color accuracy, saturation, contrast, etc are features still superior on crts, and i disagree with the same point of light theory u propose. Inaccurate geometry means the monitor is painting the same point of light consistently on the same part of the crt mask on an inaccurate location on the plane of the screen.
Image quality on CRTs are still a hell of a lot better than LCDs, they scale resolutions nicer, and they are cheaper... Downsides are they are big, are a pain in the ass to set up geometry for, and don't look quite as cool...
Tubeless tires (sewup or whatnot) that you are talking about are nearly identical to current automobile tires in that there is no innertube to hold the air in and rely on pressure to seal the casing against the rim.
Airless tires have been around for quite a while for bicycles. These tires are mostly filled with urethane. And like the car tirein review, it suffers from pretty miserable rolling resistance issues as well as weight problems to say the least. Development in airless tires have shown quite some improvement over solid rubber tire, however I don't think they will be getting rid of the pneumatic tire anytime soon (~20 years).
Linux desktop market penetration ~3%, Linux server market penetration ~24%, (IDC figures) two completely different markets, two completely different figures, I wonder why? Linux is an alternative to running web servers, doing research etc. Linux is not an alternative for Joe Schmoe who wouldn't know the difference between a floppy disk and a hard drive, as you can see from the numbers noone uses it at all, i'll just call that 3% a statistical abberation.
As for your computers being f..ed up, I don't know what to say. I'm running 3 windows xp sp2 boxen here now and they are stable and run beautifully. With autoupdate, xp firewall, norton av, spybot, and spyware blaster on my system I haven't had a virus or adware problem in over a year.
If you are a linux or mac fanboy turn away now.... People can't be aware of the alternatives that do not exist. First off I think it's blindly ignorant to say people aren't aware of Macs. Sure macs can do some things very well, but for most people (not slashdot people) Macs aren't as useful/convienent to them. Linux is even more useless to the average user at its current state (though it has been getting much friendlier to install and wider driver support). Yea, Microsoft's crap may sometimes be buggy and have security issues but at the same time I'll chalk that up to user error. Turn on your firewall, turn on autoupdate, get a virusscanner, stop downloading stupid shit, etc.
I'm sure if the technolgical commoners were invading the linux world, theyd quickly figure out how to fuck that up too. All in all, Windows success has been it downfall, by merit Windows has the greatest compatibility amongst the largest amount of software and hardware out there. I'm sure if a true linux or mac alternative existed, we wouldn't even be having this conversation right now.
1. Then i suggest some good reads on the physics of pebble bed reactors which has an extensive listing of both the pros and cons of these reactors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed _modular_re actor 2. It's about 4.5 billion years 3. Certainly it can be attacked, hell, you could blow up Hoover damn and cause catastrophic flooding for miles. BTW, the reference to 9/11 is completely unwarranted. Just as you can't build crashproof planes, or cars, you can't build all skyscrapers with the thought that someone is going to slam a jet into it. It's an assigned risk, you increase security for those facilities, and build to the highest tolerances but besides that you have to leave it to chance like everything in the world.
1. It does work, as it said in my earlier post... 2. Consult google on the half life of uranium or read the article. 3. As long as the reactor unit is intact they can blow the roof off (no safety dome is needed for these reactors to contain massive quanitites of radioactive steam) The terrorists would need to detonate the reactor itself, read the article. 4. Yes it does, once again read the article. 5. Read the article and it'll answer your questions and if that doesn't satisfy you, you are welcome to google around for pebble bed reactors.
I know this is slashdot, but I did include the link so please RTFA.
Please read this and shut up...
Taken from wired.com
To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.
Known as China's MIT, Tsinghua University sprawls across a Qing-dynasty imperial garden, just outside the rampart of mirrored Blade Runner towers that line Beijing's North Fourth Ring Road. Wang Dazhong came here in the mid-1950s as a member of China's first-ever class of homegrown nuclear engineers. Now he's director emeritus of Tsinghua's Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, aka INET, and a key member of Beijing's energy policy team. On a bright morning dimmed by Beijing's ever-present photochemical haze, Wang sits in a spartan conference room lit by energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs.
"If you're going to have 300 gigawatts of nuclear power in China - 50 times what we have today - you can't afford a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl," Wang says. "You need a new kind of reactor."
