From what I read on the Call of Duty forums, the main complaint with wireless mice was *lag*. Apparently, there's a delay in processing the input as opposed to a wired mouse.
As to the tilt-wheel mouse - my thought is that it's asking too much of the fingers to try and move side-to-side. Fingers aren't really capable of strong side-to-side forces, especially with regards to how most folks hold a mouse. The current scroll wheel works well for the middle finger because it's just extension/retraction of that digit.
Now... if they moved the wheel to the left so that I could do the side-to-side with my index finger, and do the left-click button with my middle finger, it might work out.
I have a PCKeyboard, it's *close* but not quite the same feel as my authentic UK-made IBM keyboard from 1998. Still, it's pretty good.
But the big reason that I bought it is that it comes with a trackpoint mouse pointer between the G and H keys. That means no fumbling for a mouse in a crowded desktop (or server closet) when all you want to do is click a stupid dialog button. (I also do 99% of my work on a laptop with a trackpoint-style mouse pointer, so it's compatible with what I'm used to.)
I'll probably get another one in a while for my other machine because it's too darn handy to have that pointer nubby at my fingertips.
With a public address for your fridge you could check remotely, if you have enough eggs at home.
And if it's running an embedded MS-OS, it's quite likely that when you get home you'll find your fridge temp to be set to 65F because some cracker thought it would be funny. Or, if you're talking about having RFIDs on the egg shells so you can count the egs, you're implying that everything else in the fridge has RFIDs. Which leads to the question of whose business is it to see what's in your fridge and how easy do you want to make it that someone else can see the contents of your fridge?
Think about utilities remotely querying the counters for electricity, water, gas and heating in each home.
Think about organized crime networks querying counters for electricity / water / gas / heating to figure out who's home and who's gone on vacation for a week.
Yes, it sounds like I'm a privacy-fanatic, doesn't it? But if you can access the information from outside the home, then a determined attacker can also access the information from outside the home. All you've done is made it easier to automate the process of gathering that information.
That's not to say that IPv6 is not needed, but I think most of the examples presented are pie-in-the-sky ideas that completely ignore the human issues. (Companies that will do *anything* if it improves their profit picture, ethics be damned.) My evaluation simply starts from the point of view that if it can be abused it *will* be abused.
Let's say you get a roommate and you want to put both your appliances on your LAN. Well, he's been using 192.168.0.x... and so have you. One of you is going to have to renumber, redo your DNS and anything else that used the IPs.
I lay that fault at the feet of the manufacturers of NAT/routers and other implementers. A better design would have been for those boxes to randomly pick the 3rd octet so that two groups would only have a 1/255 chance of that happening. In fact, when I configured my network, I specifically chose a 3rd octet that was randomly chosen.
I'll take a few stabs at answering that... (not a crypto person, just an amateur)
1) man-in-the-middle attack - in order to transmit the public key for encrypting the content (well, to encrypt a symetrical key which is then used to encrypt the content), you need to make sure that the key you get is actually the key for the entity that you're talking to. If the attacker in the middle can fool you into thinking that their public key is the proper one, everything you transmit is decrypted by the attacker who then chooses what to send on to the destination. MITM attacks are sorta what quantum-crypto is being designed for.
So you need a secure way of getting public keys for particular machines... why not use DNS? Well, that's what FreeS/WAN uses, except that there are issues with the security of DNS transactions that would allow MITM attacks.
Or you can use a PKI (kerberos) server to exchange keys, but PKI has the downside of being centralized (also issues with scaling of certificate-revocation-lists, etc.). Microsoft's OSs support kerberos, but do it in a not-quite-standard way IIRC.
2) Goverments will probably have fits once IPSec is widespread and their carnivore / echelon systems become useless. In fact, they'll probably outlaw it, or require easily-broken algorithms, or other restrictions. When encryption is outlawed, only criminals will have encryption... or some quote to that effect.
