1. Only publicly traded companies have to comply with SOX. I don't think the situation you described has anything to do with SOX.
2. I can see your point that Google apps may not be compatible with SOX, but this would matter only to publicly traded companies.
3. You haven't been paying attention to the news. I've seen multiple stories about SOX causing many small publicly traded companies to delist from the stock market and go private, and how it's causing businesses to skip the US stock markets when it comes time for them to do their IPO. In other words, yes, there's a general feeling that SOX is driving business away from the US. Here's an example article I found through a very quick search: Is SOX Driving Small Companies Overseas?
SOX seems to be too onerous on most companies, and only the largest ones can properly put up the effort to meet its requirements. I'm not an expert, so I'm going by what I've read and heard on the news, and by the huge amount of IT changes that SOX has caused at my work. I'm as anti-corporate as they come, and I can see that SOX is having some negative effects. I think he's right that something is going to change.
It's a site that's compiling all stories of people who are being unjustly hit by the Viacom Youtube blitzkrieg. Makes me wonder, could this DMCA provision be used as a kind of denial of service attack? What if a site or ISP started receiving a ton of random DMCA takedown notices? What if they were from fake or spoofed names and addresses so as not to be traced? This stuff is just insane.
It seems that many (most?) major companies try to stay well away from any chance of getting in trouble (or just being sued for no reason). I noticed in my limited experience with this that it seems to be standard practice now with major companies to not say anything about someone's previous employment with them except for employment dates and title. They'll give employment dates, title and nothing else, at least in the last two or three cases where I checked.
That is true! I was shocked when I drove through the nice parts of Beverly Hills to see the cars parked on a lot of the nice homes' driveways. I saw a LOT of corollas and civics. Go to a wannabe fancy apartment complex and you'll see a lot of BMWs, Lexus, Acura, etc. I guess this is evidence of the ideas of that book "The Millionaire Next Door" at work.
This device just looks astounding! However, I'm just way to weary of Cingular to try them out. I have heard SO many bad things about Cingular, including that they are one of the worst rated cell providers out there, along with Sprint. Now I'm hearing people here say that you are required to sign up for their insanely priced data plans if you want to get the 2 year contract price on smart phones. I have also heard that it's like pulling teeth to get phone unlock codes from them. I've been very happy with T-Mobile for the last few years and don't plan on changing any time soon. Too bad. No iPhone for me until they start selling unlocked ones for a reasonable price on eBay (probably a few years down the line).
Those are mosquitos that transmit Dengue Fever, which is a tropical disease. They spoofed it as a PSA against mosquitos. Toward the middle of the clip, once they get in the water, they put up title cards saying "Dengue mosquitos reproduce in the water", "Don't leave any standing water around", etc, etc. Pretty funny. At first I was wondering WTF? But once the title cards came on it all made sense - they run actual PSAs there telling people not to leave standing water in their yards (in plant vases, etc) to control the mosquito population.
Well, I had one place hire me to sort out their IT... they had a weird proprietary wiring system that worked only with weird proprietary network cards and talked only to a weird proprietary server. I've never seen any of this garbage before or since. All the wires were about 1/2" thick and were run along the hallways, because they'd never heard of the idea that you could have wiring *installed*. And the server was down most of the time, they'd actually poke at it once a day until it went up for an hour or so so they could exchange files, before it crashed again.
Sounds like 10Base5 or "Thicknet", which was the original Ethernet cabling spec.
Can't they just put an amber coating on the outside of the glass to produce a more pleasant glow?
Not really. There are some CFL bulbs with colored outside coatings, but they are usually special use bulbs, like yellow outdoor bulbs that don't attract insects, or different "party" colors. The problem with putting any color coating on a light bulb is that any coating enough to change the color noticeably also reduces the light output of the bulb by quite a bit, making the bulb less efficient, which is one of their main advantages to start with.
From what I have read (don't recall where - wikipedia's CFL entry doesn't seem to go into detail on this), the way that manufacturers get different color tones from their bulbs is by using different combinations of phosphors. Each phosphor apparently emits a small part of the light spectrum, so they put some phosphor for blue, some for green, some for red, etc. I don't know if those are the actual colors. It's just an example I made up, and I don't even know if they have that much range - the phosphors might just be variations of green/blue/yellow. You can imagine this can get pretty complicated/expensive, but I understand that they have made progress in the last few years on the CRI (color rendition index) of the bulbs.
