Likewise. I'm 38, and I think my upper limit's dropped to below 17KHz, but still above the CRT flyback frequency (15.6?). Worse.. I seem to recall that exposure to high-frequency noise is what -causes- the loss of high-frequency hearing as we age (the hair cells become brittle and eventually snap, or something like that).
If I'm right, this "high-frequency" sonar could actually cause hearing problems. Bad. The white paper says they're using 20KHz tones. I wonder if the average laptop speaker/mic/OS can deal with stuff closer to 30-40KHz; that might be safer, even if there's a drop-off.
8 cents per PAGE doesn't sound like a nominal fee to me.
PACER has only one government employee, and the printer is about 0.177 miles from his office. He has to make a separate trip for each page (back problems).
So really, we're just paying the standard 52 cents/mile. Obviously.
You are in a nicely-appointed lobby that would not be out of place at an upscale accounting firm. There is a reception desk, some waiting chairs, and a stack of Wall Street Journals. Down the hall to the east, you hear sounds of flushing.
> GO TO BATHROOM
Here? In the lobby? You would certainly be escorted out by the grumpy security guard that just walked through.
> ASK GUARD FOR BATHROOM
He's gone already, but did not seem the conversational type. He walked down the hall to the east, opened a door, and went inside. You can hear a faucet running there.
> GO TO BATHROOM
Using what? The stack of Wall Street Journals? They are printed on 100% post-consumer recycled fibers, if you catch our drift. It would be unpleasant.
> GO EAST
You wander down the hallway, a little too frantic for a casual stroll, muttering "Follow that guard!" to yourself and giggling. You spy two doors, marked "Women" and "Men". The men's room door is open. You see a guard inside, eyeing the last sheet of toilet paper.
> GO TO BATHROOM
You're in the men's room already.
> GO TO BATHROOM IN BATHROOM
WIth what? Your bare hands?
> GO TO BATHROOM IN BATHROOM WITH TOILET PAPER
Splendid concept, that toilet paper. Changed the whole face of hygiene (and the other end too.) Sadly, the guard has highly-trained bathroom-guard reflexes, and snatches the last sheet before you can even blink. As he quivers with smug satisfaction, you notice a billfold in his pocket. It contains quite a bit of cash.
The ribbon makes finding more obscure things a very very slow process, with all these ribbon change, new menu open things going on, compared to simply reading all the menu options.
Apparently Microsoft thinks otherwise - and they have hard data from the actual clickstream of Excel users. The whole reason they introduced the ribbon (and got rid of the awful UI "improvements" of Office XP and 2003) was that (a) other than the top 10 commands, everyone uses a different subset of Office functionality, and (b) the top 10 feature requests were already in Office. Everyone thinks Office is bloated, but just like pork-barrel politics, everyone means something different by "bloat".
Office had already grown way past the point where you could discover a feature by reading all the menus; that's why they tried Personalized Menus and Task Panes and all that. According to Microsoft's data, the ribbon is more discoverable than the old UI - though obviously it requires relearning, and thus rediscovering a bunch of functions all at once.
That said, Firefox clearly doesn't have the massive command vocabulary of Office, and I can't imagine there are any Firefox features that were too hard to find via menus. This seems more like copycatting.
And the third funny thing is that there's simply no way any "advanced Excel user" would, or COULD switch to Linux, because OOo can't do as much as Excel can.
But lets face it, we're not marketing to the computer savvy users. We're marketing to the user that takes his computer to Geek Squad every time he gets a virus...
In other words, the AOL user of 15 years ago. And it's sad but true: AOL had a bunch of big-budget, witty Chiat/Day ads, but the late-night blue-screen infomercials were far more effective.
I left AOL in 2001, but my roommate wrote the original Personal Filing Cabinet, and I can confirm that there's no known official way of exporting any of it, or at least there wasn't last I checked. There are some third-party tools that do a so-so job of the mail itself, but they are very picky about which AOL client version you have, and I don't know if they export the address book itself... and it looks like they've all been abandoned anyway (there was ForMorph, PFCViewer, and FvonGordon's PFC Converter).
And yes, it's cool to see Google doing this of their own (apparent) volition. It's tempting, when you're the 800-pound gorilla, to view your user base as a captive audience, and to make it as difficult as possible to switch away (we used to call that "flypaper"). But in the long term, it encourages competition, which fosters innovation, which benefits everyone.
