I was disappointed by the remote also. It was much less precise than I had hoped or had been lead to believe in a lot of the reviews. The local BestBuy happened to get a shipment last Friday so I picked one up since there were a couple on the shelf. I played the sports package for about 45 minutes. Now, a week later, I haven't touched the system once - and really don't have any desire to do so. I'll likely just pack it back up and return it so it'll have a better home.
I think it's a reasonably good attempt for the first generation of motion sensing controllers, but it's not good enough for me (personally) to find it an enjoyable experince.
I had regular Comcast outages also. Each time I called, they would say their system was down so they couldn't look up my information. When I eventually called to cancel, and they asked why, I said it was way too much to pay for all the downtime. The CSR said "Really? We don't see any reports from you about outages." Agrrrrhhhh! It made me curious if their systems were actually down all those times, or if that's just the technique they use so their "uptime" looks better on paper.
I agree that quantity is not equal to quality. It's been very frustrating in recent years when preforming literature searches. I guess researchers have always tried to maximize the number of papers. However, in some cases it's become absolutely shameless. Some researchers generate 15-20 papers dealing with material that would barely make 3 good papers. Often times a new paper is nothing more than placing the results in a different order. Interestingly, the countries showing the largest increase in publications also seem to be the most guilty of this.
Actually, I credit the early King's Quest and Space Quest series by Sierra (and even Zork) for teaching me how to type. That was back before you just moused over everything in games and actually had to type out your commands (and you got lots of trys when attempting to find just the right phrase that the game was expecting). Some games do a much better job of disguising their lessons than others do.
I think informative is a relative term. Just because the business believes it is informative doesn't mean the recipient does. I've opted in for a few newsletters before expecting that they would send me something once or twice a month only to be barraged with 4-5 e-mails a week. To me that's spam. Then, to make it worse, it often takes multiple attempts to get off their list. Somebody saying it's ok to send them stuff is not same a saying "please feel free to spam me all you want", although many businesses seem to think that.
If the principal's earning potential was affected, it was due solely to how he handeled the situation. I didn't know you could sue someone for putting you in the position to demonstrate your incompetence to your superiors...
Yikes, looks like the going rate for a used 48GX on ebay is $150-200. I'm glad I have a spare one tucked away if my main one ever actually dies. Of course I'd still be willing to pay that much if mine needed replacement.
I thought Myst looked pretty, but after years of playing the "King's Quest" and "Space Quest" series of adventure games (and others), I thought many of the puzzles were laughable. Let's see, there's a box of matches on the floor and a wood burning stove in the corner...hmmmm....maybe I should try to light it! If something was that easy in other games it usually meant it was a trap and you were going to die.:) However, I guess it never would have had the mass appeal if people had to spend days trying to solve individual puzzles.
It wasn't exactly voluntary, if I understand correctly, the DJ's were forcing them to drink certain volumes in a particular time frame (like 2 minutes for each bottle initially). Now, they could have dropped out at any time, but is doesn't sound like the contestants had control over the rate of water consumption.
Also, just because you know you can die from drinking too much water, it may not help. What percentage of the people reading this right now know the exact volume of water over a given timeframe will kill you? I don't. I usually hate frivolous lawsuits...but I think the family has a pretty strong and valid case in this instance.
Not running OS X on the PPC is a big plus for me. With OS X I wouldn't be able to use all the obscure software programs that are already out there for PDAs. That's why I'm willing to lug around a PDA phone in the first place (I certainly don't need to listen to mp3s and read my e-mail that badly). Seems like a waste to have all the power and big screen and only use it for phone/mp3 player/mail reader.
But my 4-year old Pocket PC phone can do everything they claim, and much more. And it's over four years old! Of course I didn't understand why anyone would want the carry around a brick for an MP3 player (with few features) when the iPod came out (I already owned several other mp3 players when the iPod was announced). So, I'll probably be wrong again.
True, the talk I attended was probably more years ago than I thought. At the time an engineer was describing his company's new ultra-low cost method of producing the silicon for solar cells. He had mentioned that the "break-even" point on energy was a little over 2 years for the process (I see some current solar cells are 1.7 years).
However, the study cited in your link uses an expected lifetime of 30 years of operation. I'm certainly not a solar cell expert, but that seems a little optimistic. If I remember correctly the industry people were using 15 years as the expected useful lifetime. If 30 years is realistic then the factor of 4-17 isn't that bad.
Anyway I just wanted to bring up that point because most people don't realize that the array they just installed on their roof is going to have to run for a couple of years (or more) before it even produces the amount of electricty needed to make it in the first place.
Everyone always seems to forget how much energy actually goes into producing a solar cell. It wasn't all that long ago that the electricity needed just to melt the silicon was more energy than the cell would generate throughout it's entire lifetime (they do degrade over time). That doesn't even include all the energy consumed during any additional manufacturing, transportation, and installation.
