Basically, Apple signed a five-year deal in 2007 because they badly needed a carrier who was willing to sink many millions into the release.
Here's the thing that sucks for early adopters: If you bought in '07, you had to sign a two-year deal with AT&T. Par for the course for a phone the way we've got it structured in the US. But after your two years are up, you'd still be stuck with AT&T for another three years due to the 5-year deal they have with Apple. Either that, or jailbreak your phone, etc.
Practically, though, the extra three years are no big deal for the early adopters... surely most of them would move onto a new phone after two years, since they are early adopters.
It's recommended that you look at your display or phone from around an arms length away or risk damaging your vision in the long term.
Well, *I* recommend that you place the display right up against your eyeball and then carefully pull your bottom eyelid under the lip of the display to keep it in place.
So, technically, you can say it's recommended that you do so.
Seriously, do you have any citation for that recommendation? My understanding was that as long as you take frequent breaks to change your focal length to long distances, the risk of long-term vision* damage was low.
*I do recall reading something about problems with circadian rhythms due to electronic displays, however. But not permanent, IIRC... circadian rhythms can be reset in a few weeks.
Yes, the net impact on UC is the same. But the phrasing really matters. An increase of 300% out of the blue is unreasonable.
But the implication that UC gets a discount far larger than anyone else muddies the waters.
I'd be curious to see what discounts other large subscribers get, and if UC's discount is really out of whack with the discounts other institutional subscribers receive.
Perhaps the larger news here is not this proposed increase for UC, but instead how much everyone else is paying for the same journals. I'm sure that $OTHER_INSTITUTION would not be pleased to know that they pay triple or quadruple (or worse!) what UC pays.
I'm thinking what it comes down to is that the proposed price increase is merely a bargaining tactic... that is the price without discounts, Nature's starting point for negotiations. UC starts at their current ridiculous discount, and eventually they meet somewhere in the middle. UC is simply playing the publicity card, which, as a public institution at a time when California's budget is in shambles, is a pretty savvy move. I'm sure UC and Nature have crunched the numbers -- they'll probably settle somewhere just north of the amount of cash Nature would expect to receive if the University system decided not to subscribe, and individuals and professors would need to subscribe on their own. The "bit north" is the price UC is willing to pay for the convenience of their students and staff as part of public subsidy of the journal subscriptions.
1) Why call it Timberwolf? To avoid the Iceweasel debacle?
This was the inspired effort of the lead marketing consultant (one of the grizzled developer's girlfriends).
2) Timberwolf sounds a whole lot cooler than Firefox.
Yes, this was the special insight of the aforementioned girlfriend -- she realized that there was a unique opportunity to capitalize on the zeitgeist: namely the Three Wolf Moon phenomenon and the popularity of the reality TV logging shows.
3) AmigaOS looks pretty from the screenshots.
So does your mom... but that's just because both sets of screenshots were taken using the "MySpace angle".
Could someone with mad hacker skills and way too much time on their hands please post some figures comparing the computing power of an Amiga to an iPad?
Sure. This is the computing power of an Amiga:
.
See it? Now this is the computing power of an iPad:
o
And that's about as exact an approximation as we need... computing power is not a complete metric for comparing computing systems. More important is the computing ecosystem -- the applications available, the restrictions on use of the system, etc. I'm sure that there are some people out there for whom an Amiga is better suited to their computing needs than an iPad, since it is largely an open ecosystem.
But you have to recognize that your "hobby time" spent with antique hardware and software is of very little benefit to the world.
Which is why it's called a hobby.
Actually, almost everything I do is of very little benefit to the world. Yet my job is not a hobby, my family is not a hobby, breathing is not a hobby... and yet, one of my hobbies is maintaining hiking trails. Probably this is the one thing with the most positive impact on the world that I do, and it's a hobby.
My main point here is that someone spending time on Amiga development may be pursuing a hobby... but whether their hobby benefits the rest of the world in a measurable manner is beside the point. The only concern is whether or not it fulfills them without harming others. And you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate harm to others without introducing societal opportunity cost, which is a tough selling point when it comes to individual fulfillment.