The poster before me has a good point on the problem of the application you have versus durability of the bulb, but if you still want to find the dimmable CFLs you are looking for, here's my suggestion:
Don't bother with the home depot website. It has a very limited selection in this department, compared to their retail stores. Search the web for "bulb" or "light bulbs" (or "lamps" isn't that what you call them in the UK?) to find specialized online light bulb / lamp vendors, like bulb.com or others. Email a few that have what you are looking for to see if they will ship to the UK. If you don't find any US online bulb stores that ship to the UK, see if you find some online stores in Europe (or in the UK itself - search UK sites at google.co.uk or at your favorite UK specific search site) that will ship, or perhaps look at the GE, Philips, and Sylvania/Osram websites to see if they have info on resellers, and perhaps email some of those to see if they can special order the specific models you are looking for. I'm sure that one way or another you will find someone that will ship to you. Good luck!
So true about the whole "crushing the competition" attitude inside Microsoft. I had occasion to visit a Microsoft office in Phoenix, AZ around '93-'94 or so. They had small posters around the office (I saw it in the kitchen) showing a cartoon representation of Internet Explorer literally crushing Netscape Navigator under its feet. The IE figure was standing on top of the NN figure's body which was laid flat. I can understand competitiveness, but I thought that that stuff was a little disturbing. But hey, I figure that's one of the factors in their success: completely ruthless/cutthroat competition, so it must work for them.
Anyway, I think that there is something, actually two things, that could break Microsoft's stranglehold on non-distributed computing. The quick prospect would be if Apple released OS X for generic PC clones. The slow prospect is Linux gaining more foothold in the market and more support from application vendors. Both are only maybes though.
I heard a report on public radio a few months back (either NPR or Marketplace - I don't have time to search through their archives for the link right now), where they said that this same kind of effect is what has stopped any recognizable brands of products to come out of China.
They have all this manufacturing power, but because of weak enforcement of IP laws, as soon as some product starts to stand out, 50 other factories will start making the exact same thing, even using the same packaging and logos (clones, just like in SL), making them undiscernible from the real thing in the eyes of the consumer. Instant dilution of brand power.
It makes sense if you think about it and compare to some other Asian countries - Japan has a ton of well-known brands, Korea has several brands that are starting to establish themselves very well, like Hyundai and Samsung, but there really isn't any established/recognizable Chinese brand of any product. I think the report went on to say that Lenovo is one of the first companies trying to break out of this pattern, but whether they will be successful is yet to be seen.
Interesting. It looks like they might be serious about making the PS3 into a general computing device. It's still a little expensive to really be useful, but maybe in a few years when the price comes down and we find out what kind of performance you can get in general computing tasks (maybe running linux?), it could be cool.
Your post must have caught me at just the right time and in the right mood, because I literally cried from laughter for about two minutes when I read your post. Then I cried and stuttered for another three minutes trying to read it out loud to my wife - you know when you are trying to retell something that is so funny that you keep getting interrupted by your own uncontrollable laughter? I'm embarassed for myself, but I still think this is the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot, based on my reaction... Thanks!
Ah, thank you for the answer and the best description yet of what happened. I looked it up on youtube and found this (audio only though): The Tubes Speech. You're right about it being a halting/rambling/angry speech, with a bunch of technical inaccuracies.
I won't question your obvious disillusionment (sp?) with politicians and the political process, but I just couldn't let this pass:
deregulate communications as much as possible to allow for more competition. That will help everyone with lower prices, more competitive levels of service based on what the customer needs (rather than a one-size-fits-all solution)
What country have you been in for the last 10 years? Maybe you haven't been following what has been happening in the communications and broadcasting industries in the US lately since the loosening of regulations took place? Just to refresh your memory, the result has been the exact opposite of what you describe: there's been rampant consolidation in both industries - the communications industry is down to 2 or 3 major players (AT&T/SBC, Verizon, and maybeSprint), and the broadcast industry is down to a handfull of major players as well (radio for example, is down to 2 companies that own most of the radio stations in the US, Clearchannel and Infinity), with concrete and drastic results against free speech. So how has deregulation in the communications industry helped competition or anything else other than mega-corporations pockets again?
