I thought this was cool, until the "can't fit a CD-ROM" part.
All this proves is you can fit a lower-powered nano-ITX mobo in the same case as a Mac Mini, and power it up. But it's not the same, nor even complete...
It was a cool experiment, but not a sucessful one... Hat's off to the Mac design team for shoving that much stuff into such a small box.
One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.
The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting.
--- snip ---
The states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Anyone else notice that these are better characterized as predominantly Catholic states? Perhaps these stats aren't so surprising given that divorce is recognized as OK by Protestants and is doctrinally proscribed in Catholicism.
Methinks that that the author of referenced article (and the parent's poster) didn't consider all the available data.
>THIS is why I read slashdot. News for Nerds Stuff
that matters.
>Mod me down. As if. Next week, I get to try to explain to a bunch of legislators the difference between a "hacker" and a "cracker". This is the perfect example. Visual aids and all...
This could be built fairly easily using the Flash Communication Server for data comm and video streaming, and building the quiz show client in either Flash or Director. (Despite its name, FlashComm works with Director just fine.) Keep the quiz logic in the client, and use a bit of server-side Actionscript to do the scorekeeping/results arbitration.
I hate MACR's pre-built components, but given that real-time video streaming is pretty much drag'n'drop with them, you could have a prototype up in a couple of hours.
you obviously have no idea how small 400 million dollars is in hte scheme of things at Time Warner. Most people in that company feel AOL is a lag on business, not some cash cow to be milked. That 400 million dollars you are riving about doesn't even hit 1% of total revenue to Time Warner. They bring in over 41 billion dollars a year in revenue (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWX).
ANOTHER math error. You're comparing AOL's monthly subscriber revenue to TW's yearly revenue. Multiply 400 mil by 12, and you end up with 4.8 billion a year, or over 10% of the whole TWX pie. And that's not counting AOL's ad revenues.
Before you try to say anything about money or the financials of a major corporation, try to do a tiny bit of research so you don't sound quite so ignorant. It took me a total of 2 minute to look this stuff up.
Before you start with the ad hominem attacks, try making a little sense out of the data you googled. I've been following the company for years, and know more than a few people who work there. A really big problem is that a lot of the cash is going out of Dulles and up to NY -- a year ago, the TWX CFO said that one of their goals was to "reposition Time Life so that it's no longer a drag on this division's financial performance."
Compare that to what he said about AOL: "This revenue is very high margin and so $1 of revenue translates into an extraordinarily, unusually high level of impact on earnings." In other words, AOL is a cash cow.
The yahoo link you posted shows an EBITDA of $6.76B. AOL's revenue of over $5B had an admitted " extraordinarily...high level of impact on earnings." What do you make of that?
They still have millions of subscribers and they are probably earning about $40M a month in subscriber revenue.
They've got 22 million subscribers. To keep the math easy, say they're billing 20 mil @ $20. That's 400 million dollars a month in subscriber revenue. Cash.
You're an order of magnitude off. Where's that cash going? It's not staying in the AOL division, for sure. Time Warner's been using AOL as a cash cow, and they've been sucking it dry for years.
In the real world, there's recognized right to self defense, an active one at that. If someone is an immediate threat to your life (or sometimes property), you are allowed to use force, even deadly force. For lesser situations, you can still use proportionate and reasonable force.
So what's the big deal? Spammers steal bandwidth, server resources, adminstrative resources, among other things. The spamvertised web sites brought this upon themselves. They, not Lycos Europe, are responsible for any collateral damage.
I'm glad to see somebody's finally stepped up to the plate with something like this.
I've done a lot of lighting for both video and stage, and you're missing the point. The SightLight isn't supposed to be the primary light source for the iSight. If you use it that way, (depening on ambient light) you'll get an image with a lot of contrast and noise.
The way to use the SightLight is as a secondary fill source. Especially with overhead lighting, a lot if people get horrible shadows under their eyes and cheeks, well-defined forehead wrinkles, and the like. That's why a lot of people look like Hermann Munster on a web cam.
