I think the "30 year" figure is off by about a decade. I'd personally say the early/mid-90s were the high point of audio fidelity -- CDs were universal, the loudness war hadn't begun, and every upper middle-class high school student in Miami had a 10-15" sub with 250+ real RMS watts behind it to make the neighbors hate him;-)
> Speakers were generally much better because there was no 7:2 surround sound.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. The total speaker budget has been remarkably constant over the years (roughly a kilobuck), but the number of speakers you're expected to buy has roughly doubled, and the quality & real lifespan of those speakers has gone down the toilet in the meantime.
The sad part is, the high-end audio industry got things TOTALLY wrong. Why do we even HAVE speakers with passive filter networks, instead of speakers that combine the same multiple drivers that they did 20 years ago... but give each one its own pristine digital amp and DSP, all networked together & tuned to perfection with zero phase distortion (buffer them long enough to allow the "slowest" DSP operation in their collective pipelines to complete, then reclock the output with a separate clock signal shared by all the speaker drivers to bring them all back into sync again for the actual audio output).
Re:Data, Images, Binary builds etc.
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The Rise of Git
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· Score: 1
> God I hate people that put bins and bits and images that should be linked and stored on appropriate storage, not archived in a RCS.
Please keep in mind that pre-Vista, Windows didn't actually *have* proper symlinks. NTFS junctions technically existed since NT4, but Microsoft guarded them like a state secret and bent over backwards to avoid making people aware of them. Also, junctions are more like Ext3 hardlinks, so you can't *quite* use them with reckless consequence-free impunity the way you can with real symlinks.
As long as you aren't trying to use it under Windows without Github or a real Linux system to fall back on for operations that just don't (quite) work yet with the Windows version. Two specific operations that come to mind are 'push' and 'rebase'.
Personally, I'd be kind of amused if NASA decided to allow the Dragon to dock, NASA's bureaucracy prevented it from carrying actual cargo since it's technically still a 'test', and SpaceX cut a deal with FedEx to symbolically make the first private package delivery to the ISS (with the station's Commander having final authority to approve or refuse anything brought or kept onboard, of course)
It would be interesting to see what kind of stuff the crewmembers themselves would have shipped up if they had more or less carte blanche to do so free of official size, weight, and political considerations (insert scene of Commander looking the other way and devouring a few homemade Rice Krispy treats while the crate of Vodka-infused Belgian chocolate gets unloaded and moved over to the "Russian" side of the station...)
> So Google will suspend my social media and email account if I break their TOS.
Google also controls nearly everything that makes ownership of an Android phone worthwhile, and provides SSO to growing numbers of unrelated sites.
The problem isn't so much Google's suspension of Google+ accounts as it is their seemingly indiscriminate willingness to play Judge Dredd, pull out the BFG2000, and incinerate everything in sight on the slightest whim, for any reason or no reason at all. Other companies have poor customer service, but Google has none whatsoever -- not even for paid customers, or customers whose affiliation has generated real revenue for Google even if no actual cash changed hands between Google and the individual. It's almost like they hired executives with Asperger's to write and implement the company's business plan.
I think part of the problem is that Google itself has no grasp of the impact its actions have on the lives and livelihoods of real people. They aren't evil so much as oblivious and indifferent. They're kind of like a moody child with a magic wand, unlimited powers they're barely aware of, a vague sense of chaotic-good morality, and growing history of operating with complete disregard of the trail of collateral damage they leave around them.
That said, the problems of Facebook and/or Twitter suspension DO go a bit beyond social networking, too. Both companies have increasingly positioned themselves as universal "single sign-on" providers (as does Google). In real-world terms, it would be like having your landlord change the locks and dispose of your belongings some random Tuesday afternoon because you made a credit card purchase from somebody in China before work that triggered your bank's fraud algorithm (even if the bank itself has long since unfrozen the account after being satisfied that the purchase was legitimate). In Google's universe, you wouldn't even be told WHY you were locked out, let alone made whole afterward. You'd just be fucked.
What WebOS *really* needs is a nice, unobtrusive Dalvik compatibility layer that works kind of like VMware Fusion -- run Android apps transparently under WebOS where there's no better WebOS alternative, and enjoy the best of both in the meantime. If HP has any sanity, they're working on this exact issue right now. If they can pull it off, it'll ensure that at worst, a WebOS phone is only slightly less convenient than Android for running android apps, and at best, would let users have their Android cake with WebOS frosting.