I consider myself very technologically savvy, have been working in IT for 15 years, 10 of those in networking, and I've honestly never understood why people deride the politician that made the "tubes" analogy so much. Isn't the analogy of tubes or pipes fairly accurate to describe the Internet's physical infrastructure? What's so weird about that? Someone please explain it, I honestly want to know. Thanks in advance.
I was wondering the same thing (which ally?). More details please, grandparent poster. I thought maybe he meant France -> Algeria, although I don't know how long that lasted.
I'm no expert at this, but I've read slashdot enough to know that are a variety of alternatives besides what you listed that would work. Read up on voting methods on wikipedia. The first one that springs to mind is that you could rank your choices, for example, 1st Democrat, 2nd Green, 3rd Republican, 4th Libertarian, etc...
I wondered the same thing as the grandparent post, and guessed at the same conclusions as the parent post. There's a way to do it without giving everyone a free holiday (but really, I think a strong argument could be made for it to be a holiday). Election day could be on a weekend! In Brazil (they just had runoff presidential elections last week), election day is Sunday, although voting is mandatory there, so perhaps it wouldn't work here with voluntary voting...
You're the one that's not accurate
on
Wii Confirmed at 480p
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The parent post was right. The "480p" on the Wii means 720x480 (or maybe 852x480). Not 480 by something else. That's typical of how TV resolutions are referred to - the vertical resolution, not the horizontal.
Just to add to all the other posts above. There's no way that archeologists would ever give up digging. For one, what people write is often far from truthful, complete, accurate, or precise. There are archeologists out there that dig through *current* (let alone 150 year old)landfills and garbage to get accurate data, because of this fact. For example, there's a group that did a study of how much beer the people in a certain community drank regularly: first they asked them to put on paper how much beer they had each week. Then they studied each household's garbage and found that those people drank a lot more beer than they were accounting for.
The other reason for digging is that what people write at one point in time is possibly colored by ignorance, technological limitations, cultural bias, and a variety of other limitations and distortions that a contemporary observer is bound to suffer from. The whole concept is similar in a way to legal trials. Physical evidence always holds a lot more weight than witness accounts. Why? People screw up. A lot.
People seem to forget that this is a SD console, not HD. Isn't it supposed to be twice as powerful as the original XBOX? Why would you need any more power than that for SD games? It's probably going to look incredible on SD TVs.
Yes, it seems we do. And I think you are right that guys are close to it, in many ways. I certainly want to visit the area again to get to know it better. I've been to Norway (Bergen), but not to Sweden or Denmark.
Slashdot Mirror
2. I can see your point that Google apps may not be compatible with SOX, but this would matter only to publicly traded companies.
3. You haven't been paying attention to the news. I've seen multiple stories about SOX causing many small publicly traded companies to delist from the stock market and go private, and how it's causing businesses to skip the US stock markets when it comes time for them to do their IPO. In other words, yes, there's a general feeling that SOX is driving business away from the US. Here's an example article I found through a very quick search: Is SOX Driving Small Companies Overseas?
SOX seems to be too onerous on most companies, and only the largest ones can properly put up the effort to meet its requirements. I'm not an expert, so I'm going by what I've read and heard on the news, and by the huge amount of IT changes that SOX has caused at my work. I'm as anti-corporate as they come, and I can see that SOX is having some negative effects. I think he's right that something is going to change.
It's a site that's compiling all stories of people who are being unjustly hit by the Viacom Youtube blitzkrieg. Makes me wonder, could this DMCA provision be used as a kind of denial of service attack? What if a site or ISP started receiving a ton of random DMCA takedown notices? What if they were from fake or spoofed names and addresses so as not to be traced? This stuff is just insane.
It seems that many (most?) major companies try to stay well away from any chance of getting in trouble (or just being sued for no reason). I noticed in my limited experience with this that it seems to be standard practice now with major companies to not say anything about someone's previous employment with them except for employment dates and title. They'll give employment dates, title and nothing else, at least in the last two or three cases where I checked.
That is true! I was shocked when I drove through the nice parts of Beverly Hills to see the cars parked on a lot of the nice homes' driveways. I saw a LOT of corollas and civics. Go to a wannabe fancy apartment complex and you'll see a lot of BMWs, Lexus, Acura, etc. I guess this is evidence of the ideas of that book "The Millionaire Next Door" at work.
