Fuelling a car with oil (gasoline actually, unless your engine is in pretty bad shape) is a horrid, stupid idea that everyone *should* be opposed to. Lubrication of a vehicle not powered by gasoline would be a problem, but you'd just have to re-lube with synthetics.
The world's oil stocks being unusable wouldn't be a utopia instantly, but it would force people to stop destroying the environment for a profit. Chunks of ice the size of cities are falling off Antarctica more and more frequently, and I'm a huge fan of Vancouver, Montreal, and Amsterdam, just to name a few. Maybe an ecological revolution, planned or not, would be a good thing.
for two, in case you weren't aware of this but there are no nuclear engineers anymore. nuclear science has taken a significant hit in recent years. there are very few people studying to be nuclear scientists/engineers
Uhh, maybe in your neck of the woods, but the rest of the world has made significant advancements, and you can find (for example) Canadian nuclear reactors across central Canada, in several European and Asian countries, and we're building a few in China. But I have to wonder who's building them, since all the nuclear engineers and scientists traded in their diplomas for taxi cabs...
Your US==Alles worldview saddens and disenheartens me. Please learn before you speak. Sad thing is, this is far from the first time I've heard these silly statements from people on slashdot. Sadder still, it's far from the first time they've been modded up.
If all the world's oil reserves were totalled... Well, we could always use the bioengineered fuels harvested from genetically engineered grains. Maybe they're not perfect yet, but they work. That would get us through in the short term, for sure.
And maybe, just maybe, people would have to go *gasp* outside. I think this is exactly what the world needs. Walk to work, take your time, cycle. People have become so concerned with getting to where they need to be so they can go somewhere else. I think having to walk at least to/from the Skytrain station would maybe make people think about enjoying life, rather than rushing through it. Sure, it wouldn't be all peaches and cream, but it would sure be better than what we have now.
Before FedEx, nothing needed to be shipped overnight anyway. Now, businesses can't live without it. The world needs to relax. Food for thought.
A poor analogy. The TiVo does not use up your recording time, doesn't force you to watch it, will record your shows instead of its promos if the times conflict, and asks you if you want to record it, if you're watching something else. Basically, it's as unobtrusive as you can get, it helps keep TiVo's costs down, and who knows, maybe some people will want to see the show (sounds boring to me, but who knows).
This is a far cry from forcing you to watch something you don't want to watch. Let's not cry wolf, shall we?
Man, whatever happens, someone will bitch about it.
Look, the revolution here is not that they're allowing you to have MP3s, forget about that. The revolution here is that they're selling individual songs. Imagine if this gets popular. One-hit wonder? Buy the song, not the crappy CD. The opportunity to support an artist for a good song, but to avoid supporting them for a good song and ten filler tracks is something I'll pay $0.99 for. And who knows, maybe their encoder is better than yours.
Or, maybe you should stop bitching about every little thing, because if they're offering to sell you one song, chances are they're not going to be protectionist about not letting you encode them yourself. People have a chance to show they approve of a tenative first step, and your first reaction is to bitch and moan about how it's not what YOU want. Well shut up, some of us are aware that first steps are delicate and that encouragement can lead to second steps, then walking, then running. But if people like you have their way, then Vivendi will give up, and the RIAA will be able to say 'look, we offered them what they wanted and they didn't take it'.
The higher your frequency, the higher the bandwidth, and the less reliable the signal.
My (digital) cellular phone, which I got back in the days of mostly analog phones, had great quality compared to the analogs (it was digital, and on a much higher frequency), and held a signal great, but if it weren't for the fact that it was very new technology as well as the phone company having built a network solely for that phone, I wouldn't have been able to get a signal in as many places, because it's more line-of-sight. High wavelength signals suffer more corruption from reflecting off surfaces.
Aside from that, if we keep going up and up from what we're at now, we hit microwaves (which is great, download your pr0n and warm your cocoa at the same time), and then infrared. At this point, we're pretty much entirely line-of-sight unless you have a lot of fairly reflective surfaces. Then we get into visible light (lasers), ultraviolet, x, and gamma rays.
