No mention of the latest generation ipod shuffle? The one where they figured control buttons would "clutter up" the design, so instead you have to buy special, expensive apple earbuds/headphones that are all cluttered up with inline controls and only cost ten times the cost of normal headphones? So the shuffle plus a pair of "special" headphones costs more than a nano?
I'd buy a shuffle in an instant, if it had volume up / volume down / play-pause buttons on the device.
I know adapter cables are sold, and I guess I could duct tape / hot glue gun the adapter onto the shuffle, to make an almost usable "exercise ipod". But having to pay the "apple tax" and then whip out the duct tape and hot glue gun to make it usable is just going too far.
Note I'm not an apple hater, I enjoy by nano for exercise listening and my ipod touch for PDA and video use, but the shuffle is just a design disaster.
And even many of these metric parts have fun values like "2.54 mm" as standards
Thats not a metric part, thats a 0.100 inch pin spacing expressed metrically.
Thats like reporting the length of the space shuttle in cubits, then using that number to describe it as a "biblical" spacecraft, since it was reported in cubits.
Here's another mystery. Why does the headline link to a story at USATODAY.COM ?
You wanna know whats up with some peculiar internet routing? OK, we get quotes from the guys with hands on the SSH session keyboards right off the NANOG mailing list.
You wanna talk about apple stuff, Woz himself posts here, although all he talks about is his Prius accelerating.
You wanna talk about amateur space exploration, John Carmack himself posts here about his peroxide motors.
You wanna talk about star trek, you get CleverNickName posting, although not since October.
I figure Don Knuth, linus, and RMS probably post here too, although AC.
Here is a very interesting spacecraft story, and we get a hyperlink to USA-freaking-today.com. USA-freaking-today.
Slashdotters you should be ashamed of yourself for slashdot linking to USA-freaking-today, I know theres a genuine NASA console jockey out there whom can post the real goods, AC at least...
It often seems that the closed source crypto marketplace in a binary state, either publicly known as snake oil, or not yet publicly known as snake oil. After being burned a zillion times, it seems its all snake oil.
We seem to operate out of a misplaced Puritan holdback of... 'humans are inherently evil and must be controlled lest they be themselves', which could only equal evil in this mindset... Without an atmosphere of assumed trustworthiness, how can our society thrive and move forward at all? The music industry (and the film industry) are symptomatic of a much bigger problem.
Are you saying society will be corrupted by the music industry?
OK, it would be better if the music industry trusted us, and vice versa I suppose. Now, lets look at the rest of society and find me a trustworthy banker / mortgage broker / real estate agent / used car salesman / new car salesman / executive / anybody in marketing or sales / vehicle mechanic...
I'd say, the music industry is being corrupted by society. If all the "intelligent" or "hard working" jobs are outsourced to other companies, what is left but some combination of illegal / immoral / unethical or living in the margin?
everyone will just keep several extra sets of funny glasses around so when company comes they can
Hard to say if their plan is to profit off the "everyone brings their own $200 sunglasses" model, or the "every house has a stack of paper plates" model.
I could see this as a path to get everyone to upgrade their glasses... baby boomers aren't getting any younger, they probably all wear glasses, and its time for the corps to shear the sheep again?
Finally, a 3D blue-ray player! I keep losing my 2-dimensional player when the wind blows it under the couch. It's impossible to see from the side, since it is infinately thin, so I have to move the couch to be able to see it from the top or bottom. They should have made them 3 dimensional in the first place!
I still have one of those old fashioned "entertainment centers" you know a 2001-movie style monolith of wood with cutouts for various machinery such as my CRT TV. In that scenario, 2D devices stack nicely in the limited space available as if a stack of paper.
There is only one party, the big corporation party. Slightly different marketing messages. Occasionally some rabble rousing about unimportant stuff like flag burning, just to keep the desperate illusion of difference alive...
So let me ask you, what is your specific beef with it?