Not necessarily: 9 hours
This device just looks astounding! However, I'm just way to weary of Cingular to try them out. I have heard SO many bad things about Cingular, including that they are one of the worst rated cell providers out there, along with Sprint. Now I'm hearing people here say that you are required to sign up for their insanely priced data plans if you want to get the 2 year contract price on smart phones. I have also heard that it's like pulling teeth to get phone unlock codes from them. I've been very happy with T-Mobile for the last few years and don't plan on changing any time soon. Too bad. No iPhone for me until they start selling unlocked ones for a reasonable price on eBay (probably a few years down the line).
Those are mosquitos that transmit Dengue Fever, which is a tropical disease. They spoofed it as a PSA against mosquitos. Toward the middle of the clip, once they get in the water, they put up title cards saying "Dengue mosquitos reproduce in the water", "Don't leave any standing water around", etc, etc. Pretty funny. At first I was wondering WTF? But once the title cards came on it all made sense - they run actual PSAs there telling people not to leave standing water in their yards (in plant vases, etc) to control the mosquito population.
Sounds like 10Base5 or "Thicknet", which was the original Ethernet cabling spec.
Not really. There are some CFL bulbs with colored outside coatings, but they are usually special use bulbs, like yellow outdoor bulbs that don't attract insects, or different "party" colors. The problem with putting any color coating on a light bulb is that any coating enough to change the color noticeably also reduces the light output of the bulb by quite a bit, making the bulb less efficient, which is one of their main advantages to start with.
From what I have read (don't recall where - wikipedia's CFL entry doesn't seem to go into detail on this), the way that manufacturers get different color tones from their bulbs is by using different combinations of phosphors. Each phosphor apparently emits a small part of the light spectrum, so they put some phosphor for blue, some for green, some for red, etc. I don't know if those are the actual colors. It's just an example I made up, and I don't even know if they have that much range - the phosphors might just be variations of green/blue/yellow. You can imagine this can get pretty complicated/expensive, but I understand that they have made progress in the last few years on the CRI (color rendition index) of the bulbs.
The poster before me has a good point on the problem of the application you have versus durability of the bulb, but if you still want to find the dimmable CFLs you are looking for, here's my suggestion:
Don't bother with the home depot website. It has a very limited selection in this department, compared to their retail stores. Search the web for "bulb" or "light bulbs" (or "lamps" isn't that what you call them in the UK?) to find specialized online light bulb / lamp vendors, like bulb.com or others. Email a few that have what you are looking for to see if they will ship to the UK. If you don't find any US online bulb stores that ship to the UK, see if you find some online stores in Europe (or in the UK itself - search UK sites at google.co.uk or at your favorite UK specific search site) that will ship, or perhaps look at the GE, Philips, and Sylvania/Osram websites to see if they have info on resellers, and perhaps email some of those to see if they can special order the specific models you are looking for. I'm sure that one way or another you will find someone that will ship to you. Good luck!
So true about the whole "crushing the competition" attitude inside Microsoft. I had occasion to visit a Microsoft office in Phoenix, AZ around '93-'94 or so. They had small posters around the office (I saw it in the kitchen) showing a cartoon representation of Internet Explorer literally crushing Netscape Navigator under its feet. The IE figure was standing on top of the NN figure's body which was laid flat. I can understand competitiveness, but I thought that that stuff was a little disturbing. But hey, I figure that's one of the factors in their success: completely ruthless/cutthroat competition, so it must work for them.
Anyway, I think that there is something, actually two things, that could break Microsoft's stranglehold on non-distributed computing. The quick prospect would be if Apple released OS X for generic PC clones. The slow prospect is Linux gaining more foothold in the market and more support from application vendors. Both are only maybes though.
I heard a report on public radio a few months back (either NPR or Marketplace - I don't have time to search through their archives for the link right now), where they said that this same kind of effect is what has stopped any recognizable brands of products to come out of China.
They have all this manufacturing power, but because of weak enforcement of IP laws, as soon as some product starts to stand out, 50 other factories will start making the exact same thing, even using the same packaging and logos (clones, just like in SL), making them undiscernible from the real thing in the eyes of the consumer. Instant dilution of brand power.
