...in most 3rd world countries, the person selling you the blank CD for $1.00 will gladly sell you a CD with MS Windows and MS Office on it for $2.00?
Not to point out the incredibly obvious, but: (a) because that doesn't happen much in South Africa, and (b) because a CD with MS Windows and Office is not going to help you if you're looking for the latest Linux releases.
Actually, South Africa has one of the most advanced waste-water management systems in the world. In spite of being the 30th-driest country in the world, the majority of the population have access to clean drinking water at a low cost (practically free for the poor), and drinkable water is piped directly through the taps into every home here - you don't need to buy bottled water. We literally flush our toilets with drinking water here!
The reason for the lack of broadband here has nothing to do with the economy, poverty etc. --- the problem is purely that the current telecomms regulations have resulted in only one single monopoly provider being 'allowed' to provide telecomms facilities. This means monopoly pricing - "what the market will bear" - so we have extremely high prices, and one company that rakes in billions and billions in profits every year. There is no competition. In fact, the country even has the required bandwidth infrastructure (both internally and international), but thanks to the monopoly situation, the bandwidth is literally lying unused! This is hopefully set to change with the new telecomms legislation currently being drafted, but I don't really have my hopes up, given that the process appears to be corrupt.
but when you start talking about third world countries, even small costs can be prohibitive
South Africa may be a third-world country if you divide GDP by population, due to the relatively large population, but it is by no means poor - it has the 29th-largest GDP in the world, and most of the wealth is held by about a quarter of the population (about 10 million people), meaning that for that segment of the population, South Africa is first-world. Most of the white people here, and now the "emerging black middle class" too, live essentially first-world lives. These people can more than afford something like this even if it isn't cheap - small costs are definitely NOT a problem for the middle class here (who form the market for this - not the poor, obviously). What is a problem in South Africa, and is what provoked the development of this, is high telecommunications costs, but these are not the result of a lack of infrastructure or wealth - these are purely the result of the fact that South African telecomms is dominated by a single monopoly provider that is legally protected by government regulations, and which sets their prices at "what the market will bear". For example ADSL access here costs about five times international norms, and is severly limited (e.g. 3GB monthly usage cap). Dial-up call charges are basically billed "per-minute" and extremely expensive. So again, this is not due to the economy being unable to support it - the country in fact HAS the bandwidth, but most of the pipes (national and international) are lying unused because of the monopoly provider - they deliberately create artificial scarcity of bandwidth in order to justify charging retail prices for wholesale access.
One of these toasters is just down the road from me, it seems. I will definitely be using it to get up to date Linux distributions.
And if M$ had donated 57 PocketPC units to the students, then it would have been an example of M$ just trying to indoctrinate another set of future customers?
Uh, yeah, because now it's just OpenSource vendors trying to indoctrinate the students to become future customers? Oh wait, OSS IS FREE --- so your comment makes no sense whatsoever, and there is no contradiction/double-standards there.
I know you were joking, but the machines aren't connected to the Internet... from this site:
"The other big drawback to this project is that the locations using the system are tied into one-way broadcasts from EduVision, not connected to the Internet at large. There's a philosophical issue at play -- this system makes students and schools are little more than consumers of educational material. The people testing the devices already note a practical problem with one-way communication: there's no way to get feedback to the makers directly from the users. This one-way system also raises the question of what happens if EduVision goes away -- without the central distribution of updated material, the electronic textbooks are suddenly fragile, power-hungry versions of old paper books."
But all people have little bits of "evil" in them - nobody is totally good. Are you suggesting we should reject everyone? That doesn't seem practical. Likewise for companies --- all companies have at least little bits of "evil" in them (they are run by people after all) --- are you suggesting we stop buying from companies altogether? WTF - the entire free market system would collapse completely.
Wow... Spoken like someone who knows absolutely nothing about Microsoft's history. Your question betrays an incredible depth of (perhaps willful) ignorance.