Thus, we have to play around in the sub-microwave range, which is good anyway because it's the best suited for what we want. The requirement now is that perfect balance - high bandwidth, high resistance to signal degredation, high range. This is why AM radio is mono, and FM is stereo - more bandwidth. 802.11[a|b] is [|realdamn ]great for the bandwidth, but is more line-of-sight. 802.11a is worse for this than b, as it uses higher frequencies (correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure).
Thus, to answer your question, there is a relatively small range of frequencies that work for what we as a society need (want), and they vary between bandwidth and reliability. It's all about choice.
your month cost per tennant will probably be $20-30/month in hardware depreciation and bandwidth usage
While amortization of assets is technically net worth lost, it's not cash outflow per se, and thus as long as the hardware keeps working, it's not applicable to the monthly cost. If you can keep it to the point it's worth nothing, I'd be quite surprised.
What I would go for is 9 megabit SDSL if it's offered by the telco, or multiple DSL lines if not. You can provide the same theoretical bandwidth as a T1 (downstream, anyway) with one DSL connection, and there's no point getting a hardcore-business class line for residential-class users. This is also a great place for FTTH to take hold - run a fibre line to an apartment complex, branch off gigabit fibre to the buildings, run 10/100 up the buildings and out along the floors, and voila, instant high-speed network. Run the lot of them through a caching proxy server, and whee.
That being said, how do the phone lines get into the building? A T1 is a great way to get a good 64 phone lines into a building. It's possible (to my limited knowledge) that they already have the equipment and technical expertese. Then again, I seriously doubt it.
Anyway, that's my uneducated input on the subject. I'm going to go pretend to know enough to give medical advice now.
"I remember Linux, we had in at my high school. It never worked right, let's just go with Windows XXL 2010(tm), you know that works."
Actually, we had the same problem at my technical school. The library was filled with iMacs (maybe 25 of them), running OS 9 and At Ease, and administered by a Social Studies teacher (he got the job because no one else applied).
They were, thanks to being set up poorly before the SocialS teacher got there, flaky at best. Any attempt to change the preferences in Netscape resulted in the system locking up and having to be unplugged (and having to unplug an iMac usually meant finding the outlets and trying each cord until yours blinked off, or until you ran out, which was fun).
As a result, the several thousand dollars they spent on those iBooks was doubled and spent again two years later on Seanix (UGH UGH UGH) machines to fill the library - oh, and they bought MORE Seanix machines than they had had iMacs.
Idiocy. And I wondered why the CIS students were learning to code on TC 3.0 for DOS under Win98 on P200 machines. Oh well, at least the keyboards weren't bolted down (the current teacher unbolted them when he was hired).
I'll add in my two cents about what I like about it; namely, the architecture.
My first experience with The Sims was on my vacation to Israel; the family I was staying with were a bunch of sims junkies (the kids anyway), and so Galia and I would sit there for hours playing house, as it were.
I'd come up with some neat new design for a house (my favourite was every-room-a-building with paths and foliage in between, fenced off), and we'd spend an hour working on it, getting it perfect, furnishing it, trying to fit furniture in, and then she'd take over and do most of the managing of people with some input from myself, micromanaging their lives while I teased her about being a control freak.
Quite an amusing game to play with someone else, but I've never managed to play it alone for more than a few minutes. Games are always better in groups of two or more.
As for CSM, let's hope that he is well and truly dead this time, though I hope to see the actor appear in other venues since he was a very good bad guy without being campy.
He (the actor, William B. Davis) was also a very good speaker when he came to the University of Lethbridge. Spoke on a variety of interesting subjects, most of them X-Files related somehow or another, was quite amusing, I took one of the arrow posters off the wall and had him sign it. Probably in the landfill now, but he was still pretty cool.
Factoid: He's actually an ex-smoker. When he appeared on the first episode of the X-Files, the producers asked him if he wanted real cigarettes or the fake herbal ones. He figured he was cured of his addiction, and went for the real ones. After finding himself getting itchy for them when he got home, he decided that it was no more real ones for him, despite the fact that the herbal ones are truly putrid.
