because of the nature of the back-end service, they didn't just need a UNIQUE serial number, but also an UNPREDICTABLE serial number
Looks like the device also has a username... A pity they didn't concatenate the username with the MAC and then MD5 hash it. That would be quite unpredictable, although there is no longer a guarantee of uniqueness (although collisions would be 'kind of rare')
Given how rudimentary and just plain awful Kodak's interface was for their WiFi picture frames from 2 years ago when I bought a few for the family to share the same albums with each other across the nation, this story doesn't surprise me in the least.
I've noticed that problem is nearly universal across the entire pic frame marketplace. I swear the manufacturers are trying to kill the marketplace by intentionally making frame with horrific UIs.
Why can't I buy a frame that simply displays a.RSS on the internet? Not a monthly pay service. Not some 3rd party that'll probably be out of business before the batteries die. Not some special format only. Just freaking show me the pix. And please no BS about processing power as everyone knows a 8 MHz XT in the 80s was good enough to view Pr0n so don't give me some BS that a dedicated 100 MHz process "could never possibly display a picture without preprocessing".
Why can't I buy a frame that simply displays a URL? Heres the webcam IMG tag, now download it every 60 minutes and leave me alone? Again no stupid third party subscription BS please?
Why can't I buy a frame that simply watches for a specific browsable SMB share and directory, and every time it appears on the network, sync to the local copy, plus sync every 15 minutes thereafter?
All I can find to purchase is either flash card only, or if its networked its absolute junk garbage.
Unless some manufacturer will build one that doesn't suck (and I got a pocket full of cash I'm willing to spend), I'm going to have to wall mount a plain ole LCD monitor, get one of those "video over Cat-5 balun thingys" and run a low power PC in my basement. I swear I'm gonna do it this year (is that the geekiest 2010 new years resolution ever?)
The probability of one or two really nice racy pictures in there will no doubt motivate someone to search the space eventually though.
Just remember, goatse works both ways....
Buy a frame for $50, upload goatse to it, for gods sake put the frame face down on the desk with a post it ordering everyone to not look at it, if not outright duct taping it, and you can goatse a "frame-scanner" or whatever you want to call them...
As a side issue, Kodak probably knows what MACs they've sold (or do they?) so they could put up a VERY special page for framescanners of MACs that have never been manufactured. Two girls one frame, or something.
If you see it, you can kill it, with RPGs or whatever, so hovering in the air merely increases the range from which it can be struck.
Then there are no current levitation systems that don't involve massive airflow, making a huge dust cloud (also ingesting all kinds of junk into the engines)
Then they mention "asymmetric threats" because everyone knows that guarantees grant money, but in my opinion using a levitating APC or whatever in the middle east would be fairly suicidal...
Is TigerDirect that good? I would trust Newegg with my newborn (if I had one), but I always got a shady vibe from TigerDirect...
I've never had a problem in years and years of ordering, probably at least five figures total of "stuff" from them.
Three things to note:
1) They have (or had) "special rules" for certain products like CPUs, memory, maybe others, and the rules vary over time. You don't like the rules, don't buy anyway, then complain you don't like the rules. The "special rules" all seem to vaguely revolve around improper cooling experiments and/or overclocking related misadventures.
2) They sell stuff, as opposed to being a service company. If you buy from a local PC integrator, its expected they'll sell you the correct thing and get it working and overall make it right, because they're a service company that happens to sell hardware. Tiger sells boxes that happen to contain hardware, much like mouser.com yet assembled, so if you buy incompatible hardware (an AMD CPU and an intel MB or some crazy combo) they'll just simply trust you and ship it and give you a moderately hard time if you try to return stuff. Another interesting maneuver is devices that may or may not work with your OS, which would have been pretty easy to check with a ten second google search before ordering. Similarly, they currently, or in the past, sold used/reconditioned PCs, VERY prominently marked as such, but you'll still see fools complaining "they shipped me a used PC" and so forth. They send you exactly what you order, each and every time, even if you're drunk and order something stupid.