That's exactly what you can see 40 minutes away, behind a glass-enclosed guardhouse flanked by military police. Nestled against a brown mountainside stands a five-story white cube whose spare design screams, "Here be engineers!" Beneath its cavernous main room are the 100 tons of steel, graphite, and hydraulic gear known as HTR-10 (i.e., high-temperature reactor, 10 megawatt). The plant's output is underwhelming; at full power - first achieved in January - it would barely fulfill the needs of a town of 4,000 people. But what's inside HTR-10, which until now has never been visited by a Western journalist, makes it the most interesting reactor in the world.
In the air-conditioned chill of the visitors' area, a grad student runs through the basics. Instead of the white-hot fuel rods that fire the heart of a conventional reactor, HTR-10 is powered by 27,000 billiards-sized graphite balls packed with tiny flecks of uranium. Instead of superhot water - intensely corrosive and highly radioactive - the core is bathed in inert helium. The gas can reach much higher temperatures without bursting pipes, which means a third more energy pushing the turbine. No water means no nasty steam, and no billion-dollar pressure dome to contain it in the event of a leak. And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide - designed to last 1 million years - there's no steaming pool for spent fuel rods. Depleted balls can go straight into lead-lined steel bins in the basement.
Wearing disposable blue paper gowns and booties, the grad student leads the way to a windowless control room that houses three industry-standard PC workstations and the inevitable electronic schematic, all valves, pressure lines, and color-coded readouts. In a conventional reactor's control room, there would be far more to look at - control panels for emergency core cooling, containment-area sprinklers, pressurized water tanks. None of that is here. The usual layers of what the industry calls engineered safety are superfluous. Suppose a coolant pipe blows, a pressure valve sticks, terrorists knock the top off the reactor vessel, an operator goes postal and yanks the control rods that regulate the nuclear chain reaction - no radioactive nightmare. This reactor is meltdown-proof.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l
Large format film sounds nice but u run into problems like increased chromatic abberation (bigger lens), processing defects, and of course analog to digital conversion losses.
What annoys me is that most people believe a film camera is nothing like digital cameras. Yes, digital cameras have no "film" but really, what do u think film is, that makes it so magical. There are grains on the film as well as grains on the photographic paper responsible for capturing incoming light just as a ccd or cmos sensor would on any digital camera. True you can spring for ultra high resolution film which will have active grain clusters (not all grains in a film are guaranteed to function, as chemistry is a bit of a sloppy science) slightly smaller than a gigapixel camera, but then u lose pretty much all the benefit in the analog to digital transfer just as a transfer to photopaper will degrade the quality as well.
Never will copper be phased out by wireless, the old telcos may lose dominance, but until the reliability is there (powerouts, national emergencies, etc), most simply won't switch over to a fully landline free solution.
Convergence is a definite. A lot of comments I've read so far seems to miss the point of convergence. The phone is not going to put digital camera makers out of buisness, simply because of physical limitations (the optics must be larger) a phone camera will never be as good as a dedicated camera, but soon resolution will get even better than it is, and it will certainly replace the cheap point and shoot cameras (not everyone is margaret burke white nor do they need 8 megapixels). Furthermore as solid state memory advances and cheapens (we already have 1gb cf cards commerically available) there will be even more of a reason for sticking in mp3 and video playback capabilities. But until someone figures out how to cram a 15gig drive into a cell phone, the ipod will still hold its crown.
As a side note. I'll never give up my standalone digital camera, or my standalone video camera, nor my ipod. But lets say you see something interesting one day and you want to take a picture or video of it, you'll probably have your cell phone; or you're waiting on a long line, you're bored so you listen to some music or play some games, once again you'll probably have your cell phone. It just makes sense.
Just because many of the current implementations of convergence are crap (my sony ericson T616 for example) does not mean everything in the future will as well. Remember the PC is leading example of a convergence device (music, video, printing press, sex toy, you name it, it prob does it).
Here in south korea, they have mobile phone recharge docks in many establishments around the city. The machines have multiple dongles and most phones have 3 contact points on the batteries case that the machines can be adjusted to fit if the dongles aren't compatible. (I believe some level of standardization will be important) Anyway with this in mind, you can go to your local cafe, enjoy a cup of coffee / starcraft and get ur battery charged and reconditioned at the same time. I think with complete convergence just around the corner, infrastructure will grow to service the market. Like cars and gas stations; because sadly battery technology just doesn't advance as fast they can shrink hard drives!