The folks whom control the media have been demonizing the results of Germany passing enabling legislation for at least five decades. Then we turn around and pass our own enabling legislation, and expect some 1984 style "forgetting" about decades of propaganda. Human nature just doesn't work that way. Give us a couple decades of scaremongering TV and we'll be crying for more chains, but its going to take time, be patient, we'll get there.
Well, all those absolutes. Companies are not like college students with an empty wallet. The world wide marketing budget and world wide travel budget for all corporations has not declined to zero.
If trade shows were the most useful way to spend the marketing budget, and were also the most useful way to spend the R&D / purchasing budget, people on both sides would participate. But they're obsolete and replaced by websites, suprbowel commercials, facebook pages, spam, whatever 2.0, because those give more bang for the buck.
The modern trade show is a way to get journalists to write complimentary copy, although its cheaper to pay them directly via cash or "free" samples. On the purchasing side trade shows are kind of like a company paid for staff party or team building off site exercise, its just for fun no decisions are made. A long way from the dark ages when contacts were made and real business was transacted at trade shows... Trade shows are a dying tradition, like newspapers, or "real TV news reporting" (as opposed to infotainment), or magazines...
Basically, you learn two skills, star hopping from beta cep to tau cep, and then you compare the brightness of tau cep with its neighbors which have fixed, known magnitudes to estimate tau cep magnitude today.
Well that...or the largest economic decline in several generations. But let's go with websites.
Eh, its trendy to be all depression-centric, but trade shows have been dying for a decade or more. COMDEX croaked in 2003, right in the early years of the credit/housing bubble.
But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"
I've found the largest reason for the decline is internet websites.
In ye olden days, if you wanted to learn about a new product, you had to go to a trade show, and get the hard sell from the salespeople. Now a days everything you'd ever want to know is in a downloadable PDF or on the website. If I want the hard sell, they've got sales phone numbers on the website.
I also had a model 100. Its important to note that the FOUR AA batteries literally lasted weeks. Perhaps 50 hours of continuous use? I know I went thru a set of batteries every month or so. Also the ancient static ram drew enough current in sleep mode to drain the batteries in about one year.
This thing drains its EIGHT AA batteries in the traditional laptop 3 hours or whatever. Lame.
My palmIII ran for weeks on two AAA, my ipod touch runs about one day per charge.
Instead of popping up a "your battery might be about to fail", give us a gas gauge. "Your battery has only [====> 40% ---] of original capacity". Show that for *all* batteries.
A car analogy? On slashdot? Unpossible. Anyways:
Well, more like the accelerator pedal is sticking, and corporate HQ says there's no problem here please move along, and eventually too many pedals are sticking, and then the govt (whom owns their main competitor) starts squawking, then everyone whom was playing World of Warcraft while driving and had an accident gets the bright idea of blaming the gas pedal instead, next thing you know...
Two completely different OS's both suffering from the same style of issue in their newest product.
The problem is as old as laptops themselves. Look at all the entertainment linux laptop users have had for decades now.
Here is the problem:
1) Laptop mfgr only make the ACPI stuff work just barely well enough on a good day to sometimes work on the version of windows the laptop shipped with.
2) Laptop mfgr has no motivation to patch, if anything they'd tell you to buy a new one.
3) Even for vertically integrated companies (Apple) its entirely possible they don't have a stable of every combination of hardware and BIOS/EFI/firmware they've ever sold. And/or testing accidentally skipped the wrong one.
Its odd how generally speaking, no one screws up the keyboard port, which on PCs is a hideously complicated synchronous serial microcontroller based thingy with A20 gates and such and even worse its often done in emulation and converted over USB, but generally speaking, almost everyone screws up battery monitoring, which need be little more than a single port A/D converter.
2) for the cost of something like the Iraq war, we could have provided health coverage for the entire country for like 15 years.
