Even 12 hours would be good. Most flights longer than that hours stop *somewhere*, during which time you could (theoretically) charge the laptop again and be good to go. In my experience, it's unlikely that a single leg of a flight will last (significantly) more than 12-hours at a time.
Unless you're going somewhere like New Zealand, of course.
>>But no one in America would claim that a $200,000 speeding ticket is justified.
In Finland, copyright law is not insane.
Fines, however, are.
The amount you get for a speeding ticket (or any offense punishable by a fine) is relative to your monthly income, which the police check on the spot thanks to the widespread use of mobile technology.
Last time I re-installed Windows was early 2006: I had an XP SP1 disc. Time to be owned: approximately 4 *seconds* (10MBPS public facing LAN connection to the internet, no router or anything in between)
I had to download XP SP2, AV software, Firewall program etc while putting up with popups, then, save those to a separate partition, nuke the Windows install and start *again* (this time installing the AV and firewall software before plugging in the cable again)
Oh, and what about Jaiku? You could theoretically co-ordinate many people at once with a single message (I send mine via Gtalk, and it costs me probably about 0.0000000001 euro per message).
Can't say enough about Data Plans! I still send about 250 SMS per month (but I pay like... 3-5 eur or something for that, so that is bugger all, as far as I am concerned)...
Oh and don't even get me started on the inbuilt IMAP functionality... and the Gmail app... hell, if I wasn't coding/demoing stuff for part of my day, I wouldn't even really need a laptop. Since obtaining the E-series, my productivity has gone significantly up, because I type more 1-sentance short messages rather than long convoluted emails to people as I normally would (see parent), and half the time I do it when I'm buzzing around (not driving) and all I'd otherwise be doing is flicking through my playlist... so I can do real work at my desk and fake work (answering questions, confirming stuff) on the go.
I'm with Elisa. I pay about 50eur a month for something like 1000 min, 300 SMS and unlimited 2mbit data, which I utilize for things like unlimited Skype calling to New Zealand (4eur/kk), plus incoming Skype for my Finnish, New Zealand and Japanese phone numbers, Various IM clients (with Fring) and Gizmo.
For the record, I have a Nokia E-series and I used to pay Sonera nearly 150eur/kk for the same privileges. (For those outside Finland, Sonera is the carrier of the iPhone in Finland, and Finland has something like 5 or 6 carriers for 5 million people)
As well as the occasional times where I have to use the public transport system and decide to watch youtube videos on my laptop via the power of USB and wvdial.
Just download EQO and you've also got access to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber/GTalk, ICQ... or Download Fring and you've got all those plus Skype and a couple of others... oh, and lets not forget Gizmo5!
I have EQO, Fring and Gizmo on my Nokia (I have the E51, but you could use EQO on any S40, Fring on any S60/S80, Gizmo on any S40,S60 or S80...)... PLUS with my E51 I don't have any contract to any one supplier... so like... big whoop.
As nice as an iPhone would be, and as much as I might like an iPhone, I can't be stuffed paying >80â a month to Sonera (Finland) for a plan that doesn't even give me as much niceties as my current provider (Elisa), and no-one is going to brick my E51 should I decide to hack it up a little.
I downloaded Opera Mini. And I have a touch response when I am typing. It has Wifi. It supports 3.5G network access (and my provider supports 2mbit, and I even regularly get 2mbit when I'm downloading).
I'm afraid I have to agree with Maddox on the iPhone vs. Nokia E-series here. Not that I don't want an iPhone - I just don't want one *that* much... and considering I'd just recently changed from Sonera, so I decided... "bugger it". The only advantage is the big screen on the iPhone... but with the whole fingerprints thing, I probably couldn't read it anyway without compulsively wiping it.
Also I think its much nicer to look at a display that is set to between 75-85% brightness versus 100% brightness!
Having just told my OS to set my HP Business Notebook with the matte screen to 75%, I feel much better looking at it, since I just realized my cow-irkers have their f/&Â%ing fluorescent bulbs on (I'm pushing to get them changed to halogen). Mine are off, but I can still see theirs. Maybe I should turn my desk around to face away.
