I have already commented on how expensive the new standard is. People have already mentioned early adopters.
The price tag isn't about much other than that, you will just have to wait for it to go down.
Check out prices for ANY AC compliant router. I recently got a new MB with built in AC complaint wifi. When I looked at upgrading my router, it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to do that. I found a few in the 100-150$ range on sale, but most were in the 200+ range. So a suggested retail for this at 299$ isn't as crazy as it sounds.
Comparing it to a 30$ N or G is just silly. This is likely priced like a quality AC router is 250$, and you're paying a 50$ fee for open source etc...
Anyway while I am glad this is being made, I won't be getting any until it is at least below 100$, and likely waiting till it is less than 75$.
What would be cooler, is if a nuclear sub surfaced to rescue everyone. Though I suspect they have restrictions as to where they could surface with ice thickness. Though would make for a good movie perhaps where the icebreaker teams need to trek across the ice surface to a suitable location. Then again, now that their are 3 ships stuck, there may not be enough room on a sub (never mind security concerns).
Canada does have a bigger icebreaker than the one they sent. It is not has long, but has several thousand more displacement. However it is probably a long way away from the S Pole. If it is taking 7 days for the Polar Star, it would probably take weeks for Louis S. St-Laurent to make it.
Russia has by far the largest and most capable icebreakers in their nuclear class ships. However it has been mentioned that they might not be able to use their nuclear plants outside of an Arctic region for cooling reasons, making transport difficult. I am not sure if this is the case of not as I haven't see anything anywhere to confirm that. Russia also has a large fleet of conventional icebreakers, however as to their displacement and locations I am not sure. It very well could be that pouring so much into their nuclear fleet diminished their conventional. i.e. why build any big conventional ships when you already own all the the largest nuclear powered ships.
As I said in my first sentence, this is off topic. I was merely responding to the response to my original post which had directly to do with Windows 8.
I think it is funny how many Slashdot stories get twisted into american political debate about something totally unrelated...:)
Its a bit off topic, but I will come to the defense of Obamacare thing, at least a bit.
Canadian here so I get more less free health care anyway (except Dental, which is odd I think, covered in the UK system I believe).
Two reasons for US health care reform. You say it is the "best" system on the planet, and maybe it is for those that can afford it (hence the actual name Affordable Health Care Act), however A) the US has MILLIONS that have no insurance in an insurance based system, and B) per capita it is probably the most expensive system in the world. Not only for individuals, but for government. A government that has Trillions upon Trillions of debt, and a structural deficit that makes it exponentially worse year over year. The US isn't alone in this regard, Canada and other free healthcare countries have a LOT of budget tied up in healthcare costs, and keeping it down is difficult.
So, something has to change in the US clearly. However due to the political system and the very large insurance lobby, to say that change is unwieldy is probably a vast understatement. So rather than make very radical change (though I know many, probably yourself included, see this current change as pretty radical), Obama had to compromise or accomplish nothing, and did some sort of Frankenstein hybrid system of a public nationalized system using also private insurers. So not exactly perfect (imo anyway), but I don't see how anything better could be done in that sort of climate that wasn't total political suicide. It is a step anyway. However even this, complicates the next step, as you have to now work with all these states and insurance groups.
So that is the policy. Then there was the implementation. As mentioned, this isn't easy for any country. The UK blew BILLIONS trying to make an electronic healthcare system and got nothing. However with the policy, you have to build a system that is vastly complex to begin with, then make it even more complicated by dividing it by 50 states, then even more complicated by integrating I don't even know how many insurance companies. All with different IT structures, standards, software, databases, etc... A monumental task that should take YEARS to implement. Then try and roll it out in a matter of months, and then wonder why things blew up? After the initial blow up, and it came out that they allowed for only a month of actual testing, with a limited number of users, using dummy data, I literately laughed out loud. Doomed to failure comes to mind. I am thinking too many yes men in the room. Anyone with in an inkling or blip of sense could have told the administration that what they were trying to do was impossible, and was fraught with a high amount of risk involved. Political people don't like hearing the word no very often I think.
Something had to be done from my perspective, but the policy was less than half measures due to political partisanship and lobbying, and the implementation was premature and complicated by the a fore mentioned policy decisions.
