In the university lecture I was in this year on FPGA's the big selling point was the fact you could do exactly this and how its used in industry. I'm not seeing any 'news'
"Researchers at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich are reporting that solar sunspot activity is at a 1000-year peak.... Based on both observations and ice core records, we are now at a sunspot peak exceeding solar activity for any time in the past thousand years."
"I love humans. Always seeing patterns in things that aren't there."
I don't believe TV shows would go off the air because of people skipping commercials. They might reduce the budget per episode or increase ad content per timeslot, but there's too much of an industry in place to produce ads to tolerate it going away.
Vested interests in web advertising may be more tenuous than tenacious as they have more of an opportunity to measure effectiveness. The trick will be to find a way to avoid the ads without letting them know you've avoided the ads, such as browsing behind a high-bandwidth proxy that intercepts them so they don't impact your lower bandwidth while also masquerading as you to hide its presence. (Maybe even hosting a virtual browsing environment so it can respond properly to probing scripts seeking to verify impressions.)
Meanwhile, the CSI shows are getting product placement in the show, even to the extent that the product placed in the show was the murder weapon and/or dismemberment tool! And if there was any doubt about sponsorship, at least one regular ad for the product airs during the ad break (though not yet specific to the episode with a pitch like, "If you like how our Sawzall cut through a human body in this episode, just think what other uses you could find for it in your home!").
Re:Comma chameleon, come and go, come and go
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I personally, find it funny, how some people, tend to abuse commas.
It's a common (NPI) source of comedy:
Rimmer: After intensive investigation, comma, of the markings on the alien pod, comma, it has become clear, comma, to me, comma, that we are dealing, comma, with a species of awesome intellect, colon. Holly: Good. Perhaps they might be able to give you a hand with your punctuation. Rimmer: Shut up.
Instructions for continuing to be able to use your (friken expensive) player.
0) Go to the website for your player (assuming they still support it and not deny its existence) click the "buy updated firmware" link, and enter your credit card information.
1) Use your computer to download the latest firmware. 2) Burn a CD/DVD (you sure as hell had better not need to burn a blu-ray or hd dvd disk!!) 3) Insert in you player and power cycle and hope the upgrade works and doesn't leave you with a brick. 4) Continue to pay a premium for content for your player knowing that you'll probably have to do this firmware shuffle at least twice a year.
If youse wants to keep watchin' the latest releases, youse gotsa give us da money to, ya know, recoup the costs of piracy necessitating da development of dis here new firmware. No money, no firmware, no movies.
More satisfied for less, is perhaps more accurate.
That depends on what you're less of. And it would be a less accurate quote from Flash Gordon:
Ming: After the earthquakes and tidal waves, they won't be quite the human beings you remember. They'll be more tractable, easier for you to rule, in the name of Ming. Flash: You mean slaves. Ming: Let's just say, they'll be satisfied with less.
Interestingly, after I got my second monitor, a coworker friend of mine came to my desk from the building across the street and saw the setup and was extremely jealous. He ended up finding a spare monitor near his desk for his own setup. After that, all of the people near his desk saw his setup and wanted it to. We actually ended up having some ITS meetings where enough people brought up the idea of dual-monitors that it's now a standard request for people to get with minimal justification. So who knows, maybe you'll start a trend like what happened for me.
Here, the potential for jealousy was a reason to veto any justifications for a long time. The only thing that turned it around was an updating of our training room (for visiting customers) to LCDs that led to an excess of 17" CRTs. Suddenly, anyone who wanted two displays could have them for the asking. Remaining excess were sold off for home use. Now any CRTs that die are replaced with LCDs.
Thing is, high-res CRTs are still much cheaper than comparable DVI LCDs. Even though my video card at home can use a dual-link DVI display, when my old VGA died I got another VGA running at 2048x1536 rather than a 2560x1600 Dual-link DVI for 3-4 times as much money. But I still use a small 1280x1024 LCD display next to it (ADC->DVI adapted).
And since it's VGA, I can still use it with my KVM switch on four computers. I couldn't do that with any DVI display without buying a new KVM switch.
2. 2560x1600 isn't as good as 3200x1200, IMO. The 30" monitor is too tall, I prefer something wider and flatter.
But which is quite incapable of drinking coffee!
Sorry, force of habit there. Anyway, due to the replacement of CRTs in our training room with LCDs, the company where I work decided to relent and let anyone who wanted them to have two displays. (The IT department refuses to support more than that.) After that, the remaining monitors were sold off for $5 each, so I have three on a PC at home with a Matrox TripleHead2Go, also arranged in an arc. It assembles them as 3*1280 x 1024, presenting the set to the system as a single VGA display, though I wish it could do them individually in portrait for a 3*1024 x 1280, giving it an aspect allowing 1920 x 1080p HD video. Instead it offers portrait on the set, giving a less useful 1024 x 3*1280 display, far too tall to be useful, especially with CRTs. (Three displays are much better than two as you don't have applications deciding to center themselves on the divide between two screens.)
