"Every time this topic is discussed, I hear the same excuses. Mostly, people claim that the US is too large and with too many rural areas. It's a load of crap. We've paid billions subsidizing the laying of lines, more per person than numerous other countries and we still have much slower and more expensive service than those countries. Sweden has been the model of how to do this right. Despite government corruption and favoritism on par with the US, they have managed almost complete saturation, for less per-person government subsidy, and with a population density almost the same as the US."
We've paid billions subsidizing the laying of voice-quality phone lines. While DSL can run on the same cable type as analog voice, its maximum distance is MUCH lower. I'd say only 25% or less of "good quality" voice lines in the US are even remotely close enough to their CO to provide DSL service. Even in central New Jersey, one of the most densely populated areas of the most densely populated state in the nation, only 50% or so of residences are actually close enough to their telco COs to get DSL service.
Cable TV penetration is MUCH lower since it hasn't received any subsidies, or if it has, has received far less than the telephone industry.
Not sure if threading is fixed yet, so I will quote piggydoggy:
"But lower population density doesn't actually matter that much, since not only aren't there any marked differences with regards to suburbs, but because the telephone and TV cables through which to offer broadband are already installed. Few people live in ranches 30 miles from the nearest center of civilization, where the population density is pronounced and acquiring a broadband connection could actually be a problem."
a) DSL has a MUCH lower distance limit for data service on phone lines than voice. Even in central New Jersey there are plenty of large areas that are too far away from their COs for DSL but have excellent voice quality. My parents' home is in one of these areas, and NJ is one of the most densely populated states in the nation, and central NJ is one of the most densely populated parts of the state (as compared to South Jersey, where the population density is quite low in the Pine Barrens.)
b) Cable TV penetration is much lower than you think. I know a lot of people in the area I'm living now (upstate NY) whose only options for TV are terrestrial broadcast and satellite because there isn't any cable service even remotely close to where they are.
It's too bad that by the time the Q3F team released their Canal Zone remake, Q3F was basically dead and no one played it.
Hopefully Q4F works well... What's the current most popular TF incarnation, preferably one that has a version of CZ?:)
I never thought of Canal Zone as a good sniper map... It was LOTS of fun as a demoman though, lots of strategic intersections to pipebomb. 9 times out of 10, someone going into the boathouse to try and cap that command point wouldn't see the pipes in time, resulting in them flying across the room.:)
It's simply too difficult, without some sort of centralized tracking (such as a DRM download site) to figure out how those fees are distributed between the artist. It'll be a logistical nightmare.
There are simpler solutions - Yes, DRM is a wholesale failure. Nearly every attempt at DRM has failed technically (it gets broken), and by assuming your customers are criminals, many of them will, in fact, make a decision to be criminals, because of the fundamental fact that the P2P networks offer a *better* product at a lower price.
The solution? Stop trying to hawk inferior products. Provide a BETTER product than the P2P networks, and you will find that people are willing to pay for it if it is a better product.
Things the record companies could offer in an official product:
Convenience and selection - I hate trying to hunt around on P2P networks for some obscure non-mainstream track that few people have.
Reccommendations - Stuff like "similar artists", "people who purchased this also purchased Y", and so on.
Lower prices than the current status quo. Maybe 1/4 of what they currently charge (25 cents/track, no per-album pricing), or even something like 10 cents per megabyte. They'll likely find that their per-track profit losses are more than made up for by volume. $1 is a little expensive for an impulse buy of a track you're not sure of. $0.25 per track - At that price I would (and have) buy a full album just because I like one track. (Hey, isn't that what the record companies want us to do?)
Does that all sound familiar? Yes, allofmp3 provided all of those. I've spent more money there in the past 2-3 months (prior to Visa and MC cutting them off) than I have on music in the past 2-3 years. (With most of THAT money being back when PyMusique allowed DRM to be removed from iTMS tracks). If you can't beat em', join them. Rather than combating allofmp3 by busting out the lawyers, the solution would have been to compete with them on merit with a similar service.
2fort4 was way overrated, and too many people played it and nothing else. It was just one huge sniperfest and not much else. There were far better maps, but people were so ignorant that it was hard to find people playing anything other than 2fort4 (see the other poster's comment about some people not even knowing of other maps)
Now Canal Zone, the first (and pretty much only) QWTF Capture and Hold style map, was where it was at. Canal Zone was amazing, I miss it so much.
Um, because he isn't selling himself as an expert? He's the existing network admin, and IS the expert on the existing network technologies installed, including the legacy phone system.
The school wants to move into a "new" area of networking, and hence the article submitter needs to move into that area too.
Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever heard a privately owned company? Not every company in existence is publically traded, and hence not every company has such a legal responsibility. In fact, probably most companies of the size of Universal Tube are in the privately owned category.