All that said... congrats to the developers on a (somewhat) stable release. They should take pride in their accomplishment, regardless of how important that accomplishment is to society as a whole.
You don't even need to go so far as to refer to lebensraum.
China, India, and other countries all have disputed claims on areas of the Tibetan plateau. There was a war fought over some of that territory only a few decades ago. And those disputes are heating up again... because the Tibetan plateau is the location of the headwaters of some of the largest rivers in Asia.
The prospect of war between India and China is a scary one, IMO. I sometimes wonder if China would push into a war over the Tibetan plateau in order to help pacify their own citizens in case their economy dips even further.
Subsistence farming is not really sustainable. At the scale required to sustain the earth's current population, it WOULD be more environmentally destructive. We could kill a lot of people, but that is a different problem.
If we were to practice subsistence farming with technology and methods from two hundred years ago, I'm sure you'd be right. But we are limited to those methods, and if it were approached with sustainability in mind, I think it could be done with less environmental damage than you might think -- although usable water would be a huge issue.
Blood will have gone into my next phone. I will purchase it humbly.
Bully for you. I, on the other hand, will purchase my next phone hungrily
|SPARKLE| |SPARKLE|*
* Vampires sparkle now, right? Or do they still brood palely in the corner while the Cocteau Twins' tender but dark lyrics float over the crowd? I can't keep my pop culture undead types straight anymore, what with all these kids and their newfangled** ways of representing the dark lords of the night.
**newFANGled... get it? Hah! Don't forget to tip your waitress, I'll be here all week, try the type-O negative!***
***Get it? I substituted a blood type for "fish". Because this post is about vampires. And there just aren't enough re-hashed vampire jokes on the internets, probably because they all suck***
****Not a joke about sucking blood. Stale vampire jokes really do suck. The freshness of our internet LOLs is at literally at stake***** here!
****OK, I'm done now. I'm not going to explain that one, though it crushes my heart to leave it a mystery.
Apple is just doing the bidding of their customers, nothing more.
That's not exactly true. The entire concept of marketing is to shape what your customers want. Apple markets its products so that people do what Apple wants (become its customers).
But that doesn't really make a difference.
You can't say that a hired assassin has no culpability because he is just doing what his customer wants. Apple must also take responsibility for its actions, whatever they may be.
I was specifically referring to the BOP, which as far as I'm aware was installed correctly, and should have prevented a continuous spill, regardless of whatever nonsense took place at the surface. It was a last-resort failsafe that was supposed to have been rock-solid.
Here's some food for thought on whether the process used to ensure operability of the BOP is proper. Seems to me like there are some issues with the certification process -- there are papers going back to 2001 that address fundamental unreliability of operating BOPs -- and it's my belief that oversight and certification processes are severely lacking.
Certifying a process and making sure the process is performed are two very separate acts.
Agreed. But when the process that was certified does meet the industry best practices (such as acoustic triggers), there is a problem with the certification.
No, it's not unprecedented. The Montara oil spill last summer/fall was a clear precedent for this engineering failure.
(b) there were multiple safeguards
But there were no effective safeguards. There were fewer safeguards than other wells operating in similar conditions. Some of the safeguards "in place" weren't actually in place because someone screwed up.
(c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil
It is not, however, an economic necessity that we drill for oil in a manner that is unsafe. It's an economic necessity that we drill for oil in a manner that will not cause the loss of billions an billions of dollars in economic activity from fishing, tourism, etc.
(d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be made.
First, that's a poor paraphrasing of Murphy's Law. Catastrophic mistakes are not inevitable. Second, Murphy's Law is not a true law. It's a rule-of-thumb. If anything, Murphy's Law tells us that we need to be more vigilant, and that we need to establish more safety features to prevent catastrophic events in the inevitable case that something does go awry.
I don't think that's really fair -- if we get into a car accident, we're quick to shrug it off as just that: an accident. Nobody's fault. We pick up the pieces and move on.