My Math teacher in High-School would never let us work with the lights on because it degraded our performance, and to this day, I like that kind of environment. (Like most of you, I was in the advanced math class... we had to bring up the averages;))
When I got new lenses a few years back, they asked if I wanted some anti-reflective coating on them after they found out I worked with computers (which admittedly took some getting used-to). To this day I can't be 100% sure if it helped or not, but, might be worth a shot.
Last week I got given an HP 6715b widescreen laptop. Nice because it has a matte LCD but one thing bothered me: I had to interrup the startup of {chosen distro}'s liveCD and hack around in the terminal because the installer didn't handle widescreen by default.
Or maybe it was the ATI card, but my old HP nx9005 haa an ATI card and that worked fine.
Anyway, the thing that irks me about widescreen: my photos are in 4:3 format. I don't take most of my photos in 2:3 format or whatever wide format is offered by my camera. So Gnome has to stretch them. And that looks ugly. Of course, sometimes its better if it scales it so that it cuts off the top and bottom, but... that doesn't always work.
But I must admit, the resolution on the new screen is fantastic. I have my windows open, with my desktop icons visible on the left, and I switch between my 4 desktops all the time, so I can use my mouse scroll wheel to effectively do that.
Maybe it's just the large increase in pixels overall (compared to 1024*768), but my old display looks ugly compared to this.
Wait... PETA? Aren't they the 'charity' with the gigantic HQ who financially sponsor acts of vandalism, such as the looting, pillaging and razing of medical research facilities, including but not limited to harassment of the staff?
I'm a meat-eater, through and through. In my opinion, there are few things better than cooking up a good slab of Reindeer or Elk meat which a friend or relative has taken from the tundra in Lapland.
Well, the movie industry (whoever it was) just posted record profits... so we can be pretty sure they're not in as much trouble as they would like the general public to believe.
As far as the music industry... well... I don't know about their profits, but they haven't produced anything good in quite some time, so, they can shrivel up and go away, as far as I'm concerned. Or start putting out good music. Pick one.
I can't remember which cd/dvd I was listening to/watching, but as it happens, Henry Rollins has some good ideas on the subject. Oh, and George Carlin expresses similar sentiments.
"I have been running XP and previous versions of Windows for years and years, and I haven't had a virus since Blaster."
That you know of.
"If you have a little bit of common sense your chance of being infected is very low."
By common sense, you mean "don't plug in to the internet ever", right? Last time I reinstalled an XP system, it took a little under 4 seconds to be overridden with crap, popups and who knows what else. I didn't even have to start up IE! It all seemed to be infected by TFTP or something.
I have it on video somewhere, I think. Silly me... I just wanted to download a firewall... what was I thinking?! But I downloaded the firewall (and other programs) on to another partition and nuked the system again. Grr, was that a frustrating day!
The other 2 paragraphs I actually agree quite whole-heartedly on.
See my other comment about how much a new Porsche will cost... though in retrospect, my percentages are probably out. Legal fees are probably far more than 10%.
I concur with this idea. Why don't we scrap the labels and pay the artists directly for their music?
First off, it will mean the demise of "artists" like Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton (among a myriad of others), but it will also mean the rise of artists that can actually play their instruments and maybe even sing. With the Social-Networking sites being so popular now, and with this interweb thing being pretty much everywhere, who needs a label for distribution?
Maybe the idea *is* a little extreme, but it seems that its beginning to happen.
New Porsche is going to cost me $150,000. My fee for winning is 10% of the outcome... so damages should be $1,500,000!...and movies are only $250,000 (unless those figures have changed, of course).
This includes quite a lot of public-domain (Classical/Old Jazz and such on which the copyrights should have expired) music.
I consider most Classical Music to be public domain, since by the time it's in (MP3/OGG/FLAC) format it *can* be difficult to distinguish *which* orchestra played it... of course, with the exception of particular artists like Maksim Mrvica, Vanessa Mae, Nigel Kennedy and others who put a spin on it to create a particular style.
In addition, this collection also includes a LOT of foreign-language music too *and* very few duplicates.
But still. 50 Gigs. Thats like... less than a week of torrents.
Are you sure Paris actually sang on the album, and didn't just slip some girl $500 who actually *can* sing to do just that? I have my doubts. But this is not really the point. I'm curious to know who actually would *buy* this crap in the first place.
