Actually... sometimes it is... Just to confuse everyone:
In Britain (ex pat living in US) we have TWO things called Jelly
...yes, the world of confectionary, cakes and desserts is truly a minefield for the US/GB traveller. A cookie is a biscuit... unless its a cookie, and ask for a muffin and its fifty/fifty whether you get a rich, circular bread roll or a US style hypertrophied fairy cake. Even we can't decide whether a "biscuit" (US) is a "scone" (long o) or "scon" (short o).
For those of you who don't know what Jell-O is: it's a desert made from gelatin, which is made from animal bones.
That's "jelly" for us British viewers. It took me a while to work out that a "peanut butter and jelly" sandwich was actually only 82.5% as disgusting as it sounded (peanut butter and Marmite is much better) - however, I know of at least one diner in the US that are similarly confused about "fish'n'chips" - with rather dry and salty results).
Neither of them is fictional. Which one you observe depends on your frame of reference and relativity tells us that there is no "one, true frame of reference."
But none of that really matters; Google should have bought the Nortel patents and sued the hell out of Apple.
Maybe Google took that "Don't be evil" mission statement of theirs more seriously than we thought?
Or, maybe even Google, as a lone 500lb gorilla, couldn't hope to outbid the whole consortium of 500lb gorillas who actually bought the patents (two of whom are well known for having supervillain-class vaults full of gold in their basement vaults)? Even if they had, you can rest assured that the unsuccessful gorillas would have climbed up to the next level and started rolling barrels stuffed with anti-trust accusations and their own patent portfolios at Google for the next 5 years.
Of course, Psion nailed the personal organiser with the Series 3/3a some time before that, and its pretty much been downhill (but in color and with mobile internet) from there, but the Newton was pretty obviously the precursor of the iPaq/Palm type of device.
There are ways to format optical RW media to behave like floppies
Thing is, CD-R is so cheap, ~10c per GB, that it doesn't really matter that they are single-use (not very green, but I suspect that Gaia has bigger fish to fry). Apart from the issues with packet-writing, RW discs have always been sufficiently more expensive to ensure that it made economical sense to use write-once discs.
It always seems sacrilege, but I suppose those of us who were around in the 80s have registered CDs as objects of value, and haven't really registered the fact that they're now cheaper than floppies ever were, and that's before allowing for inflation and taking into account the 1000x capacity increase.
Glad i am not the only one. I still would love to see cheap 5x-10x packs of small usb sticks or similar.
Yeah. They seem to have bottomed out at several bucks a pop... OK for giving away to customers/contacts where you might get some "intangible" payback, but not really hand-out-without-thinking material. They could do cheap plastic ones with no metal shroud, just contacts (I had some double-ended SD cards like that that could plug into a SD slot or a USB port, but they were 1G, which was quite big at the time, not cheap enough to be disposable).
CDs were still a recent comer, and 8-track was fresh in the mind.
More to the point, VHS vs. Betamax was still fresh in the mind. I seem to recall that DCC, DAT and Minidisc all popped up at around the same time (plus, digital audio recording had been one of the selling points of Video 8 before it got sidelined into camcorders) and it was clear that one or two of them would fail. Maybe people just decided to sit on their money and see who won the war. Turned out, none of them really did (although it was only DCC that, deservedly, sunk without trace).
I don't know what Ofcom is thinking. Take-up on digital radio is low, costs are still high, and the benefits to the consumer are minimal when compared to digital TV. I really can't imagine people retrofitting every car and replacing every alarm clock.
Hmm. Is the DAB band any good for broadband? If so, I think we have a winner.
DAB is a waste of space: its redundant in the living room, with many of the radio channels available in better quality over DVB or internet radio, and its a non-solution to the problem of cheap portable radios with widespread reception. Kill it with fire.
Contrary to that most people belive, you do NOT have a god-given right to listen to radio on a device that was sold before the semiconductor was invented.
Whereas people do have a god-given right to wireless broadband wherever they choose to live?
Anyhow, the issue is not people having to replace the 1930 cat's whisker rig in their living room: its people having to replace all the cheap, modern FM radios in their bedrooms, cars, boats, showers, potting sheds, phones/personal audio players with expensive DAB sets which might not even be able to receive a signal and offer few other advantages.
Don't do it over night, but set a clear deadline, ie. 2015, 2020.
...and people will ignore it until right before the deadline:-)
You also need to have a viable alternative in place - currently, DAB is not that alternative.
however their privacy agreement [dropbox.com] still says they will gladly decrypt and give your data to law enforcement
Yeah, because they're really going to say "we will defy the police, laugh at court injunctions and fight the US army barehanded, even if we end up pounding rocks in Gitmo and get all our servers impounded, rather than hand over your bootleg copy of Harry Potter 7 to The Man".
