A friend had a gizmo which I thought was quite slick, but I can't find any such item on the market. It was a small tray for ice cubes, and a motorized wheel. Put the can on the ice, and the motor would roll the can against the ice cubes. It was surprisingly efficient at pulling most of the heat out of tepid soda in a couple of minutes. Great for desk situations where your mini-fridge isn't restocked.
Anyone else seen these, and maybe have a product name?
The press rightly continues to use the word 'piracy' for illicit copying and distribution of original materials. Some think it's a new phenomenon, and hard to square with the traditional image of the Jolly Roger and swashbuckling robbers-at-sea. The use of the word 'piracy' as signifying an unauthorized copy of a manuscript is hundreds of years old, long before modern Copyright doctrine was developed. From http://www.ninch.org/forum/price.report.html:
There was very little trust in the print medium when it was first developed--it was seen as unstable and subject to piracy and fraudulent copying. Authenticity was hard to guarantee: indeed, the term "piracy" was first used by John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, to describe certain pernicious practices of early printers and booksellers. A "pirate" was someone who participated in the "unauthorized reprinting of a title recognized to belong to someone else." "Stationers" eventually emerged as the trusted practitioners who were placed in charge of various aspects of publishing--practices we would now recognize as printing, publishing, editing, and bookselling. Stationers worked out the conventional practices of making books, and thus made printing a viable economic enterprise with the elaborate complexity of producing a book eventually invisible to all but the practitioners in the trade.
That's Dr. John Fell (1625-86), who was given the title of Bishop of Oxford in 1675.
[/stock rant]
Now, the word "theft" is the word I object. One cannot steal an idea, one cannot steal the text of a book, one cannot steal the image of a mouse. Even if it is copied and the copy is somehow proven to impact the sales payable to the original creator, it is not theft. The original creator is not denied the chance to continue to sell their creation. It is a crime to infringe the creator's rights of monopoly, but it is not "theft." Rightly, the courts have also recently been pointing out to the MPAA that their aggressive rhetoric is squarely outside the definitions of law.
These have been going around for a long time, and people have worked with different resolutions and different intensity gains. The most common images composite the lights onto images showing a gamut of ocean-depths because the shades of blue are informative, if not realistic. Any newer, higher-resolution version is only mildly interesting.
By the way, the XPlanet project (xplanet.sf.net) can use images like this for the night-side rendering of a near-realtime Earth on your desktop.
Well, aren't YOU the arrogant omnipotent windbag. You say you know what every store everywhere will do or won't do. Just because a website gives some weasel language, doesn't make it so. Individual franchises have market leeway, especially when competitors are very close by.
Amendment X is irrelevant -- it deals with the powers of the federal government, not with the rights of the people.
Um, go to school. Governmental powers are situations where individual rights are withdrawn or restricted. That is, if the government has a power, you lose a freedom. If the Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power, and the states haven't similarly carved out a power, then you still have the right.
I haven't RTFA, but it seems to me that GNOME isn't the right project for system tools. It's nice when gui-oriented system configuration features are made available in a GNOME style, but does it make sense for GNOME itself to have system-specific features?
The GNOME project and all its core features should be independent of what OS is running underneath, relying on a minimum of required components like suitable graphics, sound, pointer and keyboard services.
Saying that it's just a natural outcome and you shouldn't bother complaining about it is like blaming the native North American tribesfolk for dying when the Europeans brought a ton of new viruses and germs to which they weren't immune. Yes, it's a natural outcome of having a monoculture society. Yes, it happens and yes, it's tragic.
But now that we know the dangers of monoculture vulnerabilities, we have a duty to rectify and adapt and evolve, both in terms of defenses and diversity.
I have always thought the 'Rendezvous' name was so non-Apple. Seems like every Apple technology is ThisTalk or ThatTalk, ever since the first Macintoshes that could "talk" to cabled devices like printers. This "OpenTalk" initiative name makes more sense for the Apple brand, it would seem.
Now that Apple's got a pretty good speech-recognition and text-to-speech engine, all the networking talks have to compete with the real talking for cute marketing terminology, such as "PlainTalk."
