But on my system (Gentoo PPC on a 333mhz iMac), Ctrl-C has it's own 'clipboard' and highlight has it's own clipboard, so if I highlight one thing, press CTRL-C, then highlight something else- then go to another program and press CTRL-V and then Middel click, I will get two completely seperate peices of text- and once I got used to the 'two clipboard' system, it was actaully something interesting, I've found a couple specialized applications for it.
Back to the point however, on my system at least CTRL-C highlight what I want to write over CTRL-V, works, in every X application I have. So maby the problem is not you, but your distrobution; try another one?
That is, it works when the iMac is not busy recompling X over a three day strech of time- or is it no longer 'cool' to make fun of Gentoo's compile times?
(gentoo wasen't actually my first choice- but it's all that I could get to run on it; however I'm quite pleased with it now, and might actually use it on another system when I upgrade)
Seriously- if your gaming habbits are eating away at your couple time, I think you need to evaluate your situation...
My girlfirend dose not like action games, she likes the sims, she likes chatting on the computer, she likes littel flash games, she kicks my ass in soul calibur 2 (Though my constant picking of yoshimitsu might have something to do with that), and we both enjoy smash brother's meele- That said we spend a lot more of the time we spend together, together.
We also enjoy time by ourselves; she has a liking for musicals and historical peices at the theater- she can go see those herself, it woulden't be any fun for her to have me there sleeping on her shoulder anyway. Likewise goes for me and action games (first person shooters and the like), and predominantly action movies (Unless it's a bond movie- she loves those)
Several famous and not so famous psycologists(sp), psycatrists(sp) have said 'relationships do not exist in a vaccume'- So you can't just cut your girlfriend out of your relationship because you want more 'me' time without upsetting the balance of the relationship.
Get out of your self-centric shell and look at it from another angle, lets just say, for the sake of argument, that your girlfirend likes insect taxadermy (completely random thing, that should seem interesting, but not 'let me join in' to a gamer), and because the monarch butterflies are in season she wants to spend upwards of 6 hours a day, catching, preserving and mounting them- 6 hours that you two normally spend doing 'couple stuff' like going for walks holding hands, or cuddling, or having sex, or whatever it is you do in your couple time- How will you feel, would you not feel dijected that some monarch butterflies are ranking above you in her life right now?
So you want him to sit, during the night, for 8+ hours, when people only come in the store every ten to fifteen minutes, half of them being drunk, stones, or otherwise suspicious looking to begin with, since there comming into a convience store late at night- and somehow pick the weird freek who wants to buy 'giant-jugs-and-shit' from the guy who has a small gun in his pocket and is going to point that at you before the one goes to the porn stand and the other walks up to the register calmly like he wants to buy cigarettes and then says 'empy the register'.
His job is simply to ring up there purchases when they come though, and hand over the money when they get held up- literally. A friend of mind woked at 7-11, and his job training included 'what to do in the event of a hold up', and do you know what it is; Hand over the money, wait until they leave and then call the cops- because doing anything else gets you killed.
Heck maby he could have picked out the mugger, lets just say that he can- then what!?! He can see the mugger, he can see him comming, you have 15 seconds what are you going to do- trigger the alarm? To what end- either the cops are going to arrive long after he's gone, or worse- there going to arrive while he's in the store, with a gun pointed at your face while your putting cash in the bag, then he's going to get scared, and then he's going to figure out that YOU triggered some sort of silent alarm, and then he's going to mad a YOU, and scared, and have a gun; This is not a constructive situation.
Maby you want him to have his own gun, and get into a firefight, in the convience store, over a paltry sum of $250 in the register that the owner figures will be lost to robberies as a cost of doing buisness anyway
Let me sumarize; You have missed the point.
The contents of the register are not worth loosing your life over, there not worth getting in a confrontation with a twitchy mugger, there not worth much at all- let the mugger have it, call the cops afterwards, and let the surveliance cameras do the rest of the work.
Imagine that a popular japanese movie depicting the americans as nuke-happy jumping southerners who just want to show off there new toy as a way to do dammage to the japanese for the hell after descimating the local populace with firebaombs was released here, and the US powers that be decided to sensort it as 'hate mongering'- would you still be complaining?
What about if the americans created a cartoon depicting the japanese as idiotic monkey faced individuals with awful teeth, actually called them 'monkey face', and ended the cartoon with an atomic-style explosion killing them all to a skippy soundtrack (It happened; watch 'bugs bunny vs the japanese') and the japanese government censored it.
I'm not arguing that china is nessassarily right or wrong with this action, so much as pointing out other perspectives that you can look at the situation from.