No we don't. No harm done -- then sure, we move on. But if some asshole was driving negligently and I'm permanently disabled or disfigured, I wouldn't just shrug and move on. This catastrophe is not the equivalent of a fender-bender to the people directly affected.
But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard? No, I don't think they should. They're holding themselves to the same standard the average person would.
Horseshit. It remains to be seen what standard they hold themselves to. And it doesn't really matter -- what matters is what standard WE hold them to. And my feeling is that we need to ensure they make good on the damage they've caused.
Catastrophic accidents are not excusable. BP, Transocean, Halliburton (oh, excuse me, Xe), every party that shares culpability does, indeed, share culpability -- and we need to ensure that they are penalized harsh enough that we never face this situation again.
Now, after that lengthy response... I realize I forgot something... do not feed the trolls. Oh well, too late.
given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.
Designed? Possibly. Certain safety standards that are mandatory for offshore drilling near other countries were not used on this rig. Certified? Not really. If someone did certify the safety precautions, they should lose whatever authority they have to certify anything. How many reports of safety precautions and features being overlooked, ignored, or just plain not done properly do we need before we can consider that this well was not being built with adequate safety precautions?
given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols in conformance with past experience.
Yeah... you might want to read up on that some... it is quite clear to anyone who has read any of the reports out there that safety protocols and industry best practices were not followed.
Read through your link, and read some other reviews earlier. OK, I'll admit it's more than just a browser on the TV. It's also a DVR.
Seriously, it's just a browser + DVR + custom interface. Woohoo.
The key here is that it will likely prompt major sites to redesign their content for their interface, which might make it actually more useful than s-video-out.
They have developed an IP-based method of communicating with the TV hardware itself.
Not so fast, there... they've developed an IP-based method of communicating with special software/hardware that needs to be integrated into production TVs for us to use it, to which Sony has already committed. You'll need to buy a new TV to take advantage of it, or perhaps there will be an option to buy a set-top box.
In short, this just puts a limited functionality web browser with a custom interface in your TV. For most of us geeks, it's inferior to the setups we already have... But for my mom, for example, this would be great. With GoogleTV, she can view all the LOLcats she wants from the comfort of her living room sofa.
One of my new corp mates (and an EVE newbie) is tooling around in a Destroyer playing Level 4 missions with some of the guys up in Empire. A logistics Basilisk targets New Guy. Logi Guy is auto-targeted by New Guy, and New Guy fires on Logi Guy (not knowing any better).
CONCORD, of course, shows up and blows up New Guy. But they also blow up Logi Guy because - get this - he was repping a criminal.
When I heard about this one over Vent I damn near pissed myself.
I have no idea what you're talking about, so here would be a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head, if I had a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head, and if slashdot allowed us to post pictures of bunnies with pancakes on their heads.
Seriously, is that the stuff legends are made of? A noob makes a noob error, and the automated policing system decision engine decides that both the noob and the "logistics Basilisk" (which I'm assuming is some kind of non-combatant) should be obliterated? I mean, it's just a robocop logic malfunction. It's amusing, to be sure, but the stuff of legend?
sorry if it sounds like I'm griping, but a "legend" should be thrilling, IMO.
For all you metric fans out there, the volume 320 × 10^6 cubic miles is approx. 133.4 × 10^7 cubic km with an average depth of 3.69 km.
Yes, but that's meaningless to most people, it's a VLN without context. For all you fans of real, visceral numbers you can relate to, that volume (1.33 x 10^9 km^3) is approximately equal to the amount of water in the earth's oceans.
Hope that helps you to understand the magnitude of the number. Glad to be of service.
Thats true but my point is that for Lance Armstrong (a very fit guy) to get any benefit from exercise he is going to have to push against something. Jumping up and down on a DDR pad won't cut it.
What do you think jumping is, besides pushing against the ground?
