The problem, as I see it, is that tickets are being sold for other than market value. There's a pretty simple solution to this that maximizes revenue for ticket sellers and makes scalpers largely obsolete: sell tickets via Dutch auction. You still end up with a few people selling surplus tickets shortly before the event, there are always going to be some people who are unable to attend, or are willing to pay a higher price at the last minute.
Other ways to screw over ticket scalpers: add additional dates. Not an option for sporting events, but a lot of concert tours have enough slack in their schedule that they can add an extra date in high demand cities. Some years back, I recall ticket scalpers getting screwed pretty bad when Bon Jovi added a second show here.:)
And since this is an emergency fix hastely cobbled together, go back to your dealer in a 6 months or a year and ask if there's another update, for when they've finished polishing the latest updated. The upside to dealer service is that they (or at least mine does) typically update firmware when you take the car in, something a lot of independant shops don't have access to. A lot of unreported problems quietly get fixed with the consumer none the wiser (unless you check the sticker on your ECC.)
As an employer, I find adding stupid rules to the application process to be a great way of filtering applicants. Part of the job is following directions and showing some creativity. My personal favorite is to require that all resumes be submitted in plain text with EBCDIC encoding. Very few applicants follow proceedure, but those that do have a great shot at getting the job.
The Roku is an excellent little device. It just plain works. The only downsides to it is that it takes up another input on the TV (I've only got 3 to work with) and it's another remote to deal with. The good new about this little annoucement is that I'll be able to move the Roku down to the rec room so I can watch things while I workout.
Dude, it's a slow news day. Most of us have already packed it in for xmas. It's just an excuse for us to rant about our favorite OSes. My OS/2 Warp live forever.
Second, the sources for those templates would generally be the experts who derive their living from selling that sort of information
I'm not sure I follow... there's a ton of open source software out there and it's produced by people who make their living producing software. There are also a lot of low cost legal templates available (see nolo.com, there's also a similar section at my local office supply store). In any event, the templates aren't a big deal - laywers use them routinely. The bigger problem is knowing all the stupid legal quirks that aren't shown on those forms (filing deadlines, limits, proceedures, etc.). Personally, I think it's shameful that we have a legal system that the common man can't use without professional help.
And I'd like to clarify something about the original post here. Radley Balko is not just some random blogger. He is an investigative journalist (a damn fine one) for Reason Magazine (a damn fine publication). I believe his official title is "Senior Editor" (How does someone my own age qualify as a senior anything? Total grade inflation).
Deliberately bricking the consoles would be a PR and financial disaster. It could also result in felony charges for whoever authorized it and knowingly aided in carrying out the bricking. That's not an answer. MS may not care if you mod the console, but they care very much if you pirate games (and that's what 99% of modded consoles are for [citation needed]).
My guess is that it'll contain just enough flash to load the OS.
But I'm left to wonder how I'll post LOLcats to my favorite blogs without hotlinking them.
In any event, ChromeOS is a complete non-issue for me. I have too many business apps that I need to run for which there are no web equivilents. That said, I wish the industry would move towards fully sandboxing all applications. It should be fundamentally impossible to have your OS infected with malware. It should be possible to install software for a business network by dropping a package on the server and specifying how many licenses you have. Or likewise for a home network. There's still a risk of things like macro viruses, but that's a much smaller footprint. Microsoft should totally hire me. I'd make the perfect OS. Except then there'd be no need to upgrade every few years. Well, we'd just have to move on to making other useful programs.
Nope, can't do it. The data is an asset and it's still subject to whatever terms it was collected under. Just like the bank that wrote my mortgage may have gone bankrupt, but my payment and interest rate remain the same.
The data is also a medical record, and that comes with a whole slew of restrictions as well. In summary, the privacy implications are exactly the same as they were a year ago.