Actually, it's worse... your paid apps are bound to your gmail identity as well.
If they locked an Android owner out of not only his contact list and gmail, but effectively revoked the purchase of every paid Market app without refunding the purchase price, I can see a lawsuit regardless of what their TOS might say. Just ask Capital One how well "universal default" stood up to judicial scrutiny once challenged (that was their practice of instantly jacking up all of your interest rates to the maximum if you had a late payment reported to a credit bureau by ANYONE... even if it was an error, due to somebody else's screw-up, or something like a medical bill that was tied up with a health insurance claim. With Android, at least, Google definitely crossed the line from "free" to "paid service", and there's a limit to how trigger-happy you can be with TOS violations before it becomes fraud.
Kind of like Microsoft's inane decision that Windows 2000 Pro was only for "enterprise" users, despite arguably being one of the best releases of Windows ever. Sigh. I still get tears thinking about how I installed Norton Antivirus, updated the AGP GART driver, installed Nero, then went about 2 weeks without having to reboot. Ah. I miss the happy, reboot-free days of Win2k. In contrast to, say, Vista, where installing the OS from the DVD took 17 minutes, followed by 4 hours of patches with so many reboots I lost count. It's like Microsoft just quit even TRYING to make a reboot-free lifestyle a design goal somewhere between 2k and XP, and everything just went to hell from there.
Toshiba's portable display is a step in the right direction, but it's too dim unless you use their standalone power supply. And their official external power supply is a cruel joke of an afterthought that was obviously tacked on at the last minute with minimal dedicated design effort. I can understand it being dim when powered by 100mA from a wimpy laptop USB port, but for god's sake, it should AT LEAST be able to take advantage of a proper powered USB hub capable of supplying 500mA per port when available.
An interesting compromise would be if Toshiba chucked the current external PSU they sell, and replaced it with one that's ALSO a universal laptop PSU with a 4 USB ports: 1 for the monitor that uses the fifth pin to confirm to the display that it can supply full power for the display in addition to data, 1 that's a dedicated, data-shorted charging port for phones, and 2 that are proper powered USB ports capable of supplying 500mA. Then you could leave your laptop's official PSU at home, and enjoy the monitor at full brightness along with proper powered USB hub for only slightly more weight and volume than the laptop's original PSU.
Screw cheaper and lighter. I want a real, honest to god Model M-type buckling spring keyboard. Another pound and half-inch is a small price to pay for 30-50wpm of improved typing speed:-)
> What you will need to do is replace those $0.30 bulbs with $1.50 bulbs when they burn out.
Unless you care about light quality. Just about any 25-cent hundred-watt bulb from a dollar-store 4-pack is almost guaranteed to have a higher CRI (color rendering index) than any flicker-free high-frequency CFL of comparable brightness that costs less than $5-10. I've seen plenty of cheap CFLs, and they're pretty dire. Worse, the cheap, crap CFLs seem to be driving the good ones with high CRI and high-frequency refresh off the market. True broad-spectrum CFLs have become basically impossible to buy at stores like Home Depot, and are becoming uber-niche items even online. And by "true broad-spectrum", I mean bulbs that literally print their CRI in hard numbers on the package in a way that has specific legally-binding meaning, not bulbs that SAY they're "natural color", but don't have a CRI number printed anywhere. Go ahead -- scrutinize the bulbs at Home Depot and Lowe's. Unless you trip across a forgotten-about bulb that's been on the shelf for 3 years, it's damn near impossible to find any with a real CRI number on them. The industry just kind of settled on "better than the worst used to be, but not good enough to meet the definition of high-CRI", and went with it for everything.:(
Or, for something completely different... if you have an Android phone, and can get over Sony's butt-ugly wrist strap that makes it look like something from the closeout bin at a dollar store & the relentless evil that permeates every pore of the company, you can get a wrist-mounted bluetooth-tethered faux watch remote display for your Android phone -- the Sony LiveView;-)
Actually, my point was that Windows 7 BREAKS the norm they established with Windows 95.
Windows 3.x (and earlier) encouraged tiling and cascading. Windows 95 acknowledged that it was a bad idea that just didn't work well in real life, and established window-maximization as the new norm (with the taskbar to keep other windows easily-accessible when a different one was maximized).
By "MDI" I'm specifically referring to dockable window frameworks where you have one main window, but child areas within it that can be moved around and resized, then collectively maximized and hidden.
Re:I don't remember those 90s...
