I can't find a link for the boiling point of chloradine (chloradane, suggests google? I'm having trouble tracking this substance down), but its short name and inclusion of chlorine makes me think it's a relatively light molecule -- 400C is fairly hot. I'd be surprised if it didn't also boil off during roasting.
It is also worth mentioning that the coffee bean is covered by the flesh of the berry, which is discarded during processing, presumably getting rid of most externally applied substances.
I'm not saying your concerns are without merit, but there are probably other, bigger things to worry about when it comes to food. Coffee is probably pretty chemical-free compared to a lot of produce and seafood. And then there's estrogen-mimicking plasticizers in our water, radon, cosmic rays...
caffeine is pretty safe. It can aggravate a number of other conditions (ulcers, hypertension, etc) but its role in causing these conditions isn't clear. A lot of people assume it is -- the same way some people without hypertension avoid sodium. There may be some causality there, but if there is, it's a lot weaker than most people assume.
Interestingly, caffeine also seems to have a neuroprotective effect when it comes to Parkinson's (here's an article even the most java-addled./er should be able to get through).
Also interesting: nicotine has an even stronger neuroprotective effect against Parkinson's. And what's really weird: smokers metabolize caffeine about twice as fast as nonsmokers (nobody's really sure why). Next time your pretentious smoker buddy starts bragging about how much coffee he cranks, you might mention this. He's got a biochemical advantage.
I don't smoke, and I wouldn't advise doing it as part of your health regimen, but nicotine's interations with caffeine are kind of intriguing.
except for mice (and keyboards, if weird ergonomics are your thing). This will make the Tablet PC look like a rousing success -- although I suspect the SPOT watch will be an even bigger flop (note to engineers who grew up w/ Dick Tracy and won't let the "awesome watch" idea die: we have cellphones now. It's time to retire.).
I don't think "video ipods" of any sort will ever take off. It's just too much trouble to collect the media (currently) given its low reusability -- people are much more likely to enjoy listening to a song over and over than they are to enjoy listening to a video over and over. The benefits you get for the cost of such a dedicated device are way too low currently to justify the effort. Sure, this functionality will arrive eventually, but as an afterthought -- the way our phones can now play games because their specs allow it moreso than because the specs were set to allow game playing.
Not to mention the varying power requirements of video vs. audio. Cost will just be too high. I'd say the coming generation of cheap(ish) small factor multi-gigabyte storage will make PDAs a cheaper, more powerful solution for those really desperate for portable, nerd-friendly digital video. Everyone else will just buy a portable DVD player.
unless Claude Shannon's theories (the underpinnings of information theory) turn out to be wrong. Put simply they let you figure out how many bits it takes to represent a piece of data with optimal efficiency.
Of course, other stuff is going on in compressed audio as well -- in fact, most of it is based around psychoacoustic models, to let us know what data we can't actually hear and can therefore throw out. But, while those models can always be improved, it seems pretty clear that we've pared most of the audio waveform down. There are improvements to be made, sure, but they probably will serve mostly to improve fidelity, not compression size.
Maybe I'm just being myopic, but I don't see any more compression breakthroughs coming... at least until someone develops quantum storage (which I won't even pretend to understand).
Rockstar is complicit in this. I'm certainly opposed to censorship (although I do wish game developers exercised better taste), but to pretend that kids don't make up a huge portion of the game market is just sticking your head in the sand. GTA has been advertised *everywhere*, including places it probably shouldn't be: primetime TV, cartoon network, all-ages game publications, etc.
Yeah, I know, they need to sell games, and have every right to. But you can't have it both ways: knowingly making money off of kids who shouldn't be playing your games, then crying foul on parents when those kids get their hands on the game. You can say the rating system needs to be enforced all you please. The fact is that it isn't enforced, probably never will be, and that's how the game companies like it.
Do you really think the presentation of tits, guns and violence in most controversial games is "mature"? This ain't Shakespeare -- it's trash designed to titillate 14 year old boys. Killing prostitutes for health and cash is nothing profound, it's just a cynical transaction: shock value for money.