You have a huge entity like M$ and then you have these dingbat little companies making accelerators and crashproofing software. I don't like crediting microsoft for much on the OS end but I give M$ a bit more credit than for them to leave such an easy software fix undone. But hey that's just my two quid.
I see where you were trying to head with your analogies but there is a flaw in your logic. The law isn't going to come and bite you if you are looking to see how the thing is made and whatnot, nor would they get into a big huff if you recreated one for your own amusement. But when you start producing batches of big block chevy v8's in your garage and start selling them, sad to say it but then you have crossed the line... Whether its betty crocker, gm, or even charlie parker, hacking and hocking are two completely different beasts.
For your first question, obviously not - microsoft can take care of itself; as for the second yes I certainly do. I don't understand why you are whining about helping out the poor guys (software industry that cannot fight ms) and at the same time frown on helping some "backward nation" (FYI that term is often considered derogatory) Why don't we foster some competition in the global marketplace, I hear it's better...
On another note, I may be a sniveling gates worshipper but rest assured, with your level of compassion for your fellow man, noone will ever worship you.
Just take a look at who exactly is being beaten by the corporate moneystick... Well some rich investors for one, some programmers here and there, some execs, some lawyers, oh and the few ppl who whon't be able to go to acapulco for summer break because the company they invested in got beat by the MS$ stick. Now compare that with the good he's doing around the world. Helping ppl that would have never been helped otherwise. You tell those sick, needy ppl that saving their life from the ravages of disease and malnutrition is outwieghed by the need to have a slightly less buggy internet explorer. If you honestly believe this, you should be placed right next to Darl, because that is obtuse logic by anyones standards.
Yes he has run a brutal campaign against competitors (the market says the competitors will only try harder = more innovation), Yes he has a lot of money, but No, you're still dead wrong.
PS
I find it hard to believe that gate's 95% of 45 billion he pledged to give to charity is just a drop in the bucket.
This may be flamebait but who cares. Theres too many idiots on slashdot who just need a clue. Some slashdot people hate Bill Gates because he is the man behind Windows, ooh the evil microsoft company that attacks cool noble things like Linux. Jeez, give me a break. Open source zealotry has its place, but comparing the "good" the linux movement did versus what Bill is accomplishing now; I think Bills the clear winner.
And despite all the useless mud that open source fanboys sling at Gates, I say Gate's effort in donating and founding organizations to promote education; world health as well as civic and arts organizations in perhaps the neediest regions of the globe makes him #1 in my book.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Five years ago, in a story on Bill Gates' philanthropy, Salon asked the question, "Is Bill Gates a Closet Liberal?" At the time, Gates had not yet really opened the floodgates of his charitable giving, but a close look at the causes he had supported indicated he was interested in reproductive health and family planning issues, and fighting the spread of infectious diseases, with a focus on the Third World. Since then, Gates has publicly promised to give away 95 percent of his wealth -- $43 billion as of September 2002 -- and he appears to be living up to his words.
In "Health, Wealth, and Bill Gates," a new installment of "NOW With Bill Moyers" airing Friday night on PBS, Gates talks at length about his involvement in global health issues. The interview is a fascinating, detailed look at how and why Gates is giving away his billions. And while it doesn't definitively answer the question of whether Gates is a liberal -- saving dying children is not the province of a particular ideology -- one thing emerges: Gates may go down in history as the single individual who did more to help the world's neediest people than anyone who has ever lived. In the interview, Gates comes off as knowledgeable, sincere and determined to use his wealth to effect massive change. Whatever you think of his business practices, when it comes to global health he is one righteous dude.
I think it was 3-4 years ago, made a ghetto water cooling system to overclock my k6-2, had the pipes running to my minifridge next to my desk, worked fine then one day my computer just died, found that I my pump had stalled and the cpu roasted in its own juices. But I was surprised that the computer even worked for that long considering when I opened the case the motherboard was completely soaked, and had rusticles everywhere (never did factor in for humid weather and condensation).
Also my friend had a laptop where he broke the power connector so he couldn't charge the thing. He just bought a new one so he gave the broken one to me. I popped it open using a swiss army knife, resoldered the broken mobo connections put some duct tape and epoxy putty on it, now the thing works like new!