Cannon beats 35mm
It puts 10 MP (specifically a cannon, which may be important, as lense and CCD design do have profound effects on the digital camera) as being the superior to 35mm film in every possible catagory, hence a 20 MP camera like this one fujifilm camera> would outperform a 70mm film in every possible catagory
With the added benifits of digital (being able to review the pictures, delete unnessassary photoes, send photos without the need to scan over the internet, one step adding photoes to photo editing software, cheaper cost of prints, no development costs; no one who has enough money to buy a good digital camera should be using a non-digital; The only remanining reasons are cost (because you allready own 70mm photo equipment, which is not cheap to replace), inability, and lazyness; But the cost issue is mostly a misnomer- Even though a 20MP digital costs a lot; the savings from not having to make extera prints to make sure that the client likes it, or having to piss off clients with prints they don't like and the development costs on those prints (assuming you do photography professionally, but why else would you have a 20mp camera or 70mm film camera?) will pay for itself soon enough.
The only people who should not have digital cameras RIGHT NOW, are, ironically, home users- who can get a good 35mm for $200, but would need to pay $700 for a good ~10MP digital camera, the difference of $500 would pay for a LOT of photo development!
Unforutnately your numbers do not 'hold water' as it were-
500 barrels out from the field
150 barrels to fuel the farming operation - except that the farming needs to take place anyway to feed the population, the waste plant matter which is normally discarded could be used for fermentation
100 barrels to fuel the refinement operation- Except that fermentation is a 'natural' process and would be largely non-energy intensive (there would be some energy involved to remove the alchohol before all the bacteria inside died, and then to distill it
80 barrels to fuel the distribution- Also flawed, this should be lower then the cost to distribute oil, since rather then having to come from other countries, or other states- ethanol could be produced locally for every location, so distrobution costs would be lower
As an example consider biodisel. Biodisel made from scrap plant matter (and note that's scrap; hence the cost of farming should be left out, since the farming had to take place anyway to feed people, the leftovers of the farming are then converted into biodisel) is cheaper then regular disel (in canada at least), and the process for making biodisel is a lot more energy intensive then the (relatively) nautral process of fermentation.
However, poking holes in my own argument- 100% of the plant matter cannot be converted to ethanol, which begs the question- is there enough scrap plant matter, right now, today to replace our oil based economy with an ethanol one; and will it be cheaper everywhere to create ethanol then to harvest fossile fules?
Pure hydrogen needs to come from somehwere, which normally means electrolosis which has less then a 50% efficiency; however, ethanol (booze) is also a plentiful source of hydrogen, and it can be extracted from plant leftovers, essentially making energy from waste- Ethanol fule cells allready exist, but as of yet have a tendancy to break down in the course of 5 years, which is rather inefficent; however it goes without saying that the technology will improve and lifespan will go up, while pure hydrogen has been looked at as a power source for ~30 years, etanol fule cells are relatively recent ~5 years.
What OS you are running is rarely an issue for support so long as you can assume that the person on the other end of the line has some mild understanding of what they are looking at- if they don't know what there looking at, they will be using one of the major applications, with it's default software, after all there the same options, just in different places (For instance, lets just say that in the future when linux takes over, the three major distrobutions are Fedora, Sussie, and Mandrake), which is no more complicated (I would actually say less complicated) then supporting windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP (all of which place the same options in different places).
Just like today in the windows world, if you use opera for your browser and you have problems; the tech person is going to ask you to use IE- so too will those with odd programs be told to use more 'basic' ones (mozilla instead of Konq for instance) and it will be up to the user to apply the settings and changes in the basic program to there variations of those programs, or that person could contact applicaiton specific support (contact KDE for problems with Konq)
However while tech support can say 'use the specific application' a virus writer cannot- a virus writer will have to guess what the person is browsing the internet with or else write explots that have variations for multiple programs and setups.
Real world example: If you call internet tech support they are going to tell you to disconnect your firewall- they support the internet to ONE computer, not to your network, and they only support it on windows, with Netscape (mozilla) or IE as browsers; However, once you reestablish the connection your perfectly free (and many people do) then hook it up to there network, firewall it, and use other browsers- This makes things far more difficult for a hacker to get into those systems, and then to actually do dammage to them (not impossible mind you, but more difficult)
can't be worse then my existing setup of running bochs with a windows install on my PPC/linux machine which then runs windows version of flash, and I can do most flash things with it, most, some, ok- very few, but it works, and it usually renders homestarrunner ok... sometimes... the short ones...
Once again, my point is- anything would be better, and making a Java version would make it faster then the ridiculusness of a virtual emulated system with a different OS and then installing flash for that while still preserving macromedias 'family jewels'
oh no; here comes the magic phrase: I know I'm going to get modded into oblivion, but...