From a business perspective, never write an application for a proprietary operating system. You're too vulnerable to the whims of the vendor that distributes the OS.
or:
From a business perspective, never write an application that requires hardware. You're too vulnerable to the whims of the manufacturer.
I've done maintenance on many projects, where a bit of obsolete functionality was simply left alone, or at most just removed from the UI (e.g. its menu item removed). It wasn't worth the effort to actually remove the code, as it was inter-related with stuff that was still in use, and automatically tested by unit tests and integration tests. It was simpler to just leave it there, and as long as it continued to 'work', it was left alone.
Yes, I've seen those projects too - five years later, when nobody was left who remembered why this bit of code existed, but they had to keep it updated anyway so the project would compile.
It's always a trade-off - I like the "technical debt" metaphor. Unused code is a technical debt too; it's like having a thousand savings accounts at long-forgotten banks with only a few pennies in each account. Closing any one account will cost more than it's worth, but continuing to account for the interest on our taxes will also cost more than it's worth. Pick your poison.
There is one advantage of broadcast media -- ability to get information to a lot of people without burning up large amounts of Internet bandwidth. It takes up a lot less bandwidth to do one 1024p HD channel on a dedicated line than streaming the same content to millions of viewers.
Does that mean that if the cable companies remain major providers of Internet bandwidth, their incentive to reduce bandwidth costs could eventually outweigh their incentive to guarantee end-to-end DRM for content providers?
Kinda similar to AT&T, who set up lots of free wi-fi hotspots so they can reduce the iPhone's expensive 3G network demands.
you know it's going to hit the wall and you're utterly helpless against the collective ignorance that allows it to happen
Yep. It's called "learned helplessness". Dogs who learn that they can jump away to prevent electric shocks will keep trying to jump away. Dogs who haven't learned anything will try to jump away as well. But dogs who've learned that they can't control shocks stop trying; they lie down and whimper.
I doubt there's a single slashdotter here (except maybe NYCL) who couldn't have made a DVR out of an old laptop, a few roofing nails and a bananna. And most of us could have done it without the nails and bananna.
Interesting, if so why didn't you do? It is very easy to say things are obvious after the fact.
+1.
Sorry, but when TiVo was founded, Moore's law was still only giving us changes in degree, not changes in kind. The simplest way to record a TV show was with VCR+ codes from the newspaper. The idea of continuously recording streaming video in real time from a consumer set-top box onto a hard drive - with a 30-minute buffer! - was in fact novel.
Slashdot needs a word for all these obvious-in-retrospect claims. Something like "post hoc prior thought", only pithier.
The big surprise in Apple's memo is that they claim that Google's voicemail "disables" visual voicemail. AFAICT, they're claiming that Google, by providing a non-AT&T phone number where people can call you and leave you messages that you can fetch from your iPhone, is constructively disabling visual voicemail.
The big problem with the cloud concept is that it assumes that the need for servers is spread out evenly across the day and the year.
Or, more accurately, that it assumes the need for servers is spread out more evenly among multiple customers than it is with only one. And that seems likely.
"Peak" hours have flopped back and forth over the years. I'd guess the PSTN first peaked during the day, as businesses opened. Later, as PBXes spread, maybe peak moved to residential callers at night. Meanwhile, data circuits were built for daytime business use, and services like AOL, CompuServe and GEIS piggybacked on the unused nighttime capacity.
As online services grew, night use eclipsed the daytime use, and the spread of modems meant that PSTN CO's were undersized for night use. In the 1990s, network TV schedules had a huge impact on AOL's peak hours; every Thursday, the US would sign off to watch Friends, Seinfeld and ER. (Today, I'm sure there's a reverse effect, as people live-tweet their favorite shows.) And so on. And that's just in the US; obviously, there's a follow-the-sun advantage to serving multiple countries from one data center.
Cloud computing's just the next step in outsourcing your data center management. Instead of hiring tech-temps to install servers and IronPort to make backups, you pay the cloud provider to build you 1/nth of a data center. Virtualization means that there's no loss of functionality as with shared servers. It's just a financial bet - you think that the cloud costs are lower than the TCO of having your own data center or leased colo space.
This is basically a list of things to assume about the class of 2013
By the time I was 21, I'd bought a house; by the time I was 23, I was managing 35-year-olds. I remember how much I resented them constantly mentioning my youth. But, now that I'm 38, I can tell you a secret:
When we marvel at how much has changed since we were kids, it's not that we want to make you feel naive. It's that we didn't know that we were old.
