Actually, for that to be useful, it should include the average size of the most common games as well. Since Wii games may well be smaller than PS3/360 games (lower res graphics, &c), this could also make a difference. Anyway, if it was measured in "seconds per game" I'd agree with you. By measuring it in seconds per meg, they failed to meet your criteria.
'In Kenya, there are over 60 unique, fundamentally different languages,' he says. 'You're lucky to get a phone with a Swahili interface, but even that might be somebody's third language. Nokia would love to have phones for everyone's mother tongues, but it has no idea how to translate words like "address book" into all of these languages.'"
Nokia is exactly the sort of company who could, very easily, hire 60 different people (full time no less), who all had English (or whatever) as a second language and also had writing skills, each of whom could be in charge of the localization for their particular "first language". The additional manpower cost would be truly insignificant to their bottom line, and they'd end up with well-translated manuals, support documentation, et cetera.
This has a far greater relevance for someone with a low- or un-funded project than a major multinational corporation.
Wow. That eerily mirrors my experience with MS Word - to the point that I got in the habit (on Windows) of pasting everything through Notepad to remove formatting rather than risk accidentally hitting Paste instead of PasteSpecial and slightly screwing up the format of the remainder of the document. Pasting from a browser was the absolute worst thing, IIRC, and could easily get you into situations like the random section-not-ending properly issue, or a phantom blank page showing up unexpectedly.
Shudder... such memories... Still, if it didn't hurt Word, it probably won't hurt Deki.
Alternately, if it was easily accessible public information to see exactly how many people, even in the god-fearing US of A, have Muslim friends... maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, since it would squash the "Lone Muslim-Lover Must Die" threads pretty easily. Kinda like the awareness that lots of people are gay has made it a lot more socially acceptable to be one of them...?
Slow memory is better than no memory - it's not like you're going to use swap until ram gets short.
Then why didn't you need more than 4GB of swap in the previous example? My point was that you started out with 8GB of available memory. You still have 8GB of available memory, but its faster. Why do you suddenly need 12GB (or 16GB) when you never did before?
How about, "This flashlight charges to full in 10 minutes. If you leave it plugged in for another two hours, you get an extra 10% 'superboost' charge!"
This is marketing language we're talking about, after all.
Let's say that I have a machine with 4GB ram (and a 4GB swap partition). I never run out of memory, but I do see times when swapping is causing performance issues.
I choose to - without changing the machine's processing load one iota - install another 4GB of chip ram to fix the swapping problem. Instead of having 8GB of memory (half fast, half slow), I now have 12GB of memory (2/3 fast, 1/3 slow).
If I then remove my swap partition completely, I'm back to my original 8GB of available memory, but instead of being half fast and half slow, its all fast.
WTF do I then magically need another 8GB of slow memory in the form of a swap partition?
This assumes that the operator got the spelling exactly correct - which is far from guaranteed. For a voice identification, being able to check everything visually actually does make sense.
Of course, much of the conflict arose from the fact that the land that was given already had residents who weren't exactly thrilled to leave. What would the reaction of people have been if the world governments -- primarily the Eastern ones -- granted New York State as a homeland to displaced Native Americans? I mean, its a tiny portion of the US, even if it is fairly desirable to a lot of people...
I'm absolutely not saying that the current aggression is wrong, just that some of it is actually understandable. That's what makes this such a complex issue.
I suppose you think we'd be loved and respected by the rest of the world, if ONLY we hadn't invaded Iraq! Iran would be our friend. Europeans-on-the-street would be saying they wish they could be just like us.
Think again. We're unpopular, we're often complained about, BECAUSE WE ARE PREEMINENT. No other reason is necessary.
Actually, before 9/11, the US had fairly strong support in Europe and elsewhere. Not massive, but nothing terribly bad either. After 9/11 when the US retaliated against Afghanistan, there was very strong support. It really is only since the invasion of Iraq for the flimsiest of excuses that recent worldwide anger against the US and its policies became widespread.
Let me toss this one back at you. How many times do you continually push high bandwidth traffic to or from your bank? You could easily throttle those pages down to 10% of "full speed" and very few people would notice, let alone figure out the pattern.
How on earth did five toilets for $5 million get green-lighted? It must have been a consultant spending somebody else's money and with a fee to justify.