I've won my every C, C++ and Perl obfuscation contest I've entered several times, and even when the people doing the hiring are programmers themselves, it still doesn't help me at all! I guess it's just not an important factor to them.
Well, I hate to nitpick, but technically, they're not stealing, since they have a right (given them by the EULA) to do whatever they wish.
Personally, I don't see a problem. If I make a mod, and then they take it, put it on CD, and sell it without my permission, then hey, that's fucking cool, dude, because hey, I got fucking published! I'd love that. Talk about bragging rights. All I'd ask is that they let me know beforehand, so I could brag to my friends about it.
I do agree that the EULA should be changed. It's only fair to ask people what you can do with their mods. But calling a right given to them by the EULA 'stealing' is a whole other matter.
An interesting question would be if Bioware followed through with this and got sued. Don't get me wrong, I love the company, but I'd like to see EULAs challenged in court at some point. Bioware's not Microsoft, but it would be good to see them struck down.
First you go and give away that they're dead before I get a chance to see it, and then you give away that they're still alive before I get a chance to see it. You guys really hate me, don't you?
Check out IMP. Works pretty nice. Watch out for the Debian packages, I've had them obliterate my MySQL user/pword databases, but that's the maintainer's fault. Nice packages. Needs IMAP. Very good.
Hate to tell you, but the reserves under Texas aren't nearly enough to last as long as people claim. There's more oil in Northern Anberta than in all of the US, and more offshore from BC than in Alberta. Well, maybe I don't hate to tell you. The sooner these reserves start running out, the sooner we stop polluting, and then everyone wins.
Oil companies and politicians that are funded by them love to go on about how oil will last us forever and ever.
Oil companies and politicians are also the reason that no one is going forward with any great speed towards alternative energy sources. Big Oil needs that oil to keep its stranglehold on the economy and keep making ludicrous amounts of money. Politicians need to keep their campaigns funded, so they need Big Oil. The US government needs oil so politicians can get that money. Voila. US needs oil.
Sure, it's an artificial need, but that's hardly important in the real world.
I checked my usage a while ago, and Windows 98, running IE 4, Mozilla (multiple tabs), Trillian, Winamp, XChat, and the Norton Systemworks System Info app ate about 50 megs of my memory, total. I had 30 megs of free physical out of my 80. Not bad, I thought.
You 'don't have exact numbers handy', but you pull a lot of numbers out of your ass. You can't say 'I don't know what the numbers are' then quote a half dozen. Your point may be valid, but get real numbers or don't quote any. Besides, everyone knows that Opera takes up a million bajillion gigs of ram. I don't have the exact numbers handy, but....
And lastly, you rate scrolling speed as an issue, which is the dumbest argument you have. Not to be abusive, but browsers can set how much they want the page to scroll per arrow key, so every redraw redraws a certain amount, which could be changed. I could make Mozilla scroll to the bottom of a document instantly when you press the down arrow. Does that mean I have optimizations, or just silly preferences?
You also ignore the fact that Opera's DOM support is sub-par at the moment, and in 6.01, it didn't even support the CSS width: attribute on a table cell properly (width:150 ended up taking up most of the screen; I had screenshots up once, but cleaned out my homedir, or I'd link them:( oh well).
Opera might be up there, but it's not there yet, and it has a ways to go before I'll pay $20 when I have a half dozen other browsers begging me to use them. Good luck.
It's completely standards-compliant, sure, except that some things don't work properly, some don't work at all, and the rest ranges frmo perfect to buggy as hell.
It's not a bad browser if you have nothing else, but I'm not going to pay $20 for a browser that doesn't work as well as Mozilla in most circumstances, and is a bitch to configure and work with (in my experience).
If they want our viewership, they damn well better earn it.
While I agree with your points about commercials sucking, networks make money by either having commercials, or having people pay for content (HBO, etc). Therefore, their providing to you, for free, television shows is in return for your eyeballs come commercialtime. Getting up and going elsewhere, that's fine. Fastforwarding, I'm ok with. Reading a book or magazine, sure, but intentionally, deliberately, blatantly skipping over commercials removes the only source of income the networks have to fund these commercials. If advertisers say 'we're not going to pay as much because people aren't watching', then less shows get produced, and the quality goes down.
