Just because you have a mobile doesn't mean that it has to be turned on.
I'd gotten very used to always having a mobile on, being able to be contacted anywhere and at anytime. But I got rid of my mobile 3 years ago and haven't bothered getting a replacement, and it's been very refreshing to have to make appointments to meet people and so on.
More realistically, if you have your own mobile, you can leave it on and have it with you 24/7. But a mobile from your job should be set to turn on at 9 and off at 5, if those are your hours. I'm shocked by how many people I work with allow their bosses to make them work outside of office hours by ringing them up and getting them to do errands in their own spare time. It's bad enough with European companies slowly moving towards the American model of unpaid lunch breaks that aren't even 30 minutes long, without also copying the 24/7 worker ethic.
I work in a level 2 lab here, and sometimes I bring in my Powerbook for taking down notes during a long day of experiments. While it's not necessary to have it sterile (as it stays out on a desk away from the sterile areas), I do clean it superficially with antiseptic to minimise risks of infecting my cells.
A spray bottle with 70% or 90% alcohol and a bit of tissue paper will kill most germs, and also do a lovely job of removing oils and grime. And if you turn your computer off before starting, there shouldn't be too much risk of electrocuting yourself.
There have been HUNDREDS of articles like this over the last few years, especially since Apple moved to OS X. And every time the tone is, that Mac users have no idea how dangerous computing is, and have too much trust in Apple and OS X to be inherently virus/malware/spyware/trojan proof.
The problem for me is, that I see nothing to shake that trust in OS X.
I switched to OS X machines after years of administrating a collection of around 100 PCs in two internet cafes, and 100 PCs running Windows being used by thousands of clueless users entails massive amounts of work and hardship to keep them virus/malware/spyware/trojan free. We had a few Mac machines, and all they ever needed was to have 'software update' run once in a while.
There's no point telling people that they have too much faith in OS X's powers to keep out the hackers and viruses, when there are STILL no viruses for Macs, still no malware apps, still no trojans, still no worms. What can they expect articles like this to make users do? Run anti-virus software everyday? What the hell would it be looking for?
or without a headphone amp, odds are you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an ipod mini (supposedly the worst sounding ipod) and any of the other offerings, or any iriver/archos alternatives.
iPods are mainly for portable music, most of the time music on the move doesn't need audiophile reproduction, and even the cheapest MP3 players offer very decent music quality.
If you are mulling over splashing out so you can get GREAT sound quality from an iPod, just concentrate on the parts that count, the headphones. A pair of sennheiser or etymotics will set you back just half the price of an iPod and will make a stunning difference to sound quality.
Here's a simple way to increase your lifespan. Eat less. In fact, halve the amount of food you eat.
There are papers that you can search for with sciencedirect.com or scholar.google.com that show rats that are given half the calories of the control group living almost 50% longer. It's just not exactly something that you can sell to people. You can live longer, if you live LESS. There's a reason animals that live very long lives have very slow metabolisms (such as Turtles) and animals that have very high metabolisms live less (such as humming birds and mice). To put it simply, you can 'burn the midnight oil' and live a short life, or eat less and do less and live longer.
Putting it more complicatedly, the reason you age is generally regarded to be because of damage your body and cells accumulate over a lifetime of living. The damage often comes from 'Oxidative stress'. This is just a very broad umbrella term for anything that causes the generation of 'Reactive oxygen species' that are highly reactive molecules that zip about your cell damaging proteins and DNA. ROS are made by things such as too much Vitamin K, smoking, UV light or certain other radiation bands, too much iron in the diet, and so on.
And the biggest contributor to ROS in your body over it's life? The Mitochondria. The 'power plant' of each cell. It makes ROS as a part of the process used to make ATP (the 'batteries' of your cells) and inevitably some escapes and causes damage. Over a life-time the damage builds up.
The biggest contributor to ageing is just plain old living (kind of obvious really), and the best way to therefore cut down on that damage is to eat less, slowing down the metabolism and decreasing the amount of ROS the mitochondria produces.
IMHO, not really worth it! you could get hit by a bus tomorrow! Dig into your fresh Chiabatta and Fetta cheese!
Matt Nikki in the comments section discovered that the DRM can be bypassed simply by renaming your favourite ripping program with "$sys$" at the start of the filename and ripping the CD using this file, which is now undetectable even by the Sony DRM. You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!"
All I've seen from people on this issue are ways to get around the DRM. Yes, there are MANY ways to get around it, audio line-out to a DAT or an iPod, using linux, a mac, CDex, Audiograbber, Audiohijack-pro...