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7 Days In Email Hell
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· Score: 3, Informative
I do the same thing with hyphens and Qmail. It's practically eliminated spam as a problem for nearly a decade. The only two problems I have are people (and businesses) that get freaked out seeing an email address like me-yourname@mydomain.com, and websites that want an email address to recover a login (if I can't figure out what address I made up for that particular site... I have semi-standards, but they don't always work 100%).
Ummmm, Acorn is kind of a reach. They might have come up with the basic idea of a taskbar, but Windows95 is a gigantic step up from that.
Microsoft's key innovation was to decisively break the Apple-Unix tradition of "a billion tiny windows shattered across the screen", giving us an alternative that worked very well on single, (relatively) low-res monitors. They established the norm of maximizing windows to fill the whole screen, and MDI as kind of a compromise that attempted to give the flexibility of dockable windows with the convenience of instant maximization/minimization. MDI obviously hasn't exactly aged well into the era of 2-3 monitor desktops, but at the time, it was a definite step forward.
> If their R&D is so awesome, why can't they make their own products and not resort to ripping off other businesses to make money?
Someone here has to say it, so here goes.
Windows Mobile at its core was actually a pretty good mobile operating system. It just sucked at being a *phone* used for making voice calls. It was more or less dysfunctional and unusable out of the box in its virgin state, but after you spent a week or two tweaking and extending it, it ended up being pretty cool. Truthfully, Android 1.5 was a *massive* step down from WM6 at its best, and 2.1 was kind of a draw (better in some ways, infuriatingly worse in others because the areas where it sucked were almost all areas where an open-source OS is supposed to be unsuckable, like proper bluetooth support for HID, SPP, and OBEX).
It's pretty sad, really. Microsoft killed off a perfectly good mobile OS that basically just needed a new phone app and facelift, and replaced it with SidekickOS in dotNET drag (read up on Windows Phone's history if you don't believe it).
Er... and mousewheels. Can't forget mousewheels. Or the taskbar. Let's be honest here -- KDE and Gnome follow that particular design norm more religiously than Windows *itself* does (when you consider the default behavior of Windows 7).
I give Microsoft partial credit for fonts, too. No, they didn't invent ATM or TrueType, but you can *bet* that we'd still be paying shitloads of money per font if Adobe had its way. As recently as ~10 years ago, Adobe still sold a CD full of fonts for $99 that didn't actually give you the ability to *use* any of them without paying additional fees *on top* of that.
> the warmer outside the more efficient the device and vice versa.
Sort of, but not quite the way you mean. A heat pump is most efficient at heating when it's hot outside, and most efficient at cooling when it's cold outside, because a heat pump in heat mode is basically air conditioning the back yard and pumping the waste heat into your house. When it's 10 below outside, a heat pump falls flat on its face, just like an air conditioner does when it's 102 degrees at 99.9% humidity outside and you're trying to cool the house down to 72 (and, despite your A/C's best efforts, the interior is 79 and rising by a degree an hour... assuming the evaporator coil doesn't ice up first).
Heat pumps are awesome, though, for the majority of the US that spends most of the year between 30 and 90 degrees (in the humid south, though, you're probably better off spending the extra cash on an air conditioner with dual-speed compressor to handle the hot and hotter days that are typical instead of a comparably-priced heat pump to handle the moderately cold and uncomfortably hot days you'd find elsewhere in the country).
You know what's really weird? I have a Thinkpad T61 with SSD and Vista Business. It actually takes it *longer* to go from 'hibernated' to 'fully-functioning' than it takes it to cold boot. And waking it up from 'suspend' takes almost as long as a cold boot. It's almost like Windows is finding the computer to be in such a powered-down, chaotic and messed up state that cleaning up the mess and bringing everything back into working order ends up taking almost as long as just booting cold... and hibernation is the worst of both worlds -- the time to boot up cold, followed by the time to straighten out the mess the system finds itself in upon virtually waking up from an extended slumber.
I suspect something is grossly misconfigured in the BIOS, or needs to be manually tweaked in the registry, but it's damn near impossible to find a coherent explanation *anywhere* that really, truly explains all the various BIOS power options, how they relate to one another, and how they affect the operation of various versions of Windows. God forbid, maybe an O'Reilly "Heads Up" book on power management;-)
> If Elsevier et al don't like those terms, they have every right to see how long they last without any content derived from public funding.
