According to a recent article, less than 4% of online users buy music downloads, with an average yearly expenditure of under $20. Obviously, most of the music on most iPods is MP3's. Why removing DRM from AAC matters is not clear, since most people with portable music players already get their tracks by ripping CDs.
You care less about the company, and therefore your job
In my view, this is a pro, not a con. Caring about the company makes sense if you have a stake in its outcome (other than continuation of your job), but if you're just a peon then your caring just leads to exploitation.
The reason Borders partnered with Amazon in the first place was because they couldn't come up with a good enough web site on their own. What has changed since that time? I think their greed is overcoming their common sense here, as Amazon is going to be hard to compete with.
I first thought of SRC Computers, the late Seymour Cray's last company, which makes dynamically reconfigurable computers (using x86 microprocessors). But they're more into reconfiguring the connections, not the processors themselves...
Really, this doesn't sound any different than loadable microcode, which nobody's cared much about for the last 20 years. Processing power is pretty cheap these days, so there's no reason to make a processor "retargetable", it just increases the cost and reduces the performance.
Actually, it's all about money. They want control of their own media artifacts so that they can make money off of them. Whether that will actually come to pass is extremely unlikely. Nobody is going to care about Joost for the exact reason that Viacom likes it: because random people can't post videos there.
Sorry, my obviousometer was down for maintenance this morning.
Maybe it has a date-rollover problem.
I think the original poster was spot-on; Y2K was over-hyped and used by many in the IT industry as a cash cow. You appear to have been employed by this cash cow, so your judgement on its importance is suspect. There were, in fact, almost no important failures due to Y2K, and you can't claim that your heroic efforts were the only thing keeping society alive. Most business IT systems routinely have bugs and failures due to coding and design flaws, hardware failures, etc. Y2K would have been like a normal day in this respect, except for a slightly higher rate than usual.
The avian flu is likely also being over-hyped for profit (either by health-care or media people), and likely would just be a blip on the usual deaths due to infectious diseases (pneumonia and influenza currently cause tens of thousands of deaths annually in the US).
For better or worse, fix-on-failure is the norm for many systems in today's world, and it actually works out pretty well, since resources aren't wasted on non-problems as much.
Well, you've repeated the normal fantasy: brave, adventurous frontiersmen will go forth into space and colonize it because they're tough enough. But the facts speak otherwise: space is a nasty place for humans, and the resources required to survive there make it unlikely we're going to successfully "break the bonds of Earth". It's a dream, pure and simple, and has no basis in reality.
The "frontiersmen" who colonized the Americas didn't have to send back to Europe for food, water, and oxygen. And they didn't have ten-million-dollar-per-passenger budgets. And oh, yeah, there were already tens of millions of people living there when they arrived (unlike on Mars, where everybody got really excited that there might be a bacteria fossil a few years back).
Even with the huge costs of current space travel, we have a hard time replacing a loose screw outside the closed environment of the ISS. How will future "frontiersmen" be able to feed themselves? They can't just go out and shoot a deer, even on the comparative paradise of Mars. Space colonization is a pipe dream, pure and simple.
I think you are one of those people who like a nice, safe comfy life.
Yeah, that must be it. I admit that I like eating, drinking, and breathing, unlike your hypothetical "adventurers" who are going to turn a profit off of exporting Martian rocks. The Alaska point still stands (or Antartica, if you prefer): Why aren't modern "frontiersmen" mining the mountains of the south pole? It's orders of magnitude easier to reach than the moon.
It would be nice if people could routinely travel in space without being a fracking Astronaut/Cosmonaut in the first place.
In fact, most people who fantasize about space travel don't think through the complications involved. It's cold, airless, and lacking in any of the requirements for human life. Basically the only reason to go to space is for the view, and for the coolness factor. Even if we colonize the moon, the colony will only be sustainable by frequent expensive shipments of supplies from Earth.
Ask yourself: if living in space is so great, why don't more people want to live in Alaska? It's a much, much nicer place, and has good views and a fairly high coolness factor. Living in space is purely a fantasy, and the longer we throw resources at it the more resources we're going to waste.