If a serious videogame needs to use violence, sex or any other debatable storytelling element in order to succeed as a piece of art, then I'm all for it. But for all of our whining about how videogames are art and should be taken seriously, the medium is still clearly aimed at juveniles. Until gaming actually matures I'm not prepared to give outfits like Rockstar a free pass.
"Hey guys, have a good night's sleep, and by the way, the Space Station is slowly depressurizing, and we can't work out why. Oh well, see you in the morning.
asti spumante is just one italian sparkling wine. moscato is another type of italian sparkling white -- lambrusco is a sparkling red. There are probably a number of other varieties of which I'm unaware.
on that note there are other french sparkling wines, too, besides champagne. I don't claim to know much about wine, but it really is a shame that here in the US it's largely marketed as an "elite" drink rather than an everyday accompaniment to food. Being able to get a passable bottle for $3 in Italy is one of the things I remember most fondly about life over there.
crippled MS software -- wmv not being available on apple, MS's option to pull a software product line's mac support if apple ever gets too popular. Getting games written for directX. Proprietary NTFS being the standard format for drives. Pushing custom MSSQL database connectors in all of their development products to increase development costs for other DB platforms.
I don't think any of these are really critical. What's going to be is whatever proprietary DRM scheme Microsoft introduces. If they win that battle, everyone will end up having to use an MS OS to use media on their PC.
Things are fine they way they are for now. Let x86 die the quiet death it deserves.
And Windows with it.
It's a lovely dream -- do you really see any signs that this is happening in the consumer space? The ipod's support for Windows has been a runaway success. Apple should make it possible for MS users to use more of their products. The switch campaign failed. It's too big a leap of faith to ask.
Nobody's saying apple needs to support every winmodem out there. They can just provide some "apple approved!" stickers to the PCI device makers with the biggest marketshare, and support those. Giving consumers choice is a good thing, but you don't have to let them use *everything*. Just stuff they can get at BestBuy, and that you're willing to write drivers for. If the strategy works you can adopt the MS model (hopefully with stricter QC) and let the vendors write the drivers.
The game market is lost for the foreseeable future. But the netapp market is huge -- there's finally an ease of OS use and critical mass of (somewhat) tech-savvy adults that you don't have to be able to play anything more complex than solitaire for people to buy your PC.
marketshare *is* essential. It puts you in control of your own destiny. You don't have to have >50%, just a competitive share.
Interoperability is essential for computing. It's like language: english may not be the most efficient thing we could use on slashdot, but interoperability is the deciding factor.
Given that, if you only have 5 or 10% of the market, you will always be at the big guy's anticompetitive whim as they decide on some new proprietary standard that locks you out. Then you suffer losses for 12 months until the courts tell them to stop.
Apple doesn't have to be bigger than MS, just big enough that MS has to ensure they're products work with apple, the way apple has to be sure their products work with MS.
What does apple do best? Design. It specializes in excellent, intuitive software and superb design on its hardware. What doesn't it do well? Produce PC hardware that is a good value for the money. Okay, I know they subcontract this stuff out, and I anticipate plenty of flames about how fast apple's processors are. I admit this. The G5 is very nice.
I am willing to admit that apple's top offering is generally neck-and-neck with the fastest x86 of the world. This may or may not be technically accurate, but let's concede it. The fact remains that on a flops-per-dollar basis, you're better off buying x86. VaTech aside, you don't build a supercomputer with apples. (Don't expect any sympathy for tech from me -- wahoowa!)
Apple should start buying commodity hardware from the wintel world. Keep building your own cases; write your own driver software to make it bulletproof. Let Panther install on a pentium machine. The only hardware they should make: gadgets (ipod is clearly apple's foot in the door of popular adoption), and, as bad as it is for the consumer, proprietary widgets for their cases. Stuff that lets your ipod do things it couldn't otherwise; or that makes DVD authoring easier. Most of this will be crippleware -- disingenuous measures that enable functionality that everyone *could* have, but that they only give to owners of apple cases.
You can still charge your premium, but it has to be less -- and you can afford to do so, if you start buying from the same guys Dell buys from.
