The terminal you're sitting at is IBM-compatible or even has an IBM processor in it. IBM is evil, too, as they made the counting machines for the Nazis. Google for "Hollerith machines holocaust" if you didn't know it.
Is 60yo history so extremely important to affect our daily lives today? No doubt??
Remember that a Leica from the 50s is a piece of equipment developed more than 80 years after the invention of chemical photography and therefore a rather evolved piece. Todays digital cameras are hardly 10 year-old technology, so we can't possibly hope those last as long as a model built on tech existing 80 years or more. To get a similarly advanced digital model, you would have to buy that classic digital in 50 years or in 2055, 2020 if we assume progress is 2 times faster than before.
I regularly cringe when I hear people defending old technology as vastly superior to today's. Be it tube amplifiers, vinyl records, chemical cameras or single speed bicycles. I regard it as barely hidden elitism, because most old-tech defenders fail to realize the uses and advantages of modern equipment while basking in their apparent understanding and knowledge.
I wish more people would lose their prejudices against new things and stop overrating traditional methods. If we could at least agree that both, new and inherited tech have their advantages, we could get along better.
Sure, negatives from a hundred years ago are still viewable. But in what shape are those? How much contrast and detail do they show? How easy to use?
Digital technology evolves at a pace never seen before. Today you have one disc, 2.5$ a piece, hold a year of work. In 10 years, you will have one disc hold 10 years of work for the same price. In 2020, we'll probably have storage mediums that can hold all the photos you'll ever take, in 3 different formats and an integrated projector if you want.
Sure, CD-Rs don't last nearly as long as old negatives, but you can transfer everything to the next medium with little or no effort, saving more than two thirds of physical storage space for the discs. (CD to DVD) Try that with your grandpa's negatives. Take a bluray disc in 2 years and copy 10 DVDs onto one of them. I bet a case of beer on the fact that 3 bluray discs are sufficient for all your past photography, with 3 more sufficient for everything you'll shoot in 10 years from now. And due to the formats popularity, JPEG compatible readers will be around a long time, I suppose. If not, by the year 2030 or so, you'll have a computer fast enough to batch-convert millions of old JPGs into the then newest format in less than 10 minutes. And yet every pixel of every photo is still exactly the same color, saturation and hue as your camera's imaging system put out it when you pressed the trigger. Despite the fact that those pictures got over dozens of storage mediums, everything is bit-wise the same as before. Maybe residing on a keychain-sized medium weighing 20 grams.
My grandpa had many thousands of negatives, a huge archive of every branch of our family, so I know of what I'm speaking. After his death, no one had the slightest idea of what to do with them. Everything weighted in at about 50kg and took more than 3 cbm. No one in our family had either enough room to store them all nor time to review and save the most important parts. So all the cases were put in basement and attic, revieved slowly when we had the time and motivation. But taken out of optimal conditions, all of the films degraded badly in less than 15 years, mold consumed some prints, negatives became brittle, adding to dust and disorder within the boxes. We threw them all away when we moved.
When you don't want to devote oodles of space to storing photos and negatives, don't have a climate stable enough to conserve them in attics and basements, all-digital is the way to go. Had my grandpa used a 4mp digital camera, shot in 2288 x 1712 *uncompressed* TIF with 12mb per image, we would instead only had to deal with 130 CDRs, 20 DVDs, less than a quarter of my home servers RAID. Either way, the lifelong archive of my grandparents would have fit in a reasonably small disc spindle sitting comfortably somewhere in our conditioned living room instead of taking up half the attic, more than a half of the basement while being consumed by mold and the sands of time.
Critizise going digital all the way you like, but there's no way around if your physical space is limited or you don't want to devote half your apartment for storage.
If you have a rule of law without democracy, it's all for nothing.
Even more, if you have a rule of law without democracy you have genuine fascism. Nazi Germany was a rule of law, everyone stood against the same laws and those laws were properly enforced. Except for the fact that it were draconian, bigot laws specifically designed against enemies of the ruling party. Jews and communists weren't imprisoned and burned at the whim of a camp commander or local warlord but at the order of the chancellor himself that had become law.
The first true dictatorship move was the "Ermächtigungsgesetz" (law of empowerment), that enabled the chancellor (who headed the executive branch before) to issue presidential orders ("Notverordnung" or "emergency order") that were treated like laws. So the parliament issued a law that said everything the chancellor undersigns is from now on treated as a law. And the bureaucrats in Nazi Germany heeded every order to the letter. Even if that meant genocide.
Let's see you upgrade your desktop machine. If the PSU, the form factor, the RAM interface, the CPU socket, the graphics socket and the HDD connection still fits.
I had that update thing going on for years. And everytime it was the memory, the cpu, the mobo and the psu that had to go. Most of the time, the old HD was too small anyway, so the only thing I could re-use were the screen and some cd/dvd-drives. What a bargain...
Did that for years now and you know where it got me? I ended up having a stockpile of unused hardware taking up space in the basement and in my room. Tried to sell them, but it's mostly the power users that buy single pieces of equipment and they never want a 3 year old videocard or CPU. In rare cases they're building a rig for their girlfriends or relatives, but then they rather recycle their own surplus than buying some from friends or ebay.
Who wants a 3 year old component? A stable machine complete with everything maybe, but at a horrible discount. With parts you won't get anywhere except hoarding them and building cheap rigs for the only-websurfing-and-emailing portion of your friends. Notebooks sell better, as it took me a long time to find a cheap notebook for "word & excel"-use, not slower than 800mhz. None below 600 euros I've found, even with damaged pixels and a totally mistreated battery. And yes, I tried ebay, too. I just wanted a decent machine to read my email and listen to some music while on business trips and maybe play some modest games. But that failed, 700 euros or more was the sound barrier. The space below is inhabited by 600-700MHz snails or with machines having more or less serious defects. More than 256mbs of RAM were extremely rare and upgrade S0-DIMMs are never cheap. So I would've ended up buying a not-cheap machine that is not fast, has not much memory and a small HD. All that and 2 USB1.1 ports for 700 euros. 800 if I dared to include WLAN-chipsets, but USB2.0 was out of the question. While the desktop machine was getting older and needed upgrades, too.