Just out of curiosity, I googled "sleshwere", and got exactly one hit. Congratulations on a new single-word googlewhack! Unfortunately, there are now two slashdot postings containing that word.
Oh, and about the dolphins, bummer. But why are mammals more important than other non-mammalian species that have gone extinct? Because we're more closely related to them? That's rather self-centered, don't you think?
This shouldn't be your first Rails review, either
on
Rails Recipes
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From the review:
Now I realize I've been gushing a little, so let me to balance it with at least some words of caution. First, this book assumes you know Rails. You will not learn Rails here.
Actually, I could hardly read your review, since it was so crammed with non-standard jargon (at least, from my perspective as a longtime C++/Java programmer). Lighten up on the Ruby-specific buzzwords, please! "how to use models in migrations", "integration testing as a DSL", "great YAML tricks for use in fixtures", huh???? It's nice that the book taught you how to do those things, whatever they are, but maybe a review should relate these things to more normal (non-Ruby) programmers' experiences in common language somehow.
Welcome to the open-source experience! Where you waste a few hours just trying to get some program to stop deleting your work when running on a common computer type, only to accidentally disable your computer completely, then discovering that it's all your fault because you made some trivial error in an obscure configuration file and didn't get any feedback from the software as to what exactly was wrong. At least you've got a nice feeling of accomplishment from the successful completion of this important task.
If open-source cars work this well, we're all in trouble.
A good countermeasure that I've heard of (but haven't tried yet) is to hit your windshield washers. If they're close enough to catch the overspray it generally will clue them in to get back further.
The problem with your question is that you assume "living standards" have eroded in the past 40 years. What is your basis for this assumption? The US a very rich society nowadays; you can live like a medieval king on the average salary. Almost anybody who isn't lazy, disabled, or a drug addict owns a car, has a comfortable place to live, enormous quantities of food and entertainment, etc. If you feel the need to work over 40 hours per week to stay even, it's probably because you're being greedy. Yes, I know, you have to have a late-model car, cable TV, a nice laptop computer, and eat out restaurants five nights per week. Think about what your parents were doing in the 60's and compare it with your current lifestyle; if you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that you have things a lot better.
Slashdot Mirror
According to a recent article, less than 4% of online users buy music downloads, with an average yearly expenditure of under $20. Obviously, most of the music on most iPods is MP3's. Why removing DRM from AAC matters is not clear, since most people with portable music players already get their tracks by ripping CDs.
Actually, the movie explained the 'verse MUCH better than the TV show did.
Coal and oil, on the other hand, just appear for free, completely cleanly, where they're needed.
Fixed it for you.
You care less about the company, and therefore your job
In my view, this is a pro, not a con. Caring about the company makes sense if you have a stake in its outcome (other than continuation of your job), but if you're just a peon then your caring just leads to exploitation.
I'd say more, but it's lunch time, gotta go. :D
The reason Borders partnered with Amazon in the first place was because they couldn't come up with a good enough web site on their own. What has changed since that time? I think their greed is overcoming their common sense here, as Amazon is going to be hard to compete with.
Really, this doesn't sound any different than loadable microcode, which nobody's cared much about for the last 20 years. Processing power is pretty cheap these days, so there's no reason to make a processor "retargetable", it just increases the cost and reduces the performance.
The BC calendar counted down, and you saw what happened to every society that was around back then.
Actually, it's all about money. They want control of their own media artifacts so that they can make money off of them. Whether that will actually come to pass is extremely unlikely. Nobody is going to care about Joost for the exact reason that Viacom likes it: because random people can't post videos there.
Maybe it has a date-rollover problem.
I think the original poster was spot-on; Y2K was over-hyped and used by many in the IT industry as a cash cow. You appear to have been employed by this cash cow, so your judgement on its importance is suspect. There were, in fact, almost no important failures due to Y2K, and you can't claim that your heroic efforts were the only thing keeping society alive. Most business IT systems routinely have bugs and failures due to coding and design flaws, hardware failures, etc. Y2K would have been like a normal day in this respect, except for a slightly higher rate than usual.