Dimensional Weight is used because it costs a fixed amount of money to move a tractor trailer from point A to point B (ignoring the minor issue of fuel consumption between pulling an empty trailer vs one loaded with heavy materials). There's a fixed amount of volume inside of the trailer, and the revenue per cubic inch/meter needs to exceed some value in order for you to turn a profit.
Simple math really, has nothing to do with shipping companies attempting to rip anyone off. They're just trying to make sure that each customer pays enough for it to be profitable to take said customer's business. And it's generally cheap for a customer to switch to another carrier if quality/performance of the service is the same.
(Yes I worked in the transportation industry for a few years.)
Unfortunately (as quoted elsewhere), if you exceed the elasticity of the gel, it *shatters*. Which probably means you get not only the bullet but lots of tiny silica fragments all along the bullet's path.
This is why I wish there were more discussion sites where it wasn't just groupthink plus a few flamers.
Which, IMHO, is what makes/. an interesting experiment. For the most part, the flamers / bias are kept in check by moderating/meta-moderating. Most noise/flame/idiot posts get mod'd down so that you don't have to spend a lot of time mentally skipping over junk posts. However, the reader has the option of whether or not to ignore the effects of moderation (reading at 0 or -1, or changing scoring values).
If I'm in a hurry, I might only skim at +3 (+4 if the post is a day or two old), and it's easy to drill down to see what other posts were in a particular thread. Or, if I have more time, I might read at 0 or +1 to see if there's something that moderation missed. That degree of control is something that I miss when I go read something like Groklaw with 300+ posts, half of which add nothing, but have to be slogged through anyway.
Sure,/. is biased in what they post, a lot of commenters have their own personal agendas that they push. I won't say there's perfect balance of views here, but for the most part, you get a good variation. There are numerous topics where it's possible to walk away from the discussion having to question why you personally believe X over Y.
My Yahoo! - seriously... I get the top stories from multiple news sources, collected into a single page. Downside is that you don't see all of the other stories that a particular news outlet is publishing.
Supplemented by a bunch of e-mail newsletters (BBC, CNN, technical rags) and catching up on the latest at Slashdot.
Thats why it is a firing squad, 4 blanks that don't kill, and one real bullet that does.
According to most of the references I've found, it's the other way round. One person gets a blank, everyone else gets live rounds (sometimes everyone gets live rounds and there are no blanks). The idea is that even though an experienced shooter can tell the difference, there are psychological reasons not to pay attention or to believe that you truly drew the blank round. Also, no one person can stop the execution by failing to fire.
Which is more important the 10,000 people who want to use ham radio to talk with truckers in wisconsin or highspeed access to the worldwide network? Protecting Ham Radio for interference is like holding up progress for the people who still watch black and white TVs.
I still say protecting the Ham Radio folks is the better option. In an emergency, those frequencies serve well as backup (sometimes primary) communication. This is one of the main reasons we have the FCC, to make sure that one group doesn't trample all over the airwaves in use by a 2nd group.
There are other options that can be deployed which don't interfere with existing communications equipment. This doesn't even have the advantage of being wireless like the latest Verizon announcement or some of the other WiFi stuff. BPL is a poor choice in comparison unless they can fix the radio interference issues.
Agreed... and it's something that I think a lot of folks miss. Creating yet another law will not stop X, but it might make it easier to prosecute once X has happened. However, whenever you create a new law to prosecute X, there's a high chance of the system being subverted to also allow Y and Z to be prosecuted, or weirdness where X doesn't get addressed at all.
Spam, in particular, is a combination of technical (SMTP is too trusting), economic (receiver pays the majority of the costs), and social (willing to do anything, don't care about existing laws).