Cross-training is beneficial to a lot of athletes, because it exercises muscle groups not normally exercised by the athlete's training in their normal sport. Since cycling is very much limited in the type of motion required, don't you think that the lateral motion required of something like DDR dancing would exercise Lance's muscles differently than cycling?
And as for aerobic fitness, it really doesn't matter *how* you get your heartrate up -- if you're a person that improves aerobic capacity through exercise (some people do not have that ability), then any exercise will serve to either help maintain your current level of fitness, or to improve your aerobic capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
Contractual obligations. Here's some info.
Basically, Apple signed a five-year deal in 2007 because they badly needed a carrier who was willing to sink many millions into the release.
Here's the thing that sucks for early adopters: If you bought in '07, you had to sign a two-year deal with AT&T. Par for the course for a phone the way we've got it structured in the US. But after your two years are up, you'd still be stuck with AT&T for another three years due to the 5-year deal they have with Apple. Either that, or jailbreak your phone, etc.
Practically, though, the extra three years are no big deal for the early adopters... surely most of them would move onto a new phone after two years, since they are early adopters.
Well, *I* recommend that you place the display right up against your eyeball and then carefully pull your bottom eyelid under the lip of the display to keep it in place.
So, technically, you can say it's recommended that you do so.
Seriously, do you have any citation for that recommendation? My understanding was that as long as you take frequent breaks to change your focal length to long distances, the risk of long-term vision* damage was low.
*I do recall reading something about problems with circadian rhythms due to electronic displays, however. But not permanent, IIRC... circadian rhythms can be reset in a few weeks.
I'm not sure how discriminating your taste is, or what your preference is, and I assume you're male...
You are aware of what kind of person would be laying you because of your iPhone, right?
I mean, they probably wouldn't be nerdy *AT ALL*. What good is that?
Yes, the net impact on UC is the same. But the phrasing really matters. An increase of 300% out of the blue is unreasonable.
But the implication that UC gets a discount far larger than anyone else muddies the waters.
I'd be curious to see what discounts other large subscribers get, and if UC's discount is really out of whack with the discounts other institutional subscribers receive.
Perhaps the larger news here is not this proposed increase for UC, but instead how much everyone else is paying for the same journals. I'm sure that $OTHER_INSTITUTION would not be pleased to know that they pay triple or quadruple (or worse!) what UC pays.
I'm thinking what it comes down to is that the proposed price increase is merely a bargaining tactic... that is the price without discounts, Nature's starting point for negotiations. UC starts at their current ridiculous discount, and eventually they meet somewhere in the middle. UC is simply playing the publicity card, which, as a public institution at a time when California's budget is in shambles, is a pretty savvy move. I'm sure UC and Nature have crunched the numbers -- they'll probably settle somewhere just north of the amount of cash Nature would expect to receive if the University system decided not to subscribe, and individuals and professors would need to subscribe on their own. The "bit north" is the price UC is willing to pay for the convenience of their students and staff as part of public subsidy of the journal subscriptions.
This was the inspired effort of the lead marketing consultant (one of the grizzled developer's girlfriends).
Yes, this was the special insight of the aforementioned girlfriend -- she realized that there was a unique opportunity to capitalize on the zeitgeist: namely the Three Wolf Moon phenomenon and the popularity of the reality TV logging shows.
So does your mom... but that's just because both sets of screenshots were taken using the "MySpace angle".
Sorry.
Sure. This is the computing power of an Amiga:
.
See it? Now this is the computing power of an iPad:
o
And that's about as exact an approximation as we need... computing power is not a complete metric for comparing computing systems. More important is the computing ecosystem -- the applications available, the restrictions on use of the system, etc. I'm sure that there are some people out there for whom an Amiga is better suited to their computing needs than an iPad, since it is largely an open ecosystem.
Actually, almost everything I do is of very little benefit to the world. Yet my job is not a hobby, my family is not a hobby, breathing is not a hobby... and yet, one of my hobbies is maintaining hiking trails. Probably this is the one thing with the most positive impact on the world that I do, and it's a hobby.