Im on a trip in south korea, and ive noticed something similar, I think it is called ringo, basically the subscriber chooses tracks they want to be played instead of a standard ring tone, so when someone calls you, you get whatever hideous music the subscriber wants you to hear.
When I first read the headline, I envisioned a geostat satellite taking a visual survey of the tour de france. But if you RTFA its nothing but a souped up european version of WAAS + GPS, and the trackers are not even attached to the riders bikes to boot. Kinda disappointing... but at the same time not much of a loss. Cycling isn't exactly a play by play sport. The espn highlight reels more than suffice to capture the excitement and perhaps some mayhem when someone crashes the peloton. Do you really want to see Lance climb a mountain for 2 hours.
As for drug use in the TdF, despite what many people say, the reason why drug use seems so prevalent in the TdF is because of how seriously the French race officials enforce their regulations, opposed to say major league baseball.
To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be if, say, the horse were galloping through the center aisle
Yes thats right 300-400 speakers, i must say this is downright impractical for all but the most crazed of audiophiles. Interesting and superior technology to whats out there, but sounds like this will go the way of the betamax
P2P has always been touted as a method of promotion, but in reality it isnt. P2p technology by nature only serves as an outlet for distribution, not a method of promotion. Sadly brick and mortar promotion channels still have the most clout in getting the word out to a broad audience and this is why the current industry is model is king. They know it, and I think most slashdotters sorely fear its true. Think of the dot coms, why would these companies spend millions to advertise on tv and radio when their target audience is so readily available to them online. Pretty simple, tv and radio comprise a huge segment of the population, plus they are a captive audience, they see what you tell them to see. So in the end the matrix has you, after all you can't find what you don't know exists.
Only one problem with your statement, that is that MRE's are not for daily consumption, they are a last resort when you are unable to return to your base for food, water, etc. So for instance your black hawk goes down in the middle of god knows where, you will have the military mandated 3 days of rations strapped on your pack. So until some rangers pull you out of there, those 3 days of rations are most certainly your problem. Now throw in a few mountains you might need to climb and a few hundred kilometers, and you just might see how much difference a few pounds would make.
Slashdot Mirror
color accuracy, saturation, contrast, etc are features still superior on crts, and i disagree with the same point of light theory u propose. Inaccurate geometry means the monitor is painting the same point of light consistently on the same part of the crt mask on an inaccurate location on the plane of the screen.
Image quality on CRTs are still a hell of a lot better than LCDs, they scale resolutions nicer, and they are cheaper... Downsides are they are big, are a pain in the ass to set up geometry for, and don't look quite as cool...
Tubeless tires (sewup or whatnot) that you are talking about are nearly identical to current automobile tires in that there is no innertube to hold the air in and rely on pressure to seal the casing against the rim.
Airless tires have been around for quite a while for bicycles. These tires are mostly filled with urethane. And like the car tirein review, it suffers from pretty miserable rolling resistance issues as well as weight problems to say the least. Development in airless tires have shown quite some improvement over solid rubber tire, however I don't think they will be getting rid of the pneumatic tire anytime soon (~20 years).
Lay a big fiber optic cable, resell the bandwidth from india to somewhere else, profit!
Yes I know... Its a pretty bad joke
Linux desktop market penetration ~3%, Linux server market penetration ~24%, (IDC figures) two completely different markets, two completely different figures, I wonder why? Linux is an alternative to running web servers, doing research etc. Linux is not an alternative for Joe Schmoe who wouldn't know the difference between a floppy disk and a hard drive, as you can see from the numbers noone uses it at all, i'll just call that 3% a statistical abberation.
As for your computers being f..ed up, I don't know what to say. I'm running 3 windows xp sp2 boxen here now and they are stable and run beautifully. With autoupdate, xp firewall, norton av, spybot, and spyware blaster on my system I haven't had a virus or adware problem in over a year.
If you are a linux or mac fanboy turn away now.... People can't be aware of the alternatives that do not exist. First off I think it's blindly ignorant to say people aren't aware of Macs. Sure macs can do some things very well, but for most people (not slashdot people) Macs aren't as useful/convienent to them. Linux is even more useless to the average user at its current state (though it has been getting much friendlier to install and wider driver support). Yea, Microsoft's crap may sometimes be buggy and have security issues but at the same time I'll chalk that up to user error. Turn on your firewall, turn on autoupdate, get a virusscanner, stop downloading stupid shit, etc.