Somehow whenever china gets mentioned- it's horrid stompings on the concept of human rights comes up. That's good, china has some very serious problems with human rights that need to be addressed, even today. However, I find a lot of this stomping to be 'blind stomping' people insult china's human rights violations, without understanding them; or trying to assault the root of the problem. Also statments like 'china shoulden't be doing this until they can get there human rights issues sorted out' come up a lot.
Maby this IS how there going to fix there human rights issues- by making forward strides to making a forward thinking comunity china will raise it's peoples standard of living, and slowly emerge as a global 'contender' in world politics and technology (there allready recognised as a power; but often a pool of cheap labour power, rather then a technological one), so long as china's people are (in the world view) nothing more then cheap labour, how will they ever be able to comprihend there own people as cheap 'disposable' labour; and that sort of thinking results in- you guessed it, human rights violations- if there lives are cheap; there is no incentive not to end them when they commit 'crimes' (the state identifies crimes, which may or may not align with morality or even sanity- see the DMCA for examples)
The next problem I have with people poo-pooing on china's human rights violations blissfully ignores human rights violations from other countries (torture of Iraqie prisoners, horrid treatment of 'illegal combattants' in guantolomo bay from the US for instance, in my own country, we were still 'indoctrinating native children into society' which is a polite way of saying kidnapping native americans and forcing them to attend schools far from home while there sexually assaulted by the priests and nuns until 1971)
My point is; none of our countries are 'perfect' when it comes to human rights- and I think that china should be given some slack- for all the ill they are doing, they seem to be improving by leaps and bounds- improvement still needs to be done, the human rights issues still need to be addressed; but simply saying 'china is a hole where humans have no rights and should be ignored' is wrong- china as a country is trying to better itself, it diserves recognition for that; great change either requires time, or revolution: I think everyone can agree revolution is not in the bests interests of anyone with regard to china.
Some companies by nature of needing to make a profit will want to keep the 'family jewels' locked up- to my knoledge flash dose not use any copyright encumbered compression schemes or patented techniques to do what it dose- if they made the source open some other company would snatch up there product and release there own version, possibly forkig what is currently a very fixed and ordered standard
That said- multi-platform languages like Java were MADE for this sort of scenario- you just write your code in Java/python/ruby/perl whatever, and the local execution program will make it run on whatever arcetecture/OS the person has- so I guess what I'm really saying is- Hey macromedia, make a Java/pthon/ruby version of flash so tht we can ALL be happy!
I really like that idea- driving on a highway means driving through a cool (since no sun directly on blacktop) green shaded pathway- The reduction in the ammount of AC you need to be running might also bring about energy savings in your biodisel powered vehicle, netting you more Km/l without sacrificing comfort.
I'm betting that if you count his time at $10/hr, figuring that he spent 30 hours straight working on it (not counting the hours that he walked away to let it dry), and that it's a top of the line machine worth about $2000, $3000 for his time: $5000 would be the minimum asking price, however it's just so beautiful, I imagine he could fetch $10,000 for it. But that's just a ballpark guess I'm making up by comparing it to art auctions I've seen, and then adding in my precieved cost of the computer.
Seriously, most 'impressive case mods' are just a bunch of kit, random applications, and of course cathode ray tubes to light it up in neon.
This guy made something impressive, and beautiful, and he paid such attention to detail (like painting the whole CD rom drive, and continuing the 'rusted' theme internally as well as getting the water to glow green without getting the whole case to be bathed in green light, as such- I think it needs to be viewed as art, and no 'just another case mod'
As much as I find HP all in one devices to be crashy peices of crap, they are cheap, and most can do ADF scanning for under $300, you'll have to handhold the machine to get it working, but the ADF and scanner on it are actually rather solid units. (then again, what could you possibly screw up in an ADF and a scanner?!?)
I also have to agree with others, you MUST set it up as your policy that you will only put the documents into the scanner, press scan and walk away- nothign more; or else your productivity in other areas will be consumed by this project (unless you can get more money for this project to hire students)
unforutnately no, I also coulden't send him a USB hub- Because it 'wasen't the printers fault'- we coulden't send him anything that would actually fix the printer, despite the fact that HP dose make hubs, and jetdirect devices, both of which would have fixed his problem.
Throught this thread I've been defending help desk workers, but this is an ask slashdot for the worst explanation from tech support, so I'll share a personal expericed from my perspective as me, on the other side of the phone.
I worked for HP's outsourced tech support, supporting all in one printers, on macs. One such printer; the HP laserjet 3330 had a critical undenyable hardware problem; when you plugged the 3330 into a mac, either ther mac would reset constantly, or the printer would shut down (the printer has no on or off button!)- it only effected some printers, with some macs, but it was widespread enough that that about 50% of 3330 calls related to this problem (incidentally I spent 2 full hours trying to replicate the problem on dozens of different macs to no avail); so I had congruently tracked it down to a hardware failure, and a memo went out that this was a hardware failure. About 40 seconds after the memo went out, another memo went out saying that we were not allowed to identify it as a hardware failure on the part of the printer...
