I wonder why it is cheaper to buy a new $400 PC than paying top rate of, say $100 per machine, to get someone to insert the recovery CD and get everything back to factory defaults.
Rather, it's either pay $100 to get the same two-year old machine back, complete with scuffed exterior, ugly/dirty keyboard, jerky mouse and, lately, a worrying fan noise; or for an additional $300 get a brand-new faster PC with the latest OS, more memory and bigger drive.
Well, yes and no. Take that plug for 110V/60Hz and try to use it in Europe, where you usually have 220 or 240V and 50Hz (but different physical plugs in different coutnries). Other parts of rhe world mostly have one or another combination of european or american plugs and either 110 or 220V and usually 50Hz. Except my favourite example, Japan, where you for some reason have american-style plug, but 100V and either 50Hz _or_ 60Hz, depending on what part of the country you're in.
screw pdf, with a passion! Although due to the volume of 'em out there, a pdf converter would be nice
I'd rather be without txt and html than pdf. A lot of my reading - and a lot of the texts I need to carry around - are scientific papers, which are almost without exception in pdf. If I can't read pdf, it's not a text reader worth considering for me.
I got the impression that the ability to use your own texts was a third-party hack, and not supported by Sony. And I'm not happy at all about having to convert to its own format; You can't convert a PDF that is just scanned images of a text, for instance (which is still all too often the case with scientific papers). Converting multi-file html texts would be a headache as well.
True, it's better than the impression I got when I played with it. There may be hope still.
The only thing I've heard of so far is the mystical ebook-reader from Sony, available in Japan only.
Nothing mystical about it. I've played with one, and it's neat. The screen is wonderful. In a store it looks really good but a little washed out, since the white isn't really white and the black isn't tuly black. When you bring it out into daylight, it's amazing. Where a normal screen would be hard to read, this one just gets better instead. It really has the general feel of reading on paper, not on a screen.
Unfortunately the drawbacks are numerous as well. First, the unavoidable one: the update frequency is sedentary at best. I mean, you really wait slightly for the screen to change when you flip the "page". Not a problem for a text reader to be sure, but forget anything about animations or a normal GUI. And unfortunately, Sony's implementation of the device is screaming-defiance-at-an-uncaring-world frustrating. The case, buttons and so on feel cheap and unreliable, and the whole thing is DRM:ed to h*ll and back. Forget about easily moving your own texts to it - no, you're supposed to rent books. And the memory is paltry; about 10Mb if I remember correctly.
It's an absolutely great reader, that I will never in a million years actually buy since the execution just isn't there. If it was slightly smaller, DRM free, could display all normal formats (html, Unicode text and PDF at the least), USB2 connection, had good amount of memory and/or an CF card slot, and preferably could also work as an mp3 player and radio (there's a definite limit on the amount of gadgets I'm willing to carry) I'd get one today.
She needs new hardware way more often than whe needs (or can) upgrade the applications. I don't know exactly what version she is running now, but she is using the OS9 emulator layer to do it. And up until about now, newer versions have simply not been an option, since she needs to track the version her clients use.
She could get a new mac and new versions of the apps about now. That would mean staying with that mac for the lifetime of that software version, though (which for the present one has been more than four years). Getting a faster machine two years from now would not be a real alternative anymore; she'd need to repurchase the software again, and there is zero guarantee that the needed version would even be for sale for the Intel machines (there's very likely newer versions of both apps out by that time). And if the current machne breaks (it does happen), getting a replacement that can run the same software is suddenly not certain.
It's a real problem. One person I know is using Photoshop and Illustrator professionally. She currently has an older Mac (a G4), and older versions of the applications, and is getting to the point where she'd really prefer to upgrade the software (she's had the same versions for a number of years; the upgrade cycle is in part constrained by what versions her clients have available).
But if she gets PPC versions of Photoshop and Illustrator now, she'll have to shell out for new applications again when she buys a new Mac, something she'll need to do in the next year or so. And if she gets a PPC mac now, she'll be locked into that machine until she (and her clients) are good and ready to start using newer Photoshop and Illustrator versions again - which takes a long time.
The problem for her is that the upgrade cycle for software and hardware is very different, but this change forces them into lockstep. She is very seriously considering getting a Windows machine instead to avoid this headache. I've been able to talk her into waiting a bit until we have more info, but with the situation being what it is I can't honestly say to her it would not be the better business decision.