New Zealanders might remember the case of the Paul Holmes CD a few years back (it became the single most returned item after Christmas that year).
Henry Rollins has the right idea: he says that if the labels started putting out music that wasn't so shitty, people might want to buy it. Forcing people to pay $23 of their hard earned cash for a J-Lo (or in this case Paris Hilton) CD is the real crime.
I once took a business course aimed at new entrepreneurs in my city. As it turns out, the lecture I'm about to elaborate on was more of a sales push for this persons consulting company (which was, coincidentally, out of town, and anyone hiring her would have probably had to pay her fee in addition to an hours worth of gas-mileage).
In addition, the instructor was... not advanced, per se, but learned a few things from "Windows XP for dummies" the previous day.
She spent a great deal of time explaining why people shouldn't keep all their documents in 'my documents", because "it would be easy for hackers to just find the folder and delete it or modify the files".
Keeping in mind, that, in 2002-2003, most of these people had 56k at best, and get this: Her solution to the problem was do make a folder in c:\ called "data", and then... change the "my documents" icon path to be c:\data... and save all your documents in there
I was the only technical person in the room, so I stood up to inform the crowd (most of whom I knew from other meetings held by the same organization): 1. Hackers breaking in to home PCs? Fat chance. (Not to mention the hacker vs cracker vs phreaker vs script kiddie etc) 2. Most of you are all still on 56k. As a result, the way dialup works, a "hacker" would have to know a few things about your system in advance, OR you'd have to be broadcasting your vulnerabilities EG you'd already have a virus. 3. c:\data is easier to get to (in windows 2000 or xp) than c:\documents and settings\....... and a "hacker" will just use the %mydocuments% in any script, so if you go changing that my docs path, it doesn't matter where your files are actually stored. 4. Install security software (firewall and virus scanner, even if its zone-alarm and avg) 5. Don't open email attachments, unless you know what they are. 6. This is a waste of time. Can I teach the next tech class?
That said, the choice to use longhorn server in production isn't actually a bad one. It's really, REALLY stable. I keep hearing (from people both inside and outside the company) that it's more stable than 2003 is
Sshhhh... Don't tell Microsoft that, they might ship it as is.
I remember at a Macromedia conference about 7 years ago when Flash 5 was released, during the demo Flash 5 had crashed on us. He explained that it was just Flash 5 beta, and someone said something like "That sounds like an excuse Bill Gates would use", to which he responded something like "Maybe, but the problem is that Bill actually ships his betas".
I guess you had to be there. It was funny at the time.
Government aside, I'd do it. For example, it would be nice to know which way I'm most likely to die and combat it before it gets too far. Will I get the cancer or the heart disease? Am I likely to develop an addiction to alcohol? Is there some reason for my mothers and sisters issues with anxiety? Am I mentally ill in some way?
Some of these things run in different parts of the family, though my lifestyle is quite different - I don't smoke, I drink minimally, I eat far better and I exercise.
Am I really Scot-Anglo-Norsk-Maori-???, or is there just such confusion at the level of my great-grandmother because (from the stories that I've heard) she seemed to be such a slut in one of the world wars when her husband was away? My maternal-grandmother I think has like 7 siblings, but I think only 1 or 2 to her father, though I would need a citation on that one.
Perhaps it could even go so far as to help me to cherry-pick a wife - see if the current girlfriends DNA is a good match for producing good, healthy offspring or something.
The government under which I live (not the US) already has my DNA. Scary, I know, but, I don't do anything wrong that I know of. My home country's government has incredibly strict privacy laws so I suppose I could list my address as being there (at my parents place or something) and then they couldn't tell anyone at all.
The assumption that I (and apparently everyone else) came up with, based upon the articles title and summary: the US government wants to quash the internet.
Whats weirder: I wasn't the least bit surprised. I could see the Bush administration going the way of the Chinese/North Korean/Burmese/Choose-your-pick government. (I could just imagine them all twiddling their fingers, repeating the mantra "if only").
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Even 12 hours would be good. Most flights longer than that hours stop *somewhere*, during which time you could (theoretically) charge the laptop again and be good to go. In my experience, it's unlikely that a single leg of a flight will last (significantly) more than 12-hours at a time.