So I paid 1300 for a machine that's more than 3 times as fast as my old desktop, HL2-fps-wise, is ultra-quiet, 1gig ram and usb2.0. And surely has a substantial resale value once the latest games begin lagging. 700 euros for 2 year old notebooks that cost 1300 new was rare when I looked through all the offers. But 500 euros price loss in 2 years makes 250 euros per year. The same as yours, but without noise and with online gaming lying in the city park, via one of some free WLANs around.
Up front, it sounds more expensive, but notebooks can be resold as long as they are working and workable. Complete desktop systems have huge discounts, single parts can hardly be sold at all.
Comparison: my old machine is a 1800+ Athlon, with a GF4-4200, 128mb vram, 512mb system ram. Can you imagine anyone bidding more than 200 euros for that? Maybe around 150 euros, but only if I'm lucky and meet a fool on ebay. Cost new: 1000 euros. Age: 3.5 years. Loss per year: 240 euros. Savings compared to notebook: 10 euros per year. Encumberance on LAN parties: unbearable. Surfing from places other than my desk: impossible. Watching DVDs with friends in the park: no way. Playing C+C Generals against some other random traveller on a seemingly endless transatlantic flight: harr harr.
My computer uses exactly 40 Watts under full load, which means playing HL2 at a decent resolution. The PSU is fanless, noiseless and can deliver 60W sustained power, although that's never needed if my power meter reads correctly. The computer has a heat pipe system, transporting CPU and GPU heat to a single 8x8cm heatsink with a small temperature controlled fan, exhausting directly to outside air. This fan switches off, so the system is, except for a barely noticeable HDD noise, extremely silent, whenever convection cooling is sufficient, e.g. system is less than half-loaded and ambient temperatures are below 25 degrees Celsius, for example while writing/.-comments and surfing the web ATM. The CPU core frequency adapts in 4-step granularity to current computing power needs, so it saves more power and exhausts less heat while the CPU is waiting for me typing comments in a browser window. Typical low-power intake is about 25W, so the PSU is barely above room temperature.
The system had cost me 15 percent more as an equally powerful (in terms of computing power) but 7 times as energy consuming system. And the best (hehe): it has an integrated UPS with a backup capacity of 2 to 4 hours, depending on load. Did I mention the flatscreen built in for improved portability to LAN-parties?
Welcome to the world of current notebooks. I will never go back to a desktop rig, as long as those are weighing more than 4kgs, consume more than 200W while writing mails and surfing the web and produce more noise than a vacuum cleaner.
I don't know why PC manufactures haven't caught up to the current standards in power saving and noise reduction. Traditional desktop systems are IMHO not that much cheaper to offset their disadvantages, compared to notebooks. When I browse sites like Newegg, I conclude the price premium for notebooks is less than 15 percent, taking the integrated 15-17 inch TFT screen into account. The only thing notebooks lack is HDD space and speed. Most have 4800 upm ones and their capacity is 100GB at max. Capacity is offset by cheap USB-HDs if needed and speed is currently catching up with the first 7200 upm HDs appearing for the 2,5" form factor. Noise will then be an issue again, though, I fear.
1.) Layout looks simple, but is not. Screen readers and accessibility tools will have their problems with that. Javascript shouldn't be required for accessing a site, not because of Lynx or stone age browsers, but because of search engine indexing and accessibility tools. For that reason alone, it is a must.
2.) adblock.mozdev.org can not only remove the ads, but collapse the space allotted to them, making even the most ad-ridden pages readable with ease. The issue on ad-blocking vs. content "stealing" aside, your adblocking method seems outdated.
3.) Multi-column texts are nice but can be attained through different methods. Preferably by means compatible with different screen resolutions, text sizes, terminal capabilities and client-side text processing tools. I seriously doubt they got different standard compatible css'es for different viewing methods.
4.) Fits entirely in my window. Wastes hectars of screen space when the browser is maximized while becoming sidescrolling when browsing in a modestly sized window. I have a scroll mouse, a page-up/down set of keys on my keyboard and I'm not afraid to use them. I admire the ideal of being in control of the size of my browser window. Most other web desing including/. survives a reduction in widht or height. IHT design does not.
Please note: the web's goal is not niceness but versatility in displays, terminals and programs, especially when there's a text-only information to transmit. As there are thousands of websites that combine being nice with being accessible, I think IHT just wants to be unique or recognizable in their design.
Personally, I was offended by their layout. I didn't found the "printable" link, tabbed browsing wasn't usable and bookmarks to a specific page couldn't be set. All that to make their web presence look like a newspaper on dead tree. No, thanks.
The back button should take you exactly where it says: BACK to the last page you were viewing when you clicked some button. Anything else is against usability standards established centuries ago. The web is built on pages, not sites. Imagine yourself reading some pages on one site and being instantly booted from that site just because you wanted to reread the previous page. Javascript totally required for reading, a well hidden link to the printable version (I didn't find it, though I looked for 15 seconds and I'm not dyslexic) and then this issue with not being able to go back.
This design may look nice, but it is no highlight in ergonomic web design. And don't get me started about screen readers for the blind and other accessibility tools...
The same reason people bring gifts on chrismas day, give a dollar to a begging homeless, help other vehicle drivers if their car is stuck in the snow and whatever else I can imagine. And why people try to convince others of their religion, political opinion - sharing of ideals. People want to bring others the same good things they experienced and that's one reason. Some open source projects are head and shoulders above their commercial counterparts, especially the Gecko-based browsers come to mind, but also the VideoLAN client and some more. I just feel pity for people I know and value if they creep around the web with their default installed IE, fighting popups and blinking banners, always in danger of malware and security holes while navigating with clumsily with one window to Google and back.
As a more savvy user, I just have and urge and a duty to help people I know and like. And as most friends, even the most technically unsavvy, ignorant and technologically careless people use their Mozilla or Firefox and *never* switch back and even install that thing on their own on the next machine or at the office, I feel I helped them. Most are thankful the popups are gone, the tabbed browsing is easy, Google is fast to reach and their computer breaks down less often - I don't have that much support issues for my friends, there's less malware to bust and less systems to reinstall for them. And to be honest, it was quite a burden sometimes when another PC was infected *again* and they'd called me in panic to make that thing usable *again*.