Frankly, I'd be satisfied if Google would just fucking give us an option to completely exclude search results behind paywalls. Yes, I know you can sometimes avoid them by just ignoring anything that doesn't have a link to view from Google's cache (big tip-off), but it's still annoying how they've increasingly littered their search results with that crap.
Or, as MrSafety sang (in a slightly different context, slightly paraphrased)... "I will not will not pay... I will not will not pay... the stuff's o-kay-ayy, but I still will not pay..."
As much as I think current copyright law is fucked (particularly with regard to orphaned works), there's a grain of sensibility to the idea of allowing copyright on aspects of a published/broadcast form. If I spend substantial amounts of time/money/resources scanning public-domain books into pdf, it's entirely reasonable that I should retain copyright over the literal pdf file, and even to images rendered directly from it. HOWEVER, if somebody else were to OCR and proofread those PDFs, or even type them from scratch (reading from the PDF), that should effectively neutralize the PDF-related aspect of the new copyright, because OCR'ing or re-typing from PDF isn't substantially different from doing the same from the source. Well, except for two little problems -- the creator of the pdf might have gone to substantial time and expense to acquire access to the source material to begin with. Likewise, if someone were to convert it to raw markup-free text (by reading and typing, or OCR and editing), it would be nearly impossible for anyone to later claim they did the same instead of simply copying the raw text (at least, for works shorter in length than a few hundred thousand words, where things like minor errors creeping in (or intentionally salted into place) could arguably be treated like a form of watermarking).
By the same token, suppose it's 200 years from now, and I somehow come into ownership of a third-generation copy of a Charlie Chaplin movie that has unambiguously fallen out of copyright (and largely ceased to exist for whatever reason). If I spend time restoring it, I've definitely added value. Arguably, in current terms, if I spend 3 weeks encoding it into variable-bitrate h.264 with aggressive forward- and reverse- prediction, the h.264 encoding itself adds substantial value (anybody who's ever encoded Huffy into h.264 knows that h.264 encoding is almost as much of an art as a science, and copies with nominally-similar bitrates and/or encoding times can vary WILDLY with regard to encoding time and/or final output quality). At the very, VERY least, if society decides that my restoration and recovery actions were without value, someone who wants to distribute it themselves should be required to prove that they rendered MY h.264 file into a few terrabytes of raw RGB frames, then re-encoded them frame by painful frame into h.264 (or some other codec) themselves (roughly akin to opening a pdf document in one window, and hand-typing it word by word into an editor in another window).
I think most people can agree that there's value in recovery, restoration, and re-encoding. The devil's in the details. Granting Berne-like terms for it is utterly absurd, but granting something like 5 years, or maybe 10-25 with compulsory licensing and rules that make it increasingly difficult to sue for infringement after the first 5-10 years (say, mandatory arbitration at your own cost before you can even bring about an infringement case after year 5, damages limited to demonstrated directly-lost revenue after year 10, etc). For works where the line between the original public domain work and any new content (interpretation, footnotes, commentary, etc) is blurred, your right to sue for infringement would largely depend upon how easy you made it for an honest person to avoid infringement (ie, if all of YOUR content was clearly tagged and separated logically from the public domain work, someone reproducing it would have little defense; if you made it damn near impossible for someone without access to the original PD work to determine where YOUR new content began and ended, they'd have a substantial defense against accusations of infringement).
> cheap alarm clocks rely on 60 HZ to keep time accurately
Um, I think you need to narrow that down to "cheap electromechanical alarm clocks", unless I've seriously overlooked something, "Cheap" alarm clocks (from China, in particular, as though the distinction even matters anymore) now basically consist of a backlit LCD module glued to a piece of plastic, with piezo buzzer for the alarm itself. The really, *really* hardcore-cheap ones don't even plug in -- they just ship with a coin cell, and aren't backlit (or make you press a button to light them up, like a 1970s wrist watch in reverse). The grand prize goes to one I saw ripped apart online that dispensed with the diode bridge, and wired up the sidelight LEDs to do double-duty as both nighttime illumination AND rectifiers. I vaguely remember seeing old-fashioned electric alarm clocks somewhere like Wal-Mart or Walgreens for a few bucks 5-10 years ago, but I think value-engineered LCD alarm clocks shoved them aside quite a while ago.
It could also be argued that Android owners are more likely to have the technical skills to take matters into their own hands, and won't bother wasting their time with "tech support" for anything short of actual honest-to-god hardware failure.