As usual, it's New Egg to the rescue. You can search monitors according to pixel size. The largest pixel sizes give you a resolution of 1920x1080 at 28" (~$370). There are also some even larger screens at lower resolution, but I don't know how big you want to go. They have large format screens - 32" at 1366x768, but those seem to be quite a bit more expensive (~$950).
To which I call bullshit. The only reason anyone knows about their Go! programming language is that they had the good fortune of Google releasing a language with the same name. They should be thrilled. Prior to tuesday, neither language had an article on Wikipedia. The Go! article didn't appear until Wednesday.
Back to the point, the only legal issue is a trademark (which falls under the broad umbrella of IP). There is no registered trademark, neither language is (at this point in time) being used in a commercial manner. Hell, if I wanted, I could write my own operating system and call it Windows and as long as I wasn't selling it, there isn't anything Microsoft could do about it.
It's a big world, these kinds of collisions happen from time to time. Much ado about nothing.
No, this is absolutely retarded. They're not "incentivizing" solar power, they're subsidizing it. Heavily. You and I are paying for it. That's money that could be doing a lot of actual good if put to better use. We've been waiting 30 years for the solar industry to develop an economical product and it hasn't happened yet.
Unfortunately, that order only pertains to Flordia, this latest bit of idiocy was filed in federal district court. Still, once he gets himself banninated from federal court, there are 49 other states he can work on. The system does work, but it takes time. Eventually, he'll get banned/fined into submission.
Having just finished reading the judge's decision from last year, a couple of things jump out at me: 1) the original purchaser of the software (an architecture company named Cardwell/Thomas Associates) could easily be on the hook for a breach of contract suit by Autodesk. And 2) My understanding is that AutoCAD has a horribly draconian product activation scheme. AutoDesk would in no way be obligated to furnish an activation code for the product, rendering it useless unless the purchaser can find a crack for it. Until product activation is abolished, this kind of crap is going to continue.
Completely impractical for a large scale work. A 2gb movie file would take thousands of pages. And let's not also forget the golden rule of data storage: longevity is inversely proportional to density. All else being equal, a lower density medium will last longer than a high density medium. So longeveity becomes an economical tradeoff. A page with less information encoded will be readable for a much longer period of time than a page with smaller features.
The virtue of digital media is that you can make unlimited perfect copies. As such, conservation then becomes an issue of good data storage hygine. Copy and validate, repeatedly. And as you say, maintain documentation on the data format, and as another poster has pointed out, always transcode to current file formats; maintain both current and original. In the event of a post apocolypse reconstruction, it will likely be lost. At the same time, however, your paper solution would probably also suffer enough damage to make any worthwhile reconstruction impossible. All we are is dust in the wind, dude.
The problem is that we need liquid biofuels. Ethanol production is just not going to happen. The first step in production is fermentation and that wastes 40% of your source energy. Then purification requires a lot of energy. At least with biodiesel, all you're doing is splitting off a glycerol molecule. But then, what do you do with all that glycerol? Back to point, ethanol - not very useful. Let's see if Monsanto can bio-engineer this thing to grow big oily pods.
It's a high margin niche item. They only have to sell it to a few hundred fan boys to really rake it in. On top of that, some of those idiot fan boys might have been out looking at a Mustang instead. It's one of those stupid promotions that doesn't have to move a lot of units to be profitable. That said, I'll be impressed if they can get even 100 losers to by this idiotic package.
For those of you too young to remember, in 1993 MTV still played some music, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was in heavy rotation at the time. In the early '90s, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and what not were all very much MTV bands (and Kurt Cobain really hated that). The Who and Elvis Costello, not so much.:)
DVDs have tons of error correction and are designed to take a certain amount of abuse. Since that is the case, you can sample the decay after a few years and extrapolate the functional life of the disc. More or less. Either way, so long as the discs last at least 30-40 years, this company probably won't be around to sue if they start failing prematurely.