But that is all just retarded, if you're buying this CD and you use it as Sony want you to use it, it is NO different than if you buy the CD and rip it with some workaround. Sony don't SEE a difference. The MP3s will be on DC++ anyway, it's not like they will lose sales to people ripping it for their iPods or whatever.
And if you do buy the CD, (regardless of wheter you rip it or not) you have just voted. Corporations are the Governments of today and with your purchase you vote. And buying any content protected CD regardless of what you do with it is a VOTE to Sony that DRM is acceptable to you. And that means next time it won't be some crappy nobody C&W CD that is taking over your PC, it'll be the big Sony acts. And then the big EMI acts and WB acts and so on.
Vote with your cash, buy non-DRM encumbered CDs or else just steal it. I'd prefer to take the moral issues and risk of stealing rather than just be Sony's bitch and install their shitty rootkit on my computer.
Wal-mart could also see a glass half FILLED with milk, Google would be able to tell customers that Wal-mart have a better deal than their competitors. That's all google can do, is spread information. It's not ever going to act by itself, it's just going to allow people to make better decisions (assuming the information is accurate).
Some customers might spend a while looking at froogle.com and find that the cheapest Speakers only cost 50 quid at Wal-mart, and that'll keep Wal-mart and the consumers happy.
Others might spend time with google.com and find the best speakers are from Genelec and buy them, keeping Genelec and the consumers happy.
More information = more informed people = less bad purchases. It can only affect Wal-mart (and others) badly if they are not offering what their target market wants.
As the voting form requires to vote for all categories it is not a good thing to do this if you have no clue who all these people are. Even I, as a overaddict news consuming European, have no clue what to choose for most of the categories because here in Europe news sources are mostly nation minded and therefore very fragmented.
Oh please, give me a break. There are a huge number of fantastic EU focused news-sites that have excellent coverage on all matters pertaining to the Union. Not to mention the EU's own news pages.
And of course most news sites (such as BBC news) have an EU portal. And of course you can use google news with a custom filter for 'European Union' to get your daily fix.
Steve went on, "It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something.... Most people don't take the time to do that." He then proceeded to tell a story that both sheds light on his private life and gives some insight into the decision-making process that often turns life into a hell for people who work with him. Making the point that design isn't just an issue for "fancy new gadgets," he described how his whole family became involved in, of all things, the selection of a new washing machine and dryer. This is a little hard to picture: The billionaire Jobs family didn't have very good machines. Selecting new ones became a project for the whole family. The big decision came down to whether to purchase a European machine or an American-made one. The European machine, according to Steve, does a much better job, uses about one-quarter as much water, and treats the clothes more gently so that they last longer. But the American machines take about half as long to wash the clothes.
"We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We spent about two weeks talking about this. Every night at the dinner table" -- imagine dinner-table conversation about washing machines every night! -- "we'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design." In the end, they opted for European machines, which Steve described as "too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in this country."
Of course, this wasn't really about washing machines; it was about passing along the concern for design to his children and perhaps to (his wife) Laurene. The decision clearly gave him more pleasure than you would expect. He called the new machines "one of the few products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really happy about. These guys (had) really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers."
Steve's surprising tag line on the story says a great deal about how much design really means to him: "I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years."
Some people might think it a bit weird that there was so much thought going into buying a washing machine, but i think that if you get to see some of the lovely stuff Miele make you might not think it so weird. It's obvious the engineers at Miele are as obsessive over their machines as Jobs is over his. And it's clear he noticed and appreciated that.
Not to mention how nice it is to know that despite his billions he still does his own laundry.
I am always fixing peoples PCs, I don't mind, most of the time it's drivers or spyware. I had a good friend come over two weeks ago with a Compaq presario 1000 (compaq now owned by HP and HP responsible for their products).
The (slightly over 1 year old) laptop would not turn on. No response at all, when you hit the power, it made the tiniest of 'whirrs' and did nothing. So I guessed it was a broken Video card or bad ram. It was something I wasn't going to touch anyway. I decided just on a whim (while we waited for the kettle to boil) to google. Turns out this is a very common problem with this X1000 model. Compaq used over-clocked 9000 ATI cards driven as 9200s. They overheated and over time worked themselves out of the motherboard. A quick initial fix was to press the 67Y keys very hard. I did it, and the laptop booted.
Problem is, this is not a repair, apparently the problem will repeat until that fix doesn't work. This occurred in Sweden, and in Sweden the law is if the problem is manufacturers, you have a 3 year guarantee. So my friend gets her cash back (to buy a powerbook or Toshiba on my recommendation). All the poor bastards in the US (who have a forum to complain about this issue) are out of luck, HP have ignored them. They sold mislabelled and unfit-for-purpose hardware and shafted their customers. Most of the comments I read about this (frankly terribly designed and ugly) laptop were all saying "never HP,never again".