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I think the "30 year" figure is off by about a decade. I'd personally say the early/mid-90s were the high point of audio fidelity -- CDs were universal, the loudness war hadn't begun, and every upper middle-class high school student in Miami had a 10-15" sub with 250+ real RMS watts behind it to make the neighbors hate him ;-)
> Speakers were generally much better because there was no 7:2 surround sound.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. The total speaker budget has been remarkably constant over the years (roughly a kilobuck), but the number of speakers you're expected to buy has roughly doubled, and the quality & real lifespan of those speakers has gone down the toilet in the meantime.
The sad part is, the high-end audio industry got things TOTALLY wrong. Why do we even HAVE speakers with passive filter networks, instead of speakers that combine the same multiple drivers that they did 20 years ago... but give each one its own pristine digital amp and DSP, all networked together & tuned to perfection with zero phase distortion (buffer them long enough to allow the "slowest" DSP operation in their collective pipelines to complete, then reclock the output with a separate clock signal shared by all the speaker drivers to bring them all back into sync again for the actual audio output).
> God I hate people that put bins and bits and images that should be linked and stored on appropriate storage, not archived in a RCS.
Please keep in mind that pre-Vista, Windows didn't actually *have* proper symlinks. NTFS junctions technically existed since NT4, but Microsoft guarded them like a state secret and bent over backwards to avoid making people aware of them. Also, junctions are more like Ext3 hardlinks, so you can't *quite* use them with reckless consequence-free impunity the way you can with real symlinks.
> git is better than all the other VCSes
As long as you aren't trying to use it under Windows without Github or a real Linux system to fall back on for operations that just don't (quite) work yet with the Windows version. Two specific operations that come to mind are 'push' and 'rebase'.
Personally, I'd be kind of amused if NASA decided to allow the Dragon to dock, NASA's bureaucracy prevented it from carrying actual cargo since it's technically still a 'test', and SpaceX cut a deal with FedEx to symbolically make the first private package delivery to the ISS (with the station's Commander having final authority to approve or refuse anything brought or kept onboard, of course)
It would be interesting to see what kind of stuff the crewmembers themselves would have shipped up if they had more or less carte blanche to do so free of official size, weight, and political considerations (insert scene of Commander looking the other way and devouring a few homemade Rice Krispy treats while the crate of Vodka-infused Belgian chocolate gets unloaded and moved over to the "Russian" side of the station...)
> So Google will suspend my social media and email account if I break their TOS.
Google also controls nearly everything that makes ownership of an Android phone worthwhile, and provides SSO to growing numbers of unrelated sites.
The problem isn't so much Google's suspension of Google+ accounts as it is their seemingly indiscriminate willingness to play Judge Dredd, pull out the BFG2000, and incinerate everything in sight on the slightest whim, for any reason or no reason at all. Other companies have poor customer service, but Google has none whatsoever -- not even for paid customers, or customers whose affiliation has generated real revenue for Google even if no actual cash changed hands between Google and the individual. It's almost like they hired executives with Asperger's to write and implement the company's business plan.
I think part of the problem is that Google itself has no grasp of the impact its actions have on the lives and livelihoods of real people. They aren't evil so much as oblivious and indifferent. They're kind of like a moody child with a magic wand, unlimited powers they're barely aware of, a vague sense of chaotic-good morality, and growing history of operating with complete disregard of the trail of collateral damage they leave around them.
That said, the problems of Facebook and/or Twitter suspension DO go a bit beyond social networking, too. Both companies have increasingly positioned themselves as universal "single sign-on" providers (as does Google). In real-world terms, it would be like having your landlord change the locks and dispose of your belongings some random Tuesday afternoon because you made a credit card purchase from somebody in China before work that triggered your bank's fraud algorithm (even if the bank itself has long since unfrozen the account after being satisfied that the purchase was legitimate). In Google's universe, you wouldn't even be told WHY you were locked out, let alone made whole afterward. You'd just be fucked.
What WebOS *really* needs is a nice, unobtrusive Dalvik compatibility layer that works kind of like VMware Fusion -- run Android apps transparently under WebOS where there's no better WebOS alternative, and enjoy the best of both in the meantime. If HP has any sanity, they're working on this exact issue right now. If they can pull it off, it'll ensure that at worst, a WebOS phone is only slightly less convenient than Android for running android apps, and at best, would let users have their Android cake with WebOS frosting.
Actually, it's worse... your paid apps are bound to your gmail identity as well.