That being said, I don't think the quality can go down any further. Most TV I watch is CBS (Survivor, Amazing Race, CSI), HBO (Sopranos and Sex in the City, which I would watch if I had a PVR), Canadian (This Hour, Lexx, and the news), or has already been paid for (M*A*S*H). There are a few exceptions, but nothing I watch regularly. Maybe if the networks didn't throw money away on crap like they do (VIP? Come on...) it wouldn't be an issue, but people don't want quality TV, they want to rot their brains, and if you want to rot your brain too, you have to pay the toll.
I think the more sensible solution is to break gelatin so that it is incompatible with finger print scanners. It is up to the companies that make gelatin to change it so that it will cause fingerprint scanners to crash. The industry has to police itself, it can't rely on government to do it.
--Dan
Most Notable Improvements
on
GCC 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here's a short run-down of the improvements that really caught my eye this time around.
Better PPC support (64-bit PowerPC GNU/Linux support in the backend, and altivec support with -maltivec)
Everyone knows I'm no fan of the GNU project, but GCC3.1 shows that they have a lot going for them. Very exciting guys, I can't wait to see what 3.2 has in store.
Someone has to break the encryption on the DVDs first or make a mod chip that lets you boot unencrypted CDs. Hasn't happened yet, but it's only a matter of time.
Someone else linked to copyxbox.com, which itself has links to such places as xboxmods.co.uk, which appear to prove you wrong (not that I'd think you'd mind).
Slashdot Mirror
Fuelling a car with oil (gasoline actually, unless your engine is in pretty bad shape) is a horrid, stupid idea that everyone *should* be opposed to. Lubrication of a vehicle not powered by gasoline would be a problem, but you'd just have to re-lube with synthetics.
The world's oil stocks being unusable wouldn't be a utopia instantly, but it would force people to stop destroying the environment for a profit. Chunks of ice the size of cities are falling off Antarctica more and more frequently, and I'm a huge fan of Vancouver, Montreal, and Amsterdam, just to name a few. Maybe an ecological revolution, planned or not, would be a good thing.
--Dan
for two, in case you weren't aware of this but there are no nuclear engineers anymore. nuclear science has taken a significant hit in recent years. there are very few people studying to be nuclear scientists/engineers
Uhh, maybe in your neck of the woods, but the rest of the world has made significant advancements, and you can find (for example) Canadian nuclear reactors across central Canada, in several European and Asian countries, and we're building a few in China. But I have to wonder who's building them, since all the nuclear engineers and scientists traded in their diplomas for taxi cabs...
Your US==Alles worldview saddens and disenheartens me. Please learn before you speak. Sad thing is, this is far from the first time I've heard these silly statements from people on slashdot. Sadder still, it's far from the first time they've been modded up.
If all the world's oil reserves were totalled... Well, we could always use the bioengineered fuels harvested from genetically engineered grains. Maybe they're not perfect yet, but they work. That would get us through in the short term, for sure.
And maybe, just maybe, people would have to go *gasp* outside. I think this is exactly what the world needs. Walk to work, take your time, cycle. People have become so concerned with getting to where they need to be so they can go somewhere else. I think having to walk at least to/from the Skytrain station would maybe make people think about enjoying life, rather than rushing through it. Sure, it wouldn't be all peaches and cream, but it would sure be better than what we have now.
Before FedEx, nothing needed to be shipped overnight anyway. Now, businesses can't live without it. The world needs to relax. Food for thought.
--Dan
In fact there is a very real possibility that this approach could turn the enemy into a bunch of friendly peaceful pot smoking farmers ..
The world has enough Canadians, try something new for a change.
--Dan
A poor analogy. The TiVo does not use up your recording time, doesn't force you to watch it, will record your shows instead of its promos if the times conflict, and asks you if you want to record it, if you're watching something else. Basically, it's as unobtrusive as you can get, it helps keep TiVo's costs down, and who knows, maybe some people will want to see the show (sounds boring to me, but who knows).