In Ireland, you had a PIN number, a password, and several security questions like "Where were you born?" "what are the last 3 numbers of your contact phone number?"
Not too bad, but as the article says, easy to get over a period of time, if you have keyboard loggers.
In Sweden, A system that is apparently years old, you get a secure key-fob from www.vasco.com, and that's it. you enter your account number, then activate your key-fob, enter your PIN into that, then 2 4-digit random numbers from the login screen, then it will give you a single 6-digit number to enter into the login screen, and that's it. Plus the website (SEB bank) is perfectly happy with IE OR firefox, safari, camino.
Scandinavia is the Mac of the social world, they do everything years ahead of the rest of the pack.
Pithhelmet Pithhelmet Pithhelmet Pithhelmet...
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Why Do You Block Ads?
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· Score: 1
I've tried out a lot of ad-blocking software, for windows, OS X and linux, for Opera, Firefox, Galleon, Camino, IE, Safari, Mozilla and so on. And the absolute best was pithhelmet. You install it, and you never touch it ever ever ever again. You never see an ad again. No wildcards, no right clicking and adding URLs to a list, no accidental blocking of e-mail composer window pop-ups, just an ad free internet.
And why do I block ads? Because unlike ads in print, flashing moving blinking siezure-inducing gif ads are not casual and latent, they annoy the living SHIT out of me. And unlike moving ads on TV/in the cinema, they almost seem to aim at being as crass and annoying as possible.
I don't see it as a bad thing that I block ads (denying the advertiser their investment), because I'm aware that 90% of the people on the net are cruising along with IE and Gator/Collwebsearch/Bonzi Buddy installed, watching a few dozen pop-ups every ten minutes, and so keep all those fantastic advertising companies in business. I don't see a future where anything but a huge minority are savvy enough to install ad-blocking software, so I don't worry about cutting off a source of the 'nets revenue.
They chose the second. This meant their PC market share will probably now never rise above 5%, the PC product line whatever its merits will not be a source of much growth.
Apple's PC sales growth is around double that of the rest of the industry. It's at over 40%.
Let me just also add, that if Apples marketshare is still under 5% in 2 years, I'll sell my macs and go back to my Amiga 500.
But when you take a screenshot in OS X you don't have to select and drag a box around the window you want as this author has done.
Press Apple-Shift-4, which changes your cursor to a cross-hairs, this lets you drag a box on any part of the screen and the contents are dumped to the desktop as a screenshot.
But! then press spacebar and the cursor changes to an icon of a camera, now click on the window you want to take a screenshot of, and the screenshot will be of that window only, pixel-perfect to the border.
Etymotic, Shure and Koss all make noise isolating headphones, which are generally cheaper and have higher quality sound than noise cancelling gimmicks like the Bose headsets.
Basically, you put in a set of these ear-canal plugs, you hear nothing but the music, and therefore can listen to your music at far lower levels in noisy environments than you would be able to with normal open or closed can style headphones.
The isolation from the Etymotic ER-4p/s for example, is 44 decibels, which is phenomenal. I own a pair of Er-4ps myself, and have used them a lot while travelling, and have to say that spending 300 euro on a set of headphones does not look like a waste of cash once you get up to 30,000 feet in a packed Airbus.
The isolation is so complete that it's shocking to hear the noise levels that everyone else is being exposed to once you pull the headphones out after a period of use.
A lot of commentary I've read about the Hurricane Katrina disaster has shown total ignorance of how the dutch people have overcome their problems with sinking land and rising sea levels. Over half of the Netherlands is under Sea level ( as you can see here) and the Dutch haven't just build a massive defense system against flooding, but have continued to push back the shoreline and claim more land from the sea. They claimed 1650 Km^2 back in the 1930s!
To say that New Orleans is a city that should be left flooded and forgotten just because it happens to be below sea level is nonsensical, as the Dutch have almost an entire country (and one of the richest countries in the world) operating from below Sea level with a far larger border with the Sea to protect against. All it takes is a little innovative engineering.
alternate energy sources certainly merit investment we are a looong way from being able to produce anywhere near the energy needed to supply millions of autos with hydrogen.
Or at the very minimum, Denmark and Germany. Both of which have huge amounts of energy produced by wind. Not only that, the EU has already made mandates to set-up a 5,000 Mega watt wind farm off shore in EU waters by 2015. Each turbine will produce 5 Megawatts, that is a hell of a lot of energy to come from one machine. More importantly, they are huge investment in future technology, already Denmark supplies 20% of it's own electricity from wind farms.
Check out a picture of just ONE of the blades here.