Now is the time to strike. Microsoft has a mature (read: stagnant) OS out that will not be replaced for 12-18 months. The recent rise of malware and spam has extended for a generation the idea that windows is an substantially inferior product, even as their OS offering is actually the most competitive it's ever been. If you can attack it sufficiently to weaken adoption of Longhorn, you will have made a huge gain.
You have a tremendous amount of credibility with your existing fanbase, with *nix geeks since redoing your OS, and with windows users as they discover ipod/iTMS. If you let windows users switch to your OS without buying a new computer, you could actually establish sufficient marketshare to challenge MS for market dominance in the next 5 years.
the data on a different drive thing makes sense for mp3s, movies, documents... but not for much else, at least under windows. The registry makes sure of that.
I only mention this because I've had a lot of problems at work as a result of our server setup guy subscribing to this philosophy. Sure, a 6GB windows partition and a 40 GB data partition for programs sounds nice, but when C fills up you're hosed.
no, not so that your identity could be stolen. So that transactions can't be processed without the presence of the wallet (or wherever) RFID *and* the manually activated keychain RFID. The wallet RFID could be of concern to the tinfoil hat crowd since it could be used for tracking; I'm sure other arrangements could be made for them -- they might just have to flip a switch on the wallet token to signify they're in "shopping mode".
RFIDs cost less than a quarter to make, and are tiny... I could see CC companies sending customers sets of them -- red, yellow, blue, maybe, and you have to have one of each on your person for transactions to work. Stick one in your wallet, another on your keychain, and a third goes in the tongue of your sneakers, under a velcro tab in your underwear waistband -- wherever. This would be considerably more secure than the current signed-slab-of-plastic method. True, "gimme your wallet!" would turn into "gimme all your personal effects!" But I think this is probably a bigger burden on the mugger than the muggee.
And I agree: the cashier *should* have to look at a picture. So why not send one down the wire when the transation is authorized? A device with a tiny LCD screen and a 56k modem would do the job, and certainly be within the financial reach of any business that needs to do CC processing. This would take care of the fake ID problem pretty well.
I agree, technology isn't always the solution. But I think a lot of the./ crowd sees "RFID" and reads it as "evil". There are privacy concerns, to be sure. But this tech has positive applications as well.
RFID is inherently a passive technology. But don't confuse passive with always-on.
Why can't we just put a button on the little RFID dongle you would put on your keychain? Answer: we can. And this is what the CC companies should do. I know, speedpass doesn't implement it. But it would be very, very simple to do and go a long way toward easing my fears about this. I'm envisioning something similar to a Photon light.
Even better, why not pair it with an always-on RFID in your wallet, and only allow transactions when both are present? This'd prevent simple theft by valets, pursesnatchers, etc.
I remember my friend writing a 3 page Star Trek parody "script". He changed the names similarly -- Captain Dirk, Comm Officer Hula Hoopa. We were 8. It wasn't funny then, either.
Star Trek parodies? Come on. This is the lamest thing I've ever seen on slashdot.
Sure, the internet helped position him as the leader of the democratic pack. It won't help him win the general election.
However, I think he's got a legitimate shot, and the reason is how he speaks. He is the first politician of national prominence I've ever seen that speaks in a normal cadence, one that implies he's thinking about the things on which he speaks instead of reciting rehearsed, focus-group-tested banalities.
Now, whether what he says is or isn't a focus-group-tested banality, I can't say. I just know that his delivery is impressive. Clinton is regularly lauded for the way he could make audiences feel he was speaking directly to them. He also had a gift for expressing the nuances of policy positions. If you ask me, Dean leaves him in the dust on these counts.
I remember first seeing him on a taped edition of 'crossfire' in my high school government class in 98. Every one of us came out of that class with a very favorable impression of Dean.
Although of course, when put up against Robert Novak, Satan himself would start looking pretty electable.
does wep encrypt mac addresses too? or can those be sniffed easily w/ wep on?
Personally, I just use MAC filtering. Yeah, you can spoof a MAC address pretty easily on most hardware in windows. But I'm on 802.11b, and WEP definitely slows things down. And it was periodically resetting the connection on my Orinoco card.