On the technical side, there's small rays of hope. Reverse-MX proposals (SPF, LMAP) or Yahoo!'s domain-keys are trying to eliminate the Mack-truck sized loophole that allows domains to be forged and companies to be joe-job'd. This should also put a dent in the e-mail worm/spam problem or at least force those machines to route e-mail through a (likely) better-administered SMTP server. Bayesian seems to be working well still and has a bit of life left (multi-word / markov bayesian is probably next). Whitelisting of domains gets easier once the forging issue is taken care of. IP blacklists are still around (don't care for them personally, like hunting flies with a shotgun). We may even see e-mail get as far as requiring public-key signatures along with web-of-trust. I'd say that all e-mail will be required to be encrypted to each recipient's private key, but gov'ts would probably nix that. Individually, none of these technical proposals make much of an impact, but each one closes up yet another loophole.
Social-side I'm not sure of what is going to make a difference. Too many countries involved with different social mores or laws (or lack thereof).
Economic sanction is possible, but currently it's easy-as-sin to joe-job your competition - so there's a high risk of false-accusations. Plus, it's easy to move the stuff off-shore and out of reach of authorities. However, as some of the technical means come into mainstream it will hopefully drive spammer costs up (having to register new domains all the time, etc.).
I hear ya... I have a 19" from about 1998 or so. Does 1600x1200 @ 75hz, and the equivalent LCDs for 1600x1200 are all pretty pricey still. (Besides the scaling issue of playing games at resolutions other then 1600x1200.)
If it dies, I'll be hard put to decide whether to switch to LCD, or get a much cheaper 19" that does the same as this one.
OTOH, if they came out with a 150-200dpi LCD in a 19" form factor, I'd probably go ahead and switch.
Ugh... I just had flashbacks to my typing class in the late 80s (fully manual typewriters).
Bolding text was a real fun task... A{backspace}AL {backspace}LP {backspace}PO {backspace}O {space}.
Or counting out letters so that you could center text on the page properly.
My first printer was an electronic typewriter hooked up to a serial port on the computer. Boy did that prove difficult (spent a day at the local repair shop getting them to make it work). Not to mention trying to print a 20 page term-paper and making sure the form-fed paper stayed aligned (no sprockets).
That's exactly what I was thinking... what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Heck, that's probably an action-item on the "what-to-do" plan the next time that corporate profits dip and the radio conglomerates. After all, it's a lot cheaper to hire someone in a 3rd world country to do the radio-voice since it's all pre-programmed and completely washed of any creativity by the (semi) local DJ.
This leaves me wondering just how many other stocks out there are rated so highly based off of a hope and prayer? Is the entire system this easily manipulated?
The buy/sell system has been manipulated for the last decade. Flip through some back issues of the financial rags and you'll see all sorts of articles related to the "chinese-wall" between different sides of the investment banks. Basically, analysts have been known to promote stocks that the other side of the company is either IPO'ing or would make a tidy profit if the stock goes up.
Consumer-grade audio cards / speakers are probably *just* approaching the penetration levels where audio-quality will become a determing factor. Even 2 years ago, most of the on-board audio chips embedded in the motherboards weren't all that great. (My nForce2 motherboard does quite well...)
2 years ago, transfer rates and storage density was still an issue... better to only need 1Mb/min (128Kbps MP3) instead of 6Mb/min. At least, I think lossless audio compression is around 2:1. Hard drives were about 1/8th the size they are now and DVD-R was still pretty expensive. ISDN was still considered fast.
So I agree that the technical indicators are finally in place for what you envision... but the enemy of the perfect is "good enough". Most folks are quite happy just upping the bitrate to 192/256/320 and calling it close enough.
You see similar shifts in other areas... for the longest time, PCs have been about speed first, noise second. Yet the past year, we're starting to see a shift towards noise/power taking precedence over raw speed. The machines are now fast enough for 99% of what we do other then games/modeling... no need to have them sound like a jet engine or consume more power then the lights in Las Vegas.
Replacing MP3s with something better is like trying to replace regular audio CDs with the new fancy-shmancy SACDs.
A truly useful extension would be one that would work on the receiver's end and move top-posts to the bottom, or bottom-posts to the top (whichever way the receiver prefers to see it). So regardless of how the poster did it, you'd see it in your preferred method.