Using the SightLight mitigates a lot of this, particularly the eye shadows. For 40 bucks, it does a good job at the job it's supposed to do. (It's certainly cheaper than a real lighting kit!)
BTW, there's a switch on the SightLight to reduce brightness, making the "headlight in your face" effect a little easier to take.
The SightLight is a nifty gadget that does its job pretty darn well. It sucks as a primary light, but using it as such is simply pilot error...
I do some sports photography (I shoot lacrosse when I'm not playing). With high-capacity CF cards a fraction of the cost of the glass you put on your camera, it doesn't make much sense to be continually uploading to a server just for additional storage -- CF cards swap out in a few seconds and I generally only need a few to shoot a whole game.
The big issue is what happens AFTER you shoot: Photo Editing. Typically, only 10% of the shots you take are usable, and of those, most need to be cropped in some way. That generally takes a lot of time, and in a publishing situation, gets done by somebody other than the photographer.
That's what's cool here. If the camera could stream the photos to a powerbook in the press box, you could have an editor working on the shots during the game, so when the game's over, everything's ready to go. Makes it a lot easier for a newspaper to go to press with images of late games and such.
"Hey, you want to make some extra dollars by building this car or writing this piece of software?
Hate to break it to you, but there's a ton of software that gets written this way in the real world. Easily 50% of the gigs that my company's landed in the last 15 years have been as the result of competitive bidding. (And a much higher percentage of gigs for new clients.) Donno what I think about using a bid system for nursing care, but for Roland Piquepaille to imply in the parent (and his blog) that this doesn't happen in the software world is simply fantasy.
"It is a criminal offense to vote absentee while remaining in the states."
Donno where you live, but in Virginia, for instance, that is SO NOT true. There is a whole list of reasons that are OK, from being away at school to being out of town on business to just having a long workday.
On a panel at a Jupiter conference in 1994, my business partner, Ellen White, hit the nail on the head. She commented: "I don't want 500 channels. I want one channel that's all mine."
The point was -- and still is -- that the "channel" concept sucks. There's enough CPU cycles floating around that my "entertainment box", whatever that is, should be smart enough to show me Red Sox games and NOT show me tampon ads.
Use the telephone. You'll probably never get through to your congressman, but getting through to staff is actually more important. Call the office in DC (http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html) and ask to speak to the STAFF MEMBER who's tracking HR 107. If no one's following it, ask for the staff member who handles IP, technology, or computer issues.
There's no more powerful statement to make than "I'm your constituent, and if this passes it's a problem for me", except for...
"This is so important that it will impact how I'm going to vote in November." But you damn well better believe it if you say it, because that's the easiest lie to detect. (Hey, if your guy's from the wrong party, but does the right thing here, why aren't you voting for him?)
Stay on message. Resist the urge to talk about Iraq, or software patents, or anything else. The point is for the staff member to say, "I got 50 calls today abut HR 107, they're mostly from people in the district, and they all said it's important that the bill gets through". Hard to believe, but if a party whip isn't demanding a position, this generally determines how somebody's gonna vote.
And don't take a lot of time. In the first three minutes, you've made your case or not. In any case, your call has already been recorded as for or against, and is going to be in tomorrow's daily brief. Once you state your case, all you can do is fuck up, unless the staff member starts asking you questions.
Follow up with a fax. It should go to the DC office, the closest district office, the sponsor (Boucher), and if you're feeling creative, all of the bill's cosponsors -- there's actually bi-partisan support. (Available from the bill link above.) Staff tally these things, and it goes into the decision matrix.
BTW, if anybody's from Rhode Island, Patrick Kennedy was a co-sponsor, but withdrew his support.
Don't bother with email. These guys get slashdotted every day (imagine a half million people knowing your email address), so the sad fact is that nobody on the hill reads email.
Follow up, part II: a personal note to the staff member. It may not help this time, but a note card saying "Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today" goes a long, long way the next time you need to talk to your representative. Tip O'Neil got to be Speaker that way, and you can make the case that George H.W. Bush got to be president that way. The legislative process is all about relationships.