Yeah, or they could also just cut the price on games so that people aren't as motivated to resell them. That would also cut down the margins for resale shops. It seems to have essentially worked for the movie industry. Why rent for $5 when you can buy for $9?
Also make games that have good replay value.
I have some sympathy for the game companies, but not much.
Actually, that's a good point about the HDD. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a MFM drive and controller on ebay or what not. If you need to format it, load up debug and g=c800:5. That's something I haven't needed to know in 16+ years. Perfectly good brain cells wasted on that.
Yep, the keyword there is most spambots. It just takes one motivated enough to write a parser for javascript for common munging techniques. Or in this case, finding an app out there that does it automagically for them. I would expect that email addresses stored as an image would be less subject to abuse for two reasons: First, it creates a much larger download causing a bottle neck and second, it's much more computationally intensive. Still, it can of course, be done. After all, it may only be a matter of time until Google or MSN parse it and save the results for the rest of the world.
What I find works best is to use a web form for submitting messages on our company website. That only gets spammed about once a month, and usually for something almost relavant to what we do. Then again, 2 years ago it never got spammed.
That's exactly the point. Polaroid isn't making film anymore because there is no demand for it. As a courtesy to their customers, they kept production up long after it ceased to be profitable. Horse-drawn carriages work because, while demand is small, service can be provided on a small scale. Polaroid film can't readily be made by some guy in his basement. Even if this group can get started making the film for Polaroids, demand will likely only go down, and efficiancy will never go up. They're going to find out that Polaroid stopped making this film for a reason.
But, it's not my money, and if they want to throw theirs out the window, that's not my problem.
No, the big problem is that it takes something complex, like specifying server hardware and dumbs it down to a little sticker. When I evalutate servers, power consumption is relatively low on my list, following after reliability and performance. Still, I wish Dell/HP/IBM would do a better job of showing power consumption with their server specs. Not that I'm particularly concerned about being green, but I do need to account for the loads on my cooling systems, ups, and backup generator.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem, as I see it, is that tickets are being sold for other than market value. There's a pretty simple solution to this that maximizes revenue for ticket sellers and makes scalpers largely obsolete: sell tickets via Dutch auction. You still end up with a few people selling surplus tickets shortly before the event, there are always going to be some people who are unable to attend, or are willing to pay a higher price at the last minute.
Other ways to screw over ticket scalpers: add additional dates. Not an option for sporting events, but a lot of concert tours have enough slack in their schedule that they can add an extra date in high demand cities. Some years back, I recall ticket scalpers getting screwed pretty bad when Bon Jovi added a second show here. :)
Yes. Double yes.
And since this is an emergency fix hastely cobbled together, go back to your dealer in a 6 months or a year and ask if there's another update, for when they've finished polishing the latest updated. The upside to dealer service is that they (or at least mine does) typically update firmware when you take the car in, something a lot of independant shops don't have access to. A lot of unreported problems quietly get fixed with the consumer none the wiser (unless you check the sticker on your ECC.)
As an employer, I find adding stupid rules to the application process to be a great way of filtering applicants. Part of the job is following directions and showing some creativity. My personal favorite is to require that all resumes be submitted in plain text with EBCDIC encoding. Very few applicants follow proceedure, but those that do have a great shot at getting the job.
The Roku is an excellent little device. It just plain works. The only downsides to it is that it takes up another input on the TV (I've only got 3 to work with) and it's another remote to deal with. The good new about this little annoucement is that I'll be able to move the Roku down to the rec room so I can watch things while I workout.
Dude, it's a slow news day. Most of us have already packed it in for xmas. It's just an excuse for us to rant about our favorite OSes. My OS/2 Warp live forever.
Second, the sources for those templates would generally be the experts who derive their living from selling that sort of information
I'm not sure I follow... there's a ton of open source software out there and it's produced by people who make their living producing software. There are also a lot of low cost legal templates available (see nolo.com, there's also a similar section at my local office supply store). In any event, the templates aren't a big deal - laywers use them routinely. The bigger problem is knowing all the stupid legal quirks that aren't shown on those forms (filing deadlines, limits, proceedures, etc.). Personally, I think it's shameful that we have a legal system that the common man can't use without professional help.