I know... technically difficult, but even if it only handled the simple cases...
Re:Why are people still using IE? Firebird rocks.
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
4.) Cannot turn on the tab bar by default or always have it on
Some of us wish that Firebird had multiple processes so that a crash in one window wouldn't wipe out the other 4 windows with half a dozen tabs each....
(A habit that you form once you have a tabbed browser...)
Thunderbird 0.4 has worked well for me for the last month (replaced Moz 1.4). It's finished enough that it's useable for me at least.
That pretty much agrees with what I've personally seen.
CD - I have no idea what they're going to manage to replace this with... it's in everything (cars, boomboxes, PCs, etc.). The audio quality is "good enough" for 99% of the public, the interface is simple, it's compatible with everything (except for the recent attempts at DRM). That makes for a darn high hurdle that any new format would have to compete against. Possibly, if they could replace it with something recordable (cassettes vs LPs, DRM will kill it), smaller form-factor (whoops, there goes compatibility), higher audio quality (tough sell, CD is good enough). Which is pretty much a match for the Sony MD disc. Pity that the Sony MD disc gets killed on both proprietary and DRM fronts, it could've replaced cassette tapes.
DVD was a great upgrade to VHS. Pretty much a no-brainer other then the recording issue (which is finally going mainstream). A high-def version of DVD might take off (would be significant upgrade), if they don't kill it with DRM and it can be used for digital archiving on PCs. 25Gb/layer would make for a very nice archival size (it would have to be at *least* 20Gb, 30Gb/layer would sell faster). Much like DVD-R has replaced CD-R as an archival medium. A format war will also kill it off (or lead to *very slow* adoption rates).
An interesting format to me would be a cartridge about the size of a 3.5" floppy disk (or a touch smaller 2.5" x 3.0"), with hard shell, that can be used for music / video / data storage. Re-writeable would be necessary, write-once would be interesting. Top capacity would need to be around 15-20Gb per side with twice the error-correction of today's DVDs. Make them small enough and reliable enough to use in digital cameras. A unified format that is consumer-friendly, less prone to damage, might be enough to move us off of the CD/DVD physical size treadmill.
How about a great new effort for PEDESTRIAN super-highways. If you've been on a rail-to-trail you know what a great concept this is. A safe place for kids and adults to get from one place to another on their bikes, skates, etc... Add lots of pedestrian bridges. After all, America is facing a crisis of obesity. A lot of this can be attributed that we spend profound amounts of time in cars on our asses instead of WALKING.
Sure, if everyone wants to go back to living in little enclaves where their yard is only 1/10th acre (tops) and there are around 100-200 people living within a stone's throw. Walking only works if your destination is within walking distance (which I define as around 1 mile each way).
Suburbia is why people don't walk and why cars are pretty much required to get around anywhere outside of the major metro areas. People wanted 1-3 acre lots for their houses where they can pretend that the neighbors aren't around. Developers have pretty much had free reign to convert vast tracts of land into cute little housing developments.
There's been a lot of noise over the last decade about "greenways", which is all well and good, but probably 20 years too late (in the northeast US).
Ugh, Mulan was like bland, westernized chinese food... complete with salt-n-pepper and a side of McD's fries. I remember walking out of the theatre very dissapointed with how "un-ethnic" it felt.
Disney also has the bad habit of trying to extract every last cent of profit out of it's productions. (The sheer amount of merchandising is offensive.)
300Gb SATA drives ($280ea), tricked out in a 4x300 RAID5 array would be a close competitor. Price would probably come right in around $1200 if you include the RAID card.
However, the LaCie probably isn't a bad little doo-hickey for making backups of that terabyte array. (Cheaper then tape, even if you bought 3 devices and rotated them weekly.)
Slashdot Mirror
From what I read on the Call of Duty forums, the main complaint with wireless mice was *lag*. Apparently, there's a delay in processing the input as opposed to a wired mouse.