Unless you're going somewhere like New Zealand, of course.
>>But no one in America would claim that a $200,000 speeding ticket is justified.
In Finland, copyright law is not insane.
Fines, however, are.
The amount you get for a speeding ticket (or any offense punishable by a fine) is relative to your monthly income, which the police check on the spot thanks to the widespread use of mobile technology.
Last time I re-installed Windows was early 2006: I had an XP SP1 disc. Time to be owned: approximately 4 *seconds* (10MBPS public facing LAN connection to the internet, no router or anything in between)
I had to download XP SP2, AV software, Firewall program etc while putting up with popups, then, save those to a separate partition, nuke the Windows install and start *again* (this time installing the AV and firewall software before plugging in the cable again)
Oh, and what about Jaiku? You could theoretically co-ordinate many people at once with a single message (I send mine via Gtalk, and it costs me probably about 0.0000000001 euro per message).
Can't say enough about Data Plans! I still send about 250 SMS per month (but I pay like... 3-5 eur or something for that, so that is bugger all, as far as I am concerned)...
Oh and don't even get me started on the inbuilt IMAP functionality... and the Gmail app... hell, if I wasn't coding/demoing stuff for part of my day, I wouldn't even really need a laptop. Since obtaining the E-series, my productivity has gone significantly up, because I type more 1-sentance short messages rather than long convoluted emails to people as I normally would (see parent), and half the time I do it when I'm buzzing around (not driving) and all I'd otherwise be doing is flicking through my playlist... so I can do real work at my desk and fake work (answering questions, confirming stuff) on the go.
You must be with TeleFinland.
I'm with Elisa. I pay about 50eur a month for something like 1000 min, 300 SMS and unlimited 2mbit data, which I utilize for things like unlimited Skype calling to New Zealand (4eur/kk), plus incoming Skype for my Finnish, New Zealand and Japanese phone numbers, Various IM clients (with Fring) and Gizmo.
For the record, I have a Nokia E-series and I used to pay Sonera nearly 150eur/kk for the same privileges. (For those outside Finland, Sonera is the carrier of the iPhone in Finland, and Finland has something like 5 or 6 carriers for 5 million people)
As well as the occasional times where I have to use the public transport system and decide to watch youtube videos on my laptop via the power of USB and wvdial.
Big who F&#%ing cares.
Just download EQO and you've also got access to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber/GTalk, ICQ... or Download Fring and you've got all those plus Skype and a couple of others... oh, and lets not forget Gizmo5!
I have EQO, Fring and Gizmo on my Nokia (I have the E51, but you could use EQO on any S40, Fring on any S60/S80, Gizmo on any S40,S60 or S80...)... PLUS with my E51 I don't have any contract to any one supplier... so like... big whoop.
As nice as an iPhone would be, and as much as I might like an iPhone, I can't be stuffed paying >80â a month to Sonera (Finland) for a plan that doesn't even give me as much niceties as my current provider (Elisa), and no-one is going to brick my E51 should I decide to hack it up a little.
I downloaded Opera Mini. And I have a touch response when I am typing. It has Wifi. It supports 3.5G network access (and my provider supports 2mbit, and I even regularly get 2mbit when I'm downloading).
I'm afraid I have to agree with Maddox on the iPhone vs. Nokia E-series here. Not that I don't want an iPhone - I just don't want one *that* much... and considering I'd just recently changed from Sonera, so I decided... "bugger it". The only advantage is the big screen on the iPhone... but with the whole fingerprints thing, I probably couldn't read it anyway without compulsively wiping it.
Also I think its much nicer to look at a display that is set to between 75-85% brightness versus 100% brightness!
Having just told my OS to set my HP Business Notebook with the matte screen to 75%, I feel much better looking at it, since I just realized my cow-irkers have their f/&Â%ing fluorescent bulbs on (I'm pushing to get them changed to halogen). Mine are off, but I can still see theirs. Maybe I should turn my desk around to face away.