And I'd like to clarify something about the original post here. Radley Balko is not just some random blogger. He is an investigative journalist (a damn fine one) for Reason Magazine (a damn fine publication). I believe his official title is "Senior Editor" (How does someone my own age qualify as a senior anything? Total grade inflation).
Deliberately bricking the consoles would be a PR and financial disaster. It could also result in felony charges for whoever authorized it and knowingly aided in carrying out the bricking. That's not an answer. MS may not care if you mod the console, but they care very much if you pirate games (and that's what 99% of modded consoles are for [citation needed]).
My guess is that it'll contain just enough flash to load the OS.
But I'm left to wonder how I'll post LOLcats to my favorite blogs without hotlinking them.
In any event, ChromeOS is a complete non-issue for me. I have too many business apps that I need to run for which there are no web equivilents. That said, I wish the industry would move towards fully sandboxing all applications. It should be fundamentally impossible to have your OS infected with malware. It should be possible to install software for a business network by dropping a package on the server and specifying how many licenses you have. Or likewise for a home network. There's still a risk of things like macro viruses, but that's a much smaller footprint. Microsoft should totally hire me. I'd make the perfect OS. Except then there'd be no need to upgrade every few years. Well, we'd just have to move on to making other useful programs.
Nope, can't do it. The data is an asset and it's still subject to whatever terms it was collected under. Just like the bank that wrote my mortgage may have gone bankrupt, but my payment and interest rate remain the same.
The data is also a medical record, and that comes with a whole slew of restrictions as well. In summary, the privacy implications are exactly the same as they were a year ago.
As usual, it's New Egg to the rescue. You can search monitors according to pixel size. The largest pixel sizes give you a resolution of 1920x1080 at 28" (~$370). There are also some even larger screens at lower resolution, but I don't know how big you want to go. They have large format screens - 32" at 1366x768, but those seem to be quite a bit more expensive (~$950).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824254043
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16889252035
Personally, I prefer a 4:3 ratio on my screens and those have become very hard to find.
To which I call bullshit. The only reason anyone knows about their Go! programming language is that they had the good fortune of Google releasing a language with the same name. They should be thrilled. Prior to tuesday, neither language had an article on Wikipedia. The Go! article didn't appear until Wednesday. Back to the point, the only legal issue is a trademark (which falls under the broad umbrella of IP). There is no registered trademark, neither language is (at this point in time) being used in a commercial manner. Hell, if I wanted, I could write my own operating system and call it Windows and as long as I wasn't selling it, there isn't anything Microsoft could do about it. It's a big world, these kinds of collisions happen from time to time. Much ado about nothing.
No, this is absolutely retarded. They're not "incentivizing" solar power, they're subsidizing it. Heavily. You and I are paying for it. That's money that could be doing a lot of actual good if put to better use. We've been waiting 30 years for the solar industry to develop an economical product and it hasn't happened yet.
Unfortunately, that order only pertains to Flordia, this latest bit of idiocy was filed in federal district court. Still, once he gets himself banninated from federal court, there are 49 other states he can work on. The system does work, but it takes time. Eventually, he'll get banned/fined into submission.
Having just finished reading the judge's decision from last year, a couple of things jump out at me: 1) the original purchaser of the software (an architecture company named Cardwell/Thomas Associates) could easily be on the hook for a breach of contract suit by Autodesk. And 2) My understanding is that AutoCAD has a horribly draconian product activation scheme. AutoDesk would in no way be obligated to furnish an activation code for the product, rendering it useless unless the purchaser can find a crack for it. Until product activation is abolished, this kind of crap is going to continue.