Bottom line, consumer wireless gear can't keep out anyone who's determined to get in. I say make a stab at it to disclaim some liability, use decent security on your LAN, and call it a day.
for actions performed with your connection. I suspect a case on this will be decided in the next five years. As it stands now, I suspect you would probably be help responsible for illegal activity performed with your connection. IANAL of course, but it seems doubtful the courts or a jury would understand the finer points of wireless security.
A web server is not the same as a toaster. A new ergonomic grip and translucent color styling does not matter when you're purchasing servers for your company.
Sure, this thing is probably easy to administer than a "real" server. Is it easier to administer than a server hosted by someone else? Obviously not. And the latter solution is likely to be cheaper, able to handle more requests, and connected to a fatter pipe than you could afford for the same money at your hosting facility -- which for companies looking at this hardware, is probably an unventilated closet.
My point is, you can go with ease of use or power. There are easier, cheaper solutions. And this is by no means powerful. It's a worst of both worlds situation.
for development you'd be better off just using any spare PC -- more flexibility, cheaper.
Why would someone use this rather than buying hosting from someone else? Obviously there are advantages to hosting your own site, but I don't think this machine particularly exposes them. Is the idea for momandpop.com to serve their site over their cablemodem or business DSL connection using this thing? They'd be much better off buying their hosting from someone else.
If bigwebdevcompany.com needs a dumb, low-powered web server they'd save a lot of money with a trip to walmart and a set of linux ISOs. I just don't see where this enters the market as a useful tool.
I was gonna say the same thing -- I came in right before zmodem, and I'd always use Ymodem (unless it effed up, then to xmodem...). I think Y let you resume files
Slashdot Mirror
Please. It's a specious argument.
DDT boils at 260C (link)
I can't find a link for the boiling point of chloradine (chloradane, suggests google? I'm having trouble tracking this substance down), but its short name and inclusion of chlorine makes me think it's a relatively light molecule -- 400C is fairly hot. I'd be surprised if it didn't also boil off during roasting.
It is also worth mentioning that the coffee bean is covered by the flesh of the berry, which is discarded during processing, presumably getting rid of most externally applied substances.
I'm not saying your concerns are without merit, but there are probably other, bigger things to worry about when it comes to food. Coffee is probably pretty chemical-free compared to a lot of produce and seafood. And then there's estrogen-mimicking plasticizers in our water, radon, cosmic rays...
and, when combined with booze, it's a treatment for stroke!
Interestingly, caffeine also seems to have a neuroprotective effect when it comes to Parkinson's (here's an article even the most java-addled ./er should be able to get through).
Also interesting: nicotine has an even stronger neuroprotective effect against Parkinson's. And what's really weird: smokers metabolize caffeine about twice as fast as nonsmokers (nobody's really sure why). Next time your pretentious smoker buddy starts bragging about how much coffee he cranks, you might mention this. He's got a biochemical advantage.
I don't smoke, and I wouldn't advise doing it as part of your health regimen, but nicotine's interations with caffeine are kind of intriguing.
I don't think "video ipods" of any sort will ever take off. It's just too much trouble to collect the media (currently) given its low reusability -- people are much more likely to enjoy listening to a song over and over than they are to enjoy listening to a video over and over. The benefits you get for the cost of such a dedicated device are way too low currently to justify the effort. Sure, this functionality will arrive eventually, but as an afterthought -- the way our phones can now play games because their specs allow it moreso than because the specs were set to allow game playing.
Not to mention the varying power requirements of video vs. audio. Cost will just be too high. I'd say the coming generation of cheap(ish) small factor multi-gigabyte storage will make PDAs a cheaper, more powerful solution for those really desperate for portable, nerd-friendly digital video. Everyone else will just buy a portable DVD player.
Of course, other stuff is going on in compressed audio as well -- in fact, most of it is based around psychoacoustic models, to let us know what data we can't actually hear and can therefore throw out. But, while those models can always be improved, it seems pretty clear that we've pared most of the audio waveform down. There are improvements to be made, sure, but they probably will serve mostly to improve fidelity, not compression size.
Maybe I'm just being myopic, but I don't see any more compression breakthroughs coming... at least until someone develops quantum storage (which I won't even pretend to understand).