It's especially true during the "punctuation" part of punctuated equilibrium. In the late '90s, I tried to figure out what my generation's version of "We didn't have automobiles" was. Sure, there was the Internet, but it was slow, search wasn't as integral or widespread as it is now, and life didn't yet revolve around it. What would I say to kids? "When I was your age, we didn't have these fancy CD players in our cars. If we wanted to listen to a CD on a road trip, we had to tape it! And none of these fancy remote controls with their 50 buttons. Our remote controls had six buttons, and if you wanted to watch channel 36, you just held the "up" button a while."... Not impressive.
Then, all of a sudden: Cheap RAM. Multicore. Cheap, fast, always-on residential Internet. Cheap DSP. Amazon. Google. eBay. iTunes. Youtube. P2P. Cell phones. Digital cameras. Fast laptops. Death of newspaper, network TV, film, music industry. Digitization of everything. The end of the concept of "out of print". GPS. Cheap, fast, always-on wireless Internet. VoIP. The end of the concept of "lost track of".
What just happened? Aren't we the post-history generation?... We're not?
Today, I suspect this sort of behind-the-scenes performance is only infrequently the bottleneck in anyone's audio performance
Really? What sort of audio were you working with? In a recording-studio environment, it's still a critical problem; one of the biggest advantages Pro Tools has over native DAWs is that your headphone mixes will Just Work. I set up a 32-channel RME/Nuendo system on a dual-core XP box a few years ago, and it was always a tradeoff - do I want the built-in, zero-latency, zero-effect monitor mix, or do I ratchet down the buffer sizes and repatch everything so I can give the vocalist some reverb and still get it back to their ears in time, and hope something doesn't go awry to ruin the take?
Yes, # skips the greeting when calling AT&T subscribers and, apparently, T-Mobile subscribers. If you call a Verizon customer and press #, you get the login prompt, and (AFAICT) no way to actually leave your friend a message without calling back.
So, just as TFA says: You can skip everyone's greeting, but you have to memorize which carrier they use.
The government has to choose between placing the lab in the geographic center (Kansas) or the population center (coasts) of the US. Both are bad for different reasons.
There does seem to be a tradeoff. If you build the lab in Kansas, a breach would affect a much smaller population, and you risk tornados. But the much bigger danger is that if you build the lab in Kansas, you risk not destroying Long Island.
So you know that when you pour together your rum and coke into a glass, the final state (uniform mix) must be lower in free energy than the initial state (rum on the bottom, coke on top).
I donmt understanf i poored five rum nf cokes and this made les ssens each time
Slashdot Mirror
Likewise. I'm 38, and I think my upper limit's dropped to below 17KHz, but still above the CRT flyback frequency (15.6?). Worse.. I seem to recall that exposure to high-frequency noise is what -causes- the loss of high-frequency hearing as we age (the hair cells become brittle and eventually snap, or something like that).
If I'm right, this "high-frequency" sonar could actually cause hearing problems. Bad. The white paper says they're using 20KHz tones. I wonder if the average laptop speaker/mic/OS can deal with stuff closer to 30-40KHz; that might be safer, even if there's a drop-off.
PACER has only one government employee, and the printer is about 0.177 miles from his office. He has to make a separate trip for each page (back problems).
So really, we're just paying the standard 52 cents/mile. Obviously.
You are in a nicely-appointed lobby that would not be out of place at an upscale accounting firm. There is a reception desk, some waiting chairs, and a stack of Wall Street Journals. Down the hall to the east, you hear sounds of flushing.
> GO TO BATHROOM
Here? In the lobby? You would certainly be escorted out by the grumpy security guard that just walked through.
> ASK GUARD FOR BATHROOM
He's gone already, but did not seem the conversational type. He walked down the hall to the east, opened a door, and went inside. You can hear a faucet running there.
> GO TO BATHROOM
Using what? The stack of Wall Street Journals? They are printed on 100% post-consumer recycled fibers, if you catch our drift. It would be unpleasant.
> GO EAST
You wander down the hallway, a little too frantic for a casual stroll, muttering "Follow that guard!" to yourself and giggling. You spy two doors, marked "Women" and "Men". The men's room door is open. You see a guard inside, eyeing the last sheet of toilet paper.