Because this was a pilot program. Many things are frightfully expensive if you only by one or two of them - you're paying a hugely non-amortized cost for design, tooling and other R&D. This is the source, btw, of most of the military "$50,000 toilet" jokes -- creating a full set of design specifications to allow you to build something from scratch is expensive. If you then only build 5 as a test run, and divide the cost out evenly, they look ridiculous. Once you buy 5,000, the effective cost per unit goes way down.
From personal observation, however, it seems to me that if you could afford a running RV (you can easily get one in adequate operating condition for less than $2,000), you could afford a spot at a campground for $400 a month.
While I don't disagree with your final conclusions, I have to question your math here - just because you can afford a $2000 one-time payment doesn't imply that you can spend 1/5 that amount every single month.
The one thing that player-based upconverters could do (but IMO generally don't do) is take advantage of the fact that they know what's about to happen.
Upconverting a single frame correctly is a real PITA. You have to get the motion to look right, for example. If you can look ahead a few frames, you know whether something is moving up and down, for example. Sure, I know I'm talking about difficult concepts -- but this would be a really great way to differentiate your product. Heck, take rolling credits from a standard 420p source. You could get all sorts of good information about the full look of each line if you were flipping ahead a few frames... but nobody does.
Easy? No. Possible? Sure... and people (few but some) would pay quite a bit for it.
I'm a HD fan - in fact, I rarely watch SD any more when it comes to OTA programming. I just don't seem to care much any more about HD over DVD quality programs. As the summary says, line doublers while they aren't great (nowhere close to 1080p quality) work 'okay'. I held off because of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle, and that showed me that there really wasn't a need for either.
That, and the fact that many Blu-Ray discs take 90+ seconds to go from insertion to movie watching is just stupid. If I buy a copy of a movie I want to watch it, not play with it. A 'quick-play' mode (and note that I'm not even talking about watching mandatory trailer-crap, just getting the damn thing 'loaded') would dramatically increase the odds that I'd buy into it.
I'll probably pick one up when my current DVD player finally dies... but there's no compelling reason to do so before it does. And this from a self-confessed geek who at least used to have a ton of home theatre stuff.
The man was identified as Craig Matthew Feigin, 23, who was charged with modifying computer data and disrupting or denying computer system services
So actually turning on the webcam and capturing the pictures wasn't illegal. Using the woman's internet access to send them, or hard drive to store them, was illegal. Although if its a crime to "modify computer data", wouldn't hist standard repair contract include a waiver against that? Otherwise, you could turn your computer over to a repair service (not recommended, but that's another story) and then charge them if they did anything.
Similar to nuclear energy. The radioactive waste created by a modern reactor is less than that created by the mining process for a coal plant, when measured against the amount of power generated. The radioactivity from coal isn't all concentrated in one easy-to-handle package, though. I doubt that anyone would be terribly interested in "solving" the waste problem from a reactor by grinding it up small and dispersing it over a wide area, but that would actually be similar-to (and cleaner-than) the current coal process... if you include the whole life cycle.
If the goal is to receive mail addressed to you@yourdomain.com and read it in Google, you can always sign up for Google Apps (free) and set your domain's MX records to send mail directly to Google. That doesn't solve the problem as stated, but it works, its dead easy, and in many ways its a cleaner solution.
Any competent law enforcement would have left the stolen property under observation until the badges showed up.
This sounded like a rural county law enforcement division. These guys often have very limited resources - sometimes only a few officers for an entire county. Tying one person down to keep an eye on a few thousand dollars of stolen merchandise seems like a pretty poor decision, IMO.
For that matter, its entirely possible that someone noticed the cop getting close and panicked. Or, as you say, was tipped off. No way of knowing. But having the cop hang around for hours would have been a pretty poor use of his time.
Any electronic device that cost several thousand dollars will be expected to be wireless and have GPS.
And for devices under several thousand dollars, i'll make a fortune selling fake antennas and stickers that say "this device is protected by gps and will alert the authorities if it is moved", and "smile for the camera":)
Actually, that's not a great idea. At least down here (and if this flies in Texas I'm sure it flies everywhere in the US), you can be held seriously liable for claiming that you have surveillance video when you don't, if a crime occurs on your property. It may sound odd, but it actually makes sense, since businesses were basically creating a false sense of security for their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, for that to be useful, it should include the average size of the most common games as well. Since Wii games may well be smaller than PS3/360 games (lower res graphics, &c), this could also make a difference. Anyway, if it was measured in "seconds per game" I'd agree with you. By measuring it in seconds per meg, they failed to meet your criteria.