My Math teacher in High-School would never let us work with the lights on because it degraded our performance, and to this day, I like that kind of environment. (Like most of you, I was in the advanced math class... we had to bring up the averages ;))
When I got new lenses a few years back, they asked if I wanted some anti-reflective coating on them after they found out I worked with computers (which admittedly took some getting used-to). To this day I can't be 100% sure if it helped or not, but, might be worth a shot.
Yeah Gnome has this built in (probably KDE too): For Ubuntu System > Preferences > Keyboard > Typing Break.
Last week I got given an HP 6715b widescreen laptop. Nice because it has a matte LCD but one thing bothered me: I had to interrup the startup of {chosen distro}'s liveCD and hack around in the terminal because the installer didn't handle widescreen by default.
Or maybe it was the ATI card, but my old HP nx9005 haa an ATI card and that worked fine.
Anyway, the thing that irks me about widescreen: my photos are in 4:3 format. I don't take most of my photos in 2:3 format or whatever wide format is offered by my camera. So Gnome has to stretch them. And that looks ugly. Of course, sometimes its better if it scales it so that it cuts off the top and bottom, but... that doesn't always work.
But I must admit, the resolution on the new screen is fantastic. I have my windows open, with my desktop icons visible on the left, and I switch between my 4 desktops all the time, so I can use my mouse scroll wheel to effectively do that.
Maybe it's just the large increase in pixels overall (compared to 1024*768), but my old display looks ugly compared to this.
Wait... PETA? Aren't they the 'charity' with the gigantic HQ who financially sponsor acts of vandalism, such as the looting, pillaging and razing of medical research facilities, including but not limited to harassment of the staff?
I'm a meat-eater, through and through. In my opinion, there are few things better than cooking up a good slab of Reindeer or Elk meat which a friend or relative has taken from the tundra in Lapland.
Well, the movie industry (whoever it was) just posted record profits... so we can be pretty sure they're not in as much trouble as they would like the general public to believe.
As far as the music industry... well... I don't know about their profits, but they haven't produced anything good in quite some time, so, they can shrivel up and go away, as far as I'm concerned. Or start putting out good music. Pick one.
I can't remember which cd/dvd I was listening to/watching, but as it happens, Henry Rollins has some good ideas on the subject. Oh, and George Carlin expresses similar sentiments.
"I have been running XP and previous versions of Windows for years and years, and I haven't had a virus since Blaster."
That you know of.
"If you have a little bit of common sense your chance of being infected is very low."
By common sense, you mean "don't plug in to the internet ever", right? Last time I reinstalled an XP system, it took a little under 4 seconds to be overridden with crap, popups and who knows what else. I didn't even have to start up IE! It all seemed to be infected by TFTP or something.
I have it on video somewhere, I think. Silly me... I just wanted to download a firewall... what was I thinking?! But I downloaded the firewall (and other programs) on to another partition and nuked the system again. Grr, was that a frustrating day!
The other 2 paragraphs I actually agree quite whole-heartedly on.
Or about £45.
Hell, even the Georgian Lari has more buying power than the USD at the moment.
You seem to be forgetting about little boy Lars (of Metallica)... These goddamn thieves, I want my 69c!!
See my other comment about how much a new Porsche will cost... though in retrospect, my percentages are probably out. Legal fees are probably far more than 10%.
I concur with this idea. Why don't we scrap the labels and pay the artists directly for their music?
First off, it will mean the demise of "artists" like Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton (among a myriad of others), but it will also mean the rise of artists that can actually play their instruments and maybe even sing. With the Social-Networking sites being so popular now, and with this interweb thing being pretty much everywhere, who needs a label for distribution?
Maybe the idea *is* a little extreme, but it seems that its beginning to happen.
I think that the lawyers work it out like this:
...and movies are only $250,000 (unless those figures have changed, of course).
New Porsche is going to cost me $150,000. My fee for winning is 10% of the outcome... so damages should be $1,500,000!
50 Gigs? Pffrt. Multiply by *at least* 4.
This includes quite a lot of public-domain (Classical/Old Jazz and such on which the copyrights should have expired) music.
I consider most Classical Music to be public domain, since by the time it's in (MP3/OGG/FLAC) format it *can* be difficult to distinguish *which* orchestra played it... of course, with the exception of particular artists like Maksim Mrvica, Vanessa Mae, Nigel Kennedy and others who put a spin on it to create a particular style.