Just so you know I am not biased, Canada has its own group of problems with its system. Most of which can be boiled down to the fact that it is federally funded, but provincially administered. So you get standards of care with a lot of variation depending on where you actually live. For example a particular drug might be offered in one area, but not in another which uses an alternative standard. I know of one example where to obtain a particular drug privately was so expensive, it was cheaper to enroll the person in university to get the health plan which did include it. Crazy.
Anyway it remains to be seen if eventually the US experiment will work out for the best, and likely no one will know for years, and much of it will depend on actually trying to make it work, which politically unless something changes, may be sabotaged from the start.
From my own experience with insurance companies, they are all a bunch of vultures, and until the US can somehow get out from under their yoke they will be screwed indefinitely.
I don't think "unforeseen" means what you think it means...
Of course this is Australia, up is down, black is white, and sending a ship to rescue a ship stuck in ice and by doing so also gets stuck in ice is unforeseen.
Ever wonder if the Bible was just a very well written book at the time that got very popular and over time just sort of got out of control?
Was reading the book "WE" which apparently 1984 and Brave New World were somewhat based on recently. It is mostly a discourse on Utopian government type structure. It poses the question would you prefer complete control and happiness, or freedom and possible strife? It also juxtaposes that same argument against christian religion to a lesser degree, having a lot of arguments mirrored in the Bible.
The whole Adam and Eve story for example. Which basically amounts to the exact same thing.
As the story goes, God is all like: Here is a Garden of Paradise. You can stay here forever and be happy. However you must obey me and not eat this apple (a symbol of control). The the Devil (opposite, opposed, of God) shows up (representing free will, freedom, USA may not like that), says hey totally eat that apple, super tasty. After which God is all angry and "punishes" them by expelling them from the perfect garden (society) and into earth apparently, whereby they suffer all sorts of calamities.
Anyway it sounds very much like a philosophical story, not to be taken as literal truth, but to get the reader to ask questions about the principles of control vs freedom. Maybe it could be that the folks at the time were unsophisticated enough to be able to comprehend conceptual things, and just took it all literally, but got enough of it to know that something pretty important was being said.
Then it also sounds a bit like propaganda by a tyrannical regime trying to reassert control by way of misinformation. "The Benefactor is all knowing, trust in the Benefactor!":)
However I will look into CS2... That may be just want my Dad needs. That is hoping that he can figure out how to get it, or if it is even compatible with Windows 8...
Or I could just pirate their software. However that goes a bit beyond just ethically vague.
Were it just me, I would likely do the later, using it to figure out how to batch convert the files, convert them, then delete the software. I would assuage my guilt by the fact that I am using for a specific purpose to solve a problem cause by Adobe itself, then ceasing my use of the software.
However this is my Dad, and I feel more inclined for a legitimate fix. Of course I could just steal the thumb drive with the backups, do it on my own computer and just give him the end product none the wiser I suppose... I just didn't have the resources over Christmas unless I wanted to do it locally on his computer.
This is even assuming that it works, which it may not anyway.
I had some of the same problems. New hardware, old Windows 7. Many of the included drivers didn't work, however the only one that really matters is the Ethernet. The rest you can download once you are online, also stupid Windows authentication, and updates.
The way I did it originally (later I had updated drivers saved for re-installs), was to use my android phone to download them via WiFi (which was still working independently), then using a USB connection to copy them over to the computer and install them. Then its the painful driver update routine for specific hardware windows shrugs at. Then Windows update downloads and installs 140+ critical updates... at least it is automated I guess.
If they are going to sell Windows 7 still, can they not press some updated DVD's? Call it Windows 7 2014 or whatever. Update the damn drivers you lazy gits!
Not being able to cross the tropics to attempt a rescue is pretty moot as it would take the ship too long to get there anyway.
The irony here is that 90% of the worlds nuclear ice breakers are Russian, and this was a Russian ship that was trapped.
Canada should get off its ass and get nuclear ice breakers. Unfortunately this becomes political nonsense rather than common sense very quickly. I doubt Canada has the ability to produce nuclear ice breakers, or it could but at ridiculous expense. It would make much more sense to contract it out to the Russians and have them build us a few. Though this wouldn't help this particular situation all that much as they would be in the north also.