I had to do a callback, during which I assured the person on the other end of the line that it was his mac expereincing the hardware failure- even though his printer was turning off, would not print, and several other USB devices were working- I finally after some thought said that the
'mac's ability to accept an off or on code from a USB keyboard means that it's constantly pooling for a result, for whatever reason your mac is sending malformed polling requests that are causing the printer to shut down, perhaps if you got a USB hub it would isolate the printer from the problem' (As much as I diden't know what they did to foul up the hardware in those printers, I did know that a USB hub normally fixed it)
I felt really bad, in fact I felt so bad that I made one of my mannagers send the guy two free toner rolls and a big stack of paper.
As someone who has worked in tech support, I have to speak up and say that when I was doing it; 90% of problems, were user problems, and not problems on our side.
And the whole point of troubleshooting is to isolte points to failure- REset the modem, reset your computer, disconnect the router, still not working, next step, try a ping to the internet, try a ping to the server, try a ping to yourself, reset the modem again (just in case you ignored the tech the first time he sugested it, reset the computer again.
That above scenario will solve somewhere around 70% of all network problems, and if you take out the request to reset the modem and computer the second time the rate drops sharply, because peopel have a tendancy to assume that tech support people have no idea what there doing and can safely be ignored. We've been given a script to follow that says to do exactly that, and we get in trouble if we don't do that scenario first; so sit tight, let us establish that it is not your firewall, your computer, or your modem, and then we can get to some real tech support- or hell, do it yourself, first, before you call in, and be sure to say that you did it yourself, first, how you did it when you get connected and save time.
I'm glad that someone else noticed that the store reps explanation was fundamentally correct. Now it's not 100% correct, and it's not the answer that anyone who has taken a course in networking would answer, but it's correct enough that a customer would not have been misinformed by the rep's answer.
As many if not more devices are supported (and that means with drivers) on linux, and even worse, they are supported by random individuals who are looking at the output from a 'black box' device (like a printer, or a scanner) and writing a driver based on that (since unline the driver writers they do not have access to the proprietary internals of the device), and they are not being paid, which often means that 'good enough' means it works and can crash on ocassion. Despite this, linux systems (And BSD systems, and to a lesser extend mac systems (while most hardware in macs are tightly controlled anyone can build a printer for a mac, and trust me some printer manufacturers *cough* HP *cough* do a pisspour job on the mac drivers) are downright rock solid compared to windows systems (This is of course entirely personal experience, and the most often reason I reset either machine is a result of slow memory leaks degrading performance over time); so one of the following is therefore true:
1-80% of crashes are not due to drivers
2-I exist almost entirely in the 20% due to a satistical anomoly
3-Somehow people just trying to make things work have mannaged to build greatly superior drivers without knowing the internals of the systems there building those drivers for
4-There is a fundamental flaw in the windows arcetecture that allows drivers to more easily crash it compared to linux
5-Building drivers for windows requires more skill then building them for Linux, and the end result of this is that windows drivers are more crashy
howeer your point about the digital SLR and other high cost but not ridiculus in a nation like the EU, north ameria, or austrialia being well outside of the average indian workers budget, I imagine, still holds true (unlike what the previous poster claimed, I am not from india, nor have I ever traveled there)
regardless of who coined the phrase for it, googol is a number, and google can feel free to copy it.
Or dose someone get to sue the UH shopping chanel hosted on www.million.com too? Hey, I'm sure if I traced back my family lineage far enough someone in my family must have coined some number somewhere- and there's a website for EVERY bloody number (thought some of them are just squatters, they are registered)
In other words, this is just plain ridculous and indicitive of the litigation based soceity that the united states is rapidly becomming.
Even if this works 100%, isin't one of the reasons HIV is so hard to treat BECAUSE it's extremely mutative and because of this quickly adapts to any form of treatment- Coulden't introducing another variation of HIV into the bloodstream end up 'double-gunning' the test subject, as the 'bad HIV' mutates to be immune to the 'good HIV' and the 'good HIV' mutates to become bad for the 'host'?
Now don't get me wrong- I see a lot of good in using more HIV to counter HIV- because of it's mutative abilities; if the 'good HIV' has been reconfigured to somehow prey on 'bad HIV' it will keep mutating in course to follow the 'bad HIV's mutations so that it will survive. However that said, I'm not sure it will allwase work that way, and only time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
But on my system (Gentoo PPC on a 333mhz iMac), Ctrl-C has it's own 'clipboard' and highlight has it's own clipboard, so if I highlight one thing, press CTRL-C, then highlight something else- then go to another program and press CTRL-V and then Middel click, I will get two completely seperate peices of text- and once I got used to the 'two clipboard' system, it was actaully something interesting, I've found a couple specialized applications for it.