Finally, Stay polite. The staff member (or the congressman) may be a pinhead, but if you get belligerent, he might vote the other way because you're seen as an asshole. Bite your tounge, especially if they're stupid.
Note: If your Congressman's a Congresswoman, use your favorite word processor to adjust the genders referenced above. Reread, lather, rinse, repeat.
Whah, there, Dragon. You're putting a ton of words in my mouth, there.
What's strange is for somebody to think that if we're talking about the regulation of public airwaves in the US, that a "US-centric" view of what's obscene isn't exactly the issue. Other nations can, and do, regulate their own airwaves differently, and it's none of my business.
The point isn't where I think women's breasts are obscene (frankly, I quite like them!), but if the halftime show was appropriate content on a US broadcast network during a widely-viewed (read: general audience) event.
Given the "US-centric" comment, I'll guess that you're not from here. So, ya'll ought to know that, over here, the "nipple incident" really turned into a metaphor for the whole over-the-top halftime show. Many of my friends who have kids tell me that once they realized what was going on, halftime turned into rodeo time; rounding up their kids and getting them out of dodge. A lot of them are still pretty pissed off about that.
Your point about commercial content seems reasonably well-taken. (But, then, I'm a moron, so what do I know?) On the other hand, it's pretty easy to distract a kid for 30 seconds when a Cialis ad comes on, something that a lot of parents do pretty routinely, which makes it less of an issue.
Whether you agree that parents are making appropriate choices isn't the point. What is, and the point you fail to understand, is that what they allow their children to see is their choice to make, and not Janet Jackson's or MTV's. People felt blindsided by the halftime show, punctuated by the nipple, becuase there was no expectation that something like that was coming. A lot of people are still pretty pissed.
Whether you agree, or not, the public airwaves in the US are regulated, and there are content standards. The halftime show was designed to, without warning, "push the envelope", and did. Many viewers, particularly those with children, were upset. Many registered voters complained, and the FCC is changing the regulatory environment.
That's the way the system works; I'd even venture that that's the way it's supposed to work. If you don't like it, do what you need to do and run for Congress.
Think about this for a second -- the only place the FCC's "cracking down" is on publicly-regulated airwaves.
The issue isn't about parents letting the TV raise them. My business partner has a six year old, who's huge into football. She and her husband carefully control what their kids are allowed to watch. When he wanted to watch the Super Bowl, the expectation was that she was letting her son watch a football game, not some washed-up "musician's" saggy boob. That's the whole point of the FCC's action.
There are plenty of other outlets for all sorts of creative expression. Nobody would have noticed if the JJ incident happened on MTV. All the FCC is doing is keeping the public airwaves broadly "public".
>SCO's comments in the media are not SCO's legal case. That's another
>matter entirely, and one that has been considerably more carefully
>orchestrated.
The document states that "SCO has identified no more than approximately 3,700 lines of code", then quotes Darl McBride comments at Harvard this week saying "[T]here is roughly a million lines of code". IBM concludes that if McBride's statement is true, "then SCO should have identified them in response to the Court's Order."
Bottom line, SCO's public statements are now in play. Their "more carefully orchestrated" media comments are now a major liability.
The President's come under some criticism of late because he hasn't vetoed any bills in this term. Maybe we can give him a reason to change that.
White House contact info is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ The most effective communication for this type of this thing is a real phone call and fax.
If you decide to fax a note, the general rules of thumb are to address the issue in the first sentence, to keep it short, be concise with your reasoning, and to note anything that gives you expertise relating to the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought this was cool, until the "can't fit a CD-ROM" part.
All this proves is you can fit a lower-powered nano-ITX mobo in the same case as a Mac Mini, and power it up. But it's not the same, nor even complete...
It was a cool experiment, but not a sucessful one... Hat's off to the Mac design team for shoving that much stuff into such a small box.
One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.
The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting.