Don't buy a Mac until you can get an Intel one; and of course you ought to wait six months after that release so vendors have had time to port their software over. A year to a year and a half in other words. Also, do not buy expensive software like Photoshop or Illustrator at this time, since you'll have to shell out all over for them again when you get an Intel Mac (and that can easily come to more than the cost of the machine itself).
It would be really fascinating to see what the sales figures will be like for the next year or two.
None of France's friends thought anything of it when France left NATO in '66. In the case of the Iraq war, French stalling tactics ensured that US troops had to reroute through the North of Iraq, causing unnecessary delay and loss of lives.
This is tangent to my original post; I regret adding it. But see it from the other side: you have a war of aggression, initiated over the objections of the world, against your express political wish and against a massive opinion at home. You are not going to be aiding and abetting that war in any way - the US would not, and neither did France.
As a real aside, French foreign policy has long been heartily disliked by other European nations; if anything, France being part of the EU has been a net liability when countries have voted about membership. It is amazing that US actions over the past decade or so actually has managed to make France foreign policy look good in comparison, to the rest of the world. I would not have thought it possible. If nothing else, that should serve as a quick-n-dirty warning sign that something is not right.
That was peace won by millions of lost lives and the slaying of almost an entire religion on the continent. That was peace maintained by assuring the shield of NATO (to which guess who contributes the bulk of money?) Of course, no one begrudges Europe these, but one does wish they were better friends in times of need. Instead, we got sour Chirac and soulless Schroeder. You will, I'm sure, excuse the bitterness.
It was another ceasefire in about a thousand years of warfare on the continent. The EU did put and end to that vicious cycle (which, of course, it was designed to do).
Oh, and since when are friends required to agree with one another all the time, and not allowed to critizise? That's not friendship, that's toadyism.
Right. That must be why nearly noone used to get divorced at all when marriages were arranged and they only actually got to have sex *after* they were married.
You mean when everyone had premarital and extramarital sex as a matter of course, and men in power had (multiple) publicly acknowledged mistresses precisely because the marriages where arranged and loveless.
I still get the distinct feeling that no self-respecting "moral" vegetarian would go near the stuff. It's like sythesizing heroin and saying "but it's not *real* heroin, it doesn't come from a poppy!" Maybe the drug analogy is overkill. But since the Smeat(TM) (let's call it;) steak is indistinquishable from a slaughtered steak, it is still "meat". If people who don't have real meat get Smeat and like it, wouldn't that encourage them to eat real meat? Call it a "gateway food".;-D
Hey, a sensible, balanced disagreement on issues - on slashdot no less! What is the world coming to...
Again, I think you are confusing two different groups of people. Some moral vegetarians see the eating of animal flesh as the problem. They would not touch this. But those moral vegetarians I have met do not object to eating of flesh. They object to some aspect of animal keeping, whether conditions in large-scale farming or just that you have to kill a sentient being for it. Especially those objecting to the killing tend to be fine with eating milk and eggs, for instance - animal protein as much as the flesh, but it doesn't require taking an animals life for it.
This would be very much like using milk or eggs, except you don't have to keep animals imprisoned either, making more people happy about it.
Your argument about drugs is interesting, but it once again presupposes that the substance itself is the problem for all these people. Again, it isn't. If it was, they'd object to quorn as well - or anything containing sodium glutamate, really.
Now, in practice I assume this won't ever come to commercial fruition. We do have pretty good alternatives already for those who want the taste but not the animal history, and those alternatives are as expensive as they are largely because they have little competition. I doubt this has the potential to beat them on price or taste. And I'm prepared to bet this has minimum the same multiplier of inefficiency that real slaughter animals incur, compared to eating the plant matter directly, so it's no real alternative for that reason either (no fake steak in space).
Since being vegetarian is reasonably easy to define and is recognized and understood, many people become "vegetarians" as a convenient shortcut to avoid, say, meat that's been raised with growth hormones or antibiotics, that hasn't been tested for BSE, "meat" that is actually "meat by-products", meat from animals that haven't been well treated, or any other of a number of practices that tend to make some people uncomfortable. They'd ideally want to eat meat that conforms to the standards they like, but since it isn't available - or just too expensive, too difficult to ascertain, or too much of a hassle to find - it's easier to forgo meat altogether.