Back to the point however, on my system at least CTRL-C highlight what I want to write over CTRL-V, works, in every X application I have. So maby the problem is not you, but your distrobution; try another one?
That is, it works when the iMac is not busy recompling X over a three day strech of time- or is it no longer 'cool' to make fun of Gentoo's compile times?
(gentoo wasen't actually my first choice- but it's all that I could get to run on it; however I'm quite pleased with it now, and might actually use it on another system when I upgrade)
Seriously- if your gaming habbits are eating away at your couple time, I think you need to evaluate your situation...
My girlfirend dose not like action games, she likes the sims, she likes chatting on the computer, she likes littel flash games, she kicks my ass in soul calibur 2 (Though my constant picking of yoshimitsu might have something to do with that), and we both enjoy smash brother's meele- That said we spend a lot more of the time we spend together, together.
We also enjoy time by ourselves; she has a liking for musicals and historical peices at the theater- she can go see those herself, it woulden't be any fun for her to have me there sleeping on her shoulder anyway. Likewise goes for me and action games (first person shooters and the like), and predominantly action movies (Unless it's a bond movie- she loves those) Several famous and not so famous psycologists(sp), psycatrists(sp) have said 'relationships do not exist in a vaccume'- So you can't just cut your girlfriend out of your relationship because you want more 'me' time without upsetting the balance of the relationship.
Get out of your self-centric shell and look at it from another angle, lets just say, for the sake of argument, that your girlfirend likes insect taxadermy (completely random thing, that should seem interesting, but not 'let me join in' to a gamer), and because the monarch butterflies are in season she wants to spend upwards of 6 hours a day, catching, preserving and mounting them- 6 hours that you two normally spend doing 'couple stuff' like going for walks holding hands, or cuddling, or having sex, or whatever it is you do in your couple time- How will you feel, would you not feel dijected that some monarch butterflies are ranking above you in her life right now?
So you want him to sit, during the night, for 8+ hours, when people only come in the store every ten to fifteen minutes, half of them being drunk, stones, or otherwise suspicious looking to begin with, since there comming into a convience store late at night- and somehow pick the weird freek who wants to buy 'giant-jugs-and-shit' from the guy who has a small gun in his pocket and is going to point that at you before the one goes to the porn stand and the other walks up to the register calmly like he wants to buy cigarettes and then says 'empy the register'.
His job is simply to ring up there purchases when they come though, and hand over the money when they get held up- literally. A friend of mind woked at 7-11, and his job training included 'what to do in the event of a hold up', and do you know what it is; Hand over the money, wait until they leave and then call the cops- because doing anything else gets you killed.
Heck maby he could have picked out the mugger, lets just say that he can- then what!?! He can see the mugger, he can see him comming, you have 15 seconds what are you going to do- trigger the alarm? To what end- either the cops are going to arrive long after he's gone, or worse- there going to arrive while he's in the store, with a gun pointed at your face while your putting cash in the bag, then he's going to get scared, and then he's going to figure out that YOU triggered some sort of silent alarm, and then he's going to mad a YOU, and scared, and have a gun; This is not a constructive situation.
Maby you want him to have his own gun, and get into a firefight, in the convience store, over a paltry sum of $250 in the register that the owner figures will be lost to robberies as a cost of doing buisness anyway
Let me sumarize; You have missed the point.
The contents of the register are not worth loosing your life over, there not worth getting in a confrontation with a twitchy mugger, there not worth much at all- let the mugger have it, call the cops afterwards, and let the surveliance cameras do the rest of the work.
you are correct- I had momentarily forgotten that megapixils are a measurement of area;
That said, no need to throw insults.
Imagine that a popular japanese movie depicting the americans as nuke-happy jumping southerners who just want to show off there new toy as a way to do dammage to the japanese for the hell after descimating the local populace with firebaombs was released here, and the US powers that be decided to sensort it as 'hate mongering'- would you still be complaining?
What about if the americans created a cartoon depicting the japanese as idiotic monkey faced individuals with awful teeth, actually called them 'monkey face', and ended the cartoon with an atomic-style explosion killing them all to a skippy soundtrack (It happened; watch 'bugs bunny vs the japanese') and the japanese government censored it.
I'm not arguing that china is nessassarily right or wrong with this action, so much as pointing out other perspectives that you can look at the situation from.