I'm sure if the technolgical commoners were invading the linux world, theyd quickly figure out how to fuck that up too. All in all, Windows success has been it downfall, by merit Windows has the greatest compatibility amongst the largest amount of software and hardware out there. I'm sure if a true linux or mac alternative existed, we wouldn't even be having this conversation right now.
1. Then i suggest some good reads on the physics of pebble bed reactors which has an extensive listing of both the pros and cons of these reactors.d _modular_re actor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_be
2. It's about 4.5 billion years
3. Certainly it can be attacked, hell, you could blow up Hoover damn and cause catastrophic flooding for miles. BTW, the reference to 9/11 is completely unwarranted. Just as you can't build crashproof planes, or cars, you can't build all skyscrapers with the thought that someone is going to slam a jet into it. It's an assigned risk, you increase security for those facilities, and build to the highest tolerances but besides that you have to leave it to chance like everything in the world.
1. It does work, as it said in my earlier post...
2. Consult google on the half life of uranium or read the article.
3. As long as the reactor unit is intact they can blow the roof off (no safety dome is needed for these reactors to contain massive quanitites of radioactive steam) The terrorists would need to detonate the reactor itself, read the article.
4. Yes it does, once again read the article.
5. Read the article and it'll answer your questions and if that doesn't satisfy you, you are welcome to google around for pebble bed reactors.
I know this is slashdot, but I did include the link so please RTFA.
Please read this and shut up... Taken from wired.com To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen. Known as China's MIT, Tsinghua University sprawls across a Qing-dynasty imperial garden, just outside the rampart of mirrored Blade Runner towers that line Beijing's North Fourth Ring Road. Wang Dazhong came here in the mid-1950s as a member of China's first-ever class of homegrown nuclear engineers. Now he's director emeritus of Tsinghua's Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, aka INET, and a key member of Beijing's energy policy team. On a bright morning dimmed by Beijing's ever-present photochemical haze, Wang sits in a spartan conference room lit by energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. "If you're going to have 300 gigawatts of nuclear power in China - 50 times what we have today - you can't afford a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl," Wang says. "You need a new kind of reactor." That's exactly what you can see 40 minutes away, behind a glass-enclosed guardhouse flanked by military police. Nestled against a brown mountainside stands a five-story white cube whose spare design screams, "Here be engineers!" Beneath its cavernous main room are the 100 tons of steel, graphite, and hydraulic gear known as HTR-10 (i.e., high-temperature reactor, 10 megawatt). The plant's output is underwhelming; at full power - first achieved in January - it would barely fulfill the needs of a town of 4,000 people. But what's inside HTR-10, which until now has never been visited by a Western journalist, makes it the most interesting reactor in the world. In the air-conditioned chill of the visitors' area, a grad student runs through the basics. Instead of the white-hot fuel rods that fire the heart of a conventional reactor, HTR-10 is powered by 27,000 billiards-sized graphite balls packed with tiny flecks of uranium. Instead of superhot water - intensely corrosive and highly radioactive - the core is bathed in inert helium. The gas can reach much higher temperatures without bursting pipes, which means a third more energy pushing the turbine. No water means no nasty steam, and no billion-dollar pressure dome to contain it in the event of a leak. And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide - designed to last 1 million years - there's no steaming pool for spent fuel rods. Depleted balls can go straight into lead-lined steel bins in the basement. Wearing disposable blue paper gowns and booties, the grad student leads the way to a windowless control room that houses three industry-standard PC workstations and the inevitable electronic schematic, all valves, pressure lines, and color-coded readouts. In a conventional reactor's control room, there would be far more to look at - control panels for emergency core cooling, containment-area sprinklers, pressurized water tanks. None of that is here. The usual layers of what the industry calls engineered safety are superfluous. Suppose a coolant pipe blows, a pressure valve sticks, terrorists knock the top off the reactor vessel, an operator goes postal and yanks the control rods that regulate the nuclear chain reaction - no radioactive nightmare. This reactor is meltdown-proof. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l
Large format film sounds nice but u run into problems like increased chromatic abberation (bigger lens), processing defects, and of course analog to digital conversion losses.