I know I usually opt for a vegetarian alternative if I'm unsure what the meat actually is and where it comes from.
The gray areas are certainly interesting. But the existence of gray areas does not preclude recognizing the black and the white at either end.
I guess (I'm not vegetarian myself) that where to draw the line is up to each individual, but one fairly easy line is to not eat meat period. That way you don't have to decide on whether truly wild animals (such as moose) is fine, while free-ranging but tagged animals (such as reindeer) is not. You also don't have to worry endlessly every time you go to a restaurant, pestering the kitchen with questions about the origin that may or may not be truthfully answered.
If this was a physical area, that gray area is a featureless rock desert, and the "no animal meat" line is a deep, easily found river. You know when you are on one side and you know when you are on the other.
Growing meat protein this way is from this perspective no different than using Quorn or soybeans as a source of meatlike proteins. It doesn't matter that it's biologically identical to meat from an animal; no animal has been involved anymore than it is with a creatively cultivated fungus.
If meat is immoral, isn't the promotion of meat immoral? Isn't trying to emulate meat in effect promoting is as OK? Just like candy cigarettes, "smokeless" cigarettes, toy guns, etc. that are all blamed for "promoting" a perceived evil?
You are tarring all vegetarians with the same brush. I know a number of vegetarians, and none of them refuse meat on the grounds that eating meat is immoral. I know those people exist; I just don't know of any personally.
Some are vegetarians because they feel better (as in healthier), physically, on an all-vegetable diet (and they would not touch this, of course, no matter where it came from); others are so because they see keeping animals penned up and fed for slaughter as immoral, and especially so when done in the industrial manner we do today. The eating of animals is not what's bothering them; the keeping of animals for that purpose is. And before you ask - yes, some of them do eat fish that's been caught in the wild.
..or someone who doesn't want the energy content of sugar but still want sweet drinks?
Really, why is it so strange when it's about meat but not about other things? Vegetarians have all kinds of different reasons not to eat meat, but not liking the flavour is probably a pretty unusual one.
Especially for moral reasons - how could it be immoral to make it easier not to do whatever you think is wrong?, and not to have to sacrifice anything for it?
You seem to be confusing Skype with Kazaa. The founders of Skype founded Kazaa as well, but sold it and have long since nothing to do with Kazaa the company.
To be honest, I dont tend to take much notice of spelling and grammer errors (I am worse that most people anyway).
As long as it's not egregarious, neither do I, or most people - conciously.
But we do (and it has been shown any number of times) that we will base our estimate of trustworthiness and relevance in part on these "superficial" aspects; not just the correct spelling or grammar, but also in the choice of words, turns of phrase and so on.
This effect diminishes as you get to know the person behind the words better, of course. But yes, it does mean that in this medium, dyslectics, non-native speakers (of whatever language is used) and people with impoverished vocabularies are at a disadvantage.
This is sectioned "Hardware", not "Science", so perhaps this time around we could have an actual discussion on fusion technology and the planned plant, not devolve into a flamefest between idiots.
I think the main reason americans and french dislike another is because they are so similar to each other.
If you are american or french, really think through why you hate usa/france. Congratulations, now you know the reasons the rest of the world is getting fed up with you as well.
Actually it was pretty amazing; the childish utterly over-the-top hissy-fits of the americans in the wake of the Iraq debacle ("freedom fries"? Come on!) was probably the only thing that could actually make the rest of the EU to actually overcome the dislike of the posterior-orifice attitude of the french political class.
I have nothing against France (only some French), but I was warmly hoping that Japan gets the project. In my view, Japan is so perfectly suited, technology and mentality-wise, to pull this off.
Either country would have been fine; the reasons are of course political (as in people-related - "politcal" is not a negative), not technical.
That said, the French have a huge amount of experience with nuclear power. You might also want to take a look at the accident statistics of the Japanese nuclear industry; it's not encouraging reading.
Well, you get Finnegan's Wake and Crime and Punishment, for instance, and they'll eat up a lot of whatever time margin you can get on the more accessible titles.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder why it is cheaper to buy a new $400 PC than paying top rate of, say $100 per machine, to get someone to insert the recovery CD and get everything back to factory defaults.