Nokia is exactly the sort of company who could, very easily, hire 60 different people (full time no less), who all had English (or whatever) as a second language and also had writing skills, each of whom could be in charge of the localization for their particular "first language". The additional manpower cost would be truly insignificant to their bottom line, and they'd end up with well-translated manuals, support documentation, et cetera.
This has a far greater relevance for someone with a low- or un-funded project than a major multinational corporation.
Wow. That eerily mirrors my experience with MS Word - to the point that I got in the habit (on Windows) of pasting everything through Notepad to remove formatting rather than risk accidentally hitting Paste instead of PasteSpecial and slightly screwing up the format of the remainder of the document. Pasting from a browser was the absolute worst thing, IIRC, and could easily get you into situations like the random section-not-ending properly issue, or a phantom blank page showing up unexpectedly.
Shudder... such memories... Still, if it didn't hurt Word, it probably won't hurt Deki.
As you said, "informative?"
Sigh - posting to undo "redundant" mod that was supposed to be "insightful"
Alternately, if it was easily accessible public information to see exactly how many people, even in the god-fearing US of A, have Muslim friends... maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, since it would squash the "Lone Muslim-Lover Must Die" threads pretty easily. Kinda like the awareness that lots of people are gay has made it a lot more socially acceptable to be one of them...?
Then why didn't you need more than 4GB of swap in the previous example? My point was that you started out with 8GB of available memory. You still have 8GB of available memory, but its faster. Why do you suddenly need 12GB (or 16GB) when you never did before?
How about, "This flashlight charges to full in 10 minutes. If you leave it plugged in for another two hours, you get an extra 10% 'superboost' charge!"
This is marketing language we're talking about, after all.
That gets truly bizarre though.
Let's say that I have a machine with 4GB ram (and a 4GB swap partition). I never run out of memory, but I do see times when swapping is causing performance issues.
I choose to - without changing the machine's processing load one iota - install another 4GB of chip ram to fix the swapping problem. Instead of having 8GB of memory (half fast, half slow), I now have 12GB of memory (2/3 fast, 1/3 slow).
If I then remove my swap partition completely, I'm back to my original 8GB of available memory, but instead of being half fast and half slow, its all fast.
WTF do I then magically need another 8GB of slow memory in the form of a swap partition?
This assumes that the operator got the spelling exactly correct - which is far from guaranteed. For a voice identification, being able to check everything visually actually does make sense.
Of course, much of the conflict arose from the fact that the land that was given already had residents who weren't exactly thrilled to leave. What would the reaction of people have been if the world governments -- primarily the Eastern ones -- granted New York State as a homeland to displaced Native Americans? I mean, its a tiny portion of the US, even if it is fairly desirable to a lot of people...
I'm absolutely not saying that the current aggression is wrong, just that some of it is actually understandable. That's what makes this such a complex issue.
I suppose you think we'd be loved and respected by the rest of the world, if ONLY we hadn't invaded Iraq! Iran would be our friend. Europeans-on-the-street would be saying they wish they could be just like us.
Think again. We're unpopular, we're often complained about, BECAUSE WE ARE PREEMINENT. No other reason is necessary.
Actually, before 9/11, the US had fairly strong support in Europe and elsewhere. Not massive, but nothing terribly bad either. After 9/11 when the US retaliated against Afghanistan, there was very strong support. It really is only since the invasion of Iraq for the flimsiest of excuses that recent worldwide anger against the US and its policies became widespread.
Let me toss this one back at you. How many times do you continually push high bandwidth traffic to or from your bank? You could easily throttle those pages down to 10% of "full speed" and very few people would notice, let alone figure out the pattern.
How on earth did five toilets for $5 million get green-lighted? It must have been a consultant spending somebody else's money and with a fee to justify.