However the government wants to create jobs, and to spend the 6 or 8 Billion locally. Which means we are getting "ice hardened" warships. Which I believe are more less the corvette size. So really expensive warships, that are slow and small, and don't really break ice all that well either.
The same promises were made for Video/Music streaming. In that it is off site, and supposedly used as DRM. However it is bs. There are certain clever ways to go about it. However Once you have it on your machine, you can do all sorts of stuff to it to then save it as something else. This has been done time and again.
Most people probably wouldn't know how to do it, even with snap chat. But all it takes is someone to build a application that does it for you, then you can just use that.
Taking a screen shot of your device for example while using snap chat would seem to be the easiest and most trivial solution. Not having used snap chat maybe it has a way to disable your phones ability to take a screen shot...
Anyway the protection is an illusion. It is better than nothing, but it probably isn't all that secure to begin with.
I have a hell of a time to get all the various video formats working on my computer that are modern and produced now, and have all sorts of codec packages, players, etc... and even then some will or will not play, or be missing subs or whatever. Try using any of those down the road!
Have you tried any of them? Because I have. Some say they support it, but don't. Even when they do there are apparently two types of PDX files, one produced by Photoshop, and one produced by Photoshop Deluxe Express, and it seems most can only do those produced by actual Photoshop. The Deluxe Express which came with digital cameras as free software isn't quite the same it seems. Of those that even say they support that, I found two, however when I tried either one of them neither of them actually worked and produced images that were not the picture that was taken.
It is likely you might be able to buy a retail copy of Photoshop to convent them, and that probably would work, but then you are spending thousands of dollars. Potentially you might be able to take it to a store that has Photoshop capability, and they might convert it for you for a fee. However I am not sure if it would have batching (or the people using it would know how to batch it), and if thousands of photos have to be converted individually...
Anyway all in all, a pretty shitty deal. I told my dad this is what happens when you use proprietary formats. However my dad and most digital camera users wouldn't know any better, and just used whatever software came with the camera. Anyway it probably isn't impossible, but it is very difficult and a huge pain in the ass. This is after say maybe 10 years. Now make that exponentially more difficult after 100 years.
Was a bit hard to get into, but once you do it is an interesting read. Some parts are a bit weird. Also some parts are funny because of how long ago it was written, and also how they didn't understand some things all that well at the time. Also I read the English translation from original Russian, and it makes you wonder as to the choices they made in interpretation. Was written early 1900's, but Translated much later, in the early 1970's (or at least my version was). Using ballast in rocketry for example or how electricity is applied and used. Though one of my favorite terms was something like "it was like a phonograph in my head playing over and over"... Heh!
It also in addition to commentary on government and society, it also touches on religion with the same sorts of themes. The guiding principle being complete control and happiness VS freedom and possible strife.
That's nothing. Going through my Dad's thumb drives over Christmas I found one that contains all his digital photos. Fully about half of them are in an unreadable PDX (Photoshop Deluxe Express) format. So they are already unreadable gibberish, and that is only a handful of years in the past. No amount of software would convert them to something useful. Just image what someone would find in 100 years.
The same reason why it took like 3 years for the last Game Thrones book to come out in softcover rather than hardcover. It isn't like there was some sort of shortage, or production problem. It is because they want to sell you more hardcovers which cost 3 times as much. Myself I refuse. Even now that it is out, I am thinking of waiting til it comes out in a used book store. I was that pissed at how they handled it (two released dates delayed) when it was obvious they are just being dicks about the whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I have already commented on how expensive the new standard is. People have already mentioned early adopters.
The price tag isn't about much other than that, you will just have to wait for it to go down.
Check out prices for ANY AC compliant router. I recently got a new MB with built in AC complaint wifi. When I looked at upgrading my router, it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to do that. I found a few in the 100-150$ range on sale, but most were in the 200+ range. So a suggested retail for this at 299$ isn't as crazy as it sounds.
Comparing it to a 30$ N or G is just silly. This is likely priced like a quality AC router is 250$, and you're paying a 50$ fee for open source etc...