Yes, it's still in it's infancy, but it's certainly not a whacky implausible alternative, as the Danes have clearly shown. If every country invested in their own wind/solar/wave sources with as much gusto as Denmark, the world would be a hell of a lot cleaner.
You have not yet seen HDTV on good HDTV capable hardware?
Would i be right?
why pay monthly fees to use a DVR or buy a $3000 TV for marginal picture improvement. at this point, you'd have to be pretty blind not to be somewhat satisfied by standard picture quality. you can see what's going on, can't you? then why does it matter?
Well, here's how you can change your mind on how it matters.
(1) Go to a local Apple Store
(2) sit down in front of the 30" display
(3) Download a few of the HDTV H.264 trailers from apple.com
(4) ???
(5) Start saving up
HDTV picture clarity is no small improvement, it can be jaw-dropping, and although at the moment it costs a bomb, a lot of aggressive marketing and pricing between Sony, Matsushita and Philips are bringing the prices way down.
HDTV is no DVD-A/SACD, it's a real and distinct and fantastic improvement.
Americans I know cry bloody murder as gas prices inch up to 4 USD a gallon.
Here in Europe, we're between 5 and 7 USD a gallon, and we've never had gas prices so low as they are in the US. And averages wages in most EU countries are less than they are in the USA, so how in the hell can Americans find 3 or 4 USD a gallon as impossibly high prices?
Even the difference in Fuel economy of US and European cars can't be that much of a factor! So what gives?
The widget manager isn't much of a manager. All you can do is uncheck a widget to disable it. This basically just hides it from the widget dock. There is no way to move a widget from ~/Library/Widgets/ to/Library/Widgets/ and you can't delete widgets.
To delete a widget in the widget manager, click the red button to the right of the widget icon.
Yeah! It's complicated I know.
Call me a big weird freak if you like, but...
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Top Mice Compared
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· Score: 1
... but I like trackpads the best. I had to use one without choice when I bought a powerbook for use on my travels, and mice are just not very fun to use on a plane or train where your arms have to be squished in to your sides.
So I used the trackpad, and now, a few years later, even when I'm on my desk I don't bother with a mouse unless I'm playing some quake.
Very easy to use when typing without moving your arms, very precise after some practise, and it leaves my hands in a comfortable position. Now if only someone would make USB trackpads for desktop computers:)
This is probably the worst thing I've ever seen passed as news on/. I've seen plenty of people complaining about Advertisements for people's new sites or products being posted as news stories, and I winced at that review of the Battery Sticker that gave mobile phones longer battery life, but this is an all time low.
This article is so ridiculously retarded and bereft of any insight, it is not even an educated guess, or any kind of intelligent prediction. Someone using 3 appleinsider links as his sources and also stupid enough to postulate erroneously on the capabilities of the current iPod photo chip's power even though those data are available on the net with a little digging, does not deserve to have his drivel served up to/. readers as news.
Having said that, this quote made me laugh,
Their strategy is to release a bare minimum and upgrade if they absolutely have to. This is a major, major flaw of Apple and you can find examples of it over and over in their history (iMac with no way to write data, 12" Powerbook severely underpowered at 867 MHz, iPod photo that cannot actually take photos)
...when stonehenge is being discussed, is that a few hundred miles away in Dublin, Ireland, there is a megalithic tomb that is far older than stonehenge and the pyramids, and still functions today as an astrological calender. It illuminates internally only twice a year, on the longest and shortest days of the year.
Certainly Stonehenge is impressive, I find it far more impressive that a 5000 year old tomb with clock function still works even today.
resources
The dollar cannot avoid further declines against other major currencies unless the US trade and current account deficits improve, legendary investor and businessman Warren Buffett said.
"I think, over time, unless we have a major change in trade policies, I don't see how the dollar avoids going down," the world's second-richest individual told CNBC television.
"I don't know when it happens. I don't have any idea whether it will be this month or this year or next year, but we are force-feeding dollars on to the rest of the world at the rate of close to a couple billion dollars a day, and that's going to weigh on the dollar."
Buffett noted the record US deficit of 164.7 billion dollars in the third quarter of 2004 in the current account, which measures trade and investment flows.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you have a mobile doesn't mean that it has to be turned on.
I'd gotten very used to always having a mobile on, being able to be contacted anywhere and at anytime. But I got rid of my mobile 3 years ago and haven't bothered getting a replacement, and it's been very refreshing to have to make appointments to meet people and so on.
More realistically, if you have your own mobile, you can leave it on and have it with you 24/7. But a mobile from your job should be set to turn on at 9 and off at 5, if those are your hours. I'm shocked by how many people I work with allow their bosses to make them work outside of office hours by ringing them up and getting them to do errands in their own spare time. It's bad enough with European companies slowly moving towards the American model of unpaid lunch breaks that aren't even 30 minutes long, without also copying the 24/7 worker ethic.