3) Shipping dates all over the map. Some stuff they drop ship from around the country and you'll get it tomorrow morning, no kidding. Some weird stuff is shipped apparently on a slow boat from China. Generally the newer it is, the faster you get it. The good news is they have many warehouses, so you could get stuff extremely quickly. The bad news is they have many warehouses, so depending on the pony express, it could take awhile. Everything online is simply marked as "in-stock" of course, which is technically true...
Overall, I enjoy buying from them about as much as it sounds like you enjoy buying from the 'egg.
This being slashdot, that information should be in the header with all the other stuff I listed. I shouldn't have to go to the publishers website to find it out if it is "all rights reserved" or CC or what ever.
Fair enough. In most technical book reviews I complain that slashdot reviews should explain why I'd want to buy the book, if its just a slightly edited collection of last years google search results and some man pages from the old version, or what makes it better than that. Obviously not a problem with this book, but usually is a problem with the technical books.
The slashdot book review guidelines need some modernization...
1. I could see a lot of overlap in those categories.
Yeah lots of overlap, but the best way to separate them would be to contrast two of Richard Feynman's classics. The "lectures on physics" is a very technical physics class, theoretically for all college freshmen, at least back in the old days when they were smarter, on average. On the other hand, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" was freaking hilarious general read, that also got into some technical topics about the Challenger disaster as kind of a side story, but it was mostly about him getting involved in humorous adventures, and I do not believe it contained a single equation.
Overall, it sounds like another book on how to live your life and be happy. Its a pretty big market.
Yeah, but all his PR seems to emphasize how successful he is in the business world, as opposed to how happy he is. I suppose there's always the "do as I say, not as I do"...
I'd like to know where an author stands in the copyright debate, and this can be demonstrated by how they license the content they produce.
If we are to shun musicians who cling to the RIAA, shouldn't we at least grumble at authors who cling to the old school book publishing establishment (I'm not even sure if there is a similar organization in book publishing) ?
You didn't try very hard... I checked out the publishers web page, and oddly enough its about six pages and they only seem to publish three books. On the good side, they have a free preview online book reader thing, bad side its in flash (why not just text). On the bad side, about the third page or so of the free ebook preview is the usual dead tree title page "all rights reserved" legalese, so its not CC. Odd that a "software dude" would go all closed source. Also their six page website has a ridiculously serious terms and conditions page, roughly as long as the review, as one of their six pages.
So, they don't have as modern of an outlook or technologically advanced as Baen Books, on the other hand, they don't seem to be "old school" obsolete by any means. Like most things in reality, not all black or all white, and in this particular company seems to be somewhat better than average, with some remaining areas for improvement. I'd give them about a grade of "B-", mostly for effort.
1) Is it a "business" book written using technical terms, or a "technical" book trying to sell into the business (or philosophical textbook?) arena? What is the educational level of the text? Whom is the books audience?
2) How can a book with trousers in the title not result in any comments about hot grits for several minutes after posting?
Every one of these devices, from the smart phone up to the monster desktop, is able to do it all....
... very poorly. In fact, just barely well enough to not get class action lawsuits, usually, which is not exactly glowing praise.
Possibly the lowest res worst quality digital cameras ever made on cellphones, complete with greasy lenses dusty sensors and dim slow sensitivity. Viewing the web thru a screen the size of a postage stamp, even webtv was better. Non-apple music player user interfaces that make you wish for the good old days of the 1997 Diamond Rio, but thankfully the phone battery will die in an hour or two so you won't have to suffer long. GPS navigators that work great on any trip shorter than two hours (after which the device overheats and/or the battery dies). Games released for phones in 2009 that would make a Vic-20 user cringe at the poor graphics. Email reader with all the features of "elm" from 1991, albeit with a nice slow GUI.
Or you can get something like an iphone, which does most of that, sort of well, but costs about $3000 over about two years, some upfront, plus hefty monthly fees, soon bandwidth charges will make that even higher if you make the mistake of actually using it.