What annoys me is that most people believe a film camera is nothing like digital cameras. Yes, digital cameras have no "film" but really, what do u think film is, that makes it so magical. There are grains on the film as well as grains on the photographic paper responsible for capturing incoming light just as a ccd or cmos sensor would on any digital camera. True you can spring for ultra high resolution film which will have active grain clusters (not all grains in a film are guaranteed to function, as chemistry is a bit of a sloppy science) slightly smaller than a gigapixel camera, but then u lose pretty much all the benefit in the analog to digital transfer just as a transfer to photopaper will degrade the quality as well.
Never will copper be phased out by wireless, the old telcos may lose dominance, but until the reliability is there (powerouts, national emergencies, etc), most simply won't switch over to a fully landline free solution.
Convergence is a definite. A lot of comments I've read so far seems to miss the point of convergence. The phone is not going to put digital camera makers out of buisness, simply because of physical limitations (the optics must be larger) a phone camera will never be as good as a dedicated camera, but soon resolution will get even better than it is, and it will certainly replace the cheap point and shoot cameras (not everyone is margaret burke white nor do they need 8 megapixels). Furthermore as solid state memory advances and cheapens (we already have 1gb cf cards commerically available) there will be even more of a reason for sticking in mp3 and video playback capabilities. But until someone figures out how to cram a 15gig drive into a cell phone, the ipod will still hold its crown. As a side note. I'll never give up my standalone digital camera, or my standalone video camera, nor my ipod. But lets say you see something interesting one day and you want to take a picture or video of it, you'll probably have your cell phone; or you're waiting on a long line, you're bored so you listen to some music or play some games, once again you'll probably have your cell phone. It just makes sense. Just because many of the current implementations of convergence are crap (my sony ericson T616 for example) does not mean everything in the future will as well. Remember the PC is leading example of a convergence device (music, video, printing press, sex toy, you name it, it prob does it).
Here in south korea, they have mobile phone recharge docks in many establishments around the city. The machines have multiple dongles and most phones have 3 contact points on the batteries case that the machines can be adjusted to fit if the dongles aren't compatible. (I believe some level of standardization will be important) Anyway with this in mind, you can go to your local cafe, enjoy a cup of coffee / starcraft and get ur battery charged and reconditioned at the same time. I think with complete convergence just around the corner, infrastructure will grow to service the market. Like cars and gas stations; because sadly battery technology just doesn't advance as fast they can shrink hard drives!
You have a huge entity like M$ and then you have these dingbat little companies making accelerators and crashproofing software. I don't like crediting microsoft for much on the OS end but I give M$ a bit more credit than for them to leave such an easy software fix undone. But hey that's just my two quid.
A linux based phone that only works with M$ mail... What is the world coming to!
I see where you were trying to head with your analogies but there is a flaw in your logic. The law isn't going to come and bite you if you are looking to see how the thing is made and whatnot, nor would they get into a big huff if you recreated one for your own amusement. But when you start producing batches of big block chevy v8's in your garage and start selling them, sad to say it but then you have crossed the line... Whether its betty crocker, gm, or even charlie parker, hacking and hocking are two completely different beasts.
For your first question, obviously not - microsoft can take care of itself; as for the second yes I certainly do. I don't understand why you are whining about helping out the poor guys (software industry that cannot fight ms) and at the same time frown on helping some "backward nation" (FYI that term is often considered derogatory) Why don't we foster some competition in the global marketplace, I hear it's better... On another note, I may be a sniveling gates worshipper but rest assured, with your level of compassion for your fellow man, noone will ever worship you.
Just take a look at who exactly is being beaten by the corporate moneystick... Well some rich investors for one, some programmers here and there, some execs, some lawyers, oh and the few ppl who whon't be able to go to acapulco for summer break because the company they invested in got beat by the MS$ stick. Now compare that with the good he's doing around the world. Helping ppl that would have never been helped otherwise. You tell those sick, needy ppl that saving their life from the ravages of disease and malnutrition is outwieghed by the need to have a slightly less buggy internet explorer. If you honestly believe this, you should be placed right next to Darl, because that is obtuse logic by anyones standards. Yes he has run a brutal campaign against competitors (the market says the competitors will only try harder = more innovation), Yes he has a lot of money, but No, you're still dead wrong. PS I find it hard to believe that gate's 95% of 45 billion he pledged to give to charity is just a drop in the bucket.