The difference is about the same as someone asking you to move 2000lbs of sand from your driveway to your roof using a ladder and someone asking you to lug a single 2000lb solid rock to the top of your roof. There's a big difference in logistics.
I was about to say yes you're right...but the more I think about it I'm not so sure....
I would agree if the "bubbly" film was attached to the hull (it would be like coating the ship with styrofoam), but since it's a low friction free flowing fluid I don't think it's correct to say it acts like part of the hull.
I think the bubble film has to be treated as a layer of low density fluid the ship is sitting in surrounded by a larger body of higher density water. If that's the case it would have slightly lower level in the water. I assume this lower level would be equivilant to loading the ship with additional weight equal to the weight of water displaced by the air in the bubbles directly surrounding the hull.
Of course it's the end of the day and I have a headache and I need to think some more about it before I convince myself.:)
With methan hydrate releases the theory is that the entire volume of water surrounding the ship is "full of bubbles" and has an effectively lower density. What they are talking about here us just surrounding the hull with a thin layer of bubbles.....maybe the ship sits a couple inches (to pull a guess out of my rear) lower in the water....but there's not going to be any danger of sinking a ship...
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that can't stand those Head On commercials. I do the exact same thing and switch the channel the second they come on and usually don't make it back to that channel for a long time (my attention span is short enough that I can easily get interested in some other show that's on). Most other commericals I can just tune out - the Head On ones are like scraping fingernails. I wonder if they offer deep discounts to all the other advertisers that have spots running immediately after those. Out of principle, I will never buy or use one of their products.
Yeah, I don't see the problem either...you end up with 3 happy people.
The homeless guy gets paid for standing in line...
The middle man makes a nice little profit...
The end user with lots of money gets one of the first units without having to stand in line (and these are probably the exact customers that sony will want to have their system - they buy all the latest games right at release instead of waiting for them to hit the bargin bin)...
Yeah, but then they won't get their 15 mins of fame when all the local tv stations come out to interview them and ask them why they would be willing to queue up for so long.......I suspect the real reason most of them are there this early is just for attention.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's specifically trying to reproduce the look of an old television CRT.
opps, link borked... http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=53.592505,-15.710449&spn=11.529717,23.005371&z=6
I'm beginning to lean towards the imaging artifact explanation also. If you go a little ways north you can see a large area with this grid pattern appearance. http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=31.480209,-24.120483&spn=2.988616,5.026245&t=h&z=8
I was disappointed by the remote also. It was much less precise than I had hoped or had been lead to believe in a lot of the reviews. The local BestBuy happened to get a shipment last Friday so I picked one up since there were a couple on the shelf. I played the sports package for about 45 minutes. Now, a week later, I haven't touched the system once - and really don't have any desire to do so. I'll likely just pack it back up and return it so it'll have a better home. I think it's a reasonably good attempt for the first generation of motion sensing controllers, but it's not good enough for me (personally) to find it an enjoyable experince.
I had regular Comcast outages also. Each time I called, they would say their system was down so they couldn't look up my information. When I eventually called to cancel, and they asked why, I said it was way too much to pay for all the downtime. The CSR said "Really? We don't see any reports from you about outages." Agrrrrhhhh! It made me curious if their systems were actually down all those times, or if that's just the technique they use so their "uptime" looks better on paper.
I agree that quantity is not equal to quality. It's been very frustrating in recent years when preforming literature searches. I guess researchers have always tried to maximize the number of papers. However, in some cases it's become absolutely shameless. Some researchers generate 15-20 papers dealing with material that would barely make 3 good papers. Often times a new paper is nothing more than placing the results in a different order. Interestingly, the countries showing the largest increase in publications also seem to be the most guilty of this.
Actually, I credit the early King's Quest and Space Quest series by Sierra (and even Zork) for teaching me how to type. That was back before you just moused over everything in games and actually had to type out your commands (and you got lots of trys when attempting to find just the right phrase that the game was expecting). Some games do a much better job of disguising their lessons than others do.
I think informative is a relative term. Just because the business believes it is informative doesn't mean the recipient does. I've opted in for a few newsletters before expecting that they would send me something once or twice a month only to be barraged with 4-5 e-mails a week. To me that's spam. Then, to make it worse, it often takes multiple attempts to get off their list. Somebody saying it's ok to send them stuff is not same a saying "please feel free to spam me all you want", although many businesses seem to think that.
If the principal's earning potential was affected, it was due solely to how he handeled the situation. I didn't know you could sue someone for putting you in the position to demonstrate your incompetence to your superiors...
Yikes, looks like the going rate for a used 48GX on ebay is $150-200. I'm glad I have a spare one tucked away if my main one ever actually dies. Of course I'd still be willing to pay that much if mine needed replacement.