And then, it's ideological. Fight monopolies, for the betterment of society as a whole and my own cheaper and better software environment in the future. And then you see people thanking you for showing them alternatives. Not all people are happy using an infringed copy of Office XP and even less are ready to shell out 300 bucks for a legal one. So give them OpenOffice, they are happy, society is a small bit better and it doesn't cost more than a few cents.
So in short: I've seen my friends and colleagues quite happy with their Mozilla enough times to know I've got to convert some more to that browser. And I know exactly the internet and document world would look like hell and be useless when open standards and free-as-in-speech software weren't there. I hate it when people are exploited or hindered and that's why I try to make open and free standard software popular among my friends and relatives.
The "helicopter" assault at the end of Clones was vietnam-film style. Cue "Ride of the Valkyries" and it would have been a not-so-bad reference to a great movie.
That scene brought me a fair bit of enjoyment and made me forget the 5 euros I spend on that film. Stromtroopers doing the Air Cav thang, that was so damn funny I could barely hold on to my seat.:)
Audi is in fact a VW brand. Both lines of cars share many components, in fact everything except engine, interior and exterior desing is exactly the same. So the popular VW Golf is for most intents and purposes identical to an Audi A3. It costs more, looks wealthier and its engine may be a bit different, but car underbody, structure and build units are the same.
Seat, Skoda and Audi brands are definetly owned owned by VW, maybe some other brands, too.
Actually, this is a great idea to produce the background images quite fast, thanks pal.
Hide desktop icons and set color to blue. Photograph desktop with notebook screen open. Close laptop screen, make another photo from same viewpoint. Make sure the camera angle is perpendicular to the plane of the screen to avoid perspective distortion.
Use the blue desktop as a stencil for the second image, i.e. keep all pixels from the second image when those were blue on the first picture.
Crop some edges on the resulting pictures, if necessary and you're finished. Remaining picture should now show the correct parts of the background image.
I read about filtering cheap vodka with cheap Brita water filters that should produce pretty decent tasting vodka. I put it to a test, invested about 15 euros for that and YES, it works. The first thing I read on teh intarweb to impress my friends. Feel free to use any filtration system you like, but I can assure you, cheap vodka is going to be quite okay. It's not going to be first quality, as it will certainly not gain any quality taste, but getting drunk with the resulting liquid lends a lot less headaches and sickness.
I don't either, but that's not my point. The thing is, the process of filing accusations and lawsuits and their subsequent resolution are at the heart of a free society. If anything or anybody in a free society is able to drive obscure lawsuits, undermine due process and force more or less innocent people to expend large amounts of money or surrender, that society isn't free (as in speech) anymore.
Leaving an WLAN-AP wide open is it's default config, not negligence. Either we have a rule of conduct for networking environments (like traffic rules!) or we don't. If we don't, we can't sue individuals for not securing their networks. We would place an unfair and enormously expensive burden on them. "In dubio pro reo" must apply in this case, but this has been perverted by the RIAA to "in dubio pay money".
In a free society, all a judge could do was a) forcing you to close that open relay and b) educate yourself on network security, so this incident doesn't happen again. Because no one can ever prove it was you who shared these incredibly valuable songs from Britney Spears.:) There is no "you should have known" or "you had to assume the worst" or whatever. The critical point isn't even that Joe Sixpack doesn't know jack about computers, spyware, trojans and open relays, but rather freedom of speech. If I as an healthy individual decide to share my expensive DSL connection with my friends in the backyard or with any stranger that happens to sit on a park bench behind the house, I'm not responsible for their actions. In fact, I'm punishable to harsh sentences if I even *tried* to monitor their internet usage. Privacy laws apply to even one's own access point.
Take a cellphone and this example: a friend of you, Mr. X is a criminal. Narcotics trafficking. You *don't* know this and assume you never talked about jobs, only about biking, girls, cars and snowboards. His cellphone battery went flat someday at your place and you gave him your phone. He arranges a drug lord meeting with said phone. Your phone, your connection.
"Bahn" = "long, plain and rather long stretch of something" or "a long straight path".
"Bahn" without a secondary word originally means a large, flat, uncut piece of paper (Papierbahn), cloth (Stoffbahn), roof covering (Teerbahn) etc., no matter for what purpose these items are used.
Then there is "Eisenbahn" (Eisen = Iron), which is the German word for railway. "Deutsche Bahn" is derived from this. "Fahrbahn" (Fahr- = drive-) is "road surface" or "road lane". The formation of "Autobahn" should be clear by now.
The rather outdated verb "bahnen" means "to make a way".
Colloquial use of "Bahn" almost always refers to a train for rail-, tram- (anything metro-related except for underground: elevated tramways "Hochbahn", city "Stadtbahn", road "Straßenbahn", express "Schnellbahn", differs from city to city, therefore always used abbreviated "S-Bahn") or subways (Untergrundbahn "U-Bahn").
Woohoo, it's you again, worst nightmare. And me. Anyway: what have the TOS of RoadRunner, for instance, to do with the suing of copyright infringers? TOS are an agreement between the ISP and Joe Subscriber. Whatever clause they contain, it doesn't matter at all when Joe Subscriber is getting sued by MPPA et al., just because a TOS does not form a part of civil law.
If two people would sign a rather silly contract, making one of them responsible for the crimes of the other one, don't you think it would rather be the perpetrator of a crime to appear before a judge, not his contract partner?;) If not, I'm sure the Mobsters would have found a way to do that by now, eh?
You sure it is? Would it be my responsibility if I leave a handgun lying around, someone takes it (preferably a minor in the household) and shoots someone, I'm responsible. So far so good.
Other question: if I leave my car unlocked, so it gets stolen and involved in an accident - am I responsible, too? Cars are dangerous things. Not as much as firearms, but can be devastating nonetheless. Assume it is my responsibility, too.
What about a box cutter on the front porch? Still dangerous and I'm responsible, eh? Allright, what about a bottle of whiskey? Wine? Beer? Could be dangerous to minors, I'm responsible, right? Think of the children! What about a bottle of milk? Some people are allergenic to lactose. It could go sour and get an unsuspecting thief (a child, maybe!) a sick stomach. Am I responsible?