We related to companies in much the same way we relate to the people in our lives: we don't regard any as being "totally good" or "totally evil", rather, we regard people as being somewhere inbetween, with varying proportions of "good" and "evil". Some people are mostly good but occasionally bad; these people we (rightfully) tend to forgive when they do an occasional bad thing, and as long it's not too bad we keep those people in our lives. Other people though are sometimes good but mostly bad, and this type of person we avoid. We relate to companies in the same way, and it makes perfect sense to do so. There is nothing hypocritical about it, as the astroturfers on slashdot desparately try to imply, when we appear to treat different companies by different standards --- just like there is nothing hypocritical about it if you forgive your, say, mostly-good girlfriend when she occasionally loses her temper with you, but you don't forgive someone who always treats you like crap for doing the same thing. Not only is this perfectly normal, it makes perfect sense too.
There's no such thing as a totally good or totally evil person or company. So what normal people seek out is those people/companies who are "mostly good".
So there is that weird silence when nobody is talking. I better like hearing the backround noise because it makes you feel more "emersed".
Yup, I know what you mean... that sudden 'silence' makes me feel like the call has been disconnected, so I instinctively 'hello?'. Of course it's done to save BW though... why transmit when nobody is talking. I was thinking though, why not just introduce a little generated noise on the client side?
I thought most of the animation in FF was quite realistic, but what really "stood out" to me like a sore thumb while watching FF was how perfectly styled and especially how clean Aki's hair looked the entire time. She looked like those women in the shampoo commercials, with bouncy, shiny overly-perfect hair swooshing around. Nobody in real life can keep their hair that clean all day long, especially not given the things she was doing in the story... in real life peoples' hair looks a lot more 'dull' somehow.
Like cellphones that use more towers and lower levels of radiation? Or like cellphones that are smarter about the directions they transmit, i.e. not transmit right into your head (which isn't very effective anyway)? Holy fscking "duh", use your imagination.
For example, as intelligent beings we could decide that it'd be in our best interest to give up cell phones
Or (more likely) we could simply use the knowledge to build safer cellphone systems... exactly like we have done every single time in human history that we've ever discovered potentially harmful problems in new technologies - so it seems surprising you didn't think of that option.
There is still value in doing studies like this though, because it's important to understand what kinds of risks we are facing, so that one can make decisions over whether or not to change systems. Every time an article like this comes up, you get the predictable slew of responses on slashdot "well everything we do has risks but we just have to put up with it, what are we supposed to, get rid of technology?". That's a dumb strawman - nobody is saying we should get rid of cellphones even if it does turn out they have harmful effects, we could use that knowledge to decide to build safer cellphone systems.
Consider when the commercial airline industry was younger and after a number of aircraft crashed, they discovered metal fatigue. If slashdot had been around then I'm sure half of the slashdotters would have spewed the usual "what are we supposed to do, get rid of aircraft technology" crap. But fortunately nobody in the real world did that - instead, they simply figured out a way to build aircraft from better materials, and made safer aircraft. Thanks to the studies that helped us understand the metal fatigue problems, we now have all the same benefits of commercial airline technology, with far fewer risks than it used to have.
Those are of course important questions. But it doesn't mean the results are necessarily irrelevant. It appears that the type of damage may be proportional only to the total duration of exposure. If the fissures don't heal by themselves, then it doesn't matter if the radiation is constant or not. And don't underestimate the total time people spend on cellphones - according to my phone's timers, I've already spent 17 hours total call time and I only bought the phone four months ago. And I'm not a heavy user by any means. A typical person can easily log two weeks talk time in any given year.
Still, I doubt the amount of radiation I get from my phone is at the same levels as in these tests. Firstly modern phones adjust their power output levels depending on signal strength. Secondly my phone is probably a bit further from my eyeballs. Thirdly, there is other matter between my eyeballs and my phone that absorbs some of the microwave radiation.
So the question here is now not whether or not there is an effect, but rather, is the effect negligible in practice, and this hasn't been answered yet.