And, as I said in my previous post, their potential loss of sales in their core business from putting banner ads on their page is going to be far more than the miniscule amount of ad revenue gained, thus *IF* they did happen to be publically traded and have such obligations to increase revenue, putting banner ads on their site would be a surefire way to get sued by their shareholders.
Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
"Well there is an easy solution : create a small front page wich just say something like ( click here to continue , or click here if you wanted to visit Youtube ) , than place some ads below that . Instead of losing money , they will now gain money from the ads."
No they won't. They'll gain a miniscule amount of money from the ads, and will lose a potentially significant number of sales because their website would no longer look professional, but would look X-10ish instead.
A reputable company expecting to make sales to industrial customers putting up random banner ads is the dumbest idea I've ever seen. Purchasing people at any potential customer of Universal Tube would instantly consider looking elsewhere if utube's site were covered in random banner ads.
Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
"How many of those hits were proper customers? Can we have figures from before youtube arrived? how many turned into customers after they hit the wrong domain?"
Very few, most likely. Did you bother to look at Universal Tube's site? They sell large, expensive machinery that very few site visitors are going to have an interest in, let alone be able to afford. In short, it's a low-volume high-profit market they're in.
"How can a company with such massive hit numbers draw so little in sales (especially since they are a real company):"
That's Universal Tube's complaint. They are getting massive amounts of hits from misdirected traffic that are not generating them any sales, and more importantly, EVERY HIT COSTS THEM MONEY in terms of site downtime because their site can't handle the traffic and massively increased bandwidth bills. Upgrade their hosting plan? That costs money, serious money which gives Universal Tube no return on their investment because the increased traffic does not generate them customers.
To put it simply - Via domain name confusion, YouTube is conducting an unintentional distributed denial of service attack against Universal Tube. Does that make more sense to you?
"Hang on, I just checked something out - shouldn't they more correctly be suing universaltubes.com, they appear to have a closer name than youtube????
There is also universaltube.com doing a similar job.
Both companies do a similar job and at first glance cannot tell a different between them - this is more like passing off than anything, or are utube simply after the publicity...."
A misdirect from universaltube.com to utube.com would have a high probability of generating new sales for utube.com for that exact reason. Also, the amount of traffic going to universaltube.com is most likely low, and so any misdirects that do occur will be insignificant even if they don't generate sales (which as I said before, is far more likely for those misdirects.)
Universal Tube isn't after publicity - In fact, their fundamental complaint is that YouTube has caused them unwanted publicity that is costing them money but is not increasing their sales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR - "Despite widespread confusion there does not seem to be any open source implementation to decompress newer than version 2.0 RAR archives (7-zip uses a proprietary plugin under "unRAR license" for decompression)." - I suspect that if an open-source RAR archiver/unarchiver existed, it would be in Gentoo Portage, but only the "official" binary-only RAR implementation is.
Still, in this case, using *any* compression format on already-compressed audio files is a Bad Idea if you are distributing via BitTorrent, because it makes things significantly more difficult for your seeders.
Maybe the content is nerdy, but really, what intelligent person distributes content using:
RAR - It's a proprietary compression algorithm with no open-source implementations. Real nerds use open compression schemes.:)
Any compression - Music files do not compress well. The advantage of compression in terms of size is, at most, a few percent for MP3s. There is an advantage in having everything in one file though.
Archive formats within a torrent - I can understand compressing source code or text or other stuff that is actually COMPRESSIBLE in a torrent, but the tiny percentage gain in file size you get from compressing already-compressed music is fully negated by the fact that it is guaranteed that if the torrent content is not in an "immediately usable" form, people are less likely to seed it, because instead of just seeding the content that they have to keep around already to listen to (or view in the case of video), they have to keep one copy around stuck in an archive to seed and a separate copy of the content in a usable form.
I'm not surprised some of these torrents are lacking seeds due to this issue.
Some countries (including my own) deserve to be dropped in the rankings for government-sponsored restrictions on the press.
Other countries (Denmark being one of the best examples) don't deserve to be dropped in the rankings due to things the government has no involvement in/control of. Does the whole country really deserve to be penalized 19 places in the rankings for the actions of a tiny handful of wackjobs who are acting completely independently of the government? Hell, if anything, Denmark deserves credit for giving the journalists police protection when they were threatened.
Fortunately insurance makes the pump affordable, although I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies are artificially increasing the "pre-insurance" price of pumps by increasing demand significantly.
Yes, the CGMS systems are sadly still in their infancy, but they're a sign of Very Good things to come. Depending on insurance coverage, I may finally make the switch to the pump once the Minimed CGMS is widely available and insurable. I think the inconveniences are worth it if the price for sensors can be dropped below $40 per 3 days (which is honestly not more than the pre-insurance cost of test strips if you test as frequently as I do.) Yes, you still do need to do "classic" fingerstick testing to confirm readings before taking action, but at least in my case I could probably do away with 1-3 tests per day that I currently do just for trend analysis.