After all, it boils down to three questions:
- to what extend can someone be held responsible when others misuse their property?
- how much can someone be held responsible for harm created by services, goods or anything else given away for free?
- how "dangerous" is a regular IP connection? Like a handgun? Like a car or heavy powertool? Knife, alcoholic beverage? Milk?
I see an open Wifi-spot exactly as dangerous as an open public letterbox. Not even in the case of a serious letter bomb would one these people be sued
a) the postal service for providing unchecked packet relay, b) the mailman, c) the person responsible for the letterbox, maybe a mall owner where that thing is located d) the manufacturer of paper, strings, stamps and glue.
What do we learn from that? Do not ever accept to take a letter/transmit an IP packet from your neighbors into town/to your gateway. Ignorance is negligence, openness is danger, sharing is stealing, not assuming the worst is abetting it, freedom is slavery. Thanks pal for reminding me. I'll register for re-education tomorrow, I promise!
German ex-monopolist Deutsche Telekom already copyrighted that "T" and the color "magenta". And won lawsuits defending them. We're already there, folks...
Thanks a lot. I'm still a bit sceptical but ozone can't be harder to a patient than AZT, I suppose. For someone with a terminal illness, no hope is too small to pursue and this hope seems not-so-small. Ozone is used in water purification and disinfection worldwide, so it sounds viable to purify blood samples. The worst that could happen would be a literal massacre on red and white blood cells in the removed portion of the blood. Possible negative effects would not be worse than those experienced by a blood donor, the amount of blood and blood cells lost would be about the same. This effect would be easily checked with the most basic lab equipment: let volutary patient donate blood, check under microscope for living blood cells, process with ozone, check again for blood cells and if the blood cells are alive and well, infuse it into the patient again, very slowly or in small portions at first. If patient survives with no adverse effects on 10ml, try 50. Repeat in increasing steps until adverse effects surface for up to 100 percent of the donated blood. If that poses no harm to the patient, repeat it for two weeks and then check blood samples and HIV-loads. If there's anything measurable: rinse, repeat until HIV negative.
Except for the HIV loads per ml blood, everything could be carried out by low or no-budget medical labs. If this treatment has even a hint of medical importance it could never be supressed. Not in the 3rd world and not in our countries.
Could you clear that up a little? How is that treatment done and what are the effects of this? If that may be a silver bullet, please let us know. Illegal or not, but if I knew a cheap and substantial cure for every HIV+ in the world, I would go to prison *and* hell to make it known to everyone...
What if our entire universe already is simulated in a computer, including us human "observers"? Isn't it then at least conceivable that there is a possibility to tap into already existing aggregated data streams somewhere within that system?
Descartes be damned, while we still can't reliably determine if the entire reality we perceive is simulated. Too bad the "Matrix"-movie sequels ruined the concept, as the general hypothesis behind them is interesting.
If our entire reality is a computer simulation, it surely isn't perfect, it can't be. I bet Goedels Theorem also applies for "outside" algorithms as well, so that "universe machine" couldn't be perfect. And if we might be some kind of "programs" inside a non-perfect system environment, we could "peek" at other "memory pages", "manipulate the stack" or whatever that would be called.
To further idealize the situation, I would conclude and call i.e. Shaolin monks "cheaters" as in "using an aimbot on a public game server". Gathering data from outside the current process environment inside our computers is called debugging at best, cheating at worst.
If information about the other "players" is stored at a different adress in the same memory page from the same process - and it could be accessed somehow - it doesn't matter how many "pixels" that "character" is away in the actual "game".
So far the hypothesis. Making actual predictions on realworld (sic) situations is where that falls apart. Because this models our reality as "created by someone", it could theoretically explain everything away. From gravity and general relativity up to the most improbable psi-experience accounts. Basically it concludes each and every question with "because God (sic) wanted our universe to be exactly like that". Which brings us nowhere in terms of science and progress. If these random number generators are enabling us to eventually test an hypothesis like that mentioned here, it could really be a breakthrough, in terms of science and society together.
Human beings have been religious since their very beginning and it would hardly surprise me if there really was something behind it. And I think it's time to bring this outside the realm of charlatans and textbooks from more than 2000 years ago. And make it usable beyond feel-good activity and "population control" or "opium for the masses".
Exactly. Over here in Europe the same development is underway. Customers getting screwed, products being little more than scam, services sold that no one needs and so on.
People worldwide conduct their business more and more *against* or "in spite of" their customers and other people, not *with* them or at least beneficiary for both. The usual win:win situation of trading (someone gets a good product, the other gets good money) is subverted into a perceived zero sum game, where everyone thinks he has to betray or coerce someone else into much too-favorable deals.
And yes, this is a problem of lost decency. Customers are bargaining about the edge of a cent, retailers push useless service plans, large corporations outsource everything and eventually just sell a brand and some emotions. This is gonna crash horribly and we'll be in the middle of ground zero on impact.
I say the automobile industry is going down real soon now, they have outsourced most of their key business factors, have failed to produce innovation besides different designed, safer, faster and stronger versions of their 50 year old models and milked their cash cows to the bone. The only innovation to core components in 50 years were the hybrid and rotary engines from Toyota and Mazda, respectively. Everything else was increasing ease of use and reliability. And now that this is max'ex out, they start decreasing it again by adding computers to it. And thats quite and example for the state of affairs current large corporations are in. When all automakers in the western world try to compete alone through brand recognition and different accessories and gimmicks around the main parts, it should tell us something...
I think you hit it on the head here, just propel the spacecraft into Mars orbit, drop off supplies, sling-shot around Mars and head back home. No energy costly stopping required under many circumstances...
Played it on an AMD 1800+ with a GF4200Ti without too much of a problem. This is a 4y old computer that wasn't anything high-end when I bought it. Doom3 ran playable on that thing and it was fun. I think its hardware requirements are severely overestimated. It had some lag, though. The first game for each session hadn't cached all weapon models, so it was useful to cycle all weapons at the spawn to not have the lag when they're needed later on. Except for that one ulra-large room down the old excavation site, just after the long sliding lift - that scene was unplayable with 3fps or less. Everything else was ok.
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1152000 floppies if you use first generation, 80 KB 8" discs. All of these floppies laid beside one another would cover a stretch 165km in length...