Rather, it's either pay $100 to get the same two-year old machine back, complete with scuffed exterior, ugly/dirty keyboard, jerky mouse and, lately, a worrying fan noise; or for an additional $300 get a brand-new faster PC with the latest OS, more memory and bigger drive.
Not a bad deal.
Well, yes and no. Take that plug for 110V/60Hz and try to use it in Europe, where you usually have 220 or 240V and 50Hz (but different physical plugs in different coutnries). Other parts of rhe world mostly have one or another combination of european or american plugs and either 110 or 220V and usually 50Hz. Except my favourite example, Japan, where you for some reason have american-style plug, but 100V and either 50Hz _or_ 60Hz, depending on what part of the country you're in.
Fun for all, in other words.
screw pdf, with a passion! Although due to the volume of 'em out there, a pdf converter would be nice
I'd rather be without txt and html than pdf. A lot of my reading - and a lot of the texts I need to carry around - are scientific papers, which are almost without exception in pdf. If I can't read pdf, it's not a text reader worth considering for me.
I got the impression that the ability to use your own texts was a third-party hack, and not supported by Sony. And I'm not happy at all about having to convert to its own format; You can't convert a PDF that is just scanned images of a text, for instance (which is still all too often the case with scientific papers). Converting multi-file html texts would be a headache as well.
True, it's better than the impression I got when I played with it. There may be hope still.
The only thing I've heard of so far is the mystical ebook-reader from Sony, available in Japan only.
Nothing mystical about it. I've played with one, and it's neat. The screen is wonderful. In a store it looks really good but a little washed out, since the white isn't really white and the black isn't tuly black. When you bring it out into daylight, it's amazing. Where a normal screen would be hard to read, this one just gets better instead. It really has the general feel of reading on paper, not on a screen.
Unfortunately the drawbacks are numerous as well. First, the unavoidable one: the update frequency is sedentary at best. I mean, you really wait slightly for the screen to change when you flip the "page". Not a problem for a text reader to be sure, but forget anything about animations or a normal GUI. And unfortunately, Sony's implementation of the device is screaming-defiance-at-an-uncaring-world frustrating. The case, buttons and so on feel cheap and unreliable, and the whole thing is DRM:ed to h*ll and back. Forget about easily moving your own texts to it - no, you're supposed to rent books. And the memory is paltry; about 10Mb if I remember correctly.
It's an absolutely great reader, that I will never in a million years actually buy since the execution just isn't there. If it was slightly smaller, DRM free, could display all normal formats (html, Unicode text and PDF at the least), USB2 connection, had good amount of memory and/or an CF card slot, and preferably could also work as an mp3 player and radio (there's a definite limit on the amount of gadgets I'm willing to carry) I'd get one today.
You can still run the old software on the new machine, using Rosetta.
But how well? We won't know until the stuff actually hits the shelves.
We'll see; we're holding off on buying anything for the time being.
She needs new hardware way more often than whe needs (or can) upgrade the applications. I don't know exactly what version she is running now, but she is using the OS9 emulator layer to do it. And up until about now, newer versions have simply not been an option, since she needs to track the version her clients use.
She could get a new mac and new versions of the apps about now. That would mean staying with that mac for the lifetime of that software version, though (which for the present one has been more than four years). Getting a faster machine two years from now would not be a real alternative anymore; she'd need to repurchase the software again, and there is zero guarantee that the needed version would even be for sale for the Intel machines (there's very likely newer versions of both apps out by that time). And if the current machne breaks (it does happen), getting a replacement that can run the same software is suddenly not certain.
This really is a problem for people like her.
It's a real problem. One person I know is using Photoshop and Illustrator professionally. She currently has an older Mac (a G4), and older versions of the applications, and is getting to the point where she'd really prefer to upgrade the software (she's had the same versions for a number of years; the upgrade cycle is in part constrained by what versions her clients have available).
But if she gets PPC versions of Photoshop and Illustrator now, she'll have to shell out for new applications again when she buys a new Mac, something she'll need to do in the next year or so. And if she gets a PPC mac now, she'll be locked into that machine until she (and her clients) are good and ready to start using newer Photoshop and Illustrator versions again - which takes a long time.
The problem for her is that the upgrade cycle for software and hardware is very different, but this change forces them into lockstep. She is very seriously considering getting a Windows machine instead to avoid this headache. I've been able to talk her into waiting a bit until we have more info, but with the situation being what it is I can't honestly say to her it would not be the better business decision.