I don't really listen to much music at all, while I'm doing anything else. I can enjoy it if I'm spending all my attention on the music, but I find it annoying and distracting 90% of the time if I'm trying to do anything else. Instrumental music is easier to ignore so I can concentrate on the tasks at hand, but if I'm just trying to tune it out, then why bother?
Plus, I have a LOT of other things to do with my time than deciding on playlists and spend cash on discs and downloads and devices.
[barry] On another note, wouldn't "Tragically The Who" make a great band name? [/barry]
The OSS community is fragmented, and values "do it yourself" too highly. Developers don't ASK for designs (other than skins and icons), and they ignore any interaction designs you offer them. I'd like to see that change, but honestly, I see little hope. There are very few people who can both design for the user AND implement the design.
Wow, even as a Mac user, I find this thread annoying simply for the impending flame war that will inevitably erupt. Don't we have anything more worthwhile we could be discussing than just another lame Mac vs. PC debate?
You did not spell any words incorrectly; you made no homonym errors; you used complex sentence structure; and while I think that your phrase order is a little unrefined, the grammar is natural for an extemporaneous comment.
While I understand and empathize with your argument, and having used emacs for sixteen years, I must say, a recommendation that reads, "like emacs, only moreso!" will not sway your average personal computer user (or even your devotee) to try it out.
Debugging existing code is rarely the "significant problem." Breaking the mold and creating software that is far more usable and useful than today's software... now that is a significant invention.
I just finished re-reading Niven and Pournelle's Footfall, which is a pretty well-told story of humanity's war with peculiar invaders. In it, they employ laser jet launching (ground-based laser vaporizes interior of jet bell to produce jet thrust), Orion propulsion (series of atomic explosions under hemispherical blast plate), and the Bussard ramjet (ramjet which collects and ejects interstellar hydrogen).
I love re-reading older science fiction just to see how badly they foretold their futures. Most stories understandably miss the mark on the spread of cellular telephone and personal computing in our culture. The only other serious anachronism in Footfall is that they employ the shuttle Challenger in the story climax. Besides that, the story could still be made into a plausible miniseries or movie.
I hope they include the Animatrix short, "Last Flight of the Osiris." It's the only track of the Animatrix disc which I think is worth anything, and was pretty well done. I think Squaresoft (Final Fantasy: Spirits Within) did the animation for this, and aside from the state-of-the-art-but-still-weak lip synch job, it matched the Matrix look pretty well.
It would be neat if the W Brothers beatify/canonize this track as official Matrix lore.
This reminds me of the most recent National Public Radio April Fools' Joke: they claimed, very convincingly, that the USPS is working on portable zip codes. People think there's a prestige about 90210, for example. It's almost a brand, by itself. So when they move away, they want to take that with them. The gag was done so cleanly that there were quite a few people fooled.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else seen these, and maybe have a product name?
[stock rant]
The press rightly continues to use the word 'piracy' for illicit copying and distribution of original materials. Some think it's a new phenomenon, and hard to square with the traditional image of the Jolly Roger and swashbuckling robbers-at-sea. The use of the word 'piracy' as signifying an unauthorized copy of a manuscript is hundreds of years old, long before modern Copyright doctrine was developed. From http://www.ninch.org/forum/price.report.html:
That's Dr. John Fell (1625-86), who was given the title of Bishop of Oxford in 1675.
[/stock rant]
Now, the word "theft" is the word I object. One cannot steal an idea, one cannot steal the text of a book, one cannot steal the image of a mouse. Even if it is copied and the copy is somehow proven to impact the sales payable to the original creator, it is not theft. The original creator is not denied the chance to continue to sell their creation. It is a crime to infringe the creator's rights of monopoly, but it is not "theft." Rightly, the courts have also recently been pointing out to the MPAA that their aggressive rhetoric is squarely outside the definitions of law.
And this helps them sell Apple hardware, how, exactly?
By the way, the XPlanet project (xplanet.sf.net) can use images like this for the night-side rendering of a near-realtime Earth on your desktop.