The terminal you're sitting at is IBM-compatible or even has an IBM processor in it. IBM is evil, too, as they made the counting machines for the Nazis. Google for "Hollerith machines holocaust" if you didn't know it.
Is 60yo history so extremely important to affect our daily lives today? No doubt??
Remember that a Leica from the 50s is a piece of equipment developed more than 80 years after the invention of chemical photography and therefore a rather evolved piece. Todays digital cameras are hardly 10 year-old technology, so we can't possibly hope those last as long as a model built on tech existing 80 years or more. To get a similarly advanced digital model, you would have to buy that classic digital in 50 years or in 2055, 2020 if we assume progress is 2 times faster than before.
I regularly cringe when I hear people defending old technology as vastly superior to today's. Be it tube amplifiers, vinyl records, chemical cameras or single speed bicycles. I regard it as barely hidden elitism, because most old-tech defenders fail to realize the uses and advantages of modern equipment while basking in their apparent understanding and knowledge.
I wish more people would lose their prejudices against new things and stop overrating traditional methods. If we could at least agree that both, new and inherited tech have their advantages, we could get along better.
Sure, negatives from a hundred years ago are still viewable. But in what shape are those? How much contrast and detail do they show? How easy to use?
Digital technology evolves at a pace never seen before. Today you have one disc, 2.5$ a piece, hold a year of work. In 10 years, you will have one disc hold 10 years of work for the same price. In 2020, we'll probably have storage mediums that can hold all the photos you'll ever take, in 3 different formats and an integrated projector if you want.
Sure, CD-Rs don't last nearly as long as old negatives, but you can transfer everything to the next medium with little or no effort, saving more than two thirds of physical storage space for the discs. (CD to DVD) Try that with your grandpa's negatives. Take a bluray disc in 2 years and copy 10 DVDs onto one of them. I bet a case of beer on the fact that 3 bluray discs are sufficient for all your past photography, with 3 more sufficient for everything you'll shoot in 10 years from now. And due to the formats popularity, JPEG compatible readers will be around a long time, I suppose. If not, by the year 2030 or so, you'll have a computer fast enough to batch-convert millions of old JPGs into the then newest format in less than 10 minutes. And yet every pixel of every photo is still exactly the same color, saturation and hue as your camera's imaging system put out it when you pressed the trigger. Despite the fact that those pictures got over dozens of storage mediums, everything is bit-wise the same as before. Maybe residing on a keychain-sized medium weighing 20 grams.
My grandpa had many thousands of negatives, a huge archive of every branch of our family, so I know of what I'm speaking. After his death, no one had the slightest idea of what to do with them. Everything weighted in at about 50kg and took more than 3 cbm. No one in our family had either enough room to store them all nor time to review and save the most important parts. So all the cases were put in basement and attic, revieved slowly when we had the time and motivation. But taken out of optimal conditions, all of the films degraded badly in less than 15 years, mold consumed some prints, negatives became brittle, adding to dust and disorder within the boxes. We threw them all away when we moved.
When you don't want to devote oodles of space to storing photos and negatives, don't have a climate stable enough to conserve them in attics and basements, all-digital is the way to go. Had my grandpa used a 4mp digital camera, shot in 2288 x 1712 *uncompressed* TIF with 12mb per image, we would instead only had to deal with 130 CDRs, 20 DVDs, less than a quarter of my home servers RAID. Either way, the lifelong archive of my grandparents would have fit in a reasonably small disc spindle sitting comfortably somewhere in our conditioned living room instead of taking up half the attic, more than a half of the basement while being consumed by mold and the sands of time.
Critizise going digital all the way you like, but there's no way around if your physical space is limited or you don't want to devote half your apartment for storage.
If you have a rule of law without democracy, it's all for nothing.
Even more, if you have a rule of law without democracy you have genuine fascism. Nazi Germany was a rule of law, everyone stood against the same laws and those laws were properly enforced. Except for the fact that it were draconian, bigot laws specifically designed against enemies of the ruling party. Jews and communists weren't imprisoned and burned at the whim of a camp commander or local warlord but at the order of the chancellor himself that had become law.
The first true dictatorship move was the "Ermächtigungsgesetz" (law of empowerment), that enabled the chancellor (who headed the executive branch before) to issue presidential orders ("Notverordnung" or "emergency order") that were treated like laws. So the parliament issued a law that said everything the chancellor undersigns is from now on treated as a law. And the bureaucrats in Nazi Germany heeded every order to the letter. Even if that meant genocide.
Let's see you upgrade your desktop machine. If the PSU, the form factor, the RAM interface, the CPU socket, the graphics socket and the HDD connection still fits.
I had that update thing going on for years. And everytime it was the memory, the cpu, the mobo and the psu that had to go. Most of the time, the old HD was too small anyway, so the only thing I could re-use were the screen and some cd/dvd-drives. What a bargain...
Did that for years now and you know where it got me? I ended up having a stockpile of unused hardware taking up space in the basement and in my room. Tried to sell them, but it's mostly the power users that buy single pieces of equipment and they never want a 3 year old videocard or CPU. In rare cases they're building a rig for their girlfriends or relatives, but then they rather recycle their own surplus than buying some from friends or ebay.
Who wants a 3 year old component? A stable machine complete with everything maybe, but at a horrible discount. With parts you won't get anywhere except hoarding them and building cheap rigs for the only-websurfing-and-emailing portion of your friends. Notebooks sell better, as it took me a long time to find a cheap notebook for "word & excel"-use, not slower than 800mhz. None below 600 euros I've found, even with damaged pixels and a totally mistreated battery. And yes, I tried ebay, too. I just wanted a decent machine to read my email and listen to some music while on business trips and maybe play some modest games. But that failed, 700 euros or more was the sound barrier. The space below is inhabited by 600-700MHz snails or with machines having more or less serious defects. More than 256mbs of RAM were extremely rare and upgrade S0-DIMMs are never cheap. So I would've ended up buying a not-cheap machine that is not fast, has not much memory and a small HD. All that and 2 USB1.1 ports for 700 euros. 800 if I dared to include WLAN-chipsets, but USB2.0 was out of the question. While the desktop machine was getting older and needed upgrades, too.