Don't buy a Mac until you can get an Intel one; and of course you ought to wait six months after that release so vendors have had time to port their software over. A year to a year and a half in other words. Also, do not buy expensive software like Photoshop or Illustrator at this time, since you'll have to shell out all over for them again when you get an Intel Mac (and that can easily come to more than the cost of the machine itself).
It would be really fascinating to see what the sales figures will be like for the next year or two.
Good luck typing on it.
None of France's friends thought anything of it when France left NATO in '66. In the case of the Iraq war, French stalling tactics ensured that US troops had to reroute through the North of Iraq, causing unnecessary delay and loss of lives.
This is tangent to my original post; I regret adding it. But see it from the other side: you have a war of aggression, initiated over the objections of the world, against your express political wish and against a massive opinion at home. You are not going to be aiding and abetting that war in any way - the US would not, and neither did France.
As a real aside, French foreign policy has long been heartily disliked by other European nations; if anything, France being part of the EU has been a net liability when countries have voted about membership. It is amazing that US actions over the past decade or so actually has managed to make France foreign policy look good in comparison, to the rest of the world. I would not have thought it possible. If nothing else, that should serve as a quick-n-dirty warning sign that something is not right.
That was peace won by millions of lost lives and the slaying of almost an entire religion on the continent. That was peace maintained by assuring the shield of NATO (to which guess who contributes the bulk of money?) Of course, no one begrudges Europe these, but one does wish they were better friends in times of need. Instead, we got sour Chirac and soulless Schroeder. You will, I'm sure, excuse the bitterness.
It was another ceasefire in about a thousand years of warfare on the continent. The EU did put and end to that vicious cycle (which, of course, it was designed to do).
Oh, and since when are friends required to agree with one another all the time, and not allowed to critizise? That's not friendship, that's toadyism.
Right. That must be why nearly noone used to get divorced at all when marriages were arranged and they only actually got to have sex *after* they were married.
You mean when everyone had premarital and extramarital sex as a matter of course, and men in power had (multiple) publicly acknowledged mistresses precisely because the marriages where arranged and loveless.
I still get the distinct feeling that no self-respecting "moral" vegetarian would go near the stuff. It's like sythesizing heroin and saying "but it's not *real* heroin, it doesn't come from a poppy!" Maybe the drug analogy is overkill. But since the Smeat(TM) (let's call it ;) steak is indistinquishable from a slaughtered steak, it is still "meat". If people who don't have real meat get Smeat and like it, wouldn't that encourage them to eat real meat? Call it a "gateway food". ;-D
Hey, a sensible, balanced disagreement on issues - on slashdot no less! What is the world coming to...
Again, I think you are confusing two different groups of people. Some moral vegetarians see the eating of animal flesh as the problem. They would not touch this. But those moral vegetarians I have met do not object to eating of flesh. They object to some aspect of animal keeping, whether conditions in large-scale farming or just that you have to kill a sentient being for it. Especially those objecting to the killing tend to be fine with eating milk and eggs, for instance - animal protein as much as the flesh, but it doesn't require taking an animals life for it.
This would be very much like using milk or eggs, except you don't have to keep animals imprisoned either, making more people happy about it.
Your argument about drugs is interesting, but it once again presupposes that the substance itself is the problem for all these people. Again, it isn't. If it was, they'd object to quorn as well - or anything containing sodium glutamate, really.
Now, in practice I assume this won't ever come to commercial fruition. We do have pretty good alternatives already for those who want the taste but not the animal history, and those alternatives are as expensive as they are largely because they have little competition. I doubt this has the potential to beat them on price or taste. And I'm prepared to bet this has minimum the same multiplier of inefficiency that real slaughter animals incur, compared to eating the plant matter directly, so it's no real alternative for that reason either (no fake steak in space).
Forgot:
Since being vegetarian is reasonably easy to define and is recognized and understood, many people become "vegetarians" as a convenient shortcut to avoid, say, meat that's been raised with growth hormones or antibiotics, that hasn't been tested for BSE, "meat" that is actually "meat by-products", meat from animals that haven't been well treated, or any other of a number of practices that tend to make some people uncomfortable. They'd ideally want to eat meat that conforms to the standards they like, but since it isn't available - or just too expensive, too difficult to ascertain, or too much of a hassle to find - it's easier to forgo meat altogether.