If over a hundred bucks a month won't do it, I guess a perfect machine would cost at least two or three hundred a month. I can get a nice car for that.
I also don't entirely understand why one would buy a proprietary license for a GPL product?
Read the GPL. It specifically prevents a variety of antisocial activities like not releasing the source code, not releasing it as a part of a non GPL program, etc.
If you can buy the same code under another license that basically has no obligations other than "send us the money", then you have... no obligations, which can be convenient primarily for anti-social folks. Dual licensing is basically the equivalent of the catholic church selling indulgences, its OK to sin, if you send us some cold hard cash.
I read the whole long forking article. Am I paraphrasing and summarizing it correctly: a GPL mysql would never survive without the technical contributions from the dual licensed customers, because the dual licensed customers payed money to buy a commercial license that does not be require them to make technical contributions? It read like a bunch of nonsense without logical arguments but including lots of FUD.
Guaranteed, they won't increase real security, but they will increase security theatre.
Stuff that's very public, annoying, and utterly ineffective, like background and credit score checks as part of Cisco CCNA certification, maybe an official scarey looking badge or uniform for internet security personnel, maybe some very public raids against random citizens, etc.
Heres a thought... Americans used to be "citizens". Now we're merely "consumers". Maybe with the new internet we'll get a new name like "surfers".
I pay them every month based on metered gallons used.
I must be a moron to be paying these guys who put the plumbing in every month.
Now, are you paying them for the plumbing or the gallons, make up your mind?
Where I live, the plumbing is free, so they can profit off the bulk material commodity gallons that flow thru the pipes.
I have a yard where I can dig a hole and shit!
You should pay your landscaper every time you look out the window and admire the lawn. He deserves a permanent reoccurring revenue stream, for work done in the past, just like everyone else. At least have the landscaper remove the poison ivy and thistles first before you take a dump.
By the way, back when I was in high school, I may have bagged your groceries one time, and it seems I have not received my 2009 yearly payment from you for that performance... You wouldn't be a pirate now, would you? Perhaps if I release the "directors cut"?
I must be way ahead of the curve because I already have a device that can stream netflix, run boxee, xbmc, act as a media server, etc. It's called a computer. You can get one for very little money these days, even with hdmi output for use as a htpc. They do a lot of cool stuff!
Yeah I have one of those too. And setting up mythtv on it was frankly pretty trivial, I believe every person in the entire world whom ever had a problem with mythtv, all five of them, post their issues with religious fervor to each myth-related slashdot story. The only problem I had with my nice mythtv front ends, fanless small case, IR keyboard/mouse (program a universal learning remote control to act as the keyboard), and a fancy enough combination of graphics card and scan converter, cost something like $800 total several years ago. I "bought in" at that point because the price for a FE had finally dropped below one grand.
I guess the the things in the article run about $130. If only I could use them as mythtv frontends...
"We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression--as with a book or song--and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it's accessed."
I should pay my plumber every time I flush, forever. And, I should pay some carpenter every time I go up or down "their" stairs. Its not fair that they don't have a perpetual revenue stream from work they did in the past.
The U.S. was still unquestionably the world superpower through the 1990s at least, but the spurt of building tall buildings stopped by the mid-1970s, since they weren't particularly economical
Its simpler than that. Virtually all American cities are dying due to gross government mismanagement. All the job growth is in the suburbs. "downtown" is where companies/people go to die/downsize. Virtually all people with education and skills want to live in the suburbs for VERY obvious reasons, primarily because of the other people whom live in the burbs and the other people whom live in the cities. So, why would the executives want a long horrible commute?
If all the job growth is in the suburbs, and all the downsizing is downtown, why build new skyscrapers downtown? It's hard to justify a new tower if the neighborhood is 25% unoccupied. That is why my "hometown" hasn't had anything over ten stories built in at least a decade, but the burbs are/were utterly swarming with construction crews. Anything to get away from city government, anything...
It doesn't matter if you can find an anecdote or an isolated counterexample, once a large enough fraction of the market moves to the burbs, the downtown market starts a permanent decline, and that is a bad time to build more excess capacity.