Because this was a pilot program. Many things are frightfully expensive if you only by one or two of them - you're paying a hugely non-amortized cost for design, tooling and other R&D. This is the source, btw, of most of the military "$50,000 toilet" jokes -- creating a full set of design specifications to allow you to build something from scratch is expensive. If you then only build 5 as a test run, and divide the cost out evenly, they look ridiculous. Once you buy 5,000, the effective cost per unit goes way down.
From personal observation, however, it seems to me that if you could afford a running RV (you can easily get one in adequate operating condition for less than $2,000), you could afford a spot at a campground for $400 a month.
While I don't disagree with your final conclusions, I have to question your math here - just because you can afford a $2000 one-time payment doesn't imply that you can spend 1/5 that amount every single month.
Only assuming that you got to keep the car.
8 times $999.999 is about $10,000. Apple gets 30%, author gets 70%. 70% of $10,000 is $5,600.
No cats were harmed in the making of this post.
The one thing that player-based upconverters could do (but IMO generally don't do) is take advantage of the fact that they know what's about to happen.
Upconverting a single frame correctly is a real PITA. You have to get the motion to look right, for example. If you can look ahead a few frames, you know whether something is moving up and down, for example. Sure, I know I'm talking about difficult concepts -- but this would be a really great way to differentiate your product. Heck, take rolling credits from a standard 420p source. You could get all sorts of good information about the full look of each line if you were flipping ahead a few frames... but nobody does.
Easy? No. Possible? Sure... and people (few but some) would pay quite a bit for it.
I'm a HD fan - in fact, I rarely watch SD any more when it comes to OTA programming. I just don't seem to care much any more about HD over DVD quality programs. As the summary says, line doublers while they aren't great (nowhere close to 1080p quality) work 'okay'. I held off because of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle, and that showed me that there really wasn't a need for either.
That, and the fact that many Blu-Ray discs take 90+ seconds to go from insertion to movie watching is just stupid. If I buy a copy of a movie I want to watch it, not play with it. A 'quick-play' mode (and note that I'm not even talking about watching mandatory trailer-crap, just getting the damn thing 'loaded') would dramatically increase the odds that I'd buy into it.
I'll probably pick one up when my current DVD player finally dies... but there's no compelling reason to do so before it does. And this from a self-confessed geek who at least used to have a ton of home theatre stuff.
From TFA:
The man was identified as Craig Matthew Feigin, 23, who was charged with modifying computer data and disrupting or denying computer system services
So actually turning on the webcam and capturing the pictures wasn't illegal. Using the woman's internet access to send them, or hard drive to store them, was illegal. Although if its a crime to "modify computer data", wouldn't hist standard repair contract include a waiver against that? Otherwise, you could turn your computer over to a repair service (not recommended, but that's another story) and then charge them if they did anything.
Similar to nuclear energy. The radioactive waste created by a modern reactor is less than that created by the mining process for a coal plant, when measured against the amount of power generated. The radioactivity from coal isn't all concentrated in one easy-to-handle package, though. I doubt that anyone would be terribly interested in "solving" the waste problem from a reactor by grinding it up small and dispersing it over a wide area, but that would actually be similar-to (and cleaner-than) the current coal process... if you include the whole life cycle.
Its not really a fix, but...
If the goal is to receive mail addressed to you@yourdomain.com and read it in Google, you can always sign up for Google Apps (free) and set your domain's MX records to send mail directly to Google. That doesn't solve the problem as stated, but it works, its dead easy, and in many ways its a cleaner solution.
You can't rename a server?
This sounded like a rural county law enforcement division. These guys often have very limited resources - sometimes only a few officers for an entire county. Tying one person down to keep an eye on a few thousand dollars of stolen merchandise seems like a pretty poor decision, IMO.
For that matter, its entirely possible that someone noticed the cop getting close and panicked. Or, as you say, was tipped off. No way of knowing. But having the cop hang around for hours would have been a pretty poor use of his time.
And for devices under several thousand dollars, i'll make a fortune selling fake antennas and stickers that say "this device is protected by gps and will alert the authorities if it is moved", and "smile for the camera" :)
Actually, that's not a great idea. At least down here (and if this flies in Texas I'm sure it flies everywhere in the US), you can be held seriously liable for claiming that you have surveillance video when you don't, if a crime occurs on your property. It may sound odd, but it actually makes sense, since businesses were basically creating a false sense of security for their customers.