This is a far cry from forcing you to watch something you don't want to watch. Let's not cry wolf, shall we?
--Dan
Man, whatever happens, someone will bitch about it.
Look, the revolution here is not that they're allowing you to have MP3s, forget about that. The revolution here is that they're selling individual songs. Imagine if this gets popular. One-hit wonder? Buy the song, not the crappy CD. The opportunity to support an artist for a good song, but to avoid supporting them for a good song and ten filler tracks is something I'll pay $0.99 for. And who knows, maybe their encoder is better than yours.
Or, maybe you should stop bitching about every little thing, because if they're offering to sell you one song, chances are they're not going to be protectionist about not letting you encode them yourself. People have a chance to show they approve of a tenative first step, and your first reaction is to bitch and moan about how it's not what YOU want. Well shut up, some of us are aware that first steps are delicate and that encouragement can lead to second steps, then walking, then running. But if people like you have their way, then Vivendi will give up, and the RIAA will be able to say 'look, we offered them what they wanted and they didn't take it'.
Nice.
--Dan
The higher your frequency, the higher the bandwidth, and the less reliable the signal.
My (digital) cellular phone, which I got back in the days of mostly analog phones, had great quality compared to the analogs (it was digital, and on a much higher frequency), and held a signal great, but if it weren't for the fact that it was very new technology as well as the phone company having built a network solely for that phone, I wouldn't have been able to get a signal in as many places, because it's more line-of-sight. High wavelength signals suffer more corruption from reflecting off surfaces.
Aside from that, if we keep going up and up from what we're at now, we hit microwaves (which is great, download your pr0n and warm your cocoa at the same time), and then infrared. At this point, we're pretty much entirely line-of-sight unless you have a lot of fairly reflective surfaces. Then we get into visible light (lasers), ultraviolet, x, and gamma rays.
Thus, we have to play around in the sub-microwave range, which is good anyway because it's the best suited for what we want. The requirement now is that perfect balance - high bandwidth, high resistance to signal degredation, high range. This is why AM radio is mono, and FM is stereo - more bandwidth. 802.11[a|b] is [|realdamn ]great for the bandwidth, but is more line-of-sight. 802.11a is worse for this than b, as it uses higher frequencies (correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure).
Thus, to answer your question, there is a relatively small range of frequencies that work for what we as a society need (want), and they vary between bandwidth and reliability. It's all about choice.
--Dan
your month cost per tennant will probably be $20-30/month in hardware depreciation and bandwidth usage
While amortization of assets is technically net worth lost, it's not cash outflow per se, and thus as long as the hardware keeps working, it's not applicable to the monthly cost. If you can keep it to the point it's worth nothing, I'd be quite surprised.
What I would go for is 9 megabit SDSL if it's offered by the telco, or multiple DSL lines if not. You can provide the same theoretical bandwidth as a T1 (downstream, anyway) with one DSL connection, and there's no point getting a hardcore-business class line for residential-class users. This is also a great place for FTTH to take hold - run a fibre line to an apartment complex, branch off gigabit fibre to the buildings, run 10/100 up the buildings and out along the floors, and voila, instant high-speed network. Run the lot of them through a caching proxy server, and whee.
That being said, how do the phone lines get into the building? A T1 is a great way to get a good 64 phone lines into a building. It's possible (to my limited knowledge) that they already have the equipment and technical expertese. Then again, I seriously doubt it.
Anyway, that's my uneducated input on the subject. I'm going to go pretend to know enough to give medical advice now.
--Dan
"I remember Linux, we had in at my high school. It never worked right, let's just go with Windows XXL 2010(tm), you know that works."
Actually, we had the same problem at my technical school. The library was filled with iMacs (maybe 25 of them), running OS 9 and At Ease, and administered by a Social Studies teacher (he got the job because no one else applied).
They were, thanks to being set up poorly before the SocialS teacher got there, flaky at best. Any attempt to change the preferences in Netscape resulted in the system locking up and having to be unplugged (and having to unplug an iMac usually meant finding the outlets and trying each cord until yours blinked off, or until you ran out, which was fun).