See the following site
Cannon beats 35mm
It puts 10 MP (specifically a cannon, which may be important, as lense and CCD design do have profound effects on the digital camera) as being the superior to 35mm film in every possible catagory, hence a 20 MP camera like this one fujifilm camera> would outperform a 70mm film in every possible catagory
With the added benifits of digital (being able to review the pictures, delete unnessassary photoes, send photos without the need to scan over the internet, one step adding photoes to photo editing software, cheaper cost of prints, no development costs; no one who has enough money to buy a good digital camera should be using a non-digital; The only remanining reasons are cost (because you allready own 70mm photo equipment, which is not cheap to replace), inability, and lazyness; But the cost issue is mostly a misnomer- Even though a 20MP digital costs a lot; the savings from not having to make extera prints to make sure that the client likes it, or having to piss off clients with prints they don't like and the development costs on those prints (assuming you do photography professionally, but why else would you have a 20mp camera or 70mm film camera?) will pay for itself soon enough.
The only people who should not have digital cameras RIGHT NOW, are, ironically, home users- who can get a good 35mm for $200, but would need to pay $700 for a good ~10MP digital camera, the difference of $500 would pay for a LOT of photo development!
Unforutnately your numbers do not 'hold water' as it were-
500 barrels out from the field
150 barrels to fuel the farming operation - except that the farming needs to take place anyway to feed the population, the waste plant matter which is normally discarded could be used for fermentation
100 barrels to fuel the refinement operation- Except that fermentation is a 'natural' process and would be largely non-energy intensive (there would be some energy involved to remove the alchohol before all the bacteria inside died, and then to distill it
80 barrels to fuel the distribution- Also flawed, this should be lower then the cost to distribute oil, since rather then having to come from other countries, or other states- ethanol could be produced locally for every location, so distrobution costs would be lower
As an example consider biodisel. Biodisel made from scrap plant matter (and note that's scrap; hence the cost of farming should be left out, since the farming had to take place anyway to feed people, the leftovers of the farming are then converted into biodisel) is cheaper then regular disel (in canada at least), and the process for making biodisel is a lot more energy intensive then the (relatively) nautral process of fermentation.
However, poking holes in my own argument- 100% of the plant matter cannot be converted to ethanol, which begs the question- is there enough scrap plant matter, right now, today to replace our oil based economy with an ethanol one; and will it be cheaper everywhere to create ethanol then to harvest fossile fules?
Yes, and no.
Pure hydrogen needs to come from somehwere, which normally means electrolosis which has less then a 50% efficiency; however, ethanol (booze) is also a plentiful source of hydrogen, and it can be extracted from plant leftovers, essentially making energy from waste- Ethanol fule cells allready exist, but as of yet have a tendancy to break down in the course of 5 years, which is rather inefficent; however it goes without saying that the technology will improve and lifespan will go up, while pure hydrogen has been looked at as a power source for ~30 years, etanol fule cells are relatively recent ~5 years.
What OS you are running is rarely an issue for support so long as you can assume that the person on the other end of the line has some mild understanding of what they are looking at- if they don't know what there looking at, they will be using one of the major applications, with it's default software, after all there the same options, just in different places (For instance, lets just say that in the future when linux takes over, the three major distrobutions are Fedora, Sussie, and Mandrake), which is no more complicated (I would actually say less complicated) then supporting windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP (all of which place the same options in different places).
Just like today in the windows world, if you use opera for your browser and you have problems; the tech person is going to ask you to use IE- so too will those with odd programs be told to use more 'basic' ones (mozilla instead of Konq for instance) and it will be up to the user to apply the settings and changes in the basic program to there variations of those programs, or that person could contact applicaiton specific support (contact KDE for problems with Konq)
However while tech support can say 'use the specific application' a virus writer cannot- a virus writer will have to guess what the person is browsing the internet with or else write explots that have variations for multiple programs and setups.
Real world example: If you call internet tech support they are going to tell you to disconnect your firewall- they support the internet to ONE computer, not to your network, and they only support it on windows, with Netscape (mozilla) or IE as browsers; However, once you reestablish the connection your perfectly free (and many people do) then hook it up to there network, firewall it, and use other browsers- This makes things far more difficult for a hacker to get into those systems, and then to actually do dammage to them (not impossible mind you, but more difficult)
can't be worse then my existing setup of running bochs with a windows install on my PPC/linux machine which then runs windows version of flash, and I can do most flash things with it, most, some, ok- very few, but it works, and it usually renders homestarrunner ok... sometimes... the short ones...
Once again, my point is- anything would be better, and making a Java version would make it faster then the ridiculusness of a virtual emulated system with a different OS and then installing flash for that while still preserving macromedias 'family jewels'
oh no; here comes the magic phrase: I know I'm going to get modded into oblivion, but...