Add to that the fact that this pill will do nothing to help Type 1 diabetics such as your wife and myself.
In fact, in our case such a pill could be dangerous, as injections of glucagon (which this inhibits) are the "last resort" treatment for severe hypoglycemia (low blood sugar, caused by either an overdose of insulin, a smaller than normal meal combined with a normal insulin dose, or exercise without accompanying food or reduced insulin.)
Others have hinted at this, but the basics of diabetes, Type I and Type II: Type I - Often called "juvenile diabetes", is almost always diagnosed before the age of 20 (hence the name), and usually before 10-15, hence its name. It is nearly unheard of for someone to develope Type I later than the age of 20. Type I is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the beta cells in the pancreas, which produce insulin. Due to the total lack of insulin, external insulin injections are required to treat this disease, no other treatment exists. (Well, prior to the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, total starvation was a treatment, but it would only work for a year or two at most before death. Without insulin, no matter how much sugar is in the blood, the body itself actually starves. A starvation diet would prevent the additional problems resulting from excessive blood sugar concentration to some degree, but wouldn't fix the fact that the body itself was starving.) Once a Type I diabetic starts treatment, diabetes becomes a balancing act. Insulin and exercise lower blood sugar, food and stress raise it. High blood sugar (above 120 mg/dl) does all sorts of long-term damage to the body, low blood sugar (below 80 mg/dl) can lead to weakness, disorientation, and if the sugar concentration gets too low, unconsciousness and death.
About the only really "good news" for Type I diabetics recently has been the development of continuous blood glucose monitoring systems, which makes insulin dose management much easier by providing much more information to fine tune insulin, food, and exercise levels. Unfortunately CGMS is not very accurate so far and requires fingersticks for confirmation before action is taken, and also is not yet covered by insurance companies. As a result, few people can obtain it and it cannot be used for a "closed loop" system where an insulin pump automatically reacts to blood sugar levels.
Type II is a different animal - The exact causes are unknown, but it usually is the result of decreased pancreatic capacity (due to old age) or increased insulin resistance (due to weight, stress, or other factors). It is often referred to as "adult diabetes" due to the fact that it is rarely seen in people under 30 unless they are overweight. While it is true that many Type IIs are overweight, many (probably 50% or more) are simply either old or unlucky. I once knew a Type II who was in his low 30s and was thin as a pencil - fortunately for him, he was able to manage his diabetes with diet alone (many small meals per day are in many ways better than three large ones.) New treatments for Type II are coming out all the time, and to be honest, that means that this article really isn't news. A new treatment for Type I (other than new insulin variants with different activity/time profiles such as Humalog/Novolog at the "faster than human insulin" end and Lantus at the "so long-acting there is no noticeable peak" end) would be big news.
As I mentioned in my post, you DO get lots of problems with built-in Bluetooth depending on which stack the laptop vendor chose. It's all in the stack, and not the hardware for the most part.
To my knowledge, both Apple and Dell use Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) chipsets. There is basically no difference between the two in terms of the BT hardware, and a large portion of the USB BT dongles out there (which use the exact same CSR hardware). In fact, in the case of Dell's Bluetooth modules (at least the 350, there's a 355 out now which might use different silicon), they are just an internal USB dongle with a different form factor.
All CSR hardware I've used works great with BlueZ under Linux. While the front ends and user interfaces still need lots of work and support for AD2P and the Headset and Handsfree profiles are still under heavy development, BlueZ works great with CSR chipsets. (Not so well with Broadcom chipsets, but is that any surprise when talking about Broadcom?)
Under Windows, the main problem seems to be multiple different BT stacks all of which stink for one reason or another. This is one case where I actually hope MS drives the "competition" out of the market by integrating a highly functional Bluetooth stack into Vista - While the default stack in XP SP2 is incredibly limited in terms of which profiles it supports, there is one good thing to say about it - it works with any hardware. In terms of quality, it blows away the other stacks for the profiles it does support. Unfortunately it just doesn't support some common profiles such as Headset, Handsfree, and AD2P. Other vendor stacks (WIDCOMM/Broadcom, BlueSoleil, Toshiba) do, but they are all of low quality and all of them are locked to the dongle they came with. (Guess what - in typical Broadcom fashion, they started the trend with the WIDCOMM stacks after they bought out WIDCOMM. Broadcom doesn't even allow the user to download upgrades to their stack!). In this case, the third-party vendors deserve to be pushed out of the market because their greed is making users' lives miserable with all of the compatibility problems.
There's also the huge variation in terms of actual functionality of devices that claim to support a particular profile. For example, some Handsfree 1.1-compliant headsets play much better with PCs and Treos than others do. Motorola headsets claim compliance, but don't seem to exhibit compliant behavior with anything other than Motorola phones for example. They behave badly with WIDCOMM, they behave badly with BlueSoleil, they behave badly with Treos, they even misbehave with BlueZ + bluetooth-alsa.