To summarise the summary: DropBox may not be a suitable location for a Wikileaks mirror, the Anonymous membership list or your extreme pr0n collection. Film at 11. Aside from the security risk, the fucking Mac users would keep moving the files instead of copying them, and you'd be forever restoring stuff from the backup.
Re:"chocolate-printer" ... not "chocolate printer"
on
3D Chocolate Printer
·
· Score: 1
Note the hyphen. A "chocolate printer" would be a printer made out of chocolate. And that would be news, not this.
If they based their design on the self-replicating RepRap then they should be able to use it to print out a chocolate chocolate-printer.
After building the printer, they fired up their 3D modelling software, loaded the first demo file they found and proceeded to print out a chocolate teapot.
its a bit like saying you can plug in a CAT 5 cable and get gigabit...
No. Its saying that one CAT5 cable is as good as any other CAT5 cable for any application that requires a CAT5 cable. If you're running 100BaseT in a normal environment with regulation-length cable runs then any honestly-labelled CAT5 cable will do. Buying CAT6 won't make your 100BaseT run any faster or make your photo collection look warmer. Nor will buying a super-deluxe CAT5 cable hand-woven by virgins from copper that Steve Jobs has pissed on - which is what these high-street stores are trying to pull.
There are various grades of HDMI cable for different task. If you're running a 1920x1440 monitor or a 3D telly then you should get the high-speed flavor rather than bog-standard but you can still get those for a fiver from reputable online suppliers. The problem is not stores telling people that they need a $10 high-speed HDMI cable rather than a $5 normal speed one, they're telling people that a $100 super-deluxe high-speed cable will give them a better picture and sound than the $10 high-speed HDMI cable. Which is BS.
...and the victims of this are usually people wanting 6' cables to connect their BluRay to their TV, not slashdotters wanting to run 60' cables past their homemade van-der-graff generator, in front of their Pringles-can long distance WiFi link, under the Farnsworth fuser and down to their experimental video wall.
Doesn't really prove anything, but it seems unlikelly that roundabouts significantly increase the number of traffic accidents. Even if they do, they certainly do not increase the number of deaths.
My prediction: roundabouts lead to more minor accidents (people getting rear-ended at low speed) and less major ones (e.g. 30mph t-bones when someone shoots across a 4-way without looking).
The usual problem with roundabouts is people running into your back while you're waiting to pull out, because they were looking for a slot on the roundabout rather than at where they were going.
OTOH, the trend in the UK seems to be replacing roundabouts with lights, because roundabouts break down under high traffic loads - the fact that modern cars can do 40 round a roundabout without breaking a sweat doesn't help.
Genuine question: why do you hate automatic transmissions? I mean, if you prefer to drive a manual, then great. But why do you care what others do? I see this sentiment all the time, and the best answer I've ever gotten was "it's better on steep icy roads". I suppose if you live in Scandinavia, that's a pretty good argument, but I don't.
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in the UK, if you take your driving test in an automatic you're not allowed to drive a manual - so pretty much everybody learns in a manual unless they have a disability.
Apart from that, (a) automatics are more expensive and (b) a perception (true or otherwise) that they higher fuel consumption (which is a big deal given UK fuel prices).
Plus, once you're used to a manual there's a greater feeling of control.
No. It was only the first generation of Intel Macs that were "Core Duo" (32 bit). Worst case scenario is, I think, the original Mac Mini which (according to Wikipedia) didn't go "Core 2" until August 2007 - everything else was "Core 2" by the end of 2006.
Don't know if Apple announce "end of life" dates for OS X, but as of this spring they were still producing security updates for 10.5 so unless they have a drastic policy change, 10.6 should be OK for a while. Plus, their recommended way of upgrading from pre-10.6 to 10.7 is to buy 10.6 first, so they're going to be selling 10.6 for a while longer.
Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it.
I tried. How about posting a link?
Not that I'd be surprised if this happened as a result of public pressure - I think His Jobsness may have overestimated the availability of fast, uncapped internet connections.
No, not yet. As opposed to Windows which has had annoying online activation since Windows XP, not to mention the whole "Windows genuine advantage" thing.
And even where Apple has gone for lock-down and digital distribution, we've at least seen a quid-pro-quo in terms of prices and terms of use (20 quid for Lion, 35 quid for Lion server, one purchase covers all your macs...) The only exception is with books, and I suspect that's because of the publishers, not Apple.