Therein lies the problem with the American sicknesscare system. As long as anyone in the system makes money off it, once they know you're willing to pay "one Iraq war per 15 year" they'll simply extort "two Iraq wars per 15 years" and they'll get it too, because no one wants to die.
Look at the education bubble. The more money the govt provides for education, the higher the price charged. Anywhere the govt kicks in money, the prices will rise.
The immune system will, given time, almost always come up with antibodies and mount a response; but some conditions will kill you good and hard before you have time to mount that response.
Occasionally overreacts and kills you by fever, also occasionally gets the peculiar idea that wheat, soy, milk protein is an enemy invader and attacks your stomach wall, like my son (whom is perfectly healthy if he avoids those foods, projectile vomiting otherwise) Even worse is when it gets the idea your own innards are the enemy... I dated a girl in the very early 90s whos mother had Lupus and thats how she described Lupus, since theres some genetic component, they're probably both dead by now, don't know.
So, its not as simple as feed the T-cells the equivalent of a monster energy drink, and explains the interest in proper engineering of a specific response.
I'll stick with a doctor who isn't an agent of the government, thanks.
Hmm. No public schools, no govt scholarships, doesn't take medicare patients, no medical license, no business license, doesn't cooperate with the CDC,... That leaves us with what, one master herbalist in Berkley?
I guess when they have dual CPU notebooks with full size keyboards and 21" displays, I might be more interested in them. But I'd also want solid state hard drives and hdmi cables to wire them to the TV...
But... But... But... Marketing told me you guys wanted postage stamp size touch sensitive screens, batteries that last two hours, and 3 second e-ink refresh rates. And its gotta use a cloud, whatever that is. And an app store, gotta have an app store. I guess you must be wrong.
No. Consider a strongbox. The best strongboxes, or safes are rated to withstand X minutes of attacking with Y Tools, with the idea being that within those X minutes, the security guards or the police will have responded and arrested the guy patiently drilling holes in the wall. Even though safes have been successfully manipulated, drilled, pried, lanced, or detonated, manufacturers still design strongboxes to thwart burglars, changing locks, adding glass discs, experimenting with new alloys, new shapes, and so on. Inevitably, some thieves will figure out a way to thwart these safeguards, and design begins anew.
That design pattern only works, if, once out of a zillion tries, the safe opens and the contents are essentially replicated instantly to everyone on the internet.
Here is the slashdot car analogy. Its my car with my car door lock, and I'll do what I want with my precious unique angel of a car. One in a billion people cracks the lock, and suddenly the entire world has a perfect digital copy of my precious "unique" car. And they'll do whatever they please with their copy of "my" car. Ooops.
It was an X program. That is the entire point of and X program. It is too push technology.
I think the problem is the X-33 didn't fit the X program very well. The X-15 had an equation, every pound of vehicle weight means X lower top speed and/or X lower altitude. With the X-33 orbiter, its orbit or don't orbit. I think it would have been a PR disaster if it didn't quite make it. Thus either it'll suck, or they'll push the limit too far and blow it up and that'll suck. Perhaps they beat the vegas odds and get everything to work perfectly, in which case it'll suck when people ask why spend all that cash when multistage disposable boosters are a much cheaper program. Kind of a no-win situation.
No one remembers the X-3 very fondly, although it was an interesting aircraft and provided valuable results.
Slashdot Mirror
No mention of the latest generation ipod shuffle? The one where they figured control buttons would "clutter up" the design, so instead you have to buy special, expensive apple earbuds/headphones that are all cluttered up with inline controls and only cost ten times the cost of normal headphones? So the shuffle plus a pair of "special" headphones costs more than a nano?
I'd buy a shuffle in an instant, if it had volume up / volume down / play-pause buttons on the device.
I know adapter cables are sold, and I guess I could duct tape / hot glue gun the adapter onto the shuffle, to make an almost usable "exercise ipod". But having to pay the "apple tax" and then whip out the duct tape and hot glue gun to make it usable is just going too far.