This may be flamebait but who cares. Theres too many idiots on slashdot who just need a clue. Some slashdot people hate Bill Gates because he is the man behind Windows, ooh the evil microsoft company that attacks cool noble things like Linux. Jeez, give me a break. Open source zealotry has its place, but comparing the "good" the linux movement did versus what Bill is accomplishing now; I think Bills the clear winner.
/ 05/09/gates /index_np.html
And despite all the useless mud that open source fanboys sling at Gates, I say Gate's effort in donating and founding organizations to promote education; world health as well as civic and arts organizations in perhaps the neediest regions of the globe makes him #1 in my book.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Five years ago, in a story on Bill Gates' philanthropy, Salon asked the question, "Is Bill Gates a Closet Liberal?" At the time, Gates had not yet really opened the floodgates of his charitable giving, but a close look at the causes he had supported indicated he was interested in reproductive health and family planning issues, and fighting the spread of infectious diseases, with a focus on the Third World. Since then, Gates has publicly promised to give away 95 percent of his wealth -- $43 billion as of September 2002 -- and he appears to be living up to his words.
In "Health, Wealth, and Bill Gates," a new installment of "NOW With Bill Moyers" airing Friday night on PBS, Gates talks at length about his involvement in global health issues. The interview is a fascinating, detailed look at how and why Gates is giving away his billions. And while it doesn't definitively answer the question of whether Gates is a liberal -- saving dying children is not the province of a particular ideology -- one thing emerges: Gates may go down in history as the single individual who did more to help the world's neediest people than anyone who has ever lived. In the interview, Gates comes off as knowledgeable, sincere and determined to use his wealth to effect massive change. Whatever you think of his business practices, when it comes to global health he is one righteous dude.
Source:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003
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I think it was 3-4 years ago, made a ghetto water cooling system to overclock my k6-2, had the pipes running to my minifridge next to my desk, worked fine then one day my computer just died, found that I my pump had stalled and the cpu roasted in its own juices. But I was surprised that the computer even worked for that long considering when I opened the case the motherboard was completely soaked, and had rusticles everywhere (never did factor in for humid weather and condensation).
Also my friend had a laptop where he broke the power connector so he couldn't charge the thing. He just bought a new one so he gave the broken one to me. I popped it open using a swiss army knife, resoldered the broken mobo connections put some duct tape and epoxy putty on it, now the thing works like new!
Im on a trip in south korea, and ive noticed something similar, I think it is called ringo, basically the subscriber chooses tracks they want to be played instead of a standard ring tone, so when someone calls you, you get whatever hideous music the subscriber wants you to hear.
When I first read the headline, I envisioned a geostat satellite taking a visual survey of the tour de france. But if you RTFA its nothing but a souped up european version of WAAS + GPS, and the trackers are not even attached to the riders bikes to boot. Kinda disappointing... but at the same time not much of a loss. Cycling isn't exactly a play by play sport. The espn highlight reels more than suffice to capture the excitement and perhaps some mayhem when someone crashes the peloton. Do you really want to see Lance climb a mountain for 2 hours.
As for drug use in the TdF, despite what many people say, the reason why drug use seems so prevalent in the TdF is because of how seriously the French race officials enforce their regulations, opposed to say major league baseball.
To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be if, say, the horse were galloping through the center aisle
Yes thats right 300-400 speakers, i must say this is downright impractical for all but the most crazed of audiophiles. Interesting and superior technology to whats out there, but sounds like this will go the way of the betamax
P2P has always been touted as a method of promotion, but in reality it isnt. P2p technology by nature only serves as an outlet for distribution, not a method of promotion. Sadly brick and mortar promotion channels still have the most clout in getting the word out to a broad audience and this is why the current industry is model is king. They know it, and I think most slashdotters sorely fear its true. Think of the dot coms, why would these companies spend millions to advertise on tv and radio when their target audience is so readily available to them online. Pretty simple, tv and radio comprise a huge segment of the population, plus they are a captive audience, they see what you tell them to see. So in the end the matrix has you, after all you can't find what you don't know exists.
Only one problem with your statement, that is that MRE's are not for daily consumption, they are a last resort when you are unable to return to your base for food, water, etc. So for instance your black hawk goes down in the middle of god knows where, you will have the military mandated 3 days of rations strapped on your pack. So until some rangers pull you out of there, those 3 days of rations are most certainly your problem. Now throw in a few mountains you might need to climb and a few hundred kilometers, and you just might see how much difference a few pounds would make.