Higher data rates, higher sound quality for headsets, error correction for headset audio (read: significantly increased range and quality).
They still haven't fixed the compatibility nightmares of Bluetooth. God forbid you might want to use a Motorola headset with a Treo for example! It'll work, but barely, and most functionality (such as picking up a call from the headset) won't work.
The state of Bluetooth stacks for Windows is even worse. Microsoft's stack doesn't seem to support anything other than the serial profile - no headset audio, no AD2P. Only 50% of the stacks available a few months ago supported headset audio, even fewer supported AD2P (high quality stereo audio). Every single Bluetooth stack insists on making the headset the default audio device for the entire system, which is useless (and incredibly annoying) when you only want to use it for a SIP/IAX softphone, Skype, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, or similar stuff. Last but not least, even though most Bluetooth stacks support the majority of hardware chipsets out there, every single one is locked to a specific device vendor. i.e. if you buy a Dell with a CSR chipset, it'll come with the Toshiba bluetooth stack (worthless since it puts all serial devices at COM40 or above which most apps don't support). The WIDCOMM stack works with CSR chipsets, but is locked to whatever vendor's CSR-based dongle you got the stack with. You can't even upgrade to a recent version in most cases. (Buy a dongle with a WIDCOMM 3.x stack, and you can't upgrade to 5.x legally).
From what I've heard, both Microsoft and Logitech BT keyboards/mice don't work well unless you use the dongle and BT stack that came with the hardware - what's the point of being Bluetooth in that case?
About the only Bluetooth device I've ever used that worked well is my GPS receiver. I've tried 3 different headsets with my Treo and 2-3 different BT stacks on my PC for use with those headsets and have never been satisfied with the results.
"And so, modern mathematics, unwilling to give the Fields medal to the intuative but not pedatic Perelman, but unable to give it to the super garbled Morgan and Tian, instead had to give it to Yau. But since Yau hadn't actually added anything but formality to the proof, and the other team and only added more, they had to give the medal to Perelman as well. They would have preferred to have just given it to Morgan and Tian, so they're bitter now and blaming Yau for publishing so soon."
I can't comment on the rest of your post, but you got at least one critical fact wrong:
Perelman won the Fields medal, but refused to accept it. The article essentially claimed that all of this corruption and bickering was why Perelman refused the medal - He seemingly wants nothing more to do with the field of mathematics in its current state.
"Leveler: An individual's rank and status in society are not significant. As in the culture of early video game arcades, "It didn't matter what you drove to the arcade. If you sucked at Asteroids, you just sucked." Players on online games use a separate avatar unrelated to their real life person, and social status is rarely invoked."
In this case, "Leveler" has NOTHING to do with leveling up. RTFA.
"4. X-Windows. What a mess. Why do I have to tell it my x & y refresh rates for my monitor? Windows just 'knows'. Many more things here I feel that X-Windows should just 'know' - the number of buttons on my USB mouse for-instance. If Windows can do it, there's no reason why Linux can't. Also, X-Windows 'feels' slower than Windows. I'm sure there's good reasons for this, but I don't care; Windows is snappier."
I've noticed no speed differences in terms of responsiveness between X and Windows. In fact, frequently Windows on this machine is far less responsive than X.
As to refresh rates - I haven't had to choose a refresh rate in years. Stop using ancient hardware that doesn't report its refresh rates to the video card, and stop using a video card so ancient it can't provide that information to X. Video cards have supported this for probably nearly a decade, in the case of monitors maybe 4-5 years. Things get even easier with monitors/vid cards that do DVI.
Guess what? Since fuel cells directly convert chemical energy into electrical energy, they are far more efficient than a combustion engine that is limited by the laws of thermodynamics (i.e. the process is chemical energy -> thermal energy -> mechanical or thermal energy). I believe I've seen specifications indicating that fuel cells can achieve at least 50% efficiency, of not more. (The table on Wikipedia confirms this - some efficiencies are as high as 70%).
The idea is not that sodium borohydride is a better energy storage system alone than diesel, it's that the "whole system" is better, due to the fact that fuel cells are inherently far more efficient than nearly anything which involves a thermal cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoting 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF:
"Every time this topic is discussed, I hear the same excuses. Mostly, people claim that the US is too large and with too many rural areas. It's a load of crap. We've paid billions subsidizing the laying of lines, more per person than numerous other countries and we still have much slower and more expensive service than those countries. Sweden has been the model of how to do this right. Despite government corruption and favoritism on par with the US, they have managed almost complete saturation, for less per-person government subsidy, and with a population density almost the same as the US."