If they locked an Android owner out of not only his contact list and gmail, but effectively revoked the purchase of every paid Market app without refunding the purchase price, I can see a lawsuit regardless of what their TOS might say. Just ask Capital One how well "universal default" stood up to judicial scrutiny once challenged (that was their practice of instantly jacking up all of your interest rates to the maximum if you had a late payment reported to a credit bureau by ANYONE... even if it was an error, due to somebody else's screw-up, or something like a medical bill that was tied up with a health insurance claim. With Android, at least, Google definitely crossed the line from "free" to "paid service", and there's a limit to how trigger-happy you can be with TOS violations before it becomes fraud.
Kind of like Microsoft's inane decision that Windows 2000 Pro was only for "enterprise" users, despite arguably being one of the best releases of Windows ever. Sigh. I still get tears thinking about how I installed Norton Antivirus, updated the AGP GART driver, installed Nero, then went about 2 weeks without having to reboot. Ah. I miss the happy, reboot-free days of Win2k. In contrast to, say, Vista, where installing the OS from the DVD took 17 minutes, followed by 4 hours of patches with so many reboots I lost count. It's like Microsoft just quit even TRYING to make a reboot-free lifestyle a design goal somewhere between 2k and XP, and everything just went to hell from there.
Toshiba's portable display is a step in the right direction, but it's too dim unless you use their standalone power supply. And their official external power supply is a cruel joke of an afterthought that was obviously tacked on at the last minute with minimal dedicated design effort. I can understand it being dim when powered by 100mA from a wimpy laptop USB port, but for god's sake, it should AT LEAST be able to take advantage of a proper powered USB hub capable of supplying 500mA per port when available.
An interesting compromise would be if Toshiba chucked the current external PSU they sell, and replaced it with one that's ALSO a universal laptop PSU with a 4 USB ports: 1 for the monitor that uses the fifth pin to confirm to the display that it can supply full power for the display in addition to data, 1 that's a dedicated, data-shorted charging port for phones, and 2 that are proper powered USB ports capable of supplying 500mA. Then you could leave your laptop's official PSU at home, and enjoy the monitor at full brightness along with proper powered USB hub for only slightly more weight and volume than the laptop's original PSU.
Screw cheaper and lighter. I want a real, honest to god Model M-type buckling spring keyboard. Another pound and half-inch is a small price to pay for 30-50wpm of improved typing speed :-)
> What you will need to do is replace those $0.30 bulbs with $1.50 bulbs when they burn out.
Unless you care about light quality. Just about any 25-cent hundred-watt bulb from a dollar-store 4-pack is almost guaranteed to have a higher CRI (color rendering index) than any flicker-free high-frequency CFL of comparable brightness that costs less than $5-10. I've seen plenty of cheap CFLs, and they're pretty dire. Worse, the cheap, crap CFLs seem to be driving the good ones with high CRI and high-frequency refresh off the market. True broad-spectrum CFLs have become basically impossible to buy at stores like Home Depot, and are becoming uber-niche items even online. And by "true broad-spectrum", I mean bulbs that literally print their CRI in hard numbers on the package in a way that has specific legally-binding meaning, not bulbs that SAY they're "natural color", but don't have a CRI number printed anywhere. Go ahead -- scrutinize the bulbs at Home Depot and Lowe's. Unless you trip across a forgotten-about bulb that's been on the shelf for 3 years, it's damn near impossible to find any with a real CRI number on them. The industry just kind of settled on "better than the worst used to be, but not good enough to meet the definition of high-CRI", and went with it for everything. :(
Or, for something completely different... if you have an Android phone, and can get over Sony's butt-ugly wrist strap that makes it look like something from the closeout bin at a dollar store & the relentless evil that permeates every pore of the company, you can get a wrist-mounted bluetooth-tethered faux watch remote display for your Android phone -- the Sony LiveView ;-)
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Ericsson-Liveview-display-Android/dp/B004E2V4NM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1310083296&sr=8-1
Actually, my point was that Windows 7 BREAKS the norm they established with Windows 95.
Windows 3.x (and earlier) encouraged tiling and cascading. Windows 95 acknowledged that it was a bad idea that just didn't work well in real life, and established window-maximization as the new norm (with the taskbar to keep other windows easily-accessible when a different one was maximized).
By "MDI" I'm specifically referring to dockable window frameworks where you have one main window, but child areas within it that can be moved around and resized, then collectively maximized and hidden.