> GO TO BATHROOM
You're in the men's room already.
> GO TO BATHROOM IN BATHROOM
WIth what? Your bare hands?
> GO TO BATHROOM IN BATHROOM WITH TOILET PAPER
Splendid concept, that toilet paper. Changed the whole face of hygiene (and the other end too.) Sadly, the guard has highly-trained bathroom-guard reflexes, and snatches the last sheet before you can even blink. As he quivers with smug satisfaction, you notice a billfold in his pocket. It contains quite a bit of cash.
> ASK GUARD TWO FIVES FOR A TEN
Apparently Microsoft thinks otherwise - and they have hard data from the actual clickstream of Excel users. The whole reason they introduced the ribbon (and got rid of the awful UI "improvements" of Office XP and 2003) was that (a) other than the top 10 commands, everyone uses a different subset of Office functionality, and (b) the top 10 feature requests were already in Office. Everyone thinks Office is bloated, but just like pork-barrel politics, everyone means something different by "bloat".
Office had already grown way past the point where you could discover a feature by reading all the menus; that's why they tried Personalized Menus and Task Panes and all that. According to Microsoft's data, the ribbon is more discoverable than the old UI - though obviously it requires relearning, and thus rediscovering a bunch of functions all at once.
That said, Firefox clearly doesn't have the massive command vocabulary of Office, and I can't imagine there are any Firefox features that were too hard to find via menus. This seems more like copycatting.
And the third funny thing is that there's simply no way any "advanced Excel user" would, or COULD switch to Linux, because OOo can't do as much as Excel can.
In other words, the AOL user of 15 years ago. And it's sad but true: AOL had a bunch of big-budget, witty Chiat/Day ads, but the late-night blue-screen infomercials were far more effective.
I left AOL in 2001, but my roommate wrote the original Personal Filing Cabinet, and I can confirm that there's no known official way of exporting any of it, or at least there wasn't last I checked. There are some third-party tools that do a so-so job of the mail itself, but they are very picky about which AOL client version you have, and I don't know if they export the address book itself... and it looks like they've all been abandoned anyway (there was ForMorph, PFCViewer, and FvonGordon's PFC Converter).
And yes, it's cool to see Google doing this of their own (apparent) volition. It's tempting, when you're the 800-pound gorilla, to view your user base as a captive audience, and to make it as difficult as possible to switch away (we used to call that "flypaper"). But in the long term, it encourages competition, which fosters innovation, which benefits everyone.
But then would you say:
From a business perspective, never write an application for a proprietary operating system. You're too vulnerable to the whims of the vendor that distributes the OS.
or:
From a business perspective, never write an application that requires hardware. You're too vulnerable to the whims of the manufacturer.
Stereo SIDPlayer:iTunes killer!
Reminds me of the time someone broken into my car and stole every CD but Milli Vanilli.
Yes, I've seen those projects too - five years later, when nobody was left who remembered why this bit of code existed, but they had to keep it updated anyway so the project would compile.
It's always a trade-off - I like the "technical debt" metaphor. Unused code is a technical debt too; it's like having a thousand savings accounts at long-forgotten banks with only a few pennies in each account. Closing any one account will cost more than it's worth, but continuing to account for the interest on our taxes will also cost more than it's worth. Pick your poison.
Does that mean that if the cable companies remain major providers of Internet bandwidth, their incentive to reduce bandwidth costs could eventually outweigh their incentive to guarantee end-to-end DRM for content providers?
Kinda similar to AT&T, who set up lots of free wi-fi hotspots so they can reduce the iPhone's expensive 3G network demands.
Yep. It's called "learned helplessness". Dogs who learn that they can jump away to prevent electric shocks will keep trying to jump away. Dogs who haven't learned anything will try to jump away as well. But dogs who've learned that they can't control shocks stop trying; they lie down and whimper.
+1.
Sorry, but when TiVo was founded, Moore's law was still only giving us changes in degree, not changes in kind. The simplest way to record a TV show was with VCR+ codes from the newspaper. The idea of continuously recording streaming video in real time from a consumer set-top box onto a hard drive - with a 30-minute buffer! - was in fact novel.
Slashdot needs a word for all these obvious-in-retrospect claims. Something like "post hoc prior thought", only pithier.