As to the tilt-wheel mouse - my thought is that it's asking too much of the fingers to try and move side-to-side. Fingers aren't really capable of strong side-to-side forces, especially with regards to how most folks hold a mouse. The current scroll wheel works well for the middle finger because it's just extension/retraction of that digit.
Now... if they moved the wheel to the left so that I could do the side-to-side with my index finger, and do the left-click button with my middle finger, it might work out.
I have a PCKeyboard, it's *close* but not quite the same feel as my authentic UK-made IBM keyboard from 1998. Still, it's pretty good.
But the big reason that I bought it is that it comes with a trackpoint mouse pointer between the G and H keys. That means no fumbling for a mouse in a crowded desktop (or server closet) when all you want to do is click a stupid dialog button. (I also do 99% of my work on a laptop with a trackpoint-style mouse pointer, so it's compatible with what I'm used to.)
I'll probably get another one in a while for my other machine because it's too darn handy to have that pointer nubby at my fingertips.
With a public address for your fridge you could check remotely, if you have enough eggs at home.
And if it's running an embedded MS-OS, it's quite likely that when you get home you'll find your fridge temp to be set to 65F because some cracker thought it would be funny. Or, if you're talking about having RFIDs on the egg shells so you can count the egs, you're implying that everything else in the fridge has RFIDs. Which leads to the question of whose business is it to see what's in your fridge and how easy do you want to make it that someone else can see the contents of your fridge?
Think about utilities remotely querying the counters for electricity, water, gas and heating in each home.
Think about organized crime networks querying counters for electricity / water / gas / heating to figure out who's home and who's gone on vacation for a week.
Yes, it sounds like I'm a privacy-fanatic, doesn't it? But if you can access the information from outside the home, then a determined attacker can also access the information from outside the home. All you've done is made it easier to automate the process of gathering that information.
That's not to say that IPv6 is not needed, but I think most of the examples presented are pie-in-the-sky ideas that completely ignore the human issues. (Companies that will do *anything* if it improves their profit picture, ethics be damned.) My evaluation simply starts from the point of view that if it can be abused it *will* be abused.
Let's say you get a roommate and you want to put both your appliances on your LAN. Well, he's been using 192.168.0.x ... and so have you. One of you is going to have to renumber, redo your DNS and anything else that used the IPs.
I lay that fault at the feet of the manufacturers of NAT/routers and other implementers. A better design would have been for those boxes to randomly pick the 3rd octet so that two groups would only have a 1/255 chance of that happening. In fact, when I configured my network, I specifically chose a 3rd octet that was randomly chosen.
why is this so hard ?
I'll take a few stabs at answering that... (not a crypto person, just an amateur)
1) man-in-the-middle attack - in order to transmit the public key for encrypting the content (well, to encrypt a symetrical key which is then used to encrypt the content), you need to make sure that the key you get is actually the key for the entity that you're talking to. If the attacker in the middle can fool you into thinking that their public key is the proper one, everything you transmit is decrypted by the attacker who then chooses what to send on to the destination. MITM attacks are sorta what quantum-crypto is being designed for.
So you need a secure way of getting public keys for particular machines... why not use DNS? Well, that's what FreeS/WAN uses, except that there are issues with the security of DNS transactions that would allow MITM attacks.
Or you can use a PKI (kerberos) server to exchange keys, but PKI has the downside of being centralized (also issues with scaling of certificate-revocation-lists, etc.). Microsoft's OSs support kerberos, but do it in a not-quite-standard way IIRC.
2) Goverments will probably have fits once IPSec is widespread and their carnivore / echelon systems become useless. In fact, they'll probably outlaw it, or require easily-broken algorithms, or other restrictions. When encryption is outlawed, only criminals will have encryption... or some quote to that effect.
Dimensional Weight is used because it costs a fixed amount of money to move a tractor trailer from point A to point B (ignoring the minor issue of fuel consumption between pulling an empty trailer vs one loaded with heavy materials). There's a fixed amount of volume inside of the trailer, and the revenue per cubic inch/meter needs to exceed some value in order for you to turn a profit.