What is this going to change? I guess it would be easier to update the designs because you don't have the 2-D crosspath issue anymore. And you should also have shorter distances between components. Is there anything else significant?
Without the limitations of 2-D interconnects, you could:
build barrel rollers / barrel shifters in the shape of a barrel...
Currently, using 2-D techniques, you can easily build on-die flat arrays of parallel processors. With 3-D, I guess you could build on-die 3-D arrays of parallel processors. Still out of luck for hypercube (4-D) architecture, although wiring might be somewhat simpler..
How do stacked circuits do a better job of dissipating heat than a flatter circuit that can dump heat to a heatsink on at least one side?
The article didn't mention any heatsink limitations, or at least firefox didn't find that word. Some weird fractal shaped device with a bunch of sides? Of course the minimum volume design would be a sphere, which has minimum surface area per volume, kind of counterproductive.
My guess is going 3-d allows the heat generation of the whole die to approach the max... Rather than having regions that run hot and regions that run cold, with the limit of the whole device being the hottest little part, you could spread the hot parts around the die, in theory maybe every little portion of the die could dump exactly the same amount of heat, for a given workload anyway...
"It is impossible however to overdose on nicotine through smoking alone (though a person can overdose on nicotine through a combination of nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and/or tobacco smoking at the same time)."
You might want to lok into dosages of pharmaceuticals. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors can have a dosage between 5mg - 150mg. a day.
It's the dose that makes the poison.
Well, yes, there are industrially refined and manufactured materials that have an effect in that dosage over half a decade, because livers and kidneys haven't had enough time to evolve to deal with that kind of stuff. If, 10000 years ago, someone licked a rock or whatever and consumed 150 mg of "something", could it have had an effect?
Now a natural, raw, plant based, serotonin reuptake inhibitor that only weighed 150mg in raw form, that would be interesting.
I thought about it more over lunch and rephrased, what I'm getting at is:
really small effective dose of something bad like poison, dead before the liver and kidneys even have a chance.
really huge dose of something bad like too much carbs or too much red meat or too much booze, just too much for liver and kidneys to realistically process, and/or they die trying.
That middle-ground, your innards have a fighting chance at saving you, and thru evolution, they seem to be pretty good at it. And that filtration that saves you from bad stuff, probably filters out similar dosages of good stuff.
Then combine that with the duration effect. Anything required that you don't take for six years, you'll probably be dead, with the possible exception of calcium. Anything bad for you that you take for six years, you'll probably be dead.
Combine the two effects and I'd be very surprised to find something in the mg range that you can take for half a decade that would have much positive or negative result.
average of six years. Half of the participants took two 120-milligram capsules of ginkgo a day
No surprise because of the dosage... a peculiarity of human metabolism that theres very few (no?) raw materials you can consume at that level for years that has any effect other than life or death.
There are vitamins and minerals that have some effect at those dosages... again, generally speaking, after six years the effect is either life or death.
Everything else has no effect. 120 mg of red meat, no effect. Now, 4 Kg of grilled red meat every day, that'll have an effect on blood chemistry after six years. But not 120 mg.
Although caffeine would have some effect for the first month or two, tolerance rapidly develops, resulting in no effect. And 120 mg of tea leaves would be pretty weak tea.
There are some carefully refined prescription medicines that have an effect... but unrefined plant material, no.
I'm struggling to think of a "raw material" that would have any effect other than life and death at that low of a dose over that time period... High yield lead ore? High yield mercury ore?
Now you go to the Kg range, or the ug range, substances with interesting effects exist.
Slashdot Mirror
because of the nature of the back-end service, they didn't just need a UNIQUE serial number, but also an UNPREDICTABLE serial number
Looks like the device also has a username ... A pity they didn't concatenate the username with the MAC and then MD5 hash it. That would be quite unpredictable, although there is no longer a guarantee of uniqueness (although collisions would be 'kind of rare')
Given how rudimentary and just plain awful Kodak's interface was for their WiFi picture frames from 2 years ago when I bought a few for the family to share the same albums with each other across the nation, this story doesn't surprise me in the least.