Note of course it's not the CRTs that can damage your eyesight, just focusing at short distances for long periods every day for years. I don't know of any evidence that suggests CRTs themselves have any harmful effects (apart from perhaps the toxic flame retardants i.e. PBDEs used in computer equipment.)
I'm 28 and although I've been short-sighted for a little over 15 years, my vision has deteriorated still somewhat during the last few years. This is almost certainly due to staring at the computer monitor for long periods each day without taking breaks. My optometrist agrees. A large percentage of people with jobs that require long periods of concentration at short distances develop eyesight problems quickly - this stuff is known, ask your eye doctor. The fact that there are exceptions like yourself does not mean it isn't true, as any first-year stats student will tell you, you can't determine much with a statistical sample of size 1.
Ask law students how many of them go in with perfect eyesight and need glasses within a few years of study. They spend long periods concentrating on thick books full of tiny text.
The trick is to take regular breaks, e.g. once an hour to spend a few minutes focusing on something in the distance. (If you are a smoker, then you probably already take frequent breaks while on the job.)
That's probably mainly because most here on slashdot are primarily computer geeks, with knowledge only in that domain - most don't know the first thing about economics... many here might be able to change a video card or hack together a PHP website, but very few here are versed in even the basics of economics, or business strategy for that matter.
Um, no, they didn't just change the peg value. It's allowed to move within base_value +/- 0.03 each day; at the end of each day of trading, that value becomes the new baseline for the next day. This allows it to find it's 'natural' rate gradually, giving the economy time to adjust, rather than a sudden strengthening in value.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a Microsoft product, no one on Slashdot is going to actually pay money for it
That's because most slashdotters' parents are going to buy it for them ;)
Dude, that was a pathetic comeback to lobsterGun's great comeback.
Not to point out the incredibly obvious, but: (a) because that doesn't happen much in South Africa, and (b) because a CD with MS Windows and Office is not going to help you if you're looking for the latest Linux releases.
clean drinking water
Actually, South Africa has one of the most advanced waste-water management systems in the world. In spite of being the 30th-driest country in the world, the majority of the population have access to clean drinking water at a low cost (practically free for the poor), and drinkable water is piped directly through the taps into every home here - you don't need to buy bottled water. We literally flush our toilets with drinking water here!
The reason for the lack of broadband here has nothing to do with the economy, poverty etc. --- the problem is purely that the current telecomms regulations have resulted in only one single monopoly provider being 'allowed' to provide telecomms facilities. This means monopoly pricing - "what the market will bear" - so we have extremely high prices, and one company that rakes in billions and billions in profits every year. There is no competition. In fact, the country even has the required bandwidth infrastructure (both internally and international), but thanks to the monopoly situation, the bandwidth is literally lying unused! This is hopefully set to change with the new telecomms legislation currently being drafted, but I don't really have my hopes up, given that the process appears to be corrupt.
but when you start talking about third world countries, even small costs can be prohibitive
South Africa may be a third-world country if you divide GDP by population, due to the relatively large population, but it is by no means poor - it has the 29th-largest GDP in the world, and most of the wealth is held by about a quarter of the population (about 10 million people), meaning that for that segment of the population, South Africa is first-world. Most of the white people here, and now the "emerging black middle class" too, live essentially first-world lives. These people can more than afford something like this even if it isn't cheap - small costs are definitely NOT a problem for the middle class here (who form the market for this - not the poor, obviously). What is a problem in South Africa, and is what provoked the development of this, is high telecommunications costs, but these are not the result of a lack of infrastructure or wealth - these are purely the result of the fact that South African telecomms is dominated by a single monopoly provider that is legally protected by government regulations, and which sets their prices at "what the market will bear". For example ADSL access here costs about five times international norms, and is severly limited (e.g. 3GB monthly usage cap). Dial-up call charges are basically billed "per-minute" and extremely expensive. So again, this is not due to the economy being unable to support it - the country in fact HAS the bandwidth, but most of the pipes (national and international) are lying unused because of the monopoly provider - they deliberately create artificial scarcity of bandwidth in order to justify charging retail prices for wholesale access.