So I paid 1300 for a machine that's more than 3 times as fast as my old desktop, HL2-fps-wise, is ultra-quiet, 1gig ram and usb2.0. And surely has a substantial resale value once the latest games begin lagging. 700 euros for 2 year old notebooks that cost 1300 new was rare when I looked through all the offers. But 500 euros price loss in 2 years makes 250 euros per year. The same as yours, but without noise and with online gaming lying in the city park, via one of some free WLANs around.
Up front, it sounds more expensive, but notebooks can be resold as long as they are working and workable. Complete desktop systems have huge discounts, single parts can hardly be sold at all.
Comparison: my old machine is a 1800+ Athlon, with a GF4-4200, 128mb vram, 512mb system ram. Can you imagine anyone bidding more than 200 euros for that? Maybe around 150 euros, but only if I'm lucky and meet a fool on ebay. Cost new: 1000 euros. Age: 3.5 years. Loss per year: 240 euros. Savings compared to notebook: 10 euros per year. Encumberance on LAN parties: unbearable. Surfing from places other than my desk: impossible. Watching DVDs with friends in the park: no way. Playing C+C Generals against some other random traveller on a seemingly endless transatlantic flight: harr harr.
My computer uses exactly 40 Watts under full load, which means playing HL2 at a decent resolution. The PSU is fanless, noiseless and can deliver 60W sustained power, although that's never needed if my power meter reads correctly. The computer has a heat pipe system, transporting CPU and GPU heat to a single 8x8cm heatsink with a small temperature controlled fan, exhausting directly to outside air. This fan switches off, so the system is, except for a barely noticeable HDD noise, extremely silent, whenever convection cooling is sufficient, e.g. system is less than half-loaded and ambient temperatures are below 25 degrees Celsius, for example while writing /.-comments and surfing the web ATM. The CPU core frequency adapts in 4-step granularity to current computing power needs, so it saves more power and exhausts less heat while the CPU is waiting for me typing comments in a browser window. Typical low-power intake is about 25W, so the PSU is barely above room temperature.
The system had cost me 15 percent more as an equally powerful (in terms of computing power) but 7 times as energy consuming system. And the best (hehe): it has an integrated UPS with a backup capacity of 2 to 4 hours, depending on load. Did I mention the flatscreen built in for improved portability to LAN-parties?
Welcome to the world of current notebooks. I will never go back to a desktop rig, as long as those are weighing more than 4kgs, consume more than 200W while writing mails and surfing the web and produce more noise than a vacuum cleaner.
I don't know why PC manufactures haven't caught up to the current standards in power saving and noise reduction. Traditional desktop systems are IMHO not that much cheaper to offset their disadvantages, compared to notebooks. When I browse sites like Newegg, I conclude the price premium for notebooks is less than 15 percent, taking the integrated 15-17 inch TFT screen into account. The only thing notebooks lack is HDD space and speed. Most have 4800 upm ones and their capacity is 100GB at max. Capacity is offset by cheap USB-HDs if needed and speed is currently catching up with the first 7200 upm HDs appearing for the 2,5" form factor. Noise will then be an issue again, though, I fear.
1.) Layout looks simple, but is not. Screen readers and accessibility tools will have their problems with that. Javascript shouldn't be required for accessing a site, not because of Lynx or stone age browsers, but because of search engine indexing and accessibility tools. For that reason alone, it is a must.
/. survives a reduction in widht or height. IHT design does not.
2.) adblock.mozdev.org can not only remove the ads, but collapse the space allotted to them, making even the most ad-ridden pages readable with ease. The issue on ad-blocking vs. content "stealing" aside, your adblocking method seems outdated.
3.) Multi-column texts are nice but can be attained through different methods. Preferably by means compatible with different screen resolutions, text sizes, terminal capabilities and client-side text processing tools. I seriously doubt they got different standard compatible css'es for different viewing methods.
4.) Fits entirely in my window. Wastes hectars of screen space when the browser is maximized while becoming sidescrolling when browsing in a modestly sized window. I have a scroll mouse, a page-up/down set of keys on my keyboard and I'm not afraid to use them. I admire the ideal of being in control of the size of my browser window. Most other web desing including
Please note: the web's goal is not niceness but versatility in displays, terminals and programs, especially when there's a text-only information to transmit. As there are thousands of websites that combine being nice with being accessible, I think IHT just wants to be unique or recognizable in their design.
Personally, I was offended by their layout. I didn't found the "printable" link, tabbed browsing wasn't usable and bookmarks to a specific page couldn't be set. All that to make their web presence look like a newspaper on dead tree. No, thanks.
The back button should take you exactly where it says: BACK to the last page you were viewing when you clicked some button. Anything else is against usability standards established centuries ago. The web is built on pages, not sites. Imagine yourself reading some pages on one site and being instantly booted from that site just because you wanted to reread the previous page. Javascript totally required for reading, a well hidden link to the printable version (I didn't find it, though I looked for 15 seconds and I'm not dyslexic) and then this issue with not being able to go back.
This design may look nice, but it is no highlight in ergonomic web design. And don't get me started about screen readers for the blind and other accessibility tools...
The same reason people bring gifts on chrismas day, give a dollar to a begging homeless, help other vehicle drivers if their car is stuck in the snow and whatever else I can imagine. And why people try to convince others of their religion, political opinion - sharing of ideals. People want to bring others the same good things they experienced and that's one reason. Some open source projects are head and shoulders above their commercial counterparts, especially the Gecko-based browsers come to mind, but also the VideoLAN client and some more. I just feel pity for people I know and value if they creep around the web with their default installed IE, fighting popups and blinking banners, always in danger of malware and security holes while navigating with clumsily with one window to Google and back.
As a more savvy user, I just have and urge and a duty to help people I know and like. And as most friends, even the most technically unsavvy, ignorant and technologically careless people use their Mozilla or Firefox and *never* switch back and even install that thing on their own on the next machine or at the office, I feel I helped them. Most are thankful the popups are gone, the tabbed browsing is easy, Google is fast to reach and their computer breaks down less often - I don't have that much support issues for my friends, there's less malware to bust and less systems to reinstall for them. And to be honest, it was quite a burden sometimes when another PC was infected *again* and they'd called me in panic to make that thing usable *again*.