Yeah, I know, they need to sell games, and have every right to. But you can't have it both ways: knowingly making money off of kids who shouldn't be playing your games, then crying foul on parents when those kids get their hands on the game. You can say the rating system needs to be enforced all you please. The fact is that it isn't enforced, probably never will be, and that's how the game companies like it.
Do you really think the presentation of tits, guns and violence in most controversial games is "mature"? This ain't Shakespeare -- it's trash designed to titillate 14 year old boys. Killing prostitutes for health and cash is nothing profound, it's just a cynical transaction: shock value for money.
If a serious videogame needs to use violence, sex or any other debatable storytelling element in order to succeed as a piece of art, then I'm all for it. But for all of our whining about how videogames are art and should be taken seriously, the medium is still clearly aimed at juveniles. Until gaming actually matures I'm not prepared to give outfits like Rockstar a free pass.
I thought the addition of sugar was always necessary to provide fuel for the secondary fermentation?
on that note there are other french sparkling wines, too, besides champagne. I don't claim to know much about wine, but it really is a shame that here in the US it's largely marketed as an "elite" drink rather than an everyday accompaniment to food. Being able to get a passable bottle for $3 in Italy is one of the things I remember most fondly about life over there.
I'm also kind of dubious about your "3 times as strong" statement. Have you guys figured out a way to boil water at >100C or something?
I don't think any of these are really critical. What's going to be is whatever proprietary DRM scheme Microsoft introduces. If they win that battle, everyone will end up having to use an MS OS to use media on their PC.
Nobody's saying apple needs to support every winmodem out there. They can just provide some "apple approved!" stickers to the PCI device makers with the biggest marketshare, and support those. Giving consumers choice is a good thing, but you don't have to let them use *everything*. Just stuff they can get at BestBuy, and that you're willing to write drivers for. If the strategy works you can adopt the MS model (hopefully with stricter QC) and let the vendors write the drivers.
The game market is lost for the foreseeable future. But the netapp market is huge -- there's finally an ease of OS use and critical mass of (somewhat) tech-savvy adults that you don't have to be able to play anything more complex than solitaire for people to buy your PC.
Interoperability is essential for computing. It's like language: english may not be the most efficient thing we could use on slashdot, but interoperability is the deciding factor.
Given that, if you only have 5 or 10% of the market, you will always be at the big guy's anticompetitive whim as they decide on some new proprietary standard that locks you out. Then you suffer losses for 12 months until the courts tell them to stop.
Apple doesn't have to be bigger than MS, just big enough that MS has to ensure they're products work with apple, the way apple has to be sure their products work with MS.
I am willing to admit that apple's top offering is generally neck-and-neck with the fastest x86 of the world. This may or may not be technically accurate, but let's concede it. The fact remains that on a flops-per-dollar basis, you're better off buying x86. VaTech aside, you don't build a supercomputer with apples. (Don't expect any sympathy for tech from me -- wahoowa!)
Apple should start buying commodity hardware from the wintel world. Keep building your own cases; write your own driver software to make it bulletproof. Let Panther install on a pentium machine. The only hardware they should make: gadgets (ipod is clearly apple's foot in the door of popular adoption), and, as bad as it is for the consumer, proprietary widgets for their cases. Stuff that lets your ipod do things it couldn't otherwise; or that makes DVD authoring easier. Most of this will be crippleware -- disingenuous measures that enable functionality that everyone *could* have, but that they only give to owners of apple cases.
You can still charge your premium, but it has to be less -- and you can afford to do so, if you start buying from the same guys Dell buys from.
Now is the time to strike. Microsoft has a mature (read: stagnant) OS out that will not be replaced for 12-18 months. The recent rise of malware and spam has extended for a generation the idea that windows is an substantially inferior product, even as their OS offering is actually the most competitive it's ever been. If you can attack it sufficiently to weaken adoption of Longhorn, you will have made a huge gain.
You have a tremendous amount of credibility with your existing fanbase, with *nix geeks since redoing your OS, and with windows users as they discover ipod/iTMS. If you let windows users switch to your OS without buying a new computer, you could actually establish sufficient marketshare to challenge MS for market dominance in the next 5 years.