Simple math really, has nothing to do with shipping companies attempting to rip anyone off. They're just trying to make sure that each customer pays enough for it to be profitable to take said customer's business. And it's generally cheap for a customer to switch to another carrier if quality/performance of the service is the same.
(Yes I worked in the transportation industry for a few years.)
Unfortunately (as quoted elsewhere), if you exceed the elasticity of the gel, it *shatters*. Which probably means you get not only the bullet but lots of tiny silica fragments all along the bullet's path.
This is why I wish there were more discussion sites where it wasn't just groupthink plus a few flamers.
/. an interesting experiment. For the most part, the flamers / bias are kept in check by moderating/meta-moderating. Most noise/flame/idiot posts get mod'd down so that you don't have to spend a lot of time mentally skipping over junk posts. However, the reader has the option of whether or not to ignore the effects of moderation (reading at 0 or -1, or changing scoring values).
/. is biased in what they post, a lot of commenters have their own personal agendas that they push. I won't say there's perfect balance of views here, but for the most part, you get a good variation. There are numerous topics where it's possible to walk away from the discussion having to question why you personally believe X over Y.
Which, IMHO, is what makes
If I'm in a hurry, I might only skim at +3 (+4 if the post is a day or two old), and it's easy to drill down to see what other posts were in a particular thread. Or, if I have more time, I might read at 0 or +1 to see if there's something that moderation missed. That degree of control is something that I miss when I go read something like Groklaw with 300+ posts, half of which add nothing, but have to be slogged through anyway.
Sure,
What do you use?
My Yahoo! - seriously... I get the top stories from multiple news sources, collected into a single page. Downside is that you don't see all of the other stories that a particular news outlet is publishing.
Supplemented by a bunch of e-mail newsletters (BBC, CNN, technical rags) and catching up on the latest at Slashdot.
Thats why it is a firing squad, 4 blanks that don't kill, and one real bullet that does.
According to most of the references I've found, it's the other way round. One person gets a blank, everyone else gets live rounds (sometimes everyone gets live rounds and there are no blanks). The idea is that even though an experienced shooter can tell the difference, there are psychological reasons not to pay attention or to believe that you truly drew the blank round. Also, no one person can stop the execution by failing to fire.
Execution by firing squad
Firing Squad Protocol
Death by firing squad
Which is more important the 10,000 people who want to use ham radio to talk with truckers in wisconsin or highspeed access to the worldwide network? Protecting Ham Radio for interference is like holding up progress for the people who still watch black and white TVs.
I still say protecting the Ham Radio folks is the better option. In an emergency, those frequencies serve well as backup (sometimes primary) communication. This is one of the main reasons we have the FCC, to make sure that one group doesn't trample all over the airwaves in use by a 2nd group.
There are other options that can be deployed which don't interfere with existing communications equipment. This doesn't even have the advantage of being wireless like the latest Verizon announcement or some of the other WiFi stuff. BPL is a poor choice in comparison unless they can fix the radio interference issues.
Agreed... and it's something that I think a lot of folks miss. Creating yet another law will not stop X, but it might make it easier to prosecute once X has happened. However, whenever you create a new law to prosecute X, there's a high chance of the system being subverted to also allow Y and Z to be prosecuted, or weirdness where X doesn't get addressed at all.
Spam, in particular, is a combination of technical (SMTP is too trusting), economic (receiver pays the majority of the costs), and social (willing to do anything, don't care about existing laws).