Completely impractical for a large scale work. A 2gb movie file would take thousands of pages. And let's not also forget the golden rule of data storage: longevity is inversely proportional to density. All else being equal, a lower density medium will last longer than a high density medium. So longeveity becomes an economical tradeoff. A page with less information encoded will be readable for a much longer period of time than a page with smaller features.
The virtue of digital media is that you can make unlimited perfect copies. As such, conservation then becomes an issue of good data storage hygine. Copy and validate, repeatedly. And as you say, maintain documentation on the data format, and as another poster has pointed out, always transcode to current file formats; maintain both current and original. In the event of a post apocolypse reconstruction, it will likely be lost. At the same time, however, your paper solution would probably also suffer enough damage to make any worthwhile reconstruction impossible. All we are is dust in the wind, dude.
The problem is that we need liquid biofuels. Ethanol production is just not going to happen. The first step in production is fermentation and that wastes 40% of your source energy. Then purification requires a lot of energy. At least with biodiesel, all you're doing is splitting off a glycerol molecule. But then, what do you do with all that glycerol? Back to point, ethanol - not very useful. Let's see if Monsanto can bio-engineer this thing to grow big oily pods.
It's a high margin niche item. They only have to sell it to a few hundred fan boys to really rake it in. On top of that, some of those idiot fan boys might have been out looking at a Mustang instead. It's one of those stupid promotions that doesn't have to move a lot of units to be profitable. That said, I'll be impressed if they can get even 100 losers to by this idiotic package.
For those of you too young to remember, in 1993 MTV still played some music, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was in heavy rotation at the time. In the early '90s, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and what not were all very much MTV bands (and Kurt Cobain really hated that). The Who and Elvis Costello, not so much. :)
DVDs have tons of error correction and are designed to take a certain amount of abuse. Since that is the case, you can sample the decay after a few years and extrapolate the functional life of the disc. More or less. Either way, so long as the discs last at least 30-40 years, this company probably won't be around to sue if they start failing prematurely.
Yeah, or they could also just cut the price on games so that people aren't as motivated to resell them. That would also cut down the margins for resale shops. It seems to have essentially worked for the movie industry. Why rent for $5 when you can buy for $9?
Also make games that have good replay value.
I have some sympathy for the game companies, but not much.
Actually, that's a good point about the HDD. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a MFM drive and controller on ebay or what not. If you need to format it, load up debug and g=c800:5. That's something I haven't needed to know in 16+ years. Perfectly good brain cells wasted on that.
Yep, the keyword there is most spambots. It just takes one motivated enough to write a parser for javascript for common munging techniques. Or in this case, finding an app out there that does it automagically for them. I would expect that email addresses stored as an image would be less subject to abuse for two reasons: First, it creates a much larger download causing a bottle neck and second, it's much more computationally intensive. Still, it can of course, be done. After all, it may only be a matter of time until Google or MSN parse it and save the results for the rest of the world.
What I find works best is to use a web form for submitting messages on our company website. That only gets spammed about once a month, and usually for something almost relavant to what we do. Then again, 2 years ago it never got spammed.
That's exactly the point. Polaroid isn't making film anymore because there is no demand for it. As a courtesy to their customers, they kept production up long after it ceased to be profitable. Horse-drawn carriages work because, while demand is small, service can be provided on a small scale. Polaroid film can't readily be made by some guy in his basement. Even if this group can get started making the film for Polaroids, demand will likely only go down, and efficiancy will never go up. They're going to find out that Polaroid stopped making this film for a reason.
But, it's not my money, and if they want to throw theirs out the window, that's not my problem.
No, the big problem is that it takes something complex, like specifying server hardware and dumbs it down to a little sticker. When I evalutate servers, power consumption is relatively low on my list, following after reliability and performance. Still, I wish Dell/HP/IBM would do a better job of showing power consumption with their server specs. Not that I'm particularly concerned about being green, but I do need to account for the loads on my cooling systems, ups, and backup generator.