I thought Myst looked pretty, but after years of playing the "King's Quest" and "Space Quest" series of adventure games (and others), I thought many of the puzzles were laughable. Let's see, there's a box of matches on the floor and a wood burning stove in the corner...hmmmm....maybe I should try to light it! If something was that easy in other games it usually meant it was a trap and you were going to die. :) However, I guess it never would have had the mass appeal if people had to spend days trying to solve individual puzzles.
whoooshh....nevermind....I just felt the sarcasm flying past my head....
Pass the aluminum foil please.....
It wasn't exactly voluntary, if I understand correctly, the DJ's were forcing them to drink certain volumes in a particular time frame (like 2 minutes for each bottle initially). Now, they could have dropped out at any time, but is doesn't sound like the contestants had control over the rate of water consumption. Also, just because you know you can die from drinking too much water, it may not help. What percentage of the people reading this right now know the exact volume of water over a given timeframe will kill you? I don't. I usually hate frivolous lawsuits...but I think the family has a pretty strong and valid case in this instance.
Not running OS X on the PPC is a big plus for me. With OS X I wouldn't be able to use all the obscure software programs that are already out there for PDAs. That's why I'm willing to lug around a PDA phone in the first place (I certainly don't need to listen to mp3s and read my e-mail that badly). Seems like a waste to have all the power and big screen and only use it for phone/mp3 player/mail reader.
But my 4-year old Pocket PC phone can do everything they claim, and much more. And it's over four years old! Of course I didn't understand why anyone would want the carry around a brick for an MP3 player (with few features) when the iPod came out (I already owned several other mp3 players when the iPod was announced). So, I'll probably be wrong again.
Yep, sensationalism pisses me off too. It looks like some of the posters are starting to pick up nasty habits from the digg.com people.
True, the talk I attended was probably more years ago than I thought. At the time an engineer was describing his company's new ultra-low cost method of producing the silicon for solar cells. He had mentioned that the "break-even" point on energy was a little over 2 years for the process (I see some current solar cells are 1.7 years).
However, the study cited in your link uses an expected lifetime of 30 years of operation. I'm certainly not a solar cell expert, but that seems a little optimistic. If I remember correctly the industry people were using 15 years as the expected useful lifetime. If 30 years is realistic then the factor of 4-17 isn't that bad.
Anyway I just wanted to bring up that point because most people don't realize that the array they just installed on their roof is going to have to run for a couple of years (or more) before it even produces the amount of electricty needed to make it in the first place.
Everyone always seems to forget how much energy actually goes into producing a solar cell. It wasn't all that long ago that the electricity needed just to melt the silicon was more energy than the cell would generate throughout it's entire lifetime (they do degrade over time). That doesn't even include all the energy consumed during any additional manufacturing, transportation, and installation.
The difference is about the same as someone asking you to move 2000lbs of sand from your driveway to your roof using a ladder and someone asking you to lug a single 2000lb solid rock to the top of your roof. There's a big difference in logistics.
I was about to say yes you're right...but the more I think about it I'm not so sure....
:)
I would agree if the "bubbly" film was attached to the hull (it would be like coating the ship with styrofoam), but since it's a low friction free flowing fluid I don't think it's correct to say it acts like part of the hull.
I think the bubble film has to be treated as a layer of low density fluid the ship is sitting in surrounded by a larger body of higher density water. If that's the case it would have slightly lower level in the water. I assume this lower level would be equivilant to loading the ship with additional weight equal to the weight of water displaced by the air in the bubbles directly surrounding the hull.
Of course it's the end of the day and I have a headache and I need to think some more about it before I convince myself.
With methan hydrate releases the theory is that the entire volume of water surrounding the ship is "full of bubbles" and has an effectively lower density. What they are talking about here us just surrounding the hull with a thin layer of bubbles.....maybe the ship sits a couple inches (to pull a guess out of my rear) lower in the water....but there's not going to be any danger of sinking a ship...
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that can't stand those Head On commercials. I do the exact same thing and switch the channel the second they come on and usually don't make it back to that channel for a long time (my attention span is short enough that I can easily get interested in some other show that's on). Most other commericals I can just tune out - the Head On ones are like scraping fingernails. I wonder if they offer deep discounts to all the other advertisers that have spots running immediately after those. Out of principle, I will never buy or use one of their products.
Yeah, I don't see the problem either...you end up with 3 happy people. The homeless guy gets paid for standing in line... The middle man makes a nice little profit... The end user with lots of money gets one of the first units without having to stand in line (and these are probably the exact customers that sony will want to have their system - they buy all the latest games right at release instead of waiting for them to hit the bargin bin)...
Yeah, but then they won't get their 15 mins of fame when all the local tv stations come out to interview them and ask them why they would be willing to queue up for so long.......I suspect the real reason most of them are there this early is just for attention.