As a result, the several thousand dollars they spent on those iBooks was doubled and spent again two years later on Seanix (UGH UGH UGH) machines to fill the library - oh, and they bought MORE Seanix machines than they had had iMacs.
Idiocy. And I wondered why the CIS students were learning to code on TC 3.0 for DOS under Win98 on P200 machines. Oh well, at least the keyboards weren't bolted down (the current teacher unbolted them when he was hired).
--Dan
I'll add in my two cents about what I like about it; namely, the architecture.
My first experience with The Sims was on my vacation to Israel; the family I was staying with were a bunch of sims junkies (the kids anyway), and so Galia and I would sit there for hours playing house, as it were.
I'd come up with some neat new design for a house (my favourite was every-room-a-building with paths and foliage in between, fenced off), and we'd spend an hour working on it, getting it perfect, furnishing it, trying to fit furniture in, and then she'd take over and do most of the managing of people with some input from myself, micromanaging their lives while I teased her about being a control freak.
Quite an amusing game to play with someone else, but I've never managed to play it alone for more than a few minutes. Games are always better in groups of two or more.
--Dan
As for CSM, let's hope that he is well and truly dead this time, though I hope to see the actor appear in other venues since he was a very good bad guy without being campy.
He (the actor, William B. Davis) was also a very good speaker when he came to the University of Lethbridge. Spoke on a variety of interesting subjects, most of them X-Files related somehow or another, was quite amusing, I took one of the arrow posters off the wall and had him sign it. Probably in the landfill now, but he was still pretty cool.
Factoid: He's actually an ex-smoker. When he appeared on the first episode of the X-Files, the producers asked him if he wanted real cigarettes or the fake herbal ones. He figured he was cured of his addiction, and went for the real ones. After finding himself getting itchy for them when he got home, he decided that it was no more real ones for him, despite the fact that the herbal ones are truly putrid.
--Dan
There is a new program that I found interesting called CSI, I will have to see how that one turns out.
My guess is, the guy dies.
--Dan
I've won my every C, C++ and Perl obfuscation contest I've entered several times, and even when the people doing the hiring are programmers themselves, it still doesn't help me at all! I guess it's just not an important factor to them.
--Dan
Well, I hate to nitpick, but technically, they're not stealing, since they have a right (given them by the EULA) to do whatever they wish.
Personally, I don't see a problem. If I make a mod, and then they take it, put it on CD, and sell it without my permission, then hey, that's fucking cool, dude, because hey, I got fucking published! I'd love that. Talk about bragging rights. All I'd ask is that they let me know beforehand, so I could brag to my friends about it.
I do agree that the EULA should be changed. It's only fair to ask people what you can do with their mods. But calling a right given to them by the EULA 'stealing' is a whole other matter.
An interesting question would be if Bioware followed through with this and got sued. Don't get me wrong, I love the company, but I'd like to see EULAs challenged in court at some point. Bioware's not Microsoft, but it would be good to see them struck down.
--Dan
First you go and give away that they're dead before I get a chance to see it, and then you give away that they're still alive before I get a chance to see it. You guys really hate me, don't you?
--Dan
Dude, this is the X-Files, they don't need any reason to bring dead characters back.
The only thing good about that is that you get to see your least favourite characters die repeatedly. I'm always big on that.
--Dan
Check out IMP. Works pretty nice. Watch out for the Debian packages, I've had them obliterate my MySQL user/pword databases, but that's the maintainer's fault. Nice packages. Needs IMAP. Very good.
--Dan
Hate to tell you, but the reserves under Texas aren't nearly enough to last as long as people claim. There's more oil in Northern Anberta than in all of the US, and more offshore from BC than in Alberta. Well, maybe I don't hate to tell you. The sooner these reserves start running out, the sooner we stop polluting, and then everyone wins.
Oil companies and politicians that are funded by them love to go on about how oil will last us forever and ever.
Oil companies and politicians are also the reason that no one is going forward with any great speed towards alternative energy sources. Big Oil needs that oil to keep its stranglehold on the economy and keep making ludicrous amounts of money. Politicians need to keep their campaigns funded, so they need Big Oil. The US government needs oil so politicians can get that money. Voila. US needs oil.