I work in a level 2 lab here, and sometimes I bring in my Powerbook for taking down notes during a long day of experiments. While it's not necessary to have it sterile (as it stays out on a desk away from the sterile areas), I do clean it superficially with antiseptic to minimise risks of infecting my cells.
A spray bottle with 70% or 90% alcohol and a bit of tissue paper will kill most germs, and also do a lovely job of removing oils and grime. And if you turn your computer off before starting, there shouldn't be too much risk of electrocuting yourself.
Try these for 10 USD
There have been HUNDREDS of articles like this over the last few years, especially since Apple moved to OS X. And every time the tone is, that Mac users have no idea how dangerous computing is, and have too much trust in Apple and OS X to be inherently virus/malware/spyware/trojan proof.
The problem for me is, that I see nothing to shake that trust in OS X.
I switched to OS X machines after years of administrating a collection of around 100 PCs in two internet cafes, and 100 PCs running Windows being used by thousands of clueless users entails massive amounts of work and hardship to keep them virus/malware/spyware/trojan free. We had a few Mac machines, and all they ever needed was to have 'software update' run once in a while.
There's no point telling people that they have too much faith in OS X's powers to keep out the hackers and viruses, when there are STILL no viruses for Macs, still no malware apps, still no trojans, still no worms. What can they expect articles like this to make users do? Run anti-virus software everyday? What the hell would it be looking for?
or without a headphone amp, odds are you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an ipod mini (supposedly the worst sounding ipod) and any of the other offerings, or any iriver/archos alternatives.
h eadphones/sennheiser-hd-555.phph eadphones/sennheiser-hd-595.phpa r-monitor/etymotic-er-6i.phpa r-monitor/etymotic-er-4p.php
iPods are mainly for portable music, most of the time music on the move doesn't need audiophile reproduction, and even the cheapest MP3 players offer very decent music quality.
If you are mulling over splashing out so you can get GREAT sound quality from an iPod, just concentrate on the parts that count, the headphones. A pair of sennheiser or etymotics will set you back just half the price of an iPod and will make a stunning difference to sound quality.
http://www.headphone.com/products/headphones/all-
http://www.headphone.com/products/headphones/all-
http://www.headphone.com/products/headphones/in-e
http://www.headphone.com/products/headphones/in-e
Here's a simple way to increase your lifespan. Eat less. In fact, halve the amount of food you eat.
There are papers that you can search for with sciencedirect.com or scholar.google.com that show rats that are given half the calories of the control group living almost 50% longer. It's just not exactly something that you can sell to people. You can live longer, if you live LESS. There's a reason animals that live very long lives have very slow metabolisms (such as Turtles) and animals that have very high metabolisms live less (such as humming birds and mice). To put it simply, you can 'burn the midnight oil' and live a short life, or eat less and do less and live longer.
Putting it more complicatedly, the reason you age is generally regarded to be because of damage your body and cells accumulate over a lifetime of living. The damage often comes from 'Oxidative stress'. This is just a very broad umbrella term for anything that causes the generation of 'Reactive oxygen species' that are highly reactive molecules that zip about your cell damaging proteins and DNA. ROS are made by things such as too much Vitamin K, smoking, UV light or certain other radiation bands, too much iron in the diet, and so on.
And the biggest contributor to ROS in your body over it's life? The Mitochondria. The 'power plant' of each cell. It makes ROS as a part of the process used to make ATP (the 'batteries' of your cells) and inevitably some escapes and causes damage. Over a life-time the damage builds up.
The biggest contributor to ageing is just plain old living (kind of obvious really), and the best way to therefore cut down on that damage is to eat less, slowing down the metabolism and decreasing the amount of ROS the mitochondria produces.
IMHO, not really worth it! you could get hit by a bus tomorrow! Dig into your fresh Chiabatta and Fetta cheese!
Matt Nikki in the comments section discovered that the DRM can be bypassed simply by renaming your favourite ripping program with "$sys$" at the start of the filename and ripping the CD using this file, which is now undetectable even by the Sony DRM. You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!"
All I've seen from people on this issue are ways to get around the DRM. Yes, there are MANY ways to get around it, audio line-out to a DAT or an iPod, using linux, a mac, CDex, Audiograbber, Audiohijack-pro...
But that is all just retarded, if you're buying this CD and you use it as Sony want you to use it, it is NO different than if you buy the CD and rip it with some workaround. Sony don't SEE a difference. The MP3s will be on DC++ anyway, it's not like they will lose sales to people ripping it for their iPods or whatever.