We've paid billions subsidizing the laying of voice-quality phone lines. While DSL can run on the same cable type as analog voice, its maximum distance is MUCH lower. I'd say only 25% or less of "good quality" voice lines in the US are even remotely close enough to their CO to provide DSL service. Even in central New Jersey, one of the most densely populated areas of the most densely populated state in the nation, only 50% or so of residences are actually close enough to their telco COs to get DSL service.
Cable TV penetration is MUCH lower since it hasn't received any subsidies, or if it has, has received far less than the telephone industry.
Not sure if threading is fixed yet, so I will quote piggydoggy:
"But lower population density doesn't actually matter that much, since not only aren't there any marked differences with regards to suburbs, but because the telephone and TV cables through which to offer broadband are already installed. Few people live in ranches 30 miles from the nearest center of civilization, where the population density is pronounced and acquiring a broadband connection could actually be a problem."
a) DSL has a MUCH lower distance limit for data service on phone lines than voice. Even in central New Jersey there are plenty of large areas that are too far away from their COs for DSL but have excellent voice quality. My parents' home is in one of these areas, and NJ is one of the most densely populated states in the nation, and central NJ is one of the most densely populated parts of the state (as compared to South Jersey, where the population density is quite low in the Pine Barrens.)
b) Cable TV penetration is much lower than you think. I know a lot of people in the area I'm living now (upstate NY) whose only options for TV are terrestrial broadcast and satellite because there isn't any cable service even remotely close to where they are.
Looks like another legitimate use for FairUse4WM.
:)
MS should make it available to their old customers as a way of selling more Zunes.
(That said - Why can't MS make a utility or service that relicenses/reencrypts PlaysForSure content as Zune content?)
It's too bad that by the time the Q3F team released their Canal Zone remake, Q3F was basically dead and no one played it.
:)
:)
Hopefully Q4F works well... What's the current most popular TF incarnation, preferably one that has a version of CZ?
I never thought of Canal Zone as a good sniper map... It was LOTS of fun as a demoman though, lots of strategic intersections to pipebomb. 9 times out of 10, someone going into the boathouse to try and cap that command point wouldn't see the pipes in time, resulting in them flying across the room.
It's simply too difficult, without some sort of centralized tracking (such as a DRM download site) to figure out how those fees are distributed between the artist. It'll be a logistical nightmare.
There are simpler solutions - Yes, DRM is a wholesale failure. Nearly every attempt at DRM has failed technically (it gets broken), and by assuming your customers are criminals, many of them will, in fact, make a decision to be criminals, because of the fundamental fact that the P2P networks offer a *better* product at a lower price.
The solution? Stop trying to hawk inferior products. Provide a BETTER product than the P2P networks, and you will find that people are willing to pay for it if it is a better product.
Things the record companies could offer in an official product:
Convenience and selection - I hate trying to hunt around on P2P networks for some obscure non-mainstream track that few people have.
Reccommendations - Stuff like "similar artists", "people who purchased this also purchased Y", and so on.
Lower prices than the current status quo. Maybe 1/4 of what they currently charge (25 cents/track, no per-album pricing), or even something like 10 cents per megabyte. They'll likely find that their per-track profit losses are more than made up for by volume. $1 is a little expensive for an impulse buy of a track you're not sure of. $0.25 per track - At that price I would (and have) buy a full album just because I like one track. (Hey, isn't that what the record companies want us to do?)
Does that all sound familiar? Yes, allofmp3 provided all of those. I've spent more money there in the past 2-3 months (prior to Visa and MC cutting them off) than I have on music in the past 2-3 years. (With most of THAT money being back when PyMusique allowed DRM to be removed from iTMS tracks). If you can't beat em', join them. Rather than combating allofmp3 by busting out the lawyers, the solution would have been to compete with them on merit with a similar service.
2fort4 was way overrated, and too many people played it and nothing else. It was just one huge sniperfest and not much else. There were far better maps, but people were so ignorant that it was hard to find people playing anything other than 2fort4 (see the other poster's comment about some people not even knowing of other maps)
Now Canal Zone, the first (and pretty much only) QWTF Capture and Hold style map, was where it was at. Canal Zone was amazing, I miss it so much.
That level had some wicked teleporter (or whatever it was called - it's been a long time) tricks.
:)
Shoot the teleporter beacon up onto a ledge on the outside of the enemy base.
Run in, grab flag.
Take the portal to the top of the tower.
Jump off the tower on the same side as your beacon.
Teleport to your beacon.
Go pick up flag while enemy tries to figure out how you didn't die from jumping off the top of their tower.
Of course, get sniped in the back on your return trip with the flag.
Um, because he isn't selling himself as an expert? He's the existing network admin, and IS the expert on the existing network technologies installed, including the legacy phone system.
The school wants to move into a "new" area of networking, and hence the article submitter needs to move into that area too.
Have you ever heard a privately owned company? Not every company in existence is publically traded, and hence not every company has such a legal responsibility. In fact, probably most companies of the size of Universal Tube are in the privately owned category.