--- snip ---
The states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Anyone else notice that these are better characterized as predominantly Catholic states? Perhaps these stats aren't so surprising given that divorce is recognized as OK by Protestants and is doctrinally proscribed in Catholicism.
Methinks that that the author of referenced article (and the parent's poster) didn't consider all the available data.
>THIS is why I read slashdot. News for Nerds Stuff that matters.
>Mod me down.
As if. Next week, I get to try to explain to a bunch of legislators the difference between a "hacker" and a "cracker". This is the perfect example. Visual aids and all...
Q: How many RIAA lawyers does it take to screw in a light blub?
A: RIAA lawyers don't have time to screw in lightbulbs, silly! They're too busy screwing 14 year old kids and their grandmothers...
This could be built fairly easily using the Flash Communication Server for data comm and video streaming, and building the quiz show client in either Flash or Director. (Despite its name, FlashComm works with Director just fine.) Keep the quiz logic in the client, and use a bit of server-side Actionscript to do the scorekeeping/results arbitration.
I hate MACR's pre-built components, but given that real-time video streaming is pretty much drag'n'drop with them, you could have a prototype up in a couple of hours.
you obviously have no idea how small 400 million dollars is in hte scheme of things at Time Warner. Most people in that company feel AOL is a lag on business, not some cash cow to be milked. That 400 million dollars you are riving about doesn't even hit 1% of total revenue to Time Warner. They bring in over 41 billion dollars a year in revenue (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWX).
ANOTHER math error. You're comparing AOL's monthly subscriber revenue to TW's yearly revenue. Multiply 400 mil by 12, and you end up with 4.8 billion a year, or over 10% of the whole TWX pie. And that's not counting AOL's ad revenues.
Before you try to say anything about money or the financials of a major corporation, try to do a tiny bit of research so you don't sound quite so ignorant. It took me a total of 2 minute to look this stuff up.
Before you start with the ad hominem attacks, try making a little sense out of the data you googled. I've been following the company for years, and know more than a few people who work there. A really big problem is that a lot of the cash is going out of Dulles and up to NY -- a year ago, the TWX CFO said that one of their goals was to "reposition Time Life so that it's no longer a drag on this division's financial performance."
Compare that to what he said about AOL: "This revenue is very high margin and so $1 of revenue translates into an extraordinarily, unusually high level of impact on earnings." In other words, AOL is a cash cow.
The yahoo link you posted shows an EBITDA of $6.76B. AOL's revenue of over $5B had an admitted " extraordinarily...high level of impact on earnings." What do you make of that?
They still have millions of subscribers and they are probably earning about $40M a month in subscriber revenue.
They've got 22 million subscribers. To keep the math easy, say they're billing 20 mil @ $20. That's 400 million dollars a month in subscriber revenue. Cash.
You're an order of magnitude off. Where's that cash going? It's not staying in the AOL division, for sure. Time Warner's been using AOL as a cash cow, and they've been sucking it dry for years.
I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down...
In the real world, there's recognized right to self defense, an active one at that. If someone is an immediate threat to your life (or sometimes property), you are allowed to use force, even deadly force. For lesser situations, you can still use proportionate and reasonable force.
So what's the big deal? Spammers steal bandwidth, server resources, adminstrative resources, among other things. The spamvertised web sites brought this upon themselves. They, not Lycos Europe, are responsible for any collateral damage.
I'm glad to see somebody's finally stepped up to the plate with something like this.
The Command Post is a "newsblog collective", and has, last I saw, over 80 bloggers lined up for election night.
Their election page, http://www.command-post.org/2004/index.html has nearly 50 articles from all around the country so far, and that's just since 7pm tonight.
I've done a lot of lighting for both video and stage, and you're missing the point. The SightLight isn't supposed to be the primary light source for the iSight. If you use it that way, (depening on ambient light) you'll get an image with a lot of contrast and noise.
The way to use the SightLight is as a secondary fill source. Especially with overhead lighting, a lot if people get horrible shadows under their eyes and cheeks, well-defined forehead wrinkles, and the like. That's why a lot of people look like Hermann Munster on a web cam.