Note I'm not an apple hater, I enjoy by nano for exercise listening and my ipod touch for PDA and video use, but the shuffle is just a design disaster.
And even many of these metric parts have fun values like "2.54 mm" as standards
Thats not a metric part, thats a 0.100 inch pin spacing expressed metrically.
Thats like reporting the length of the space shuttle in cubits, then using that number to describe it as a "biblical" spacecraft, since it was reported in cubits.
Not to mention movies like "the Green Kilometer" - doesn't have the same ring to it.
I can see my ipod now, "Aerosmith" "Toys in the Attic" "Big 25.4 Centimeter Record"
Here's another mystery. Why does the headline link to a story at USATODAY.COM ?
You wanna know whats up with some peculiar internet routing? OK, we get quotes from the guys with hands on the SSH session keyboards right off the NANOG mailing list.
You wanna talk about apple stuff, Woz himself posts here, although all he talks about is his Prius accelerating.
You wanna talk about amateur space exploration, John Carmack himself posts here about his peroxide motors.
You wanna talk about star trek, you get CleverNickName posting, although not since October.
I figure Don Knuth, linus, and RMS probably post here too, although AC.
Here is a very interesting spacecraft story, and we get a hyperlink to USA-freaking-today.com. USA-freaking-today.
Slashdotters you should be ashamed of yourself for slashdot linking to USA-freaking-today, I know theres a genuine NASA console jockey out there whom can post the real goods, AC at least...
[citation needed]
The six year archive of schneier's blog?
http://www.schneier.com/
It often seems that the closed source crypto marketplace in a binary state, either publicly known as snake oil, or not yet publicly known as snake oil. After being burned a zillion times, it seems its all snake oil.
We seem to operate out of a misplaced Puritan holdback of ... 'humans are inherently evil and must be controlled lest they be themselves', which could only equal evil in this mindset ... Without an atmosphere of assumed trustworthiness, how can our society thrive and move forward at all? The music industry (and the film industry) are symptomatic of a much bigger problem.
Are you saying society will be corrupted by the music industry?
OK, it would be better if the music industry trusted us, and vice versa I suppose. Now, lets look at the rest of society and find me a trustworthy banker / mortgage broker / real estate agent / used car salesman / new car salesman / executive / anybody in marketing or sales / vehicle mechanic ...
I'd say, the music industry is being corrupted by society. If all the "intelligent" or "hard working" jobs are outsourced to other companies, what is left but some combination of illegal / immoral / unethical or living in the margin?
What is a "fixture list"?
Its more or less the thing that EA updates in its video games each year to get sports fans to pay another $50+
It sounds like a list of hardware used to hold the ball or the sinks and toilets in the mens room (WC).
Unlike a fixture list, that could actual add real value, if you're trying to replace a specific broken part with a compatible aftermarket part.
Sorry, I'm not British.
And for everyone else, there's google.
everyone will just keep several extra sets of funny glasses around so when company comes they can
Hard to say if their plan is to profit off the "everyone brings their own $200 sunglasses" model, or the "every house has a stack of paper plates" model.
I could see this as a path to get everyone to upgrade their glasses... baby boomers aren't getting any younger, they probably all wear glasses, and its time for the corps to shear the sheep again?
Finally, a 3D blue-ray player! I keep losing my 2-dimensional player when the wind blows it under the couch. It's impossible to see from the side, since it is infinately thin, so I have to move the couch to be able to see it from the top or bottom. They should have made them 3 dimensional in the first place!
I still have one of those old fashioned "entertainment centers" you know a 2001-movie style monolith of wood with cutouts for various machinery such as my CRT TV. In that scenario, 2D devices stack nicely in the limited space available as if a stack of paper.
they forget both parties voted for it repeatedly,
There is only one party, the big corporation party. Slightly different marketing messages. Occasionally some rabble rousing about unimportant stuff like flag burning, just to keep the desperate illusion of difference alive...
So let me ask you, what is your specific beef with it?