And, as I said in my previous post, their potential loss of sales in their core business from putting banner ads on their page is going to be far more than the miniscule amount of ad revenue gained, thus *IF* they did happen to be publically traded and have such obligations to increase revenue, putting banner ads on their site would be a surefire way to get sued by their shareholders.
"Well there is an easy solution : create a small front page wich just say something like ( click here to continue , or click here if you wanted to visit Youtube ) , than place some ads below that . Instead of losing money , they will now gain money from the ads ."
No they won't. They'll gain a miniscule amount of money from the ads, and will lose a potentially significant number of sales because their website would no longer look professional, but would look X-10ish instead.
A reputable company expecting to make sales to industrial customers putting up random banner ads is the dumbest idea I've ever seen. Purchasing people at any potential customer of Universal Tube would instantly consider looking elsewhere if utube's site were covered in random banner ads.
"How many of those hits were proper customers? Can we have figures from before youtube arrived? how many turned into customers after they hit the wrong domain?"
Very few, most likely. Did you bother to look at Universal Tube's site? They sell large, expensive machinery that very few site visitors are going to have an interest in, let alone be able to afford. In short, it's a low-volume high-profit market they're in.
"How can a company with such massive hit numbers draw so little in sales (especially since they are a real company):"
That's Universal Tube's complaint. They are getting massive amounts of hits from misdirected traffic that are not generating them any sales, and more importantly, EVERY HIT COSTS THEM MONEY in terms of site downtime because their site can't handle the traffic and massively increased bandwidth bills. Upgrade their hosting plan? That costs money, serious money which gives Universal Tube no return on their investment because the increased traffic does not generate them customers.
To put it simply - Via domain name confusion, YouTube is conducting an unintentional distributed denial of service attack against Universal Tube. Does that make more sense to you?
"Hang on, I just checked something out - shouldn't they more correctly be suing universaltubes.com, they appear to have a closer name than youtube????
There is also universaltube.com doing a similar job.
Both companies do a similar job and at first glance cannot tell a different between them - this is more like passing off than anything, or are utube simply after the publicity...."
A misdirect from universaltube.com to utube.com would have a high probability of generating new sales for utube.com for that exact reason. Also, the amount of traffic going to universaltube.com is most likely low, and so any misdirects that do occur will be insignificant even if they don't generate sales (which as I said before, is far more likely for those misdirects.)
Universal Tube isn't after publicity - In fact, their fundamental complaint is that YouTube has caused them unwanted publicity that is costing them money but is not increasing their sales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR - "Despite widespread confusion there does not seem to be any open source implementation to decompress newer than version 2.0 RAR archives (7-zip uses a proprietary plugin under "unRAR license" for decompression)." - I suspect that if an open-source RAR archiver/unarchiver existed, it would be in Gentoo Portage, but only the "official" binary-only RAR implementation is.
Still, in this case, using *any* compression format on already-compressed audio files is a Bad Idea if you are distributing via BitTorrent, because it makes things significantly more difficult for your seeders.
I've listened to quite a few of those, but thanks for the FSR pointer.
:)
I'm listening to "Back in the Day" now, it's GOOD.
ytcracker's Nerdrap Entertainment System album was one of my nerdcore favorites previously, but so far, FSR's Hotel Coral Essex might beat it.
Maybe the content is nerdy, but really, what intelligent person distributes content using:
:)
RAR - It's a proprietary compression algorithm with no open-source implementations. Real nerds use open compression schemes.
Any compression - Music files do not compress well. The advantage of compression in terms of size is, at most, a few percent for MP3s. There is an advantage in having everything in one file though.
Archive formats within a torrent - I can understand compressing source code or text or other stuff that is actually COMPRESSIBLE in a torrent, but the tiny percentage gain in file size you get from compressing already-compressed music is fully negated by the fact that it is guaranteed that if the torrent content is not in an "immediately usable" form, people are less likely to seed it, because instead of just seeding the content that they have to keep around already to listen to (or view in the case of video), they have to keep one copy around stuck in an archive to seed and a separate copy of the content in a usable form.
I'm not surprised some of these torrents are lacking seeds due to this issue.
I was just about to post to this effect.
Some countries (including my own) deserve to be dropped in the rankings for government-sponsored restrictions on the press.
Other countries (Denmark being one of the best examples) don't deserve to be dropped in the rankings due to things the government has no involvement in/control of. Does the whole country really deserve to be penalized 19 places in the rankings for the actions of a tiny handful of wackjobs who are acting completely independently of the government? Hell, if anything, Denmark deserves credit for giving the journalists police protection when they were threatened.
Nothing stops the zombie from browsing /. at -1...
Fortunately insurance makes the pump affordable, although I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies are artificially increasing the "pre-insurance" price of pumps by increasing demand significantly.