Using the SightLight mitigates a lot of this, particularly the eye shadows. For 40 bucks, it does a good job at the job it's supposed to do. (It's certainly cheaper than a real lighting kit!)
BTW, there's a switch on the SightLight to reduce brightness, making the "headlight in your face" effect a little easier to take.
The SightLight is a nifty gadget that does its job pretty darn well. It sucks as a primary light, but using it as such is simply pilot error...
I do some sports photography (I shoot lacrosse when I'm not playing). With high-capacity CF cards a fraction of the cost of the glass you put on your camera, it doesn't make much sense to be continually uploading to a server just for additional storage -- CF cards swap out in a few seconds and I generally only need a few to shoot a whole game.
The big issue is what happens AFTER you shoot: Photo Editing. Typically, only 10% of the shots you take are usable, and of those, most need to be cropped in some way. That generally takes a lot of time, and in a publishing situation, gets done by somebody other than the photographer.
That's what's cool here. If the camera could stream the photos to a powerbook in the press box, you could have an editor working on the shots during the game, so when the game's over, everything's ready to go. Makes it a lot easier for a newspaper to go to press with images of late games and such.
"Hey, you want to make some extra dollars by building this car or writing this piece of software?
Hate to break it to you, but there's a ton of software that gets written this way in the real world. Easily 50% of the gigs that my company's landed in the last 15 years have been as the result of competitive bidding. (And a much higher percentage of gigs for new clients.) Donno what I think about using a bid system for nursing care, but for Roland Piquepaille to imply in the parent (and his blog) that this doesn't happen in the software world is simply fantasy.
Donno where you live, but in Virginia, for instance, that is SO NOT true. There is a whole list of reasons that are OK, from being away at school to being out of town on business to just having a long workday.
For Virginia's rules, visit: http://www.sbe.state.va.us/Election/AbsenteeVoting /absente1.htm
Many states have similar rules; a quick trip to you state's web site will get you the scoop...
On a panel at a Jupiter conference in 1994, my business partner, Ellen White, hit the nail on the head. She commented: "I don't want 500 channels. I want one channel that's all mine." The point was -- and still is -- that the "channel" concept sucks. There's enough CPU cycles floating around that my "entertainment box", whatever that is, should be smart enough to show me Red Sox games and NOT show me tampon ads.
Not a bad idea, but there are a few simple rules to make your vote actually count...
First, read the f'ing bill. It's here
Use the telephone. You'll probably never get through to your congressman, but getting through to staff is actually more important. Call the office in DC (http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html) and ask to speak to the STAFF MEMBER who's tracking HR 107. If no one's following it, ask for the staff member who handles IP, technology, or computer issues.
There's no more powerful statement to make than "I'm your constituent, and if this passes it's a problem for me", except for...
"This is so important that it will impact how I'm going to vote in November." But you damn well better believe it if you say it, because that's the easiest lie to detect. (Hey, if your guy's from the wrong party, but does the right thing here, why aren't you voting for him?)
Stay on message. Resist the urge to talk about Iraq, or software patents, or anything else. The point is for the staff member to say, "I got 50 calls today abut HR 107, they're mostly from people in the district, and they all said it's important that the bill gets through". Hard to believe, but if a party whip isn't demanding a position, this generally determines how somebody's gonna vote.
And don't take a lot of time. In the first three minutes, you've made your case or not. In any case, your call has already been recorded as for or against, and is going to be in tomorrow's daily brief. Once you state your case, all you can do is fuck up, unless the staff member starts asking you questions.
Follow up with a fax. It should go to the DC office, the closest district office, the sponsor (Boucher), and if you're feeling creative, all of the bill's cosponsors -- there's actually bi-partisan support. (Available from the bill link above.) Staff tally these things, and it goes into the decision matrix.
BTW, if anybody's from Rhode Island, Patrick Kennedy was a co-sponsor, but withdrew his support.
Don't bother with email. These guys get slashdotted every day (imagine a half million people knowing your email address), so the sad fact is that nobody on the hill reads email.