The folks whom control the media have been demonizing the results of Germany passing enabling legislation for at least five decades. Then we turn around and pass our own enabling legislation, and expect some 1984 style "forgetting" about decades of propaganda. Human nature just doesn't work that way. Give us a couple decades of scaremongering TV and we'll be crying for more chains, but its going to take time, be patient, we'll get there.
ran out of money per se
can afford to go.
Well, all those absolutes. Companies are not like college students with an empty wallet. The world wide marketing budget and world wide travel budget for all corporations has not declined to zero.
If trade shows were the most useful way to spend the marketing budget, and were also the most useful way to spend the R&D / purchasing budget, people on both sides would participate. But they're obsolete and replaced by websites, suprbowel commercials, facebook pages, spam, whatever 2.0, because those give more bang for the buck.
The modern trade show is a way to get journalists to write complimentary copy, although its cheaper to pay them directly via cash or "free" samples. On the purchasing side trade shows are kind of like a company paid for staff party or team building off site exercise, its just for fun no decisions are made. A long way from the dark ages when contacts were made and real business was transacted at trade shows... Trade shows are a dying tradition, like newspapers, or "real TV news reporting" (as opposed to infotainment), or magazines...
I know its not a one night job, but maybe some visual observations of variables for extra credit thru the entire year?
Yeah it is a bit late to start now:
You'll be spending alot of time at the AAVSO website, may as well start here:
http://www.aavso.org/publications/manual/
Basically, you learn two skills, star hopping from beta cep to tau cep, and then you compare the brightness of tau cep with its neighbors which have fixed, known magnitudes to estimate tau cep magnitude today.
http://www.aavso.org/images/starhopping.gif
It has the virtue of being free, if nothing else.
Well that...or the largest economic decline in several generations. But let's go with websites.
Eh, its trendy to be all depression-centric, but trade shows have been dying for a decade or more. COMDEX croaked in 2003, right in the early years of the credit/housing bubble.
But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"
I've found the largest reason for the decline is internet websites.
In ye olden days, if you wanted to learn about a new product, you had to go to a trade show, and get the hard sell from the salespeople. Now a days everything you'd ever want to know is in a downloadable PDF or on the website. If I want the hard sell, they've got sales phone numbers on the website.
I also had a model 100. Its important to note that the FOUR AA batteries literally lasted weeks. Perhaps 50 hours of continuous use? I know I went thru a set of batteries every month or so. Also the ancient static ram drew enough current in sleep mode to drain the batteries in about one year.
This thing drains its EIGHT AA batteries in the traditional laptop 3 hours or whatever. Lame.
My palmIII ran for weeks on two AAA, my ipod touch runs about one day per charge.
Instead of popping up a "your battery might be about to fail", give us a gas gauge. "Your battery has only [====> 40% ---] of original capacity". Show that for *all* batteries.
A car analogy? On slashdot? Unpossible. Anyways:
Well, more like the accelerator pedal is sticking, and corporate HQ says there's no problem here please move along, and eventually too many pedals are sticking, and then the govt (whom owns their main competitor) starts squawking, then everyone whom was playing World of Warcraft while driving and had an accident gets the bright idea of blaming the gas pedal instead, next thing you know...
Two completely different OS's both suffering from the same style of issue in their newest product.
The problem is as old as laptops themselves. Look at all the entertainment linux laptop users have had for decades now.
Here is the problem:
1) Laptop mfgr only make the ACPI stuff work just barely well enough on a good day to sometimes work on the version of windows the laptop shipped with.
2) Laptop mfgr has no motivation to patch, if anything they'd tell you to buy a new one.
3) Even for vertically integrated companies (Apple) its entirely possible they don't have a stable of every combination of hardware and BIOS/EFI/firmware they've ever sold. And/or testing accidentally skipped the wrong one.