I do the same thing with hyphens and Qmail. It's practically eliminated spam as a problem for nearly a decade. The only two problems I have are people (and businesses) that get freaked out seeing an email address like me-yourname@mydomain.com, and websites that want an email address to recover a login (if I can't figure out what address I made up for that particular site... I have semi-standards, but they don't always work 100%).
WinSplit Revolution is your new friend :-)
Ummmm, Acorn is kind of a reach. They might have come up with the basic idea of a taskbar, but Windows95 is a gigantic step up from that.
Microsoft's key innovation was to decisively break the Apple-Unix tradition of "a billion tiny windows shattered across the screen", giving us an alternative that worked very well on single, (relatively) low-res monitors. They established the norm of maximizing windows to fill the whole screen, and MDI as kind of a compromise that attempted to give the flexibility of dockable windows with the convenience of instant maximization/minimization. MDI obviously hasn't exactly aged well into the era of 2-3 monitor desktops, but at the time, it was a definite step forward.
> If their R&D is so awesome, why can't they make their own products and not resort to ripping off other businesses to make money?
Someone here has to say it, so here goes.
Windows Mobile at its core was actually a pretty good mobile operating system. It just sucked at being a *phone* used for making voice calls. It was more or less dysfunctional and unusable out of the box in its virgin state, but after you spent a week or two tweaking and extending it, it ended up being pretty cool. Truthfully, Android 1.5 was a *massive* step down from WM6 at its best, and 2.1 was kind of a draw (better in some ways, infuriatingly worse in others because the areas where it sucked were almost all areas where an open-source OS is supposed to be unsuckable, like proper bluetooth support for HID, SPP, and OBEX).
It's pretty sad, really. Microsoft killed off a perfectly good mobile OS that basically just needed a new phone app and facelift, and replaced it with SidekickOS in dotNET drag (read up on Windows Phone's history if you don't believe it).
Er... and mousewheels. Can't forget mousewheels. Or the taskbar. Let's be honest here -- KDE and Gnome follow that particular design norm more religiously than Windows *itself* does (when you consider the default behavior of Windows 7).
I give Microsoft partial credit for fonts, too. No, they didn't invent ATM or TrueType, but you can *bet* that we'd still be paying shitloads of money per font if Adobe had its way. As recently as ~10 years ago, Adobe still sold a CD full of fonts for $99 that didn't actually give you the ability to *use* any of them without paying additional fees *on top* of that.
> the warmer outside the more efficient the device and vice versa.
Sort of, but not quite the way you mean. A heat pump is most efficient at heating when it's hot outside, and most efficient at cooling when it's cold outside, because a heat pump in heat mode is basically air conditioning the back yard and pumping the waste heat into your house. When it's 10 below outside, a heat pump falls flat on its face, just like an air conditioner does when it's 102 degrees at 99.9% humidity outside and you're trying to cool the house down to 72 (and, despite your A/C's best efforts, the interior is 79 and rising by a degree an hour... assuming the evaporator coil doesn't ice up first).
Heat pumps are awesome, though, for the majority of the US that spends most of the year between 30 and 90 degrees (in the humid south, though, you're probably better off spending the extra cash on an air conditioner with dual-speed compressor to handle the hot and hotter days that are typical instead of a comparably-priced heat pump to handle the moderately cold and uncomfortably hot days you'd find elsewhere in the country).
You know what's really weird? I have a Thinkpad T61 with SSD and Vista Business. It actually takes it *longer* to go from 'hibernated' to 'fully-functioning' than it takes it to cold boot. And waking it up from 'suspend' takes almost as long as a cold boot. It's almost like Windows is finding the computer to be in such a powered-down, chaotic and messed up state that cleaning up the mess and bringing everything back into working order ends up taking almost as long as just booting cold... and hibernation is the worst of both worlds -- the time to boot up cold, followed by the time to straighten out the mess the system finds itself in upon virtually waking up from an extended slumber.
I suspect something is grossly misconfigured in the BIOS, or needs to be manually tweaked in the registry, but it's damn near impossible to find a coherent explanation *anywhere* that really, truly explains all the various BIOS power options, how they relate to one another, and how they affect the operation of various versions of Windows. God forbid, maybe an O'Reilly "Heads Up" book on power management ;-)
> If Elsevier et al don't like those terms, they have every right to see how long they last without any content derived from public funding.