CRTs for programmers are being replaced with LCDs only as the CRTs die. One co-worker uses his LCD in portrait mode, which is a lot better for reading our large code blocks.
Multiple displays are also far superior when debugging, allowing the application to run on one display and the debugger on the other.
I now wish I had control over the resolution and geometric arrangement of my displays. (Linux allows two displays to overlap, or to even have a gap between them to account for bevel dead space; I haven't found a way to do that on Windows or Mac.) IT decided to restrict that ability to root. That also limits what options I have in providing my own displays. My 19" is capable of higher resolutions, but right now it's driven with larger pixels than the 17" display.
And, by playing it at home instead of out on the street, teens are less likely to be distracted into walking into the path of a bus or to get mugged for their PSPs (apart from older siblings and their ruffian friends).
"640K RAM should be enough for anyone" "32-bit should be enough for anyone" "4GB limit on hard drives? Who is going to use a whole 4GB?" "Besides Photoshop, what software is ever going to use BOTH processors?"
If nothing else, it would be a great machine to finally be able to run Vista!
The capstone to those is this simple truism: "Reasonable Limits Aren't."
I'm a little surprised that one could reasonably hit the limit.
I'm not surprised at all. Reasonable Limits Aren't.
Time and time again, someone decides you could never need more than x of some thing, and designs this "reasonable limit" into the technology accordingly. Time passes and it is discovered to be unreasonable and it has to be replaced with a new technology. Many times the new technology establishes a new "reasonable limit" which proves unreasonable again later. It is those that establish an absurdly unreasonable limit at the start that stand the test of time. A common mistake is basing the limit on the world's population alone without considering other factors like allocation of more than one unit per person or even variable birthrate. If you must use the world's population, square it, cube it, or more, or design in a method for infinite expansion (copyright).
Perversely, Verizon decided to use an unreasonable limit (unreasonably low), and if they'd been up front about it rather than claiming "unlimited" (the ultimate in unreasonably high), there would have been no problem. People would have tailored their use accordingly. They could have even established penalties like the "minimum balance" in bank accounts, or just accelerating your billing cycle so you're billed every month or every 5 GB whichever comes first. Bandwidth-limited service from USENET servers (like Giganews) operate this way.
What Verizon has done is determined a "practical limit", because they can't truly provide unlimited service. They've come up with a number at which they've determined they couldn't give you more even if you offered to pay them.
Check your voice phone contracts too. Some of those new "unlimited" plans have severe restrictions on how you can use them, like how long an individual call can last, no conference calls, no modem calls.
After a search of 2,500 fungi and bacteria the researchers discovered two bacteria - Elizabethkingia meningosepticum and Bacterioides fragilis - which contained potentially useful enzymes.
Is it just me, or does anyone else not like the name Elizabethkingia meningosepticum? I don't have a problem with the Elizabethkingia, but the meningosepticum sounds bad, making me think Elizabeth King was not the discoverer but rather the Patient Zero.
Why can't they be more like astronomers who call things as they see them, like how spots on the sun are called "sunspots"?
If a paint manufacturer put a label on the paint can seal that was 'accepted upon opening' that stated that you couldn't use the paint except on PaintCo Brand Wood...
Punching a hole in the can and attaching a spout to transfer the contents to another container doesn't break the labeled seal.
BTW, the clauses that say you can't modify the software are part of the license agreement. Though they tend to survive termination of the agreement in perpetuity, they aren't binding until you agree to them.
It helps if there are no technological protections (per the DMCA) against alteration of the program, the agreement, or the code presenting the agreement, or other seals you had to break to get to that point that had such agreements attached.
Devil's advocate on this one: the license agreement says an Apple-labled computer
And similarly, I'll be fine when I try to install MacOS on a PC with Apple sticker;)
Actually, the term could easily be interpreted as a computer labeled by Apple, not by the end user or third party. Earlier versions of that license agreement though had different language which had that loophole (something like "hardware displaying the Apple logo" I think), so I interpret the change of language is intended to close that loophole.
I think GS/OS might be old enough to have the original form of that restriction, but I haven't had luck finding a copy of its agreement yet.
Will NeoOffice prevent a problem I'm having with OpenOffice.org 2.1 always opening my spreadsheets maximized to my 2048x1536 screen, and when I hit the unzoom button, it is still maximized, sometimes with the resize widget off the bottom of that screen? (Earlier OOo 1.x versions wouldn't remember a spreadsheet's window size, but at least didn't open them filling the screen.)