One of these toasters is just down the road from me, it seems. I will definitely be using it to get up to date Linux distributions.
And if M$ had donated 57 PocketPC units to the students, then it would have been an example of M$ just trying to indoctrinate another set of future customers?
Uh, yeah, because now it's just OpenSource vendors trying to indoctrinate the students to become future customers? Oh wait, OSS IS FREE --- so your comment makes no sense whatsoever, and there is no contradiction/double-standards there.
Why don't you AstroTurfers get logons already?
I know you were joking, but the machines aren't connected to the Internet ... from this site:
"The other big drawback to this project is that the locations using the system are tied into one-way broadcasts from EduVision, not connected to the Internet at large. There's a philosophical issue at play -- this system makes students and schools are little more than consumers of educational material. The people testing the devices already note a practical problem with one-way communication: there's no way to get feedback to the makers directly from the users. This one-way system also raises the question of what happens if EduVision goes away -- without the central distribution of updated material, the electronic textbooks are suddenly fragile, power-hungry versions of old paper books."
And MS actually lost a court case about that, but hey, today's teenagers don't know that so I guess we're in the "rewriting history" phase.
Microsoft went through great pains to get SimCity to work, but ignored Lotus 123. I don't think so.
Uh, Lotus competed with MS, SimCity did not.
Thank god I dumped Apple after IBM dumped them.
Yeah! You really stuck it to 'em, by sticking with the Wintel platform that ... uh, oh wait ... will also be DRM'd in the near future.
Did you really think Intel put in DRM just for Apple? WTF.
But all people have little bits of "evil" in them - nobody is totally good. Are you suggesting we should reject everyone? That doesn't seem practical. Likewise for companies --- all companies have at least little bits of "evil" in them (they are run by people after all) --- are you suggesting we stop buying from companies altogether? WTF - the entire free market system would collapse completely.
So who became more evil Apple or Microsoft?
Wow ... Spoken like someone who knows absolutely nothing about Microsoft's history. Your question betrays an incredible depth of (perhaps willful) ignorance.
We related to companies in much the same way we relate to the people in our lives: we don't regard any as being "totally good" or "totally evil", rather, we regard people as being somewhere inbetween, with varying proportions of "good" and "evil". Some people are mostly good but occasionally bad; these people we (rightfully) tend to forgive when they do an occasional bad thing, and as long it's not too bad we keep those people in our lives. Other people though are sometimes good but mostly bad, and this type of person we avoid. We relate to companies in the same way, and it makes perfect sense to do so. There is nothing hypocritical about it, as the astroturfers on slashdot desparately try to imply, when we appear to treat different companies by different standards --- just like there is nothing hypocritical about it if you forgive your, say, mostly-good girlfriend when she occasionally loses her temper with you, but you don't forgive someone who always treats you like crap for doing the same thing. Not only is this perfectly normal, it makes perfect sense too.
There's no such thing as a totally good or totally evil person or company. So what normal people seek out is those people/companies who are "mostly good".
So there is that weird silence when nobody is talking. I better like hearing the backround noise because it makes you feel more "emersed".
Yup, I know what you mean ... that sudden 'silence' makes me feel like the call has been disconnected, so I instinctively 'hello?'. Of course it's done to save BW though ... why transmit when nobody is talking. I was thinking though, why not just introduce a little generated noise on the client side?
I thought most of the animation in FF was quite realistic, but what really "stood out" to me like a sore thumb while watching FF was how perfectly styled and especially how clean Aki's hair looked the entire time. She looked like those women in the shampoo commercials, with bouncy, shiny overly-perfect hair swooshing around. Nobody in real life can keep their hair that clean all day long, especially not given the things she was doing in the story... in real life peoples' hair looks a lot more 'dull' somehow.