On the technical side, there's small rays of hope. Reverse-MX proposals (SPF, LMAP) or Yahoo!'s domain-keys are trying to eliminate the Mack-truck sized loophole that allows domains to be forged and companies to be joe-job'd. This should also put a dent in the e-mail worm/spam problem or at least force those machines to route e-mail through a (likely) better-administered SMTP server. Bayesian seems to be working well still and has a bit of life left (multi-word / markov bayesian is probably next). Whitelisting of domains gets easier once the forging issue is taken care of. IP blacklists are still around (don't care for them personally, like hunting flies with a shotgun). We may even see e-mail get as far as requiring public-key signatures along with web-of-trust. I'd say that all e-mail will be required to be encrypted to each recipient's private key, but gov'ts would probably nix that. Individually, none of these technical proposals make much of an impact, but each one closes up yet another loophole.
Social-side I'm not sure of what is going to make a difference. Too many countries involved with different social mores or laws (or lack thereof).
Economic sanction is possible, but currently it's easy-as-sin to joe-job your competition - so there's a high risk of false-accusations. Plus, it's easy to move the stuff off-shore and out of reach of authorities. However, as some of the technical means come into mainstream it will hopefully drive spammer costs up (having to register new domains all the time, etc.).
I hear ya... I have a 19" from about 1998 or so. Does 1600x1200 @ 75hz, and the equivalent LCDs for 1600x1200 are all pretty pricey still. (Besides the scaling issue of playing games at resolutions other then 1600x1200.)
If it dies, I'll be hard put to decide whether to switch to LCD, or get a much cheaper 19" that does the same as this one.
OTOH, if they came out with a 150-200dpi LCD in a 19" form factor, I'd probably go ahead and switch.
Ugh... I just had flashbacks to my typing class in the late 80s (fully manual typewriters).
Bolding text was a real fun task... A{backspace}AL {backspace}LP {backspace}PO {backspace}O {space}.
Or counting out letters so that you could center text on the page properly.
My first printer was an electronic typewriter hooked up to a serial port on the computer. Boy did that prove difficult (spent a day at the local repair shop getting them to make it work). Not to mention trying to print a 20 page term-paper and making sure the form-fed paper stayed aligned (no sprockets).
That's exactly what I was thinking... what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Heck, that's probably an action-item on the "what-to-do" plan the next time that corporate profits dip and the radio conglomerates. After all, it's a lot cheaper to hire someone in a 3rd world country to do the radio-voice since it's all pre-programmed and completely washed of any creativity by the (semi) local DJ.
This leaves me wondering just how many other stocks out there are rated so highly based off of a hope and prayer? Is the entire system this easily manipulated?
The buy/sell system has been manipulated for the last decade. Flip through some back issues of the financial rags and you'll see all sorts of articles related to the "chinese-wall" between different sides of the investment banks. Basically, analysts have been known to promote stocks that the other side of the company is either IPO'ing or would make a tidy profit if the stock goes up.
Consumer-grade audio cards / speakers are probably *just* approaching the penetration levels where audio-quality will become a determing factor. Even 2 years ago, most of the on-board audio chips embedded in the motherboards weren't all that great. (My nForce2 motherboard does quite well...)
2 years ago, transfer rates and storage density was still an issue... better to only need 1Mb/min (128Kbps MP3) instead of 6Mb/min. At least, I think lossless audio compression is around 2:1. Hard drives were about 1/8th the size they are now and DVD-R was still pretty expensive. ISDN was still considered fast.
So I agree that the technical indicators are finally in place for what you envision... but the enemy of the perfect is "good enough". Most folks are quite happy just upping the bitrate to 192/256/320 and calling it close enough.
You see similar shifts in other areas... for the longest time, PCs have been about speed first, noise second. Yet the past year, we're starting to see a shift towards noise/power taking precedence over raw speed. The machines are now fast enough for 99% of what we do other then games/modeling... no need to have them sound like a jet engine or consume more power then the lights in Las Vegas.
Replacing MP3s with something better is like trying to replace regular audio CDs with the new fancy-shmancy SACDs.
A truly useful extension would be one that would work on the receiver's end and move top-posts to the bottom, or bottom-posts to the top (whichever way the receiver prefers to see it). So regardless of how the poster did it, you'd see it in your preferred method.
I know... technically difficult, but even if it only handled the simple cases...