BTW, I'm glad to see that this was addressed:
Annoying focus behavior of OOo was fixed
When a document is loaded in the OOo GUI a view is created at the end of the loading process. Until now OpenOffice.org always grabbed the focus to the window of this view. This is very annoying when a large document was loaded and the user sent OOo to the background as he wants to do something else while the document is loading. At the end of the loading process the document suddenly was brought to front and disturbed the user in what he was doing at this time (on WinXP it might flicker in the taskbar only when the focus meanwhile was transferred to a different application). Now OOo will bring the window to front (or starts flickering the window in the task bar) only when a modal dialog was opened in the OOo document window as part of the loading process (e.g. a dialog asking for granting execution of macros). The window could have been left in the background even in this case. But as modal dialogs could prevent OOo from opening other documents until they are closed, users might get confused if they didn't notice that their first document is still blocked by a dialog waiting for being closed by the user. As part of the fix for this annoying user interface bug it was was also fixed that dialogs opened in the loading time sometimes had the wrong parent window what especially created problems in the GUI test tool. As this bug fix has an impact on the visual experience of OOo I found it's appropriate to send out this notification thought it's neither an enhancement nor a feature change.
They make a 500 carousel player now? I paid $349 for my 400 and found it doesn't like to play DVD-R media that plays fine in other players. It also doesn't flip disks. I back-fill the player as I watch disks, so it's always full.
I'm approaching 800 titles in my library. Disk count is much higher, considering how many of those titles are complete seasons and many are complete series runs. Television accounts for more than 50% of my rack.
I'd love to rip the whole library to hard drives, but I'd have to sell off a large part of my collection just to afford the drives big enough to hold what would remain. I'm more likely to remaster entire TV seasons to a Blu-Ray disk in SD.
Perhaps they should consider making players with one small hard drive in them, say only able to hold about half a dozen rips (60 GB), and play them from the drive instead of the tray. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for a player like that that would be free of glitches at the layer change. Maybe devote the extra space to a robust playlist manager that I can program to play specific chapters and tracks regardless of how the disc has been scripted to present them. Not only would this allow bypassing unskippable ads on Disney DVDs, it would also be useful to insert the trailer for the next episode of The X-Files before the credits of the preceding episode.
Some disks even have tracks that aren't accessible from their menus, such as the dedication card remembering Jon Pertwee on the Region 2 release of Fox's Doctor Who TV-movie.
A pity this isn't a big enough issue for the general public, or else you'd see this political cartoon for it:
A desk stands in an otherwise bare office. The desk is labeled USPTO. No one sits behind the desk. On the desk, a sign reads "SELF-SERVICE". Also present is a rubber stamp and pad. The bottom of the stamp is visible and reads (in mirror-image of course) "APPROVED".
A nearby wastebasket is labeled "Prior-Art File". A stone wheel is in it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe TV shows would go off the air because of people skipping commercials. They might reduce the budget per episode or increase ad content per timeslot, but there's too much of an industry in place to produce ads to tolerate it going away.
Vested interests in web advertising may be more tenuous than tenacious as they have more of an opportunity to measure effectiveness. The trick will be to find a way to avoid the ads without letting them know you've avoided the ads, such as browsing behind a high-bandwidth proxy that intercepts them so they don't impact your lower bandwidth while also masquerading as you to hide its presence. (Maybe even hosting a virtual browsing environment so it can respond properly to probing scripts seeking to verify impressions.)
Meanwhile, the CSI shows are getting product placement in the show, even to the extent that the product placed in the show was the murder weapon and/or dismemberment tool! And if there was any doubt about sponsorship, at least one regular ad for the product airs during the ad break (though not yet specific to the episode with a pitch like, "If you like how our Sawzall cut through a human body in this episode, just think what other uses you could find for it in your home!").
Where's the prediction of people flying cars into parking structures?
I believe in the Isle of Man (.im) they speak English(Brit.) and Manx.
Thing is, high-res CRTs are still much cheaper than comparable DVI LCDs. Even though my video card at home can use a dual-link DVI display, when my old VGA died I got another VGA running at 2048x1536 rather than a 2560x1600 Dual-link DVI for 3-4 times as much money. But I still use a small 1280x1024 LCD display next to it (ADC->DVI adapted).
And since it's VGA, I can still use it with my KVM switch on four computers. I couldn't do that with any DVI display without buying a new KVM switch.