Yes, the CGMS systems are sadly still in their infancy, but they're a sign of Very Good things to come. Depending on insurance coverage, I may finally make the switch to the pump once the Minimed CGMS is widely available and insurable. I think the inconveniences are worth it if the price for sensors can be dropped below $40 per 3 days (which is honestly not more than the pre-insurance cost of test strips if you test as frequently as I do.) Yes, you still do need to do "classic" fingerstick testing to confirm readings before taking action, but at least in my case I could probably do away with 1-3 tests per day that I currently do just for trend analysis.
Add to that the fact that this pill will do nothing to help Type 1 diabetics such as your wife and myself.
In fact, in our case such a pill could be dangerous, as injections of glucagon (which this inhibits) are the "last resort" treatment for severe hypoglycemia (low blood sugar, caused by either an overdose of insulin, a smaller than normal meal combined with a normal insulin dose, or exercise without accompanying food or reduced insulin.)
Others have hinted at this, but the basics of diabetes, Type I and Type II:
Type I - Often called "juvenile diabetes", is almost always diagnosed before the age of 20 (hence the name), and usually before 10-15, hence its name. It is nearly unheard of for someone to develope Type I later than the age of 20. Type I is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the beta cells in the pancreas, which produce insulin. Due to the total lack of insulin, external insulin injections are required to treat this disease, no other treatment exists. (Well, prior to the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, total starvation was a treatment, but it would only work for a year or two at most before death. Without insulin, no matter how much sugar is in the blood, the body itself actually starves. A starvation diet would prevent the additional problems resulting from excessive blood sugar concentration to some degree, but wouldn't fix the fact that the body itself was starving.) Once a Type I diabetic starts treatment, diabetes becomes a balancing act. Insulin and exercise lower blood sugar, food and stress raise it. High blood sugar (above 120 mg/dl) does all sorts of long-term damage to the body, low blood sugar (below 80 mg/dl) can lead to weakness, disorientation, and if the sugar concentration gets too low, unconsciousness and death.
About the only really "good news" for Type I diabetics recently has been the development of continuous blood glucose monitoring systems, which makes insulin dose management much easier by providing much more information to fine tune insulin, food, and exercise levels. Unfortunately CGMS is not very accurate so far and requires fingersticks for confirmation before action is taken, and also is not yet covered by insurance companies. As a result, few people can obtain it and it cannot be used for a "closed loop" system where an insulin pump automatically reacts to blood sugar levels.
Type II is a different animal - The exact causes are unknown, but it usually is the result of decreased pancreatic capacity (due to old age) or increased insulin resistance (due to weight, stress, or other factors). It is often referred to as "adult diabetes" due to the fact that it is rarely seen in people under 30 unless they are overweight. While it is true that many Type IIs are overweight, many (probably 50% or more) are simply either old or unlucky. I once knew a Type II who was in his low 30s and was thin as a pencil - fortunately for him, he was able to manage his diabetes with diet alone (many small meals per day are in many ways better than three large ones.) New treatments for Type II are coming out all the time, and to be honest, that means that this article really isn't news. A new treatment for Type I (other than new insulin variants with different activity/time profiles such as Humalog/Novolog at the "faster than human insulin" end and Lantus at the "so long-acting there is no noticeable peak" end) would be big news.
As I mentioned in my post, you DO get lots of problems with built-in Bluetooth depending on which stack the laptop vendor chose. It's all in the stack, and not the hardware for the most part.
To my knowledge, both Apple and Dell use Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) chipsets. There is basically no difference between the two in terms of the BT hardware, and a large portion of the USB BT dongles out there (which use the exact same CSR hardware). In fact, in the case of Dell's Bluetooth modules (at least the 350, there's a 355 out now which might use different silicon), they are just an internal USB dongle with a different form factor.
All CSR hardware I've used works great with BlueZ under Linux. While the front ends and user interfaces still need lots of work and support for AD2P and the Headset and Handsfree profiles are still under heavy development, BlueZ works great with CSR chipsets. (Not so well with Broadcom chipsets, but is that any surprise when talking about Broadcom?)
Under Windows, the main problem seems to be multiple different BT stacks all of which stink for one reason or another. This is one case where I actually hope MS drives the "competition" out of the market by integrating a highly functional Bluetooth stack into Vista - While the default stack in XP SP2 is incredibly limited in terms of which profiles it supports, there is one good thing to say about it - it works with any hardware. In terms of quality, it blows away the other stacks for the profiles it does support. Unfortunately it just doesn't support some common profiles such as Headset, Handsfree, and AD2P. Other vendor stacks (WIDCOMM/Broadcom, BlueSoleil, Toshiba) do, but they are all of low quality and all of them are locked to the dongle they came with. (Guess what - in typical Broadcom fashion, they started the trend with the WIDCOMM stacks after they bought out WIDCOMM. Broadcom doesn't even allow the user to download upgrades to their stack!). In this case, the third-party vendors deserve to be pushed out of the market because their greed is making users' lives miserable with all of the compatibility problems.