Anyway while I am glad this is being made, I won't be getting any until it is at least below 100$, and likely waiting till it is less than 75$.
What would be cooler, is if a nuclear sub surfaced to rescue everyone. Though I suspect they have restrictions as to where they could surface with ice thickness. Though would make for a good movie perhaps where the icebreaker teams need to trek across the ice surface to a suitable location. Then again, now that their are 3 ships stuck, there may not be enough room on a sub (never mind security concerns).
Canada does have a bigger icebreaker than the one they sent. It is not has long, but has several thousand more displacement. However it is probably a long way away from the S Pole. If it is taking 7 days for the Polar Star, it would probably take weeks for Louis S. St-Laurent to make it.
Russia has by far the largest and most capable icebreakers in their nuclear class ships. However it has been mentioned that they might not be able to use their nuclear plants outside of an Arctic region for cooling reasons, making transport difficult. I am not sure if this is the case of not as I haven't see anything anywhere to confirm that. Russia also has a large fleet of conventional icebreakers, however as to their displacement and locations I am not sure. It very well could be that pouring so much into their nuclear fleet diminished their conventional. i.e. why build any big conventional ships when you already own all the the largest nuclear powered ships.
What could possibly go wrong?
"Fire twin hell fire missiles at target epsilon!"
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
As I said in my first sentence, this is off topic. I was merely responding to the response to my original post which had directly to do with Windows 8.
I think it is funny how many Slashdot stories get twisted into american political debate about something totally unrelated... :)
Its a bit off topic, but I will come to the defense of Obamacare thing, at least a bit.
Canadian here so I get more less free health care anyway (except Dental, which is odd I think, covered in the UK system I believe).
Two reasons for US health care reform. You say it is the "best" system on the planet, and maybe it is for those that can afford it (hence the actual name Affordable Health Care Act), however A) the US has MILLIONS that have no insurance in an insurance based system, and B) per capita it is probably the most expensive system in the world. Not only for individuals, but for government. A government that has Trillions upon Trillions of debt, and a structural deficit that makes it exponentially worse year over year. The US isn't alone in this regard, Canada and other free healthcare countries have a LOT of budget tied up in healthcare costs, and keeping it down is difficult.
So, something has to change in the US clearly. However due to the political system and the very large insurance lobby, to say that change is unwieldy is probably a vast understatement. So rather than make very radical change (though I know many, probably yourself included, see this current change as pretty radical), Obama had to compromise or accomplish nothing, and did some sort of Frankenstein hybrid system of a public nationalized system using also private insurers. So not exactly perfect (imo anyway), but I don't see how anything better could be done in that sort of climate that wasn't total political suicide. It is a step anyway. However even this, complicates the next step, as you have to now work with all these states and insurance groups.
So that is the policy. Then there was the implementation. As mentioned, this isn't easy for any country. The UK blew BILLIONS trying to make an electronic healthcare system and got nothing. However with the policy, you have to build a system that is vastly complex to begin with, then make it even more complicated by dividing it by 50 states, then even more complicated by integrating I don't even know how many insurance companies. All with different IT structures, standards, software, databases, etc... A monumental task that should take YEARS to implement. Then try and roll it out in a matter of months, and then wonder why things blew up? After the initial blow up, and it came out that they allowed for only a month of actual testing, with a limited number of users, using dummy data, I literately laughed out loud. Doomed to failure comes to mind. I am thinking too many yes men in the room. Anyone with in an inkling or blip of sense could have told the administration that what they were trying to do was impossible, and was fraught with a high amount of risk involved. Political people don't like hearing the word no very often I think.
Something had to be done from my perspective, but the policy was less than half measures due to political partisanship and lobbying, and the implementation was premature and complicated by the a fore mentioned policy decisions.
Just so you know I am not biased, Canada has its own group of problems with its system. Most of which can be boiled down to the fact that it is federally funded, but provincially administered. So you get standards of care with a lot of variation depending on where you actually live. For example a particular drug might be offered in one area, but not in another which uses an alternative standard. I know of one example where to obtain a particular drug privately was so expensive, it was cheaper to enroll the person in university to get the health plan which did include it. Crazy.