Is this going to be yet another of those technologies like Firewire which will end up being a toy for Mac Fanboys
...would this be the "toy" which became the standard interface for a generation of DV camcorders and decks? It wasn't too shabby for hooking up external hard drives until USB3 came along.
Because different cables can use different chips or firmware. The initial Intel release said that optical cables might be available in the future - same (electrical) sockets, but with an optical transciever built into each plug.
Also, Thunderbolt is not a USB replacement for attaching mice and cheap memory sticks - its an external PCIe bus and its killer apps will be things that you can't do with USB. Hence the first peripherals are things like kick-ass RAID arrays, fast SSDs, high end video capture/editing kit etc. One of the forthcoming peripherals is an external case to take a full-size PCIe card (try that with USB!)
So, lots of MacBook users are not going to use TB as anything other than a monitor port, so it makes sense to shift some of the component costs to the cable rather than the motherboard.
Must be a European thing....why do you keep saying Math as a plural? Maths??
I don't think its a plural - we'd say "the Maths is wrong" not "the Maths are wrong". Its just a different way of abbreviating. OTOH "Statistics are false" and we say "Stats" as well.
AFAIK in the US you use "Physics" in the same way which I'd guess is a contraction of "The Physical Sciences". Maybe "Maths" is a contraction on "The Mathematical (Sciences|Arts)]"?
It gets worse when you start talking about the Maths, It's not just the odd extra letter: try "cuboid" (a right rectangular prism), "trapezium" (irregular quadrilateral in US, quadrilateral with two parallel sides in UK) "Standard form" (Scientific notation in UK, always "...of a polynomial" in US) "Gradient" (British for "slope"). Don't even start on "percent(s)" vs. "percentage(s)"... So much for the universal language of mathematics. I think you won on "billion" (original UK usage 10^12) though.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually... sometimes it is... Just to confuse everyone:
In Britain (ex pat living in US) we have TWO things called Jelly
...yes, the world of confectionary, cakes and desserts is truly a minefield for the US/GB traveller. A cookie is a biscuit... unless its a cookie, and ask for a muffin and its fifty/fifty whether you get a rich, circular bread roll or a US style hypertrophied fairy cake. Even we can't decide whether a "biscuit" (US) is a "scone" (long o) or "scon" (short o).
For those of you who don't know what Jell-O is: it's a desert made from gelatin, which is made from animal bones.
That's "jelly" for us British viewers. It took me a while to work out that a "peanut butter and jelly" sandwich was actually only 82.5% as disgusting as it sounded (peanut butter and Marmite is much better) - however, I know of at least one diner in the US that are similarly confused about "fish'n'chips" - with rather dry and salty results).
Neither of them is fictional. Which one you observe depends on your frame of reference and relativity tells us that there is no "one, true frame of reference."
But none of that really matters; Google should have bought the Nortel patents and sued the hell out of Apple.
Maybe Google took that "Don't be evil" mission statement of theirs more seriously than we thought?
Or, maybe even Google, as a lone 500lb gorilla, couldn't hope to outbid the whole consortium of 500lb gorillas who actually bought the patents (two of whom are well known for having supervillain-class vaults full of gold in their basement vaults)? Even if they had, you can rest assured that the unsuccessful gorillas would have climbed up to the next level and started rolling barrels stuffed with anti-trust accusations and their own patent portfolios at Google for the next 5 years.
but seriously, how many years later did the a-word company release their devices?
About 7 years before the iPaq.
The Apple Newton was released in 1993.
Of course, Psion nailed the personal organiser with the Series 3/3a some time before that, and its pretty much been downhill (but in color and with mobile internet) from there, but the Newton was pretty obviously the precursor of the iPaq/Palm type of device.
There are ways to format optical RW media to behave like floppies
Thing is, CD-R is so cheap, ~10c per GB, that it doesn't really matter that they are single-use (not very green, but I suspect that Gaia has bigger fish to fry). Apart from the issues with packet-writing, RW discs have always been sufficiently more expensive to ensure that it made economical sense to use write-once discs.
It always seems sacrilege, but I suppose those of us who were around in the 80s have registered CDs as objects of value, and haven't really registered the fact that they're now cheaper than floppies ever were, and that's before allowing for inflation and taking into account the 1000x capacity increase.
Glad i am not the only one. I still would love to see cheap 5x-10x packs of small usb sticks or similar.
Yeah. They seem to have bottomed out at several bucks a pop... OK for giving away to customers/contacts where you might get some "intangible" payback, but not really hand-out-without-thinking material. They could do cheap plastic ones with no metal shroud, just contacts (I had some double-ended SD cards like that that could plug into a SD slot or a USB port, but they were 1G, which was quite big at the time, not cheap enough to be disposable).