Follow up, part II: a personal note to the staff member. It may not help this time, but a note card saying "Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today" goes a long, long way the next time you need to talk to your representative. Tip O'Neil got to be Speaker that way, and you can make the case that George H.W. Bush got to be president that way. The legislative process is all about relationships.
Finally, Stay polite. The staff member (or the congressman) may be a pinhead, but if you get belligerent, he might vote the other way because you're seen as an asshole. Bite your tounge, especially if they're stupid.
Note: If your Congressman's a Congresswoman, use your favorite word processor to adjust the genders referenced above. Reread, lather, rinse, repeat.
Whah, there, Dragon. You're putting a ton of words in my mouth, there.
What's strange is for somebody to think that if we're talking about the regulation of public airwaves in the US, that a "US-centric" view of what's obscene isn't exactly the issue. Other nations can, and do, regulate their own airwaves differently, and it's none of my business.
The point isn't where I think women's breasts are obscene (frankly, I quite like them!), but if the halftime show was appropriate content on a US broadcast network during a widely-viewed (read: general audience) event.
Given the "US-centric" comment, I'll guess that you're not from here. So, ya'll ought to know that, over here, the "nipple incident" really turned into a metaphor for the whole over-the-top halftime show. Many of my friends who have kids tell me that once they realized what was going on, halftime turned into rodeo time; rounding up their kids and getting them out of dodge. A lot of them are still pretty pissed off about that.
Your point about commercial content seems reasonably well-taken. (But, then, I'm a moron, so what do I know?) On the other hand, it's pretty easy to distract a kid for 30 seconds when a Cialis ad comes on, something that a lot of parents do pretty routinely, which makes it less of an issue.
Whether you agree that parents are making appropriate choices isn't the point. What is, and the point you fail to understand, is that what they allow their children to see is their choice to make, and not Janet Jackson's or MTV's. People felt blindsided by the halftime show, punctuated by the nipple, becuase there was no expectation that something like that was coming. A lot of people are still pretty pissed.
Whether you agree, or not, the public airwaves in the US are regulated, and there are content standards. The halftime show was designed to, without warning, "push the envelope", and did. Many viewers, particularly those with children, were upset. Many registered voters complained, and the FCC is changing the regulatory environment.
That's the way the system works; I'd even venture that that's the way it's supposed to work. If you don't like it, do what you need to do and run for Congress.
Think about this for a second -- the only place the FCC's "cracking down" is on publicly-regulated airwaves.
The issue isn't about parents letting the TV raise them. My business partner has a six year old, who's huge into football. She and her husband carefully control what their kids are allowed to watch. When he wanted to watch the Super Bowl, the expectation was that she was letting her son watch a football game, not some washed-up "musician's" saggy boob. That's the whole point of the FCC's action.
There are plenty of other outlets for all sorts of creative expression. Nobody would have noticed if the JJ incident happened on MTV. All the FCC is doing is keeping the public airwaves broadly "public".
>SCO's comments in the media are not SCO's legal case. That's another
>matter entirely, and one that has been considerably more carefully
>orchestrated.
Interestingly, IBM referenced SCO's public statements in their filing today: http://pacer.utd.uscourts.gov/images/203cv00294000 00103.pdf
The document states that "SCO has identified no more than approximately 3,700 lines of code", then quotes Darl McBride comments at Harvard this week saying "[T]here is roughly a million lines of code". IBM concludes that if McBride's statement is true, "then SCO should have identified them in response to the Court's Order."
Bottom line, SCO's public statements are now in play. Their "more carefully orchestrated" media comments are now a major liability.
The President's come under some criticism of late because he hasn't vetoed any bills in this term. Maybe we can give him a reason to change that.
White House contact info is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ The most effective communication for this type of this thing is a real phone call and fax.
If you decide to fax a note, the general rules of thumb are to address the issue in the first sentence, to keep it short, be concise with your reasoning, and to note anything that gives you expertise relating to the issue.
These guys actually do keep track of the mail.