My main point here is that someone spending time on Amiga development may be pursuing a hobby... but whether their hobby benefits the rest of the world in a measurable manner is beside the point. The only concern is whether or not it fulfills them without harming others. And you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate harm to others without introducing societal opportunity cost, which is a tough selling point when it comes to individual fulfillment.
All that said... congrats to the developers on a (somewhat) stable release. They should take pride in their accomplishment, regardless of how important that accomplishment is to society as a whole.
You don't even need to go so far as to refer to lebensraum.
China, India, and other countries all have disputed claims on areas of the Tibetan plateau. There was a war fought over some of that territory only a few decades ago. And those disputes are heating up again... because the Tibetan plateau is the location of the headwaters of some of the largest rivers in Asia.
The prospect of war between India and China is a scary one, IMO. I sometimes wonder if China would push into a war over the Tibetan plateau in order to help pacify their own citizens in case their economy dips even further.
I never claimed Apple users have no culpability.
I claimed that Apple has culpability. They are not mutually exclusive.
It's possible to not need external sources of fertilizer for self-sufficiency farming. Animal waste (manure) works very well.
In terms of land area, generally, 1 acre is sufficient per person from what I've read and experienced.
If we were to practice subsistence farming with technology and methods from two hundred years ago, I'm sure you'd be right. But we are limited to those methods, and if it were approached with sustainability in mind, I think it could be done with less environmental damage than you might think -- although usable water would be a huge issue.
Bully for you. I, on the other hand, will purchase my next phone hungrily
|SPARKLE| |SPARKLE|*
* Vampires sparkle now, right? Or do they still brood palely in the corner while the Cocteau Twins' tender but dark lyrics float over the crowd? I can't keep my pop culture undead types straight anymore, what with all these kids and their newfangled** ways of representing the dark lords of the night.
**newFANGled... get it? Hah! Don't forget to tip your waitress, I'll be here all week, try the type-O negative!***
***Get it? I substituted a blood type for "fish". Because this post is about vampires. And there just aren't enough re-hashed vampire jokes on the internets, probably because they all suck***
****Not a joke about sucking blood. Stale vampire jokes really do suck. The freshness of our internet LOLs is at literally at stake***** here!
****OK, I'm done now. I'm not going to explain that one, though it crushes my heart to leave it a mystery.
That's not exactly true. The entire concept of marketing is to shape what your customers want. Apple markets its products so that people do what Apple wants (become its customers).
But that doesn't really make a difference.
You can't say that a hired assassin has no culpability because he is just doing what his customer wants. Apple must also take responsibility for its actions, whatever they may be.
Fine. It's trivial to find citations for this, since it was all over the news for a few weeks, but here you go, lazy one:
Brazil, Canada, and Norway require acoustic triggers as backup for BOPs.
Here's some food for thought on whether the process used to ensure operability of the BOP is proper. Seems to me like there are some issues with the certification process -- there are papers going back to 2001 that address fundamental unreliability of operating BOPs -- and it's my belief that oversight and certification processes are severely lacking.
Doh. Typo.
s/does/doesn't above.
Agreed. But when the process that was certified does meet the industry best practices (such as acoustic triggers), there is a problem with the certification.
No, it's not unprecedented. The Montara oil spill last summer/fall was a clear precedent for this engineering failure.
But there were no effective safeguards. There were fewer safeguards than other wells operating in similar conditions. Some of the safeguards "in place" weren't actually in place because someone screwed up.
It is not, however, an economic necessity that we drill for oil in a manner that is unsafe. It's an economic necessity that we drill for oil in a manner that will not cause the loss of billions an billions of dollars in economic activity from fishing, tourism, etc.
First, that's a poor paraphrasing of Murphy's Law. Catastrophic mistakes are not inevitable. Second, Murphy's Law is not a true law. It's a rule-of-thumb. If anything, Murphy's Law tells us that we need to be more vigilant, and that we need to establish more safety features to prevent catastrophic events in the inevitable case that something does go awry.