4.) Cannot turn on the tab bar by default or always have it on
That one is handled by Tabbrowser Extensions.
Not 100% sure of a fix for #2.
Some of us wish that Firebird had multiple processes so that a crash in one window wouldn't wipe out the other 4 windows with half a dozen tabs each....
(A habit that you form once you have a tabbed browser...)
Thunderbird 0.4 has worked well for me for the last month (replaced Moz 1.4). It's finished enough that it's useable for me at least.
I believe it's due to tax structure, legal structure and fees. The 4th link lays this out in detail.
Why Choose Delaware as Your Corporate Home?
Why Delaware?
Should I incorporate in Delaware?
Structuring your U.S. company - incorporate in Delaware? (best article of the lot)
That pretty much agrees with what I've personally seen.
CD - I have no idea what they're going to manage to replace this with... it's in everything (cars, boomboxes, PCs, etc.). The audio quality is "good enough" for 99% of the public, the interface is simple, it's compatible with everything (except for the recent attempts at DRM). That makes for a darn high hurdle that any new format would have to compete against. Possibly, if they could replace it with something recordable (cassettes vs LPs, DRM will kill it), smaller form-factor (whoops, there goes compatibility), higher audio quality (tough sell, CD is good enough). Which is pretty much a match for the Sony MD disc. Pity that the Sony MD disc gets killed on both proprietary and DRM fronts, it could've replaced cassette tapes.
DVD was a great upgrade to VHS. Pretty much a no-brainer other then the recording issue (which is finally going mainstream). A high-def version of DVD might take off (would be significant upgrade), if they don't kill it with DRM and it can be used for digital archiving on PCs. 25Gb/layer would make for a very nice archival size (it would have to be at *least* 20Gb, 30Gb/layer would sell faster). Much like DVD-R has replaced CD-R as an archival medium. A format war will also kill it off (or lead to *very slow* adoption rates).
An interesting format to me would be a cartridge about the size of a 3.5" floppy disk (or a touch smaller 2.5" x 3.0"), with hard shell, that can be used for music / video / data storage. Re-writeable would be necessary, write-once would be interesting. Top capacity would need to be around 15-20Gb per side with twice the error-correction of today's DVDs. Make them small enough and reliable enough to use in digital cameras. A unified format that is consumer-friendly, less prone to damage, might be enough to move us off of the CD/DVD physical size treadmill.
How about a great new effort for PEDESTRIAN super-highways. If you've been on a rail-to-trail you know what a great concept this is. A safe place for kids and adults to get from one place to another on their bikes, skates, etc... Add lots of pedestrian bridges. After all, America is facing a crisis of obesity. A lot of this can be attributed that we spend profound amounts of time in cars on our asses instead of WALKING.
Sure, if everyone wants to go back to living in little enclaves where their yard is only 1/10th acre (tops) and there are around 100-200 people living within a stone's throw. Walking only works if your destination is within walking distance (which I define as around 1 mile each way).
Suburbia is why people don't walk and why cars are pretty much required to get around anywhere outside of the major metro areas. People wanted 1-3 acre lots for their houses where they can pretend that the neighbors aren't around. Developers have pretty much had free reign to convert vast tracts of land into cute little housing developments.
There's been a lot of noise over the last decade about "greenways", which is all well and good, but probably 20 years too late (in the northeast US).
Ugh, Mulan was like bland, westernized chinese food... complete with salt-n-pepper and a side of McD's fries. I remember walking out of the theatre very dissapointed with how "un-ethnic" it felt.
Disney also has the bad habit of trying to extract every last cent of profit out of it's productions. (The sheer amount of merchandising is offensive.)
300Gb SATA drives ($280ea), tricked out in a 4x300 RAID5 array would be a close competitor. Price would probably come right in around $1200 if you include the RAID card.
However, the LaCie probably isn't a bad little doo-hickey for making backups of that terabyte array. (Cheaper then tape, even if you bought 3 devices and rotated them weekly.)