Sorry, force of habit there. Anyway, due to the replacement of CRTs in our training room with LCDs, the company where I work decided to relent and let anyone who wanted them to have two displays. (The IT department refuses to support more than that.) After that, the remaining monitors were sold off for $5 each, so I have three on a PC at home with a Matrox TripleHead2Go, also arranged in an arc. It assembles them as 3*1280 x 1024, presenting the set to the system as a single VGA display, though I wish it could do them individually in portrait for a 3*1024 x 1280, giving it an aspect allowing 1920 x 1080p HD video. Instead it offers portrait on the set, giving a less useful 1024 x 3*1280 display, far too tall to be useful, especially with CRTs. (Three displays are much better than two as you don't have applications deciding to center themselves on the divide between two screens.)
CRTs for programmers are being replaced with LCDs only as the CRTs die. One co-worker uses his LCD in portrait mode, which is a lot better for reading our large code blocks.
Multiple displays are also far superior when debugging, allowing the application to run on one display and the debugger on the other.
I now wish I had control over the resolution and geometric arrangement of my displays. (Linux allows two displays to overlap, or to even have a gap between them to account for bevel dead space; I haven't found a way to do that on Windows or Mac.) IT decided to restrict that ability to root. That also limits what options I have in providing my own displays. My 19" is capable of higher resolutions, but right now it's driven with larger pixels than the 17" display.
And, by playing it at home instead of out on the street, teens are less likely to be distracted into walking into the path of a bus or to get mugged for their PSPs (apart from older siblings and their ruffian friends).
Time and time again, someone decides you could never need more than x of some thing, and designs this "reasonable limit" into the technology accordingly. Time passes and it is discovered to be unreasonable and it has to be replaced with a new technology. Many times the new technology establishes a new "reasonable limit" which proves unreasonable again later. It is those that establish an absurdly unreasonable limit at the start that stand the test of time. A common mistake is basing the limit on the world's population alone without considering other factors like allocation of more than one unit per person or even variable birthrate. If you must use the world's population, square it, cube it, or more, or design in a method for infinite expansion (copyright).
Perversely, Verizon decided to use an unreasonable limit (unreasonably low), and if they'd been up front about it rather than claiming "unlimited" (the ultimate in unreasonably high), there would have been no problem. People would have tailored their use accordingly. They could have even established penalties like the "minimum balance" in bank accounts, or just accelerating your billing cycle so you're billed every month or every 5 GB whichever comes first. Bandwidth-limited service from USENET servers (like Giganews) operate this way.
What Verizon has done is determined a "practical limit", because they can't truly provide unlimited service. They've come up with a number at which they've determined they couldn't give you more even if you offered to pay them.
Check your voice phone contracts too. Some of those new "unlimited" plans have severe restrictions on how you can use them, like how long an individual call can last, no conference calls, no modem calls.
Why can't they be more like astronomers who call things as they see them, like how spots on the sun are called "sunspots"?
BTW, the clauses that say you can't modify the software are part of the license agreement. Though they tend to survive termination of the agreement in perpetuity, they aren't binding until you agree to them.
It helps if there are no technological protections (per the DMCA) against alteration of the program, the agreement, or the code presenting the agreement, or other seals you had to break to get to that point that had such agreements attached.
I think GS/OS might be old enough to have the original form of that restriction, but I haven't had luck finding a copy of its agreement yet.
BTW, I'm glad to see that this was addressed: Thank you, Mathias Bauer.
I'm approaching 800 titles in my library. Disk count is much higher, considering how many of those titles are complete seasons and many are complete series runs. Television accounts for more than 50% of my rack.
I'd love to rip the whole library to hard drives, but I'd have to sell off a large part of my collection just to afford the drives big enough to hold what would remain. I'm more likely to remaster entire TV seasons to a Blu-Ray disk in SD.
Perhaps they should consider making players with one small hard drive in them, say only able to hold about half a dozen rips (60 GB), and play them from the drive instead of the tray. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for a player like that that would be free of glitches at the layer change. Maybe devote the extra space to a robust playlist manager that I can program to play specific chapters and tracks regardless of how the disc has been scripted to present them. Not only would this allow bypassing unskippable ads on Disney DVDs, it would also be useful to insert the trailer for the next episode of The X-Files before the credits of the preceding episode.
Some disks even have tracks that aren't accessible from their menus, such as the dedication card remembering Jon Pertwee on the Region 2 release of Fox's Doctor Who TV-movie.
A pity this isn't a big enough issue for the general public, or else you'd see this political cartoon for it:
A desk stands in an otherwise bare office. The desk is labeled USPTO. No one sits behind the desk. On the desk, a sign reads "SELF-SERVICE". Also present is a rubber stamp and pad. The bottom of the stamp is visible and reads (in mirror-image of course) "APPROVED".
A nearby wastebasket is labeled "Prior-Art File". A stone wheel is in it.