No we don't. No harm done -- then sure, we move on. But if some asshole was driving negligently and I'm permanently disabled or disfigured, I wouldn't just shrug and move on. This catastrophe is not the equivalent of a fender-bender to the people directly affected.
Horseshit. It remains to be seen what standard they hold themselves to. And it doesn't really matter -- what matters is what standard WE hold them to. And my feeling is that we need to ensure they make good on the damage they've caused.
Catastrophic accidents are not excusable. BP, Transocean, Halliburton (oh, excuse me, Xe), every party that shares culpability does, indeed, share culpability -- and we need to ensure that they are penalized harsh enough that we never face this situation again.
Now, after that lengthy response... I realize I forgot something... do not feed the trolls. Oh well, too late.
Designed? Possibly. Certain safety standards that are mandatory for offshore drilling near other countries were not used on this rig. Certified? Not really. If someone did certify the safety precautions, they should lose whatever authority they have to certify anything. How many reports of safety precautions and features being overlooked, ignored, or just plain not done properly do we need before we can consider that this well was not being built with adequate safety precautions?
Yeah... you might want to read up on that some... it is quite clear to anyone who has read any of the reports out there that safety protocols and industry best practices were not followed.
Read through your link, and read some other reviews earlier. OK, I'll admit it's more than just a browser on the TV. It's also a DVR.
Seriously, it's just a browser + DVR + custom interface. Woohoo.
The key here is that it will likely prompt major sites to redesign their content for their interface, which might make it actually more useful than s-video-out.
Not so fast, there... they've developed an IP-based method of communicating with special software/hardware that needs to be integrated into production TVs for us to use it, to which Sony has already committed. You'll need to buy a new TV to take advantage of it, or perhaps there will be an option to buy a set-top box.
In short, this just puts a limited functionality web browser with a custom interface in your TV. For most of us geeks, it's inferior to the setups we already have... But for my mom, for example, this would be great. With GoogleTV, she can view all the LOLcats she wants from the comfort of her living room sofa.
I have no idea what you're talking about, so here would be a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head, if I had a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head, and if slashdot allowed us to post pictures of bunnies with pancakes on their heads.
Seriously, is that the stuff legends are made of? A noob makes a noob error, and the automated policing system decision engine decides that both the noob and the "logistics Basilisk" (which I'm assuming is some kind of non-combatant) should be obliterated? I mean, it's just a robocop logic malfunction. It's amusing, to be sure, but the stuff of legend?
sorry if it sounds like I'm griping, but a "legend" should be thrilling, IMO.
Where did you get an Instant Adult (tm) cloning device? I thought they were sold out?
I personally lack the replicator necessary to fork Stallman and lick him myself.
Yes, but that's meaningless to most people, it's a VLN without context. For all you fans of real, visceral numbers you can relate to, that volume (1.33 x 10^9 km^3) is approximately equal to the amount of water in the earth's oceans.
Hope that helps you to understand the magnitude of the number. Glad to be of service.
Aw, come on, most of those are easy to pick. How about something that strains our decision engines a little bit?
-- Would you take a job as Steve "Monkeyboy" Ballmer's toe-cheese extractor if it meant Microsoft would publish only via OSS licenses?
-- Would you take a position as Steve "Tyrant" Jobs' fashion consultant if it meant Apple would open up the app store?
-- Would you lick Stallman's neck and armpit if it meant GNU/Hurd became a complete, usable, modern kernel?
These are the type of choices that would keep me up at night.
What do you think jumping is, besides pushing against the ground?
Cross-training is beneficial to a lot of athletes, because it exercises muscle groups not normally exercised by the athlete's training in their normal sport. Since cycling is very much limited in the type of motion required, don't you think that the lateral motion required of something like DDR dancing would exercise Lance's muscles differently than cycling?
And as for aerobic fitness, it really doesn't matter *how* you get your heartrate up -- if you're a person that improves aerobic capacity through exercise (some people do not have that ability), then any exercise will serve to either help maintain your current level of fitness, or to improve your aerobic capacity.