I only mention this because I've had a lot of problems at work as a result of our server setup guy subscribing to this philosophy. Sure, a 6GB windows partition and a 40 GB data partition for programs sounds nice, but when C fills up you're hosed.
RFIDs cost less than a quarter to make, and are tiny... I could see CC companies sending customers sets of them -- red, yellow, blue, maybe, and you have to have one of each on your person for transactions to work. Stick one in your wallet, another on your keychain, and a third goes in the tongue of your sneakers, under a velcro tab in your underwear waistband -- wherever. This would be considerably more secure than the current signed-slab-of-plastic method. True, "gimme your wallet!" would turn into "gimme all your personal effects!" But I think this is probably a bigger burden on the mugger than the muggee.
And I agree: the cashier *should* have to look at a picture. So why not send one down the wire when the transation is authorized? A device with a tiny LCD screen and a 56k modem would do the job, and certainly be within the financial reach of any business that needs to do CC processing. This would take care of the fake ID problem pretty well.
I agree, technology isn't always the solution. But I think a lot of the ./ crowd sees "RFID" and reads it as "evil". There are privacy concerns, to be sure. But this tech has positive applications as well.
Why can't we just put a button on the little RFID dongle you would put on your keychain? Answer: we can. And this is what the CC companies should do. I know, speedpass doesn't implement it. But it would be very, very simple to do and go a long way toward easing my fears about this. I'm envisioning something similar to a Photon light.
Even better, why not pair it with an always-on RFID in your wallet, and only allow transactions when both are present? This'd prevent simple theft by valets, pursesnatchers, etc.
Star Trek parodies? Come on. This is the lamest thing I've ever seen on slashdot.
However, I think he's got a legitimate shot, and the reason is how he speaks. He is the first politician of national prominence I've ever seen that speaks in a normal cadence, one that implies he's thinking about the things on which he speaks instead of reciting rehearsed, focus-group-tested banalities.
Now, whether what he says is or isn't a focus-group-tested banality, I can't say. I just know that his delivery is impressive. Clinton is regularly lauded for the way he could make audiences feel he was speaking directly to them. He also had a gift for expressing the nuances of policy positions. If you ask me, Dean leaves him in the dust on these counts.
I remember first seeing him on a taped edition of 'crossfire' in my high school government class in 98. Every one of us came out of that class with a very favorable impression of Dean.
Although of course, when put up against Robert Novak, Satan himself would start looking pretty electable.
Personally, I just use MAC filtering. Yeah, you can spoof a MAC address pretty easily on most hardware in windows. But I'm on 802.11b, and WEP definitely slows things down. And it was periodically resetting the connection on my Orinoco card.
Bottom line, consumer wireless gear can't keep out anyone who's determined to get in. I say make a stab at it to disclaim some liability, use decent security on your LAN, and call it a day.
for actions performed with your connection. I suspect a case on this will be decided in the next five years. As it stands now, I suspect you would probably be help responsible for illegal activity performed with your connection. IANAL of course, but it seems doubtful the courts or a jury would understand the finer points of wireless security.
A web server is not the same as a toaster. A new ergonomic grip and translucent color styling does not matter when you're purchasing servers for your company.
Sure, this thing is probably easy to administer than a "real" server. Is it easier to administer than a server hosted by someone else? Obviously not. And the latter solution is likely to be cheaper, able to handle more requests, and connected to a fatter pipe than you could afford for the same money at your hosting facility -- which for companies looking at this hardware, is probably an unventilated closet.
My point is, you can go with ease of use or power. There are easier, cheaper solutions. And this is by no means powerful. It's a worst of both worlds situation.
Why would someone use this rather than buying hosting from someone else? Obviously there are advantages to hosting your own site, but I don't think this machine particularly exposes them. Is the idea for momandpop.com to serve their site over their cablemodem or business DSL connection using this thing? They'd be much better off buying their hosting from someone else.
If bigwebdevcompany.com needs a dumb, low-powered web server they'd save a lot of money with a trip to walmart and a set of linux ISOs. I just don't see where this enters the market as a useful tool.
I was gonna say the same thing -- I came in right before zmodem, and I'd always use Ymodem (unless it effed up, then to xmodem...). I think Y let you resume files