It makes sense if you think about it and compare to some other Asian countries - Japan has a ton of well-known brands, Korea has several brands that are starting to establish themselves very well, like Hyundai and Samsung, but there really isn't any established/recognizable Chinese brand of any product. I think the report went on to say that Lenovo is one of the first companies trying to break out of this pattern, but whether they will be successful is yet to be seen.
Interesting. It looks like they might be serious about making the PS3 into a general computing device. It's still a little expensive to really be useful, but maybe in a few years when the price comes down and we find out what kind of performance you can get in general computing tasks (maybe running linux?), it could be cool.
Your post must have caught me at just the right time and in the right mood, because I literally cried from laughter for about two minutes when I read your post. Then I cried and stuttered for another three minutes trying to read it out loud to my wife - you know when you are trying to retell something that is so funny that you keep getting interrupted by your own uncontrollable laughter? I'm embarassed for myself, but I still think this is the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot, based on my reaction... Thanks!
Ah, thank you for the answer and the best description yet of what happened. I looked it up on youtube and found this (audio only though): The Tubes Speech. You're right about it being a halting/rambling/angry speech, with a bunch of technical inaccuracies.
What country have you been in for the last 10 years? Maybe you haven't been following what has been happening in the communications and broadcasting industries in the US lately since the loosening of regulations took place? Just to refresh your memory, the result has been the exact opposite of what you describe: there's been rampant consolidation in both industries - the communications industry is down to 2 or 3 major players (AT&T/SBC, Verizon, and maybeSprint), and the broadcast industry is down to a handfull of major players as well (radio for example, is down to 2 companies that own most of the radio stations in the US, Clearchannel and Infinity), with concrete and drastic results against free speech. So how has deregulation in the communications industry helped competition or anything else other than mega-corporations pockets again?
I consider myself very technologically savvy, have been working in IT for 15 years, 10 of those in networking, and I've honestly never understood why people deride the politician that made the "tubes" analogy so much. Isn't the analogy of tubes or pipes fairly accurate to describe the Internet's physical infrastructure? What's so weird about that? Someone please explain it, I honestly want to know. Thanks in advance.
I was wondering the same thing (which ally?). More details please, grandparent poster. I thought maybe he meant France -> Algeria, although I don't know how long that lasted.
I'm no expert at this, but I've read slashdot enough to know that are a variety of alternatives besides what you listed that would work. Read up on voting methods on wikipedia. The first one that springs to mind is that you could rank your choices, for example, 1st Democrat, 2nd Green, 3rd Republican, 4th Libertarian, etc...
I wondered the same thing as the grandparent post, and guessed at the same conclusions as the parent post. There's a way to do it without giving everyone a free holiday (but really, I think a strong argument could be made for it to be a holiday). Election day could be on a weekend! In Brazil (they just had runoff presidential elections last week), election day is Sunday, although voting is mandatory there, so perhaps it wouldn't work here with voluntary voting...
The parent post was right. The "480p" on the Wii means 720x480 (or maybe 852x480). Not 480 by something else. That's typical of how TV resolutions are referred to - the vertical resolution, not the horizontal.
Just to add to all the other posts above. There's no way that archeologists would ever give up digging. For one, what people write is often far from truthful, complete, accurate, or precise. There are archeologists out there that dig through *current* (let alone 150 year old)landfills and garbage to get accurate data, because of this fact. For example, there's a group that did a study of how much beer the people in a certain community drank regularly: first they asked them to put on paper how much beer they had each week. Then they studied each household's garbage and found that those people drank a lot more beer than they were accounting for.
The other reason for digging is that what people write at one point in time is possibly colored by ignorance, technological limitations, cultural bias, and a variety of other limitations and distortions that a contemporary observer is bound to suffer from. The whole concept is similar in a way to legal trials. Physical evidence always holds a lot more weight than witness accounts. Why? People screw up. A lot.
People seem to forget that this is a SD console, not HD. Isn't it supposed to be twice as powerful as the original XBOX? Why would you need any more power than that for SD games? It's probably going to look incredible on SD TVs.
Too funny. Hope you don't mind if I use that as my signature.
Yes, it seems we do. And I think you are right that guys are close to it, in many ways. I certainly want to visit the area again to get to know it better. I've been to Norway (Bergen), but not to Sweden or Denmark.
Shenan