For give-away media, CD-R is still king.
CDs were still a recent comer, and 8-track was fresh in the mind.
More to the point, VHS vs. Betamax was still fresh in the mind. I seem to recall that DCC, DAT and Minidisc all popped up at around the same time (plus, digital audio recording had been one of the selling points of Video 8 before it got sidelined into camcorders) and it was clear that one or two of them would fail. Maybe people just decided to sit on their money and see who won the war. Turned out, none of them really did (although it was only DCC that, deservedly, sunk without trace).
You can use your internet connection to stream radio if you so choose, so wouldn't this basically be a superset of what you could do before?
Yes:
If you pay extra for an internet receiver.
If the location where you had the radio gets a good enough signal for reliable internet.
If you pay for the internet bandwidth.
I don't know what Ofcom is thinking. Take-up on digital radio is low, costs are still high, and the benefits to the consumer are minimal when compared to digital TV. I really can't imagine people retrofitting every car and replacing every alarm clock.
Hmm. Is the DAB band any good for broadband? If so, I think we have a winner.
DAB is a waste of space: its redundant in the living room, with many of the radio channels available in better quality over DVB or internet radio, and its a non-solution to the problem of cheap portable radios with widespread reception. Kill it with fire.
Contrary to that most people belive, you do NOT have a god-given right to listen to radio on a device that was sold before the semiconductor was invented.
Whereas people do have a god-given right to wireless broadband wherever they choose to live?
Anyhow, the issue is not people having to replace the 1930 cat's whisker rig in their living room: its people having to replace all the cheap, modern FM radios in their bedrooms, cars, boats, showers, potting sheds, phones/personal audio players with expensive DAB sets which might not even be able to receive a signal and offer few other advantages.
Don't do it over night, but set a clear deadline, ie. 2015, 2020.
...and people will ignore it until right before the deadline :-)
You also need to have a viable alternative in place - currently, DAB is not that alternative.
however their privacy agreement [dropbox.com] still says they will gladly decrypt and give your data to law enforcement
Yeah, because they're really going to say "we will defy the police, laugh at court injunctions and fight the US army barehanded, even if we end up pounding rocks in Gitmo and get all our servers impounded, rather than hand over your bootleg copy of Harry Potter 7 to The Man".
To summarise the summary: DropBox may not be a suitable location for a Wikileaks mirror, the Anonymous membership list or your extreme pr0n collection. Film at 11. Aside from the security risk, the fucking Mac users would keep moving the files instead of copying them, and you'd be forever restoring stuff from the backup.
Note the hyphen. A "chocolate printer" would be a printer made out of chocolate. And that would be news, not this.
If they based their design on the self-replicating RepRap then they should be able to use it to print out a chocolate chocolate-printer.
After building the printer, they fired up their 3D modelling software, loaded the first demo file they found and proceeded to print out a chocolate teapot.
Perhaps they should have taken the hint?
its a bit like saying you can plug in a CAT 5 cable and get gigabit...
No. Its saying that one CAT5 cable is as good as any other CAT5 cable for any application that requires a CAT5 cable. If you're running 100BaseT in a normal environment with regulation-length cable runs then any honestly-labelled CAT5 cable will do. Buying CAT6 won't make your 100BaseT run any faster or make your photo collection look warmer. Nor will buying a super-deluxe CAT5 cable hand-woven by virgins from copper that Steve Jobs has pissed on - which is what these high-street stores are trying to pull.
There are various grades of HDMI cable for different task. If you're running a 1920x1440 monitor or a 3D telly then you should get the high-speed flavor rather than bog-standard but you can still get those for a fiver from reputable online suppliers. The problem is not stores telling people that they need a $10 high-speed HDMI cable rather than a $5 normal speed one, they're telling people that a $100 super-deluxe high-speed cable will give them a better picture and sound than the $10 high-speed HDMI cable. Which is BS.
...and the victims of this are usually people wanting 6' cables to connect their BluRay to their TV, not slashdotters wanting to run 60' cables past their homemade van-der-graff generator, in front of their Pringles-can long distance WiFi link, under the Farnsworth fuser and down to their experimental video wall.
Doesn't really prove anything, but it seems unlikelly that roundabouts significantly increase the number of traffic accidents. Even if they do, they certainly do not increase the number of deaths.
My prediction: roundabouts lead to more minor accidents (people getting rear-ended at low speed) and less major ones (e.g. 30mph t-bones when someone shoots across a 4-way without looking).