Anyway it remains to be seen if eventually the US experiment will work out for the best, and likely no one will know for years, and much of it will depend on actually trying to make it work, which politically unless something changes, may be sabotaged from the start.
From my own experience with insurance companies, they are all a bunch of vultures, and until the US can somehow get out from under their yoke they will be screwed indefinitely.
Agree. MOO3 was the first and last game I have ever pre-ordered. I was so excited that it was coming out. Then when I got it...
I think it can be best described as they took a really fun game and turned it into a tedious simulation.
BTW if China ever builds a nuclear icebreaker they totally have to name it Fire Dragon, which Google translate tells me is: Hulóng.
That's what happens when you send a snow dragon to do an ice dragon job.
Ideally you would think they would have a Fire Dragon that might be a lot more effective.
I'll go with:
I don't think "unforeseen" means what you think it means...
Of course this is Australia, up is down, black is white, and sending a ship to rescue a ship stuck in ice and by doing so also gets stuck in ice is unforeseen.
Can't argue there, but it pisses me off. Force feeding an OS no one wants, while disabling the one everyone does.
"Well I would move, but that would wreak my uptime..."
Ever wonder if the Bible was just a very well written book at the time that got very popular and over time just sort of got out of control?
Was reading the book "WE" which apparently 1984 and Brave New World were somewhat based on recently. It is mostly a discourse on Utopian government type structure. It poses the question would you prefer complete control and happiness, or freedom and possible strife? It also juxtaposes that same argument against christian religion to a lesser degree, having a lot of arguments mirrored in the Bible.
The whole Adam and Eve story for example. Which basically amounts to the exact same thing.
As the story goes, God is all like: Here is a Garden of Paradise. You can stay here forever and be happy. However you must obey me and not eat this apple (a symbol of control). The the Devil (opposite, opposed, of God) shows up (representing free will, freedom, USA may not like that), says hey totally eat that apple, super tasty. After which God is all angry and "punishes" them by expelling them from the perfect garden (society) and into earth apparently, whereby they suffer all sorts of calamities.
Anyway it sounds very much like a philosophical story, not to be taken as literal truth, but to get the reader to ask questions about the principles of control vs freedom. Maybe it could be that the folks at the time were unsophisticated enough to be able to comprehend conceptual things, and just took it all literally, but got enough of it to know that something pretty important was being said.
Then it also sounds a bit like propaganda by a tyrannical regime trying to reassert control by way of misinformation. "The Benefactor is all knowing, trust in the Benefactor!" :)
However I will look into CS2... That may be just want my Dad needs. That is hoping that he can figure out how to get it, or if it is even compatible with Windows 8...
Or I could just pirate their software. However that goes a bit beyond just ethically vague.
Were it just me, I would likely do the later, using it to figure out how to batch convert the files, convert them, then delete the software. I would assuage my guilt by the fact that I am using for a specific purpose to solve a problem cause by Adobe itself, then ceasing my use of the software.
However this is my Dad, and I feel more inclined for a legitimate fix. Of course I could just steal the thumb drive with the backups, do it on my own computer and just give him the end product none the wiser I suppose... I just didn't have the resources over Christmas unless I wanted to do it locally on his computer.
This is even assuming that it works, which it may not anyway.
I had some of the same problems. New hardware, old Windows 7. Many of the included drivers didn't work, however the only one that really matters is the Ethernet. The rest you can download once you are online, also stupid Windows authentication, and updates.
The way I did it originally (later I had updated drivers saved for re-installs), was to use my android phone to download them via WiFi (which was still working independently), then using a USB connection to copy them over to the computer and install them. Then its the painful driver update routine for specific hardware windows shrugs at. Then Windows update downloads and installs 140+ critical updates... at least it is automated I guess.
If they are going to sell Windows 7 still, can they not press some updated DVD's? Call it Windows 7 2014 or whatever. Update the damn drivers you lazy gits!
Not being able to cross the tropics to attempt a rescue is pretty moot as it would take the ship too long to get there anyway.
The irony here is that 90% of the worlds nuclear ice breakers are Russian, and this was a Russian ship that was trapped.