The big surprise in Apple's memo is that they claim that Google's voicemail "disables" visual voicemail. AFAICT, they're claiming that Google, by providing a non-AT&T phone number where people can call you and leave you messages that you can fetch from your iPhone, is constructively disabling visual voicemail.
Man, I hope they don't hear about postcards.
Or, more accurately, that it assumes the need for servers is spread out more evenly among multiple customers than it is with only one. And that seems likely.
"Peak" hours have flopped back and forth over the years. I'd guess the PSTN first peaked during the day, as businesses opened. Later, as PBXes spread, maybe peak moved to residential callers at night. Meanwhile, data circuits were built for daytime business use, and services like AOL, CompuServe and GEIS piggybacked on the unused nighttime capacity.
As online services grew, night use eclipsed the daytime use, and the spread of modems meant that PSTN CO's were undersized for night use. In the 1990s, network TV schedules had a huge impact on AOL's peak hours; every Thursday, the US would sign off to watch Friends, Seinfeld and ER. (Today, I'm sure there's a reverse effect, as people live-tweet their favorite shows.) And so on. And that's just in the US; obviously, there's a follow-the-sun advantage to serving multiple countries from one data center.
Cloud computing's just the next step in outsourcing your data center management. Instead of hiring tech-temps to install servers and IronPort to make backups, you pay the cloud provider to build you 1/nth of a data center. Virtualization means that there's no loss of functionality as with shared servers. It's just a financial bet - you think that the cloud costs are lower than the TCO of having your own data center or leased colo space.
By the time I was 21, I'd bought a house; by the time I was 23, I was managing 35-year-olds. I remember how much I resented them constantly mentioning my youth. But, now that I'm 38, I can tell you a secret:
When we marvel at how much has changed since we were kids, it's not that we want to make you feel naive. It's that we didn't know that we were old.
It's especially true during the "punctuation" part of punctuated equilibrium. In the late '90s, I tried to figure out what my generation's version of "We didn't have automobiles" was. Sure, there was the Internet, but it was slow, search wasn't as integral or widespread as it is now, and life didn't yet revolve around it. What would I say to kids? "When I was your age, we didn't have these fancy CD players in our cars. If we wanted to listen to a CD on a road trip, we had to tape it! And none of these fancy remote controls with their 50 buttons. Our remote controls had six buttons, and if you wanted to watch channel 36, you just held the "up" button a while." ... Not impressive.
Then, all of a sudden: Cheap RAM. Multicore. Cheap, fast, always-on residential Internet. Cheap DSP. Amazon. Google. eBay. iTunes. Youtube. P2P. Cell phones. Digital cameras. Fast laptops. Death of newspaper, network TV, film, music industry. Digitization of everything. The end of the concept of "out of print". GPS. Cheap, fast, always-on wireless Internet. VoIP. The end of the concept of "lost track of".
What just happened? Aren't we the post-history generation? ... We're not?
When I say a niche, I don't mean an itch like you have when you have an itch. I mean a niche like you have when you have a notch.
Really? What sort of audio were you working with? In a recording-studio environment, it's still a critical problem; one of the biggest advantages Pro Tools has over native DAWs is that your headphone mixes will Just Work. I set up a 32-channel RME/Nuendo system on a dual-core XP box a few years ago, and it was always a tradeoff - do I want the built-in, zero-latency, zero-effect monitor mix, or do I ratchet down the buffer sizes and repatch everything so I can give the vocalist some reverb and still get it back to their ears in time, and hope something doesn't go awry to ruin the take?
While we're turning in geek cards...
Yes, # skips the greeting when calling AT&T subscribers and, apparently, T-Mobile subscribers. If you call a Verizon customer and press #, you get the login prompt, and (AFAICT) no way to actually leave your friend a message without calling back.
So, just as TFA says: You can skip everyone's greeting, but you have to memorize which carrier they use.
C'mon, hand it over.
There does seem to be a tradeoff. If you build the lab in Kansas, a breach would affect a much smaller population, and you risk tornados. But the much bigger danger is that if you build the lab in Kansas, you risk not destroying Long Island.
Jay "Hauppauge '89" L
Are you sure you wish to reinvent Vista's UAC?
[Cancel] or [allow].
I donmt understanf i poored five rum nf cokes and this made les ssens each time
That's a suspicious number... Clearly Apple must be rejecting so many iPhone apps because the App Store database can only hold 65,536 apps!
Ah, but what if I put the lower-precedence right in parentheses?
See, that's how they get you.