And then, it's ideological. Fight monopolies, for the betterment of society as a whole and my own cheaper and better software environment in the future. And then you see people thanking you for showing them alternatives. Not all people are happy using an infringed copy of Office XP and even less are ready to shell out 300 bucks for a legal one. So give them OpenOffice, they are happy, society is a small bit better and it doesn't cost more than a few cents.
So in short: I've seen my friends and colleagues quite happy with their Mozilla enough times to know I've got to convert some more to that browser. And I know exactly the internet and document world would look like hell and be useless when open standards and free-as-in-speech software weren't there. I hate it when people are exploited or hindered and that's why I try to make open and free standard software popular among my friends and relatives.
The "helicopter" assault at the end of Clones was vietnam-film style. Cue "Ride of the Valkyries" and it would have been a not-so-bad reference to a great movie.
:)
That scene brought me a fair bit of enjoyment and made me forget the 5 euros I spend on that film. Stromtroopers doing the Air Cav thang, that was so damn funny I could barely hold on to my seat.
Audi is in fact a VW brand. Both lines of cars share many components, in fact everything except engine, interior and exterior desing is exactly the same. So the popular VW Golf is for most intents and purposes identical to an Audi A3. It costs more, looks wealthier and its engine may be a bit different, but car underbody, structure and build units are the same.
Seat, Skoda and Audi brands are definetly owned owned by VW, maybe some other brands, too.
Actually, this is a great idea to produce the background images quite fast, thanks pal.
Hide desktop icons and set color to blue. Photograph desktop with notebook screen open. Close laptop screen, make another photo from same viewpoint. Make sure the camera angle is perpendicular to the plane of the screen to avoid perspective distortion.
Use the blue desktop as a stencil for the second image, i.e. keep all pixels from the second image when those were blue on the first picture.
Crop some edges on the resulting pictures, if necessary and you're finished. Remaining picture should now show the correct parts of the background image.
I read about filtering cheap vodka with cheap Brita water filters that should produce pretty decent tasting vodka. I put it to a test, invested about 15 euros for that and YES, it works. The first thing I read on teh intarweb to impress my friends. Feel free to use any filtration system you like, but I can assure you, cheap vodka is going to be quite okay. It's not going to be first quality, as it will certainly not gain any quality taste, but getting drunk with the resulting liquid lends a lot less headaches and sickness.
I don't either, but that's not my point. The thing is, the process of filing accusations and lawsuits and their subsequent resolution are at the heart of a free society. If anything or anybody in a free society is able to drive obscure lawsuits, undermine due process and force more or less innocent people to expend large amounts of money or surrender, that society isn't free (as in speech) anymore.
:) There is no "you should have known" or "you had to assume the worst" or whatever. The critical point isn't even that Joe Sixpack doesn't know jack about computers, spyware, trojans and open relays, but rather freedom of speech. If I as an healthy individual decide to share my expensive DSL connection with my friends in the backyard or with any stranger that happens to sit on a park bench behind the house, I'm not responsible for their actions. In fact, I'm punishable to harsh sentences if I even *tried* to monitor their internet usage. Privacy laws apply to even one's own access point.
Leaving an WLAN-AP wide open is it's default config, not negligence. Either we have a rule of conduct for networking environments (like traffic rules!) or we don't. If we don't, we can't sue individuals for not securing their networks. We would place an unfair and enormously expensive burden on them. "In dubio pro reo" must apply in this case, but this has been perverted by the RIAA to "in dubio pay money".
In a free society, all a judge could do was a) forcing you to close that open relay and b) educate yourself on network security, so this incident doesn't happen again. Because no one can ever prove it was you who shared these incredibly valuable songs from Britney Spears.
Take a cellphone and this example: a friend of you, Mr. X is a criminal. Narcotics trafficking. You *don't* know this and assume you never talked about jobs, only about biking, girls, cars and snowboards. His cellphone battery went flat someday at your place and you gave him your phone. He arranges a drug lord meeting with said phone. Your phone, your connection.
Can the police now bust your house?
"Bahn" = "long, plain and rather long stretch of something" or "a long straight path".
"Bahn" without a secondary word originally means a large, flat, uncut piece of paper (Papierbahn), cloth (Stoffbahn), roof covering (Teerbahn) etc., no matter for what purpose these items are used.
Then there is "Eisenbahn" (Eisen = Iron), which is the German word for railway. "Deutsche Bahn" is derived from this. "Fahrbahn" (Fahr- = drive-) is "road surface" or "road lane". The formation of "Autobahn" should be clear by now.
The rather outdated verb "bahnen" means "to make a way".
Colloquial use of "Bahn" almost always refers to a train for rail-, tram- (anything metro-related except for underground: elevated tramways "Hochbahn", city "Stadtbahn", road "Straßenbahn", express "Schnellbahn", differs from city to city, therefore always used abbreviated "S-Bahn") or subways (Untergrundbahn "U-Bahn").
Woohoo, it's you again, worst nightmare. And me. Anyway: what have the TOS of RoadRunner, for instance, to do with the suing of copyright infringers? TOS are an agreement between the ISP and Joe Subscriber. Whatever clause they contain, it doesn't matter at all when Joe Subscriber is getting sued by MPPA et al., just because a TOS does not form a part of civil law.
;) If not, I'm sure the Mobsters would have found a way to do that by now, eh?
If two people would sign a rather silly contract, making one of them responsible for the crimes of the other one, don't you think it would rather be the perpetrator of a crime to appear before a judge, not his contract partner?
You sure it is? Would it be my responsibility if I leave a handgun lying around, someone takes it (preferably a minor in the household) and shoots someone, I'm responsible. So far so good.
Other question: if I leave my car unlocked, so it gets stolen and involved in an accident - am I responsible, too? Cars are dangerous things. Not as much as firearms, but can be devastating nonetheless. Assume it is my responsibility, too.
What about a box cutter on the front porch? Still dangerous and I'm responsible, eh? Allright, what about a bottle of whiskey? Wine? Beer? Could be dangerous to minors, I'm responsible, right? Think of the children! What about a bottle of milk? Some people are allergenic to lactose. It could go sour and get an unsuspecting thief (a child, maybe!) a sick stomach. Am I responsible?