And if you do buy the CD, (regardless of wheter you rip it or not) you have just voted. Corporations are the Governments of today and with your purchase you vote. And buying any content protected CD regardless of what you do with it is a VOTE to Sony that DRM is acceptable to you. And that means next time it won't be some crappy nobody C&W CD that is taking over your PC, it'll be the big Sony acts. And then the big EMI acts and WB acts and so on.
Vote with your cash, buy non-DRM encumbered CDs or else just steal it. I'd prefer to take the moral issues and risk of stealing rather than just be Sony's bitch and install their shitty rootkit on my computer.
Wal-mart could also see a glass half FILLED with milk, Google would be able to tell customers that Wal-mart have a better deal than their competitors. That's all google can do, is spread information. It's not ever going to act by itself, it's just going to allow people to make better decisions (assuming the information is accurate).
Some customers might spend a while looking at froogle.com and find that the cheapest Speakers only cost 50 quid at Wal-mart, and that'll keep Wal-mart and the consumers happy.
Others might spend time with google.com and find the best speakers are from Genelec and buy them, keeping Genelec and the consumers happy.
More information = more informed people = less bad purchases. It can only affect Wal-mart (and others) badly if they are not offering what their target market wants.
As the voting form requires to vote for all categories it is not a good thing to do this if you have no clue who all these people are. Even I, as a overaddict news consuming European, have no clue what to choose for most of the categories because here in Europe news sources are mostly nation minded and therefore very fragmented.
Oh please, give me a break. There are a huge number of fantastic EU focused news-sites that have excellent coverage on all matters pertaining to the Union. Not to mention the EU's own news pages.
http://euobserver.com/
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/
http://www.european-voice.com/
http://europa.eu.int/geninfo/whatsnew.htm
http://europa.eu.int/newsletter/index_en.htm
http://europa.eu.int/news/index_en.htm
http://www.eubusiness.com/
http://www.eubusiness.com/
And of course most news sites (such as BBC news) have an EU portal. And of course you can use google news with a custom filter for 'European Union' to get your daily fix.
It took me a while to find what he actually ended up buying. It was a Miele washer. Premium German engineering of course.
In another more detailed interview ,
Steve went on, "It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something.... Most people don't take the time to do that." He then proceeded to tell a story that both sheds light on his private life and gives some insight into the decision-making process that often turns life into a hell for people who work with him. Making the point that design isn't just an issue for "fancy new gadgets," he described how his whole family became involved in, of all things, the selection of a new washing machine and dryer. This is a little hard to picture: The billionaire Jobs family didn't have very good machines. Selecting new ones became a project for the whole family. The big decision came down to whether to purchase a European machine or an American-made one. The European machine, according to Steve, does a much better job, uses about one-quarter as much water, and treats the clothes more gently so that they last longer. But the American machines take about half as long to wash the clothes.
"We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We spent about two weeks talking about this. Every night at the dinner table" -- imagine dinner-table conversation about washing machines every night! -- "we'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design." In the end, they opted for European machines, which Steve described as "too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in this country."
Of course, this wasn't really about washing machines; it was about passing along the concern for design to his children and perhaps to (his wife) Laurene. The decision clearly gave him more pleasure than you would expect. He called the new machines "one of the few products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really happy about. These guys (had) really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers."
Steve's surprising tag line on the story says a great deal about how much design really means to him: "I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years."
Some people might think it a bit weird that there was so much thought going into buying a washing machine, but i think that if you get to see some of the lovely stuff Miele make you might not think it so weird. It's obvious the engineers at Miele are as obsessive over their machines as Jobs is over his. And it's clear he noticed and appreciated that.
Not to mention how nice it is to know that despite his billions he still does his own laundry.
don't make me laugh.
I am always fixing peoples PCs, I don't mind, most of the time it's drivers or spyware. I had a good friend come over two weeks ago with a Compaq presario 1000 (compaq now owned by HP and HP responsible for their products).
The (slightly over 1 year old) laptop would not turn on. No response at all, when you hit the power, it made the tiniest of 'whirrs' and did nothing. So I guessed it was a broken Video card or bad ram. It was something I wasn't going to touch anyway. I decided just on a whim (while we waited for the kettle to boil) to google. Turns out this is a very common problem with this X1000 model. Compaq used over-clocked 9000 ATI cards driven as 9200s. They overheated and over time worked themselves out of the motherboard. A quick initial fix was to press the 67Y keys very hard. I did it, and the laptop booted.