I've noticed that problem is nearly universal across the entire pic frame marketplace. I swear the manufacturers are trying to kill the marketplace by intentionally making frame with horrific UIs.
Why can't I buy a frame that simply displays a .RSS on the internet? Not a monthly pay service. Not some 3rd party that'll probably be out of business before the batteries die. Not some special format only. Just freaking show me the pix. And please no BS about processing power as everyone knows a 8 MHz XT in the 80s was good enough to view Pr0n so don't give me some BS that a dedicated 100 MHz process "could never possibly display a picture without preprocessing".
Why can't I buy a frame that simply displays a URL? Heres the webcam IMG tag, now download it every 60 minutes and leave me alone? Again no stupid third party subscription BS please?
Why can't I buy a frame that simply watches for a specific browsable SMB share and directory, and every time it appears on the network, sync to the local copy, plus sync every 15 minutes thereafter?
All I can find to purchase is either flash card only, or if its networked its absolute junk garbage.
Unless some manufacturer will build one that doesn't suck (and I got a pocket full of cash I'm willing to spend), I'm going to have to wall mount a plain ole LCD monitor, get one of those "video over Cat-5 balun thingys" and run a low power PC in my basement. I swear I'm gonna do it this year (is that the geekiest 2010 new years resolution ever?)
The probability of one or two really nice racy pictures in there will no doubt motivate someone to search the space eventually though.
Just remember, goatse works both ways....
Buy a frame for $50, upload goatse to it, for gods sake put the frame face down on the desk with a post it ordering everyone to not look at it, if not outright duct taping it, and you can goatse a "frame-scanner" or whatever you want to call them...
As a side issue, Kodak probably knows what MACs they've sold (or do they?) so they could put up a VERY special page for framescanners of MACs that have never been manufactured. Two girls one frame, or something.
No real military use for this thing.
If you see it, you can kill it, with RPGs or whatever, so hovering in the air merely increases the range from which it can be struck.
Then there are no current levitation systems that don't involve massive airflow, making a huge dust cloud (also ingesting all kinds of junk into the engines)
Then they mention "asymmetric threats" because everyone knows that guarantees grant money, but in my opinion using a levitating APC or whatever in the middle east would be fairly suicidal...
Is TigerDirect that good? I would trust Newegg with my newborn (if I had one), but I always got a shady vibe from TigerDirect...
I've never had a problem in years and years of ordering, probably at least five figures total of "stuff" from them.
Three things to note:
1) They have (or had) "special rules" for certain products like CPUs, memory, maybe others, and the rules vary over time. You don't like the rules, don't buy anyway, then complain you don't like the rules. The "special rules" all seem to vaguely revolve around improper cooling experiments and/or overclocking related misadventures.
2) They sell stuff, as opposed to being a service company. If you buy from a local PC integrator, its expected they'll sell you the correct thing and get it working and overall make it right, because they're a service company that happens to sell hardware. Tiger sells boxes that happen to contain hardware, much like mouser.com yet assembled, so if you buy incompatible hardware (an AMD CPU and an intel MB or some crazy combo) they'll just simply trust you and ship it and give you a moderately hard time if you try to return stuff. Another interesting maneuver is devices that may or may not work with your OS, which would have been pretty easy to check with a ten second google search before ordering. Similarly, they currently, or in the past, sold used/reconditioned PCs, VERY prominently marked as such, but you'll still see fools complaining "they shipped me a used PC" and so forth. They send you exactly what you order, each and every time, even if you're drunk and order something stupid.
3) Shipping dates all over the map. Some stuff they drop ship from around the country and you'll get it tomorrow morning, no kidding. Some weird stuff is shipped apparently on a slow boat from China. Generally the newer it is, the faster you get it. The good news is they have many warehouses, so you could get stuff extremely quickly. The bad news is they have many warehouses, so depending on the pony express, it could take awhile. Everything online is simply marked as "in-stock" of course, which is technically true...