Sure, it's an artificial need, but that's hardly important in the real world.
--Dan
Wheee....
:( oh well).
I checked my usage a while ago, and Windows 98, running IE 4, Mozilla (multiple tabs), Trillian, Winamp, XChat, and the Norton Systemworks System Info app ate about 50 megs of my memory, total. I had 30 megs of free physical out of my 80. Not bad, I thought.
You 'don't have exact numbers handy', but you pull a lot of numbers out of your ass. You can't say 'I don't know what the numbers are' then quote a half dozen. Your point may be valid, but get real numbers or don't quote any. Besides, everyone knows that Opera takes up a million bajillion gigs of ram. I don't have the exact numbers handy, but....
And lastly, you rate scrolling speed as an issue, which is the dumbest argument you have. Not to be abusive, but browsers can set how much they want the page to scroll per arrow key, so every redraw redraws a certain amount, which could be changed. I could make Mozilla scroll to the bottom of a document instantly when you press the down arrow. Does that mean I have optimizations, or just silly preferences?
You also ignore the fact that Opera's DOM support is sub-par at the moment, and in 6.01, it didn't even support the CSS width: attribute on a table cell properly (width:150 ended up taking up most of the screen; I had screenshots up once, but cleaned out my homedir, or I'd link them
Opera might be up there, but it's not there yet, and it has a ways to go before I'll pay $20 when I have a half dozen other browsers begging me to use them. Good luck.
--Dan
It's completely standards-compliant, sure, except that some things don't work properly, some don't work at all, and the rest ranges frmo perfect to buggy as hell.
It's not a bad browser if you have nothing else, but I'm not going to pay $20 for a browser that doesn't work as well as Mozilla in most circumstances, and is a bitch to configure and work with (in my experience).
--Dan
If they want our viewership, they damn well better earn it.
While I agree with your points about commercials sucking, networks make money by either having commercials, or having people pay for content (HBO, etc). Therefore, their providing to you, for free, television shows is in return for your eyeballs come commercialtime. Getting up and going elsewhere, that's fine. Fastforwarding, I'm ok with. Reading a book or magazine, sure, but intentionally, deliberately, blatantly skipping over commercials removes the only source of income the networks have to fund these commercials. If advertisers say 'we're not going to pay as much because people aren't watching', then less shows get produced, and the quality goes down.
That being said, I don't think the quality can go down any further. Most TV I watch is CBS (Survivor, Amazing Race, CSI), HBO (Sopranos and Sex in the City, which I would watch if I had a PVR), Canadian (This Hour, Lexx, and the news), or has already been paid for (M*A*S*H). There are a few exceptions, but nothing I watch regularly. Maybe if the networks didn't throw money away on crap like they do (VIP? Come on...) it wouldn't be an issue, but people don't want quality TV, they want to rot their brains, and if you want to rot your brain too, you have to pay the toll.
--Dan
I think the more sensible solution is to break gelatin so that it is incompatible with finger print scanners. It is up to the companies that make gelatin to change it so that it will cause fingerprint scanners to crash. The industry has to police itself, it can't rely on government to do it.
--Dan
Here's a short run-down of the improvements that really caught my eye this time around.
Everyone knows I'm no fan of the GNU project, but GCC3.1 shows that they have a lot going for them. Very exciting guys, I can't wait to see what 3.2 has in store.
--Dan
I also remember the day when people were favorable to a RedHat acquisition by AOL/TW. Go figure.
I just want nice red/black coasters to counterpoint my blue/white coasters.
--Dan
Someone has to break the encryption on the DVDs first or make a mod chip that lets you boot unencrypted CDs. Hasn't happened yet, but it's only a matter of time.
Someone else linked to copyxbox.com, which itself has links to such places as xboxmods.co.uk, which appear to prove you wrong (not that I'd think you'd mind).
Yay.
--Dan
Slashdot's story titles jump in blatant typos.
;)
Way to be trend-whores guys. You know we love you for it.
--Dan