materials with few windows, but either way, comparing the Boston City Hall with the AT&T Long Lines Building one sees quite a difference.
I look at it that nothing is free. We pay for what's "free" in other-than-currency means, but we still pay. Advertising and the subscriber's or reader's looking at it has been a way to pay for "free" newspapers for well over a hundred years. Attempting to adapt it to the world wide web model was no surprise.
And for those that want to argue that FOSS is truly free, anyone that has spent hours and hours of their time attempting to get something to work that would have worked out-of-the-box with a commercial solution definitely know the price of free software. We still pay it, mind you, but that price exists.
Heh. The screenwriter that took L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth and turned it into a movie later apologized too; apparently he met a hot girl that turned out to be a scientologist and she convinced him to do the screenplay, and his libido obliged.
I agree, and I don't have any visual impairment to speak of. That's almost more a storage-density matter though, rather than a processing power issue.
I want a good nonvisual UI because of driving. I think that this push for touchscreens in cars is foolhardy at best, outright hazardous at worst. We need to get away from interfaces for secondary functions in cars (radio, HVAC, etc) that require eyes to use.
Further multifunction integration into a single package, and more conversion chips (DACs, etc) as multifunction.
From a practical perspective for a personal computing device there will always be a lower limit on what's useful. Think of the Star Trek: TNG communicator or the Dick Tracy watch, anything made small still has to have a good user interface. In the Star Trek example the UI is entirely voice activated, so we'll either have to rethink our UI, or attempt to cram a more recognizable UI into a smaller device like how the Android-powered smartwatches did it.
I don't think that it's unreasonable to split the UI from the main computing device though. Take the watch or comm example- one could have the equivalent of a graphical dumb terminal in the form of a tablet that wirelessly connects to the smartwatch or smartfob or whatever format we go with.
Ah. The elephant in the room that I obviously ignored too.
A teacher of mine was a quadriplegic, minor arm movement, but no fingers/hands, and nothing in the lower half of his body.
Beyond this treatment actually sickening and/or killing the patient, what is the worst that could happen, from a safety point of view? I know that's in-part the point of the study, but many of those individuals that are this badly injured (or worse, no motion below the neck would probably gladly trade the risk of death for getting their bodies to work again.
This doesn't even stike me as an "Unlimited vs Unmetered", argument, this strikes me as a, "for live, personal, in-person client use vs for server-type or impersonal use" argument.
Back when I had a cablemodem in 1997, I knew that if I was caught hosting services I could have my service shut off requiring me to sign up for a business-grade account. They weren't terribly picky though, so basically so long as I didn't host a web server on port 80 and didn't have tons of incoming mail on port 25 I was probably alright, and since my connection was never shut off it was indeed alright. Later I had a business-grade DSL line/account with full reverse-resolve and several static IPs, and I could literally do anything that the law didn't prohibit me from doing. I had DNS with reverse resolve, web, mail, FTP, etc, and it was never an issue at all. It cost a little more than a residential account, but not significantly more.
Are you sure about that? It seems like a terribly foolish assertion to make, and that anyone saying that obviously isn't very smart...
Unfortunately the definition of speech is broad enough to allow that horrible picture to apply. Hell, at this point if simply spending money equals free speech, than just about anything else can too.
The important thing is that no one is required to offer a forum, excepting some of the rules regarding fair distribution of political advertising in advance of an election. Since even nasty traffic is still traffic though, it's not in the forum's interest to curtail such behavior unless it actively drives away use.
Because like it or not, traffic is traffic, and even controversial or offensive content will drive traffic. Now everyone will go over to Jezebel (still part of Gawker, right?) to see what's going on.
Some will argue that we're seeing outliers, but I don't think that's so. The Internet in is quasi-anonymity is the ultimate Ring of Gyges, allowing one to express how one truly feels without having to be identified. Even on Slashdot, where anonymity is somewhat disparaged (ie Anonymous Coward) we still use handles, alises that shield our full identites from casual knowledge, though it's generally not hard to pierce that veil if one really needs to.
People act civilly because society forces them to. If society isn't able to force them to then they would probably act much more like their online personas. Even trolls, in their efforts to stir up trouble, and probably showing more of their true selves than they realize.
It's always amused me when people are hypocrites. It also always saddens me when these hypocrites are in a position to do something terrible because of their hypocrisy.
It also strikes me as specious, at best, that they're complaining about a project that's arguably the most timely and successful-out-the-gate in the history of the American space program, if not humanity's combined space programs.
But I guess that when one can afford to buy a senator, one makes that senator bark whatever line one wants regardless of its veracity or even sense.
Okay, I'll bite...
In what way do copyrights infringe on freedom of speech or on private property rights? There is no limit to this essay, take all of the time and length you need.
You see, I don't actually have a problem with an author writing a book that's so good that it supports them for the rest of their lives. If it's truly that good then they deserve to make that money.
How many authors does that really apply to? I can think of Margaret Mitchell and J.D. Salinger, as those that literally only wrote one work and lived many, many years past th release of that work. I'm sure there are others, but it's not exactly a big group compared to those that write well and continue to write well.
I think this as an idea is a much bigger problem than it is in practice.