Overall, I enjoy buying from them about as much as it sounds like you enjoy buying from the 'egg.
This being slashdot, that information should be in the header with all the other stuff I listed. I shouldn't have to go to the publishers website to find it out if it is "all rights reserved" or CC or what ever.
Fair enough. In most technical book reviews I complain that slashdot reviews should explain why I'd want to buy the book, if its just a slightly edited collection of last years google search results and some man pages from the old version, or what makes it better than that. Obviously not a problem with this book, but usually is a problem with the technical books.
The slashdot book review guidelines need some modernization...
http://slashdot.org/faq/bookreviews.shtml
1. I could see a lot of overlap in those categories.
Yeah lots of overlap, but the best way to separate them would be to contrast two of Richard Feynman's classics. The "lectures on physics" is a very technical physics class, theoretically for all college freshmen, at least back in the old days when they were smarter, on average. On the other hand, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" was freaking hilarious general read, that also got into some technical topics about the Challenger disaster as kind of a side story, but it was mostly about him getting involved in humorous adventures, and I do not believe it contained a single equation.
Overall, it sounds like another book on how to live your life and be happy. Its a pretty big market.
Yeah, but all his PR seems to emphasize how successful he is in the business world, as opposed to how happy he is. I suppose there's always the "do as I say, not as I do"...
I'd like to know where an author stands in the copyright debate, and this can be demonstrated by how they license the content they produce.
If we are to shun musicians who cling to the RIAA, shouldn't we at least grumble at authors who cling to the old school book publishing establishment (I'm not even sure if there is a similar organization in book publishing) ?
You didn't try very hard... I checked out the publishers web page, and oddly enough its about six pages and they only seem to publish three books. On the good side, they have a free preview online book reader thing, bad side its in flash (why not just text). On the bad side, about the third page or so of the free ebook preview is the usual dead tree title page "all rights reserved" legalese, so its not CC. Odd that a "software dude" would go all closed source. Also their six page website has a ridiculously serious terms and conditions page, roughly as long as the review, as one of their six pages.
So, they don't have as modern of an outlook or technologically advanced as Baen Books, on the other hand, they don't seem to be "old school" obsolete by any means. Like most things in reality, not all black or all white, and in this particular company seems to be somewhat better than average, with some remaining areas for improvement. I'd give them about a grade of "B-", mostly for effort.
http://www.codegreenpublishing.com/
http://www.baen.com/
1) Is it a "business" book written using technical terms, or a "technical" book trying to sell into the business (or philosophical textbook?) arena? What is the educational level of the text? Whom is the books audience?
2) How can a book with trousers in the title not result in any comments about hot grits for several minutes after posting?
Every one of these devices, from the smart phone up to the monster desktop, is able to do it all....
... very poorly. In fact, just barely well enough to not get class action lawsuits, usually, which is not exactly glowing praise.
Possibly the lowest res worst quality digital cameras ever made on cellphones, complete with greasy lenses dusty sensors and dim slow sensitivity. Viewing the web thru a screen the size of a postage stamp, even webtv was better. Non-apple music player user interfaces that make you wish for the good old days of the 1997 Diamond Rio, but thankfully the phone battery will die in an hour or two so you won't have to suffer long. GPS navigators that work great on any trip shorter than two hours (after which the device overheats and/or the battery dies). Games released for phones in 2009 that would make a Vic-20 user cringe at the poor graphics. Email reader with all the features of "elm" from 1991, albeit with a nice slow GUI.
Or you can get something like an iphone, which does most of that, sort of well, but costs about $3000 over about two years, some upfront, plus hefty monthly fees, soon bandwidth charges will make that even higher if you make the mistake of actually using it.
If over a hundred bucks a month won't do it, I guess a perfect machine would cost at least two or three hundred a month. I can get a nice car for that.
I also don't entirely understand why one would buy a proprietary license for a GPL product?