Frankly, I'd be satisfied if Google would just fucking give us an option to completely exclude search results behind paywalls. Yes, I know you can sometimes avoid them by just ignoring anything that doesn't have a link to view from Google's cache (big tip-off), but it's still annoying how they've increasingly littered their search results with that crap.
Or, as MrSafety sang (in a slightly different context, slightly paraphrased)... "I will not will not pay... I will not will not pay... the stuff's o-kay-ayy, but I still will not pay..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhhiO8ZIols
As much as I think current copyright law is fucked (particularly with regard to orphaned works), there's a grain of sensibility to the idea of allowing copyright on aspects of a published/broadcast form. If I spend substantial amounts of time/money/resources scanning public-domain books into pdf, it's entirely reasonable that I should retain copyright over the literal pdf file, and even to images rendered directly from it. HOWEVER, if somebody else were to OCR and proofread those PDFs, or even type them from scratch (reading from the PDF), that should effectively neutralize the PDF-related aspect of the new copyright, because OCR'ing or re-typing from PDF isn't substantially different from doing the same from the source. Well, except for two little problems -- the creator of the pdf might have gone to substantial time and expense to acquire access to the source material to begin with. Likewise, if someone were to convert it to raw markup-free text (by reading and typing, or OCR and editing), it would be nearly impossible for anyone to later claim they did the same instead of simply copying the raw text (at least, for works shorter in length than a few hundred thousand words, where things like minor errors creeping in (or intentionally salted into place) could arguably be treated like a form of watermarking).
By the same token, suppose it's 200 years from now, and I somehow come into ownership of a third-generation copy of a Charlie Chaplin movie that has unambiguously fallen out of copyright (and largely ceased to exist for whatever reason). If I spend time restoring it, I've definitely added value. Arguably, in current terms, if I spend 3 weeks encoding it into variable-bitrate h.264 with aggressive forward- and reverse- prediction, the h.264 encoding itself adds substantial value (anybody who's ever encoded Huffy into h.264 knows that h.264 encoding is almost as much of an art as a science, and copies with nominally-similar bitrates and/or encoding times can vary WILDLY with regard to encoding time and/or final output quality). At the very, VERY least, if society decides that my restoration and recovery actions were without value, someone who wants to distribute it themselves should be required to prove that they rendered MY h.264 file into a few terrabytes of raw RGB frames, then re-encoded them frame by painful frame into h.264 (or some other codec) themselves (roughly akin to opening a pdf document in one window, and hand-typing it word by word into an editor in another window).
I think most people can agree that there's value in recovery, restoration, and re-encoding. The devil's in the details. Granting Berne-like terms for it is utterly absurd, but granting something like 5 years, or maybe 10-25 with compulsory licensing and rules that make it increasingly difficult to sue for infringement after the first 5-10 years (say, mandatory arbitration at your own cost before you can even bring about an infringement case after year 5, damages limited to demonstrated directly-lost revenue after year 10, etc). For works where the line between the original public domain work and any new content (interpretation, footnotes, commentary, etc) is blurred, your right to sue for infringement would largely depend upon how easy you made it for an honest person to avoid infringement (ie, if all of YOUR content was clearly tagged and separated logically from the public domain work, someone reproducing it would have little defense; if you made it damn near impossible for someone without access to the original PD work to determine where YOUR new content began and ended, they'd have a substantial defense against accusations of infringement).
> cheap alarm clocks rely on 60 HZ to keep time accurately
Um, I think you need to narrow that down to "cheap electromechanical alarm clocks", unless I've seriously overlooked something, "Cheap" alarm clocks (from China, in particular, as though the distinction even matters anymore) now basically consist of a backlit LCD module glued to a piece of plastic, with piezo buzzer for the alarm itself. The really, *really* hardcore-cheap ones don't even plug in -- they just ship with a coin cell, and aren't backlit (or make you press a button to light them up, like a 1970s wrist watch in reverse). The grand prize goes to one I saw ripped apart online that dispensed with the diode bridge, and wired up the sidelight LEDs to do double-duty as both nighttime illumination AND rectifiers. I vaguely remember seeing old-fashioned electric alarm clocks somewhere like Wal-Mart or Walgreens for a few bucks 5-10 years ago, but I think value-engineered LCD alarm clocks shoved them aside quite a while ago.
It could also be argued that Android owners are more likely to have the technical skills to take matters into their own hands, and won't bother wasting their time with "tech support" for anything short of actual honest-to-god hardware failure.