Somehow whenever china gets mentioned- it's horrid stompings on the concept of human rights comes up. That's good, china has some very serious problems with human rights that need to be addressed, even today. However, I find a lot of this stomping to be 'blind stomping' people insult china's human rights violations, without understanding them; or trying to assault the root of the problem. Also statments like 'china shoulden't be doing this until they can get there human rights issues sorted out' come up a lot.
Maby this IS how there going to fix there human rights issues- by making forward strides to making a forward thinking comunity china will raise it's peoples standard of living, and slowly emerge as a global 'contender' in world politics and technology (there allready recognised as a power; but often a pool of cheap labour power, rather then a technological one), so long as china's people are (in the world view) nothing more then cheap labour, how will they ever be able to comprihend there own people as cheap 'disposable' labour; and that sort of thinking results in- you guessed it, human rights violations- if there lives are cheap; there is no incentive not to end them when they commit 'crimes' (the state identifies crimes, which may or may not align with morality or even sanity- see the DMCA for examples)
The next problem I have with people poo-pooing on china's human rights violations blissfully ignores human rights violations from other countries (torture of Iraqie prisoners, horrid treatment of 'illegal combattants' in guantolomo bay from the US for instance, in my own country, we were still 'indoctrinating native children into society' which is a polite way of saying kidnapping native americans and forcing them to attend schools far from home while there sexually assaulted by the priests and nuns until 1971)
My point is; none of our countries are 'perfect' when it comes to human rights- and I think that china should be given some slack- for all the ill they are doing, they seem to be improving by leaps and bounds- improvement still needs to be done, the human rights issues still need to be addressed; but simply saying 'china is a hole where humans have no rights and should be ignored' is wrong- china as a country is trying to better itself, it diserves recognition for that; great change either requires time, or revolution: I think everyone can agree revolution is not in the bests interests of anyone with regard to china.
I agree, yet I do not agree.
Some companies by nature of needing to make a profit will want to keep the 'family jewels' locked up- to my knoledge flash dose not use any copyright encumbered compression schemes or patented techniques to do what it dose- if they made the source open some other company would snatch up there product and release there own version, possibly forkig what is currently a very fixed and ordered standard
That said- multi-platform languages like Java were MADE for this sort of scenario- you just write your code in Java/python/ruby/perl whatever, and the local execution program will make it run on whatever arcetecture/OS the person has- so I guess what I'm really saying is- Hey macromedia, make a Java/pthon/ruby version of flash so tht we can ALL be happy!
Where is my PPC flash player? Where oh where is it!?!
Does it finally exist? I do so hope....
I really like that idea- driving on a highway means driving through a cool (since no sun directly on blacktop) green shaded pathway- The reduction in the ammount of AC you need to be running might also bring about energy savings in your biodisel powered vehicle, netting you more Km/l without sacrificing comfort.
I'm betting that if you count his time at $10/hr, figuring that he spent 30 hours straight working on it (not counting the hours that he walked away to let it dry), and that it's a top of the line machine worth about $2000, $3000 for his time: $5000 would be the minimum asking price, however it's just so beautiful, I imagine he could fetch $10,000 for it. But that's just a ballpark guess I'm making up by comparing it to art auctions I've seen, and then adding in my precieved cost of the computer.
Seriously, most 'impressive case mods' are just a bunch of kit, random applications, and of course cathode ray tubes to light it up in neon.
This guy made something impressive, and beautiful, and he paid such attention to detail (like painting the whole CD rom drive, and continuing the 'rusted' theme internally as well as getting the water to glow green without getting the whole case to be bathed in green light, as such- I think it needs to be viewed as art, and no 'just another case mod'
As much as I find HP all in one devices to be crashy peices of crap, they are cheap, and most can do ADF scanning for under $300, you'll have to handhold the machine to get it working, but the ADF and scanner on it are actually rather solid units. (then again, what could you possibly screw up in an ADF and a scanner?!?)
I also have to agree with others, you MUST set it up as your policy that you will only put the documents into the scanner, press scan and walk away- nothign more; or else your productivity in other areas will be consumed by this project (unless you can get more money for this project to hire students)
unforutnately no, I also coulden't send him a USB hub- Because it 'wasen't the printers fault'- we coulden't send him anything that would actually fix the printer, despite the fact that HP dose make hubs, and jetdirect devices, both of which would have fixed his problem.
Throught this thread I've been defending help desk workers, but this is an ask slashdot for the worst explanation from tech support, so I'll share a personal expericed from my perspective as me, on the other side of the phone.
I worked for HP's outsourced tech support, supporting all in one printers, on macs. One such printer; the HP laserjet 3330 had a critical undenyable hardware problem; when you plugged the 3330 into a mac, either ther mac would reset constantly, or the printer would shut down (the printer has no on or off button!)- it only effected some printers, with some macs, but it was widespread enough that that about 50% of 3330 calls related to this problem (incidentally I spent 2 full hours trying to replicate the problem on dozens of different macs to no avail); so I had congruently tracked it down to a hardware failure, and a memo went out that this was a hardware failure. About 40 seconds after the memo went out, another memo went out saying that we were not allowed to identify it as a hardware failure on the part of the printer...