Problem is, this is not a repair, apparently the problem will repeat until that fix doesn't work. This occurred in Sweden, and in Sweden the law is if the problem is manufacturers, you have a 3 year guarantee. So my friend gets her cash back (to buy a powerbook or Toshiba on my recommendation). All the poor bastards in the US (who have a forum to complain about this issue) are out of luck, HP have ignored them. They sold mislabelled and unfit-for-purpose hardware and shafted their customers. Most of the comments I read about this (frankly terribly designed and ugly) laptop were all saying "never HP,never again".
Hp are not the company they were 10 years ago.
In Ireland, you had a PIN number, a password, and several security questions like "Where were you born?" "what are the last 3 numbers of your contact phone number?"
Not too bad, but as the article says, easy to get over a period of time, if you have keyboard loggers.
In Sweden, A system that is apparently years old, you get a secure key-fob from www.vasco.com, and that's it. you enter your account number, then activate your key-fob, enter your PIN into that, then 2 4-digit random numbers from the login screen, then it will give you a single 6-digit number to enter into the login screen, and that's it. Plus the website (SEB bank) is perfectly happy with IE OR firefox, safari, camino.
Scandinavia is the Mac of the social world, they do everything years ahead of the rest of the pack.
I've tried out a lot of ad-blocking software, for windows, OS X and linux, for Opera, Firefox, Galleon, Camino, IE, Safari, Mozilla and so on. And the absolute best was pithhelmet. You install it, and you never touch it ever ever ever again. You never see an ad again. No wildcards, no right clicking and adding URLs to a list, no accidental blocking of e-mail composer window pop-ups, just an ad free internet.
Grab it at pimpmysafari.com.
And why do I block ads? Because unlike ads in print, flashing moving blinking siezure-inducing gif ads are not casual and latent, they annoy the living SHIT out of me. And unlike moving ads on TV/in the cinema, they almost seem to aim at being as crass and annoying as possible.
I don't see it as a bad thing that I block ads (denying the advertiser their investment), because I'm aware that 90% of the people on the net are cruising along with IE and Gator/Collwebsearch/Bonzi Buddy installed, watching a few dozen pop-ups every ten minutes, and so keep all those fantastic advertising companies in business. I don't see a future where anything but a huge minority are savvy enough to install ad-blocking software, so I don't worry about cutting off a source of the 'nets revenue.
They chose the second. This meant their PC market share will probably now never rise above 5%, the PC product line whatever its merits will not be a source of much growth.
Apple's PC sales growth is around double that of the rest of the industry. It's at over 40%.
Let me just also add, that if Apples marketshare is still under 5% in 2 years, I'll sell my macs and go back to my Amiga 500.
But when you take a screenshot in OS X you don't have to select and drag a box around the window you want as this author has done.
Press Apple-Shift-4, which changes your cursor to a cross-hairs, this lets you drag a box on any part of the screen and the contents are dumped to the desktop as a screenshot.
But! then press spacebar and the cursor changes to an icon of a camera, now click on the window you want to take a screenshot of, and the screenshot will be of that window only, pixel-perfect to the border.
So it looks like this and results in this.
Noise cancelling or isolating headphones.
Etymotic, Shure and Koss all make noise isolating headphones, which are generally cheaper and have higher quality sound than noise cancelling gimmicks like the Bose headsets.
Basically, you put in a set of these ear-canal plugs, you hear nothing but the music, and therefore can listen to your music at far lower levels in noisy environments than you would be able to with normal open or closed can style headphones.
The isolation from the Etymotic ER-4p/s for example, is 44 decibels, which is phenomenal. I own a pair of Er-4ps myself, and have used them a lot while travelling, and have to say that spending 300 euro on a set of headphones does not look like a waste of cash once you get up to 30,000 feet in a packed Airbus.
The isolation is so complete that it's shocking to hear the noise levels that everyone else is being exposed to once you pull the headphones out after a period of use.
Not to mention the fantastic sound quality.
Tell that to the Dutch.
A lot of commentary I've read about the Hurricane Katrina disaster has shown total ignorance of how the dutch people have overcome their problems with sinking land and rising sea levels. Over half of the Netherlands is under Sea level ( as you can see here) and the Dutch haven't just build a massive defense system against flooding, but have continued to push back the shoreline and claim more land from the sea. They claimed 1650 Km^2 back in the 1930s!
To say that New Orleans is a city that should be left flooded and forgotten just because it happens to be below sea level is nonsensical, as the Dutch have almost an entire country (and one of the richest countries in the world) operating from below Sea level with a far larger border with the Sea to protect against.
All it takes is a little innovative engineering.
alternate energy sources certainly merit investment we are a looong way from being able to produce anywhere near the energy needed to supply millions of autos with hydrogen.