Its odd how generally speaking, no one screws up the keyboard port, which on PCs is a hideously complicated synchronous serial microcontroller based thingy with A20 gates and such and even worse its often done in emulation and converted over USB, but generally speaking, almost everyone screws up battery monitoring, which need be little more than a single port A/D converter.
2) for the cost of something like the Iraq war, we could have provided health coverage for the entire country for like 15 years.
Therein lies the problem with the American sicknesscare system. As long as anyone in the system makes money off it, once they know you're willing to pay "one Iraq war per 15 year" they'll simply extort "two Iraq wars per 15 years" and they'll get it too, because no one wants to die.
Look at the education bubble. The more money the govt provides for education, the higher the price charged. Anywhere the govt kicks in money, the prices will rise.
The immune system will, given time, almost always come up with antibodies and mount a response; but some conditions will kill you good and hard before you have time to mount that response.
Occasionally overreacts and kills you by fever, also occasionally gets the peculiar idea that wheat, soy, milk protein is an enemy invader and attacks your stomach wall, like my son (whom is perfectly healthy if he avoids those foods, projectile vomiting otherwise) Even worse is when it gets the idea your own innards are the enemy... I dated a girl in the very early 90s whos mother had Lupus and thats how she described Lupus, since theres some genetic component, they're probably both dead by now, don't know.
So, its not as simple as feed the T-cells the equivalent of a monster energy drink, and explains the interest in proper engineering of a specific response.
I'll stick with a doctor who isn't an agent of the government, thanks.
Hmm. No public schools, no govt scholarships, doesn't take medicare patients, no medical license, no business license, doesn't cooperate with the CDC, ... That leaves us with what, one master herbalist in Berkley?
I'm a little bit afraid of the person who thought Bioshock was "believable".
In a genre that gave us Prey, Halflife, and Doom, Bioshock was not too bad...
Wow, a huge three years between games.
You guys never played Zelda, Metroid, Diablo or StarCraft, have you?
civilization, simcity ...
I guess when they have dual CPU notebooks with full size keyboards and 21" displays, I might be more interested in them. But I'd also want solid state hard drives and hdmi cables to wire them to the TV...
But... But ... But ... Marketing told me you guys wanted postage stamp size touch sensitive screens, batteries that last two hours, and 3 second e-ink refresh rates. And its gotta use a cloud, whatever that is. And an app store, gotta have an app store. I guess you must be wrong.
No. Consider a strongbox. The best strongboxes, or safes are rated to withstand X minutes of attacking with Y Tools, with the idea being that within those X minutes, the security guards or the police will have responded and arrested the guy patiently drilling holes in the wall. Even though safes have been successfully manipulated, drilled, pried, lanced, or detonated, manufacturers still design strongboxes to thwart burglars, changing locks, adding glass discs, experimenting with new alloys, new shapes, and so on. Inevitably, some thieves will figure out a way to thwart these safeguards, and design begins anew.
That design pattern only works, if, once out of a zillion tries, the safe opens and the contents are essentially replicated instantly to everyone on the internet.
Here is the slashdot car analogy. Its my car with my car door lock, and I'll do what I want with my precious unique angel of a car. One in a billion people cracks the lock, and suddenly the entire world has a perfect digital copy of my precious "unique" car. And they'll do whatever they please with their copy of "my" car. Ooops.
It was an X program. That is the entire point of and X program. It is too push technology.
I think the problem is the X-33 didn't fit the X program very well. The X-15 had an equation, every pound of vehicle weight means X lower top speed and/or X lower altitude. With the X-33 orbiter, its orbit or don't orbit. I think it would have been a PR disaster if it didn't quite make it. Thus either it'll suck, or they'll push the limit too far and blow it up and that'll suck. Perhaps they beat the vegas odds and get everything to work perfectly, in which case it'll suck when people ask why spend all that cash when multistage disposable boosters are a much cheaper program. Kind of a no-win situation.
No one remembers the X-3 very fondly, although it was an interesting aircraft and provided valuable results.