Canada should get off its ass and get nuclear ice breakers. Unfortunately this becomes political nonsense rather than common sense very quickly. I doubt Canada has the ability to produce nuclear ice breakers, or it could but at ridiculous expense. It would make much more sense to contract it out to the Russians and have them build us a few. Though this wouldn't help this particular situation all that much as they would be in the north also.
However the government wants to create jobs, and to spend the 6 or 8 Billion locally. Which means we are getting "ice hardened" warships. Which I believe are more less the corvette size. So really expensive warships, that are slow and small, and don't really break ice all that well either.
The same promises were made for Video/Music streaming. In that it is off site, and supposedly used as DRM. However it is bs. There are certain clever ways to go about it. However Once you have it on your machine, you can do all sorts of stuff to it to then save it as something else. This has been done time and again.
Most people probably wouldn't know how to do it, even with snap chat. But all it takes is someone to build a application that does it for you, then you can just use that.
Taking a screen shot of your device for example while using snap chat would seem to be the easiest and most trivial solution. Not having used snap chat maybe it has a way to disable your phones ability to take a screen shot...
Anyway the protection is an illusion. It is better than nothing, but it probably isn't all that secure to begin with.
Isn't that actually generated by managers in the first place?
Sure they might shield developers from it, but if you got rid of them all, you wouldn't have it in the first place...
Also you mention music. Try video.
I have a hell of a time to get all the various video formats working on my computer that are modern and produced now, and have all sorts of codec packages, players, etc... and even then some will or will not play, or be missing subs or whatever. Try using any of those down the road!
Have you tried any of them? Because I have. Some say they support it, but don't. Even when they do there are apparently two types of PDX files, one produced by Photoshop, and one produced by Photoshop Deluxe Express, and it seems most can only do those produced by actual Photoshop. The Deluxe Express which came with digital cameras as free software isn't quite the same it seems. Of those that even say they support that, I found two, however when I tried either one of them neither of them actually worked and produced images that were not the picture that was taken.
It is likely you might be able to buy a retail copy of Photoshop to convent them, and that probably would work, but then you are spending thousands of dollars. Potentially you might be able to take it to a store that has Photoshop capability, and they might convert it for you for a fee. However I am not sure if it would have batching (or the people using it would know how to batch it), and if thousands of photos have to be converted individually...
Anyway all in all, a pretty shitty deal. I told my dad this is what happens when you use proprietary formats. However my dad and most digital camera users wouldn't know any better, and just used whatever software came with the camera. Anyway it probably isn't impossible, but it is very difficult and a huge pain in the ass. This is after say maybe 10 years. Now make that exponentially more difficult after 100 years.
Both were based on "We" which I recently read.
Was a bit hard to get into, but once you do it is an interesting read. Some parts are a bit weird. Also some parts are funny because of how long ago it was written, and also how they didn't understand some things all that well at the time. Also I read the English translation from original Russian, and it makes you wonder as to the choices they made in interpretation. Was written early 1900's, but Translated much later, in the early 1970's (or at least my version was). Using ballast in rocketry for example or how electricity is applied and used. Though one of my favorite terms was something like "it was like a phonograph in my head playing over and over"... Heh!
It also in addition to commentary on government and society, it also touches on religion with the same sorts of themes. The guiding principle being complete control and happiness VS freedom and possible strife.
Just two things:
Hobbit: First book that is faster to read than it is to watch the movies... :)
The Peace War? By Joe Haldman? Yes good, but how can you even mention it without the even better Forever War?
That's nothing. Going through my Dad's thumb drives over Christmas I found one that contains all his digital photos. Fully about half of them are in an unreadable PDX (Photoshop Deluxe Express) format. So they are already unreadable gibberish, and that is only a handful of years in the past. No amount of software would convert them to something useful. Just image what someone would find in 100 years.
The same reason why it took like 3 years for the last Game Thrones book to come out in softcover rather than hardcover. It isn't like there was some sort of shortage, or production problem. It is because they want to sell you more hardcovers which cost 3 times as much. Myself I refuse. Even now that it is out, I am thinking of waiting til it comes out in a used book store. I was that pissed at how they handled it (two released dates delayed) when it was obvious they are just being dicks about the whole thing.
All the old media models do this.