I know I usually opt for a vegetarian alternative if I'm unsure what the meat actually is and where it comes from.
The gray areas are certainly interesting. But the existence of gray areas does not preclude recognizing the black and the white at either end.
I guess (I'm not vegetarian myself) that where to draw the line is up to each individual, but one fairly easy line is to not eat meat period. That way you don't have to decide on whether truly wild animals (such as moose) is fine, while free-ranging but tagged animals (such as reindeer) is not. You also don't have to worry endlessly every time you go to a restaurant, pestering the kitchen with questions about the origin that may or may not be truthfully answered.
If this was a physical area, that gray area is a featureless rock desert, and the "no animal meat" line is a deep, easily found river. You know when you are on one side and you know when you are on the other.
Growing meat protein this way is from this perspective no different than using Quorn or soybeans as a source of meatlike proteins. It doesn't matter that it's biologically identical to meat from an animal; no animal has been involved anymore than it is with a creatively cultivated fungus.
If meat is immoral, isn't the promotion of meat immoral? Isn't trying to emulate meat in effect promoting is as OK? Just like candy cigarettes, "smokeless" cigarettes, toy guns, etc. that are all blamed for "promoting" a perceived evil?
You are tarring all vegetarians with the same brush. I know a number of vegetarians, and none of them refuse meat on the grounds that eating meat is immoral. I know those people exist; I just don't know of any personally.
Some are vegetarians because they feel better (as in healthier), physically, on an all-vegetable diet (and they would not touch this, of course, no matter where it came from); others are so because they see keeping animals penned up and fed for slaughter as immoral, and especially so when done in the industrial manner we do today. The eating of animals is not what's bothering them; the keeping of animals for that purpose is. And before you ask - yes, some of them do eat fish that's been caught in the wild.
..or someone who doesn't want the energy content of sugar but still want sweet drinks?
Really, why is it so strange when it's about meat but not about other things? Vegetarians have all kinds of different reasons not to eat meat, but not liking the flavour is probably a pretty unusual one.
Especially for moral reasons - how could it be immoral to make it easier not to do whatever you think is wrong?, and not to have to sacrifice anything for it?
You seem to be confusing Skype with Kazaa. The founders of Skype founded Kazaa as well, but sold it and have long since nothing to do with Kazaa the company.
Why not just filter out the ads and go to the site?
And if he really does do a good writeup, then more power to him.
To be honest, I dont tend to take much notice of spelling and grammer errors (I am worse that most people anyway).
As long as it's not egregarious, neither do I, or most people - conciously.
But we do (and it has been shown any number of times) that we will base our estimate of trustworthiness and relevance in part on these "superficial" aspects; not just the correct spelling or grammar, but also in the choice of words, turns of phrase and so on.
This effect diminishes as you get to know the person behind the words better, of course. But yes, it does mean that in this medium, dyslectics, non-native speakers (of whatever language is used) and people with impoverished vocabularies are at a disadvantage.
This is sectioned "Hardware", not "Science", so perhaps this time around we could have an actual discussion on fusion technology and the planned plant, not devolve into a flamefest between idiots.
I think the main reason americans and french dislike another is because they are so similar to each other.
If you are american or french, really think through why you hate usa/france. Congratulations, now you know the reasons the rest of the world is getting fed up with you as well.
Actually it was pretty amazing; the childish utterly over-the-top hissy-fits of the americans in the wake of the Iraq debacle ("freedom fries"? Come on!) was probably the only thing that could actually make the rest of the EU to actually overcome the dislike of the posterior-orifice attitude of the french political class.
I have nothing against France (only some French), but I was warmly hoping that Japan gets the project. In my view, Japan is so perfectly suited, technology and mentality-wise, to pull this off.
Either country would have been fine; the reasons are of course political (as in people-related - "politcal" is not a negative), not technical.
That said, the French have a huge amount of experience with nuclear power. You might also want to take a look at the accident statistics of the Japanese nuclear industry; it's not encouraging reading.
One title per week seems pretty leisurely to me.
Well, you get Finnegan's Wake and Crime and Punishment, for instance, and they'll eat up a lot of whatever time margin you can get on the more accessible titles.