The usual problem with roundabouts is people running into your back while you're waiting to pull out, because they were looking for a slot on the roundabout rather than at where they were going.
OTOH, the trend in the UK seems to be replacing roundabouts with lights, because roundabouts break down under high traffic loads - the fact that modern cars can do 40 round a roundabout without breaking a sweat doesn't help.
Genuine question: why do you hate automatic transmissions? I mean, if you prefer to drive a manual, then great. But why do you care what others do? I see this sentiment all the time, and the best answer I've ever gotten was "it's better on steep icy roads". I suppose if you live in Scandinavia, that's a pretty good argument, but I don't.
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in the UK, if you take your driving test in an automatic you're not allowed to drive a manual - so pretty much everybody learns in a manual unless they have a disability.
Apart from that, (a) automatics are more expensive and (b) a perception (true or otherwise) that they higher fuel consumption (which is a big deal given UK fuel prices).
Plus, once you're used to a manual there's a greater feeling of control.
Aren't those Macs less than 2 bloody years old?
No. It was only the first generation of Intel Macs that were "Core Duo" (32 bit). Worst case scenario is, I think, the original Mac Mini which (according to Wikipedia) didn't go "Core 2" until August 2007 - everything else was "Core 2" by the end of 2006.
Don't know if Apple announce "end of life" dates for OS X, but as of this spring they were still producing security updates for 10.5 so unless they have a drastic policy change, 10.6 should be OK for a while. Plus, their recommended way of upgrading from pre-10.6 to 10.7 is to buy 10.6 first, so they're going to be selling 10.6 for a while longer.
Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it.
I tried. How about posting a link?
Not that I'd be surprised if this happened as a result of public pressure - I think His Jobsness may have overestimated the availability of fast, uncapped internet connections.
Not YET ?
No, not yet. As opposed to Windows which has had annoying online activation since Windows XP, not to mention the whole "Windows genuine advantage" thing.
And even where Apple has gone for lock-down and digital distribution, we've at least seen a quid-pro-quo in terms of prices and terms of use (20 quid for Lion, 35 quid for Lion server, one purchase covers all your macs...) The only exception is with books, and I suspect that's because of the publishers, not Apple.
I take it you've discovered MacPorts and/or Fink which implement a BSD-like "ports" system offering all the usual FOSS suspects?
OK, they're source-based rather than binary, but if you're into development that probably wouldn't worry you.
Also remember that Dropbox works internationally, and not every country has the same "fair use" laws as the US.
Is this going to be yet another of those technologies like Firewire which will end up being a toy for Mac Fanboys
...would this be the "toy" which became the standard interface for a generation of DV camcorders and decks? It wasn't too shabby for hooking up external hard drives until USB3 came along.
Because different cables can use different chips or firmware. The initial Intel release said that optical cables might be available in the future - same (electrical) sockets, but with an optical transciever built into each plug.
Also, Thunderbolt is not a USB replacement for attaching mice and cheap memory sticks - its an external PCIe bus and its killer apps will be things that you can't do with USB. Hence the first peripherals are things like kick-ass RAID arrays, fast SSDs, high end video capture/editing kit etc. One of the forthcoming peripherals is an external case to take a full-size PCIe card (try that with USB!)
So, lots of MacBook users are not going to use TB as anything other than a monitor port, so it makes sense to shift some of the component costs to the cable rather than the motherboard.
Must be a European thing....why do you keep saying Math as a plural? Maths??
I don't think its a plural - we'd say "the Maths is wrong" not "the Maths are wrong". Its just a different way of abbreviating. OTOH "Statistics are false" and we say "Stats" as well.
AFAIK in the US you use "Physics" in the same way which I'd guess is a contraction of "The Physical Sciences". Maybe "Maths" is a contraction on "The Mathematical (Sciences|Arts)]"?
It gets worse when you start talking about the Maths, It's not just the odd extra letter: try "cuboid" (a right rectangular prism), "trapezium" (irregular quadrilateral in US, quadrilateral with two parallel sides in UK) "Standard form" (Scientific notation in UK, always "...of a polynomial" in US) "Gradient" (British for "slope"). Don't even start on "percent(s)" vs. "percentage(s)"... So much for the universal language of mathematics. I think you won on "billion" (original UK usage 10^12) though.
making it hard to design a clock that will work across several continents.
Well, speaking from a 50Hz country, the same goes for the mains (and I guess not everywhere guarantees a stable mains timebase).
Maybe YMMV but the low frequency time signal here in the UK seems pretty strong and reliable.