The avian flu is likely also being over-hyped for profit (either by health-care or media people), and likely would just be a blip on the usual deaths due to infectious diseases (pneumonia and influenza currently cause tens of thousands of deaths annually in the US).
For better or worse, fix-on-failure is the norm for many systems in today's world, and it actually works out pretty well, since resources aren't wasted on non-problems as much.
The "frontiersmen" who colonized the Americas didn't have to send back to Europe for food, water, and oxygen. And they didn't have ten-million-dollar-per-passenger budgets. And oh, yeah, there were already tens of millions of people living there when they arrived (unlike on Mars, where everybody got really excited that there might be a bacteria fossil a few years back).
Even with the huge costs of current space travel, we have a hard time replacing a loose screw outside the closed environment of the ISS. How will future "frontiersmen" be able to feed themselves? They can't just go out and shoot a deer, even on the comparative paradise of Mars. Space colonization is a pipe dream, pure and simple.
I think you are one of those people who like a nice, safe comfy life.
Yeah, that must be it. I admit that I like eating, drinking, and breathing, unlike your hypothetical "adventurers" who are going to turn a profit off of exporting Martian rocks. The Alaska point still stands (or Antartica, if you prefer): Why aren't modern "frontiersmen" mining the mountains of the south pole? It's orders of magnitude easier to reach than the moon.
What I really want is a screen that I can read without taking off my polarized sunglasses.
Um, dude, she flew on a shuttle mission last year, so she's already in the manned spaceflight program.
In fact, most people who fantasize about space travel don't think through the complications involved. It's cold, airless, and lacking in any of the requirements for human life. Basically the only reason to go to space is for the view, and for the coolness factor. Even if we colonize the moon, the colony will only be sustainable by frequent expensive shipments of supplies from Earth.
Ask yourself: if living in space is so great, why don't more people want to live in Alaska? It's a much, much nicer place, and has good views and a fairly high coolness factor. Living in space is purely a fantasy, and the longer we throw resources at it the more resources we're going to waste.
That's right used to be "Spring forward, Fall back". Now it's "Late Winter forward, Fall Back".
Oh, and about the dolphins, bummer. But why are mammals more important than other non-mammalian species that have gone extinct? Because we're more closely related to them? That's rather self-centered, don't you think?
Now I realize I've been gushing a little, so let me to balance it with at least some words of caution. First, this book assumes you know Rails. You will not learn Rails here.
Actually, I could hardly read your review, since it was so crammed with non-standard jargon (at least, from my perspective as a longtime C++/Java programmer). Lighten up on the Ruby-specific buzzwords, please! "how to use models in migrations", "integration testing as a DSL", "great YAML tricks for use in fixtures", huh???? It's nice that the book taught you how to do those things, whatever they are, but maybe a review should relate these things to more normal (non-Ruby) programmers' experiences in common language somehow.
If open-source cars work this well, we're all in trouble.
Apparently her secret is that she has a large bladder?
A good countermeasure that I've heard of (but haven't tried yet) is to hit your windshield washers. If they're close enough to catch the overspray it generally will clue them in to get back further.
The layoff command probably only takes a single-digit argument: le -9
The problem with your question is that you assume "living standards" have eroded in the past 40 years. What is your basis for this assumption? The US a very rich society nowadays; you can live like a medieval king on the average salary. Almost anybody who isn't lazy, disabled, or a drug addict owns a car, has a comfortable place to live, enormous quantities of food and entertainment, etc. If you feel the need to work over 40 hours per week to stay even, it's probably because you're being greedy. Yes, I know, you have to have a late-model car, cable TV, a nice laptop computer, and eat out restaurants five nights per week. Think about what your parents were doing in the 60's and compare it with your current lifestyle; if you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that you have things a lot better.
I was *not* a meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs, it was global warming.
Nice try, there, Q, but I still think you did it.The obvious feature to me would be some kind of short-range instant messaging. Of course, entering text with so few buttons could be tricky.