There's also the huge variation in terms of actual functionality of devices that claim to support a particular profile. For example, some Handsfree 1.1-compliant headsets play much better with PCs and Treos than others do. Motorola headsets claim compliance, but don't seem to exhibit compliant behavior with anything other than Motorola phones for example. They behave badly with WIDCOMM, they behave badly with BlueSoleil, they behave badly with Treos, they even misbehave with BlueZ + bluetooth-alsa.
Been around for a while.
Higher data rates, higher sound quality for headsets, error correction for headset audio (read: significantly increased range and quality).
They still haven't fixed the compatibility nightmares of Bluetooth. God forbid you might want to use a Motorola headset with a Treo for example! It'll work, but barely, and most functionality (such as picking up a call from the headset) won't work.
The state of Bluetooth stacks for Windows is even worse. Microsoft's stack doesn't seem to support anything other than the serial profile - no headset audio, no AD2P. Only 50% of the stacks available a few months ago supported headset audio, even fewer supported AD2P (high quality stereo audio). Every single Bluetooth stack insists on making the headset the default audio device for the entire system, which is useless (and incredibly annoying) when you only want to use it for a SIP/IAX softphone, Skype, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, or similar stuff. Last but not least, even though most Bluetooth stacks support the majority of hardware chipsets out there, every single one is locked to a specific device vendor. i.e. if you buy a Dell with a CSR chipset, it'll come with the Toshiba bluetooth stack (worthless since it puts all serial devices at COM40 or above which most apps don't support). The WIDCOMM stack works with CSR chipsets, but is locked to whatever vendor's CSR-based dongle you got the stack with. You can't even upgrade to a recent version in most cases. (Buy a dongle with a WIDCOMM 3.x stack, and you can't upgrade to 5.x legally).
From what I've heard, both Microsoft and Logitech BT keyboards/mice don't work well unless you use the dongle and BT stack that came with the hardware - what's the point of being Bluetooth in that case?
About the only Bluetooth device I've ever used that worked well is my GPS receiver. I've tried 3 different headsets with my Treo and 2-3 different BT stacks on my PC for use with those headsets and have never been satisfied with the results.
"And so, modern mathematics, unwilling to give the Fields medal to the intuative but not pedatic Perelman, but unable to give it to the super garbled Morgan and Tian, instead had to give it to Yau. But since Yau hadn't actually added anything but formality to the proof, and the other team and only added more, they had to give the medal to Perelman as well. They would have preferred to have just given it to Morgan and Tian, so they're bitter now and blaming Yau for publishing so soon."
I can't comment on the rest of your post, but you got at least one critical fact wrong:
Perelman won the Fields medal, but refused to accept it. The article essentially claimed that all of this corruption and bickering was why Perelman refused the medal - He seemingly wants nothing more to do with the field of mathematics in its current state.
"Leveler: An individual's rank and status in society are not significant. As in the culture of early video game arcades, "It didn't matter what you drove to the arcade. If you sucked at Asteroids, you just sucked." Players on online games use a separate avatar unrelated to their real life person, and social status is rarely invoked."
In this case, "Leveler" has NOTHING to do with leveling up. RTFA.
"4. X-Windows. What a mess. Why do I have to tell it my x & y refresh rates for my monitor? Windows just 'knows'. Many more things here I feel that X-Windows should just 'know' - the number of buttons on my USB mouse for-instance. If Windows can do it, there's no reason why Linux can't. Also, X-Windows 'feels' slower than Windows. I'm sure there's good reasons for this, but I don't care; Windows is snappier."
I've noticed no speed differences in terms of responsiveness between X and Windows. In fact, frequently Windows on this machine is far less responsive than X.
As to refresh rates - I haven't had to choose a refresh rate in years. Stop using ancient hardware that doesn't report its refresh rates to the video card, and stop using a video card so ancient it can't provide that information to X. Video cards have supported this for probably nearly a decade, in the case of monitors maybe 4-5 years. Things get even easier with monitors/vid cards that do DVI.
Guess what? Since fuel cells directly convert chemical energy into electrical energy, they are far more efficient than a combustion engine that is limited by the laws of thermodynamics (i.e. the process is chemical energy -> thermal energy -> mechanical or thermal energy). I believe I've seen specifications indicating that fuel cells can achieve at least 50% efficiency, of not more. (The table on Wikipedia confirms this - some efficiencies are as high as 70%).
The idea is not that sodium borohydride is a better energy storage system alone than diesel, it's that the "whole system" is better, due to the fact that fuel cells are inherently far more efficient than nearly anything which involves a thermal cycle.
...says the guy with the 4-digit ID...
:)
Happy now?