Read the GPL. It specifically prevents a variety of antisocial activities like not releasing the source code, not releasing it as a part of a non GPL program, etc.
If you can buy the same code under another license that basically has no obligations other than "send us the money", then you have ... no obligations, which can be convenient primarily for anti-social folks. Dual licensing is basically the equivalent of the catholic church selling indulgences, its OK to sin, if you send us some cold hard cash.
Why doesn't he just fork the whole project?
The article addresses the forking issue.
I read the whole long forking article. Am I paraphrasing and summarizing it correctly: a GPL mysql would never survive without the technical contributions from the dual licensed customers, because the dual licensed customers payed money to buy a commercial license that does not be require them to make technical contributions? It read like a bunch of nonsense without logical arguments but including lots of FUD.
... to Internet security in general ...
Guaranteed, they won't increase real security, but they will increase security theatre.
Stuff that's very public, annoying, and utterly ineffective, like background and credit score checks as part of Cisco CCNA certification, maybe an official scarey looking badge or uniform for internet security personnel, maybe some very public raids against random citizens, etc.
Heres a thought ... Americans used to be "citizens". Now we're merely "consumers". Maybe with the new internet we'll get a new name like "surfers".
Maybe we should just leave all the adult stuff, warez, etc. on the old Internet, and just use the new one for "not that".
That would leave... not much on the new Internet. .gov, itunes store, and my local bank?
Maybe, according to "them", thats not a bug, thats a feature?
I pay them every month based on metered gallons used.
I must be a moron to be paying these guys who put the plumbing in every month.
Now, are you paying them for the plumbing or the gallons, make up your mind?
Where I live, the plumbing is free, so they can profit off the bulk material commodity gallons that flow thru the pipes.
I have a yard where I can dig a hole and shit!
You should pay your landscaper every time you look out the window and admire the lawn. He deserves a permanent reoccurring revenue stream, for work done in the past, just like everyone else. At least have the landscaper remove the poison ivy and thistles first before you take a dump.
By the way, back when I was in high school, I may have bagged your groceries one time, and it seems I have not received my 2009 yearly payment from you for that performance... You wouldn't be a pirate now, would you? Perhaps if I release the "directors cut"?
I must be way ahead of the curve because I already have a device that can stream netflix, run boxee, xbmc, act as a media server, etc. It's called a computer. You can get one for very little money these days, even with hdmi output for use as a htpc. They do a lot of cool stuff!
Yeah I have one of those too. And setting up mythtv on it was frankly pretty trivial, I believe every person in the entire world whom ever had a problem with mythtv, all five of them, post their issues with religious fervor to each myth-related slashdot story. The only problem I had with my nice mythtv front ends, fanless small case, IR keyboard/mouse (program a universal learning remote control to act as the keyboard), and a fancy enough combination of graphics card and scan converter, cost something like $800 total several years ago. I "bought in" at that point because the price for a FE had finally dropped below one grand.
I guess the the things in the article run about $130. If only I could use them as mythtv frontends...
"We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression--as with a book or song--and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it's accessed."
I should pay my plumber every time I flush, forever. And, I should pay some carpenter every time I go up or down "their" stairs. Its not fair that they don't have a perpetual revenue stream from work they did in the past.
The U.S. was still unquestionably the world superpower through the 1990s at least, but the spurt of building tall buildings stopped by the mid-1970s, since they weren't particularly economical
Its simpler than that. Virtually all American cities are dying due to gross government mismanagement. All the job growth is in the suburbs. "downtown" is where companies/people go to die/downsize. Virtually all people with education and skills want to live in the suburbs for VERY obvious reasons, primarily because of the other people whom live in the burbs and the other people whom live in the cities. So, why would the executives want a long horrible commute?
If all the job growth is in the suburbs, and all the downsizing is downtown, why build new skyscrapers downtown? It's hard to justify a new tower if the neighborhood is 25% unoccupied. That is why my "hometown" hasn't had anything over ten stories built in at least a decade, but the burbs are/were utterly swarming with construction crews. Anything to get away from city government, anything...