Or at the very minimum, Denmark and Germany. Both of which have huge amounts of energy produced by wind. Not only that, the EU has already made mandates to set-up a 5,000 Mega watt wind farm off shore in EU waters by 2015. Each turbine will produce 5 Megawatts, that is a hell of a lot of energy to come from one machine. More importantly, they are huge investment in future technology, already Denmark supplies 20% of it's own electricity from wind farms.
Check out a picture of just ONE of the blades here.
Yes, it's still in it's infancy, but it's certainly not a whacky implausible alternative, as the Danes have clearly shown. If every country invested in their own wind/solar/wave sources with as much gusto as Denmark, the world would be a hell of a lot cleaner.
You have not yet seen HDTV on good HDTV capable hardware?
Would i be right?
why pay monthly fees to use a DVR or buy a $3000 TV for marginal picture improvement. at this point, you'd have to be pretty blind not to be somewhat satisfied by standard picture quality. you can see what's going on, can't you? then why does it matter?
Well, here's how you can change your mind on how it matters.
(1) Go to a local Apple Store
(2) sit down in front of the 30" display
(3) Download a few of the HDTV H.264 trailers from apple.com
(4) ???
(5) Start saving up
HDTV picture clarity is no small improvement, it can be jaw-dropping, and although at the moment it costs a bomb, a lot of aggressive marketing and pricing between Sony, Matsushita and Philips are bringing the prices way down.
HDTV is no DVD-A/SACD, it's a real and distinct and fantastic improvement.
Americans I know cry bloody murder as gas prices inch up to 4 USD a gallon.
Here in Europe, we're between 5 and 7 USD a gallon, and we've never had gas prices so low as they are in the US. And averages wages in most EU countries are less than they are in the USA, so how in the hell can Americans find 3 or 4 USD a gallon as impossibly high prices?
Even the difference in Fuel economy of US and European cars can't be that much of a factor! So what gives?
The widget manager isn't much of a manager. All you can do is uncheck a widget to disable it. This basically just hides it from the widget dock. There is no way to move a widget from ~/Library/Widgets/ to /Library/Widgets/ and you can't delete widgets.
To delete a widget in the widget manager, click the red button to the right of the widget icon.
Yeah! It's complicated I know.
... but I like trackpads the best. I had to use one without choice when I bought a powerbook for use on my travels, and mice are just not very fun to use on a plane or train where your arms have to be squished in to your sides.
:)
So I used the trackpad, and now, a few years later, even when I'm on my desk I don't bother with a mouse unless I'm playing some quake.
Very easy to use when typing without moving your arms, very precise after some practise, and it leaves my hands in a comfortable position. Now if only someone would make USB trackpads for desktop computers
This is probably the worst thing I've ever seen passed as news on /.
/. readers as news.
I've seen plenty of people complaining about Advertisements for people's new sites or products being posted as news stories, and I winced at that review of the Battery Sticker that gave mobile phones longer battery life, but this is an all time low.
This article is so ridiculously retarded and bereft of any insight, it is not even an educated guess, or any kind of intelligent prediction. Someone using 3 appleinsider links as his sources and also stupid enough to postulate erroneously on the capabilities of the current iPod photo chip's power even though those data are available on the net with a little digging, does not deserve to have his drivel served up to
Having said that, this quote made me laugh,
Their strategy is to release a bare minimum and upgrade if they absolutely have to. This is a major, major flaw of Apple and you can find examples of it over and over in their history (iMac with no way to write data, 12" Powerbook severely underpowered at 867 MHz, iPod photo that cannot actually take photos)
what an idiot.
...when stonehenge is being discussed, is that a few hundred miles away in Dublin, Ireland, there is a megalithic tomb that is far older than stonehenge and the pyramids, and still functions today as an astrological calender. It illuminates internally only twice a year, on the longest and shortest days of the year.
Certainly Stonehenge is impressive, I find it far more impressive that a 5000 year old tomb with clock function still works even today. resources
In other News....
Warren Buffett sees no way but down for US dollar
The dollar cannot avoid further declines against other major currencies unless the US trade and current account deficits improve, legendary investor and businessman Warren Buffett said.
"I think, over time, unless we have a major change in trade policies, I don't see how the dollar avoids going down," the world's second-richest individual told CNBC television.
"I don't know when it happens. I don't have any idea whether it will be this month or this year or next year, but we are force-feeding dollars on to the rest of the world at the rate of close to a couple billion dollars a day, and that's going to weigh on the dollar."
Buffett noted the record US deficit of 164.7 billion dollars in the third quarter of 2004 in the current account, which measures trade and investment flows.
All white, beautiful OS, iTunes support, iTMS support, sync to mac and PC.
:(
But just one button