Like cellphones that use more towers and lower levels of radiation? Or like cellphones that are smarter about the directions they transmit, i.e. not transmit right into your head (which isn't very effective anyway)? Holy fscking "duh", use your imagination.
For example, as intelligent beings we could decide that it'd be in our best interest to give up cell phones
Or (more likely) we could simply use the knowledge to build safer cellphone systems ... exactly like we have done every single time in human history that we've ever discovered potentially harmful problems in new technologies - so it seems surprising you didn't think of that option.
There is still value in doing studies like this though, because it's important to understand what kinds of risks we are facing, so that one can make decisions over whether or not to change systems. Every time an article like this comes up, you get the predictable slew of responses on slashdot "well everything we do has risks but we just have to put up with it, what are we supposed to, get rid of technology?". That's a dumb strawman - nobody is saying we should get rid of cellphones even if it does turn out they have harmful effects, we could use that knowledge to decide to build safer cellphone systems.
Consider when the commercial airline industry was younger and after a number of aircraft crashed, they discovered metal fatigue. If slashdot had been around then I'm sure half of the slashdotters would have spewed the usual "what are we supposed to do, get rid of aircraft technology" crap. But fortunately nobody in the real world did that - instead, they simply figured out a way to build aircraft from better materials, and made safer aircraft. Thanks to the studies that helped us understand the metal fatigue problems, we now have all the same benefits of commercial airline technology, with far fewer risks than it used to have.
Those are of course important questions. But it doesn't mean the results are necessarily irrelevant. It appears that the type of damage may be proportional only to the total duration of exposure. If the fissures don't heal by themselves, then it doesn't matter if the radiation is constant or not. And don't underestimate the total time people spend on cellphones - according to my phone's timers, I've already spent 17 hours total call time and I only bought the phone four months ago. And I'm not a heavy user by any means. A typical person can easily log two weeks talk time in any given year.
Still, I doubt the amount of radiation I get from my phone is at the same levels as in these tests. Firstly modern phones adjust their power output levels depending on signal strength. Secondly my phone is probably a bit further from my eyeballs. Thirdly, there is other matter between my eyeballs and my phone that absorbs some of the microwave radiation.
So the question here is now not whether or not there is an effect, but rather, is the effect negligible in practice, and this hasn't been answered yet.
Note of course it's not the CRTs that can damage your eyesight, just focusing at short distances for long periods every day for years. I don't know of any evidence that suggests CRTs themselves have any harmful effects (apart from perhaps the toxic flame retardants i.e. PBDEs used in computer equipment.)
I'm 28 and although I've been short-sighted for a little over 15 years, my vision has deteriorated still somewhat during the last few years. This is almost certainly due to staring at the computer monitor for long periods each day without taking breaks. My optometrist agrees. A large percentage of people with jobs that require long periods of concentration at short distances develop eyesight problems quickly - this stuff is known, ask your eye doctor. The fact that there are exceptions like yourself does not mean it isn't true, as any first-year stats student will tell you, you can't determine much with a statistical sample of size 1.
Ask law students how many of them go in with perfect eyesight and need glasses within a few years of study. They spend long periods concentrating on thick books full of tiny text.
The trick is to take regular breaks, e.g. once an hour to spend a few minutes focusing on something in the distance. (If you are a smoker, then you probably already take frequent breaks while on the job.)
Maybe it's only in XP Pro.
Yes, it's a fully up-to-date & legal XP Home.
"'taskkill' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."
That's probably mainly because most here on slashdot are primarily computer geeks, with knowledge only in that domain - most don't know the first thing about economics ... many here might be able to change a video card or hack together a PHP website, but very few here are versed in even the basics of economics, or business strategy for that matter.
Um, no, they didn't just change the peg value. It's allowed to move within base_value +/- 0.03 each day; at the end of each day of trading, that value becomes the new baseline for the next day. This allows it to find it's 'natural' rate gradually, giving the economy time to adjust, rather than a sudden strengthening in value.