It doesn't matter if you can find an anecdote or an isolated counterexample, once a large enough fraction of the market moves to the burbs, the downtown market starts a permanent decline, and that is a bad time to build more excess capacity.
Not to mention this is quite a symbol of modern capitalism in a region known to have many people with a severe distaste of capitalism.
So, put one of their mosques at the top?
What is this going to change? I guess it would be easier to update the designs because you don't have the 2-D crosspath issue anymore. And you should also have shorter distances between components. Is there anything else significant?
Without the limitations of 2-D interconnects, you could:
build barrel rollers / barrel shifters in the shape of a barrel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_shifter
build ring oscillators and ring counters in the shape of a ring...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_oscillator
Currently, using 2-D techniques, you can easily build on-die flat arrays of parallel processors. With 3-D, I guess you could build on-die 3-D arrays of parallel processors. Still out of luck for hypercube (4-D) architecture, although wiring might be somewhat simpler..
How do stacked circuits do a better job of dissipating heat than a flatter circuit that can dump heat to a heatsink on at least one side?
The article didn't mention any heatsink limitations, or at least firefox didn't find that word. Some weird fractal shaped device with a bunch of sides? Of course the minimum volume design would be a sphere, which has minimum surface area per volume, kind of counterproductive.
My guess is going 3-d allows the heat generation of the whole die to approach the max... Rather than having regions that run hot and regions that run cold, with the limit of the whole device being the hottest little part, you could spread the hot parts around the die, in theory maybe every little portion of the die could dump exactly the same amount of heat, for a given workload anyway...
From your link:
"It is impossible however to overdose on nicotine through smoking alone (though a person can overdose on nicotine through a combination of nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and/or tobacco smoking at the same time)."
You are completely wrong.
You might want to lok into dosages of pharmaceuticals.
Serotonin reuptake inhibitors can have a dosage between 5mg - 150mg. a day.
It's the dose that makes the poison.
Well, yes, there are industrially refined and manufactured materials that have an effect in that dosage over half a decade, because livers and kidneys haven't had enough time to evolve to deal with that kind of stuff. If, 10000 years ago, someone licked a rock or whatever and consumed 150 mg of "something", could it have had an effect?
Now a natural, raw, plant based, serotonin reuptake inhibitor that only weighed 150mg in raw form, that would be interesting.
I thought about it more over lunch and rephrased, what I'm getting at is:
really small effective dose of something bad like poison, dead before the liver and kidneys even have a chance.
really huge dose of something bad like too much carbs or too much red meat or too much booze, just too much for liver and kidneys to realistically process, and/or they die trying.
That middle-ground, your innards have a fighting chance at saving you, and thru evolution, they seem to be pretty good at it. And that filtration that saves you from bad stuff, probably filters out similar dosages of good stuff.
Then combine that with the duration effect. Anything required that you don't take for six years, you'll probably be dead, with the possible exception of calcium. Anything bad for you that you take for six years, you'll probably be dead.
Combine the two effects and I'd be very surprised to find something in the mg range that you can take for half a decade that would have much positive or negative result.
average of six years. Half of the participants took two 120-milligram capsules of ginkgo a day
No surprise because of the dosage... a peculiarity of human metabolism that theres very few (no?) raw materials you can consume at that level for years that has any effect other than life or death.
There are vitamins and minerals that have some effect at those dosages... again, generally speaking, after six years the effect is either life or death.
Everything else has no effect. 120 mg of red meat, no effect. Now, 4 Kg of grilled red meat every day, that'll have an effect on blood chemistry after six years. But not 120 mg.
Although caffeine would have some effect for the first month or two, tolerance rapidly develops, resulting in no effect. And 120 mg of tea leaves would be pretty weak tea.
There are some carefully refined prescription medicines that have an effect... but unrefined plant material, no.
I'm struggling to think of a "raw material" that would have any effect other than life and death at that low of a dose over that time period... High yield lead ore? High yield mercury ore?
Now you go to the Kg range, or the ug range, substances with interesting effects exist.