In addition, this collection also includes a LOT of foreign-language music too *and* very few duplicates.
But still. 50 Gigs. Thats like... less than a week of torrents.
Are you sure Paris actually sang on the album, and didn't just slip some girl $500 who actually *can* sing to do just that? I have my doubts. But this is not really the point. I'm curious to know who actually would *buy* this crap in the first place.
New Zealanders might remember the case of the Paul Holmes CD a few years back (it became the single most returned item after Christmas that year).
Henry Rollins has the right idea: he says that if the labels started putting out music that wasn't so shitty, people might want to buy it. Forcing people to pay $23 of their hard earned cash for a J-Lo (or in this case Paris Hilton) CD is the real crime.
I once took a business course aimed at new entrepreneurs in my city. As it turns out, the lecture I'm about to elaborate on was more of a sales push for this persons consulting company (which was, coincidentally, out of town, and anyone hiring her would have probably had to pay her fee in addition to an hours worth of gas-mileage).
In addition, the instructor was... not advanced, per se, but learned a few things from "Windows XP for dummies" the previous day.
She spent a great deal of time explaining why people shouldn't keep all their documents in 'my documents", because "it would be easy for hackers to just find the folder and delete it or modify the files".
Keeping in mind, that, in 2002-2003, most of these people had 56k at best, and get this: Her solution to the problem was do make a folder in c:\ called "data", and then... change the "my documents" icon path to be c:\data... and save all your documents in there
I was the only technical person in the room, so I stood up to inform the crowd (most of whom I knew from other meetings held by the same organization):
1. Hackers breaking in to home PCs? Fat chance. (Not to mention the hacker vs cracker vs phreaker vs script kiddie etc)
2. Most of you are all still on 56k. As a result, the way dialup works, a "hacker" would have to know a few things about your system in advance, OR you'd have to be broadcasting your vulnerabilities EG you'd already have a virus.
3. c:\data is easier to get to (in windows 2000 or xp) than c:\documents and settings\....... and a "hacker" will just use the %mydocuments% in any script, so if you go changing that my docs path, it doesn't matter where your files are actually stored.
4. Install security software (firewall and virus scanner, even if its zone-alarm and avg)
5. Don't open email attachments, unless you know what they are.
6. This is a waste of time. Can I teach the next tech class?
Sshhhh... Don't tell Microsoft that, they might ship it as is.
I remember at a Macromedia conference about 7 years ago when Flash 5 was released, during the demo Flash 5 had crashed on us. He explained that it was just Flash 5 beta, and someone said something like "That sounds like an excuse Bill Gates would use", to which he responded something like "Maybe, but the problem is that Bill actually ships his betas".
I guess you had to be there. It was funny at the time.
Government aside, I'd do it. For example, it would be nice to know which way I'm most likely to die and combat it before it gets too far. Will I get the cancer or the heart disease? Am I likely to develop an addiction to alcohol? Is there some reason for my mothers and sisters issues with anxiety? Am I mentally ill in some way?
Some of these things run in different parts of the family, though my lifestyle is quite different - I don't smoke, I drink minimally, I eat far better and I exercise.
Am I really Scot-Anglo-Norsk-Maori-???, or is there just such confusion at the level of my great-grandmother because (from the stories that I've heard) she seemed to be such a slut in one of the world wars when her husband was away? My maternal-grandmother I think has like 7 siblings, but I think only 1 or 2 to her father, though I would need a citation on that one.
Perhaps it could even go so far as to help me to cherry-pick a wife - see if the current girlfriends DNA is a good match for producing good, healthy offspring or something.
The government under which I live (not the US) already has my DNA. Scary, I know, but, I don't do anything wrong that I know of. My home country's government has incredibly strict privacy laws so I suppose I could list my address as being there (at my parents place or something) and then they couldn't tell anyone at all.
The assumption that I (and apparently everyone else) came up with, based upon the articles title and summary: the US government wants to quash the internet.
Whats weirder: I wasn't the least bit surprised. I could see the Bush administration going the way of the Chinese/North Korean/Burmese/Choose-your-pick government. (I could just imagine them all twiddling their fingers, repeating the mantra "if only").