I had to do a callback, during which I assured the person on the other end of the line that it was his mac expereincing the hardware failure- even though his printer was turning off, would not print, and several other USB devices were working- I finally after some thought said that the
'mac's ability to accept an off or on code from a USB keyboard means that it's constantly pooling for a result, for whatever reason your mac is sending malformed polling requests that are causing the printer to shut down, perhaps if you got a USB hub it would isolate the printer from the problem' (As much as I diden't know what they did to foul up the hardware in those printers, I did know that a USB hub normally fixed it)
I felt really bad, in fact I felt so bad that I made one of my mannagers send the guy two free toner rolls and a big stack of paper.
As someone who has worked in tech support, I have to speak up and say that when I was doing it; 90% of problems, were user problems, and not problems on our side.
And the whole point of troubleshooting is to isolte points to failure- REset the modem, reset your computer, disconnect the router, still not working, next step, try a ping to the internet, try a ping to the server, try a ping to yourself, reset the modem again (just in case you ignored the tech the first time he sugested it, reset the computer again.
That above scenario will solve somewhere around 70% of all network problems, and if you take out the request to reset the modem and computer the second time the rate drops sharply, because peopel have a tendancy to assume that tech support people have no idea what there doing and can safely be ignored. We've been given a script to follow that says to do exactly that, and we get in trouble if we don't do that scenario first; so sit tight, let us establish that it is not your firewall, your computer, or your modem, and then we can get to some real tech support- or hell, do it yourself, first, before you call in, and be sure to say that you did it yourself, first, how you did it when you get connected and save time.
I'm glad that someone else noticed that the store reps explanation was fundamentally correct. Now it's not 100% correct, and it's not the answer that anyone who has taken a course in networking would answer, but it's correct enough that a customer would not have been misinformed by the rep's answer.
I'm going to call bullox here.
As many if not more devices are supported (and that means with drivers) on linux, and even worse, they are supported by random individuals who are looking at the output from a 'black box' device (like a printer, or a scanner) and writing a driver based on that (since unline the driver writers they do not have access to the proprietary internals of the device), and they are not being paid, which often means that 'good enough' means it works and can crash on ocassion. Despite this, linux systems (And BSD systems, and to a lesser extend mac systems (while most hardware in macs are tightly controlled anyone can build a printer for a mac, and trust me some printer manufacturers *cough* HP *cough* do a pisspour job on the mac drivers) are downright rock solid compared to windows systems (This is of course entirely personal experience, and the most often reason I reset either machine is a result of slow memory leaks degrading performance over time); so one of the following is therefore true:
1-80% of crashes are not due to drivers
2-I exist almost entirely in the 20% due to a satistical anomoly
3-Somehow people just trying to make things work have mannaged to build greatly superior drivers without knowing the internals of the systems there building those drivers for
4-There is a fundamental flaw in the windows arcetecture that allows drivers to more easily crash it compared to linux
5-Building drivers for windows requires more skill then building them for Linux, and the end result of this is that windows drivers are more crashy
uhh, he said he WAS from india...
howeer your point about the digital SLR and other high cost but not ridiculus in a nation like the EU, north ameria, or austrialia being well outside of the average indian workers budget, I imagine, still holds true (unlike what the previous poster claimed, I am not from india, nor have I ever traveled there)
regardless of who coined the phrase for it, googol is a number, and google can feel free to copy it.
Or dose someone get to sue the UH shopping chanel hosted on www.million.com too? Hey, I'm sure if I traced back my family lineage far enough someone in my family must have coined some number somewhere- and there's a website for EVERY bloody number (thought some of them are just squatters, they are registered)
In other words, this is just plain ridculous and indicitive of the litigation based soceity that the united states is rapidly becomming.
Even if this works 100%, isin't one of the reasons HIV is so hard to treat BECAUSE it's extremely mutative and because of this quickly adapts to any form of treatment- Coulden't introducing another variation of HIV into the bloodstream end up 'double-gunning' the test subject, as the 'bad HIV' mutates to be immune to the 'good HIV' and the 'good HIV' mutates to become bad for the 'host'?
Now don't get me wrong- I see a lot of good in using more HIV to counter HIV- because of it's mutative abilities; if the 'good HIV' has been reconfigured to somehow prey on 'bad HIV' it will keep mutating in course to follow the 'bad HIV's mutations so that it will survive. However that said, I'm not sure it will allwase work that way, and only time will tell.