After all, it boils down to three questions:
- to what extend can someone be held responsible when others misuse their property?
- how much can someone be held responsible for harm created by services, goods or anything else given away for free? - how "dangerous" is a regular IP connection? Like a handgun? Like a car or heavy powertool? Knife, alcoholic beverage? Milk?
I see an open Wifi-spot exactly as dangerous as an open public letterbox. Not even in the case of a serious letter bomb would one these people be sued a) the postal service for providing unchecked packet relay, b) the mailman, c) the person responsible for the letterbox, maybe a mall owner where that thing is located d) the manufacturer of paper, strings, stamps and glue.
What do we learn from that? Do not ever accept to take a letter/transmit an IP packet from your neighbors into town/to your gateway. Ignorance is negligence, openness is danger, sharing is stealing, not assuming the worst is abetting it, freedom is slavery. Thanks pal for reminding me. I'll register for re-education tomorrow, I promise!
German ex-monopolist Deutsche Telekom already copyrighted that "T" and the color "magenta". And won lawsuits defending them. We're already there, folks...
Thanks a lot. I'm still a bit sceptical but ozone can't be harder to a patient than AZT, I suppose. For someone with a terminal illness, no hope is too small to pursue and this hope seems not-so-small. Ozone is used in water purification and disinfection worldwide, so it sounds viable to purify blood samples. The worst that could happen would be a literal massacre on red and white blood cells in the removed portion of the blood. Possible negative effects would not be worse than those experienced by a blood donor, the amount of blood and blood cells lost would be about the same. This effect would be easily checked with the most basic lab equipment: let volutary patient donate blood, check under microscope for living blood cells, process with ozone, check again for blood cells and if the blood cells are alive and well, infuse it into the patient again, very slowly or in small portions at first. If patient survives with no adverse effects on 10ml, try 50. Repeat in increasing steps until adverse effects surface for up to 100 percent of the donated blood. If that poses no harm to the patient, repeat it for two weeks and then check blood samples and HIV-loads. If there's anything measurable: rinse, repeat until HIV negative.
Except for the HIV loads per ml blood, everything could be carried out by low or no-budget medical labs. If this treatment has even a hint of medical importance it could never be supressed. Not in the 3rd world and not in our countries.
Could you clear that up a little? How is that treatment done and what are the effects of this? If that may be a silver bullet, please let us know. Illegal or not, but if I knew a cheap and substantial cure for every HIV+ in the world, I would go to prison *and* hell to make it known to everyone...
What if our entire universe already is simulated in a computer, including us human "observers"? Isn't it then at least conceivable that there is a possibility to tap into already existing aggregated data streams somewhere within that system?
Descartes be damned, while we still can't reliably determine if the entire reality we perceive is simulated. Too bad the "Matrix"-movie sequels ruined the concept, as the general hypothesis behind them is interesting.
If our entire reality is a computer simulation, it surely isn't perfect, it can't be. I bet Goedels Theorem also applies for "outside" algorithms as well, so that "universe machine" couldn't be perfect. And if we might be some kind of "programs" inside a non-perfect system environment, we could "peek" at other "memory pages", "manipulate the stack" or whatever that would be called.
To further idealize the situation, I would conclude and call i.e. Shaolin monks "cheaters" as in "using an aimbot on a public game server". Gathering data from outside the current process environment inside our computers is called debugging at best, cheating at worst.
If information about the other "players" is stored at a different adress in the same memory page from the same process - and it could be accessed somehow - it doesn't matter how many "pixels" that "character" is away in the actual "game".
So far the hypothesis. Making actual predictions on realworld (sic) situations is where that falls apart. Because this models our reality as "created by someone", it could theoretically explain everything away. From gravity and general relativity up to the most improbable psi-experience accounts. Basically it concludes each and every question with "because God (sic) wanted our universe to be exactly like that". Which brings us nowhere in terms of science and progress. If these random number generators are enabling us to eventually test an hypothesis like that mentioned here, it could really be a breakthrough, in terms of science and society together.
Human beings have been religious since their very beginning and it would hardly surprise me if there really was something behind it. And I think it's time to bring this outside the realm of charlatans and textbooks from more than 2000 years ago. And make it usable beyond feel-good activity and "population control" or "opium for the masses".
Exactly. Over here in Europe the same development is underway. Customers getting screwed, products being little more than scam, services sold that no one needs and so on.
People worldwide conduct their business more and more *against* or "in spite of" their customers and other people, not *with* them or at least beneficiary for both. The usual win:win situation of trading (someone gets a good product, the other gets good money) is subverted into a perceived zero sum game, where everyone thinks he has to betray or coerce someone else into much too-favorable deals.
And yes, this is a problem of lost decency. Customers are bargaining about the edge of a cent, retailers push useless service plans, large corporations outsource everything and eventually just sell a brand and some emotions. This is gonna crash horribly and we'll be in the middle of ground zero on impact.
I say the automobile industry is going down real soon now, they have outsourced most of their key business factors, have failed to produce innovation besides different designed, safer, faster and stronger versions of their 50 year old models and milked their cash cows to the bone. The only innovation to core components in 50 years were the hybrid and rotary engines from Toyota and Mazda, respectively. Everything else was increasing ease of use and reliability. And now that this is max'ex out, they start decreasing it again by adding computers to it. And thats quite and example for the state of affairs current large corporations are in. When all automakers in the western world try to compete alone through brand recognition and different accessories and gimmicks around the main parts, it should tell us something...
I think you hit it on the head here, just propel the spacecraft into Mars orbit, drop off supplies, sling-shot around Mars and head back home. No energy costly stopping required under many circumstances...
Played it on an AMD 1800+ with a GF4200Ti without too much of a problem. This is a 4y old computer that wasn't anything high-end when I bought it. Doom3 ran playable on that thing and it was fun. I think its hardware requirements are severely overestimated. It had some lag, though. The first game for each session hadn't cached all weapon models, so it was useful to cycle all weapons at the spawn to not have the lag when they're needed later on. Except for that one ulra-large room down the old excavation site, just after the long sliding lift - that scene was unplayable with 3fps or less. Everything else was ok.