Well, aren't YOU the arrogant omnipotent windbag. You say you know what every store everywhere will do or won't do. Just because a website gives some weasel language, doesn't make it so. Individual franchises have market leeway, especially when competitors are very close by.
How does ", or the people" not refer to people?
Um, go to school. Governmental powers are situations where individual rights are withdrawn or restricted. That is, if the government has a power, you lose a freedom. If the Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power, and the states haven't similarly carved out a power, then you still have the right.
The GNOME project and all its core features should be independent of what OS is running underneath, relying on a minimum of required components like suitable graphics, sound, pointer and keyboard services.
Saying that it's just a natural outcome and you shouldn't bother complaining about it is like blaming the native North American tribesfolk for dying when the Europeans brought a ton of new viruses and germs to which they weren't immune. Yes, it's a natural outcome of having a monoculture society. Yes, it happens and yes, it's tragic.
But now that we know the dangers of monoculture vulnerabilities, we have a duty to rectify and adapt and evolve, both in terms of defenses and diversity.
Now that Apple's got a pretty good speech-recognition and text-to-speech engine, all the networking talks have to compete with the real talking for cute marketing terminology, such as "PlainTalk."
Plus, I have a LOT of other things to do with my time than deciding on playlists and spend cash on discs and downloads and devices.
[barry] On another note, wouldn't "Tragically The Who" make a great band name? [/barry]
The dry cleaner called. They said they can't get the melted blobs of Vulcan ear plastic out of your black and red spandex suit.
The OSS community is fragmented, and values "do it yourself" too highly. Developers don't ASK for designs (other than skins and icons), and they ignore any interaction designs you offer them. I'd like to see that change, but honestly, I see little hope. There are very few people who can both design for the user AND implement the design.
You did not spell any words incorrectly; you made no homonym errors; you used complex sentence structure; and while I think that your phrase order is a little unrefined, the grammar is natural for an extemporaneous comment.
While I understand and empathize with your argument, and having used emacs for sixteen years, I must say, a recommendation that reads, "like emacs, only moreso!" will not sway your average personal computer user (or even your devotee) to try it out.
Debugging existing code is rarely the "significant problem." Breaking the mold and creating software that is far more usable and useful than today's software... now that is a significant invention.
Well, except to vote, or serve on a jury...
I love re-reading older science fiction just to see how badly they foretold their futures. Most stories understandably miss the mark on the spread of cellular telephone and personal computing in our culture. The only other serious anachronism in Footfall is that they employ the shuttle Challenger in the story climax. Besides that, the story could still be made into a plausible miniseries or movie.
You're a git.
So, as the "G" in "GIF" is short for "Graphics", it's pronounced like the "G" in "Graphics" -- giving "guif".
Do you pronounce the Computer Emergency Response Team as "Kert"?
Or the Center (for) Observations, Modeling (and) Prediction At Scripps as "Som-pass"?
How about the Graphic Environment Operating System we all know as "Guh-Eeyos"?
Or maybe the REmote Graphics Instruction Set is "Re-guiss"?
Is your senator a fan of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or "Jatt"?
- % mv Project.X.Blueprints.zip Britney.Spears.bend.me.over.mp3
Right, like THAT will work.I hope they include the Animatrix short, "Last Flight of the Osiris." It's the only track of the Animatrix disc which I think is worth anything, and was pretty well done. I think Squaresoft (Final Fantasy: Spirits Within) did the animation for this, and aside from the state-of-the-art-but-still-weak lip synch job, it matched the Matrix look pretty well.
It would be neat if the W Brothers beatify/canonize this track as official Matrix lore.
You can run Photoshop on Windows? Who knew? I don't think I'll stop using the GIMP on Windows, though.
Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Dent, and Mary Poppins come to mind.
I think this qualifies: umop ap!sdn
This reminds me of the most recent National Public Radio April Fools' Joke: they claimed, very convincingly, that the USPS is working on portable zip codes. People think there's a prestige about 90210, for example. It's almost a brand, by itself. So when they move away, they want to take that with them. The gag was done so cleanly that there were quite a few people fooled.